You want to text them: what to do in the next twenty minutes

What do I do right now if I want to text my ex?

The first move isn't deciding, it's delaying. Write the whole message in your notes app rather than the chat, set a twenty-minute timer and put the phone out of reach. You decide when the alarm goes off.

The urge is a wave, not a state: the psychologist Alan Marlatt called riding one out urge surfing, and relapse-prevention work puts the peak at twenty to thirty minutes. That's why the protocol runs twenty.

1. 1

   Write the message, somewhere else

   Open your notes app, not the chat. Write the whole thing, everything you'd say if you knew they wouldn't get angry. Saying it and having them read it aren't the same need.

2. 2

   Set twenty minutes, let go of the phone and breathe

   An alarm on the clock, and the phone in another room: at night, messages aren't decided, they're slid into. While you wait, in for four and out for six or eight, ten rounds.

3. 3

   Reread it and answer one question

   Read it as if somebody else had sent it to you: what do I want them to feel? If the answer is "regret it", no message produces that.

Why does the urge to text my ex show up at night?

Because everything that holds you up during the day falls away: work, people, noise. What's left is your phone and the silence, and tiredness loosens the brake.

The tiredness part is measured: in a Berkeley study published in Current Biology in 2007, twenty-six people looked at unpleasant images inside a scanner, and those who had gone a night without sleep showed 60% more amygdala activation — the brain's alarm centre — and less connection with the prefrontal cortex, the part that keeps it in check.

What should I ask myself before I text my ex?

Answer four questions in writing: what you want them to feel, what reply you need, whether this is information or contact, and whether you'd send it on a Tuesday at four. Written down, not thought.

1. What do I want them to feel? It's the only one that gives you new information. If the answer is "regret it", you're asking a message to do what messages don't do.
2. What exact reply do I need? Write it in the words you want to read, then ask whether it would still be enough tomorrow. It almost never is.
3. Is this information, or contact? "You left your jacket here" is information; "anyway, hope you're doing okay" is contact in disguise. The word that gives it away is anyway.
4. Would I send this on a Tuesday at four, sober, in front of my best friend? If not, it isn't badly written: it's a symptom of the hour.

I texted my ex and I regret it: what do I do now?

The only thing that matters is that there's no second message. One stray text ruins nothing; the chain — the one explaining the first, the apology for the second — is what stings the next day.

• Don't send another. Not "sorry", not "ignore that". Every new message makes the first bigger.
• Don't delete it. A "this message was deleted" draws more attention than the message itself.
• Don't block them straight afterwards. Texting and then blocking is a whole conversation in two moves.
• Don't sit staring at the chat. And if they leave you on read, that isn't a coded message either: it's the absence of a reply.

The uncomfortable stretch lasts less than it feels like it will. And if they answer and it turns into a long conversation at four in the morning, know what you're doing to the clock: in a 2005 study published in Personal Relationships, 58 people who had just ended a relationship kept a diary for 28 days, and contact with the ex-partner slowed the decline of both love and sadness. It didn't make them worse, it stretched them out.

What do I do if I drunk texted my ex?

It didn't happen because deep down you meant it: alcohol narrows your attention onto what's in front of you and leaves the distant consequences out of frame. The next morning you almost never need to do anything: if you sent one thing, let it die.

It's called alcohol myopia, formulated by Claude Steele and Robert Josephs in American Psychologist in 1990: alcohol doesn't release "what you really feel", it shrinks your field of view. At two in the morning the loud cue is "I miss them" and the distant one, "tomorrow I'll die of embarrassment".

If you sent something cruel, this covers it: "Sorry about last night, I wasn't in a good place. No need to reply." And no question at the end, which is what turns an apology into an opening.