HealthyGamerGG - What Breakups ACTUALLY Do To Men

Episode Date: September 14, 2026

In this episode, Dr. K breaks down the psychological, neurological, and physical impact of breakups, explaining why men often feel like a breakup destroys their entire life rather than just a relationship. Moving past generic internet advice, he details the science of self-concept, physical heart complications, and how to balance emotional processing. Mental health resources designed by Dr. K and made with love: https://bit.ly/3ZOopgQTalk to a HG Coach 1-on-1: https://bit.ly/46bIkdoDr. K's NEW Guide to Love, Sex, & Relationships: https://bit.ly/4dO3x0VDr. K's Guide to Mental Health: https://bit.ly/44z3SztHG Memberships : https://bit.ly/3TNoMVf Products & Services : https://bit.ly/44kz7x0 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hey, chat, welcome to the Healthy Gamer Gigi podcast. I'm Dr. Alokinoja, but you can call me Dr. K. I'm a psychiatrist, gamer, and co-founder of Healthy Gamer. On this podcast, we explore mental health and life in the digital age, breaking down big ideas to help you better understand yourself and the world around you. So let's dive right in. If you ask the average woman, what do you lose when you get divorced? What they will say is, I lost a relationship.

If you ask a man, what did they lose? they will say, I lost a life, right? This life is now gone. All right, chat, today we're going to talk about how to successfully navigate a breakup. So I've been meaning to make this video for a while because there's a lot of advice out there. And a lot of the advice, I've got to just be honest with you all, kind of like pisses me off. So here's an example. Fear doesn't stop death. Fear stops life. Fear doesn't stop the end of a relationship. Fear stops the relationship. And like, this is great, right? Like, oh my God, Like, fear is not the avoidance of death. It is the avoidance of life.

Oh, my God. Fear isn't what saves a relationship. Fear is what destroys a relationship. And so the first thing that I kind of noticed when I was like looking at dating advice or breakup advice on the internet is that what determines the advice that you see has nothing to do with outcomes. It has everything to do with the emotional state of the person who has recently broken up. So if I've been dumped, which video am I likely to click on?

Which video empathically resonates with me? Because when I hear statements like this, like there's some value to it, right? Like absolutely fear does prevent us from doing certain things in life that are good for us. Like that's like actually like obviously. But also if I'm afraid that my boyfriend or girlfriend's bestie at work who happens to be the gender that they're attracted to, their work husband or their work wife, if I'm afraid of their relationship, that fear can be very helpful in saving the relationship. If I'm going on a date with someone who's kind of a creep and is like, Hey, do you want to come back to my place?

I have a really great meal prepared for you. Please come back. Don't go. Fear in that situation doesn't prevent life. It prevents death. Which is the basic problem with a lot of the dating advice out there, right? And everyone is sure that this is what you should do after a breakup. And the key thing is if you're seeing it on the internet, what's determining that is the

level of emotional engagement with the post. So a great example of this is a lot of people will say number one rule after a breakup. No contact. Just go no contact, bro. No contact. Avoid them. Get rid of all the reminders. So here's a channel, which I think has pretty good information about it. And this is what I find a little bit honestly frustrating. I'm a psychiatrist. And the problem is like when I'm trying to help people through a breakup, they're like real people in real lives. And something like going no contact simply is not a luxury for like 45 to 50 percent of people. You have a shared friend group. You are married and have kids. And then how are you supposed to go no contact and delete everything and block them if you're sharing children? And so in my journey to help the people in my office, what I sort of dug into and what I found is ultimately like the way to get over breakups. And this is a concept called equifinality. So this is this concept which we'll kind of go over. This is this concept that you can use a lot of different strategies. And you can use strategies like, like avoidance, actually emotional avoidance. A lot of people will tell you things like feel your feelings.

Actually, you don't need to do that. A lot of people will employ problem focused coping. So this is where like we're not just going to journal and talk about our feelings and things like that. We're actually going to, and this is a lot of advice on the internet. Like just just go lift, bro. Like put yourself together. Go lift. Hit the gym. Start putting your life together. Like fix your car. Fix your house. Start cooking. Get into shape. Like people will offer this advice. And then there's a lot of advice around feeling your feelings. You should grieve. You should grieve this way. like grieve and accept. But then the other problem is that feeling your feelings can sometimes become damaging. So if you allow yourself to feel your sadness, what a lot of people will discover is that

their sadness will run away from them. So I'll give you guys a simple example. So people say, okay, grief is about like accepting, right, that this is over and you have to feel your feelings. But I've worked with people who accept, hey, that relationship is gone. She's moved on. He's moved on. They're married. They have kids. That's never going to be. be an option again. I've accepted that that's over and oh my God, I'm still here. I'm so sad. People say feel my feelings, but I cry every single time I think about it or even people don't feel that. Oftentimes what they feel is just immense numbness. They feel a sense of like being trapped in Amber post-relationship. They don't really know who they are and they just kind of keep muddling through

life. They keep repeating things, but they somehow feel stuck. So this is a problem, right? Because how am I supposed to feel my feelings but not get stuck? So there is the sadness of the relationship. And then there is the projection that comes afterward. So the grief of a relationship, the sadness of a relationship, that's good. That's healthy. We want to feel those feelings. The problem is when we start ruminating, and I'll tell you guys exactly what rumination is, it's repetitive thoughts.

That's when we start to get stuck in time. So what keeps us stuck? It's not the feeling of the breakup. It's all the projections that we make from it. So the moment that I start focusing on the sadness of the breakup, I'm never going to see them again. That's actually okay. But if we add another layer to it, we start thinking about what they're going to do, how they're living their life. Now I've technically moved away from the feeling of the breakup. Now I'm thinking about their life, how happy they are.

I'm looking at their pictures. By the way, that's another thing that you want to avoid is don't stock them on the internet. That prolongs the suffering of a breakup. But now you've stepped away from the grief of the actual relationship into a second order connected thing. A. If you all want to learn a little bit more, by all means, watch another YouTube video. If you guys are actually interested in finding the practical tools to change on your own, that's where memberships comes in. And if y'all are interested in getting some help or achieving a particular milestone four weeks, eight weeks or 12 weeks from now, check out coaching. So if y'all are interested, check out the link in the description below. Another example of this is if you start to project about yourself in the future.

So yes, this is sad, but now I don't know who I am. Now I'm going to be alone for the rest of my life. Now, oh my God, like things are so unfair for men or so unfair for women. I devoted the best years of my life to this person. This is different from I'm never going to see this person again. We're never going to have a relationship again. Now I'm projecting outward. And what the data shows is what keeps people stuck is the second order thinking. The thinking that grows out of the initial relationship grief. So in terms of how do you actually go about disciplining your thinking, what's the right level of emotion to feel? You can feel anything related to the breakup. But be careful the moment it grows into something else because that will keep you stuck. The key thing, and this is what's really interesting from the research, is all of these strategies lead to one place, which is equifinality of self-concept. So what does that mean?

So if you look at breakups that are devastating, some of the most devastating breakups are relationships that happen early in life. So if I'm like a 17 year old kid and I date somebody else who's, let's say 17, we date all throughout college and then 23 rolls around, 24 rolls around, and we're like, okay, what should we do next? We should get married. That's the natural trajectory. So then we get engaged, but then things like tend to fall apart, right? Sometimes you get married and then they fall apart a couple of years later.

Sometimes they fall apart during the engagement. And the reason that this is so devastating is because of the core thing that allows you to recover from a breakup. And that is self-concept. So I'll give you guys an example. So let's say I'm a 43-year-old man and you and I go on a date. And we date for about three months and then we break up. And it's like not that big of a deal to me. Why is that?

That's because I had an identity of who I was before we started dating. And then if we date for three months, I have an identity of who I am after we stopped dating. And that identity is relatively the same. So I haven't changed who I am because of the relationship. And so if you look at like a huge factor that causes distress post breakup, it is self-concept. And this is why the first relationship, that you'll have, especially if you're young and if it lasts a long time, is so devastating. Because when we started dating, I was a 17-year-old teenager.

I didn't really know who I am. And then as we went through college, I became this person. But the person that I became was heavily shaped by you. And so we have data that shows that when we enter into relationships, we actually develop a new sense of identity, right? It's not just that you complete my sentences. Oh, my God, we complete each other's sandwiches. It's that, oh, my God, we become one person via two souls.

where one soul in two bodies, we are like one object that is like split. Oh my God. Right. This is the sentiment. So we develop a sense of identity. And this is why a breakup is so devastating. Because when you lose that relationship, what you lose is your identity. And the key equifinal point of all of these different breakup adaptive coping strategies is to restore your self-concept.

And these are the kinds of things that are really important to understand. Because if you're trying to navigate dating in today's world, you have to really like cut through. all the evidence, cut through all the social media, and find that core thing, which is what we try to do in Dr. Kay's Guide to Love, Sex and Relationships, and we do it for like dating and attraction and charisma and breaking up and emotional baggage and all this kind of stuff. So now let's get into the idea of self-concept. And this is what's so scary about this idea of self-concept. So there's some really interesting data about men and women who end up breaking up. And one of the really fascinating things is one of the highest risk factors for a myocardial infarction

or heart attack for a man is during a breakup or during a divorce. And there's something specifically called Tocatsubo Cardiopathy, which is literally inflammation of the heart that is highly specific to men post-breakup. And so this is what's really interesting is like, why is that? And so if you tunnel down into why that is, what you discover is a really interesting psychological aspect to this. If you ask the average woman, what do you lose when you get divorced? What they will say is, I lost a relationship. If you ask a man, what did they lose, they will say, I lost a life, right? This life is now gone. Their identity, this is what's kind of interesting, and I'm not saying it's easier for men or harder for men or things like that.

I'm using it as supporting evidence for this idea that the more your identity is tied up in the relationship, the worse the breakup is going to be. So let's dive into some data. So the first thing that really shocks people is the median time to get over a breakup is 4.18 years. So people think, like, oh, six months later like I'm done. No, it's actually like, so first thing is if you've gone through a breakup, chances are that will have lingering effects on you for an average of four years. Now, there's a pretty wide range there. So give yourself some time. Okay. Second thing that's really interesting is that there are a lot of factors that do prolong the attachment that we have to people. So this is where people who said, you know, you should cut off all contact. It turns out that the more avoidant you are,

the faster you will get over a breakup. Second thing that's kind of interesting, is the more anxious you are, the slower you get over a breakup. And this is where we have to be a little bit careful with some of this generic advice around feel your feelings. Because if the goal is to feel your feelings and your feeling is anxiety, that can actually prolong the amount of time that you're hung up on this person. A couple of other really interesting factors, not surprising. If you are the person who initiated the breakup, you are more likely to bounce back faster. If you are the person who got dumped, you are more likely to linger with an attachment of

that person. Last thing that isn't really too big of a surprise is if you enter into another relationship, that will help you get over the prior relationship. So this idea of like, you know, the rebound relationship actually has a lot of merit because it probably helps you get over the previous person. It's not that the common wisdom or the social media sentiment is all wrong. Instead, a lot of it is contradictory and incomplete. And we really want to get to that equifinality point of resolved self-concept. We want to become a new person. Okay. So now the question, comes how do we do that? So this is where I think the best strategy is something that's called an activating deactivating strategy, which means we want to muster up the right amount of emotion.

That's an activating strategy. So we can do things like have a conversation about closure. Oh my God. We can do things like take a look at the pictures that we have and have the fond memories of that person. That is an activating element. So that will bring up some level of emotion. And if you look at the process of grief, it's not like the antidote to grief is, oh my God, my wife of 40 years has passed away. Let me burn all of her pictures. That's not how we grieve and it's not how we need to grieve. Instead, what we want to do is those will activate some degree of emotion, which is part of the healing process. So studies on trauma show that people who are able to experience intense emotion for a brief period of time are less likely to develop PTSD. People who are,

who go hard avoidance and numb themselves have a greater rate of developing PTSD. So we want to use activating strategies. Let that emotion come up. It doesn't just have to be through conversations or pictures or whatever. It can be through conversation. So we want to activate the emotion. It can also be through exercise. And then we want to use deactivating strategies.

So if we're trickling into rumination, if we're starting to get super depressed about it, we want to use deactivating strategies, which include things like emotional avoidance. which include things like hanging out with your bros or going on a girl's trip, which include things like camping, which include things like lifting. I don't know if you guys have felt emotionally bad ever, but if you like go to the gym and you work out really hard, it helps so much with your emotions. So what we basically want to do is titrate a level of activation and deactivation with our emotions so that it doesn't get overwhelming and keep us stuck. And so here's the cool thing. If we look at the equifinality of self-concept reinvention, which I know is a mouthful, all of these things will actually lead there. So if you talk to people about your relationship, that can help you get there.

If you start solving problems that are either emotional in nature, start to feel emotionally better, or just start to put your life together, get a job, get a promotion, hit the gym, get in shape, all of that stuff will help you develop self-concept. The last two things that I'll share with you all are concrete things that will directly develop self-concept. concept. The first is to start living in service to what you truly care about. So oftentimes in relationships, we make compromises. So I really love dogs, but I had to give up my dog because my partner is allergic. So then get a dog. Really spend some time thinking about not what you want, what you care about. And then start to do things in service to that. So how can you live a life where on a daily basis or weekly basis, you are doing something in service to what? you care about, whether that's helping other people, whether that's learning how to write or acquire

a skill. This isn't just like vague self-development. This is really spending some time with yourself and figuring out what you care about and what you can do in service to that. The second thing, this is really important, arguably more important, is broadening your self-concept. So generally speaking, as a psychiatrist, when I'm dealing with someone who has self-concept problems after a breakup. Their biggest problem is that their identity is defined in this box, and half of the box is taken up by another person. What a lot of mistake that people do is they try to like fill in that box, right? This is where the rebound relationship comes in, which can be fine. But the key thing here is we need to expand that box. So who can you now become? You used to think of yourself. So I've seen

this a lot, especially with like women who will start a relationship really young, will tend to have kids, become a stay at home mom. So this is a really classic example. And then at the age of 35, they get divorced. And they've been dating this person since the age of 17. And so they define themselves as a stay-at-home mom, as a good mother, as a good wife. So what is their road? It is a broadening of their sense of self-concept. So the key thing is, what more can you be, right? And don't think about what you are or what you were, but like, who else can you possibly become?

And the last thing is we focused on equifonality of concept, but there are a lot of options in there. And this is where who you are actually heavily influences what will work for you. Here's a paper, for example, that shows that there's a personality type that is capable of remaining friends after a breakup, right? So should you stay friends? Should you not stay friends? You'll get generic yeses and knows for all kinds of reasons on the internet. But it actually depends on the person. The more open you are and the more agreeable you are, the easier it is or the better it is for you to stay friends.

So this is where when it comes to relationship stuff, we have these resources like there's this great deep dive into attachment styles and relationships where if you understand what your personality, is our members have told us this is one of the best deep dives we've done and it really gives them insight into their own making so that they can navigate relationships better check out the link in the description below for your free trial thanks for joining us today we're here to help you understand your mind and live a better life if you enjoy the conversation be sure to subscribe until next time take care of yourselves and each other