When you are grieving some sort of loss, you have a lot of details to care of. You may have to learn to do things differently or for the first time. All the stress of adapting and the emotional ups and downs can effect your diet, your immune response and certainly your sleep.
Healthy Grieving
Grieving is the process of adapting to a loss. The loss can be a person you love, a friend, a job, a home or just about anything. In healthy grieving, you will start to encounter situations you used to associate with the object of your grief. You might have to fill out tax forms for the first time without your spouse. You might need to find a bakery that sells fresh bagels and realize your new home doesn't have one on the corner like your old home did. You feel the sadness and then move on and adapt.
Sleep Disturbances
There are many conditions that may make it harder for you to fall asleep, stay asleep or wake refreshed. Some causes are physiological, like sleep apnea, TMJ or restless leg syndrome. Some causes are psychological, like teeth grinding or sleep walking. Some causes are environmental, like extreme temperatures, loud noise or too much light. Grieving is one of the emotional causes of sleeplessness, along with more general stress and post-traumatic stress syndrome.
Characteristics
If the loss you suffer is great enough, you may have so many things about yourself you have to change as a result that it may affect your sleep. The more often you are reminded of the loss, and especially the more often you have to change the way you do something, the greater the stress of the grieving. You may find your mind obsessing about the moment of loss when you try to fall asleep, making it harder to fall asleep. You may feel overwhelmed with the many changes and your mind may range from one detail you need to take care of to another. You may wake up in the middle of the night with a fear or awareness of a problem that your subconscious cannot handle or drop. And even if you sleep through the night, you may not feel refreshed in the morning, because you have not allowed yourself to sleep deep enough.
Side Effects
If you are not getting enough sleep, it can make you more paranoid and more sensitive, which can intensify the grief, so it can become a vicious cycle. With a history of sleeplessness, you may find yourself delaying going to bed, and that too can add to your sleep deprivation. And you may also start alienating your support network, because you get cranky with less sleep, which can make it harder to get through the grief as well.
Resources
Grief support groups are a great way to process the grief with people who understand what you are going through. You and your group members may come up with strategies for dealing with your grief that would take longer to develop on your own. To deal with the sleep disturbances, you may want to look into herbal supplements like Valerian root or melatonin, medications your doctor may prescribe, alternative treatments like hypnosis, bodywork, or acupuncture, decreasing your stimulation level before bedtime, and decreasing your fluid consumption to obviate sleep interruptions due to bladder pressure. Your doctor may also want you to participate in a sleep study before prescribing anything so as to rule out physiological causes for your sleeplessness.
