Unhealthy Ways to Cope with Grief

After cremations as part of the cremation services offered in Dayton, OH, grief – intense grief – will be your companion for quite a while. Grief takes a tangible toll on every aspect of your life and can affect your physical, mental, and emotional well-being.

Grief will zap your energy in the days and weeks following the death of your loved one. You may feel as though it takes everything you have just to get out of bed in the morning. Facing the day ahead may seem impossible. Facing the night that follows may be excruciatingly painful.

When you’re this tired and this sorrowful, it is natural to try to self-comfort. However, self-comfort comes in two varieties: unhealthy and healthy.

Unhealthy self-comfort can include many behaviors or activities that can increase health risks and problems and can lead to long-term negative effects on your body.

One such activity may be to overindulge in foods that make you temporarily feel better. Most of us have comfort foods or favorite foods that we turn to when we’re feeling bad or we’re having a hard time.

Not all comfort foods or favorite foods are necessarily unhealthy, but many are. These comfort foods can include foods that are loaded with salt, loaded with sugar, or are high in fat. If you find yourself eating fast food every meal, or not even eating regular meals, but snacking on potato chips, cakes, pies, ice cream, or pizza and fried foods, then you are probably overloading your body with unhealthy foods.

Over time, this can lead to weight gain, more sluggishness, and a weakened immune system, making you more susceptible to getting sick more often. Long-term intake of these kinds of foods can lead to elevated blood pressure and cardiac problems.

Another unhealthy activity may be increased consumption of alcohol. Drinking alcohol can seem like a good way to dull the pain of grief. The more you drink, the less it hurts. However, alcohol is actually a depressant, so while it may initially seem to make you feel better, it can actually deepen your feelings of sorrow and sadness as you drink more.

Prolonged excessive alcohol consumption also has long-term risks, including thiamine deficiencies (affects cognition) and liver damage. The liver filters all the toxins out of your body. It can repair itself up to a certain point, but when the damage occurs at a faster rate than the liver can do the repairs, scar tissue forms on the liver and it becomes less able to remove toxins.

Total scarring of the liver is known as cirrhosis of the liver. At this point of liver damage, the liver is no functioning at all. Toxins build up in the body, causing blood pooling (the inability of blood to circulate properly through the body), fluid buildup around the abdomen that impedes kidney and bowel functioning, extreme itchiness, blood vessel breakage in the esophagus (high and fast fatality rate), and severe cognitive impairment.

Liver failure also impairs the body’s ability to absorb food and malnutrition occurs. Additionally, because the appetite decreases and the pressure of the fluid buildup on the abdomen lead to a constant feeling of fullness, liver failure will result in a form of starvation, where little or no food is eaten.

The combination of all these symptoms of liver failure leads to death.

For information about cremation services offered in Dayton, OH, our caring and knowledgeable staff at Glickler Funeral Home & Cremation Service is here to assist you.