5 Expert-Backed Ways To Help You Feel Better About Losing Friends In 2026
Design Studio's | Canva When you break up with a friend, it can be really hard to handle all the pain inside of you. Whatever caused the friendship breakup, your feelings will most likely be hurt, and you need to find a way to heal and move on afterward. Friendship breakups are often more painful than a breakup from a romantic partner and can also be more difficult to initiate and heal from, especially if you've known them for the majority of your life.
Even if you were the one who initiated the breakup, you might feel some guilt or regret afterward, even if you know you made the right decision. Lost friendships are tough to get over, especially as you enter a new year, but following these steps might help you feel a bit better sooner.
Here are five expert-backed ways to help you feel better about losing friends in 2026:
1. Understand that the causes of friendship breakups vary
Sometimes friends just fade apart, and you want to eventually end the friendship because it's fading away. Other times, there's a specific reason why you need to break up with a friend, such as a toxic or broken friendship. Being familiar with the signs of a broken friendship, including power struggles, hesitancy to open up, different interests, unhappiness, broken trust, and demeaning behavior, can help you know when to break up with a friend.
Personal development coach Kelly Rudolph explained, "There’s no excuse for treating someone badly, but there are reasons why it happens. In a frenemy situation, there is a feeling of not being good enough to have what you have and a fear of it being taken away. If you don’t feel good enough, to begin with (99.9 percent of us have been there), and you see that someone is a possible threat to what you currently have, the attacker mindset kicks in, and you lash out. It makes sense, but is still completely unacceptable, even more unacceptable between friends, as they are supposed to protect each other."
2. Give yourself time to grieve
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Sometimes, friend breakups are inevitable. The truth is that not all friendships are meant to last forever. According to Keya Murthy, a clinical hypnotherapist and spiritual life coach, anything that begins must end. "This is following the law of impermanence as taught by the Buddha," Murthy explains. "If your relationship began some time and it was based on a condition, it will end on the day it’s not serving both of you anymore."
If you're not in a good place with your friend, you owe it to them to end the friendship. It's always ideal to give them an explanation, as breaking up with a friend with no explanation or closure can harm the other friend's mental health.
It's going to take time for you to heal from this friendship breakup, especially if you didn't see it coming. If you didn't get any clarity either, you'll probably be asking yourself over and over what you did wrong. To your brain, this breakup is just as serious, if not more painful, than a romantic breakup, so expect to go through the stages of grief.
"Friendship breakups are the hardest thing to do in your life if you must ever break up with someone you shared love in the form of friendship with," Murthy says. "I once heard a wise man say, 'God gives us friends to apologize for our relatives.' And now break up with a friend? The only thing that comes to mind is to keep doing daily ho’oponopono rituals until you do not need to do them anymore."
3. Try to get the closure you need if you didn't receive it — but don't force it
If you are constantly going through the stages of grief and you still don't understand what happened, it might be a good idea to try to reach out for some closure, especially if the breakup was very fast and abrupt, and you weren't ready at all. Before asking for closure, you should try to understand on your own what happened and how it's affecting you.
"Allow yourself to really step outside of yourself and look at the situation from the other person's point of view," recommended life coach Jennifer Twardowski. "If that is too challenging, focus on looking at the situation from an objective bird’s eye point of view."
If you still don't feel great after the conversation, don't torture yourself with the what-ifs. Just know that it happened for a reason, most likely, and things will get better. Spend time with other friends who love and support you.
4. Ask yourself what you need to do to move on
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After trying to get closure, you need to ask yourself what you can do to help yourself feel better. Go to therapy or try reconnecting with other friends of yours. Let your loved ones know you love them, and use this time to connect with others more, so you don't have to feel the pain of the breakup.
Social worker Joanne Brothwell encouraged people to "accept the truth. Life is, unfortunately, unfair, and this is a universal truth. Acceptance that sometimes life doesn't go our way and exploring our expectations will allow us to let go and find happiness from within."
5. Assess your other friendships for problems so this doesn't happen again
The hardest thing about a friendship breakup is if that breakup is amongst a group of friends and you. This makes the friendship group dynamic very awkward, and people might take sides. That's also very unhealthy, and if your friend group does that, maybe it means it was unhealthy in the first place.
Talk to your closest friends one-on-one and ask them how you both are doing in your own relationship. Ask if there's anything you can work on that they would like to see or if they would want to spend more time together. Cherish your other friendships because the loss of one friendship can teach you how important your other friendships are.
After a friendship breakup, hopefully, your friend who broke things off did so in a way that you understand why they didn't want to be friends anymore. If you didn't get that out of the conversation, it might be a little harder to heal — but you won't be sad forever.
If you think there's a chance to become friends again after a breakup, that could be possible with time. "Friendships after breaking up are definitely possible," Murthy assures. "You already have a history. You needed a break. And now, you need each other again, so your friendship resumes like seasonal flowers that bloom every spring without you replanting them."
Megan Hatch is a former contributor to YourTango who has had bylines on Medium, Buzzfeed, MSN Canada, Patch, Voice of America, Canyon News, and others.
