How Grief Rewires the Nervous System

CW: suicide loss, grief, trauma responses

No one told me grief would begin to live in my body or that it would impact my nervous system for the foreseeable future.

Once I was able to accept what had happened, I expected the sadness. I expected the crying, the fog, the heaviness that makes getting out of bed feel like an athletic event. What I didn't expect was the way my body would change — the way it would start responding to the world differently, like it had been reprogrammed without my consent.

After my dad died by suicide, I became a different animal. And I mean that literally.

The Startle Response

For months after his death, I jumped at everything. A door closing. My phone buzzing. Someone saying my name when I didn't see them coming. My whole body would seize up — heart pounding, breath shallow, adrenaline flooding my system like I was about to be attacked.

I wasn't anxious in my mind. I was anxious in my muscles. In my jaw. In the pit of my stomach. My body had decided the world was no longer safe, and it was going to stay on high alert whether I agreed or not.

This is what trauma does. It rewires your nervous system. It moves the baseline from "rest and digest" to "scan for threats." And suicide loss is a particular kind of trauma because the threat came from somewhere you never expected — from someone you loved. If that could happen, your body reasons, anything can happen. Better stay ready.

Image: Pexels / Cottonbro Studio

The Exhaustion That Sleep Doesn't Fix

I have never been so tired as I was in the first year after losing my dad.

And it wasn't just "I'm sad and don't want to do things" tired. It was bone-deep, cellular exhaustion. The kind where you sleep nine hours and wake up feeling like you ran a marathon in your dreams. The kind where taking a shower feels like a legitimate accomplishment.

Part of this is the sheer metabolic cost of grief. Your body is working overtime — processing shock, regulating emotions, trying to keep you functional while your whole world has collapsed. That takes energy. Enormous amounts of it.

I remember thinking about it this way: my emotional energy is so high that my physical energy can't keep up and it's completely depleted. Resources. Whew.

But there's also the nervous system piece. When you're stuck in a low-grade fight-or-flight state, your body burns fuel like it's preparing for battle. All day. Every day. Even when you're sitting on your couch staring at nothing. Your engine is running hot, and eventually it just... depletes.

The Strange Physical Symptoms

Here's a partial list of things that happened to my body after my dad died:

• My digestion got weird. Unpredictably, inconveniently weird. I'll leave it at that.

• I got headaches in places I don't think I'd ever had headaches before.

• My shoulders crept up toward my ears and took up permanent residence there.

• I clenched my jaw so hard in my sleep that I actually cracked a tooth.

• I got sick more often. Every cold that went around found me, and it lasted longer.

• My skin broke out almost like I was fifteen again.

• I was more sensitive to substances, especially caffeine, which I decided to give up.
  

At first I thought these things were unrelated. Bad luck. Aging, maybe? But grief doesn't just live in your heart. It lives in your gut, your immune system, your fascia, your breath. The body keeps the score, as they say — and after suicide loss, the score can be brutal.

What Actually Helped

I'm a Reiki practitioner, so you might expect me to say "energy work fixed everything." And yes, Reiki has been a huge part of my healing. But I want to be honest: there's no single thing that magically resolved what suicide loss did to my nervous system. It was more like... a lot of small things, over a long time.

Movement helped. Not intense exercise — I didn't have the capacity for that. But walking. Stretching. Anything that reminded my body it could move through space without danger.

Breath work helped. Not the dramatic, cathartic kind. Just slow, intentional breathing. Box breaths. Extended exhales. Practices that manually downshift the nervous system when it's stuck in overdrive.

Being in nature helped. Something about trees and water and sky tells my animal body that it's okay. That the world is still here. That I'm still here.

Safe touch helped. And I don't just mean Reiki, though that too. I mean hugs from people I trust. A hand on my shoulder. My dog curled against my chest. Physical contact that says "you are not alone in a hostile universe."

Time helped. Not in a "time heals all wounds" platitude way. But my nervous system did, eventually, start to recalibrate.

The startle response softened. The exhaustion lifted — not all the way, but enough. My body slowly learned that it could stand down from high alert. That the emergency, while real, was not ongoing.

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Your Body Is Not Broken

This is Your Nervous System "on" Grief

If you're reading this and your body has been doing strange, frustrating, exhausting things since your loss — you're not broken. You're not weak. You're not failing at grief.

You're having a normal mammalian response to an abnormal event. Your nervous system is trying to protect you the only way it knows how. It's not efficient or pleasant, but it's not a malfunction. It's adaptation.

The work isn't to force your body back to "normal." The work is to help it feel safe enough to soften. To let it know, slowly and repeatedly, that the danger has passed. That you survived. That you're still here, still breathing, still allowed to feel okay in your own skin.

That takes time. It takes patience. It takes a lot of gentleness with yourself.

But it does happen. The body that learns to brace can also learn to rest. You have my word on that.

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If your nervous system has been working overtime since your loss, you don't have to figure this out alone. Befriend Your Grief is a 3-month companioning program for survivors of suicide loss. Learn more here.