How to look after your body post-crying session
Here are the mindful ways you can eat, sleep, exercise, and journal your body back to recovery after emotional releases.
Who doesn’t love a good cry? After all, it is a really important, natural, and healthy way for your body and mind to release emotional tension. Tears can help release built-up emotions like sadness, frustration, grief, or even joy in an outlet, which means the body doesn’t store them. If you hold on to your emotions, it can lead to anxiety, irritability, or even fatigue.
Our tears are especially important. Emotional tears contain stress hormones like cortisol, so crying quite literally flushes them out of your system. Post-cry, the body enters a rest and digest state, so your breathing regulates, your heart rate stabilises, and your muscles relax. A lot of people feel a strange sense of peace, or like to cry before sleeping, as it is the body's way of relaxing afterwards in a parasympathetic response through this calming physical system.
Crying can also mean that you are acknowledging your feelings as opposed to suppressing them, allowing self-validation to build on self-compassion to protect you against burnout and depression. Letting yourself cry is simply allowing yourself the space to feel. This can release oxytocin and endorphins, natural feel-good chemicals that reduce both physical and emotional pain. Without crying? We would experience a tight chest, stomach issues, emotional numbness, disconnection, unexpected mood swings, and bad headaches.
A good cry is basically like a pressure valve for your emotions, so below, we have some top tips on how to look after your body post-cry. From journaling to breathwork to healing foods, take a look at all the proven ways to recover and process…
Journaling
This can be great for processing your emotions, especially after a big cry! Use these prompts for different purposes. For grounding, perhaps ask “How did my emotions shift after crying?” or “What did I need in that moment?”. For self-compassion, you can journal by asking, “What would I say to a friend who felt the way I did?” and for healing, you can write about who or what makes you feel safest when you're vulnerable, and ask, “What small thing can I do tomorrow that supports how I want to feel?”
Emotional First Aid Kit
This can be in your journal, too, but in a more structured manner. You can turn to this every time and create your own, allowing you to process without any big questions. It can go as follows:
Name your feeling. This can be anything from overwhelmed, lonely, numb, tired, to everything all at once.
Validate it! Why do you feel this way? Even if you can’t pinpoint a reason, tell yourself you’re allowed to be human.
Check in with your body, and see how and what you have eaten, and if you have rested or exercised enough.
Do something kind to yourself. You can watch your favourite film, go and get your favourite chocolate bar, or even just light a candle and open a window. Bring your emotional release to a gentle close and finish resting when you see fit.
Eat well!
Nourishing your body and rehydrating are super important. Foods like soup, mashed potatoes, and porridge can be comforting to calm the nervous system, and are easy on the stomach if tense. A go-to for many, which is scientifically proven to help your post-cry, is dark chocolate. This is because it contains compounds like phenylethylamine and theobromine, which can boost your mood, as well as increase your serotonin and endorphin levels slightly. Bananas can also do this to your happy neurotransmitter, as they are rich in vitamin B6 and tryptophan. Herbal teas and coconut water, or any form of hydrating electrolyte, can help with rehydration. Particularly, chamomile and lavender can help promote calmness. And finally, opt for protein as it can regulate your cortisol, also known as your stress hormone, and restore your energy stores so you don’t feel exhausted after the emotional release.
Breathwork
This can help you move more gently to reset, ground, and re-regulate your body and mind. Start with a ‘soothing sigh’, which is to inhale deeply through your nose, exhale out your mouth, and repeat 5 times whilst raising your shoulders on inhale and dropping them on the sigh. To switch this up, inhale for 4 seconds and exhale for 6 seconds to calm a racing heart in particular and activate your parasympathetic nervous system, which is overdrive after severe emotions. There is also ‘box breathing’, which can bring your awareness and allow you to feel present, which is inhaling, holding, and exhaling for 4 seconds each.
Yoga poses
Letting your body rest and relaxing muscles can be a great way to calm your nervous system, which will be especially tense post-cry. Kneel, rest your arms on the floor, breathe deeply and rock side to side for a Child’s Pose style recovery, or put your legs on the wall as you lie on the floor, and let your arms rest with palms open next to you and close your eyes for as long as you feel necessary.