How grief affects our physical condition

By the time of the tragedy, Megan Devine had been working as a psychotherapist for five years. She helped patients cope with the consequences of violence and other traumas, overcome drug addiction, and become emotionally stable.

And then disaster struck: on a summer day, right in front of Megan, her loved one, a young, healthy man, drowned. The world has collapsed. All her knowledge and professional experience were inapplicable to such a loss. Recovery took many years. Meghan discovered a community of grieving people that became her support group. Megan then began working with grief as a psychotherapist, and then wrote the book Let’s Talk About Loss (Olymp-Business, 2020).

A large section in it is devoted to the story of the physical and mental changes that occur in the process of mourning.

“A person has ceased to be himself and has not yet become someone new,” writes Megan Devine. “All our previous state, both physical and emotional, is losing stability.”

Loss provokes changes in the biochemistry of the brain and affects almost all bodily functions — appetite, digestion, blood pressure, heart rate, breathing, muscle tension and sleep. In addition to physical reactions, cognitive impairment, memory loss, disorientation, and decreased concentration often occur during the early period of grief. Megan talks about these symptoms.

Fatigue and insomnia

Sleep disturbances often become a serious problem: you either do not sleep at all, or your awakening is reduced to small windows between long periods of sleep. When you do sleep, grief seeps into your sleep, no matter how exhausted you may be. Some people continue to regularly wake up the very minute their loved one has died. Others are awakened by the fact that they are trying to grope him in bed, and the place is empty.

If you have trouble sleeping, you are not alone. Sleep as much as you can, when you can, don’t see it as avoidance or denial. In fact, it is recovery and rest. If you can’t sleep or wake up from dreams, don’t fight it. Rest as and when you can. Discuss ways to get better sleep with doctors you trust.

Dreams and nightmares

Nightmares about your loss can make you want to avoid sleep. Recurring dreams, such as those where you are told news of death, are a healthy, necessary part of grief. Such dreams do not present you with solutions to problems or signs of the future — they mean that your creative, associative mind is trying to navigate the space of loss. This knowledge does not make nightmares more pleasant.

Every system in your body is working hard to help you survive, and nightmares are often part of the process. Note it, but don’t dive into it, don’t get bogged down in analysis. If you wake up from a nightmare, repeating a simple phrase, such as «My mind is trying to fit it in,» can sometimes help calm your mind and nervous system.

physical pain

Palpitations, headaches, abdominal pain, dizziness, nausea—these symptoms often appear in a person who is going through a difficult event. After the death of Matt (Meghan’s husband. — Approx. ed.), I seemed to have inherited his heartburn, sciatica and neck pain. Nothing like that bothered me while he was alive.

As I look through my early grief diaries now, I am amazed at the sense of fatigue it describes and the amount of physical pain: aching muscles, headaches, phantom pains in all parts of the body. In the first two years, I ended up in the emergency room at least four times: with severe pain in my stomach and chest, changes in vision, and each time the tests showed nothing.

I think in many ways the body is the vessel that holds all of this experience. His breakdowns, failures and other signs of excessive stress become clear when you think about how much he has to endure.

Weight changes

You can’t talk about «normal» appetite during grief. Some people in a situation of stress begin to eat more; others, myself included, lose all interest in food.

In the first few months, I lost over nine pounds. I just stopped eating. The only source of nutrition was cream, which I added to tea, and sometimes cake. Every few days I ate something else.

Some people develop serious illnesses as a result of what we call the «grief diet.» Complications from overeating or undereating can include diabetes, high cholesterol levels, respiratory diseases — you have probably heard of such diagnoses. When you stop eating because food makes you sick, or, conversely, constantly eat to keep yourself busy, your body has to put in more effort to maintain balance.

Instead of eating without feeling hungry, you can offer yourself alternatives: sleep, take a walk, call someone. Do what you can.

Taking care of yourself

In grief, the habit of taking care of your body can fade into the background. But the fact is that taking care of your body, your physical body, is one of the few real ways to change your experience of grief.

Body care can reduce the amount of suffering, although it will not change your pain. Remember that taking care of your physical body is an act of kindness and you deserve it.

Grief and brain

When Matt died, I lost my head — and not at all in the way it is usually understood. I used to be able to read books. I had an excellent memory. I managed my affairs without any reminders and calendars.

And suddenly I became a person who could put the keys in the refrigerator, forget the name of the dog, what day of the week it was and whether I had breakfast. I could not read more than a few sentences in a row, and they had to be repeated several times to understand the meaning.

I used to enjoy deep intellectual conversation and knew how to maintain it, but now I was losing the thread of even the most primitive conversation. I no longer understand how much money I have to count at the checkout. My brain just stopped functioning.

If your brain works differently than before, it means that you are a perfectly normal person. You are not crazy. You feel your insanity because you are living an insane state. Your brain is exhausted. The pain of loss affects memory, ability to communicate and interact. You don’t know what day of the week it is, or you can’t even read a label, let alone an entire book.

All this is absolutely normal, but it gives a feeling of losing many of the properties of your personality that made you yourself. Gradually, order will be more or less restored (or recreated). Before that moment comes, you can help your brain by leaving reminders and notes everywhere.

Just because you need stickers, timers, and alarms all the time doesn’t mean you’re in trouble. This is proof that you are doing everything possible to support your brain and alleviate your plight. If necessary, cover the whole house with notes. They will not help you find the keys, but they can remind you of other little things.

Disorientation

In the first months, the whole world can become strange and confusing. I remember how I stood at the checkout of the store and could not figure out why the money was in my hand. I lost the ability to count and did not understand the value of bills. Filled with tears, I randomly handed the cashier a wad of money.

Confusion and mental fog are common feelings in grief. All our artificial constructs — money, time, traffic rules (and everything else), social norms, hygiene — lose all connection with the reality that we live.

This confusion can come and go depending on other stressors in your life, emotionally demanding activities, and the quality of sleep and nutrition. Therefore, we return to caring for your physical body as a basic principle of life: maintaining the activity of the body can reduce the disorienting effect of grief on your mind.

Creating New Cognitive Pathways

In grief, the brain faces the task of systematizing and ordering a new, impossible reality. The received data does not make any sense to him. This event is unprecedented, and therefore it cannot be correlated with anything available. It doesn’t fit anywhere.

The brain finds it difficult to integrate it into the picture of the world. Like your soul, your brain resists the loss: «This can’t be true.» Gradually, he will have to create new neural connections and build the loss into the mind of the new person that you become every day. Over time, you will be able to read entire lines and paragraphs without having to speak them to yourself to get the gist of it.

Grief will not make sense, the loss will not be transformed into something ordinary and understandable, but your mind and soul will adapt to them. They will accept and integrate the loss. That is their task: adaptation to new experience. It’s not bad or good, it’s their job.

Olymp-Business, 2020.