How to Stop Thinking About Someone

Why you can't stop thinking about them

When it has a name: limerence

In the 1970s the psychologist Dorothy Tennov coined a word for a state many people recognised but had no name for, and set it out in her 1979 book: limerence, an involuntary, consuming preoccupation with one person, driven by the hope that they feel the same. It is not a diagnosis. It is a useful description if most of these fit:

• The thoughts arrive on their own: in meetings, in the shower, when you wake up.
• Your mood depends on them. A reply lifts the day; a slow one sinks it.
• You read meaning into small things: reply times, emoji, who they sat next to.
• What you most want is to know whether they feel the same.
• It has lasted months, sometimes with very little real contact.

If that sounds like you, start with what limerence is or work through the twelve questions in our limerence self-reflection. If it has lasted a few weeks and you can put it down on a busy day, it is more likely an ordinary crush; the difference is set out in limerence vs. crush.

Two other things can look similar. If the relationship was real and has ended, what you are going through may be grief, which runs a different course. If the thoughts are doubts about your own partner or relationship (are they right for me, do I really love them) and you feel driven to check your feelings or seek reassurance, the International OCD Foundation describes that pattern as relationship OCD, and it is treated differently.

Why pushing the thought away backfires

Seven steps that reduce it

In roughly the order that people manage to keep up. None of them needs the other person to do anything.

1. Count it for one day. Each time the thought arrives, make a tally and write down what set it off: a song, a place, their name in a group chat, lying in bed. You are not trying to stop anything yet. Most people find the triggers are a short, repeating list, and that list tells you where to act.
2. Cut what feeds it. Mute or archive the chat. Unfollow, or at least hide their stories. Take their profile off your quick-access list. Every check is a small, unpredictable reward, and unpredictable rewards are the hardest habits to break. If zero feels impossible, set a daily limit and lower it each week.
3. Give the thinking a fixed time and place. Pick 20 to 30 minutes a day, in the same chair, at the same time. When the thought arrives outside that slot, note it in a word and tell yourself it has an appointment later. In a trial with 53 people who worried heavily, a daily 30-minute worry period in a fixed time and place reduced worry, anxiety and insomnia over two weeks. That study was about worry in general, not about a person, but the structure transfers.
4. Have one specific replacement ready. Trying to think of nothing does not work. In the original thought-suppression experiments, people who were given one particular thing to think about instead showed less of the rebound. Decide in advance what yours is: a podcast episode, a walk route, a task you are halfway through. It needs to be concrete, not "something else".
5. Turn a maybe into a known answer, where you can. Uncertainty keeps the thinking going. If there is a real question you could get answered, getting the answer usually helps more than months of guessing, even when the answer is no. If asking would open a new channel of contact rather than close a question, do not ask.
6. Write down what actually happened, once. Two columns. Left: what they actually said or did, quoted. Right: what you concluded from it. The right column is usually much longer. Writing it down once gives you a record to check the story against, instead of replaying it from memory.
7. Fill the time it was using. The thinking expands into empty hours and shrinks when your days are full of things that matter to you for their own sake. This is the least interesting step and often the one that does the most. The one published limerence treatment case included rebuilding activity alongside cutting rituals and questioning the thoughts.

For the full version of this approach, including a table of the habits that keep the loop going and what to do instead, see how to get over limerence. The two-column exercise is laid out as a daily practice in our journal for anxious attachment.

If you barely knew them, or never dated

People are often embarrassed by how hard it is to stop thinking about someone they only met a few times. It makes sense once you see where the thinking gets its material. With little real information, most of what you are attached to is your own picture of them, and that picture never disappoints you. More ordinary contact usually weakens it, because the real person keeps correcting the picture. Where more contact is not possible or not wise, the writing step above does some of the same work: it separates the few things you know from the many you have filled in.

If you can't avoid them

Two books worth reading

Tennov's Love and Limerence is the book that named the experience, and many readers say it is the first time they saw their own thinking described. Tom Bellamy's Smitten is the practical one. Both are reviewed on our books page.

Frequently asked questions

When to get outside support

Consider a licensed mental-health professional if the thinking is affecting your sleep, work, eating, money or other relationships; if you are doing things you would not want described to someone you respect; if the thoughts feel unwanted and you do rituals to get rid of them; or if it has continued through several honest attempts to reduce it. If you may harm yourself or someone else, contact your local emergency or crisis service now.