If you are reading this, you are likely going through a breakup, and for that I am sorry.

Psychologists rank the end of a relationship among the most painful events a person can live through, second only to the death of a spouse. Brain scans of people who’ve just been left show the same activity seen in addiction withdrawal.

Heartbreak isn’t a metaphor. It’s a real neurological wound that affects your sleep, your appetite, ability to connect, and even your ability to feel pleasure at all. Your brain is reacting as if your safety at risk and prioritizes it above all else.

What I’ve learned is that most breakup advice on the internet trivializes it - to say the least. It doesn’t take into consideration what’s actually happening in your brain and body, how long healing really takes, or the fact that no two breakups are the same. “Go no contact.” “Hit the gym.” “Get back out there.” Advice like that treats a neurological injury like a standard bad mood.

The most important thing you can take away right off the bat is this:

“Grief is as unique as a fingerprint.”


Your grief is shaped by your history, your attachment style, the relationship itself, and how it ended. There is no “right” way to feel and no deadline for being over it. If you’re not where someone else thinks you should be, nothing is wrong with you.

This blog will teach you exactly which areas of the brain are impacted, the different states your body goes through as it grieves, and practical, research-backed ways to move through each one. Not around it. Through it.

My Story

At the time of me writing this, I am 5 months out of a breakup. I have been through 9 major heartbreaks (each lasting 2–5 years), so I have had some experience with them; probably a PhD at this point (unfortunately).

This latest one is particularly “special,” as during this time, I had been diagnosed with brain cancer and had 2 surgeries that year. I then got a brain infection and had to carry an IV bag around with me for 6 weeks. Just when I thought things couldn’t get worse, my mom got diagnosed with pancreatic cancer on Mother’s Day at the same time I got evicted from my apartment.

My girlfriend at the time was incredibly unsupportive. Her behaviour, while I was going through what I went through, was pathologically unempathetic and even cruel, so I delete-blocked her.

My nervous system shut down during this time. I developed intense depression and suffered from anhedonia for 5 months (the inability to experience pleasure) and still have it. To say this state is “hell” would be an understatement.

Getting through life, navigating it, and doing what needs to be done when you have zero motivation is, hands down, the most difficult thing I have ever done.

During this time, I read every book on trauma I could find so I could understand how my girlfriend could be so cruel. I also read the latest research on grief to understand how I could heal from it.

The first thing all that reading taught me is this: breakup grief is a neurological event. The same reward pathways that fire for food and safety get cut off suddenly, and your brain responds accordingly. The anxiety, the obsessive thoughts, the inability to sleep — these aren’t signs that something is wrong with you. They’re signs that something real happened.

Why Most People Don’t Take It Seriously

We’ve built a culture that treats breakup grief as embarrassing. You’re supposed to “get back out there,” “stay busy,” or “remember your worth.” The implicit message is that grief over a relationship is indulgent — something to push through rather than move through.

The problem is that unprocessed grief doesn’t disappear. It goes underground. It shows up years later as patterns you can’t explain, walls you didn’t mean to build, or a numbness where feeling used to be.

What Grief Is Actually Doing

When a long relationship ends, you don’t just lose the person. You lose:

• The version of yourself that existed in relation to them
• A shared future you’d been quietly constructing
• Daily rituals and the texture of ordinary life
• A source of attachment, safety, and identity

This is a compound loss. And compound losses require compound grieving.

Facing It Instead of Fleeing It

The research on grief resolution is consistent: the people who move through it most effectively are the ones who turn toward it rather than away from it. Not wallowing — turning toward. There’s a difference.

Turning toward means letting yourself feel the feeling fully, understanding what specifically you’re grieving, and not rushing to the “lesson” before you’ve sat with the loss.

That’s what this site is about. And it’s what the Levello coaching process is built around — a structured way to face what happened, understand it, and build from it.

Not past it. From it.