Grief in the body.
Why grief breaks sleep, takes appetite, hurts in the chest — and what to actually do for the body that is carrying it.
There is a way grief gets talked about that makes it sound like a feeling — sadness, mostly, perhaps mixed with disbelief and a slow-drifting numbness. As if it lived in the mind, behind the eyes, and could be described mainly with the vocabulary of mood.
This isn't entirely true. Grief is a body event.
If you have recently lost someone or something, and you have noticed that the rules of your physical body have changed — your sleep is shot, you can't taste food properly, your chest is tight, you bruise easier, you've forgotten how to read — you are not exaggerating. The body, under acute grief, behaves like a body under acute injury. The chemistry is well documented.
What's actually happening.
Your cortisol spikes and stays high. This is the stress hormone, and it was designed to help you outrun a predator over the next half hour. It is not designed to sit at full pressure for weeks. When it does, you cannot sleep properly, you cannot rest, your immune system suppresses, your appetite collapses, and your digestion stalls.
Your sleep architecture breaks. Even when you do sleep, REM is fragmented. You wake at the same hour each night — usually 3am or 4am. You are not lazy. You are not avoiding your bed. Your sleep is broken by the same chemistry that is breaking the rest of you.
Your chest hurts. The "broken heart" is not a metaphor. There is a real, documented stress cardiomyopathy in the days after acute loss — sometimes called Takotsubo syndrome. The pain is often dull, central, and unrelieved by rest. If it is sharp, radiating, with shortness of breath or sweating — that is an emergency. Phone an ambulance.
Your memory becomes leaky. You walk into a room and forget why. You read the same page four times. This is sometimes called "grief brain". It is the consequence of running the brain on too little sleep and too much cortisol. It will lift. You are not getting demented.
Your appetite goes wrong. Either gone entirely, or strangely insistent. Both are normal. Eat anyway. Toast counts. A spoon of yoghurt counts. The point is the fuel, not the meal.
What to actually do.
- Drink water. More than you think. Dehydration makes every other symptom worse.
- Get the GP appointment. Especially if it has been more than two weeks. The body needs to be seen by someone trained to see it.
- Walk outside, briefly, in real daylight. Even five minutes. Daylight is the strongest signal you can give your sleep system to right itself.
- Lower your expectations of yourself. This week, the goal is to remain a person, not to be a productive one.
- Eat small things, often. Not big meals. Toast at 10am. A handful of nuts at 2pm. Soup at 7pm.
When to escalate.
- Chest pain that doesn't settle — ambulance, today, no debate.
- No sleep at all for three nights running — GP, this week, not next.
- No food for more than a few days — GP, this week.
- Thoughts of harming yourself or not being here — phone SADAG (0800 567 567) or message ListenUp now. This is what we are for.
The grief is real and it is also physical. Treating the body kindly is not avoiding the grief. It is making it possible to survive the grief.
The rest can come later. The body first.
If any of the "when to escalate" items apply to you, please don't read another article — make the call.