Why Am I Crying at Everything After a Hysterectomy?

Welcome to week two. A diaper commercial made you cry. So did a text from your sister asking how you're doing. So did the dog, for looking at you funny. And every time, mid-sob, the same question: what do I even have to cry about?

The surgery went fine. You're healing on schedule. Everyone keeps telling you how well you're doing.

Which is how you end up on Reddit at 2am, where a woman a few weeks ahead of you has already asked your exact question: "Is this crying thing normal even though I kept my ovaries?" Under it, pages of women answering me too. And one reply that could be your diary: "I cried about EVERYTHING the first week and I kept my ovaries!"

The comments section is right, and for once it has the research on its side.

Is it normal to cry a lot after a hysterectomy?

The Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists writes the recovery leaflets your hospital hands out, and their leaflets warn you: many women feel tearful and emotional at first, and for many, it's the last symptom to improve. The last one. After the incisions, after the swelling, after the tiredness.

Up close it looks the way the forums describe it: crying daily "over the dumbest stuff." Sobbing at commercials. Fine at breakfast, a mess by noon, fine again by dinner. For some women it's less tears and more fuse, flipping from sad to snappish with nothing in between. Mood swings, and the first weeks are full of them.

Why am I so emotional after my hysterectomy?

One cause would be easier to accept. You're working with at least four.

You're sore. You're sleeping in fragments. You've spent two weeks parked on a couch while everyone else's life carries on. And the recovery you pictured is not the recovery you're getting. Any one of these can end in tears; you've got the whole set at once.

Recovering from a hysterectomy is a weeks-long, mostly horizontal project, and RCOG's leaflets tie the lying-down part straight to feeling depressed: sleeping in and staying in bed can bring it on, and long stretches off work leave women isolated. Healing asks you to do the exact things that wear a person down. Their prescription: company.

Then there's sleep, or the lack of it. A 2024 review pooled 154 experiments covering more than 5,000 people and found that losing sleep makes people less happy and more anxious. Every kind of sleep loss, same result. Those were healthy volunteers who slept in a lab and went home after. You've been sleeping in ninety-minute instalments since the hospital, on a schedule that's completely out of whack. Draw your own conclusion.

Pain has its own file. A 2016 review of surgery and depression found the two feeding each other: pain feeds the misery, and the misery lowers your threshold for pain. Your painkillers may be chipping in as well; Memorial Sloan Kettering's codeine information sheet lists mood changes among the side effects to report.

Expectations do damage too. In a 2023 Canadian study of 294 women, the roughest emotional six months belonged to women with endometriosis and women who'd needed open surgery: the recoveries that demand the most. Expected to be back at work by now, and instead you're timing your walks to the mailbox? That gap grinds on you too.

None of this is a hysterectomy quirk. A 2023 US study tracked six kinds of major surgery and found new depression after every one of them, roughly 7 to 19 percent of patients depending on the operation.

Then there's the answer you'll get if you ask on Reddit: "your body is still clearing the anaesthetic." Tempting. It makes the crying chemical, temporary, and nobody's fault.

The people who put you under time it differently. The NHS puts a general anaesthetic's effects at around 24 hours, and a Royal Berkshire leaflet keeps the drugs active for up to 48. Two days. If this is week three, the anaesthetic is long gone. The sleep, the pain, and the couch are not.

Does the emotional side get better after a hysterectomy?

For most women, yes. On average, women feel better a year or two after a hysterectomy than they did before the surgery. Not just recovered. Better.

In a study published in 2000, researchers followed 1,299 Maryland women for two years after hysterectomies for benign conditions. Depression went down. Anxiety went down. Quality of life went up. By the university's tally, nearly three quarters of the women who were depressed before surgery weren't depressed two years later.

A 2014 meta-analysis pooled the before-and-after studies and reached the same conclusion: hysterectomy for benign conditions doesn't raise anxiety, and depression mostly improves. The Canadian cohort counted 47 percent of its women reporting fewer depression symptoms only six months out.

No mystery behind it. Before surgery, these women were bleeding through their calendars and living around pain. Remove that, and people perk up. Not for everyone. On average.

If you're mid-sob in week two, these numbers aren't calling you a liar. They describe where women land after months, not where you are on a Tuesday.

Women whose ovaries came out improved too, at least in the Maryland analysis, where most of them were on oestrogen by the time anyone measured. Facing surgical menopause without hormones? That result wasn't measured on you.

Can a hysterectomy cause depression years later?

It can. The study that showed it has been public since 2019, and the pages at the top of Google for this question somehow never mention it. Most of them never mention a study at all.

Mayo Clinic researchers followed 2,094 women who had a hysterectomy and kept their ovaries, matched them one for one against women who didn't have the surgery, and kept watching for nearly 22 years. New depression diagnoses were 26 percent more likely in the surgery group, which works out to 6.6 extra cases per hundred women over 30 years, with anxiety at 4.7. Women who had the surgery between 18 and 35 fared worst; for them, the extra depression cases reached 12 per hundred.

Before that number rearranges your future, look at what the same group published alongside it. Their 2019 case-control study of women who'd had their ovaries removed ran the question backwards: women with a mental-health condition already on the chart were 55 percent more likely to end up having the surgery, and with three or more conditions, more than twice as likely. Mayo's own paper lists three possible explanations for its finding. The operation is only one of them.

Australia's long-running women's health study and Taiwan's national health records also count more depression after hysterectomy, more still when ovaries were removed, and in Taiwan's numbers, most of all for women in their thirties.

If your ovaries came out before menopause, the longest study is the heaviest: a Mayo cohort tracked women for a median of 24 years after early ovary removal and found more depression and anxiety symptoms decades on, stronger the younger the surgery. Shorter studies, SWAN's ten-year run among them, found nothing of the kind. Either way, if your ovaries are gone and years later you still don't feel like yourself, that's a job for a menopause-informed doctor, and for a clear look at what the hysterectomy did to your hormones.

Mention crying online with your ovaries intact and someone will tell you to get on HRT, quickly, before things get worse. The guidelines are pickier than the replies. NICE suggests HRT when menopause itself is behind the emotional trouble, backs CBT for the same, and finds no clear evidence for SSRIs in menopausal women without diagnosed depression. Every clause hangs on the word menopause.

Intact ovaries in week three are not menopause, and HRT there answers a question your body hasn't asked. (They do sometimes quit early after a hysterectomy. If your symptoms point that way, find out whether menopause has started before anyone hands you a prescription for it.) And diagnosed depression is its own lane: it gets treated as depression, whatever your hormones are doing.

Is it normal to grieve after a hysterectomy?

Yes. Grief turns up whether you wanted the surgery or not.

The NHS warns of a "sense of loss and sadness" after a hysterectomy: some women grieving children they can't have, some feeling less "womanly." ACOG counts sadness and relief as both common. The Office on Women's Health uses the word grief outright.

Relief is the majority experience, and it's been counted: a 2024 survey asked 268 women who'd had hysterectomies for benign disease, and 88 percent felt relief. Seven percent regretted it. Neither age nor having children predicted who landed where.

Grief shows up somewhere else: in thread titles. The big hysterectomy forums run a dedicated grief board, and it reads like this: "Mourning something I never even wanted." Women switching seats on the bus when a pregnant woman sits down. Hiding in the bedroom until Mother's Day is over. In tears in a supermarket because the aisle they turned down was the pads aisle.

A 2023 study interviewed women nine years after hysterectomies done before 40. Most had made their peace with the trade: they'd lost years to their symptoms, and now the symptoms were gone. A minority, mostly women who'd already struggled with fertility, were still grieving.

And some women never got a vote. An emergency hysterectomy, decided in minutes because the bleeding wouldn't stop, sometimes within an hour of giving birth. The NHS notes the sense of loss runs deepest where there was no other option. Grieving after surviving isn't ingratitude. It's grief.

Relief on Tuesday, grief on Thursday. They don't cancel each other out.

How long do mood swings last after a hysterectomy, and when should you get help?

How long? Who knows. It isn't something anyone tracks or researches. The most RCOG will commit to is that the tears are often the last symptom to improve, which narrows it down to somewhere between soon and eventually.

The women writing about it online have their own version: days seven through ten are the worst, and the corner comes somewhere in week two. Plenty say it matched their recovery. And since they're the only ones who've bothered to write any of this down, their timeline is the best one going. Just don't treat it as a deadline.

When to get help, on the other hand, has a firm answer: two weeks. That's where NIMH and Canada's CAMH both draw the line: down, empty, or not caring about anything, most of the day, nearly every day. The US women's health office stretches it to "longer than a few weeks." Don't wait that long.

Half the checklist for depression could describe any normal recovery, which is what makes this call hard. Wiped out? Recovering. Sleeping terribly? Recovering. No appetite, can't focus? Recovering, and possibly on painkillers.

So watch the half recovery can't explain: nothing interests you anymore, hopelessness, feeling worthless, and no movement in any of it day after day. Two weeks of that means a doctor's appointment, whatever else is healing well.

Fever, heavy bleeding, or pain on its way up is a reason to call your doctor no matter what your mood is doing.

If it's gone past that, to thoughts of death or of hurting yourself, don't wait out any two-week rule.

• Canada: call or text 988, any hour, any day.
• United States: call or text 988, or chat at 988lifeline.org.
• UK and Ireland: Samaritans, free from any phone, 116 123, around the clock.
• In immediate danger, call 911.

The crying-at-everything stage does end. For most women it fades too gradually to notice: fewer bad days, more space between them, until one day you feel like yourself again.

Common questions