Grief and crying: the headaches, the exhaustion, and the tears that won't come

You cried until your whole head hurt, and you didn't feel any better for it.

They told you it would help, that you'd feel lighter after, that tears are the release. And instead you're lying there with a pounding head, a raw face, swollen eyes and a body that feels like it's been through something physical, because it has. Nobody mentions that the crying itself can wreck you.

Crying is a physical event

So many of you have been surprised by how much a hard cry takes out of the body, so let me name what's actually going on, because it isn't just emotion.

Real, wracking grief-crying is a full-body event. The muscles of your face, jaw and scalp clench and work. Your breathing goes ragged. You lose fluid, more than you'd think, which is part of why a long cry leaves you with a throbbing "crying headache" and a dry, wrung-out feeling. Your whole system has been running hard.

So the wrung-out state afterwards isn't a sign the crying failed. It's the physical cost of it. Sometimes the relief people promised comes later, once your body has recovered, not in the raw minutes right after.

• Drink water after a big cry. You've lost more fluid than you realise, and the headache is partly dehydration.
• Rest, don't rush back to being upright and useful. Your body just did something strenuous.
• Warmth on the face and neck, a dark quiet room, help the crying-headache pass.
• It knots into the tension grief stores in the jaw and shoulders, so releasing those eases the ache too.

When the tears won't come

Now the other half, which people carry in even more shame: not being able to cry at all.

Everyone around you is dissolving and you are dry-eyed, and part of you is convinced this proves something monstrous, that you didn't love them enough, that you're cold, that you're broken. So many of you have confessed this quietly, as if it were the worst secret.

It isn't. Being unable to cry is incredibly common, and it is not a verdict on your love.

Dry eyes are not a cold heart. Grief without tears is still grief. It's just wearing a different face.

Why dry grief happens

There are real reasons the tears stay away.

Shock and numbness switch feeling off, sometimes for a long time, as protection, which is its own strange, valid state. Some people are simply wired to grieve dry, processing it in the body, in action, in the small hours, rather than through tears. And sometimes you've spent so long holding it together for everyone else that the crying just won't come on command, even when you're finally alone and it's safe.

None of that means the grief isn't there. It's there. It's just not choosing the exit everyone expects.

No right way to leak

So here's the whole of it: crying buckets is not doing grief well, and staying dry is not doing it badly. They're just two different bodies handling the same enormous thing.

If you cry, let it cost what it costs, and tend yourself gently after, the way you would any exhausted body. If you can't cry, stop auditing yourself for it. The tears may come later, in a car, at a song, out of nowhere, or they may never come the way you think they should. Either way, your grief is real, and it's yours, and it doesn't need to be witnessed as tears to count.

More in Grief and your body, or browse the whole library.

If it hurts too much right now, start here.