Grief Lives in the Body, Not Just the Mind

Grief is often associated with sadness or bereavement. But it doesn’t always show up that way. 

In this episode, I explore grief from a somatic perspective and how it lives in the nervous system, not just the mind. You might experience grief as exhaustion, heaviness, brain fog, or a loss of motivation, without realising that grief is what’s underneath. 

We look at why grief can feel so physical, how it affects your ability to function, and why it often goes unrecognised when it doesn’t fit the usual idea of mourning. 

This episode may help you understand your experience differently and bring a little more compassion to what your body is going through. 

If this meant something to you, you might also find it helpful to explore my episodes on emotional eating, nervous system regulation, and relationships, where these patterns are often closely connected.

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Transcript

Grief and the Nervous System | How Grief Lives in the Body 

0:00 – Introduction: Grief Beyond Sadness
Today I'm talking about grief, but perhaps not in the way that it's usually discussed. 

0:07 – Podcast Introduction
Hello and welcome back to the Stress and Anxiety Recovery Podcast with Shelley Treacher. 

0:13 – What We Think Grief Is
When we think about grief, we might think of sadness or mourning someone who's died. But in my work as a somatic psychotherapist, what I often see is that grief is something much bigger than that. And very often it lives not just in our thoughts or emotions but in our bodies. 

0:34 – Grief and the Nervous System
So today I want to explore what grief does to the nervous system, why it can feel so physical, and how sometimes it shows up in ways that we don't immediately recognise as grief. 

0:49 – Introducing the Video Clip
So here I want to share a short piece from one of my videos that brings this to life.  

0:56 – Grief Symptoms in the Body (Not Just Sadness) 

Sometimes grief doesn't show up as sadness. Sometimes it feels like heaviness, exhaustion, or feeling drained. 

1:07 – Loss of Energy and Motivation
You might feel like the life has just gone out of you and you have no way of concentrating or motivation. 

1:15 – Grief Lives in the Body
This is because, and what people don't realise, grief is in the body. Grief isn't just in your heart or in your head. It's in your whole nervous system.  

1:27 – How Grief Affects the Nervous System 

When we think of grief, we think of sadness usually, but actually it can affect your whole nervous system and put you into survival mode. It can affect your heart rate, your breathing, your energy level. So, you could be in a really manic, stressed out, anxious state because you're grieving, or you could be in a very low, collapsed, energyless state.  

1:54 – Grief Is Biological, Not Just Emotional 

Grief isn't just emotional, it's biological. When something deeply painful happens, the body has the same response as it does to any other threat. 

2:05 – Hyperarousal: Stress Response in Grief
There's a shock with grief. So, we might have a stress response where the heart starts beating faster and the breathing gets shallower and our energy goes up and the stress hormones get introduced to the bloodstream. This we call a hyperaroused response. 

2:25 – Hypoarousal: Collapse and Low Energy
But as grief goes on, something different happens. The body starts to slow down and the heart rate gets slower and breathing might become very, very slow. Here is where your energy drops and your motivation drops and you might feel hopeless. This we call a hypoarousal response or a collapse response.  

2:50 – Grief, Depression, and Protection 

What people often think of as depression is actually the nervous system trying to protect you from overwhelm.  

2:58 – Grief Is Not Just About Death 

And grief doesn't just happen when someone dies. Of course, it is the most powerful version of grief, but we also experience all kinds of other losses. The end of a relationship. The relationships we never had, the childhood we never had, the versions of our life that we hoped would happen but never did. The dreams that never got realised. 

3:23 – Unrecognised Grief in the Body
We experience all kinds of losses as human beings. Sometimes these losses aren't named as grief, but the body feels them the same way all the same.  

3:32 – How Grief Turns Into Anxiety and Disconnection 

When the feelings around grief have nowhere to go, we still have to process those emotions somehow. And so we can start to look like we're having other emotions that we don't normally associate with grief, like anxiety and stress or feeling disconnected.  

3:49 – Coping Mechanisms: Food, Scrolling, Relationships 

And some of us might turn to things outside of ourselves to help us cope with the feelings like food, alcohol, scrolling, work, distraction, or relationships. 

4:03 – These Behaviours Are Protection, Not Weakness
These aren't because you're weak. Any of these behaviours are just a way to protect yourself from feelings that are difficult to manage.  

4:10 – Unprocessed Grief and Behaviour Patterns 

The people I often see in my work want to change something. Compulsive eating, endless scrolling, or chasing unavailable partners. What they often don't realise is that grief has been unprocessed underneath all of this. And when it's given time and space to move and to be acknowledged, those patterns can soften. 

4:39 – Why Change Happens Naturally
Not because you forced them to change, but because the nervous system doesn't really need them to protect you anymore.  

4:46 – Healing Begins with Understanding the Body 

Healing rarely begins when we force ourselves to change. It starts when we understand what our bodies have been going through and holding. 

4:57 – Grieving in Gentle Waves
When you start to grieve gradually, slowly, gently, in manageable waves over time, those processes and behaviours start to soften.  

5:09 – Nervous System Recovery and Energy Returning 

Your energy starts to return and your nervous system starts to realise that it doesn't have to protect you so much anymore. So, it starts to let go because it knows that you've got this. You can handle it. 

5:19 – Compassion Softens Patterns
Gradually what happens is those systems, those behaviours, those patterns start to soften and let go in response to compassion.  

5:28 – Grief Is Love and Change 

Grief isn't a weakness or an inconvenience. It's one of the ways that we experience love and it's the body's response to loss and change.  

5:38 – The Body Knows How to Heal 

If we allow that to flow through us, something really important happens. The nervous system starts to shift because the body knows how to grieve, but it also knows how to heal.  

5:59 – YouTube Call to Action 

If this video meant something to you, you might find my other videos on emotional eating, nervous system regulation, or love addiction useful because these experiences and these patterns come from the same place in the body.  

6:22 – Podcast Call to Action 

If this episode meant something to you, you'll find that I have other episodes on grief. You might also be interested in some of my episodes about emotional eating, nervous system regulation, and relationships. These patterns are connected in ways that we don't initially realise.  

6:42 – Where to Go Next (YouTube Playlists) 

And as mentioned, if you want to go further than this podcast, you can also find my work on YouTube where I share playlists that help you define where to start.  

6:54 – Closing 

As always, check in with your body and be kind to yourself and I'll see you in a few weeks. 

7:03 – Sign Off
This has been Shelley Treacher from the Stress and Anxiety Recovery Podcast. Thank you so much for listening.