There’s no way to sugar-coat it, break-ups are rough.

Sure, you can bitch and moan about your ex and chant self-love mantras till the cows come home – but there’s no denying the unbearable pain of parting ways with someone you once loved.

However, how long that pain lingers is ultimately up to you, explains psychologist Guy Winch, whose book, How to Fix a Broken Heart, debunks some common myths surrounding heartbreak.

While popular culture might have you believe that a new part-time lover and a perpetual supply of Ben & Jerry’s is all you need to move on, Winch explains that break-ups affect us far more severely than we realise.

“Functional MRI Brain scan studies have shown that the withdrawal of romantic love activates the same mechanisms in the brain as get activated when addicts go through withdrawal from substances like cocaine or opioids,” the TED speaker told The Independent.

The 10 best love songs to win an Oscar Show all 10 1 /10 The 10 best love songs to win an Oscar The 10 best love songs to win an Oscar 10) “Up Where We Belong (An Officer and A Gentleman, 1982) 1982 was a year of blockbuster movie songs and “Up Where We Belong” pipped “Eye of the Tiger” to Oscars glory. Buffy Sainte-Marie, Will Jennings and Jack Nitzsche wrote it for the Richard Gere movie An Officer and A Gentleman. It was sung as a duet after Jennifer Warnes suggested a collaboration with Joe Cocker. Warnes had been a fan of the late Cocker since her teenage years and said she cried out with joy when he accepted the invitation to work with her. Their version was a worldwide hit and also won a Golden Globe and a Grammy. Rex The 10 best love songs to win an Oscar 9) “The Way You Look Tonight” (Swing Time, 1936) In Swing Time, Fred Astaire sings the gorgeous ballad “The Way You Look Tonight” to Ginger Rogers while she is washing her hair. The sentimental lyrics were written by the brilliant songwriter Dorothy Fields, whose credits include “A Fine Romance” and “The Sunny Side of the Street”. The song, with music composed by Jerome Kern, was up against some terrific competition in 1936 – beating “Pennies from Heaven” and “I’ve Got You Under My Skin” to an award in its third year. Billie Holiday, with jazz maestro Teddy Wilson on piano, had a hit with “The Way You Look Tonight” that year and the song has since been recorded by hundreds of best-selling singers, including Frank Sinatra. “The Way You Look Tonight” is popular, romantic songwriting at its very best. RKO Radio Pictures The 10 best love songs to win an Oscar 8) “Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing” (Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing, 1955) Sammy Fain’s formal love ballads epitomised the style of movie music in the 1950s. Fain won the Academy award for best song twice – for “Secret Love”, from the 1953 Doris Day movie Calamity Jane and, two years later, with the title song for Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing. Fain, a trained pianist, started out as song promoter in the 1920s and he was pragmatic about delivering the song studio bosses wanted for this William Holden movie. Fain and lyricist Paul Francis Webster constantly tinkered with the words in “Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing” to keep 20th Century-Fox happy. The song, performed by The Four Aces on the soundtrack, has remained a favourite of crooners, from Sinatra to Barry Manilow. The song has also been referenced in numerous modern films, including Grease and Nutty Professor II: The Klumps. YouTube/20th Century Fox The 10 best love songs to win an Oscar 7) “Can You Feel the Love Tonight?” (The Lion King 1994) In songwriting terms, it was essentially Elton John v Randy Newman in 1994. Newman was nominated for “Make Up Your Mind” for The Paper and John for three songs from The Lion King (his other nominations were for the songs “The Circle of Life” and “Hakuna Matata”). “Can You Feel the Love Tonight”, co-written with Tim Rice, was a popular winner and the single sold 11 million copies. The 10 best love songs to win an Oscar 6) “My Heart Will Go On” (Titanic, 1997) Canadian Céline Dion’s power ballad “My Heart Will Go On”, the theme song to James Cameron’s hit film Titanic, has been bought more than 20 million times. “My Heart Will Go On” is the romantic ballad playing as Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet embrace at the front of the ill-fated liner that crashed into a iceberg. Dion showed great technical skill coping with the tricky modulations of a song written by James Horner and Will Jennings, while the poignant tin-whistle playing is courtesy of Andrea Corr. The 10 best love songs to win an Oscar 5) “Take My Breath Away” (Top Gun, 1986) Top Gun was virtually completed when Tom Whitlock came up with the lyrics to “Take My Breath Away” as he was driving home from work and mulling on a melody Giorgio Moroder had composed. The agreed they had something good and made a demo to play for director Tony Scott. He called back Tom Cruise and Kelly McGillis to shoot some new love scenes to go with the new song. “If you see those scenes, you'll notice that they are lit differently and there are those gauzy curtains blowing around,” Whitlock told rediscoverthe80s.com “All of that was to disguise that some months had gone by and the actors didn't look exactly the same.” The songwriters picked Terri Nunn to sing the song, having worked with her new wave band Berlin previously. She nailed the song and “Take My Breath Away” became a global hit. The synthesisers on the track were played by Arthur Barrow, a veteran musician who had worked with The Doors and Frank Zappa. The 10 best love songs to win an Oscar 4) “I Just Called to Say I Love You” (The Woman in Red, 1984) In 1984, another year of popular movie title songs (“Ghostbusters” and “Footloose” were in the running), the Oscar went to Stevie Wonder’s “I Just Called to Say I Love You”. Wonder said that he had the late John Lennon in mind for a song he claimed he had first thought of in 1976. “I had the melody and lyric for the chorus, and I imagined in my mind when hearing the chords that The Beatles were singing with me. And that idea and feeling is what inspired me to use the vocoder.” The song was written for the movie The Woman in Red, a mediocre comedy starring Gene Wilder. In 2018, singer-songwriter John Prine recorded a slow, stripped-down version of the song for Spotify Singles, in which he brings out the essential charm of a ballad some find too saccharine. Wonder’s winner was a particular favourite of the writer Maya Angelou Rex The 10 best love songs to win an Oscar 3) “Moon River” (Breakfast at Tiffany’s, 1961) In Blake Edwards’s film of the Truman Capote novel Breakfast at Tiffany’s, there is a scene in which the love interest Audrey Hepburn sits on the fire escape at a New York apartment and accompanies herself on guitar singing “Moon River”. The scene is charming and the waif-like Hepburn, staying in tune and doing her best with a singing voice that was thin and limited in range, delivers a moving version of a song written for her by Henry Mancini and Johnny Mercer. Mancini later said that after the first preview screening of the film, the president of Paramount Pictures puffed a cigar and announced that the song had to be removed. “Over my dead body,” the usually mild-mannered Hepburn said. Although Paramount substituted her voice for an orchestral version on the soundtrack, her version caught the public imagination and more than a million copies of the sheet music were sold in the month after the film’s release. Paramount/Kobal/Rex The 10 best love songs to win an Oscar 2) “Mona Lisa” (Captain Carey, U.S.A, 1950) The film noir Captain Carey, U.S.A, a tale of revenge set in the aftermath of the Second World War that starred Alan Ladd, is regarded now as a dated dud. Its theme tune “Mona Lisa”, sung by Ukrainian jazz trumpeter and bandleader Charlie Spivak, is the surviving glory of the film, however. It became a global hit when it was covered in 1950 by Nat King Cole. Ray Evans wrote the poignant lyrics – “Are you warm, are you real, Mona Lisa? /Or just a cold and lonely lovely work of art?” – and realised the song, comparing a lover to the famous painting by Leonardo da Vinci, would work as a showcase for Cole’s warm baritone voice. Cole’s splendid version was at No.1 for eight weeks. In the year it won, incidentally, “Mona Lisa” beat the Disney novelty song “Bibbidi-Bobbidi-Boo” from Cinderella. Paramount The 10 best love songs to win an Oscar 1) “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” (The Wizard of Oz, 1939) Although “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” is not a straightforward love song, it is a ballad about hope and loving humanity itself, a song that co-writer Yip Harburg called an attempt to “create a rainbow world”, where the dreams you dare to dream really do come true. It was the song Ariana Grande picked to perform at the ‘One Love Manchester’ concert in 2017 for the victims of the terrorist attack. Remarkably, this 20th-century classic, whose melody was composed by Harold Arlen, was almost cut from the 1939 film The Wizard of Oz, because MGM were worried that the opening Kansas sequence was too long. Sixteen-year-old Judy Garland’s sublime version, orchestrated by Murray Cutter, wowed cinema-goers and the decision to leave it in was vindicated. Lady Gaga sings a brief section of “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” in the Oscar-nominated movie A Star is Born. Rex Features

“In other words, love is addictive and heartbreak causes us to go through powerful withdrawal.”

This, Winch explains, is why we obsess over our ex partners to the point where we feel we crave them as if they were a drug we have been deprived of.

This is also why it can be so hard to move onto someone else, he adds, because we’re inclined to idealise our exes to the nth degree, consequently distorting our memories of them by convincing ourselves that our romanticised vision of them is an accurate one, when most of the time it is not.

“You have to make sure that any thoughts you have about an ex are realistic and balanced,” Winch insists.

“If your mind conjures up images of your happiest weekend together, you need to add in the images from the weekend that drove you crazy and upset you tremendously.

“If you find yourself longing for their sweet embrace, you should remember the nights they rejected our advances and slept on the far edge of the bed.”

For those really struggling to get to grips with reality, Winch suggests writing down a list of all the reasons why the relationship didn’t work.

Another tricky aspect of heartbreak can be reckoning with the idea of “being dumped” and spending your days in a hole of self pity while the person who did the “dumping” is back out there living his or her best life without you.

Why is it so much harder to be broken up with than to break-up with someone yourself?

The answer might seem obvious, but Winch explains it’s crucial to fully understand this dissonance in order to fully “recover”.

While the break-up might seem sudden to the person who has just been dumped, Winch explains that their partner has probably been emotionally disengaged in the relationship for a long time.

“By the time the break-up happens, they are essentially over the relationship,” he said.

“However, the person who got dumped is just finding out and is in the most initial stages of grief and loss.

“People often find it bewildering that their ex was so normal and loving one week only to break-up with them the next. But the ex was only acting loving, because they hadn’t decided to ‘pull the plug’ yet, they weren’t actually feeling that way.”

When it comes to tackling heartbreak, Winch adds that there are a number of common traps people fall into.

Here, the author gives his top six tips to avoiding these and start your road to recovery ASAP.