First, My Father Died. Then, I Got a “Grief Gut”

It first happened when I was lying face up on a massage bed. Wrapped in one of the Ricari Studios’ signature sheer mesh body stocking, the practitioner worked her lymphatic massage tool across my abdomen to the somewhat-new pooch right below my belly button. “Ah,” she said with an absolute sense of knowing—despite the fact that this was the first time we had ever met, and she didn’t, in fact, know me at all. “You have a grief gut.”

In that moment, things clicked. A year ago, my father died after an absolutely brutal battle with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. Ever since, I could feel my body keeping score: First, I developed a case of chronic (and absolutely embarrassing) angular cheilitis; then came shingles; and now, apparently, life was giving me a grief gut.

“Grief is a whole-body stress response,” says research psychologist Dr. Sarah E. Hill, author of the upcoming book The Period Brain. “It activates the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis, flooding the body with cortisol and other stress hormones.” And there’s science to back it up: bereavement isn’t just about “feeling depressed,” though that’s certainly a piece of the incredibly difficult puzzle. It’s also been linked to a lower immune system, metabolic health, and can even cause a minor cardiac issue called broken-heart syndrome.

Sure, I could get out of bed every day after an hour of self-pep talk—plus a highly targeted combination of antidepressants, therapy, and the fury left over from a failed stint at the Hoffman Institute—but I could feel the loss of my father in every cell of my body. And apparently, every cell of my body was feeling it, too.

“With grief, many people may experience stress changes that lead to cortisol fluctuations,” says psychiatrist Judith Joseph, MD, MBA, whose book High Functioning aims to demystify depression. Coristol—one of the fight-or-flight hormones—is always prevalent in healthy human bodies, but too much of it can impair sleep, digestion, mental health, and more. Dr. Joseph points out that I was noticing my grief, and the ensuing rush of cortisol, affect my vagus nerve (the longest nerve in the body that connects vital organs to the brain), as well as my skin and hair in particular. “Skin changes and hair loss are also stress responses to grief, and this may be why people start to look fatigued and worn out after grieving and why some report acne and hair loss during the grieving process.”