The reason you keep opening his Instagram might have nothing to do with how much you still love him. I didn't know the answer either, not for a long stretch of trying every trick in the breakup-recovery playbook. Blocking him didn't stick. Deleting the app didn't stick. What finally did was a love manifestation practice — scripting, soulmate visualization, even a stint with the 369 method — built around a battered secondhand copy of The Secret, though it took a while before I understood why.
Quick disclosure, since we're already here: this post contains affiliate links, including one to Soulmate Story, and if you try something I mention I earn a small commission at no extra cost to you. I only link tools I've actually used in my own overthinking, journal-hoarding manifestation practice.
Is 'Just Stop Thinking About Him' Even Possible?
Here's the myth almost every breakup-recovery list repeats: go no-contact, block everywhere, distract yourself until the feelings fade. It treats moving on like a suppression exercise — mind over matter, sheer refusal to think about someone. The problem is suppression backfires. Try not to think about something and it's suddenly all you can think about. That's basically what happened every time I white-knuckled a day without checking his socials — the urge came back louder.
As a graphic designer, this is obvious once you say it out loud. You don't get a client to stop fixating on their outdated logo by telling them to stop looking at it — you hand them a new logo to look at instead. I started testing that idea in a battered notebook at a coffee shop on South Congress Avenue, sketching logo comps on one page and writing out affirmations on the next. That's the whole mechanic behind redirecting attention instead of suppressing it, and it's the piece the 'just get over him' crowd tends to skip.
The Habit Was Attention, Not Affection
Okay, hear me out. Before scripting or the 369 method, I tried a self-love challenge I found on Pinterest: a whole 21-day plan, daily prompts, the works. I abandoned it on day four, bored and a little embarrassed at how earnestly I'd committed to a checklist for liking myself. It didn't fail because self-love prompts are useless. It failed because it was aimed at the wrong target — it assumed the problem was low self-worth, when the actual problem was a very specific, very repetitive attention habit pointed at one person's feed.
My friend Kezia was the one who actually asked good questions about it. She takes my journal rambling more seriously than I do half the time, and when I told her about the Pinterest flop she didn't ask why I quit; she asked what I'd actually been trying to feel instead of just checking out. That question did more work than the whole 21-day plan.
Scripting, the 369 Method, and Soulmate Visualization: Redirecting the Target
A flat, forgettable rejection text came through not long after — no drama, barely a flicker — and instead of spiraling into the usual replay, I got in the car and drove to BookPeople like it was any other errand. That non-reaction is the actual marker of moving on, not some dramatic day where you stop caring. It's the absence of a spiral where a spiral used to live, and scripting — writing out the version of my life I actually wanted, present tense, like it was already true — is what built that muscle, one page at a time.
I also leaned on the 369 method for a while, less for the ritual itself and more because writing the same intention repeatedly forces you to get specific about what you're actually asking for. That matters, because manifesting a vague "someone better" works a lot less well than manifesting a defined feeling of stability. That specificity is the whole reason a soulmate sketch even helps: it's not fortune-telling, it's a forced exercise in deciding what you want instead of drifting toward whatever shows up next.
That's basically why I finally tried Soulmate Story — not because I thought a drawing could predict anything, but because my brain needed an actual image to redirect toward instead of my ex's face. The sketch that came back didn't resemble him even slightly, and that was sort of the point: seeing a completely different set of traits laid out on a page made the old target feel beside the point instead of aching. If a full sketch service feels like too much commitment out of the gate, Soulmate Sketch 2.0 is a lighter way to test the same idea. Jacinta, a woman I met at a manifestation meetup I went to a couple of times, is far more openly spiritual about all this than I'll ever be, and she was the one who pointed out that either version works less like a prophecy and more like a mood board — a way of visualizing your soulmate as a feeling you're moving toward instead of a face you're trying to identify.
Detachment When You Can't Go No-Contact
Not everyone gets a clean break, and that's worth saying plainly: if you share kids, a friend group, or a job with your ex, no-contact simply isn't on the table. You'll see their name in your inbox about pickup times or a mutual friend's birthday, and every one of those pings can reset the whole process if you let it. What actually helps in that situation is treating it as a detachment problem rather than a distance problem — a logistics text isn't contact with the relationship, it's contact with a scheduling issue, and you get to decide which one it feels like.
What Actually Counts as Moving On?
So here's the corrected version of the advice, the one I'd actually stand behind: moving on was never about hitting zero thoughts of him. It's about what happens in the three seconds after a thought shows up — whether you follow it down the usual path or redirect it toward something you're actually building. If you're stuck in the scrolling-and-relapsing loop, skip another rebound and try giving your brain something specific to look at instead. A Soulmate Story visualization is one low-stakes way to start, but a notebook and an honest hour would do it too.