Elisabeth Kübler-Ross said, “the reality is that you will grieve forever. You will not ‘get over’ the loss of a loved one; you will learn to live with it.” Everyone thinks of grieving as an emotional act of losing someone you love, and as a grieving person myself, I can definitely attest to this fact. However, during my grieving period, I (and others around me grieving) have not only felt emotional overwhelmed and hurt, we have also been physically drained and sick. Then, my aunt (a certified Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia nurse) heard how I was feeling and told me that because everything my doctor’s tested for came back normal, my pain was probably my grief. My response: “What? How could me grieving have anything to do with my stomach and headaches?” And that is exactly the question I intend to answer with this blog.

Grieving is in no way a fun experience and it is different for everyone. The number of mental effects that take their toll on a person who is grieving are uncountable, but over the years psychiatrists have tried to explain an “unexplainable emotion”. They have set up five stages with which they use to as guidelines for the grieving process. In their book, On Grief and Grieving, Elisabeth Kübler-Ross and David Kessler, state that the five stages of grief are 1) Denial 2) Anger 3) Bargaining 4) Depression and 5) Acceptance. All of these stages sound like they affect the head and that is it, but in reality these grief stages greatly affect physical well-being.

Along with these mental stresses, physical ailments are inevitable. According to an Everyday Health article, whenever emotional overload occurs it is very natural to feel physically exhausted. Feeling all those grieving emotions at once can easily make a person tired and have a loss of energy that the grieving person had never experienced before. Also with these emotions, it can be hard to think clearly. So, it can be difficult to do basic tasks like homework or work functions. Grieving also lowers a person’s immune system to the point where getting sick could become a normal occurrence. Normally after a loss, people go through what Dr. Sanjay Gupta (a practicing neurosurgeon and associate chief of neurosurgery at Grady Memorial Hospital and an assistant professor at Emory University Hospital in Atlanta) calls a “heartache,” which is a basic way of explaining the physical pain the loss brings on a person’s chest. In this case, it may become hard to breath during some moments of great sadness or a person’s heart might physically hurt. It is also stated that during the grieving process the “griever” is much more likely to accumulate cardiac and immune system problems. The stress on a person’s body during times of grief can cause them to be more susceptible to cardiovascular disease, cardiomyopathy, and acute heart attack.

But why does the emotional act of grieving affect so much of our physical well-being? When we grieve, chemicals in our brains called Corticotropin-releasing hormone or CRH, release hormones on rapid fire in order to respond to the overwhelming emotional loss the body is experiencing. CHR is in charge of the hormones that deal with anxiety and appetite. Normally, CRH (during a non-stressful time period) release hormones on a regular schedule of a natural 24 hour period, in which is at its highest around 8am and its lowest at night. But, during times of stress, more hormones are released and this “leads to higher levels of the stress hormone cortisol, which mobilizes energy resources, needed for dealing with the cause of the stress.” An increase amount of these hormones during a long time, like the grieving period, can hurt the body. When too much CRH hormones are released it can lead to clinical depression, anxiety, sleep disturbances, arthritis, ulcerative colitis, Crohn’s disease, and anorexia nervosa, because of the hormones CRH regulates.

Not only can grief affect the physical body months after the loss, there is also research that suggests, traumatic and complicated loss can affect the person later in life. In The American Journal of Psychiatry, Holly G. Prigerson, Andrews J. Bierhals and two other psychiatrists, wrote an article called Traumatic grief as a risk factor for mental and physical morbidity, where they studied 150 future widows and widowers in order to help confirm the authors previous work that, “indicated that symptoms of traumatic grief are predictors of future physical and mental health outcomes.” (This study builds off of many others that state that traumatic grief greatly affects physical and mental well-being, which are explained under the headnote of this journal article). For this study, the scholars examined the group at the time of their spouse’s admission to the hospital and periodically at the 6, 13, and 25 months after. Their conclusion was much like the other studies, in the way that “bereaved individuals with high scores on traumatic grief were found to be at significantly heightened risk for a variety of poor health outcomes.” This study went further as to suggest the symptoms of traumatic grief are important factors that are tied to the long-term physical and mental affects of grief on the body.

However, in a brief report called Complicated grief as a disorder distinct from bereavement-related depression and anxiety: a replication study, involving nine PhD, M.P.D, and M.D scholars explaining this study, it stated:

“It may not be the stress of bereavement, per se, that puts individuals at risk for long-term mental and physical health impairments and adverse health behaviors. Rather, it appears that psychiatric [consequences] such as traumatic grief are of critical importance in determining which bereaved individuals will be at risk for long-term dysfunction.”

In this case, they found that traumatic grief in itself, does not lead to long-term diseases; instead it can be used to predict (along with other symptoms of grief like, bereavement-related depression and bereavement-related anxiety) which patients might be a risk for these diseases. People who go through a time of traumatic grief are more likely to be at risk for long-term physical and mental ailments.

Grieving is a natural process that every person goes through many times in their life, and sometimes it is very hard to deal with the fact that grieving is hurting you physically and mentally. In reality, feeling hurt or getting sick while grieving is one of the worst times for that to happen, but unfortunately, as my research shows, it is one of the more likely occasions that it will happen. And what is even more unfortunate is that we will all go through it in different ways, but at least after reading this we can know that it is not uncommon to feel both physically and emotionally hurt during the grieving process.

I have come to the conclusion that grief is more then just mental suffering or distress. The fact that traumatic grieving affects emotional and physical well being is confirmed by research, but it seems that the contraction of long term diseases involve other grieving factors. Although the traumatic grief itself might not be the direct cause of the physical disease, it does take enough of a toll on the body that chronic grievers are more likely to contract long-term or life threatening illnesses. In conclusion, grieving sucks, but we all go through it, so it is possible to survive all of the emotional and physical suffering.

Thanks for reading! Have a great day!

Megan