What Grief Actually Does To Your Body

0:00Think about grief. We think about talking therapy or doing things with our friends. But there's so many different things out there that people can do. I mean, you mentioned breath earlier. Oh, yeah. And that's a big one. Sometimes meditations, I guess, but that can also be quite hard maybe if you're going through grief. Walking, is that quite a helpful one? I always think about regulating the nervous system when it comes to grief. Like things that are going to help pull you back into balance a little bit more. Yeah, yeah. Soothe you. Absolutely, totally agree. So my approach is mind, body, heart, soul.

0:35So sort of do something, a prescription as such to help all of you. So yes, anything that allows you to cross the left, right brain barrier. So walking, gardening, housework, I don't know, anything, cooking can actually be quite grounding, quite therapeutic. tick. Walking seems to be psychologically quite symbolic, like you're walking through, and a lot of people will go on long, long grief walks. And it does calm you down a little bit. The breath work's really important, obviously, slowing your heart rate down and giving yourself a little bit of room because your cortisol levels drop when you do that, as I'm sure you know.

1:18But one of the things that I do very, very often as a first step is to create a symbolic safe space in the mind's eye so that because when you're in a complete state and you're just utterly you know you're on the floor you you're you're broken you can't meditate you can't really regulate your body because it's too dysregulated so one of the things that helps is if you can't move like for me one of the challenges when I went through my injury is I couldn't do what I would usually do like go on a walk I couldn't do that and it was really really difficult to try and find you know regulation through that but anyway um the safe space is a symbolic safe space in your mind's eye that creates a place that you can travel to whilst you slow your breath down so you have a focus and it's the same safe place it's not a happy place it's a safe place it's different and it can't have any connection to what's traumatized you or hurt you and it can be very very detailed so you have it up your sleeve when you're feeling overwhelmed when you're feeling like just not sure i can get through today go and hang out in your safe place for two or three minutes and know it that's my safe place and for most people it is a spot in nature but if you haven't got a real spot create one use your imagination get get a fictional one and some people will go and hang out on other planets or sit on the moon or you know whatever whatever works but that that that helps the brain calm down so it takes it out of its uh stress response because when the world's unpredictable it's what we were talking about earlier the brain goes into survival mode survival mode means everything's shut down you cannot reflect you can't possibly reflect that part of your brain is not available so you need to kind of calm it down and bring it back online through simple simple simple exercises I think we've said these words a couple times we actually haven't defined them and I think it's important to the difference between regulation and dysregulation because i remember the first time my therapist said to me you're very dysregulated and i just looked at her and thought what does that mean because i think sometimes we can think our dysregulation is normal um and i think it's not until you connect to that phase or someone can see it in you that you go later on in life feel like oh i now know that i'm not regulated but i think because we live chronically stressed if we're busy people or whatever sometimes we can be dysregulated without knowing that we're dysregulated so how can someone like listen to this being like am i regulated am i dysregulated like what does that mean yeah okay that's a good question being um regulated means that you're not in survival mode.

4:26So what the brain will do is when it's assimilating loss, it will necessarily keep throwing you into survival mode because it's doing all the work it has to do to create a world that includes the absence of this person or role or location or whatever. And in order to do that, it releases more cortisol and it takes all change and all loss as a deadly threat it doesn't really know that you're in the 21st century and that this is a breakup and it's not going to kill you it just takes all changes very very threatening so you know you're dysregulated when your body is in fight or flight or freeze mode and there are very real symptoms that come along with that and maybe I'll share some of them yeah so shallow breathing that's one of the most often one where you think oh yeah I'm not actually breathing properly I'm just shallow breathing here I'm not breathing from here um having digestive issues feeling um irritable getting angry very readily um having uh difficulty sleeping uh feeling anxious uh feeling dizzy becoming noise intolerant

5:51becoming withdrawn so wanting the world to become a very small place sort of checking out finding that you're acting out so you are spending a lot more money or suddenly you've become very promiscuous or you suddenly want to make some major life decisions that have come out off the blue you know I'm leaving um kind of you know like major uh things very impulsive very impulsive yeah um getting um ill all the time your immune system flaring up uh getting hot and cold oh interesting uh what else getting very dizzy did I say that getting getting headaches not being hungry yeah yes yes yes not wanting to eat or wanting to compulsively eat rubbish yeah because you're that's your brain kind of tricking you that you need to consume calories putting on a lot of weight becoming very kind of you know heavy limbed not wanting to exercise there's so many honestly there's a long long list I'm trying to remember as many of them as I can not being able to concentrate is a really big one yeah not being able to relax not being able to sit and watch a film or you'll do what you would normally do yeah for for relaxation so you know there goes the kind of having a lovely bath and getting a candle you know you can't do that feeling kind of restless yeah um becoming very forgetful memory loss so knowing that you've said something but you can't remember or planned something you can't remember so lots of short-term memory loss um because finding it finding it impossible to concentrate so you might be present at work you might be going to work but actually you're not really you're not really there not really engaged so there's loads of things that show us that we're dysregulated loads um so important i had people kind of like star that part like write them down just to connect because i think sometimes we can put these off as very normal behaviors and actually they're signs they're signs that you're running on empty yeah they're signs and those signs and if you disconnect eventually what will happen it will start to leak out as anxiety or depression or some kind of addiction or something will happen.

8:21And I have a whole chapter in my book about doing an assessment of your mental health, so listing all the symptoms, doing a proper kind of a questionnaire of kind of where are my physical health and my mental health so that people get an idea and they start to understand it and actively look after it. That's very important. And, of course, nutrition is one of the major, major things. Well, you need to feed your grief, right? Absolutely. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You need to eat an anti-inflammatory diet. You need to cut down on your sugar. Well, you know this. Your alcohol and your processed food. And now I'm a bit guilty of drinking coffee.

9:02But I think when you're not in that dysregulated state, it's okay. I think, you know, all of these things are, it's just important to notice. You know, when I went through my dysregulation, I'm someone who loves coffee. I can drink up to three cups a day. But I remember like a few years ago when I was going through it and I didn't drink coffee for five months. I never thought that would happen. Wow. I'm impressed. But I just couldn't. You know, I knew I couldn't. And I think they're the moments when you're like, I've got to lean into doing the best things for me. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I've got to look after myself.

9:34Whereas, you know, now coffee is like one of my biggest rituals and luxuries, I would say, every day. That's like what I look forward to. when I'm in a happy place and when I'm regulated that's like my happiest thing to go and get a morning coffee to speak to my guy at the end of the road and my independent coffee shop and come back and I just love it yeah it's like my happiest time yeah so I think like that's just what's important is understanding what you need and when absolutely with your body it's not saying like you should never be doing this you should never be doing that