The 7 Stages of Breaking Up A Relationship and Putting Yourself Back Together With Music

Rationalising your life without another person is as difficult as emptying every cupboard in your house and putting everything in the centre of every room and living in it for months until you're able to sort it all out, throw out what you don't need and finally move around freely again.

If you're feeling the pain, we've made our own playlist of breakup anthems to go through every stage.

It's happened. You've broken up. No matter how many times you've suspected it's coming or thought about taking the plunge to do it, until this moment you were kind of trucking along normally, however unhappily.

Until you actually let the knife fall and sever that tie, even if everything's gone wrong, you're in a limbo-land where nothing's final. It's easy to drift on in this tug-of-love purgatory because you don't have to hate someone to break up with them, just not be able to be with them any more. And sometimes even if you're growing to hate each other, it's easier to think something will change than take the steps to actually make it happen.

Breaking up seems like such a nuclear option; destructive, disruptive, shattering your friends' groups, drawing invisible lines down everywhere you hang out, even your home.

It's a difficult step to take, whether it's mutual or one-sided. You might have known you needed to break up but not what comes after - you're in shock.

Alice put this with Ed Sheeran's Don't - but we like La Roux's Let Me Down Gently, too.

There are no rules for how quickly you move through the stages of a breakup; sometimes shock might carry on for months or even years.

At some point, though - when you're putting all their stuff in a box to the left or explaining to the fourteenth friend that you won't need a plus one to their party or just look across at them and wonder 'what was I thinking?', you're going to get angry.

You'll be angry at them, angry at you, angry at the things that happened, angry at friends' bad advice, angry at anyone who sabotaged it. You don't want to see them, you only need about 3 seconds after sitting down with a coffee to turn a chat with a mate into a rant and you're just fed up of all the time you wasted.

Relationships take a lot of emotional energy - especially towards the end. All that effort takes up room in your head and heart.

At some point, once you've got past feeling nothing much, in shock, you'll have to scour that space - and nothing cleans faster than the high-powered, deep-down detergent of anger.

Alice went for legendarily rude breakup anthem I Don't Want You Back by Eamon, with Frankie's reply song FURB and Kelis' gloriously furious anthem Caught Out There. But we like a little passive in our aggression, so we've gone with Biebs' sonnet to getting screwed over, Love Yourself.

Sadness is the natural successor to anger. Anger takes a lot of energy and especially in the middle of dealing with a breakup, it's not sustainable - it's a sprint emotion, whereas sadness is the marathon.

Feeling sad about something that's ended makes sense; you can be disappointed that something didn't work out and upset with what happened and most of that will come under sadness. Especially if you still get along with the other person, it can be difficult to process what went wrong without feeling sad for awhile.

Working through sadness can be extremely cathartic and incredibly painful - everyone feels sad sometimes but especially in stressful situations it can become overwhelming. It's normal to feel upset, even tearful and unable to think of other things for a little while after a breakup but if you feel useless, 'broken' or as though you can't carry on, especially after a little while, it's important to get help.

Talking to mates can help but if things get serious, you think about harming yourself or feeling sad seriously affects your ability to do things you used to enjoy, talk to your GP - you don't have to live with depression and low mood alone and you deserve care to feel better.

Alice chose The Script's heartache ballad Breakeven for this stage - we've gone with Bastille's struggles to be an optimist about it.

After you've got past the worst of being sad, you usually feel like being social again - seeing mates, chatting online, going to the cinema and enjoying things you like. But that can be hard without someone you used to enjoy doing all that with.

It's even harder if you have the same friends, so you're awkwardly portioning up the group into who sees who now. It's natural not just to miss someone you broke up with but all the great times you had together or even their friends.

Even if you still have loads of great people to hang out with, it can feel lonely to pick up your phone to instinctively text them and realise you shouldn't or can't. Or see them whilst you're out and not say 'hi'. It can be very difficult to miss someone, especially someone you could talk to easily and knew really well.

Alice chose Beyoncé's Blue and Adele's enormous Someone Like You - we've gone right to the heart of the matter with 5SOS's cover of Blink 182's heartbreaking I Miss You.

Once you've gone through four stages of breakup, it feels like the end must be near. You've been numb, furious, heartbroken and felt isolated - surely it's got to get easier soon?

Which is, unfortunately, sometimes, when the denial creeps in. It'll be ok to see your ex - it's been months, you'll be fine. Sometimes you will, sometimes you'll both be reconciled and over it and have a lovely catch-up. Sometimes it really, really won't - it'll be weird, you'll desperately try to avoid each other again, it'll dig everything up.

It's hard to tell which way it's going to go but a near-guarantee of it going wrong is trying to act like you're not still upset about it when you are. Sometimes you might have to be in a situation with the person before you're ready to deal with it and even if you can hold it together, it's OK to not feel good about it; your emotions about the breakup are real and having to suppress them can be a very invalidating experience, even if only for a little while.

Give yourself space and don't be hard on yourself if it takes awhile to feel OK about seeing them.

Alice's playlist had Sam Smith's Stay With Me - we've picked guests from the show Craig David and Katy B with Who Am I

Sometimes it's hard to see how you're ever going to like someone that much again, after a breakup.

Other people are different and it takes awhile to figure each other out. It can feel disheartening at first but then sometimes it just clicks.

One minute you're chatting, next minute it's four hours later. But it's exciting! It's not what you had, it never will be - thank goodness, you might be thinking by now. It turns out there can be good things after a breakup and it's possible to bond with people again.

The feeling of moving on can be enormously freeing - it makes you feel much better to have things to look forward to, whether it's seeing a new person again or just being able to connect to new and interesting people. Even if you're not going to be happy forever and ever at this point and you might still feel sad about the breakup sometimes, new stuff is happening.

Alice choses The Streets' moving tribute to helping a friend get to this stage, Dry Your Eyes - we've gone a bit further into the fun and fizziness of getting to something beyond the breakup with the Wombats' covering Carly Rae Jepsen's I Really Like You

Phew, we've made it! It might have seemed back at stage one that this was impossible but eventually you'll be over it. It might take a long time - it might even take cycling through the stages more than once but eventually you'll get there.

Getting over it doesn't mean forming a new relationship, it means getting yourself together. Towards the end of a relationship, you can end up overriding a lot of yourself with attempts to make it work or just getting worn down by it all. Then a breakup can be so painful it's hard to remember what you feel like.

When you're over something, you feel like yourself again. It's a new you; you won't rewind or reset to the way you were before the relationship or the breakup because those things will have caused you to learn and grow and heal and change but you will feel like you know who you are again.

Working out what you want to do - whether it's a new project, like learning to cook or becoming a vlogger or travelling the world or just a strong sense of direction in what you already do - is a really important part of reclaiming yourself and determining who you are beyond that relationship.

It's a very positive feeling, once you get there but an enormously hard road on the way - be kind to yourself and remember it takes as long as it takes and although there might be usual stages, there's no rules to working your way through a breakup.

You're important - it can be difficult to remember to take care of yourself when you're dealing with difficult feelings and stress but anything you can do to respect and appreciate who you are will get you a tricky, painful step closer to the end.

And when you get there? It will be great. All that weight turned into memories that don't hold you down, feeling yourself.

Alice's show ended with breakup playlist-maker extraordinaire Taylor Swift's Shake It Off; we've stuck to looking forward to this summer, though, with Zara Larsson's Lush Life.