What to Do After You Experience an Emotional Release

Emotional releases can be extremely overwhelming, beautiful, eye-opening and earth-shaking. The nature of emotional releases means that they often come with extreme highs and lows. Experiencing an emotional release might feel like your entire life is changing before your eyes. If you just had an emotional release, it can be helpful to learn a bit about what to do after the dust settles.

Everybody experiences their emotions differently, and that includes the larger events of emotional life. While certain details might be more important than others after you experience an emotional release, it’s important to pay attention to what you need and lean into that as much as possible. Here is what you should do after an emotional release.

Practice Self Care

It’s important to practice self care no matter what’s going on in your life. But after an emotional release, it can be especially important to check in with yourself. Make sure that you are consistently caring for yourself in the way that you need. It might even require a little bit of extra effort and attention right now, and that is perfectly okay. Make space for yourself emotionally, as well as physically. Care for yourself the way that you would care for a child or a friend. Remember, you are someone’s child. You are someone’s friend, and you deserve to be cared for.

Truly Understand What You’re Processing

When it comes to emotional releases, they tend to come with large realizations, events and ideas. It’s very rare to have an emotional release that isn’t about anything — so examine that. The process of an emotional release is inherently tied to understanding your experience. Look into the internal workings of what you’re feeling and experiencing right now. Process what everything is actually about, so that you can work through your release productively.

Listen to Yourself

Much like stepping into the act of self care, it can also be important to simply listen to yourself. While self care is about taking actionable steps toward providing for your needs, listening to yourself is about taking the time to pause and reflect on how you can best serve yourself in your life. Emotional releases can often put things into a new perspective. It can be especially important to listen to yourself during this time.

Some of the best ways to pause and listen to yourself are meditation and mindfulness. Try yoga, dance, journaling and simple self-reflection. These techniques will work differently in everyone’s lives. It’s important to value the ones that you know will work best for you.

Seek a Bit of Guidance 

Coming down from an emotional release can sometimes feel like you are left with more questions than answers. The truth is, you won’t have all the answers right away. It takes time to figure out exactly what you need out of your life, but that doesn’t mean you can’t begin to take the steps to figure out the answers for yourself.

One of the best ways to guide yourself towards the right questions and answers for you is to seek guidance outside of yourself from a trusted source. Whether you prefer talk therapy, spiritual guidance or another practice that sits somewhere in the middle, having somebody to reflect back with you can be extremely beneficial.

Make the Necessary Shifts In Your Life

The last step, and arguably the most important step in caring for yourself following an emotional release is to make the larger shifts that are necessary for you to live in alignment with your truth. Although emotional releases can be largely internal, more often than not, they hold desires and ideas about where you want your life to go in the future.

Emotional releases happen as a response to the internal knowledge that changes must be made in your life. The best way to hold true to yourself is to put those desires into motion. If you know that you need to make changes in your life, the only way that you were going to be satisfied by actually making those changes.

What to Do After an Emotional Release

Having an emotional release can sometimes feel like an overwhelming experience, but really, it’s an experience that can bring you closer to your truth and the life that you want to live. When you take care of yourself afterward, you can ensure that you are moving closer to your best life every day.