When you’re grieving a loved one, your glass may constantly overflow, overwhelming you and making every moment stressful. Sometimes all you can do is curl into a ball and shut out the whole world. And that’s ok. But when you unroll, there is still work, chores to do, kids to take care of, errands to run, appointments to keep . . . As you scramble to do all of these “have to’s,” remember to take care of yourself too.

Grief insinuates itself into all areas of your life—physical, emotional, cognitive, social, and spiritual. Alan D. Wolfelt, author and Director of the Center for Loss & Life Transition, writes that you must nurture yourself in all of these realms.[1] 

In this article, we’ll talk about physical self-care. The ideas come from my own experience—23 years of grief and depression. Self-care won’t erase your grief, but it can help you feel calmer and more in control as you navigate its storms.

How to Take Care of Your Physical Body

• Eat healthy foods
• Drink a lot—water, that is!
• Set a regular sleep routine
• Exercise—or at least, keep moving
• Breathe
• Soak up the sun
• Stimulate endorphins (smile, kiss, cuddle, play)

Taking care of your physical body can seem like a no-brainer. Duh! Of course you should eat healthy foods, stay hydrated, get enough sleep, and get up off the couch. But when you are grieving, these things can feel nearly impossible to do. Roiling hormones can cause food cravings, you may feel the need for extreme amounts of sleep (or be unable to rest), and just walking to the bathroom can feel like trudging through cement. I know. I’ve been there (I’m still there sometimes).

What I’ve learned to do is listen to my body. I try to choose healthy foods for meals, but if I crave 17 Reese’s peanut butter cups in the afternoon, I don’t beat myself up over it. I enjoy them and heave a sigh of relief at the temporary relief that settles over me. I keep a water bottle wherever I am. As for sleep, I’ve always been a night owl, and grief only exacerbated that. Again, I don’t fight it. I read or work late at night and sleep in when I can. Early in my grief, I slept a lot during the day too. That has gotten better. Remember that your grief will evolve. What you’re struggling with today will be different a month or a year from now.

My toughest fight is with exercise. Overweight to begin with, I’ve gained many more pounds over the years (all those peanut butter cups), and exercising is torture. Rather than give myself one more thing to feel guilty about or fail at, I never began an exercise regimen. Instead, I started small, walking my new puppy. I feel better and have more energy. I’m almost ready to hit some tennis balls. You can start by walking around your house every hour, taking the stairs, parking far from the store, pushing your child on the swing. Having a walking buddy makes it less likely you’ll skip your daily walk. Plus, it’s more enjoyable and you won’t obsess with every step about how alone you feel.

Exercise is also easier to take if it doesn’t feel like exercise. My daughter practices yoga and loves how it relaxes her. My friend kicks up her boots at country line dancing. If you have problems going out in public, check out online opportunities.

You’re going to laugh at my next physical self-care suggestion—breathe. You breathe all day every day! How is that self-care? What I advocate is a specific breathing routine that will relax and de-stress you. Licensed Eastern Medicine Practitioner Alan Tillotson of the Tillotson Institute of Natural Health taught me this technique.

Find a comfortable position—flat on your back, sitting in a chair, or cross-legged on the floor. Close your eyes, relax tense muscles, and let your body go limp. Breathe in slowly through your nose until you can’t take in any more air. Your belly should inflate like a balloon as the air pushes your diaphragm down. Then exhale slowly through your mouth. If you wish (if you can!), hold your breath for a few seconds before letting it out. It helps to count while you inhale and exhale so your mind is too occupied to go on flights of fancy. Try to exhale longer than you inhale. Inhale 1-2-3-4, hold 1-2, exhale 1-2-3-4-5-6. Try to make each breathing combo longer than the one before. With practice, you should eventually be able to get to a count of 15 or 20 or more.

 My next physical self-care recommendation is the easiest of all—sit in the sun. Nutritional oncology consultant and medical writer M. Nathaniel Mead writes that sunshine boosts the body’s production of vitamin D.[2] Virtually every tissue benefits from vitamin D, which facilitates calcium metabolism and neuromuscular and immune system functioning. Sunlight also boosts serotonin and endorphins, helping you feel happy and calm, and regulates melatonin, leading to better sleep. So when you’re feeling lousy, instead of curling up in your dark bedroom, mope in a chair on the deck or in the back yard.

Besides sunlight, there are lots of other ways to stimulate those stress-busters. Smiling is my favorite. When facial muscles produce a smile, their arrangement signals the release of neuropeptides in your brain. Dopamine, serotonin, and endorphins act as pain relievers and antidepressants and lower your heart rate and blood pressure. Here’s the mind-boggler—your brain can’t tell the difference between a real smile and a fake one! When it senses a smile, it starts the happy party. So even fake smiling can help you feel better—it floods you with endorphins, which make you feel better, so you smile more, which releases more endorphins, so you smile more . . . you get it. And if smiling can do all that, imagine what laughing can do!

You know how good it feels when you kiss your honey or your kids? Yep, endorphins. When you cuddle with them? More endorphins. Humans need physical contact. Touch starvation can result in depression, anxiety, stress, sleep problems, and relationship issues. Kind of like grief, huh? Like smiling, touch lowers your heart rate and blood pressure as pressure receptors in the skin signal the vagus nerve to slow the nervous system. The human body is wondrous, isn’t it?

Grief makes me withdraw from people, even those I love, but I always feel better after I make an effort to touch and be touched. It helps that my granddaughters plop in my lap and hug me a hundred times a day and that my husband is a snuggler.

My final self-care tip for grievers might be the hardest to accomplish—play. Play a game, play a sport, chase your kids around the yard, be a ticklebug, dance with your lover. . . . It doesn’t matter what you do, just do something carefree—not work or a chore or a “have to”—that makes you laugh and smile and move. I know you feel sluggish and morose and have the energy of a dishrag. You have to psych yourself up to walk to the mailbox, so the idea of forcing yourself to play feels dreadful. Sometimes I’d prefer a root canal—at least I could sit in the chair and do nothing. But like smiling and touch, once you force yourself to do it, those endorphins kick in and it feels good.

I know this was a lot to process. But know that you don’t have to do it all at once, or even everything on the list. Start small. Pick the one thing that sounds easiest, most fun, or least awful—the thing you think you can do without fear of failure. Do it once a day, then twice. Once you’ve nailed it, add one more strategy, then one more . . .

Grief can ravage your physical health, but practicing self-care can not only keep you healthy, it can create an oasis of peace within your pain. And what you do for your physical body ripples, improving your emotional, cognitive, social, and spiritual well-being too. More on those another time.

Good luck. Let me know what you try and how it goes.

[1] Alan D. Wolfelt, “Nurturing Yourself When You’re Grieving,” Center for Loss & Life Transition, April 9, 2021, https://www.centerforloss.com/2016/12/nurturing-youre-grieving/.

[2] M. Nathaniel Mead, (2008) “Benefits of Sunlight: A Bright Spot for Human Health,” Environmental Health Perspectives, 116(4), A160–A167. https://doi.org/10.1289/ehp.116-a160.