Playlist about How to Get Over Your Ex

Being able to get over stuff successfully and quickly requires a few key pieces. Four key ingredients are novelty, supportive themes, reframing and isomorphism.
The songs in the playlist below has all of these pieces and this post is about how this can be working for you to get over your ex.

First is novelty.  For something to change, something new is required.  New thinking, new behaviour, new way of looking at things.  Also, for your brain to rewire itself and for memories to become updated in better ways, novelty rich experiences are needed.  New environment also helps.  These songs will hopefully give you a new experience for you or at least the story behind them will be new for many.

Second is supportive themes.  This is a key piece because in studies of post traumatic growth, one of the key commonalities of people that got over stuff was them having highly supportive themes.  In other words, if you had friends and an environment with people who had experienced heartbreaking experiences and then became rockstar champions afterwards, then you would pick up some of that attitude and would have an easier time applying similar thoughts and ideas to your own life.  The songs in this list have supportive themes which will further enable you to see your break up as something that will allow you to become a bigger and better version of yourself.

Third is reframing.  One of the most effective ways to get over stuff is to change the framework.  When you change the frame, you change the experience. The songs in this list and the stories behind them will change what it means about a breakup so that you can experience it in more beneficial ways.  The organism with the most options wins.  This is the law of requisite variety.  By giving yourself more options of looking at things, it will be easier to survive and thrive.

Isomorphism (sameness of form).  One person that helped thousands of people make a change for the better is Dr Milton H. Erickson.
He was not only an American psychologist and psychiatrist, he was also one of the greatest hypnotherapists of all time. He was effective at creating change for his clients by not just hypnotizing them, but also by doing so by means of telling therapeutic stories.  He would put a client in a trance and then tell a story about tomatoes.  The client would listen to the tomato story and would somehow magically no longer have the problem anymore.  The reason for this transformation was because Milton Erickson would tell a story that would have within it a lesson in the subtext that would subconsciously benefit his client.  The client would relate to the relationships between characters and conflicts within the lesson of the story and unconsciously or consciously apply it to their own problems which would cause the client to feel better and think differently.  Milton was so good at this that his speaking patterns became studied by a linguistic professor (John Grinder) and a computer programmer (Richard Bandler).  The result of those studies and more became what's known today as Neuro-Linguistic Programming.

So I'm going to begin telling these stories of people by using elements of supportive themes, reframing, novelty and isomorphism so that after you read this post and watch the video that goes with it, you can get more benefit from listening to these songs and experiencing concepts in ways that will expand the way you used to think about the challenges you are going through.

Now we can begin...

1.  We Don't Need Another Hero - Tina Turner

After a breakup one of the problems that can hold you back is the feeling of insecurity and to be experiencing self-criticism.  This is not an effective program of thinking to do to yourself.  By taking all the blame and guilting yourself with victimhood mentality can become habitual and become a hard wired neural pathway.  I call this the X program.

This battle in your thinking is like what you want against what you don't want.  Or you can do it yourself.  You can create a life beyond your old thinking in the storms and lightning in the mind of your Thunderdome.  The Tina Turner song has lyrics about the Thunderdome which was a ring where a barbaric game was played to the death.  Two men enter, one man leaves.  It was a place for conflict.  When getting over something, the conflict can be within your own head, inside your skull, fighting in your own thunderdome.  Einstein said  'You can't solve a problem with the same level of thinking that created it.'  So instead of looking outside to fill a gap, find ways to encourage yourself to fill yourself up with the unlimited supply of love you have inside, even though you might not know it yet.  You don't need another relationship.  You don't need a self-help book.  Get outside of the old thinking that had circulated in your own 'thunderdome' and rebuild your life by focusing on rebuilding a new future, a life beyond thunderdome.  In coaching clients one of the key fundamental understandings to impart to the client is to look to yourself, not to the outside world for satisfaction.

‘Every difficulty in life presents us with an opportunity to turn inward and to invoke our own submerged inner resources. The trials we endure can and should introduce us to our strengths’ - Epictetus

Think in new ways, new energy in you from you.  Self-love doesn't come from outside, so find it in yourself to think of the greatest moments in your life, then stack those states of being together to create a new state of being, a new gestalt and a new circuit in your mind that allows you to bounce back by beginning to feel good about how you are which makes it easier to take responsibility rebuilding yourself.  Once you're feeling great, you'll find that from that state of being you'll find it easier to envision your new life beyond the problems.  Learn the lesson and move forward with that education. Can't make the same mistake next time if you learned the lesson this time.  By learning the lesson you have more understanding and that helps to change the fear and stress response that was connected to the problem.  Yes we need fear responses, but only to things that allow us to be more functional.  Otherwise we would live in fear out of safety and how would humanity continue?
Perhaps live under the fear until nothing else remains?
No.  You are going to find your answers inside after you first quiet your mind.
Tina Turner did it.  Others have too.
'There's got to be something better out there.'
Right?
Love and compassion.  Compassion is a miracle emotion.  It rewires brain circuits in ways that builds resilience.  Tina talks of compassion in this song.  And she came to blossom when she was in her mid 40's.   It took her awhile but she wanted something to rely on.  The thing to rely on is yourself, not another hero.  In what ways will you be increasing the development of your strengths that you haven't considered yet?

2. Just Dance - Lady Gaga

Before she made the transformation to Lady Gaga, she was Stefanie Germanotta, go-go dancer/artist living in New York City.  When she was 19 she was raped.  She said she changed completely after that.  A few years later she was in a relationship.  That didn't end well.  During a fight over the breakup, she said to her ex boyfriend that 'one day he won't be able to get a coffee without hearing my name.'  After all that, she continued honing her craft.  Now she is known as the pop star icon Lady Gaga.  One of her breakthrough songs was Just Dance.
To change the program you were running, at some point it has to be interrupted.  It would have to stop.  You have to break the pattern of stinking thinking.  When you feel like crap and are noticing yourself focusing on doom and gloom, that's going to increase the production of cortisol- a stress hormone.  Usually it's a good thing.

As adrenaline and cortisol levels drop, your heart rate and blood pressure return to baseline levels, and other systems resume their regular activities.

But when stressors (internal or external) are always present and you constantly feel under attack, that fight-or-flight reaction stays turned on.  Then you have long-term activation of the stress-response system — and the subsequent overexposure to cortisol and other stress hormones — can disrupt almost all your body's processes. This puts you at increased risk of numerous health problems, including:

• Anxiety
• Depression
• Digestive problems
• Headaches
• Heart disease
• Sleep problems
• Weight gain
• Memory and concentration impairment

So when you begin to find yourself replaying those stressful memories of the past, instead of allowing that stress response to escalate, instead all that moment to be your time to just dance.  This interrupts that old pathway, changes the old habit of your old self.  Just stopping that stress response is already a huge benefit with healthy long lasting benefits.  The time you save by just stopping a stress program is massive.  Stress is a killer.  Being able to stop it has a payoff value and return on investment in yourself that is immeasurable.  Dancing will burn off cortisol.  Instead of allowing a stress hormone to rot in your guts and have you get fat.

Second reason to just dance is it boosts endorphins.  Exercise is good for you and this song has a good isomorphic meaning for you  to change any thoughts of your ex and the emotional meanings you had learned to build those old habitual neural networks with. Take the lesson for your mind, dance for your body and give yourself some exercise for life.  Dancing is a fun way to exercise, especially when everything is going to be ok.

You're alive and can direct yourself in ways that improves your life overall.  You know that life is precious.  Now is your time to dance and enjoy the priceless gift of having being alive!

3.  Nam Myoho Renge Kyo - Tina Turner

Now we take it down a notch to a meditation level.  Tina Turner was married to Ike Turner.  He would beat her up and she would keep on touring with him.  Eventually she had enough.  She changed her mindset.  It was when she was going through her rough patch that she began to meditate a chant about a lotus.  This is such an important part of who she is now that even her biographical movie 'What's Love Got to Do With It'  opens up with a scene about the Nam Myoho Renge Kyo meditation from the Beyond album.  The message is to see your life like a lotus.  Yes you go through filth and muddy water.  Eventually the lotus blossoms in the sun and reveals magnificently pristine petals.  Get through the mud by following what allows you to create, vision and dream your wildest dream.  Tina Turner has lived her wildest dream after going through the filth.  Life is messy.  And when you are still inside, very still and calm, you can internalize that no mud, no lotus.

She has done this chant many times and on various television shows.  The Larry King one is easiest to find if you are looking for a different presentation.
The song is on the playlist because it's meditative which is good for quieting the monkey mind, the singer has lived the chant after she was broke and divorced and become a star.  The isomorphic relationship of that message is a double whammy becomes its a 3000 year old chant and being done by the queen of rock n roll who exemplifies rockstar resilience.  Her ability to bounce back and share a recording of her meditating might be more resonant with how you have it in you to keep on growing.  You can rewrite your old thinking for more updated ways of being that allows you to focus on the future and the solutions.

4.  Alive

The Chinese have a thing about the number four.  It sounds like death to them.  I'm not Chinese so the fourth song is Alive by Sia. We ended with a meditative tone in the last song by Tina Turner and now it's Sia-Alive which begins with the meditative tone and then like a lotus it breaks through with life and a gushing release of energy.
She writes hit songs for stars.  And when the songs she writes are rejected, she records them herself and makes them  a hit on her own.
Memory reconsolidation.  See both sides and more.  The more you can shift perceptual positions, the more information you have to make better decisions unconsciously.  The body and brain keep the score and so you can change the score by perceiving things in different ways.  Her hair colour is black from one angle, blond from another angle.  When you see both sides you are able to get the picture of what is really going on.  A breakup is the same.  When you can see all the good that you weren't seeing before, then you can make change easier because your brain has more data, a richer map of reality to create a more knowledgeable circuit.
Also, you can be a star and not show your face.  You can be achieving greatness in ways you haven't thought of yet.  Even a rockstar that doesn't like to show her face can still be a rockstar.  In what ways can you really be alive that you haven't considered yet you will once you begin focusing on the creative joy that percolates in solitude in the weeks ahead?

5. $300 by Soul Coughing

In the television show House, there is a scene where the character is going through a pivotal moment in his life.  He quits morphine, has a shower, and shaves his always unshaven face.  The music for this scene is $300 by Soul Coughing and it captures a mood about putting a decision into action.  The scene starts with a shot of his pager on the bathroom sink going off.  House decides to not just ignore the distress call from the hospital, he instead throws the pager in the garbage.  Cue song and start shaving.  This song is used to mark where House cleans up, and puts on a shirt and a tie and does what he has to do.  You might want to have a moment like this with this soundtrack to make your own ritual of transformation to signal to yourself that you are moving away from the problem and are focused instead on creating solutions.

The music for this selection is different from everything so far and different is good for updating your own internal program.  If you're going to be up dancing around, it would be good to do useful things as well.  This song is might be handy for you to do your epic stuff like have a shower or maybe eat or perhaps write yourself a new life.  Whatever you do, have a soundtrack in your head that gets you to that state of being for your brain, the organ of experience, to get the message that you can do good stuff and it can feel uncomfortable and be the right thing to do.  That's why things are uncomfortable.  Even doing the right thing can feel wrong to your body if you've programmed it that way.  Being able to stop is a stop.  But what is it to start?  Doing life.  Doing the things that presses your values so your state of being hits the top floor so you can get off to a new level of understanding so that your life condition improves along with it.

6. Adventure.

This is a song from a video game created by Phil Fish.  Phil Fish was making a video game and then had a breakup with his girlfriend, his dad was diagnosed with leukemia and his business partner left him.  Phil made his video game on his own after many false starts and bugs in the system, he was able to finally complete it.  The game was eventually released with sales in the millions when accounting for ps3 and other video game consoles.  The FEZ game is about switching perspectives so that the main hero 'Gomez' can solve problems.  You can move the environment around to get a 3d like view.  Also of note is that the game has 'glitch mode'.  There is a level that has it appear that the game is broken.  The screen goes weird and everything goes haywire buggy.

'Glitch' scene from Fez

But that is just the game programmed to appear as though it is a glitch.  That's the fun of creating. He wanted the user experience of the game to be interrupted by what had seemed to be an error in the game.  The 'glitch' was part of the game.  It was another riddle to be solved, another mystery to be having a new look at.

Looking at things with a different perspective changes the overall meaning. By looking at your problems from a different perspective further enables you to shift your thinking in much more empowering ways because you have more information to get a more accurate understanding of the problem. People can focus on a breakup and what they lost or they can focus on what they gain. The choice is yours. Phil could have given up. Instead he continues his adventure and his life is rewarded in unimaginable ways! And in the game, the character never dies. It is as Phil describes it 'a stop and smell the flowers game'. It's a place to relax and have fun. When you fall off a cliff, you bounce back into life and continue doing your game.  You are allowed to have fun aren't you? What's also fun is that 'Fez' won an award for best indie game. Now we can talk about the music  from the game which also won an award for best soundtrack.

The album is great, but if I had to recommend one song it would be "Adventure" as performed by the London Philharmonic Orchestra.

Live your life like an adventure while getting over things.  The breakup or the glitch is part of the game of the adventure of life.  Keep playing because this is the natural course of life. Answer this question, when is the last time you did something for the first time? Have an adventure and build stuff, be creative.  People with rockstar resilience build something and people that make a change for good have a goal. What goals can you experience more adventure with as you are compassionately loving yourself so that your future self can thank you for what you are soon finding yourself doing more of now? 🙂

As an extra one to add, there is a song on the B-sides called Synchrosynct.

It's likely to be something that is new for you and it all comes from the same video game Fez.

7. Chromatics -Tick Tock.

This song is used as a background for the brilliant Ronnie O'Sullivan, a genius snooker player.  He has his challenges.  He focused on his work.  Running and snooker.  The running gave him endorphins and the snooker was the game where he sparkled with legendary brilliance. With all the challenges he has had, he always had his snooker.  And his ability on being obsessed with maximizing his snooker performance on making perfect games.  This is about getting the most points you can possibly get.  This involves learning how to make the first long red and get position onto a black.  Ronnie is a master of this.  His precision is outstanding.  He also has done the most maximums.  He quit the game for a year and then came back the next year and won the world snooker championship.  His habits have been on improving his game because he loves it.  This is rockstar resilience.  Being able to make the most of the opportunities you create for yourself.  Ronnie has created magical moments in snooker history by creating it out of what seemed to be very little.  This song and video are a good representation of what Ronnie is like.

You'll likely to want to know more about him and the game and end up in the rabbit hole of Youtube after this and that can be better than a lot of things.

'Find out who the best are and copy them.'

And that's good advice. So who has some of the qualities that you would like to have?

The point of this story is to focus on that which would make your life better over all and right now.
What is the work that you can be devoting yourself?

8.  Super Mario Theme.

What would happen if you were playing your life in a video game and the problems happened and you heard this music? Try it on 🙂
You might remember times in the past where the dragons might have been holding back but you continued playing and conquered.  Yes problems are problems and life is a struggle, but when that happens in a game, you persevere and keep going. People that bounce back from things also see life like a game and they see problems as opportunities for growth.  So, give yourself the experience of thinking of that problem that you had and let that problem state linger for a few minutes and then add this music to it.  It will lighten up your thinking and reawaken some of the moments in the past where you had struggles and slayed dragons and triumphed.