There’s a healthy way to take a break during conflict. Asking for space—and specifying when the conversation will resume—can protect a relationship by giving both people time to calm down. 

The silent treatment does the opposite. Withdrawing without explanation or a plan to reconnect just creates a new conflict, leaving the person on the receiving end scrambling to figure out what went wrong.

Yet not everyone who goes quiet is trying to inflict pain. Some people shut down because they’re overwhelmed and genuinely incapable of having a productive conversation. We asked experts how to figure out what’s behind the silent treatment—and what to do when someone stops speaking to you.

First, figure out what kind of silence you’re dealing with

A healthy cooling-off period and the silent treatment can look identical from the outside, says Rachel Needle, a psychologist in West Palm Beach, Fla. Both involve someone stepping away from a conversation. What changes the meaning of that silence is whether the person explains what's happening and offers some reassurance that the conversation isn't over. Most of all, it's whether they say when they'll be back.

Someone who’s emotionally flooded might say: “I need a little time to calm down before we keep talking. Can we pick this up tonight?” Doing so gives the silence a purpose and an endpoint, Needle says. If the person needs more time when the agreed-upon hour rolls around, they can say so and suggest another time. 

That communication sends an important message, says Enid Wilson, a licensed marriage and family therapist in Sacramento: “I’m still in this relationship. I’m just taking a pause on this conversation because I need to take care of myself.” Walking away or refusing to respond leaves the other person wondering whether the conversation—or even the relationship—is over. The best version also comes with a timeframe.

People withdraw for all kinds of reasons. They might be afraid they’ll say something they regret or have learned to protect themselves by shutting down. Some people simply haven’t learned how to sit with difficult emotions or repair a disagreement, Needle says, so “silence really becomes a way to escape the discomfort, rather than having to deal with it and move through it.”

In other cases, silence is leverage. It creates uncertainty and pressures the recipient to apologize or back down. Sometimes that strategy is conscious, Needle says, and sometimes it isn't. Whatever's motivating the withdrawal, the impact on the other person can be similar. "It creates anxiety, rejection, uncertainty, and a sense of being shut out," she says.

Because it’s impossible to climb inside someone else’s head, focus on what can be observed. Did they say they needed space? Did they give some indication of when they’d return? Did they follow through—or at least check in to ask for more time? Then ask whether this is a rare rupture, or the way every disagreement ends.

Context matters, too. There's no universal number of hours that transforms a delayed response into the silent treatment. If two friends usually exchange a couple emails a month, a week of quiet probably doesn't mean much. If a partner who texts throughout the day suddenly disappears in the middle of a tense conversation, it might. Texting also strips out tone of voice and facial expression, the signals that make intent easier to interpret. "You just miss so many cues when you're not talking either on the phone or in person," Wilson says. That's why she encourages moving difficult conversations out of the text thread.

Send one clear message—and then stop chasing

When someone abruptly goes quiet, the goal is to respond without escalating the conflict while staying grounded in your own needs, Needle says. Start by calmly naming what you've observed: "I noticed that you've gone quiet. I want to understand what's going on, but I also don't want to push you if you need some space."

If the silence is unfolding over text, Wilson suggests a question instead of an accusation: "It seems like now isn't a good time to talk. Can we set a time for later tonight or sometime this week?" That gives the person room to respond while making it clear that disappearing indefinitely doesn't work for you.

Then resist the urge to send six more messages. "One of the biggest mistakes that people make is reacting to the anxiety that the silence is creating, instead of responding to the situation itself," Needle says. That anxiety might inspire repeated calls and demands to talk right now. It might inspire apologies for things you don't believe you did. Some people abandon their own needs simply to get the other person talking again; others retaliate with silence of their own.

Those reactions are understandable, but none are especially useful. Chasing might briefly relieve your distress if the person responds. But “in some cases, it can actually unintentionally reinforce an unhealthy dynamic by teaching both people that silence is what finally gets a response,” Needle says. Returning the silent treatment, meanwhile, only complicates a problem already caused by a lack of communication.

These dynamics can easily become a pursue-withdraw cycle, Wilson says. One person experiences conflict as an urgent threat to the relationship and needs to resolve it immediately. The other copes by detaching or shutting down. The more the first person calls and texts, the more conflict the withdrawer perceives—and the farther away they retreat. "If that person is conflict-avoidant, you're creating more conflict," Wilson says. "So they're going to avoid it."

The way out is to step out of the cycle, at least temporarily. That means tolerating the discomfort of not getting an immediate response, and directing all that nervous energy somewhere else. "The best and healthiest response is usually just the least reactive one," Needle says. After expressing your willingness to talk and asking when the person can reconnect, shift your attention toward what you can control. "Go for a walk, call a friend that you trust, journal, engage in another grounding activity," she suggests, rather than staring at your phone and rehearsing apologies. Doing so helps ensure the other person's silence doesn't determine when you're allowed to feel OK again.

When things are calm, make a plan for next time

When communication resumes, you might be so relieved that you simply pretend nothing happened. But unless the pattern itself is addressed, the next disagreement might end the same way.

Needle suggests leading with curiosity: “Can you help me understand what was happening for you when you needed to step away?” Once you’ve listened, describe the impact without claiming to know the person’s intent: “When I didn’t hear from you and didn’t know whether we would talk again, I felt anxious and disconnected. I’m OK with taking space during conflict, but I need to know we’ll come back to it.”

Then decide together what a future timeout will look like. Avigail Lev, a clinical psychologist in San Francisco, encourages couples to agree in advance on how either person will signal that they need a break, roughly how long it will last, what they’ll do to calm down, and who will restart the conversation. If the person needs longer, they should still check in at the agreed-upon time and provide a new endpoint. Some couples and families even choose a code word that means the conversation is pausing, Wilson says—not that the relationship is disappearing.

It's also a good idea to set a boundary. Wilson likes to think of boundaries not as walls that block people out, but as roads that show them how to stay connected: "You can be here with me, but you can't just go off-roading everywhere." A boundary does more than ask the other person to stop going silent. It clarifies what communication you require in a relationship, and what you'll do if that need repeatedly goes unmet.

One episode of withdrawal isn’t enough to judge an entire relationship, Needle says. What matters is the pattern: Does the behavior change after it’s addressed? Are both people willing to repair the rupture? Or does restoring contact always require one person to get quieter and stop raising concerns? 

If the silence continues despite repeated conversations—or leaves you feeling controlled and perpetually on edge—it might be time to seek professional help or reconsider the relationship. Healthy relationships make room for people to calm down, Needle says. They don’t leave one person indefinitely responsible for managing all the uncertainty that someone else’s silence creates.

Taylor Swift already told us she can do it with a broken heart. That might be due to grit, stamina—or a little psychological trick called a coping mantra.

When she feels stressed by her circumstances, “I go through several processes and coping mechanisms,” Swift revealed in August during the Icon Sessions, a conversation presented by the Recording Academy’s Songwriters & Composers Wing. “And one of them is saying, ‘You chose this. You chose this every day. You could have opted out of this any day before it got unmanageably big.’ And I decided not to because I love it that much.”

Even if you don’t have plans to perform in stadiums worldwide, you might recognize the peculiar frustration of being trapped by something you chose—whether that’s the job you once desperately wanted, the committee you volunteered to lead, or the dinner party you insisted on hosting. “Where people tend to get really distressed is when they feel powerless, or like something's being put upon you—you're just sort of stuck in an achy feeling,” says Jill Stoddard, a clinical psychologist in Newburyport, Mass. “But if you remind yourself, ‘Wait a minute, this is actually a choice I made, and choices do come with difficult consequences, but I'm in charge here’—that empowers you to move forward.”

Enter the coping mantra: a short, deliberate phrase you can reach for when your brain starts sprinting toward the worst-case scenario. Stress leaves little room for nuance, says Dr. Jasmine Sawhne, a psychiatrist in Los Angeles. When your body is in fight-or-flight mode, you’re not going to reason your way out of it. A mantra gives your overloaded brain something simple to grab onto—and buys you a beat to choose what to do next. Here’s how to find one that actually helps.

Make your brain an offer it can believe

“Everything will be OK” is a lovely thought. It’s also a promise about a future you can’t see—which means your anxious brain might reject it before you finish the sentence.

From a cognitive behavioral therapy perspective, predicting that everything will work out is a form of fortune-telling, says Alison McKleroy, a San Francisco therapist and author of The Self-Compassion Journal. The same goes for affirmations like “I am confident.” If you feel unsure, your brain isn’t going to buy it. You can say it 1,000 times, McKleroy says, and still not believe a word of it.

Instead of predicting a rosy outcome or forcing a new personality, a useful mantra can state a choice that’s within your control. Swift’s is essentially: I’m choosing to keep doing this, difficult parts and all. “It’s a decision you’re making out loud,” McKleroy says.

Stoddard takes a slightly different—but equally reality-based—approach. When she’s crushed by too much to do and too little time, she tells herself, “I’ll get it done. I always do.” It works because in her case, it’s true. “I wouldn’t have a PhD in psychology if I didn’t always get it done,” she says.

If you’re someone who does not, in fact, always get it done, that phrase may not be for you. This isn’t an exercise in “blowing sunshine” at yourself, Stoddard says. The best mantra is simple, specific, memorable—and true.

Figure out what your brain forgets under pressure

Rather than reflecting on which situations stress you out, try a sharper question: “What do I need to remind myself when I get uncomfortable?” suggests Joanna Hardis, a Cleveland-based therapist and author of Just Do Nothing: A Paradoxical Guide to Getting Out of Your Way.

In other words, don’t choose a generic mantra for “stress.” Identify your brain’s favorite way of making stress worse, then find a phrase that interrupts it. If you tend to predict disaster, McKleroy suggests: “I can’t know that yet” or “I don’t have a crystal ball.”

Sawhne’s stress takes a different form: She tries to solve everything at once. She runs a bicoastal psychiatry practice and has two children under 5, and she often catches herself mentally juggling five problems at the same time. Her mantra—“I don’t have to solve everything right now”—reminds her that urgency and importance aren’t the same thing. She doesn’t need the entire day, week, or situation figured out; she needs to identify what requires her attention first.

McKleroy, meanwhile, likes to over-research, add more information, and complicate projects past the point of usefulness. So she tells herself: “Let it be simple.”

“Things are usually naturally simple,” she says. “I just add stuff to it.”

Keep it short enough to say in one breath

Cap a coping mantra at about four words. When stress hits, “we just don’t have a lot of cognitive bandwidth,” Sawhne says, so you need a few words you can pull “out of your back pocket” as soon as your nervous system fires.

Shorter also means fewer words to obsess over. “Perfectionists are going to overthink it,” Hardis says. “You just want something that’s short enough that you can remember that’s going to orient you.” Her own mantra—“Discomfort, not danger”—passes the one-breath test with room to spare.

Use it to keep going while the feeling is still there

Nearly two decades ago, Hardis underwent exposure therapy for an intense fear of flying. When the plane hit turbulence, she would tell herself: “This may suck, but I can handle it.”

She still uses that mantra. During rough turbulence on a recent flight home from visiting her daughter, “I found myself saying it,” she recalls. In the past, she would have stared out the window, listened for every ominous noise, and asked a flight attendant if the plane was OK. This time, she calmly repeated her mantra and kept reading. “It helped me get through the flight and do what I knew I needed to do,” she says.

The fear was still there; it simply didn’t dictate her next move. “The goal in anxiety treatment isn’t to make the feeling go away,” Hardis says. It’s to help you decide what to do while the feeling is still there.

Borrow one—and make it sound like you

There are no bonus points for originality here. Anna Elton, a licensed marriage and family therapist in Palm Beach, Fla., and author of The Formula of Desire, uses “just keep swimming.” She borrowed it from Finding Nemo, which she watched with her kids. “That’s why it’s easy to remember,” she says. She also turns to “If it were easy, everyone would do it” when a project proves harder than expected. Her most exuberant mantra is a call-and-response: “Who is awesome? I’m awesome.” “I do it all the time,” she says. 

Once you settle on a potential mantra, say it out loud. Does it sound like something you’d actually tell yourself—or something embroidered on a throw pillow you’d try to hide? McKleroy recommends trying slightly different versions until one lands. “Brave” and “courageous” might look interchangeable on paper, for example, but one could feel much more natural coming out of your mouth.

You’ll know you’re getting close when the words produce even a small shift. The right phrase might bring “a little hit of relief,” McKleroy says, or make a spiral lose some of its momentum. If your brain instantly rejects it, change a word or scale it down. “Let it be simple,” for example, might become “Let it be simpler.”

Once you find one that works, practice it before you need it. Stoddard encourages clients to try new coping tools during low-stakes moments, when their emotions are relatively mellow. Call your mantra to mind when you’re running five minutes late, opening a mildly stressful email, or sitting down to a task you’ve been avoiding. Otherwise, summoning an unfamiliar phrase in the middle of a crisis will be “an uphill battle,” she says.

Put it where the problem lives

Years ago, when McKleroy was trying to stop procrastinating, she hung “Do it now” in big letters above her kitchen sink. “That was my command,” she says. “Just do the dishes.” After enough repetition, “do it now” stopped being a mantra and became a habit, and now she rarely procrastinates.

These days, “Let it be simple” hangs above her desk—prime territory for over-researching and adding just one more thing. McKleroy calls this “keeping it in existence,” or displaying the reminder exactly where you’ll need it.

That might mean taping your mantra to your computer monitor, writing it on the bathroom mirror, turning it into your phone lock screen, or putting it on the front of your journal. “If you’re really anxious, your mind’s not going to remember—it’s going to go blank,” Hardis says. A visual cue ensures the words are waiting for you when you need them.

Your reminder doesn’t even have to be made of words: McKleroy suggests drawing a circle on a stone and carrying it in your pocket or leaving it on the bathroom counter. To her, the circle represents simplicity. “A circle on a rock would be enough,” she says, to remind her to “let it be simple.” You could similarly choose a meaningful color, shape, or object. And—since this entire exercise began with Swift—you could even spell yours out on a friendship bracelet.