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Whether you’re hoping to reconnect with an ex or ready to date again, there’s one obstacle that consistently holds people back: overwhelming anxiety. The fear of rejection, the spiral of “what if” scenarios, the paralysis that comes from not knowing what to say or do next.
Here’s the reality: you can’t control whether your ex will want to get back together. Their feelings, circumstances, and decisions are ultimately their own. But you can control how you respond to uncertainty and rejection. You can learn to manage the anxiety that often makes post-breakup interactions feel impossible.
When someone learns to handle their anxiety effectively, several things become possible. They can have honest conversations without catastrophizing every response. They can accept whatever outcome emerges — whether that’s reconciliation or closure. And if reconciliation isn’t in the cards, they’re better equipped to move forward and build healthy relationships with new people.
This doesn’t guarantee any specific outcome with your ex. What it does guarantee is that you’ll be operating from a place of emotional stability rather than desperation — which benefits you regardless of what happens with this particular relationship.
The typical ex-back advice industry focuses on tactics, lines, and manipulation strategies. But these approaches often backfire because they don’t address the underlying anxiety driving the behavior. When you’re anxious, even the “perfect” text message or conversation can feel forced and inauthentic.
Instead, let’s focus on understanding and managing the anxiety itself. Because whether you end up with your ex or someone new, the ability to handle rejection and uncertainty with grace is one of the most valuable relationship skills you can develop.
Understanding Anxiety
Despite decades of psychological research and studies on anxiety, the ex-back advice industry is woefully uninformed on these matters and consequently spews a lot of nonsense. So here are four pointers to help you understand the subject correctly.
1. Anxiety is permanent
Anxiety is nothing but a biological mechanism that we developed because it helped us survive back in the caveman days. But as time went on and the human race evolved, our anxieties evolved with it. And as we adapted to modern society and way of life, so have our anxieties.
Therefore, no matter how you look at it, anxiety is permanent. It’s hardwired into us, and it never wanes completely no matter what we do. The only thing we can do is learn to manage it better — a.k.a., overcome it.
2. Anxiety is Common
Since anxiety is rooted in our biology, everyone has it, and almost everyone suffers from some form of it to some degree.
For example, almost every reader that comes to my blog gets the jitters when they see their ex. The same goes for when their ex texts them or when they meet up with them for the first time after their breakup.
It’s nerve-racking, yes, but also normal to feel this way.
3. Anxiety is Not Always Bad
Anxiety triggers our “fight or flight” response, primes us to take action, and helps us avoid painful events and failures in many cases.
So, if you come home one day and see a bear in your bedroom and he looks furious, you’ll obviously get anxious. And that anxiety will cause you to do one of two things: fight the bear (please don’t) or run away.
The problem occurs when we start perceiving things that aren’t a threat as a threat (usually due to shame and deep-seated insecurities), thus causing us to become anxious. This is when anxiety becomes debilitating and holds us back.
A breakup is a good example of this. When your partner breaks up with you, you get inundated with crippling anxiety because your mind triggers your “fight” response. It tells you that losing your partner is a threat to your survival and primes you to try to get them back — usually by force or manipulation. As you’d guess, this never ends well.
4. Anxiety Contains Defense Mechanisms
Anxiety’s defense mechanisms are simple behavioral patterns we use in order to avoid whatever causes us a lot of anxiety. There are four of them:
- Procrastination (postponing a date you set with your ex because you’re too nervous about meeting up/not responding to your ex’s call because you think it’ll make you seem too eager).
- Intellectualization (taking hours to craft the perfect text message for your ex/spending days researching how you’ll approach your ex when you meet up with them and ask them out on a second date).
- Apathy (bullshiting yourself that you don’t care about getting your ex back when you do/postponing a date you set with them because you’re “too tired” or “not in the mood”).
- Anger (declaring that your ex is a slut/asshole and that the breakup is their fault because they’re not interested in going out with you).
Recognizing these patterns in yourself is the first step toward managing them — which brings us to overcoming anxiety.
This cheat sheet lays out a simple yet potent approach to mending a relationship — one rooted in raw authenticity that respects both your dignity and that of your ex.
Get The Free Cheat SheetHow To Overcome Anxiety
Here are a few principles of overcoming anxiety based on cognitive behavioral therapy, one of the most researched approaches for long-term change.
1. Change Your Perception Of The Outcome
Since your ex has their own set of intertwining feelings, thoughts, desires, and issues, there is no way one can guarantee you’ll get them back. Regardless of how confident and attractive you get, you’ll have to stomach being anxious about the whole thing sometimes.
That said, changing your perception of the outcome helps to lessen those spurts of anxiety when they arrive. You do this by changing your desired outcome from “I’ll get my ex back” to “I’ll cultivate a healthy and fulfilling relationship.”
The trick is that a healthy and fulfilling relationship is an outcome that you can predict and be fairly confident about achieving.
So whenever you notice you’re telling yourself how you’ll get your ex back, stop and tell yourself how you’ll cultivate a healthy and fulfilling relationship instead — be that with your ex or someone else.
The longer you keep reminding yourself of this, the quicker you’ll accept the idea and ease yourself from some of your anxiety. You’ll still feel it, along with other painful emotions, but it won’t be as overwhelming as it used to be.
2. Build Confidence Through Practice (But Not How You Think)
The more confident you feel in social situations, the less anxious you’ll be around your ex. It’s that simple. But here’s where most people get it wrong: they think they need to practice “getting their ex back” like it’s a skill you can master.
It’s not. Your ex’s feelings aren’t a video game you can beat with enough practice rounds.
What you can practice are the underlying social and emotional skills that make you a more confident person overall. And when you’re genuinely more confident, that shows up naturally in all your interactions — including with your ex.
Here’s what actually works:
- Date other people. Not to make your ex jealous, but to practice being comfortable with vulnerability, building connections, and handling romantic tension without the emotional baggage that comes with your ex.
- Work on relationship skills with everyone in your life. Practice setting boundaries with friends, having difficult conversations with family, being more emotionally honest with colleagues. These skills transfer directly to any romantic relationship.
- Get comfortable with your own company. The more okay you are being alone, the less desperate you’ll seem when you’re with others. Take yourself out to dinner, travel solo, enjoy your own hobbies without needing validation.
The goal isn’t to become some smooth-talking pickup artist. It’s to become someone who’s genuinely comfortable in their own skin. That kind of authentic confidence is something your ex will notice — whether it leads to reconciliation or not.
3. Leverage Negative Visualization
Negative visualization is an exercise originating from Stoic philosophy. It translates to imagining the worst-case scenario in whatever gives you anxiety and scares you. Imagine that everything that can go wrong will go wrong.
This, however, is the easy part of negative visualization. Since you’re anxious, you’re probably doing it already. The tricky part is imagining how you can be okay with the worst things happening. It sounds counteractive but think about it.
If you have high expectations right now, as in, “I’ll get my ex back no matter what. It’s only a matter of time before it happens.” you’ll be pretty anxious about the whole thing — especially when things don’t go your way (which they never do).
Whereas if you have low or no expectations, you’ll be much calmer and less anxious; and paradoxically more attractive. Even if your ex never comes back, the blow won’t be half as painful since you already anticipated it and mentally prepared yourself.
4. Stop Making Your Ex the Center of Your Universe
If getting your ex back is the most important thing in your life right now, you’re setting yourself up for massive anxiety and probable failure.
When your happiness depends entirely on someone else’s decision — especially someone who already chose to leave — you’re giving them way too much power over your emotional state. Every text they don’t respond to becomes devastating. Every interaction gets overanalyzed. You turn into someone even you wouldn’t want to date.
Now the solution isn’t to stop caring about them. It’s to care about other things more.
Think about what you valued before this relationship consumed your thoughts. Maybe it was your career growth, your friendships, a creative project, getting in better shape, or learning something new. Whatever it was, you need to make those things your primary focus again.
When your ex becomes just one part of a fuller life — rather than the entire point of your life — two things happen. First, you naturally become less anxious because your self-worth isn’t riding on their every response. Second, you become more attractive because you’re not acting desperate.
The paradox: the less you need your ex back, the better your reconciliation chances become. But more importantly, the better your life becomes regardless of what they decide.
5. Accept Your Anxiety
Imagine taking a tough exam. The more you tell yourself to calm down and focus, the harder you find it to calm down and focus. Or the more you think about how you don’t want to screw it up, the more likely you are to screw it up.
Yet, if you just surrendered to your anxiety and accepted that things might not go as planned or as you want them to go, you’d relax and lower your chances of failing your exam.
Same story when it comes to getting your ex back. The more you desire to get them back, the stronger your anxiety will become and the higher your odds of getting rejected. And the more determined you are to stop being anxious, the more anxious you’ll become. It’s a catch 22.
So instead of getting ensnared, let go and surrender to your anxiety. Hell, accept it.
Of course, accepting anxiety is easier said than done. These practices can help you develop that capacity (I wrote articles on all of them): meditation, journaling, calm-breathing, therapy.
The Real Victory
Here’s what most people miss about post-breakup anxiety: the goal isn’t to eliminate it completely. The goal is to stop letting it control your decisions.
When you can sit with the uncertainty of not knowing if your ex will come back — when you can feel that anxiety without immediately rushing to fix it through desperate texts or elaborate schemes — you’ve already won. Not because you’re guaranteed to get your ex back, but because you’re no longer at the mercy of your own fears.
This work takes time. You won’t master it after reading one article or trying these strategies for a week.
But every time you choose to sit with discomfort instead of acting on it, every time you focus on building your own life instead of trying to control someone else’s feelings, you’re building genuine confidence that will serve you in every relationship going forward.
This cheat sheet lays out a simple yet potent approach to mending a relationship — one rooted in raw authenticity that respects both your dignity and that of your ex.
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