When It Hurts to Get Up: Understanding Grief That Lives in the Body
- Gordafarid Kaveh
- May 30
- 5 min read
At one point or another, we have all felt broken beyond repair. We have felt weak, and as a result, inevitably, we have felt lazy, unproductive, and sometimes like a piece of nothing who cannot seem to get through the ordeals of life. But the real truth is that in many of these cases, not all, but many there is an underlying grief quietly pulling the strings.
It is the kind of grief that does not always announce itself. It settles instead into the muscles, the bones, the tissues of our daily lives. It shows up as aching shoulders that refuse to relax, as an inexplicable fatigue that chains us to our beds, as the kind of tension that wraps so tightly around your neck that even your thoughts cannot move freely. This grief is not always about death. Sometimes it is about loss in another form: the end of a marriage, the absence of a child, the sudden emptiness after leaving the military, the collapse of a dream, or the cruel permanence of a diagnosis.
And what makes it worse is what it takes from us—our capacity to function. The grocery runs, the emails, the simple acts of showing up. When we fail to meet these daily obligations, it becomes a loop: we feel more broken, more worthless, more far from who we used to be. But the root is not laziness. It is pain. Real, physical pain. And understanding that is the first crack of light in a very long tunnel.
Maybe no one died. Maybe you still wake up in the same house, next to the same people, on the same street. But something left. A person, a job, a marriage, a dream, a diagnosis, a country. And when it left, it took something from you. Not just in your head, but in your bones.
You know the kind of grief I mean. The kind that makes the act of sitting up in bed feel like an Olympic trial. When the air is too heavy. When walking into a grocery store feels like climbing a mountain with no legs. When your shoulder screams for no reason, your wrist aches from nothing, your jaw has locked itself into a silent kind of pain. You forget what smiling feels like in your body. You wonder if you are going crazy.
You are not crazy. Your body is mourning.
Why Does It Hurt So Much?
Your brain does not fully separate emotional pain from physical pain. When you stub your toe or break a bone, your brain lights up in certain regions—pain-processing zones designed to tell you that something is wrong. What is astonishing is that these same areas activate when you lose something emotionally important: a job, a spouse, a close friend, a sense of identity.
In technical terms, these areas are called the anterior cingulate cortex and the insula. Do not worry about remembering the names. Think of them as your brain’s internal alarm system for pain. Whether the injury is from falling off your bike or being left by someone you love, the alarm still goes off. It does not ask whether the wound is emotional or physical—it just reacts.
This is why emotional loss can feel physically unbearable. Why your chest tightens. Why your muscles clench. Why you feel like you are dragging yourself through cement just to stand up. To your body, grief is not abstract. It is real. It is tangible. It is pain.
Then there is cortisol, the stress hormone that floods your system during grief. Elevated cortisol over time causes inflammation, disrupts sleep, increases blood pressure, and leaves muscles locked in a state of low-grade, constant tension. That shoulder pain? That frozen jaw? That ache in your chest? All real.
And when you are grieving something undefined—like the loss of identity after leaving the military or being separated from your child in a custody battle or realizing the life you imagined is no longer possible—your grief is often invisible. But your body doesn’t need witnesses to respond. It just responds.
Move, gently.
What I am about to tell you may sound way too simple to work. But stay with and together we may get somewhere.
I am talking about small, intentional movement. Trauma-informed yoga. A quiet walk. Swimming laps without counting them. Even sitting in a chair and gently rocking back and forth. These movements are more powerful than we often realize.
You see, when we experience loss—any kind of loss—our bodies can lock down. Literally. Our nervous systems, designed to protect us, go into a mode called “fight, flight, or freeze.” And if we do not feel safe or supported, we tend to freeze. We stay still. We stay quiet. We stop breathing deeply. The body braces, and over time, that bracing becomes pain.
Gentle movement signals to the body: you are not trapped. You are not frozen. You are still here.
Science backs this up. Movement—especially rhythmic, low-impact movement—tells the nervous system to calm down. Practices like trauma-informed yoga have been shown to lower symptoms of PTSD and grief-related stress. They activate the vagus nerve, a kind of biological switch that shifts us from stress mode to recovery mode. Breathing slows. Muscles release. And little by little, the body begins to trust again.
The path forward is not just in thinking differently.
It is in feeling safely again.
And you, my friend, are not alone in that.
Sources
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