You Can’t Fall Out of Love in 12 Minutes — But Here’s What the Science Actually Says

And why the truth is more useful than the myth.

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There’s a post going viral right now that makes a seductive claim: scientists discovered you can fall out of love in 12 minutes. Just reframe your ex through a “neutral, detached lens.” Replace “I miss them” with “this is a person with traits that don’t align with my values.” Swap “we had a deep connection” for “we bonded under specific conditions that no longer exist.” Repeat “this feeling is a chemical response, not a prophecy.” Boom, heartbreak solved.

It reads like a cheat code for the human heart. And that’s exactly why millions of people shared it.

There’s just one problem: that’s not what the study found. Not even close.

The real research is messier, more nuanced, and (if you’re willing to sit with the complexity) far more useful than any 12-minute hack. So let’s talk about what actually happened in the lab, what it means for anyone trying to move on from someone they still love, and why the uncomfortable truth beats a comfortable lie every time.

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The Real Experiment

The study in question was conducted by Dr. Sandra Langeslag and Michelle Sanchez at the University of Missouri–St. Louis, published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General in 2018. It wasn’t some obscure pilot — it was a carefully designed experiment that combined self-reported emotional data with EEG brain scans to measure what happens when people try to regulate their love feelings after a breakup.

They recruited 24 participants — 20 women and 4 men, ages 20 to 37 — who were all experiencing genuine emotional distress from a recent romantic breakup. These weren’t people casually swiping through dating apps. They were people who were still hurting.

Each participant provided 28 digital photos of their ex-partner. They answered detailed questions about the relationship — how long it lasted, how they rated its quality, and how intensely they still felt love on a scale of 1 to 9. Then they were hooked up to an EEG and put through a series of trials.

Here’s the part the viral post gets wrong: participants weren’t told to do just “one thing.” They were tested across three distinct strategies, plus a control condition where they did nothing at all. Those three strategies were:

Negative Reappraisal — Deliberately focusing on the ex-partner’s flaws and the relationship’s problems. Participants were given prompts like thinking about their ex’s annoying habits, the ways they were incompatible, or the reasons the relationship failed. This is essentially what your best friend does when they remind you that your ex never cleaned up after themselves and borrowed money they never returned.

Love Reappraisal — Accepting the feeling of love without fighting it. Participants were guided to acknowledge that it’s normal and okay to still love someone after a breakup, that the feelings would pass naturally, and that having lingering love didn’t mean they should get back together. Prompts included statements like “It is okay to love someone I’m no longer with.”

Distraction — Thinking about something positive but completely unrelated to the ex or the breakup. Participants were asked things like “What is your favorite food? Why?” — redirecting attention away from the emotional trigger entirely.

After each regulation block, participants were shown a photo of their ex while their brain activity was recorded. They also rated how much love they felt and whether they felt pleasant or unpleasant.

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What Actually Happened

Here’s where the story stops being simple.

Negative reappraisal was the only strategy that actually decreased love feelings. When people focused on their ex’s negative qualities — “he was controlling,” “she never prioritized me,” “we wanted fundamentally different things”, their self-reported feelings of love went down measurably.

But it came with a cost. Participants who used negative reappraisal also reported feeling worse. Their mood dropped. They felt more unpleasant. The strategy worked on love, but it hurt in a different way — like ripping off a bandage that takes some skin with it.

Love reappraisal — the “neutral, detached lens” approach that the viral post describes — did not change love feelings at all. Telling yourself “this is just a chemical response” or “these feelings will pass” didn’t actually reduce how much participants loved their ex. It’s a cognitively appealing idea, but the data didn’t support it as a love-reduction tool.

Distraction didn’t reduce love feelings either. But it did something else: it made people feel more pleasant. Thinking about your favorite vacation or your dog or the best meal you ever ate didn’t make you love your ex less, but it did temporarily lift your mood.

And then there’s the brain data. All three strategies — even the ones that didn’t reduce love feelings — decreased what neuroscientists call the Late Positive Potential (LPP), which is a measure of motivated attention. In plain language, every strategy made the brain react less intensely when shown the ex’s photo. The emotional trigger still fired, but it fired with less voltage.

This is significant because it suggests that even when you can’t directly dial down love, you can reduce the grip that reminders of the person have on your nervous system. You’re not eliminating the feeling, but you’re loosening its hold on your attention.

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Why the Myth Matters

So why did the oversimplified version go viral while the real findings stayed buried in an academic journal?

Because the myth tells us what we want to hear: that love is a problem with a clean solution. Twelve minutes. One technique. Done. The appeal is obvious. When you’re lying awake at 2 a.m., replaying conversations and wondering what went wrong, the idea that you could simply reframe your way out of the pain is intoxicating.

But the research tells a different story. Love regulation isn’t a light switch. It’s more like a dial with a stiff mechanism — it turns, but slowly, unevenly, and not always in the direction you expect.

The study had only 24 participants. It measured short-term effects in a controlled lab, not real-world recovery over weeks and months. The researchers themselves noted that it was unclear whether the strategies would be equally effective over longer periods. And the most effective strategy at reducing love — negative reappraisal — was also the one most likely to make you feel miserable in the process.

None of this means the research is useless. It means the takeaways are more honest than a Twitter thread can contain.

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What the Science Actually Suggests for Moving On

If you strip away the hype and sit with the real findings, there’s practical wisdom here. It’s just not as tidy.

There is no single technique that painlessly eliminates love. If someone promises you that, they’re selling something. The emotional architecture of attachment was built over months or years of shared experience, neurochemical bonding, and identity entanglement. It doesn’t dissolve because you spent 12 minutes telling yourself it was “just chemistry.”

Negative reappraisal works, but use it carefully. Reminding yourself of the real problems in the relationship — not invented ones, but genuine incompatibilities and hurts — can reduce the intensity of love feelings. But overdoing it can spiral into rumination and bitterness. Think of it as a tool for breaking the idealization cycle, not a weapon to wield against your own memories. The goal isn’t to demonize someone. It’s to see them clearly.

Accepting your feelings doesn’t make you weak — and it might be underrated. Love reappraisal didn’t reduce love in the lab, but the study only measured immediate effects. There’s a strong body of research in broader emotion regulation showing that acceptance-based strategies tend to produce better long-term outcomes than suppression or avoidance. Telling yourself “it’s okay to still feel this, and it will change” might not provide instant relief, but it builds a healthier relationship with your own emotional life.

Distraction has its place. It won’t cure heartbreak, but it can get you through a bad night. Going to the gym, calling a friend, diving into a project — these won’t erase anyone from your heart, but they can interrupt the obsessive replay loop that makes everything feel worse than it needs to be. The brain data supports this: distraction reduced how intensely the brain responded to reminders of the ex, even though it didn’t reduce love itself.

Attachment is maintained by attention — this part the viral post got right. Every replayed memory, every scroll through old photos, every “what are they doing right now” thought is feeding the loop. You may not be able to stop loving someone on command, but you can stop volunteering for the pain. The research showed that all three strategies reduced the brain’s motivated attention response. That’s not nothing. That’s the beginning of letting go.

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The Part Nobody Wants to Hear

Here’s the thing the viral version got most dangerously wrong: the implication that if you can reduce love quickly, the love wasn’t real.

That framing — “if you can fall out of love in 12 minutes, part of you was already tired of holding on” — sounds profound, but it’s actually just cruel. It implies that the depth of your pain is the measure of your love’s authenticity, and that healing efficiently means you didn’t care enough. That’s not science. That’s romanticism wearing a lab coat.

The actual research suggests something less dramatic but more liberating: love feelings are partially regulable. Not fully controllable. Not fake. Not trivial. But not completely beyond the reach of deliberate thought, either. You are not a passive victim of your emotions. You have some agency — imperfect, effortful, partial agency — in how you relate to what you feel.

That doesn’t mean love is an illusion. It means human beings have more capacity for emotional self-direction than we tend to give ourselves credit for.

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The Honest Timeline

Recovery from a real relationship doesn’t happen in 12 minutes. It doesn’t happen through a single cognitive trick. It happens through the accumulation of small choices made on difficult days: the choice to stop checking their social media, the choice to call a friend instead of texting your ex, the choice to sit with sadness without letting it narrate your entire future.

Some days the dial turns easily. Some days it won’t budge. Some days you’ll think you’re over it and then a song will come on and you’ll be right back in the thick of it.

That’s not failure. That’s the human experience of love and loss, and no study — however well-designed — has found a way to make it painless. What the science offers isn’t a shortcut. It’s evidence that you’re not powerless. That your mind is not a prison. That the stories you tell yourself about someone have real, measurable effects on how intensely you feel about them.

You can’t fall out of love in 12 minutes. But you can start, today, choosing where you point your mind. And over time — real time, lived time, not viral-post time — that choice adds up to something that feels a lot like freedom.

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The study referenced in this article: Langeslag, S. J. E., & Sanchez, M. E. (2018). Down-Regulation of Love Feelings After a Romantic Break-Up: Self-Report and Electrophysiological Data. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 147(5), 720–733.