You feel grief once you experience loss of any kind. This emotional state not only affects you mentally but physically as well. What does grief look like, and how to deal with it?
Grief is a natural reaction to the loss of someone or something you’re attached to. You might start feeling socially withdrawn, in permanent yearning, and stuck in the past, but eventually, according to your own timeline, you will start to function back into normal.
This state will impact your mental health harshly and it will leave some heavy and devastating marks on you. The severity of these feelings, however, could be minimized.
Read on to learn about grief and how to cope with it.
What is grief?
Grief is pain and loss, grief is a rollercoaster of extreme negative emotions and thoughts. It obeys its own trajectory so there is no specific timeline for it, but the reasons are various for this emotional state, here are some:
- Death of a beloved one
- Divorce or breakup
- Losing a job
- Losing health
- Loss of friendship
- Miscarriage
- Retirement
- Financial problems
Slight losses can trigger grief too. For example, you might change your job or graduate from college, anything that might feel significant and personal to you; you have the right to grieve over it.
Symptoms of grief
There are both physical and emotional symptoms of grief. If you’re feeling any of the following, you’re in a stage of grief.
Emotional symptoms include:
- Displaying anger: which could leave you feeling anxious and unsettled, and could be accompanied by jealousy and resentment that others still have their loved ones around.
- Sadness: which is your natural way of expressing these feelings. Left unresolved, it could develop into depression.
- Guilt: where you feel guilty about things you said or didn’t say to that person.
- Fear: because grief makes your insecurities rise again, leaving you to frown in overthinking and fear of detachment.
- Disbelief: which is your brain’s refusal of what happened, and trying to act like it wasn’t true.
- Isolation: which is the social and emotional withdrawal from life, where you feel like you need space from everyone around.
Physical symptoms include:
- Fatigue
- Nausea
- Lowered immunity
- Weight loss or weight gain
- Aches and pains
- Insomnia
How to cope with grief
Understand the grief cycle: Familiarize yourself with the grief cycle, which constitutes denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. Live each day by itself and try after a while to set small achievable goals that you feel like accomplishing. This gives you both space and time to recover and accept all the changes.
Connect with others: Speak up your feelings. Don’t bottle them up; let your close ones know what you’re passing through. It becomes tempting to isolate yourself, but it’s okay to ask for help. You can even seek support groups; you’d be surprised by how many feel the same.
Talk to a therapist: Talking to a therapist can help you become aware of your feelings, emotions, and even of yourself. This will help you explore ways to cope with grief and help you move through the stages towards acceptance.
Be patient: By accepting and allowing yourself to feel all the emotions you will eventually be in peace. Don’t suppress your feelings but let them unfold and deal with every single negative emotion by itself.
It’s totally normal to experience grief after a loss. Go easy on yourself
and reach out if you need to.