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: 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. Efforts to avoid the reality of loss can cause fatigue, weaken your immune system, increase inflammation, and prolong other ailments. How Do Role Adjustments Affect Your Health? When someone close to you dies, your social role changes, too. This can affect your sense of meaning and sense of self. Before losing Molly, Davis says she found a personal sense of value in "being good at helping other people and taking care of them."