Why grief can feel like a storm and what your body is actually telling you.
Grief rarely arrives as something gentle.
It comes like weather — sudden, disorienting, and powerful enough to change the landscape of your inner world without asking permission.
One moment you are functioning.
The next, your chest tightens, your breath shortens, your thoughts scatter, and something inside you braces as if danger has entered the room.
This is why grief so often feels like a storm.
Not because you are dramatic.
Not because you are unstable.
But because your body is responding to loss exactly the way it is designed to respond to threat.
A sudden loss creates a pressure shift inside the body
In a physical storm, the air pressure changes before the rain ever falls. The body senses it first.
Grief works the same way.
When someone you love is suddenly absent, your nervous system does not interpret that as “sad news.” It interprets it as a rupture in safety and attachment.
So the body responds:
Heart rate increases
Breathing becomes shallow or tight
Muscles brace
Thinking narrows
Emotions surge quickly and intensely
This is not emotional weakness.
It is the acute stress response activating to protect you.
Your body is trying to survive a world that no longer makes sense.
Grief moves in waves because the body cannot hold everything at once
One of the most confusing parts of grief is how it comes and goes.
You may feel relatively okay one moment — and then suddenly overwhelmed the next. The shift can be fast enough to make you wonder if something is wrong with you.
What’s actually happening is this:
The nervous system cannot stay at peak intensity indefinitely.
When grief surges, the body enters a high-alert state. Stress hormones rise. Attention narrows. Emotion intensifies.
But that state is not sustainable.
So the body does what it is designed to do:
it crests — and then begins to settle.
Within a single day, grief often moves in waves:
rising suddenly
peaking intensely
then easing enough for breath, clarity, or orientation to return
The loss does not disappear.
But the wave passes.
This cycling is not instability.
It is protection.
Crying is often part of the release, not the problem
Many people fear the moment tears arrive.
“If I start crying, I won’t stop.”
“If I let this out, I’ll fall apart.”
But emotional crying is not usually what prolongs a grief wave. In many cases, it signals that the body has reached the crest of the stress response.
Crying activates calming pathways in the nervous system. It can help shift the body out of high alert and toward settling.
The tears do not mean the storm is getting worse.
They often mean pressure is being released.
The fog is not failure — it’s protection
Alongside the waves, many people experience fog.
Thinking feels slow.
Words don’t land.
The world feels distant or unreal.
This fog is not confusion or denial.
When the nervous system is overloaded, clarity is often the first thing to go. Narrowing awareness helps protect the brain from taking in more than it can handle.
As the wave settles, many people notice:
the fog thinning
orientation returning
the ability to engage coming back online
This does not mean the grief is gone.
It means the body found its way back to you again.
What your body is actually saying
When grief feels like a storm, your body is not saying,
“Something is wrong with you.”
It is saying:
This loss matters.
I am trying to keep you safe.
We cannot carry all of this at once.
The waves, the tears, the fog, the sudden quiet — these are not signs of failure.
They are signs of a nervous system working hard to survive love that was torn away.
A sentence to return to when the wind picks up
Grief moves through the body in waves, and while the loss remains, the nervous system is designed to rise, crest, and settle — even when the storm feels overwhelming.
You don’t have to control the storm.
You don’t have to rush the calm.
You could try saying this out loud as a reminder:
“This wave will move.
My body knows how to come back.”
Telling yourself this often will remind your brain and body of these simple truths and help regulate you, and build trust with your process.
I hope this help!
Sending yo uso much love,
Kimber
Coming next in this series
In the next posts, we’ll slow this down and look more closely at what’s happening inside the body — including:
Understanding the body doesn’t take the pain away.
But it does remove the fear — and fear is often what makes grief harder than it already is.
Grief often feels like a storm because it moves through the body in waves. In this post, I explain what happens in the nervous system after the loss of a spouse — including grief surges, emotional fog, crying, and sudden shifts between calm and overwhelm. This grief education is designed specifically for widows who feel confused by their body’s responses and want a science-informed, compassionate understanding of why grief comes and goes. Understanding how grief waves work can reduce fear, normalize physical symptoms of grief, and help widows trust their body during acute grief.
