Grief insomnia is not often talked about during grief. My mom died in February 2020. For a long time after that, I did not really sleep. That was the year I forgot how to sleep.
I do not mean I had a few restless nights. I mean I forgot how sleep worked. I would lie down exhausted and my brain would light up like someone flipped a switch. I replayed conversations. I replayed the last days. I ran through things I said and things I wish I had said. Some nights I was afraid to fall asleep because waking up meant remembering all over again that she was gone. That first moment of remembering, every single morning, was its own small grief.
If you are reading this at 2am because you typed something like “can’t sleep after my mom died” into a search bar, I want you to know two things. First, this is one of the most common things grief does to a body. Second, it got better for me, and I can tell you exactly what helped.
I am a therapist. I knew all the sleep hygiene advice. No screens before bed, keep the room cool, go to bed at the same time every night. None of that touched what was happening to me, because grief insomnia is not a habit problem. It is a nervous system problem. My body was on alert, scanning for the next loss, and it was not going to power down just because I dimmed the lights.
Here is what actually helped, in the order I found it.
A weighted blanket
This was the first thing that made a difference. There is something about the pressure that tells your body it is safe to settle. The clinical term is deep pressure stimulation, but what it felt like was being held. In those first months I did not want to be touched by people, but I could tolerate being held by fifteen pounds of glass beads. I still use it.
Bedtime stories for adults
This sounds silly until you try it. My problem was never my body. It was my mind, which treated every quiet moment as an invitation to grieve harder. Sleep story apps gave my brain something to hold onto that was not my mother’s last week. The stories are designed to be interesting enough to follow but boring enough to drift away from. Someone with a calm voice describes a train ride through Scotland and somewhere around the third village you are gone. It works because it occupies the exact part of the brain that was keeping me awake.
Progressive muscle relaxation
PMR is a practice where you tense and release each muscle group, one at a time, from your feet up to your face. I teach this to clients now, and I always tell them the same thing. The magic is not relaxation. The magic is that grief lives in the body, and most of us are carrying it clenched in our jaws and shoulders without knowing it. PMR made me notice how much I was bracing. You cannot release tension you do not know you are holding.
4-7-8 breathing
Breathe in for four counts, hold for seven, out for eight. The long exhale is the point. It activates the part of your nervous system that handles rest, and it gives your racing mind a simple job to do. I used this when I woke up at 3am with my heart pounding, which happened a lot that first year. It did not always put me back to sleep. It did reliably bring me down from panic to something I could survive until morning.
Lexapro
I want to say this part plainly because I think people need to hear it from a therapist. I went on medication. My grief had tipped into something my body could not regulate on its own, and no amount of breathing exercises was going to fix a nervous system that had been running on high alert for months. Lexapro did not numb my grief or make me forget my mom. It turned the volume down enough that the other tools could actually work. Talking to my doctor about it was not a failure. It was one of the better decisions I made that year.
What I want you to take from this
There was no single fix. It was a stack. The blanket calmed my body, the stories occupied my mind, the breathing handled the 3am spikes, and the medication gave all of it a fighting chance. Grief insomnia usually needs more than one tool because grief hits more than one system.
And it took time. I wish I could tell you there is a shortcut, but mostly there is company, and there are tools, and there is the slow return of ordinary sleep, which came back for me the way the tide comes in. Not all at once. A little further up the sand each night.
If you are months out from a loss and still not sleeping, that is not a sign something is wrong with you. It is a sign your grief may need more support than you can give it alone. That is exactly the kind of work I do with people.
This post is my personal story, not medical advice. Decisions about medication belong in a conversation with your doctor or prescriber. If you are struggling, reaching out to a therapist who understands grief is a good place to start.
