How grief affects your body

People expect grief to hurt and are surprised when it hurts physically: the sleep that stops at four, the food that will not go down, the ache across the shoulders, the colds that keep coming. All of it is grief. Bereavement is one of the largest stresses a body goes through, and your body responds as it does to any large stress, over weeks and months. This guide is what it does, why, and which of it needs a doctor.

The stress response

A death sets off your body’s alarm system, the same one that responds to danger, and keeps it on for weeks. Adrenaline and cortisol stay high, the heart rate and the blood pressure rise, muscles stay tense, and your body burns energy as if it were running. That is why grief is exhausting in a way that has nothing to do with how much you have done, and why the tiredness does not lift with a night’s sleep, when a night’s sleep can be had at all.

Sleep

Almost universal, and often the last thing to come back. Falling asleep is hard because the mind will not stop; staying asleep is harder, and the four o’clock waking that so many bereaved people describe is the stress hormones peaking on their own schedule. Dreams about the person are common and can be either a comfort or a shock. Alcohol helps for a fortnight and then makes it worse. If sleep has not settled after a couple of months, a GP can help, and it is one of the commonest reasons bereaved people see one.

Appetite and digestion

Some people cannot eat and lose weight quickly; some eat constantly. Nausea, a churning stomach and a dry mouth are the stress response again. Food tastes of nothing. The practical answer is small amounts often, and something with protein in it, because a body under this kind of stress and without food is a body with the volume turned up on everything else. Coping with grief in the first weeks puts food near the top of what helps, for that reason.

Aches, tension and chest pain

Tense muscles for weeks produce headaches, a stiff neck, a tight jaw and an ache across the shoulders and the back. A tight chest is common and is usually the same tension. But chest pain after a bereavement must not be explained away. The days and weeks after a death carry a raised risk of heart attack and stroke, roughly double in the first month after a partner dies, and broken heart syndrome, which doctors call takotsubo cardiomyopathy, is a real condition in which severe emotional stress weakens the heart muscle and produces the symptoms of a heart attack; it is usually temporary and most people recover with treatment. Both need 999, not a page on the internet.

The immune system

Weeks of stress hormones suppress the immune system, which is why bereaved people catch everything going and take longer to shake it. Colds, cold sores, a flare of an old condition, are all common in the first months. It settles as the stress response does.

Concentration, memory and the fog

Reading the same form three times, forgetting where the car is, losing the thread of a sentence. The brain under stress and without sleep does not hold information well, and the fog is one of the things people most fear means something is wrong with them. It does not. It lifts as sleep returns.

Existing conditions

Grief makes everything you already had worse. Blood pressure, diabetes, asthma, pain conditions, depression and anxiety all tend to flare, and someone on medication for any of them should keep taking it, keep appointments, and tell the doctor what has happened. A person with a history of depression is at real risk in the months after a death and should say so to their GP early rather than late.

The two things that need a doctor

Chest pain, now, by 999. And any of the rest of this page that is still there after a couple of months, or that is stopping you living: not sleeping for weeks, losing a great deal of weight, not able to work or leave the house. That is not a matter of waiting longer; a GP can help with the sleep, check nothing else is going on, and refer you to bereavement support. When to get bereavement counselling, and where to find it in the UK lists where.

What helps

The unglamorous things, and they work because they act on your body directly: sleep when you can, food little and often, daylight and a walk in the morning, less alcohol, and one person to say things to, because saying it lowers the alarm. How long does grief last describes how the physical side eases over the first year, and it does ease, for almost everyone, as your body decides the emergency is over.