Grief is a destabilizer. It unroots the known and floods even simple moments with weight. After a serious loss, you’re not just grieving the person or thing that’s gone, you’re adjusting to the way the world now behaves around you. Managing your mental health in this space isn’t about “moving on” or “finding closure.” It’s about making space to feel what’s real while learning how to live alongside it. You won’t fix grief with strategies, but you can soften its grip enough to breathe.
Ways to Soften the Grip of Grief:
Normalize What You’re Feeling
Grief doesn’t always look like tears. Sometimes it’s yelling at the toaster, blanking out mid-sentence, or sleeping 12 hours and waking up exhausted. You might feel fine one moment and gutted the next, then guilty for laughing at something on TV. All of that belongs. If you’re wondering whether what you’re feeling is “normal,” know that grief can distort emotional responses in unpredictable ways, especially in the early aftermath. The grief process doesn’t follow rules, and neither do the emotions inside it. Let them happen, even when they don’t make sense.
Use Writing to Process the Internal Noise
When the inside of your head is too loud or tangled to speak clearly, writing can become a pressure valve. You don’t need poetic language or a plan. Just sit, open a notebook or document, and start with what’s hardest to hold. People who’ve grieved deeply often say that journaling offers significant therapeutic benefits, not because it’s cathartic once, but because returning to the page each day gives your pain somewhere to live that isn’t your chest. Whether you write to yourself, to the person you lost, or to no one at all, the act of naming what’s true has power.
Connect with Others Who Get It
Grief gets lonelier the longer it lingers. Friends may stop checking in, or avoid bringing it up entirely. You might feel like you’re “too much” for people who haven’t lived through it. That’s where group spaces can matter. Whether in person or online, support groups offer shared healing experiences, the kind where you don’t have to explain why a song wrecked you or why Mondays feel unbearable. In these spaces, you see yourself in others’ words, and realize you’re not broken, you’re human, grieving. The burden gets lighter when it’s shared.
Build a Basic, Repeatable Rhythm
When you’re grieving, things like sleep, eating, or taking a shower can feel like mountain climbs. Start small. Create a short, realistic rhythm — not for productivity, but to restore a sense of ground. If that means drinking water first thing, stretching for two minutes, or going outside once a day, that’s enough. Just one act of structure can stabilize you when everything else feels unstructured. And when that still doesn’t work, remember support is also available when overwhelmed, you don’t have to carry everything solo. Let someone in when you can.
Consider Clinical Art Therapy for Unspoken Grief
When grief is locked inside the body, words often don’t help, or can’t reach it. That’s where art therapy becomes useful. In this setting, a licensed professional helps you externalize difficult feelings using drawing, painting, sculpting, and other forms; not to make art, but to reveal what’s underneath. Research shows art therapy unlocks inexpressible grief feelings and helps regulate nervous system responses by giving shape to emotions that are otherwise somatic and stuck. This isn’t about being creative, it’s about being guided through creative processes to access what’s been suppressed.
Pay Attention to What You’re Eating
Food becomes background noise during grief. Some people forget to eat, while others can’t stop. But what you feed your body affects what your body can hold. Balanced nutrition supports emotional resilience by stabilizing blood sugar, reducing inflammation, and giving your brain what it needs to regulate emotions. You don’t need to overhaul your diet. Just notice: Am I eating enough real food? Am I drinking water? Try adding one nourishing meal per day. Your body is part of your healing, don’t leave it out.
Consider School as a Structured Path Forward
For some, grief cracks open more than pain, it opens questions. What now? Who do I want to be? In that in-between, going back to school can offer focus, scaffolding, and a small sense of future when the present feels unlivable. Take a look here: If your bandwidth is low, flexible online degree paths let you engage at your own pace. Whether you’re curious about psychology, healthcare, business, or tech, structured learning can reintroduce routine, momentum, and a longer arc to orient toward.
Prioritize Rest and Gentle Movement
Grief often hijacks your nights with insomnia, early waking, and restless thoughts; this steals energy you need just to survive the day. It’s not “just” being tired, poor sleep compounds grief, making emotional regulation harder and hurting your immune system. One thing you can try is to follow a consistent sleep routine: same bedtime, same wake‑time, dim lights before bed, no screens. For many people, improving your sleep environment and protecting the hour before bed can reduce late‑night rumination that fuels grief. Also, movement even in small doses, such as a walk, stretching, or gentle yoga, helps reset your body, release some natural stress hormones, and clear the fog.
You don’t need to do everything above. You don’t need a plan or a perfect system. You need a crack just wide enough for air to get in. Some days that crack will be writing. Other days it will be a walk, a group, or just choosing to eat. Grief won’t obey your logic, but it can be companioned, softened, and honored. This isn’t about healing all at once. It’s about coping forward, slowly, clumsily, with grit and grace in equal measure.
If you’re carrying grief right now, reach out and let Everyone Dies be part of your support system — every podcast, article, and resource is built for people who need some help to feel, heal, and carry on.
