8 Key Signs You're Avoiding Grief & How to Healthily Cope

When you’ve experienced loss or hardship, it can be overwhelming and challenging to deal with the stress and anxiety surrounding grief and coping with it. For some people, they attempt to avoid this feeling entirely by using unhealthy methods to distract themselves from their grief and their emotions. And while this may seem like a good solution in the short term, avoiding your grief can lead to burnout, depression, anxiety, fatigue, or suicidal thoughts.

Are You Avoiding Grief?

If you’re using unhealthy coping mechanisms such as overworking or isolating yourself from others, you may be avoiding your grief and feelings. When you prevent your grief, the feelings don’t go away; they start to fester and build up until eventually they explode at oftentimes irrational moments or at small things that can set you off. By acknowledging and beginning to process your grief, you can start to get back to life and build healthy habits.

4 Tips for Coping With Grief

Physical Activity

When struggling to come to terms with losing a loved one, doing some physical activity such as running, weight lifting, swimming, yoga, or anything else that requires you to be physically active can be helpful. Physical activity not only helps you stay healthy physically, but it can also help process grief, stress, anxiety, and depression.

Talk to someone

Talking to someone is a great way to start coping with grief. Talking to someone could mean talking to a family member, friend, a counselor, or even a random person willing to listen. When you speak to someone about your grief, you acknowledge that you’re grieving and talk about what you’re feeling, or you could simply talk about the person you’re grieving.

Build a Routine

Grief is complicated to process and endure, and sometimes, just getting out of bed can feel impossible. Building and sticking to a routine can be invaluable when you're grieving. The routine can be as simple as getting up at eight every morning, brushing your teeth, and eating breakfast. Building a routine helps stabilize your life and enables you to form good habits.

Do Something

Much like making a routine can help with stability, getting up and doing something can help you feel a sense of accomplishment and help combat feelings of stress and depression. It can be as simple as making your bed, getting dressed, leaving the house to run errands, or meeting up with a friend to catch up. When grieving, it’s essential to keep living your life and learn how to cope with your loved one’s absence.

8 Signs You're Avoiding Grief

Overworking

One way people will avoid their grief is to throw themselves into work and ensure that they’re busy so that they have no time to think about their grief or hurt. This is especially harmful as eventually you’ll burn out, and this method can lead to feelings of depression, anxiety, and other destructive behaviors.

Apathy

When someone avoids grief and thinking about their emotions, it can make them feel tired and apathetic towards family, friends, and life in general. When you avoid your grief, you often end up feeling exhausted and apathetic towards life, leading you to withdraw and start avoiding things that make you face your emotions. All of this can lead to suicidal thoughts, depression, and feelings of loneliness.

Isolation

Another sign that you’re avoiding your grief is when you start isolating yourself from others and things that remind you of your grief. By cutting off people close to you who want you to get better to cope with your grief, you’re harming yourself in the long run.

Difficulty Focusing

Avoiding dealing with grief and loss can cause you to have difficulty focusing and feeling constantly distracted and withdrawn. When you prevent your grief, you don’t let your mind heal, and you don’t learn how to cope with and deal with your emotions, leading to fatigue and difficulty being present.

Physical Changes

When you avoid dealing with your grief and emotions, it can affect your health. Abnormal sleeping patterns, changes in diet, and energy levels are common side effects of grief or avoiding grief.

Being Obsessive

Unlike some people who overwork themselves to distract themselves, some people will become obsessive and use books, shows, hobbies, and other things to distract themselves from grieving and facing their emotions as a form of escapism.

Irrational Emotional Responses

Constantly feeling irritated and at the end of your fuse is a common sign that you’re avoiding grief. When you bottle up your emotions, they don’t just go away; they start to fester, which can oftentimes lead to an explosion of emotions at irrational times.

Unhealthy Coping Mechanisms

A lot of people develop unhealthy coping mechanisms when they attempt to distract themselves from their grief and emotions, which can be in the form of alcoholism, obsessive behaviors, substance abuse, and other unhealthy forms of distraction and escapism.

Sources cited:

https://www.health.harvard.edu/mind-and-mood/how-to-deal-with-grief
https://www.health.harvard.edu/mind-and-mood/how-to-overcome-griefs-health-damaging-effects