Hug a good friend, settle in on the couch and watch a tear-jerker movie. If that fails, get stuck into the biggest block of chocolate you can find.
They might sound like the tips dished out by Dolly magazine to teenagers crushed by first love (the inevitable follow-up to 10 steps to get a boyfriend or How to tell when he really likes you).
But trite as such small comforts might sound, they've played a part in repairing the broken hearts of two of Australia's athletic champions, Nathan Deakes and Jana Rawlinson.
World champion race walker Deakes was a tortured soul on the day of the Olympics opening ceremony on August 8.
In late July the world champion 50km race walker had been forced to withdraw from the Games when one of his hamstring tendons ripped from his pelvis.
After flying back from Europe he'd undergone surgery, having three fishhook-like anchors drilled into his pelvic bone to hold the tendon.
On the day he was meant to march into the stadium with the Aussie team, he sat in his loungeroom in Bruce watching the midday movie, Chariots of Fire. And after two and a half weeks of emotional numbness he finally let the tears flow.
''Until that point everyone had been crying the tears that I couldn't. Then it hit me. I got really, really upset, realising that I wasn't going,'' Deakes recalled.
Sore and feeling sorry for himself as the Olympics got underway, Deakes set off to Thailand with his wife to avoid the hype back home.
There, in between checking out the Games results online, he dropped text messages to the one person he knew truly understood his suffering Rawlinson.
She was in Beijing, but instead of preparing for the 400m hurdles as world champion and hot favourite, she was in a Channel Seven TV studio.
Like Deakes, Rawlinson had pulled out of the Games squad, two weeks before him. It was a foot injury that got the better of her.
In Beijing she was putting on a brave face, talking graciously about the athletes who would vie for the gold medal she knew in her heart was hers.
The distraction of being there without really being there was an anaesthetic for her pain. Eventually it had to wear off.
That was six weeks ago, after her move to Canberra to take up an AIS scholarship, aimed at helping her stop her ruinous run of injuries.
''I got back and went gung-ho into training. I didn't know how to turn the tap off and I hurt my calf. And that was it,'' Rawlinson said before a training session this week.
''I'd made the move to Canberra, I'd just lost my Olympics and I was still getting injured, so I got very upset. I went and ate about three kilos of chocolate and went out to dinner lots and lots. I'm a normal girl. I eat for comfort.''
Rawlinson and Deakes's misery has to be put into some context. Theirs wasn't the pain of just any athlete whose Olympic dream had vanished. They were Australia's athletics trump cards.
They were our only world champions from Osaka in 2007 and therefore our best and, in the view of some pessimists, only athletics gold medal chances.
As history now records it, fears of a disaster in the Bird's Nest stadium didn't bear out. Steve Hooker (pole vault gold), Sally McLellan (100m hurdles silver) and Jared Tallent (50km and 20km walk silver and bronze) ensured the Aussie flag flew.
New stars were born while two old ones were left watching ruefully.
Yet out of their similar pain, a strong friendship has formed between Deakes and Rawlinson.
From text messages before and during the Games to keep each others' spirits up, the pair are now props for each other during their difficult physical recoveries.
Denied by their rehabilitation plan from hurdling or walking until into the new year, they find each other most days in the vast AIS gym, amid the din of weights slamming down.
Rawlinson said, ''I find Nathan a backbone for me. He's so positive and so strong.
''It's nice to know that if you're having a rough day, you can go up and give him a hug and he'll say 'we'll be right, we'll be there in Berlin [at the 2009 world championships] and on the dais'.''
As reigning world champs, both athletes qualify automatically for the world championships in August.
It's a good thing too, as neither is likely to be approaching physical preparedness until at least mid next year.
Rawlinson is confident three months' hard training will be enough to get herself to peak condition. Deakes is even more bullish about returning to competition, adding for the record that the three 50km medallists in Beijing have never beaten him over his pet distance.
''I was ecstatic for Jared [Tallent], but of course also a bit envious, with the sense of what could have been,'' Deakes said. ''It's a challenge for me to get to that standard and defend my title next year. I can't wait to get out there, to flex my muscles a bit and show them who really is the boss.''
And so, what about 2012?
Rawlinson insists she'll be there and hasn't ruled out pushing on to the 2016 Games (she's keen to hear what city will host it). Aside from raising her baby son, Cornelis, with coach and husband Chris Rawlinson, she is studying a science degree and hopes one day to study medicine. But the missing item on her resume, the Olympic medal, drives her on with fierce intensity.
Deakes's mental image of himself in London in four years is much less in focus. He's 31 now and has admitted for some time now to feeling the effects of years of hard training.
He has set himself the goal of the Commonwealth Games in Dehli in 2010, where he hopes to equal the medal tally of the Games' most successful athlete, Jamaican sprinter Don Quarrie.
From there, Deakes hopes London will look a more realistic goal than now.
One thing he'll have in his favour is his ''kindred spirit'' Rawlinson, who says she will ''absolutely'' egg him on to another Olympics.
''He's already got an Olympic medal [a bronze from Athens], even if it's not the one he wants. For the rest of his life he'll know he's in those record books.
''But in his event he's quite a young chicken. He could go on to 2016 if he wants to.''