Your body is grieving too.
Grief is often talked about as an emotional experience, but loss can affect almost every part of your body.
Sleep can disappear. Appetite can change. Your brain can feel foggy. You may be exhausted even when you’ve barely moved, anxious when nothing is happening, or experience aches, tension and physical sensations you’ve never had before.
These responses can be frightening, especially when nobody has told you they can be part of grief.
This section is here to help you understand what may be happening in your body, brain and nervous system, and why.
Not because understanding makes grief easier.
But sometimes knowing “this is grief” makes what is happening feel a little less frightening.
Your body is grieving too.
Grief doesn’t stay neatly inside your thoughts or emotions.
It can change how you sleep, eat, breathe, move and feel in your own body. It can leave you exhausted, restless, sore, unsettled or strangely alert to a world that suddenly feels less safe.
None of this means you’re doing grief badly.
Your body has been through something enormous too.
You don’t have to understand every response.
You don’t have to fix all of them.
Sometimes knowing why they are happening is enough to make them a little less frightening.
