How to Grieve Healthily: Rec. Reading v26
We recognize that habit-building and good mental health can’t be isolated to just one corner of the internet. Myrth is our favorite tool, but it’s not our only tool. In our regular Recommended Reading series, we’ll share links to articles, books, and other tools that we think you’ll find helpful in your journey.
There can be a lot of grief involved in losing a job, a relationship, or a home. These experiences change us and shape us, but the uncertainty, the pain, and the sorrow can be hard to work through.
In this installment of Recommended Reading, we’re talking about ways to navigate that grief in a healthy way so that you can process your feelings and come out stronger in the end.
1. Spend Time Grieving Intentionally
Don’t avoid your grief. We loved this blog post that, among many other helpful things, addressed the importance of intentionally feeling your grief.
This one sounds strange, but it’s based on a key idea in the mechanics of emotion: What we resist, persists. When our mind see us fighting with or running away from something (including an emotion like sadness, for example), it learns to see that thing as a threat. This means the next time something triggers your sadness, your mind is going to go on high alert, increasing your anxiety and overall level of emotionality.
But if you flip this idea on its head, it leads to a counterintuitive but powerful solution: By deliberately approaching difficult emotions like sadness, we can train our brain to become more comfortable with them. And while the pain of sadness will always be there, it’s a lot easier to work through and bear when it’s not also overburdened with fear, shame, frustration, and all sorts of other difficult feelings that come from training our minds to think of sadness as dangerous.
2. Engage in Healthy Activities
Clinical psychologists have developed frameworks for using activity to move through the grief process. Not all activity is helpful, but here are some great ideas:
In response to her clients wanting to know how to grieve, Hibbert created this anagram: TEARS. “It stands for Talking, Exercise, Artistic expression, Recording emotions and experiences, and Sobbing.” In other words, you can talk about your grief; physically release difficult emotions with exercise; express grief through dancing, painting, making collages or making music (these are especially helpful outlets for kids); write about your thoughts and feelings; or cry.
These activities will help you process what you’re feeling and why, and they’ll help you get to a place where they the most important thing driving your course forward.
3. Remember to Maintain Balance
Grief can feel all-consuming, and if you let it, it will become so. It will expand to fill the space you give it. While you have to give your grief some space or you’ll never work through it, you can’t let it take over your life. More from the University of Washington:
Active, healthy grieving requires balance—balancing the time you spend directly working on your grief with the time you spend coping with your day-to-day life; balancing the amount of time you spend with others with the time you spend alone; balancing seeking help from others with caring for yourself. Focusing too strongly on any single side of these pairings is getting off-track.
In other words: don’t try to drown the grief, but don’t let the grief drown you, either.
4. Keep Healthily Connecting With Others
Often, when people are struggling with grief, they withdraw into themselves, but these are the times when support from others is especially crucial. You have to get past your fears and reach out to the people who can help you. This blog post sums it up so well:
… use your support system and do your best to put aside your fear of being a burden or weak and helpless. If you find you are unable to do that and cannot make use of your existing support system, it’s essential to develop a new one. This may include a counselor and/or support group. Having people around you with whom you feel safe enough to share your feelings is vital to a healthy grieving process.
Your support system doesn’t have to be your family or your best friend if you’re not comfortable going to them, but you need to have somebody.
5. Take the Opportunity to Build New Habits
When we go through major life transitions, it’s also a chance to take stock of other aspects of our lives. We can decide what’s working for us, what isn’t working anymore, and what we can change to live more fully. In fact, we’ve written about it here before:
Now's your chance. What did you like about what came before, and what do you want to change? Do you want to live somewhere else, take up a new career path, make some new friends, create a new hobby? This is your time to do that. … Remember, too, that identity is not a static thing. People can grow, change, and fall in love with new ideas and out of love with old ones. Allowing yourself the opportunity to go through that process isn't a betrayal of your true identity. It may be an opportunity to find a new version of yourself you never knew was out there.
Taking up a new hobby can help you focus and channel your energies productively, keep you from ruminating in an unhealthy way, and give you something to look forward to. It can also help you figure out who you want to be in the future. We highly recommend it.
Have you experienced grief recently? What strategies helped you process it in a healthy way? Leave a comment below.
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