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Key points
- Grief comes in waves, triggered by memories, and calms with time and acceptance.
- Grief can bring anxiety; be patient with yourself as you adjust to life after loss.
- Everyone grieves differently; there's no right or wrong way to process loss.
- Seek support if stuck—counselors, groups, and resources can help you heal.
We all know that it is normal to feel sad for a while when we lose a loved one, but grief is often much bigger than just sadness, making it hard to feel like yourself. You might even wonder if you are crazy or mentally ill. At its worst, grief can make you wonder if you’ll ever be OK.
You’re not crazy if you feel grief; it is real, and grief is something that is suffered.
It means you loved someone, deeply. The experience of losing someone you love can make you wonder if you’ll ever be ok, especially now that everything is different. Grief can have many different faces and affects each of us differently.
Grief Can Affect Your Life in These 6 Normal, Natural, and Often Unpreventable Ways
1. Grief and Deep Feelings
Deep sadness and gut-wrenching pain can pave the road of missing a loved one you weren’t ready to let go. Of course, you want them back. You want things how they were, and you don’t want change – every time you think of the future without them, the tears keep coming. You might wonder if you will ever stop crying… will you ever be ok? You will, but it will take time and the pace of healing is different for each of us.
2. Feeling Like You Don’t Care
Grief can feel physically heavy, like you are walking through quicksand, at times. You do your best to go through the motions everyday, but things take longer and everything feels harder. Your energy only goes so far, and it just doesn’t feel like you have enough. Worse, you might not care. Grieving is hard work.
3. Grumpiness and Moodiness
Coping with loss can make even the most easy-going person short of patience. Life just isn’t right anymore, and wrestling with this new reality can leave you feeling irritable and distracted. Understanding the physical and emotional causes of your irritability can help you recognize what’s going on for you. As you work through loss, aim to mitigate irritability by prioritizing self-care.
4. Grief Fog
Grief can make it hard to sustain attention and concentrate, leaving you as mentally exhausted as you are physically so. This might be one of the most distressing aspects of grief: feeling mentally depleted at a time when you need all of your resources to cope. When mental fog strikes, look for places where you can reduce expectations of yourself, whether cutting corners, or putting off nonessential tasks.
5. Grief is Shared
Losing a loved one is a family affair, and often occurs in the context of having to care for others while caring for yourself. Moreover, family discord can be fueled by a shared loss, as painful emotions and their typical coping mechanisms run their course. Remembering you are not alone can help bolster compassion for your loved ones, and for yourself.
6. Sleep Changes
Not only is grief emotionally draining, it can be physically draining too. Sleep can be a victim of grief, with insomnia often accompanying the emotional toll of grief. Dreams tend to amplify as you cope with this new reality, and wishful dreams of a loved one’s return can make it harder to wake up and face the realities of loss. Try not to get spooked by your dreams – they are your mind’s way of processing loss and adjusting to your new reality.
Grief and Your Wave Of Emotions
The experience of grief is different for everyone, the severity of which tends to relate to the closeness you felt with your loved one when they were alive. Acute grief is a full-body, sad-to-your-bones experience of ongoing sadness, tearfulness, and despair that can feel physically painful, disorienting, irritable, fatigued, and mentally foggy. You can experience some or all of these symptoms, and they can be nonstop or come in waves. There is no one right or wrong way to grieve. So long as you are facing your loss and aware of your feelings, you are grieving.
Why Does Grief Come in Waves?
Thoughts of your loved one tend to take over in the wake of a loss, with memories and sadness surfacing often. Anything can remind you of your loved one, triggering a wave of grief as your emotions come flooding back and overtake you. One minute you’re living your new reality, the next you’re whisked back into the past and grieving your loss like it just happened. Whether it’s a memory of your loved one, or a memory of your grief itself, when you get triggered to remember, your feelings will always follow.
This is how grief can seem like it comes in waves, unpredictably flashing up as memories are triggered and overtaking you with emotion, then calming down and passing.
It’s believed that the waves of grief represent the emotional experience of reconciling two very different realities: the life you have known and lived before the loss, and your life afterwards, without your loved one. Feelings during this grueling transition tend to be most intense and frequent at the beginning of bereavement, and slowly diminish in both intensity and frequency with time and acceptance.
Can Grief Cause Anxiety?
With few experiences threatening our internal sense of stability and safety more than grief, anxiety and grief go hand in hand. To grieve is to feel uncertainty and fear. There is simply no way to process life getting turned upside down without feeling disoriented and spooked. Moreover, you may feel understandably afraid of what life will be like now, and if you can cope.
The uncertainties of life after a loss are real, and it can take time to regain the sense of control you need to cope. Instead of getting spooked by your grief anxiety, try instead to be patient with yourself. Simply remembering anxiety is a normal part of grieving can help you manage and work through it.
Grief is an individual experience, and accepting whatever path yours takes can help it move as smoothly as possible. Be gentle with yourself and seek outside help if you find yourself stuck. There are numerous counselors, support groups, and other community resources dedicated to grief help. Asking for help when you need it is sometimes one of the bravest things you can do to take care of yourself.
To find a therapist, visit the Psychology Today Therapy Directory.
