Title: Physical Symptoms of Grief
Headings: How Grief Shows Up In Your Body
How Grief Shows Up In Your Body
Normal vs. Pathological Grief
How Does Avoidance Harm Your Health?
How Do Role Adjustments Affect Your Health?
What Can You Do to Cope With Grief?
Health Solutions

Content: It happens when "some of the natural thoughts, feelings, or behaviors that occur during acute grief gain a foothold and interfere with the ability to accept the reality of the loss." Symptoms of complicated grief include persistent efforts to ignore the grief and deny or "rewrite" what happened. Complicated grief increases the risk of physical and mental health problems like depression, anxiety, sleep issues, suicidal thoughts and behaviors, and physical illness. How Does Avoidance Harm Your Health? Margaret Stroebe, PhD, a bereavement researcher and professor of clinical psychology at Utrecht University, says that recent research has shed light on many of "the cognitive and emotional processes underlying complications in grieving, particularly rumination." Research shows that rumination, or repetitive, negative, self-focused thought, is actually a way to avoid problems. People who ruminate shift attention away from painful truths by focusing on negative material that is less threatening than the truths they want to avoid. This pattern of thinking is strongly associated with depression. Rumination and other forms of avoidance demand energy and block the natural abilities of the body and mind to integrate new realities and heal. Research by Stroebe, and others shows that avoidance behavior makes depression, complicated grief, and the physical health problems that go with them more likely.