When Grief Breaks Your Body

Nobody talks about how grief doesn’t just live in your heart — it takes over your body. When trauma blindsides you, the shock doesn’t just stay in your mind. It settles into your skin, your nerves, your bones.

For me, it showed up in ways I couldn’t ignore:

• Anxiety as a baseline state — I wasn’t just nervous, I was wired for disaster. Even in quiet moments, I waited for the next phone call, the next loss, the next blow. My chest stayed tight, like my body was bracing for impact 24/7.

• Immune system collapse — Grief stripped my defenses. Shingles flared across my skin, migraines pounded behind my eyes, exhaustion lived in my bones. My stomach twisted daily, and no medicine seemed to touch it because the illness wasn’t only physical — it was grief lodged deep inside.

• A nervous system on fire — My heart raced like it had forgotten how to slow down. Panic attacks came without warning. Sleep became a stranger. Even when I lay in bed exhausted, my body hummed as though plugged into a current of fear.

• The hum of trauma under the skin — It was like living with a low-grade earthquake inside me. A constant vibration reminding me that nothing was safe anymore, that everything could shatter again at any moment.

This is the part of grief people don’t talk about. They see the tears, the sadness, maybe the numbness — but not the body unraveling under the weight of loss. They don’t see how a widow’s heart pounds just walking into a grocery store, or how migraines and stomach ulcers can trace themselves back not to bad diets, but to broken hearts.

The truth is, your body tells the story even when your mouth can’t. Muscles hold memories you never gave them permission to keep. Your skin flinches before your mind understands why. The body keeps score of every moment your soul fractured.

And here’s what I learned the hard way: healing isn’t just emotional work — it’s physical work too. Grief sits in your tissues until you learn to move it. Sometimes that looks like breathwork, letting oxygen touch the places that have forgotten how to release. Sometimes it looks like massage, gentle hands convincing the nervous system it is safe to unclench. Sometimes it looks like crying so hard your whole chest shakes, and realizing afterward that your body feels lighter.

Grief may have broken my body, but listening to it became part of my healing. It was the body that taught me when I’d shoved too much down, when I needed to rest, when the tears weren’t finished yet. My body was never betraying me — it was begging me to stop carrying the silence alone.

So if you’ve ever wondered why you’re exhausted months after a loss, or why your body aches in ways no doctor can explain, know this: you’re not broken. You’re grieving. Your body is grieving with you. And just as your heart deserves compassion, so does the vessel that has carried you through every breath of loss.