Step 3 of 10 · Heal From Grief & Loss
The Body in Grief
The Body in Grief
Step 3 · 13 min
🎬 Video lesson coming soon
Perhaps you are more tired than usual.
Not the tiredness of a full day — the tiredness that is present even after sleeping. The heaviness that is in your body, not just your mood. The way ordinary tasks — a shower, a meal, opening a letter — take more effort than they should.
This is your body grieving. It is doing so alongside your mind, and it requires care.
Physical symptoms of grief are real and documented: fatigue, chest heaviness, immune vulnerability, appetite changes
The grief body needs specific care: gentle movement, adequate nutrition, sleep prioritised
Somatic grief practices: allowing the body to complete what the mind cannot fully process
The physiology of tears: why crying is not weakness — it is the body's stress relief system
Grief has measurable physiological correlates. Research shows bereaved people experience:
- Elevated cortisol (the stress hormone), often sustained for months - Impaired immune function (higher rates of illness in the months following loss) - Disrupted sleep architecture, including reduced REM sleep (the emotional processing stage) - Changes in appetite (often loss of appetite, sometimes increased eating for comfort) - Cardiovascular stress — the term "broken heart syndrome" (Takotsubo cardiomyopathy) describes a real, though usually temporary, disruption of heart function following acute grief - Physical chest heaviness and pain — a documented somatic experience of grief
Caring for the grief body requires attention to basics that are easily neglected in bereavement: adequate nutrition (even when appetite is absent), gentle movement (which reduces cortisol and supports sleep), prioritised sleep, and avoidance of substances (alcohol, in particular, which disrupts the sleep and emotional processing the body needs to grieve well).
Tears are often the most visible sign of grief and one of the most suppressed. The research on crying is clear: emotional tears (as opposed to reflex tears) contain stress hormones — including cortisol — that are not present in reflex tears. Crying is not merely expressive. It is the body's mechanism for stress hormone regulation. Suppressing tears doesn't suppress the stress. It retains it.
Somatic grief practices — movement, breath, warmth, gentle touch — address the body's needs in grief directly: held, oriented, warmed, and gently alive.
Find a comfortable position · Read slowly
Let's do this slowly.
Place both hands on your chest. Feel the weight of your own hands — warm, present, real.
Take a slow breath in — all the way down into the chest where grief tends to live. If it doesn't fill completely, that's okay. Just breathe what you can.
On each exhale: let the breath carry whatever it can. You're not trying to empty the grief. You're just giving the body a moment of being breathed into, of being attended to.
Do this for five slow breaths. Just that.
Now, gently, check in: what does your body most need today? Not what you think it should need. What it actually needs.
Warmth? A proper meal? To lie down? To move, even a little — a short walk, some air? To be near another person, even without talking?
Pick the one that feels most true. And ask yourself honestly: can I give myself that one thing today?
Not everything. Just that one thing. Your body is doing something real and hard right now. It deserves care, even when the mind is too full to think about it.
You cannot grieve well if you are not caring for the body doing the grieving. The basics are not trivial — they are the container that makes processing possible.
The next lesson is about the people around you — and how to navigate their well-meaning imperfection.