How to Deal with Sub drop Physically, Mentally, and Emotionally

Feeling down or out of energy after your intense BDSM scene? You're likely experiencing sub drop. This article will highlight what sub drop is and how to remedy it physically, mentally, and emotionally.

What is sub drop?

During certain BDSM scenes, particularly those involving high levels of pain, pleasure, or both, the body releases a cascade of feel good hormones, increasing the amount of these hormones in the bloodstream significantly. 

As I mentioned before when discussing subspace, the intense experiences of both pain and pleasure trigger a sympathetic nervous system response which releases:

• Adrenaline
• Cortisol
• Endorphins
• Oxytocin
• Dopamine

At any other time during the day, your body slowly releases these chemicals at various rates to keep your body in homeostasis. When you engage in an intense BDSM session, your body is flooded with the hormones quickly in response to the trauma your body is experiencing, and you get high from these all-natural drugs. 

Sub drop is what happens when your body begins to return to homeostasis, which means it not only needs to rid your system of the extra hormones, but also momentarily decreases production so it doesn’t overfill an already full cup. It’s kind of like all-natural withdrawal from drugs, with all the nasty consequences.

What does sub drop feel like?

In short, like shit. 

Your body not only has to decrease production of hormones that normally help regulate your mood and make you feel happy, but it also has to deal with repairing your body from the damage it endured. It’s sort of like being depressed and sick at the same time. Wonderful.

Sub drop can show up differently for everyone, just as feeling depressed or sick might look different depending on the person, but there are a few similarities between people’s experience of subdrop.

Physically, you might feel:

• Very cold 
• Drop in energy levels (almost like a hangover)
• Extreme physical exhaustion
• Cravings for sugary carby things
• Thirsty
• Tremors or muscle spasms
• Soreness, inflammation, or swelling
• Longing to for physical touch

Mentally, you might feel:

• Confused
• Insecure
• Abandoned

Emotionally, you might feel:

• Lonley
• Sad
• Raw/ vulnerable

The feelings of the post-scene crash could occur in the minutes, hours, or days following an intense scene (and don’t be surprised if it happens at the most inconvenient time, because you have no control over it.)

How to deal with sub drop

The reason I broke out the feelings that you might experience from subdrop into three categories, physical, mental, and emotional, is because it will help us to identify the remedies most appropriate for that category and your symptoms. 

Because what you’re experiencing is a result of hormonal processes in the body, addressing the physical and supporting its natural process of reaching homeostasis is what should be addressed first.

Physical remedies to sub drop

The following list is in order of what is most effective and important to address first. The idea is to help your body return to homeostasis and repair itself from any damage sustained during the BDSM scene.

Sleep

If you’re feeling low on energy, getting high-quality sleep is obviously going to help restore your energy levels. What’s less obvious is that sleep is also the body’s natural repair system and hormone processor.

While you are asleep, your immune system secretes cytokines, which are a class of very small proteins. These cytokines give your body an advantage in the fight against inflammation, infection, and trauma when you are ill or injured. Pretty helpful for healing the bruises you have littered everywhere on your body.

Sleep also regulates the level of cortisol, the steroid hormone produced by the adrenal glands. Cortisol helps regulate other hormones in the body. Now, the first night of sleeping after your intense scene is likely to be pretty crappy due to the elevated cortisol from the scene. However, with each subsequent sleeping cycle, your body will naturally begin to regulate these hormones.

High quality, nutritionally dense food 

I feel like I’m going to get some angry people with pitchforks for this one…

In order to create the hormones that your body has been depleted of, it requires amino acids which are the building blocks of everything in your body. For example, the amino acid tyrosine is the precursor of the catecholamines, which is converted to dopamine. Your body could really use some of that right now.

I’m sorry, but sugar is not an amino acid. You crave carby, sugary food because it’s a quick source of calories and spike of energy, which feels good momentarily, but is going to bring you back into the drop all the same. Instead, you’d be far better off consuming quality protein after a scene, ideally with sea salt to also replenish electrolytes (more on that in a moment).

If you’d like a special treat after a scene, I’d suggest dark chocolate instead of something sugary, which will also include essential minerals, flavinoids, and mildly improve brain function by increasing blood flow.  

Drink lots of water with electrolytes

Your body has gone through a lot during that scene and it’s guaranteed that you’re going to be thirsty afterwards. It’s important to remember to include electrolytes with that water in order to replenish the ones you lost while sweating during all that umm… adult exercise.

Electrolytes are chemicals that conduct electricity when dissolved in water. They regulate nerve and muscle function, hydrate the body, balance blood acidity and pressure, and help rebuild damaged tissue. 

I personally like Trace Minerals which will include proper ratios of sodium, potassium, magnesium and calcium. 

Exercise

I don’t recommend hitting the gym right after your scene, but in the days following? Absolutely. Exercise suited to your physical ability can positively impact all of your hormones – including serotonin and dopamine – which means that you can improve both your physical and mental health and wellbeing from the get-go. Even just a few light walks outside in the fresh air and sunshine is going to improve your mood and reduce your anxiety.

Cuddling

When you cuddle with someone you care about, say your big, tough Dom, your body releases oxytocin that calms you and makes you more likely to deal better with stress. It also can lower your blood pressure and lower levels of cortisol, which also can help.

Sunlight

Getting in the sun is going to help on two fronts. First, getting enough exposure to sunlight can help keep your circadian rhythm back to normal after having altered it due to the high level of cortisol in your blood that first night after your scene.

Second, exposure to sunlight can raise your beta-endorphin levels which are the happy hormones that are natural painkillers and mood-boosters. This is going to be quite helpful. Sunlight can also influence the amount of serotonin that your brain produces, which may help you feel more focused, happy, and calm in your day-to-day life.

Cold shower

I can hear you now, “Brandon… I’m a masochist, but I’m not that kind of masochist.”

Look, I don’t recommend hopping into a cold shower right after your scene. That would actually make the levels of your cortisol worse. However, if you are still feeling subdrop a day or two after your scene, using a cold shower in the morning can help with a significant and prolonged increase in dopamine for the entire day.

Furthermore, cold showers will help reduce the inflammation that is happening in your sore and bruised body.

Mental remedies to sub drop

The next component that is important to address in your subdrop are the thoughts, and more importantly, the stories that you are telling yourself about what just happened.

Part of the reason that BDSM is enjoyable, and not traumatic, is because we tell ourselves stories that these acts are consensual, everyone is doing them out of fun and love, and everyone still likes everyone else after the scene is done.

However, those very same actions on any giving day, without those actions, are traumatic. If you had a very intense scene, how easily do you think your brain is able to draw a line that these are “good” actions, not “bad” actions? Not likely.

After an intense scene, how many times have you been in the middle of something innocuous like making coffee, and the next moment you feel like you might cry, or you’re upset at your Dom for a reason that can feel totally logical at the moment, even though you both were happy-go-lucky the night before. That’s your brain trying to make sense of what happened. It’s your brain trying to construct a “logical” narrative for the state of your body right now.

So, to help out our little monkey mind during this process, I recommend the following.

Proper aftercare immediately after the scene

What that form of aftercare looks like is less important than the fact that it actually happens. Aftercare is your transition period from potentially-trauma-inducing event to the regular world. What’s often helpful during this time is having someone, most often your Dom, to help reorient you to the regular world, helping you process what happened, and being there to remind you that you’re a good person, you’re loved, and someone is there to care for you. If you don’t have the proper aftercare that you need after the scene, there is potential to feel abandoned or unloved, which is going to kick those negative stories into overdrive and make the drop much harder. So Doms, love your little subby after you’ve beaten them.

Talk with your Dom

In the days following your intense scene, check-in with your Dom if you need to. Sometimes we all need more reassurance that we are in fact loved and cared for, and when your brain is feeling depressed, that need is often higher. Mental processing happens over days, and we don’t usually find clarity until we have wrestled with something a few times. Your Dom can also help remind you or help you rediscover why you did the scene and what you loved about it.

Connect with other people’s stories

Guess what? You’re not the first person to ever experience sub drop. There have been many that have been in this exact situation. It’s a normal part of the process. This can actually be comforting because in our depressive state, we’re more likely to think something is wrong with us, that we shouldn’t be feeling this way, when instead you’re pretty normal. (Well… normal for being a misfit kinkster that is.)

Connecting with other people’s stories and accounts of sub drop can also help you to work through the thoughts and emotions that may be arising for you. What you’re doing in this process is checking the validity of your own thoughts against those of others who have experienced the same thing.

Meditation

There are many people who have tried to meditate before and feel that they are failing because they are not able to quiet their thoughts. 

The goal of meditation is not to quiet the mind (although, eventually that does happen to some degree), but rather to help you see that the thoughts are irrelevant to anything else happening in your awareness, that they do not need to be grasped on to. 

This can be helpful during sub drop, because odds are, you’re grasping on to those thoughts with all your might and that is only causing a spiral of emotions making the drop much worse.

Emotional remedies to sub drop

Even if you’re able to mentally process the mental stories associated with your scene, you’re likely to still have some intense emotions. I strongly, adamantly, and fully recommend that you do not run from these emotions and take the proper time to feel and digest them.

Whenever I play with my subs, I encourage them to let and express whatever emotions are true for them in the moment. You want to laugh? Laugh. You want to cry? Cry. It’s ok.

Learning to be with intense emotions, usually the ones that are overwhelming and triggered by the scene, can help you see that they are just energy and sensations and that you don’t need to attach a story to them. Here’s a practice to help you do that.

Intense Emotions Practice:

• To the best of your ability, separate the thoughts and story you're assigning from the emotional energy and feeling.
• Invite the emotional energy close, noticing the sensations it's creating in your body.
• Feel the raw energy of the emotion itself whatever it is (joy, excitement, anger, fear, desire, frustration).
• Let the emotion pulse and surge through your body, however it wants to express itself, being sure to not grasp on the feeling or push it away.
• Neither own or deny ownership of the emotion, find the sweet spot where it won’t get caught but rather let it move all the way in and through your body.
• If you begin to own or grasp onto the emotion, or it feels like it's stuck in some part of the body,  there is a story that you are seeing or believing about the emotion that you need to lay aside.
• When you feel that you have allowed that emotion to fully be felt, you ground yourself back into the moment by doing a mental scan of your body

What goes up, must come down

Although sub drop does not happen to everyone, it’s likely that if you increase your hormone levels substantially during a scene, they will come crashing down. Give yourself permission to have perfectly normal reactions to intense BDSM experiences. The state of sub drop will not last forever and you’ll be back to having fun, kinky times before you know it.