Grief and anxiety go hand-in-hand.
Inside your grief, the whole world can feel like an unsafe place, one that requires constant vigilance: searching for early warning signs of trouble, guarding against more loss. It’s hard to believe in positive outcomes when the worst has already happened. And in this cultural and political climate, where more pain and loss reach our eyes and ears than ever before, your nervous system is on high alert all. the. time. It can feel like being anxious is logicial, which makes things even harder to control.
If you’re struggling with anxiety and grief, maybe you’ve tried to calm yourself down by thinking positive thoughts, by reminding yourself of the goodness all around you, asserting the typical safety of everyday life. But those things no longer work when you’ve already lived the unlikely. You don’t trust your instincts anymore. Terrible things are possible, and you have to be prepared. Anxiety, grief, and prior experience are a tricky combination. Constant vigilance can seem like the only route to take.
I used to struggle a lot with anxiety.
Driving home from grad school late at night, my tired brain would conjure all manner of horrible, horrible images: things I was helpless to stop from where I was, still hours away from home. I’d imagine I’d left the stove on 12 hours earlier, and the house had burned down. Maybe it was burning right now. Images of my animals suffering flashed in front of my eyes.
It was awful.
With a lot of self-work, insight, and just plain irritation with that pattern, I found ways to manage those fears. In fact, I became so good at redirecting those thoughts that I felt I’d completely moved on. I hadn’t had a freak out like that in well over a decade.
In the months before my partner drowned, I noticed those fears coming back. I would leave the house and begin to panic that the cats would escape, get stuck somewhere, and die cold and alone and afraid. Or that our dog would get hit by a car, and I wouldn’t be there to help. I started to worry whenever Matt was late calling. I’d spin off into imaginary negative fantasies instead of focusing on whatever was actually going on.
I caught myself in a fearful thought-spiral one day in early July. Out loud, I said STOP. Out loud, I said what I have told myself a thousand times, and have told clients over and over again: Worrying about what has not happened is not useful. If something bad does happen, you will deal with it then. It is highly unlikely that anything awful will happen. If it does, you will deal.
Seven days later, the highly unlikely did happen. And you know what? My fear sensors never made a sound. No panic. No anxiety that morning. Nothing. When I needed my acute sensitivity to all things dangerous and bad, it failed.
In the years following, my anxiety went through the roof. It didn’t matter that it had proven itself highly ineffective in predicting or preventing catastrophe. Anxiety is an addictive drug, made all the more powerful by knowing that unlikely shit does happen, and there is nothing you can do.
I tell you this story because I bet you can relate.
Anxiety is an addictive drug, made all the more powerful by knowing that unlikely shit does happen, and there is nothing you can do to stop it. So you'll need something more than positive thoughts to get you through. Click To TweetFreak accidents, out of order deaths, horrible, nightmare events — these things happen. To us. To me. To you. When anxiety steals into your mind and your heart, you can’t just quiet it down by telling your thoughts they’re illogical: Past reality trumps alleged logic. Add in the fact that those of us who have lost someone close are extra vigilant: We guard against more loss, more fear, more helplessness in the face of the randomness of life. It’s a small, hard way to live. Anxiety is exhausting.
So what can you do when that fear starts pumping through your body and your mind? How can you talk yourself off that cliff of anxiety that can’t be calmed by any ordinary means?
Here are some things that work for me:
• Acknowledge your fear. It may seem silly, but taking a moment to recognize that you are afraid can keep the feeling from escalating. You might even say, “I feel afraid something bad is going to happen and I’m totally powerless to stop it.” Tell yourself the truth about your situation, rather than try to push it away.
• Notice where the fear starts What part of your body reacts? For example, I can feel my diaphragm start to contract, to tense, pumping that anxiety adrenaline into my system. I call it the fear pump, and I see it like a set of old bellows, fanning the anxiety higher.
• Consciously turn your attention to that place. Again, it may seem silly, but by taking your mind out of its thought loop and turning it towards the physical locus of anxiety, you begin to shift the energy.
• Replace your fear thoughts with an anchor thought. An anchor thought is a mantra, a short phrase, or even a prayer from your chosen tradition. The word “mantra” can actually be translated as “mind protection,” and that is what we’re doing here: using an anchor thought to protect your mind from a ravenous fear. I often use the phrase “right now” to anchor myself in the current reality. Most of the time, what I’m afraid of is not currently happening, and this pushes me to focus on that truth, rather than the fear.
• Breathe, and repeat. You may have to do this over and over again within the span of a few minutes. That’s okay. It’s normal. Just keep practicing. Like any other skill, it will get easier the more often you use it.
• Do what needs doing, but don’t go nuts. If you have anxiety over specific things, see if you can identify ways you can lessen the risk of those things happening. Do practical, realistic things, like changing the batteries in your smoke alarms, locking your doors at night, and wearing your bike helmet. Address your fears in concrete ways, but don’t let your fears keep you captive.
Remember that calming your anxiety is not one bit related to whether something unexpected happens or not. Calming your anxiety is about only that: calming your anxiety. The crazy train of fear prevents you from being present to what is, and it most definitely keeps you from enjoying what is here in this moment. Following these steps can get you off that train before it takes you too far.
These grief-specific tips (and more) are in my book, It’s OK That You’re Not OK: Meeting Grief & Loss in a Culture That Doesn’t Understand. Grief is not an ordinary time, and ordinary tools you might use to calm anxiety, reduce stress, or connect with others don’t always apply. Check out the book to learn more about surviving intense grief. And if you’re feeling like no one else understands, come join the next session of the Writing Your Grief course – no advice, no platitudes, just love and encouragement for the life you have to live. Find the next open dates, and claim your place, at this link.
How about you? How has anxiety shown up in your grief and your life? What are some ways you’ve found to manage your anxiety? What do you wish would change? Let us know in the comments.
Since my younger brother’s suicide a year and a half ago, I have experienced anxiety in a way I never have before.
In retrospect, I had this underlying anxiety my entire life (as you mention in this blog), but before his death I was able to suppress it, then combat it by functioning at a high professional and social level – always on the go, always working, socializing, trying to build this non-stop lifestyle for myself and not think about my real fears, which include generations of alcoholism, abuse and mental illness. I think when these anxieties would finally bubble up, I would suppress them by working that much harder & drinking that much more. This led to many times when my drinking was out of control and I couldn’t even realize it. While I don’t think most people would label me as having a drinking problem from the outside, I can see now that I thought that professional success, and appearing to ‘have it together’ justified my drinking to the point of blacking out here and there, because I was just ‘young and having fun’…and I’d always make it to work the next day with a smile on my face. Our parents are alcoholics, so it makes sense as to why I had these anxieties, and how I chose to cope with them.
Since he took his own life, I have no desire to touch alcohol or live the same lifestyle I had before. I changed my career, my habits, pretty much every single thing about my daily life. I’ve refocused my life on learning to live with my grief, learning to live without him, and how to live peacefully and calmly. While in many ways this has brought me to a deeper sense of knowing myself, and more time to think about him and process what has happened….that can be a double edged sword. I think I changed my lifestyle because I knew I needed to be healthier in so many ways to survive a loss of this magnitude…that I would crack under all the pressure if I kept pushing everything down.
Because I have purposely built in so much down-time and calmness into my life to cope, I now have no where to ‘run’ from my anxiety when it flairs up. His death was violent and unexpected and truly the most horrific nightmare. It was something I feared my entire life, but at the same time somehow didn’t know was coming…and it happened in the worst way. There are very few answers surrounding it all, so my analytical mind revolves around the death constantly, while it’s almost as if my actual memories of him are blocked.
My anxiety over addiction or mental illness overcoming me or another one of my family members is through the roof. I am terrified that in the throws of grief I will completely lose my bearings and the things that have plagued so many of my family members, and ultimately led to my brothers death, will take their hold on me, or on another sibling. For nearly every positive that now happens in my life, I am immediately overcome with guilt and regret that I can’t share this with my brother, that leads to an almost manic anxiety that I am not appreciating how lucky I am in life to even have good things happen, which leads to feeling extremely low and not moving for days at a time, while also on high alert, knowing that I could get a call at any minute telling me the worst has gotten even worse. This cycle just continues. It’s all so completely exhausting.
I feel in the first year things were so insane I was able to just ‘get through’. Now that some of the shock has worn off, and reality is setting in…my anxiety is almost worse. My anxieties and fears are completely logical, as you mention. They are NOT unlikely. The worst HAS happened…and no one’s destructive behavior in our family has changed since. I don’t know how to help my family or myself, but as I see the people around me struggling, I feel I am just reliving the end of my brother’s life over and over again.
I try to meditate, and sometimes I am able to calm myself my breathing deeply and using the mantra “I am breathing in. I am breathing out” to bring me back to the moment, this usually only works if I can do this at the beginning of my anxieties arising. To curb my overall attitude, I try to exercise daily, but it’s easy to get burnt out and lose motivation doing this. I wish I could figure out how to address my anxieties on a larger scale so that the cycle is easier to escape. Once I get too far in my thinking, I find there’s almost no going back.
Seems so simple, but it really boils down to self care. I’ve run myself down and am just beginning the road back. I wish the same for you! Take care 🙂
My anxiety was not as profound as Kate’s or Megan’s. (And the circumstances of Nancy’s death were much different than what they experienced. She died after a years-long struggle with cancer.) It seemed to manifest itself in a sudden fear of driving. I have always been a fairly confident driver–when I was younger probably too confident and too willing to take risks. But suddenly, I panicked at merging onto a highway or changing lanes and kept twice as much room between me and the car in front of me than was necessary.
Ironically, one of the other issues that arises in grief–an inability to concentrate–caused me to get into an auto accident two weeks after Nancy died. I had just dropped off a shipment at FedEx, returning some clothes that Nancy had bought about a month or so earlier. I got hit by a truck while taking a turn in broad daylight–entirely my fault. No one was hurt, fortunately, but it sure didn’t help with my worry about getting behind the wheel.
I have found meditation helpful, at least during the meditation itself and for a short while after.
I have a chronic illness and already had extreme anxiety from that. I worried constantly that something bad would happen to my mother or husband, my only close family. The day my mother was killed, I had no idea. Fifteen hours had passed before I found out because I always screened calls and the phone had been ringing off the hook all day, no message ever being left (and our phone greeting stated that we screened all calls), so I eventually unplugged it assuming it was a persistent telemarketer.
I had no idea it was the coroner.
Eight months later, the same thing happened the day my husband was killed. I still can’t believe that as much as I constantly worried about something happening to him, especially after what happened with my mom, that it never once occurred to me that the same thing might have happened to him. After all, what are the odds?
But it did. The same thing.
I’ve barely been able to leave the house in the eight years since. After the thing I’d most feared in my life — suddenly losing one of the people I loved most in the world — had happened twice and I’d lost BOTH of the people I loved most, I truly believed I’d be fearless from then on, because nothing worse could ever possibly happen after that. But it’s been just the opposite: I’m terrified of EVERYTHING. So not only is it difficult for me to go out and do things because of my illness, as it had been when they were still with me, but now because of my grief on top of that, I just flat-out can’t cope with the world any more. I’m forced to go out to get groceries every two weeks, but that’s about the only thing I ever leave my house for and I’m usually a wreck when I get back home.
Four months ago, on one of those errand days to get groceries, I wrecked my car. Rolled it going around a curve on a dangerous winding road. My mom and husband were both killed in crashes as they were going around curves on dangerous winding roads. As my crash was happening in slow motion, I had plenty of time to think, “This is it… After years of being terrified of driving for fear I’d die in a crash, too, I’m going out the same way.”
Miraculously, I survived.
At first, I saw the crash as a blessing. Since losing my family, I’d spent every day wishing I were dead, and in the moment when I thought I was going to die, I was silently screaming, “I want to live!” And I was just as shocked as the paramedics that I was able to get up and walk away with a seatbelt burn being the only visible mark on me. I believed it was a miracle, especially since I’d clearly heard the voices of my mother and husband saying, “You think this is what you want, but trust us, you don’t” as it was happening. So for the first few weeks after the accident, I felt like I’d been reborn, like I had been given a profound message in the only way it could have been gotten through to me. I believed it was a sign I was meant to do something important with the rest of my life, something positive and big.
But the aftermath of the crash has been so difficult, that positivity has vanished over the months since. Now I’m in worse shape than I was before. My anxiety is so through the roof I’ve developed more health problems (high blood pressure, arrhythmia, chest and back pain, and worsening depression) on top of the ones I already had and now I’m overwhelmed with stress and anxiety even inside my own home.
I still believe I’m meant to do something important with what’s left of my life, but I have no idea what and I reeeeally have no idea HOW, being in the shape I’m in. I keep waiting for what I’m supposed to do next to dawn on me.
Then again, I’ve been trying to figure that out for eight frickin’ years.
First I want to say how courageous you are for putting this out there. Then I want to say just do baby steps. Take a short walk outside. Call a friend. Mail a card to someone going thru something tough, like you. I can relate…I went thru a series of losses and felt crippled. I thought I’d never come out of the hole. Little steps. I wish you peace. I can tell you will get it by your attitude. Much love!
I’ve dealt with anxiety all my life, even as a child due to being raised in a dysfunctional household where I witnessed violent fights between my parents. I never knew that the sensations I had experienced back then were panic attacks until I reached adulthood. I was married at age 19 to a wonderful man who made me feel safe and for many years, there was less anxiety because he was there as a teammate and a rock. But then, after being married for almost 40 years, he died due to cancer. I can thoroughly relate to that horrid feeling of heightened alertness and expectation that other bad things would happen. Well, they did…broken heater, broken water heater, car issues, health scare with our daughter, power outages and so on. Machines breaking down might seem miniscule, but when you’re on your own, your survival mode and fight or flight response mechanism go into hyperdrive over the smallest things. It’s been a full 4 years now and I am so tired of this…tired of pretending to be “strong”, of feeling ashamed of my grief and pain because of the judgement of other people, of having nothing to look forward to, of constantly, constantly, constantly, figuratively, putting out fires and just waiting for them to happen. It is exhausting. It is cruel. And no one understands until they’ve been through it and experiences the utter loneliness of your friends deserting you and moving on and your family not wanting to hear about it because they want the “old you” back again…and that will not and cannot happen for you are changed forever.
I can relate to your every word. I’ m not sure what the answer is. I wish l did. Anxiety and panic are my constant companions. I have grown so weary of the total lack of understanding. Of pretending all is well when it so isnt, just to make others feel better, l can’t play that game anymore, and have now isolated myself in doing so. People don’t approve.
Like you l am totally burned out and at the end of my tether ‘re stuff constantly going wrong, and trying to keep my head above water.
I probably have more self help books than the whole of Amazon.com and have been on a very long and fruitless. mission in the search for inner peace. But as the song goes ” l still haven’t found what I’ m looking for”. Maybe l should just stop looking.
My heart goes out to everyone of us struggling.
Exactly this. My mother died last month. I just went on a short trip — airplane and all! — with my kids and family. My anxiety was so strong. I relate to the idea of not feeling safe in the world. I long ago got over my fear of flying by using fact-based evidence: it is highly unlikely that a plane will crash. And yet… statistics take on different (irrationally different) meaning when your loved one dies in a rare or unexpected way. Sending love to all of you.
I go through anxiety and panic attacks but I dont know why. Om not scared or fear anything. My heartbeat will just suddemly invrease and then I start hyperventilating and then I become like an animal that is trapped. I practse yoga so I will and can contril my breathing but what bothers me most is that I cannot identify anything that sets off these attacks. I have never suffered from anxiety before my husbands death so these attacks freak me out. It will be 7mnths soon and it is getting worse. It will even happen whilst i am sleeping. I dont know if I am dreaming and this is what sets it off. I am taking low dosage of beta blockers and my pulse is below 55 so a sudden increase to 90 or 100 feels like my heart is just pounding. It is exhausting and if i knew what sets if off I could eliminate those factors but I dont know. It just happens.