Survived to Thrive Podcast

Episode 107: Why Grief Makes You Sweat The Small Stuff And How To Overcome It.

• Amy Miller

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Grief physically changes your brain, magnifying minor frustrations and triggering disproportionate emotional responses to life's small annoyances. Understanding the neuroscience behind these reactions can help survivors of suicide loss develop practical strategies to regain perspective when everyday stressors feel overwhelming.

• Grief impacts three key brain areas: the prefrontal cortex, limbic system, and default mode network
• Minor inconveniences like losing keys or spilling drinks can trigger outsized emotional reactions during grief
• Prolonged grief increases cortisol levels, contributing to heightened irritability and emotional reactivity
• Self-awareness and self-compassion are crucial first steps in managing disproportionate responses
• The "power of pause" technique helps create space between triggers and reactions
• Regular exercise, mindfulness practices, and quality sleep help rewire the brain's stress response
• The "zoom out method" helps regain perspective by asking "Will this matter in a week?"
• With practice, these heightened responses will gradually diminish over time

Check out survived-to-thrive.com for more information and to subscribe to get the podcast's latest episode, along with useful tips you can begin to use immediately to feel better, directly sent to your inbox.


As always, thanks for listening!

We are a community dedicated to empower survivors of suicide loss along their grief journey. We invite you to check out our website to sign up for our weekly newsletter, along with other free materials."

Website: https://www.survived-to-thrive.com/

Email: amy@survived-to-thrive.com

Speaker 1:

You are listening to the Survived to Thrive Podcast with Amy Miller, a podcast for survivors of suicide loss. In this weekly podcast, you will learn more about your unique experiences and gain insights on your brain and how it processes grief and loss due to a loved one's suicide. While suicide grief comes in all shapes and sizes, Amy shows you that you still can have a life full of joy and fulfillment even though your loved one died. You don't have to just survive anymore. You can thrive.

Speaker 2:

You are listening to the Survive to Thrive podcast with Amy Miller, episode number 107, why Grief Makes you Sweat the Small Stuff and how to Overcome it. Hey friends, welcome, welcome to this podcast. So glad you're here with me today. Okay, so yesterday I just got back from a 10-day vacation. I was able to spend some time with my family. We went to the beach, we got to go to some theme parks, we were in Florida. I got to go to Panama Beach, which is in the panhandle, where you get to see the white, fluffy, caribbean-type sand, and we also got to explore Orlando and we went to some of the beaches in Tampa. So we got to see quite a bit of Florida while we were there and we just had an amazing time. And I just really love getting out and traveling and spending some time away to really gather my thoughts, to ponder, to think about you know what's important to me, and to get out in nature and spend some time to just really ponder and get to know myself better, reconnect with myself, reconnect with my family, talk together, dream together, make goals, all of it. It's just so invigorating and energizing and I just love it and I highly recommend that you do the same for yourself. I think it's so important to get out in nature and really spend some time with yourself and reconnecting and just spending some quiet hours just pondering. I don't think any of us do it enough in our lives, right, where we just sit and we just ponder because our schedules are packed and we're just full of all of the to-dos and the things that we need to get done that we never really take a moment to just breathe and take in that fresh air. And I think it's so highly important. So consider this your open invitation to plan some of that time for yourself, whether that's here in your own home or in a faraway destination, wherever it is. Just do it, because I think it's so important, it's so healthy, it's so healing, especially when you're in the trenches of grief. I highly highly recommend All right friends.

Speaker 2:

So today's topic is to deal with grief and how that makes you sweat the small stuff, and I think this is something that's so common for survivors of suicide loss. I think it's common for all grievers really, but particularly with survivors of suicide loss, you're going to find that there are so many things that weren't so important to you suddenly become very important to you, right, and that can be a good thing, where you're realizing maybe your family's more important to you than you realized, or relationships are more important to you than you realize. Maybe it motivates you to create deeper connections with other people in your life. Create deeper connections with other people in your life. Maybe it motivates you to take the time off from the job or the big career thing that you were going for, to spend some more time with your kids, you know. Or maybe you want to rekindle your relationship with your significant other. Whatever it is right. It can be a really good thing. But on the flip side of that, it can also make the small things seem bigger.

Speaker 2:

And when I'm talking about the small things, I'm really talking about the annoying things, the things that get under your skin, the things that bother you, the minor annoyances that occur in day-to-day life that all of us experience. Right, maybe you trip over something or you drop your drink in the morning, or maybe you lose your phone and you're spending 10 minutes looking for the phone that you just set down or whatever. Right, and a lot of times, suicide loss survivors will experience heightened sensitivity to these frustrations. So what I want to say about this is that, first off, you are not alone, okay. And second of all, there are ways that we can manage this challenge in our lives okay. But in order to really get into that, we really have to talk about why grief amplifies small stressors in our lives. And in order to understand it, we have to understand what's happening in our brains and the neuroscience behind it. And what I have to say is that grief isn't just emotional, okay. It physically changes the brain, and I think this is really important for us to understand and to know. And I think most people don't understand this or knows about this.

Speaker 2:

I know I didn't learn about this, I didn't about this. I know I didn't learn about this. I didn't know this. I didn't know that it impacts your brain on a physical level. I knew it impacted me on an emotional level. I knew that I was sad. I knew I was stressed. I knew I spent a lot of time crying. I had a lot of. I had a lot of hours ruminating. I had many times feeling a lot of emotions about my loss anger, frustration, confusion, sadness, depression, you name it. I was feeling it right. I don't know if any of you have seen it. There's an emotions will right that you can reference your emotions and it's something that I placed in my journal, that I created for survivors of suicide loss. But this will of emotions has hundreds of emotions and I can guarantee you, at one point or another I probably felt 80% of them as I was going through my grief journey, my own personal grief journey, and I know all of you feel multitude of emotions when you're going through grief.

Speaker 2:

But one of the things that we don't really get and understand, or we even are taught, is that when we're going through grief, it changes the brain physically. So there's this book that's called the Grieving Brain. It was written by Mary Frances O'Connor and she explains how the grief affects three major areas in our brain. Okay, it affects the prefrontal cortex, which is this part of the brain that controls reasoning, decision-making and emotional regulation. That controls reasoning, decision-making and emotional regulation. And it also impacts the limbic system, which processes fear and emotion, and becomes hyperactive and the default mode network, and this is responsible for mental time travel, replaying past, experiencing and imagining the future. So when you have these three areas of your brain being impacted, it's going to cause some things to happen, like the prefrontal cortex, for example, after a loss becomes overwhelmed, it makes it hard to process frustration and minor setbacks logically Okay In the limbic system can really become so hyperactive that small stressors like misplacing your keys or your phone can trigger disproportionate emotional reactions.

Speaker 2:

Have you noticed that Sometimes I look at myself and one of the things that I do a lot is I misplace my phone. I put it down somewhere, I forget where it is. I'm running around my house like a crazy person trying to find it right and I can sometimes almost lose it over this and I'm thinking, wow, where did this come from? This is just a phone, right, it's not life or death, but in the moment it feels like it. Right, so it can trigger this disproportionate emotional reaction In the DMN, which is the default mode network, right where I had mentioned how it's responsible for mental time travel.

Speaker 2:

So what happens is you replay these past experience and imagine the future, and when you're in grief it gets stuck in overdrive, making you ruminate on painful moments, right, like memories maybe that you've had or you know, experiencing the news. Maybe you ruminate over hearing the news I know this is something that comes up for a lot of survivors, right? Or you're just ruminating over that, or ruminating over that last conversation you had or that last text message or that last argument you had right, and you worry about the future a lot because you worry about how you showed up in that relationship and wonder how you impacted that relationship right. And so these three areas of our brain can really be affected physically right in our grief process. And I also want to mention that there is this hormone called cortisol and that there is this hormone called cortisol and she also discusses how grief really creates a prolonged stress response leading to elevated cortisol levels, and high cortisol contributes to increased irritability, difficulty concentrating and a heightened sense of urgency over minor inconveniences. So I think it's really important to know this because I think it really helps us to understand how our brain works, is really impacting, why these little dumb things that keep happening in our life really can create this heightened emotional response. For example, say, you spilled something or your child spilled something in the morning and it just completely leads to an emotional breakdown. Okay, I think in the moment it's hard to see that, but it can create this real intense emotional breakdown and you're sobbing, maybe you're throwing a tantrum, maybe you're yelling and screaming, but you're just having this an emotional complete breakdown and you look back at it and you think what was that? Why did that happen? Right?

Speaker 2:

Another thing that happens, too is, for example. Another example might be say, you're in traffic and you're stuck in this lane in traffic and this driver ahead of you is just driving super slow and you just can't drive around them because that driver is driving just as slow as a semi truck that is blocking the slow lane and you can't move forward. And so then you have a complete irrational road rage, right? Or you feel irrationally angry at this person. You may be yelling at them in your car or whatever you know. Or maybe this shows up as a minor inconvenience at work, right? Maybe something happens at work that you know something doesn't go right. Maybe the project deadline comes and you're not finished, or maybe somebody says something to you and it rubs you the wrong way and this just spirals into self-doubt and frustration, right? Well, here's the thing Our brains like to exaggerate small stressors when we're in grief.

Speaker 2:

Okay, the brain tells a story If I can't handle this, I'll never handle anything. And grief can add a layer of cognitive distortion, making us believe everything is worse than it actually is. Another piece that really impacts. This is how there is this thought loop. We get stuck in and I call it the guilt loop, and many survivors feel guilty for being short-tempered or overreacting, and the brain already struggles with self-compassion during grief. So here you are you're feeling guilty for being short-tempered or overreacting, and then the brain is already struggling with self-compassion during grief, so you're just feeling a lot of guilt. Okay, it just feeds into each other and it can be very problematic, okay. So, with all that in mind and understanding what our brains are doing, it just feeds into each other and it can be very problematic, okay. So, with all that in mind and understanding what our brains are doing, why our brain is destabilized, why minor disruptions can really create havoc for us, why we have these heightened emotional responses and how all these small stressors become exaggerated in our brains, I want to talk about some strategies to overcome this challenge that I think will be really helpful and powerful for you.

Speaker 2:

Okay, the first one is awareness and self-compassion. Okay, remind yourself. This is grief making. This is grief making things feel worse than they actually are. I think you have to re-remind yourself this a lot, okay, because it takes a lot of repetition. It takes a lot of repeating the same things, to really help you bring awareness to what is really truly happening, that this is not just a controllable emotional thing that's going on in your brain, that this is actually something that has been rewired in your brain to make it how it is Okay. And I want you to remind yourself that the grief is making things feel worse than they are Okay.

Speaker 2:

And the second part of this is to give yourself some compassion. Okay, speak to yourself as if you were talking to a grieving friend. If you think about a friend that you know that may be experiencing grief, what are some of the things you would say to that friend? What are some of the helpful phrases you would use? Maybe you would say something to the effect of you know, you got this, I love you, I know this is hard, I appreciate you, I love you, I care for you, and flip that and say those things to yourself. It's so important to give yourself some self-compassion and to talk to yourself as if you were a grieving friend, because here's the truth we have to be our own friends.

Speaker 2:

I think that a lot of times, we don't think that we just need to beat ourselves up all the time, and the truth is is, beating ourselves up doesn't help anything. It doesn't change the grief we're experiencing In fact, it makes it probably worse but it also keeps you stuck in grief. Have you noticed this? When you're beating yourself up, when you're giving yourself this negative talk and you're telling yourself that, you know, you're horrible, you don't know how to do this, you're the worst. You, you know, don't know what you're doing, you can't do this in life. You know, if you're constantly telling yourself this, how do you expect yourself to climb yourself out of grief? You can't, because you're constantly telling yourself this. How do you expect yourself to climb yourself out of grief? You can't, because you're constantly talking yourself down, okay. So the second thing I want to talk about is, well, going back to that, just remember speak to yourself as you would a grieving friend. I think it's so important and it really offers yourself some self-compassion. So, give yourself some awareness, give yourself some self-compassion, okay.

Speaker 2:

The second piece I want to talk about is the power of the pause. Okay, and in order to do this, I like to use a grounding technique. Okay, I want you to think about what you're thinking and I want you to pause, I want you to breathe and I want you to name whatever it is that you're thinking. Okay, maybe you're angry. Maybe you're angry that you lost your keys Pause, okay. Maybe you're angry. Maybe you're angry that you lost your keys Pause, okay, and say to yourself I'm really angry that I lost my keys, okay. So what you're doing here is you're pausing, you're breathing, you're really getting clear on what you're feeling and why, because a lot of times when we're not really clear on it, we're just constantly reacting, reacting, reacting, reacting. I feel this, I feel angry, I feel mad, I'm frustrated, I'm whatever. It is Okay, and I think it really is helpful to take a pause, breathe, name it Okay, so you can get clear on what it is, all right. And then I want you to count down from five. I learned this from Mel Robbins. I think she's so amazing Just count down from five to shift gears before reacting. Okay, because when we think about what we're angry about, right, like when we're saying to ourselves I'm angry because I lost my keys, and you give yourself five seconds or five counts, you might recognize that maybe your reaction that you originally were going to do is a little bit disproportionate to the actual thing that happened, right. So I think there is so much power in just pausing and allowing yourself to spend some time to shift those gears before reacting, and this is really going to help you when you are almost about ready to lose it. Okay, over something small, it's really a powerful, powerful tool.

Speaker 2:

The third thing is about rewiring the brain's stress response. Now, like I talked about how this really impacts our brains and how grief changes our brains, but here's the truth. Guess what? We can change what has happened? We can rewire that, and one of the ways that we can do this is regular exercise, because it lowers cortisol and it helps the brain regulate emotions. Okay, another way to do this is mindfulness and deep breathing. It helps calm that limbic system down.

Speaker 2:

And the third way to help rewire the brain stress response is to sleep. It's critical. Lack of sleep worsens emotional reactivity. Now, I know you're going to tell me I just can't sleep. That's when my brain is in overdrive. That's when I'm thinking about all of the things. I'm thinking about my loss, I'm thinking about my grief, I'm thinking about how annoying my child is, or my husband or my friend, and why my friend said this thing to me. And I'm trying to solve all the world problems while I'm trying to go to bed, right. But here's the thing If you're having really strong issues with your sleep, it might be time to see a sleep doctor, someone who can help you and to kind of get you in the path moving forward and getting some sleep.

Speaker 2:

Okay, because it truly is one of the most powerful ways to help rewire the brain stress response by getting adequate sleep. Okay, now, maybe you're really struggling at night to get some sleep. Maybe the best thing to do is to spend some time to just rest, okay, and start there, just laying down, closing your eyes, just laying down. If you're having a hard time sleeping, don't get yourself up out of bed and, you know, try to distract yourself with scrolling on Facebook or, you know, going to the bathroom or doing something like that, because that kind of wakens you up even more. So, even just laying there just to rest your body, to allow your body to rest, is going to help, and it might take some practice. But it also might mean that you need to have an intervention where you may need some help from a doctor to help you get your body in sync with regular sleep again.

Speaker 2:

All right, the next thing I want to talk about is perspective shifting. This is what is called the zoom out method. Okay, and I really want you to ask will this matter in a week? I think this is huge, okay, is spilling this milk all over the floor right now? Is this going to matter in a week? Is losing my phone today going to matter next Thursday? Right, and I think that choosing to ask yourself will this matter in a week is really going to help you shift your perspective. It will also help you before you go into your countdown method 5, 4, 3, 2, 1, you know when you're pausing and you're really thinking about if this really matters or not. Right, it's going to help you to shift your gears before overreacting. Okay.

Speaker 2:

Another thing you can do is when you are asking yourself that question, another question you can ask, or another thing you could do is choose a new thought to reduce the emotional weight, because a lot of times when we do something like lose our phone or lose our keys, one of the go-to thoughts, at least for me, was you're such an idiot, why can't you remember where you put things down? Do you think that really solves it, or is that going to heighten my emotional response? And I would say it would heighten my emotional response. So, instead of saying something like that to myself, I choose a different thought. One of the thoughts that I like to say to myself is I've misplaced my phone, I'll find it soon, which is true. Okay, I've misplaced it and I'll find it soon. To me, that thought is more empowering. It gets me to move, it gets me to look, it reduces the emotional weight. Do you see the difference there? And I think it's really, really helpful in helping you to not have a disproportionate emotional response. Okay Now, in closing of this podcast, I just want to say that here's the thing I understand and I acknowledge that small stressors feel big when we're in grief, because grief is big.

Speaker 2:

Okay, and I also want to let you know that, if you're going through this right now, that this heightened response is so temporary it's not going to last forever, it's not going to be continuous. You'll have it a lot in the beginning and then things will calm down, but then later it might resurface again, and that's okay because again, it's temporary and you'll be able to get through it again. And I just want to encourage you to try one small strategy today if this is something that you're struggling, whether it's pausing, reframing or self-compassion. Just try one of them. You don't have to do it all at once.

Speaker 2:

All these tools that I offered you today are fantastic and they work, but just choose one, to start with, one that seems doable. Maybe it is just pausing for a moment, okay. Maybe it's just giving yourself some self-compassion, telling yourself that you love yourself, talking to yourself as if you're your own best friend, telling yourself that you love yourself, talking to yourself as if you're your own best friend. Okay, just choose one and see how it helps, see how it impacts you. And I just want to end with saying that, over time, the small things won't feel so overwhelming, and with practice and with retrying these different strategies and tools and tips, you're going to find yourself able to handle the small stuff better and better with each passing day, with each passing month and with each passing year. So, friends, if you're in the midst of really dealing with this problem, know that it won't last forever. Know that I love you, that I care about you, that I think about you, that you're wonderful and you deserve all the best. And until next time, bye-bye.

Speaker 1:

Thank you for listening to the Survived to Thrive podcast. If you like this podcast, please share with your friends and write a review on iTunes. Also check out survived-to-thrivecom for more information and to subscribe to get the podcast's latest episode, along with useful tips you can begin to use immediately to feel better, directly sent to your inbox.