Does no contact work if you see each other every day?

Yes, in its real job — recovery — because what re-opens the wound is mostly voluntary contact: the messages, the profile checks, the engineered run-ins. Required professional or classroom contact is survivable background. The tool still works with the optional channels closed.

How do I do no contact with a coworker ex?

Keep every required interaction brief, civil and about the work; move the optional ones — lunches, lingering chats, the messaging thread — to zero. Scripts help: decide in advance how you greet them and how meetings go, so nothing is being negotiated in the moment.

Should I quit my job or change my routine to avoid my ex?

Change cheap things freely — a gym slot, a coffee time, a seat. Expensive things — a job, a course, a friend group — deserve slower thinking, ideally after the acute weeks, when the decision is about your life rather than about anaesthesia.

What do I say when I have to talk to my ex at work?

The same things you would say to a colleague you neither love nor hate: greetings, logistics, work. Warmth is not required; hostility costs you more than them. The aim is interactions so unremarkable that nobody watching could tell there was a history.

What if we share a friend group?

You can stay in the group and still run no contact with the person: attend, be civil, do not seek them out, and ask friends plainly not to relay news. What usually breaks people is not the shared room — it is the debrief afterwards, and that part is optional.

Do accidental run-ins reset no contact?

No. The point was never a streak, and a counter that resets on accidents turns recovery into a game you can lose in a lift. What matters is what you initiate. An encounter you did not choose is weather; the message you send after it is a choice.

No Contact When You See Them Every Day

Most no contact advice assumes you can vanish from each other’s worlds. Plenty of people cannot: the ex is two desks away, in the same seminar, at the family table of a shared friend group. This page is for that version — because the rule still works there, once you know which part of it was ever doing the work.

The part of no contact that was doing the work

Full silence was never the mechanism; it was the easiest way to get the mechanism. What actually lets the habit of them fade is closing the voluntary channels: the messages, the checking, the engineered run-ins, the debriefs with mutual friends. Passing them in a corridor reopens very little. Rereading the thread at midnight reopens everything.

So when circumstances force some contact, the rule translates cleanly: minimum voluntary contact. Required interactions happen, briefly and civilly. Optional ones go to zero — and almost everything that hurts turns out to have been optional.

Two columns sorting contact with an ex you see daily: required — meetings, handovers, greetings — kept brief and civil, versus optional — the thread, the checking, lingering, the debrief — closed entirely. — DiagramThe corridor was never the problem. The optional column is where the wound reopens.

Scripts, so nothing is negotiated live

The exhausting part of seeing an ex daily is not the seeing — it is deciding, every time, how to be. Decide once, in advance:

The greeting. Pick one — a nod, a “morning” — and use it every time, in every mood. Consistency reads as composure and costs nothing.
The required conversation. About the work, brief, complete. You are aiming for unremarkable: an observer should not be able to tell there is a history.
The exit. Have a standard way to end interactions — “right, I need to get this back” — so conversations do not drift into the personal by inertia.

Warmth is not required. Hostility is not affordable — it reads badly to everyone watching and keeps you engaged with them emotionally, which is the thing you are trying to stop.

What to change, and what not to change yet

Cheap changes are free: a different gym slot, a different coffee run, a seat across the room, muting them everywhere online even though you will see them in person. Take all of these without guilt — they are logistics, not defeat.

Expensive changes — leaving the job, dropping the course, exiting a friend group — deserve slower thinking. Sometimes they are right; a workplace can genuinely be unlivable with the wrong history in it. But decide after the acute weeks, not during them, and for your life rather than for anaesthesia. The first-week rule about big decisions applies with full force here.

The shared friend group

You can keep the group and still run the rule with the person. Attend the things. Be civil in the room. Do not seek them out; do not perform recovery at them; leave when leaving is natural.

Two sentences to friends do most of the protecting: I’d rather not hear news about them for a while — and — please don’t relay anything about me either. What breaks people in shared groups is rarely the shared room; it is the informant network and the post-event debrief, and both are optional.

If the group cannot hold both of you without drama, that is information about the group, and it is fine to attend less for a season. A season — not an exile.

Run-ins, and why the counter is a trap

Sooner or later a corridor, a kitchen, a lift delivers an unscheduled minute. It rattles; that is normal; waves work like waves.

What matters afterwards: an encounter you did not choose changes nothing about your recovery. There is no streak to reset — a version of no contact that can be “ruined” by a lift is a game, not a tool. The only thing worth watching is what you initiate. The run-in is weather. The message you draft an hour later, the checking spiral it tempts you into — those are choices, and the same one-question test applies.

Where this page stops

Daily forced proximity to an ex is hard, and ordinary. Two borders, though. If their behaviour toward you at work crosses into hostility, pressure or anything that affects your standing — that is a workplace matter for a manager or HR, not a recovery exercise. And if there was fear or control in the relationship, proximity is a safety question first: the right support is a professional or a safety resource, and adjusting your environment to stay away from them is not an overreaction.

Otherwise: close the optional channels, script the required ones, and let time do what it does. How the rest of the tool works is here.