The Life Of Bryony - Life of YOU: Can’t Stop Checking Their Instagram? Dr Julie Smith on Letting Go After a Break-Up

Episode Date: March 28, 2025

The bonus series where we tackle your dilemmas and share advice to navigate life’s trickier moments. This week, I’m joined once again by psychologist, best-selling author and social media favourite Dr Julie Smith. Her new book Open When is the kind of emergency toolkit we all need for those moments when life feels like a lot—and today, she’s here to help with some of yours. Together, we unpack your questions about moving on from break-ups, managing social media triggers, and dealing with self-critical thought spirals. Julie also shares her thoughts on anger at work, why it’s a last-resort emotion, and how unmet needs often lie beneath the surface. If you’ve ever found yourself stuck in regret, shame or the habit of scrolling your ex’s feed on a Tuesday night (we’ve all been there), this one’s for you. Today: 💔 Dean can’t stop looking at his ex’s social media. How do you let go without suppressing your emotions? 📱 Sharon wants to know how to set better boundaries with social media—and her own negative thoughts. 🤯 Dawn regrets snapping at work and worries she’s becoming “that person.” What’s really going on underneath the anger? WE WANT TO HEAR FROM YOU 🗣 Got a question or a story to share? Text or send a voice note on 07796657512—just start your message with LOB 💬 Use the WhatsApp shortcut: https://wa.me/447796657512?text=LOB 📧 Prefer email? Drop us a line at [e-mail] If this episode resonated with you, please share it with someone who might need it—it really helps! Bryony xx CREDITS 🎙 Presenter: Bryony Gordon 🎙 Guest: Dr Julie Smith 🎧 Content Producer: Jonathan O’Sullivan 🎥 Audio & Video Editor: Luke Shelley 📢 Executive Producer: Mike Wooller A Daily Mail production. Seriously Popular. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

This is the Life of You, the bonus episode where we tackle your dilemmas and share advice for life's trickier moments. I'm joined once again by Dr Julie Smith, psychologist, bestselling author and TikTok star. Dr Julie's latest book, Open When, is a break in case of emergency kind of go-to guidebook for all of life's messiest, hardest moments. And today she's going to solve some of yours. When you've created and built a life that is better than looking back, then you won't need to look back anymore. Your questions answered right after this. inspired by a true life story. If I don't deal with him, he will never leave us alone. You don't see how the birds sing to you.

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It's a big deal. The Ford It's a Big Deal event. Visit your Toronto area Ford store or Ford.ca today. This is from Dean, although that's not his real name, he says. He's even honest. It may even be a woman, who knows? It's been months, but I can't stop looking at my ex's social media. I struggle to let things go even when I know holding on to them is only hurting me. How do I learn to move on without feeling like I'm ignoring my emotions?

This is a really interesting one because I think we imagine, I think we set ourselves up with expectations, don't we? That after a couple of weeks or a month, I should be over it and then I will never think about this person or what happened ever again and I'll be happy. And it just doesn't happen like that. And I think you can be constantly looking back for a long time until your life gets to the point where it doesn't bring you anything good to look back. So when you've created and built a life that is better than looking back, then you won't need to look back anymore. And so I think focusing on not doing something and taking it away is probably less helpful than looking forward

and looking at what am I gonna create that's gonna be better than that? And in some ways that involves looking at the relationship, again, not with judgment, but with curiosity. Are there bits from that experience that I can learn from? So did I get things wrong that I would do differently when I meet the person who's right for me? And I'm going to take that forward as really good learning. Or are there things that I wouldn't allow someone to do to me or new

boundaries or whatever, depending on what the relationship was like. And then just totally focusing on that future, knowing that every now and then, probably in quiet or lonely moments, you will still be tempted to look back. And usually that's because you're looking for something, right? It's a certain feeling, isn't it? That you probably associate with that person because there isn't a new association yet. And once you build a relationship that feels safe enough and positive enough with someone, then you will always associate that person with relationship and connection. And so I would say don't just try to not doing it. Yeah, not do it. What are, this is a listener,

this is a question from me to you, Julie. What are your boundaries on social media for mental health? Because we hear so much about the detrimental effect that mindless scrolling can have on us. So as someone who is in the thick of social media, what are your hard, like fast, important boundaries that you put down for yourself to protect yourself? Yeah, do you know what? I've become so aware of it. Partly being a creator means that you have to open up the app and respond to some comments or messages or things like that and post things. I've become so aware

of how scrolling makes me feel and how much valuable time it takes away from me that I have not come to loathehe it that's probably not the word but I sort of spend less time doing it. I haven't set rules about it but there's a lot more of putting it away and choosing to be in the here-net maybe because I've got kids and I'm super aware of it. Well also it's a job so you probably don't want to be doing it in your spare time. Yeah yeah there's a lot of that and and it probably makes me really terrible at things like Instagram because I, you know, forget to post on stories and or do all the things

that you apparently should be doing and but but I'm also human with a life and I want to live it in the moment and not, you know, sometimes you get it when you I was going for for a jog and I thought maybe I could take a picture of that I thought I'm ruining this moment by thinking about how it's gonna turn into content and I don't want to live like that So I think yeah, maybe being a creator has made me more aware of how I don't want to be you know doing that and so Haven't set any sort of hard and fast rules, but I just, I don't want it for myself. So I'm doing it less.

Yeah. I find that really relatable when I'm going for a jog and I'm like, I better just get some footage that might be useful for real. I'm like, just put one foot in front of the other and keep listening to the Backstreet Boys Friday. Yeah. This is a goodie. It's another goodie from Sharon. Every time I try to let go of a mistake, it says Sharon, but really, again, it's me. Every time I try to let go of a mistake, my brain replays it on a loop. How do I stop punishing myself for things that have already happened? There's that kind of rumination part isn't there where it's totally unconstructive because it's almost like a thought washing machine where it's just going to go round and round and it's just triggering whatever emotion is attached to that whether it's shame or

regret or even anxiety about you know when you kind of leave a social situation you think, oh, I wish I hadn't said that, I wish I hadn't said that, and you're just playing it over in your mind. And the thing is with when you get things wrong, you make mistakes or you do things you regret, there can be learning there, but only if you think about it in a constructive way. Again, shifting from judgment to curiosity about, okay, well, what can I learn from this? What would I do differently? And how would I do it differently?

And then leaving it alone, taking your learning with you and leaving it alone. If you're just taking the horrible feelings, then that's gonna have a detrimental effect on you. It's not gonna be helpful, it's gonna be unhelpful. So when something wants to be thought about, keeps coming back, there's some time to be spent listening to it, but make sure that's in a constructive way. So sometimes it helps to then do that with someone, whether that's a close friend you trust or a therapist or something, to look at it so

that you can do it with the curiosity and take the learning and then work out, you know, is there, you know, depending on what the situation is, do you need to forgive yourself for something or do you need to do it? But actually, sometimes the answer is maybe you do need to go and have like, take a proper look at ask why you seem to be taking the guilt and the shame and it seems to become habitual because that might point to something deeper in your background that perhaps you do need to talk with a therapist about. Yeah, because sometimes it can be because you did something that's against your values

and you need to sort of shift direction. And sometimes it's, like you say, it's a habit where you've learned early on in life something about how terrifying it is to make mistakes and get things wrong or that that means something fundamental about who you are that creates shame and that stuff needs time to go back over and look at because then the process of how you treat yourself after every setback is an echo of the past that's not really serving you anymore. So Dawn says, I lost my temper at work recently and I feel sick with regret. I

hate how quickly anger bubbles up in me and even when I try to hold it in it comes out in sarcasm or shutting people down. I don't want to be seen as that person the one who snaps. How can I stop my anger controlling me before it's too late? Mm. That's a great question. And I think the first thing coming to my mind is a question about whether that's new or not and whether it's a different, you know, whether it's a change. Because I think we always have to listen to that when anger is a last resort emotion, right? It's the emotion that like it's the fight in your fight or flight

when your brain feels like you've got nowhere else to go and you need to, you know, attack or take action. And we have to listen to that. If that's coming up more, it's because we're in that sort of survival state and something's going on and or maybe there's high stress and because you look you'll often get that won't you where you know if you've got a lot going on at work or something's really stressful you're worrying how to pay the mortgage and then your child does something that you would normally be fine with and you and you lose your temper over thing or with your partner you know you lose your temper in ways that you kind of would normally never do that. And it's because you're already at this really high

level of stress and then something else happens and it flips to the last resort emotion, right? It goes to that whoosh, I'm not okay. And so it really helps. Again, I keep saying it because it happens a lot in therapy, but it's that shift from judgment to curiosity if you can. Our temptation is to judge ourselves. So you lose your temper as a parent or even with a colleague and you immediately judge yourself for being a bad person. You're not a bad person, you're a human being. Let's look at way, way before that anger happened, what was going on. And that's the conversation I'll be having in therapy. Okay, you lost your temper on Thursday and did something you regret. What was happening Thursday before and in the, in all the week leading up to that? What's going on? What are you living

with? What, you know, what's weighing you down? And sometimes things that seem out of character when you first hear about them, no longer seem out of character when you hear someone's story. Suddenly you're going, of course, of course you did. Of course you feel this way. Why? How could you not feel this way? Look at what's going on. Look what you're dealing with. Look what's weighing you down. And once it makes sense, then you can look at what can be shifted and changed to sort of make sure that that emotion doesn't come up as often, you know, and it's usually because there are some unmet needs there that need a bit of adjustment and then when you're better looked after, you find that those sorts of emotions come up a bit less.

Thank you to Julie for all of her wisdom. I feel like we all just got a free therapy session with her. Her book, Open When, is a must read, whether you're struggling with self-doubt, anxiety, or just the wild unpredictability of life. If this episode sparked something in you, please hit follow, subscribe, leave us a review, predictability of life.