What to do when you’re grieving

Grief isn’t something to fix. It’s something to understand. To move with, not against. When we lose something—or someone—important, what happens next isn’t a failure of willpower or a personality flaw. It’s a natural systems response. And like any system under stress, it needs time, clarity, and structure to stabilize.

Most of us were never taught this. We were taught to “stay strong,” “keep moving,” or “bounce back.” But the human system doesn’t work like that. Not when love, identity, or belonging have been disrupted. This isn’t about emotional advice. It’s about learning to read the signals of loss—and knowing how to support the system that carries them.

Start here: sadness is one part of grief. But grief is the whole system reacting.

Clinical psychologist Dr. Goh Chee Leong calls grief a reflection of our capacity to love and care. And when love is disrupted—through death, disconnection, or even a major life transition—your body, brain, and sense of self don’t just “feel sad.” They enter a recalibration mode.

Here’s what that can look like:

• Physical fatigue without a clear reason
• Brain fog, poor memory, or time distortion
• Emotional swings: guilt, anger, numbness, confusion
• Existential spirals: “What does it even matter anymore?”

That’s not weakness. That’s system shock.

Grief is most associated with death. But it shows up anywhere something meaningful ends. Retirement. Career transitions. Moving out of your childhood home. Losing a friendship that once felt unbreakable. Even the loss of a long-held role—like caregiver, leader, or parent-of-a-young-child—can activate grief. Dr. Goh shares that many people underestimate how intense grief can be after retirement. People expect freedom. What they often experience is emptiness.

You go from running eight meetings a day to wondering if your family even needs your opinion. From making decisions that move markets to struggling to get your grandchild to text you back. That shift isn’t just logistical—it’s deeply psychological. Your sense of usefulness, significance, and structure vanishes overnight. That void? It’s grief.

According to Usha Ponnudurai, senior lecturer and counsellor at HELP University, grief isn’t one feeling. It’s a mix of emotions—many of them in conflict. You might feel guilty for smiling one day, then angry for feeling nothing the next. You might want to talk all the time, then ghost everyone without warning. That unpredictability makes many people think they’re doing it “wrong.”

But grief doesn’t follow a neat arc. It loops. It spikes. It disappears for a while, then comes back when you're buying groceries. The real concern, Usha says, isn’t how long it lasts. It’s when grief begins to interrupt core functions:

• You stop sleeping or eating regularly
• You can’t complete daily tasks for weeks or months
• You feel permanently stuck, detached, or hopeless

That’s when grief may have stopped being a process—and started becoming paralysis. And that’s when it may be time to bring in help.

Let’s stop framing grief as a storm of feelings.
Let’s view it as a system shift—with phases.

Phase 1: Disruption
You’ve just lost something—or someone. Your system destabilizes. The world feels noisy or meaningless. You’re scattered. Everything you used to do feels too hard or too pointless.

Helpful actions:

• Simplify routines
• Ask for (or accept) small, tangible support
• Focus on hydration, sleep rhythm, and movement—not productivity

Phase 2: Recalibration
The outside world expects you to be “back.” But you’re not. You can function, but your inner map hasn’t updated yet. This is where guilt, loneliness, or identity confusion set in.

Helpful actions:

• Talk it out with someone who won’t rush you
• Write or record what you’re feeling—not for insight, just for clarity
• Start reintroducing light purpose: teach, create, contribute

Phase 3: Integration
The loss is still there. But it no longer owns your calendar, body, or brain. You’ve made room for it. You start building new routines around it—not to replace the old, but to honor that it happened and keep going.

Helpful actions:

• Create rituals of remembrance or meaning
• Help others through similar loss, if ready
• Allow joy without guilt

Grief doesn’t match modern life rhythms. Most work cultures offer a few days off for bereavement. That’s not enough. Most families expect recovery to be linear. It’s not. Most self-help content pushes “resilience.” What’s needed is rest. Even social media—supposedly supportive—can feel performative. You post a tribute. People react. Then... silence. But you’re still grieving. Alone.

Real life doesn’t give enough time, space, or language for grief. So we internalize the belief that if we’re still sad, we’re failing. But grief isn’t a bug in the system. It is the system, responding to loss in the most human way possible.

There’s no playbook. But there are patterns. Here’s what helps—especially if you don’t know where to start.

1. Protect your basics
Water. Sleep. Sunlight. Gentle movement. These aren’t self-care clichés. They are stabilizers. If your brain is foggy and you’re overwhelmed, return to these first.

2. Create small rituals
Light a candle. Say a name. Write a memory. Play a song. Your nervous system needs cues that it’s safe to feel. Rituals help reestablish that.

3. Allow mixed emotions
You can laugh while grieving. You can feel relief and heartbreak. That duality doesn’t mean you’re betraying anyone. It means you’re processing.

4. Name the real loss
Was it the person—or the role you had with them? The job—or the status and structure it gave you? Naming the deeper identity loss helps your system know what to rebuild.

5. Ask for micro-support
Forget “let me know if you need anything.” Ask for one specific thing: help with a meal, a text check-in, a walking companion. Grief is isolating. Let people in with clarity.

Grief doesn’t have a deadline. But it shouldn’t lock you into place forever.

If months have passed and:

• You feel no joy at all
• You can’t function at work or home
• You think about giving up or disappearing
• You’re numbing constantly with food, alcohol, scrolling, or overwork

—then it’s time to speak to a professional.

You’re not failing. You’re caught in a loop. A therapist can help restart the system. That’s not weakness. That’s repair.

Grief isn’t a glitch in the system. It is the system trying to rewire around love, loss, and meaning. Some days, the system is slow. Other days, it surprises you with grace. That’s okay. What matters is not rushing, not freezing, and not isolating. You don’t have to find “closure.” You just have to find motion. And that motion doesn’t have to be fast. It just has to be real.

Loss means something was deeply held. Grief means your system noticed. Healing means giving it space to rebuild—not to what was, but to what can still be.