What Grief Does To Your Body (And How To Manage It)

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Today’s 30-Second Summary

If you don’t have time to read the whole email today, here are some key takeaways:

• Bereavement is something that happens to most of us in life. And yet, its status as a very serious life event that can significantly impact our health is often underestimated.

• Most of us are not well-prepared to handle it, and at best we might know the stages of grief:

  • Denial

  • Anger

  • Bargaining

  • Depression

  • Acceptance

• Processing grief doesn’t follow a set template, but we do need to process it. Failing to do so can be ruinous not just emotionally, but to our physical health too, such as:

  • Sleep disruption

  • Poor immune function

  • Cardiovascular problems

  • Physical pain

  • Suicidal ideation

• In today’s main feature, we look at how to go about things as healthily as possible, at a time when doing so (or even caring to do so) has quite possibly never been harder.

• Hydration is a critical and often-neglected part of good health, and healthy habits are (by science!) best picked-up when they’re made more convenient and easy.

  • Today’s sponsor, Hint Water, are offering 10almonds subscribers 45% off and free shipping, on their already very reasonably-priced flavored waters and vitamin waters

    • They are, by the way, free from sugar and artificial sweeteners, so these are different from ones you’ve probably tried before

Read on to learn about these things and more…

👀 WATCH AND LEARN

Do less, become happier, says Yale cognitive scientist

Dr. Laurie Santos notes that while evolution has wired us for relentless self-enhancement, our modern environment—full of comparisons and demands for excellence—amplifies this instinct, often to our detriment.

Here's what she suggests instead:

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Prefer Text? Click Here For The Transcript!

🫂 MAIN FEATURE

What Grief Does To The Body (And How To Manage It)

In life, we will almost all lose loved ones and suffer bereavement. For most people, this starts with grandparents, eventually moves to parents, and then people our own generation; partners, siblings, close friends. And of course, sometimes and perhaps most devastatingly, we can lose people younger than ourselves.

For something that almost everyone suffers, there is often very little in the way of preparation given beforehand, and afterwards, a condolences card is nice but can’t do a lot for our mental health.

And with mental health, our physical health can go too, if we very understandably neglect it at such a time.

So, how to survive devastating loss, and come out the other side, hopefully thriving? It seems like a tall order indeed.

First, the foundations:

You’re probably familiar with the stages of grief. In their most commonly-presented form, they are:

1. Denial

2. Anger

3. Bargaining

4. Depression

5. Acceptance

You’ve probably also heard/read that we won’t always go through them in order, and also that grief is deeply personal and proceeds on its own timescale.

It is generally considered healthy to go through them.

What do they look like?

Naturally this can vary a lot from person to person, but examples in the case of bereavement could be:

1. Denial: “This surely has not really happened; I’ll carry on as though it hasn’t”

2. Anger: “Why didn’t I do xyz differently while I had the chance?!”

3. Bargaining: “I will do such-and-such in their honor, and this will be a way of expressing the love I wish I could give them in a way they could receive”

4. Depression: “What is the point of me without them? The sooner I join them, the better.”

5. Acceptance: “I was so lucky that we had the time together that we did, and enriched each other’s lives while we could”

We can speedrun these or we can get stuck on one for years. We can bounce back and forth. We can think we’re at acceptance, and then a previous stage will hit us like a tonne of bricks.

What if we don’t?

Assuming that our lost loved one was indeed a loved one (as opposed to someone we are merely societally expected to mourn), then failing to process that grief will tend to have a big impact on our life—and health. These health problems can include:

• Sleep disruption

• Poor immune function

• Cardiovascular problems

• Physical pain

• Suicidal ideation

As you can see, three out of five of those can result in death. The other two aren’t great either. So why isn’t this taken more seriously as a matter of health?

Death is, ironically, considered something we “just have to live with”.

But how?

Coping strategies

You’ll note that most of the stages of grief are not enjoyable per se. For this reason, it’s common to try to avoid them—hence denial usually being first.

But, that is like not getting a lump checked out because you don’t want a cancer diagnosis. The emotional reasoning is understandable, but it’s ultimately self-destructive.

First, have a plan. If a death is foreseen, you can even work out this plan together.

But even if that time has now passed, it’s “better late than never” to make a plan for looking after yourself, e.g:

• How you will try to get enough sleep (tricky, but sincerely try)

• How you will remember to eat (and ideally, healthily)

• How you will still get exercise (a walk in the park is fine; see some greenery and get some sunlight)

• How you will avoid self-destructive urges (from indirect, e.g. drinking, to direct, e.g. suicidality)

• How you will keep up with the other things important in your life (work, friends, family)

• How you will actively work to process your grief (e.g. journaling, or perhaps grief counselling)

Some previous articles of ours that may help:

• How To Keep On Keeping On ← this is about looking after general health when motivation is low

• The Mental Health First-Aid You’ll Hopefully Never Need ← this is about managing depression

• How To Stay Alive (When You Really Don’t Want To) ← this is about managing suicidality

If it works, it works

If we are all unique, then any relationship between any two people is uniqueness squared. Little wonder, then, that our grief may be unique too. And it can be complicated further:

• Sometimes we had a complicated relationship with someone

• Sometimes the circumstances of their death were complicated

There is, for that matter, such a thing as “complicated grief”:

Read more: Complicated grief and prolonged grief disorder (Medical News Today)

We also previously reviewed a book on “ambiguous loss”, exploring grieving when we cannot grieve in the normal way because someone is gone and/but/maybe not gone.

For example, if someone is in a long-term coma from which they may never recover, or if they are missing-presumed-dead. Those kinds of situations are complicated too.

Unusual circumstances may call for unusual coping strategies, so how can we discern what is healthy and what isn’t?

The litmus test is: is it enabling you to continue going about your life in a way that allows you to fulfil your internal personal aspirations and external social responsibilities? If so, it’s probably healthy.

Look after yourself. And if you can, tell your loved ones you love them today.

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🌍 AROUND THE WEB

What’s happening in the health world…

• Study shows breast cancer overdiagnosis common among older women

• Holidaymakers be warned: short, intense sun-seeking trips can disrupt skin's microbiome

• The isometric secret: 15 ways to get much fitter—without moving a muscle

• Study highlights racial disparities in dementia care

• The green tea effect: from gut microbes to weight loss, new insights emerge

• How muscle cells deteriorate with age, hampering recovery from injury

• When facing difficult life experiences, study shows coping strategies matter

More to come tomorrow!

📖 ONE-MINUTE BOOK REVIEW

How to Do the Work: Recognize Your Patterns, Heal from Your Past, and Create Your Self – by Dr. Nicole LaPera

We have reviewed some self-therapy books before, and they chiefly have focused on CBT and mindfulness, which are great. This one's different.

Dr. Nicole LaPera has a bolder vision for what we can do for ourselves. Rather than giving us some worksheets for unraveling cognitive distortions or clearing up automatic negative thoughts, she bids us treat the cause, rather than the symptom.

For most of us, this will be the life we have led. Now, we cannot change the parenting style(s) we received (or didn't), get a redo on childhood, avoid mistakes we made in our adolescence, or face adult life with the benefit of experience we gained right after we needed it most. But we can still work on those things if we just know how.

The subtitle of this book promsies that the reader can/will "recognise your patterns, heal from your past, and create your self".

That's accurate, for the content of the book and the advice it gives.

Dr. LaPera's focus is on being our own best healer, and reparenting our own inner child. Giving each of us the confidence in ourself; the love and care and/but also firm-if-necessary direction that a (good) parent gives a child, and the trust that a secure child will have in the parent looking after them. Doing this for ourselves, Dr. LaPera holds, allows us to heal from traumas we went through when we perhaps didn't quite have that, and show up for ourselves in a way that we might not have thought about before.

If the book has a weak point, it's that many of the examples given are from Dr. LaPera's own life and experience, so how relatable the specific examples will be to any given reader may vary. But, the principles and advices stand the same regardless.

Bottom line: if you'd like to try self-therapy on a deeper level than CBT worksheets, this book is an excellent primer.

Click here to check out How To Do The Work, and empower yourself to indeed do the work!

Wishing you a peaceful Sunday,

The 10almonds Team