What Self-Care Actually Looks Like When You're Grieving Your Dad

The week after your dad dies, someone will tell you to take care of yourself. You'll nod. You'll have no idea what that means. Self-care, as advertised, looks like a bath bomb and a gratitude journal — neither of which does anything for a man who hasn't slept properly in two weeks and just found out he's the executor of a will that doesn't mention a single password.

So let's skip the wellness influencer version and talk about what actually happens, what actually helps, and why the instinct most men have — to just keep moving — works right up until the moment it doesn't.

The Busy Trap: How Staying Mentally Occupied Becomes a Strategy

In a Dead Dads episode featuring guest John Abreu, John described getting the call about his father's death during an important meeting. His business partner sensed something immediately. He didn't have to explain. And then — he went back to the table. He got through the rest of the day. He stayed, in his own words, "mentally busy."

He was clear-eyed about what that actually was in retrospect: deflection. Not denial, not weakness, not a failure to feel — just the human mind finding a path through the next few hours that didn't involve falling apart in a conference room. That's not a character flaw. That's a coping mechanism doing exactly what it's supposed to do in the short term.

The problem is that short-term becomes medium-term, and then six months later you're still scheduling things back-to-back because the moment you stop, the weight lands on you all at once. Grief doesn't expire while you're busy. It waits. Men who have spent years as the person who holds it together for everyone else — the one who called the funeral home, handled the estate, was strong for their mom — often find that the crash comes when they finally sit still.

This isn't a personality flaw. It's physics. You can't defer it indefinitely.

What "Self-Care" Actually Means When You're Hollowed Out

The word itself is the problem. Self-care has been co-opted so thoroughly by the wellness industry that most men will hear it and immediately picture something that has nothing to do with their life. The real version — the version that actually matters after significant loss — is considerably more unglamorous.

It starts with the basics, and the basics are harder than they sound when grief is involved. Are you sleeping? Not well, probably. Are you eating real food more than twice a day? Are you drinking enough water, or are you running entirely on coffee and the adrenaline of logistics? These aren't soft questions. Sleepless nights and extended crying — whether you let yourself cry or not — are physically exhausting in a measurable way. Cortisol spikes. The immune system takes a hit. Grief is as much a body event as it is an emotional one.

A 2019 study cited by grief researchers found that reading for as few as six minutes measurably reduces stress hormone levels. A 20-to-30-minute nap, according to the National Sleep Foundation, improves mood, alertness, and cognitive function. These aren't cures. They're maintenance. And maintenance is what gets you to the next week in a state where you can still function.

The point isn't to feel better. Right now, feeling better might not be available. The point is to not make it worse by also destroying your physical health on top of everything else you're carrying.

The Guilt of Not Grieving the Right Way

One of the most honest moments in the John Abreu episode is a conversation about performative guilt — the feeling that you should feel guilty, or that you're being led toward guilt by the question itself. Abreu describes watching his own father's generation, men who just "got on with life," and recognizing a kind of resilience in that. He sees it in his kids too: expressive in the moment, but not carrying it long.

There's a real tension there. Because grief culture — including therapy culture, wellness culture, the whole apparatus — has its own Hollywood-esque script for what loss is supposed to look like. If you're not visibly devastated, if you laughed at something yesterday, if you went back to the meeting table and got through the day, something must be wrong with you. The question "do you feel guilty?" is sometimes less a question than a suggestion.

The reality is that men grieve differently. Not worse — differently. Research consistently shows that men are more likely to engage in what's called "instrumental grief": processing through action, through doing, through activity rather than explicit emotional expression. Staying mentally busy isn't the absence of grief. For a lot of men, it is grief, just running on a different channel.

Self-care, in this context, means giving yourself permission to grieve the way you actually grieve — without apologizing for it, without measuring yourself against someone else's timeline, and without performing devastation you don't feel just to satisfy observers. Your journey is yours. As one listener wrote in a review on the Dead Dads website: "It's the type of pain that I bottle up and keep to myself. I felt some pain relief..." That alone — finding a place where your version of this is recognized — is part of what taking care of yourself actually looks like.

For more on why the standard five-stage model of grief has never fit men particularly well, Clinical Grief Models Weren't Built for Men Who Just Lost Their Dad is worth reading.

The Practical Stuff Nobody Mentions

Setting aside the emotional dimension for a moment — because sometimes the most useful thing is just a list of things that are actually within reach — here's what grief self-care looks like in practice for most men:

Sleep is not a luxury. It's the single most important recovery mechanism your body has, and grief disrupts it reliably. If you can't sleep, at least rest. Horizontal counts. If you're waking at 3am and lying there with your thoughts, that's normal. It doesn't mean something is broken. But do what you can to protect the hours you do get.

Eat something you didn't have to think about. The sympathy casseroles and the neighbor's lasagnas exist for a reason. Let people feed you. You're not imposing. You're making it possible for them to feel useful at a moment when most people feel helpless around grief. If someone offers to bring food, say yes.

Move your body, even a little. Not a training program. Not a fitness commitment. A walk around the block. Fresh air. The physical act of moving interrupts the loop that grief runs in your head, even briefly. That brief interruption matters.

Don't cancel everything. Isolation is one of grief's best recruitment tools. Staying connected to a friend, a routine, a Tuesday poker game — these things anchor you to a version of life that still exists alongside the loss. You don't have to talk about your dad. You just have to show up.

Put a hard stop on the estate logistics for at least part of each day. The paperwork, the bank calls, the password-protected iPad that is now a paperweight — all of it is real and all of it demands attention, but it will also eat every hour you give it. Capping the admin work protects whatever cognitive and emotional resources you have left for yourself.

Talking to Someone (Without Making It a Production)

Therapy comes up early and often in grief conversations, and sometimes the mention of it is enough to make men check out of the conversation entirely. So here's the honest version: you don't have to commit to years of weekly sessions and you don't have to bare your soul to a stranger on day one. You can start much smaller than that.

If in-person therapy feels like too much, online options like BetterHelp remove the friction of showing up somewhere. If cost is a barrier, Open Path Psychotherapy offers lower-cost options with a directory of therapists who work on a sliding scale.

Peer support is also worth considering. GriefShare runs in-person groups in most cities. Reddit's r/GriefSupport is imperfect but often genuinely honest — late-night, anonymous, no performance required. The value of sitting in a room (or a thread) where nobody needs the backstory is real.

For more on why peer support often lands better for men than formal group therapy, Why Men Quit Grief Support Groups After One Session and What Actually Helps is a useful read.

And if you're in crisis or feeling unsafe, please reach out now:

• Canada: Talk Suicide Canada — 1-833-456-4566 or text 45645
• United States: 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline — call or text 988
• UK and Ireland: Samaritans — 116 123

The Ambush Problem

One thing nobody warns you about is the randomness of when grief actually hits. You can be completely fine at a hockey game, completely functional in a meeting, and then a specific smell — old leather, WD-40, a particular brand of coffee — levels you without warning in the middle of a grocery store.

This is not a sign that something is wrong with your process. It's a sign that your nervous system is doing exactly what it's supposed to do: storing sensory memories and occasionally firing them without permission. The grief ninja, as it's sometimes called, doesn't operate on a schedule.

Self-care in those moments looks like giving yourself ten minutes in the car. It looks like not explaining yourself to anyone who notices. It looks like understanding that this doesn't mean you're "going backwards" or that you failed to process something correctly. Grief doesn't move in stages. It loops. It doubles back. It finds you in hardware stores.

The only honest thing you can do is stop expecting it to be linear, and stop treating yourself like you've failed when it isn't.

What You're Actually Doing When You "Take Care of Yourself"

Here's the reframe that tends to land for men more than the wellness version: self-care after losing your dad is not indulgence. It is maintenance. It is keeping the machine operational so you can show up for the people who still need you, finish the obligations that fell to you, and eventually — on some future timeline you can't predict right now — find out what life looks like on the other side of this.

You're not doing it for yourself in the spa-day sense. You're doing it because a depleted version of you is less useful to everyone, including yourself.

The week someone tells you to take care of yourself, you'll still nod. You might still not know exactly what it means. But it means sleeping when you can, eating when you can, moving when you can, letting people in when you can, and being honest enough with yourself to notice when staying busy has crossed the line from coping into hiding.

That line is worth watching. You'll know when you've crossed it.

If you want to hear what navigating this actually sounds like from men who've been through it — without the clinical detachment or the greeting-card polish — Dead Dads is on every major platform. It's not therapy. It's just the conversation that should exist and, until recently, didn't.