What is grief?

Why you feel the way you do.

Grief can feel like a hundred different things at once, or sometimes nothing at all. This section helps you understand what's actually happening inside you, so it feels less frightening and more human.

Grief doesn't follow rules

Grief can't be controlled or made to follow a schedule. It doesn't arrive on time and it doesn't leave when you want it to. There's no correct way to do it. What you feel, or don't feel, is valid.

You've probably heard of the five stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance. These ideas can be useful sometimes, but some people judge their own grief against these stages and feel like they must be doing it all wrong. Grief research has moved on a lot since those stages were created, and what matters most is your actual experience, not whether it matches a model.

Grief isn't new. It exists across every culture, across thousands of years of human history, and even some animals grieve (like elephants and crows). For most of human history, grief was something people did together — using rituals, mourning periods, communities gathering around the person left behind. We are not meant to do grief alone. Most of us don't have those structures now, which can make grief feel harder.

There are so many different feelings that the word grief encompasses and all of these feelings are valid… you just have to go with the waves and process it, how your body and mind decide to process it.

— S, 22, who lost her brother

How grief can feel

You might be devastated one minute, laughing with friends the next. You might feel nothing at all, then suddenly be completely flooded. You might seem fine on the outside, but on the inside you feel like you are falling apart.

Grief can feel a bit like stepping in puddles: you step in one, get soaked, then you're out again. Fine for a bit. Then another puddle. You're not doing anything wrong when you feel okay or laugh with your friends. You're not betraying anyone when you have a good time. The puddles will come back, but you'll also keep stepping out of them. Both the pain and the moments of relief are normal.

Numbness

Your brain is protecting you, giving your emotions time to catch up with what's happened. It can last weeks or months. It doesn't mean you don't care, or that your love wasn't real. A lot of grieving people feel frightened by numbness because they think they're supposed to be more upset. But it's one of the most common responses to loss.

Anger

Anger is often grief with nowhere to go. It can cover deeper feelings like fear, helplessness, heartbreak, panic. You might find yourself snapping at people you love, or feeling rage that seems to come out of nowhere. If you feel anger rising, it doesn't mean you are a bad person. It just means you're carrying something enormous.

Relief

If someone was ill for a long time, or suffering in some way, it is common to feel relieved when that person has died. Watching someone you love suffer is its own kind of pain. You can love someone, and feel relief that their suffering has finished when they die.

Guilt

Guilt is one of the most common parts of grief. The mind searches backwards: I should have said more, done more, been there more. For young people especially, guilt can be heavy. Growing up naturally involves pulling away from parents sometimes, wanting more space, arguing more. If someone dies during that period, we can feel guilty about how we acted and how things in our relationship with the loved one may feel unresolved. That can be a really hard thing to carry.

When the relationship was complicated

If the relationship was complicated - if the person who died hurt you, abandoned you, frightened you, or wasn't able to be the person you needed, grief can become even more confusing.

You might grieve:

the person themselves
the relationship you had
the relationship you wished you could have had
the version of them you needed but never fully got

That loss is real too.

Complicated feelings after a complicated relationship don't mean something is wrong with you. They mean you're human, and the situation was hard. Over time, these feelings become easier to carry, especially when they're spoken about, and held with support rather than shame.

What grief does to your brain and body

Your brain is still developing, and the brain systems that help regulate overwhelming emotions are not fully built. Which means that grief can feel more destabilising for you than it might for an adult.

Here's something researchers have discovered that might help explain what you're feeling. When we're close to someone, our brains actually become wired to expect them, to anticipate seeing them, hearing them, having them in your life. Some neuroscientists describe close relationships as being, on a neurological level, a bit like an addiction. Which means when someone dies, the brain experiences something closer to withdrawal than just sadness.

It's as if the brain were saying, 'Yes, I'm anticipating seeing this person' — and yet, 'I am not getting to see this person.' The mismatch is very painful.

— grief neuroscience researcher

This is why grief can feel like a physical craving, not just an emotion. And because teenage brains have particularly active reward pathways, you may feel this more intensely than an adult would.

This is also why you might find yourself needing to know where people are at all times. Panicking when someone is late. Feeling rage that seems completely out of proportion. Or going the other way - withdrawing, shutting down, feeling nothing. These are just natural ways your brain is trying to find safety in a world that has turned upside down.

The fog some people associate with grief is real too. Difficulty concentrating, forgetting things, feeling like you're moving through mud. Grief can use up quite a bit of brain energy just getting through each day and trying to hold it together.

Grief lives in the body as well as the mind. For some people, grief expresses itself more in headaches, stomach pain, chest tightness, tiredness, difficulty eating. These physical symptoms are showing you that your whole system is under strain right now and doing what it can to get through this.

The double weight

As a teenager, you are already in the middle of a tough life stage: figuring out who you are, where you belong, what actually matters to you. Grief crashes into all of that.

Researchers call this the double dose. You're dealing with the normal challenges of growing up while also trying to survive one of the most painful things a human being can go through. Each one makes the other harder. You're trying to become yourself at the exact moment grief has shattered who you thought you were.

Identity

You're not only mourning the person who died. You might also be mourning who you were before this happened, the future you expected, and the pre-grief version of yourself that felt safer, lighter, more certain.

Some young people find themselves carrying an identity they never asked for - the kid whose dad died, the sibling left behind. It can feel like grief becomes the only thing people see when they look at you.

But grief is not the only thing you are. Even when it feels all-consuming, many young people slowly find their way back to other parts of themselves, back to friendships, humour, creativity, curiosity, connection. There is a you that is and will always be much bigger than your grief story.

I feel like I've lived 10 years in the space of 3 because of all the different phases I've been through… I feel like I've grown around it instead of it shrinking.

— E, 23, who lost her mum at 20

When you question everything

After a loss, it's really common to question everything, and especially to ask this question:

What's the point?

What's the point of anything at all, if we and the people we love are going to die?

You might stop being able to imagine the future. No plans. No goals. No sense of what you're even working towards. Things that used to matter school, friendships, hobbies, ambitions, can suddenly feel completely pointless.

This is a normal reaction when the loss of a loved one shows you how fragile everything is. If someone you love can just be gone, why plan for anything? Why care about something that can disappear?

Those thoughts make complete sense after a loss. They don't mean something is permanently wrong with you.

You might also notice a kind of flatness, like the colour has drained out of things. Things that used to make you happy don't quite land the same way. The future feels blank rather than exciting.

This is one of the most common, and least talked about, parts of grief. And like most parts of grief, it does shift. Not all at once. More in small moments - a conversation that goes somewhere real, something that makes you laugh before you remember to feel bad, a glimpse of something that feels worth caring about again.

You don't have to force it. Those moments will come back. Not on a schedule. But they will come.

Why grief can feel so lonely

One of the strangest things about grief is how quickly it can make you feel completely alone, even when you're surrounded by people.

Your friends probably want to help. They just don't know how. So they go quiet. They change the subject. Or they say something that's meant to be kind but lands completely wrong- at least they're in a better place, everything happens for a reason, they'd want you to be happy. They mean well. But it can leave you feeling more alone than before.

Sometimes the people closest to you are grieving too. And without really deciding to, you start holding back, not wanting to make things harder for them. You check on them. You act fine when you're not. You become the strong one.

That makes sense. You love them. But your grief matters just as much as theirs. You don't have to protect everyone else from it.

Grief can also feel lonely in a way that's hard to explain, like you're on a different planet from everyone around you. Your friends are stressed about exams or relationship drama while something life-shattering has happened to you. That sense of feeling different, out of place, can feel very painful.

But lonely doesn't mean alone forever. Many young people find that even one person, someone who doesn't need you to be okay, someone who can just sit with you, can make an enormous difference.

Even if you don't have a great conversation with somebody… just knowing they're there for you, it makes you feel like you're not alone.