Identifying the Symptoms of Grief and How to Deal with them?

When someone close to you passes away, or you lose a rich possession, grief is a normal reaction. Physical symptoms are frequently triggered by bereavement.

However, if you do not understand the symptoms of grief and why you're experiencing them, you will find it overwhelming. Additionally, you can be concerned about the abrupt illness because of grieving. We suggest you read this article to know some medically established grief symptoms.

Adjusting to new emotions after you have undergone a crisis is a massive task. Particularly when you lose a family member or valuable belonging, the stages of grief become more intense. 

Here are some common symptoms of grief:

• You go through a persistent feeling of disbelief. This makes you question whether you are correctly analysing the situation.
• A feeling of hopelessness progressively engulfs your mind.
• You feel anxious or threatened while thinking about an upcoming engagement. This often results from a lack of self-esteem. 
• Agitation creeps in, and you often discover yourself ideating self-destructive plans.
• Problem-solving skills significantly decrease within a short period. Difficulty in concentrating on daily processes leads to more mistakes and may put you in bigger danger.
• You frequently experience nightmares.
• Questions like ‘Why is this happening to me?’ often arise, accelerating your disbelief towards religious faith.
• You feel isolated from the crowd and may even contemplate whether everyone is plotting against you. 

Living a regular life and embracing the grieving process will help you lessen the accompanying discomforts, like Numbness, Anxiety, and Depression.

Here are the following physical symptoms of grief:

• Stomach pain
• Frequent headaches
• Low tolerance to changing weather conditions leading to flu and infections
• Pounding heart and other underlying conditions causing chest pain
• General weakness
• Focus on Daily Self-Care

1. Attempt Socialising

2. Embrace Creativity

3. Consider Portraying Self-Compassion

While stressing self-compassion, we want to convey an ideology. It is essential to treat yourself with the same type of caring support and understanding that you would exhibit to anyone you care about. 

Above all, by acknowledging that you are bound to manifest personal faults and that life can be challenging at times for everyone, you honour and accept your humanity. By practising self-compassion, you admit that you are a flawed human being who is a part of the human predicament. This will guide you towards accepting your loss.

4. Prioritise Deep Breathing and Meditation

Grief can be aided by meditation in various ways. Primarily it helps you regain your healthy sleeping habits, which often become a problem after losing a loved one. In addition, it helps you minimise the bodily signs of grieving, such as headaches, tense muscles, and uncomfortable conditions in your stomach and chest.

Meditation plays a vital role in boosting the immune system's efficiency. This, in turn, increases your chances of remaining healthy when your body is under a lot of stress.

5. Seek Therapy

It is clinically tested and affirmed that combining grief treatment tools and approaches will produce better results. Here are two popular grief counselling therapies:

• Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT)

To change one's negative thought patterns, cognitive behavioural therapy teaches the person how to recognise them. This therapy has been formulated to address the symptoms of grief. Eventually, it leads to a better daily lifestyle by teaching people to manage their negative thoughts and behaviours.

• Complicated Grief Therapy (CGT)

CGT entails gaining knowledge of how to handle difficult grief symptoms. Feelings of hopelessness, being deprived for too long, or severe sadness usually get triggered due to complicated grief. Complex grieving can cause a person to become fixated on the deceased or the passing circumstances. Acceptance and commitment therapy, a common component of CGT, helps people counter this situation. 

Psychologists advise you to plan ahead of time on how to minimise the effects of ‘grief triggers’. Normally, leisure sessions, anniversaries, or any significant date may regenerate grief symptoms. Understand that during such circumstances, you may experience a perfectly normal emotional knock. A great idea can be to ensure that you are not alone or have figured out creative ways to commemorate your loss.