The Emotional Hangover: What It Is. When It Happens. How To Get Over It.

A couple weeks ago, I posted a vulnerable video talking about how down I felt after my wedding day. Not the day itself — my wedding day was everything I dreamed it would be...but the days after...I was feeling ashamed of why I didn't feel the newlywed high that everyone expects from you. That video went viral (almost half a million views!) and the comments section turned into something I didn't expect: over a hundred women, one after another, saying "I felt exactly the same way after my wedding day." Turns out I wasn't alone. Not even close.

Here's the thing about weddings that no one tells you: you spend over a year planning one single day. You pour your time, your energy, your emotions, so much of who you are, into 24 hours. It's one of the only times in your life — outside of your own funeral, honestly — where every person you love comes together, from every corner of your life, for one shared purpose. To celebrate love.

And then it's over. The dress gets packed away. Everyone flies home. The group chat goes quiet.

Then you're left standing in the quiet feeling so unbelievably sad about something so unbelievably good.

And then I realized... this is an emotional hangover --- and it doesn't just show up after weddings.

It shows up after the huge work win you spent months chasing, and now the deal is done and you're back at your desk figuring out your next deal. It shows up after the promotion you waited years to achieve, and when the celebration ends, you realize you might be waiting years for the next one.

It shows up after the trip, the launch, the graduation, the birth --- the finish line of anything that mattered enough to consume you for a little while.

Here's the silver lining hiding inside it: it only hits hard because the thing that ended was genuinely good. You don't get an emotional hangover from something you didn't care about. So, in a strange way, that heaviness is proof of how much love, effort, and joy actually filled that day or that moment.

We're so quick to prepare for these big moments in our life, and so unprepared for what comes after them, so I want to say this clearly: feeling sad because something good is over is not a sign that something is wrong with you. It's not ingratitude. It's not you being dramatic. It's just what happens when something has been a huge part of your world and then, almost overnight, it isn't anymore. Your nervous system doesn't know the difference. Either way, it registers it as a loss.

That's burnout in its quieter, less-talked-about form — not the exhausted, can't-get-out-of-bed kind, but the "why do I feel an emptiness after something amazing happened in my life?" kind.

So, how do we actually combat that feeling?

The good news is that this kind of burnout responds really well to a little intention and self-compassion

So, here's what's helped me, and what I'd tell any of the hundred women in those comments:

1. Name it before you judge it. The fastest way to make an emotional hangover worse is to spiral into guilt about feeling it. "I should be so happy, what's wrong with me" only piles on shame. Instead, try just naming it out loud or on paper: "I think I'm having an emotional hangover from xyz." Naming it takes it out of the scary, formless category and puts it into a category you already understand.

2. Give yourself a real re-entry period, not just a re-entry day. We plan for big moments in exhaustive detail and then expect ourselves to snap back to normal life right after. Build in a buffer instead. That might mean blocking a lighter week at work, planning one small, low-stakes thing to look forward to (anything that isn't another milestone), or simply telling the people close to you, "I'm in a weird transition week, be patient with me." You wouldn't expect your body to run a marathon and then immediately sprint another one. Give your emotions the same recovery window.

3. Separate your identity from the milestone. So much of our slumps comes from quietly tying our worth to the achievement. If you were "the bride" for a year, or "the person up for promotion," or "the top salesperson" on your team for years, it's disorienting to suddenly just be you again, without the title, the countdown, or the thing everyone's asking about. This is a good moment to reconnect with the parts of your identity that have nothing to do with the milestone — call the friend that you've been meaning to call, pick up the hobby that you let fall while you were busy, visit a family member that brings you joy. You were whole before the big thing happened, and you're still whole now.

4. Lean on your grit. If there's one personality trait I'd want in my corner during an emotional hangover, it's grit. Grit isn't about powering through and ignoring how you feel — it's actually the opposite. Grit is what lets you sit with an emotion, actually feel it, digest it, and then keep moving forward anyway. It's the quiet resilience that says, "This is uncomfortable, and I'm going to be okay." People with grit don't skip the sadness or the letdown; they just don't let it consume them. They feel it, learn what it has to teach them, and then take the next step. That's the whole skill: just passing through it on your way to whatever's next. The more you practice that, the faster you bounce back each time.

Every time you move through an emotional hangover instead of around it, you build a little more evidence that you can handle the next one, and the one after that.

If you're in the emotional hangover right now, whatever the "it" is for you — I hope this is your reminder that the sadness means that you're human and that something humanly, deeply mattered to you. And that's actually a good problem to have.