For a long time after my son Brady died, I felt like I’d been sucked into a tornado funnel cloud. It seemed I was a mile up and whirling without a hope of ever getting a foot back on the ground. The mind-splitting, heart-melting, skull-crushing feelings I experienced were like nothing I’d ever imagined. I was desperate for relief. What, I wondered in my agony, are the best strategies for coping with grief coping? My search for evidence-backed answers led me to write Grief Science.

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In the year or so since, I have read many research studies but none that seemed to give a straight answer to my burning question: What is the best grief coping strategy? Then I ran across a 2016 Dutch study that seemed to do just that.

This research report, “Daily life stressors and coping strategies during widowhood: A diary study after one year of bereavement,” appeared in the Death Studies scholarly journal. Its objective was to find out which specific coping strategies its grieving subjects used as well as – here’s the most interesting part – to compare how well the strategies worked at relieving their distress. Bingo.

I’ll discuss some details of how the study was done and some limitations of its findings. But first, here is the best grief coping strategy (at least according to this study.)

Best Grief Coping Strategy: Avoidance

To get fast relief from the sadness, yearning and other symptoms of grief, consider avoiding whatever seems to be prompting the emotions, whether it’s an object, event, thought or feeling. That’s essentially the bottom line of this study.

To get fast relief from the sadness, yearning and other symptoms of grief, consider avoiding whatever seems to be prompting the emotions, whether it’s an object, event, thought or feeling.

If looking at a picture of your lost loved one is upsetting you, stop looking at the picture and put it away. If visiting the graveyard has you feeling bad, leave the graveyard and consider limiting your visits. If your feelings of grief seem to have welled up from nowhere, distract yourself by reading a book or going for a walk. Those are all avoidant strategies reported by the people in this study, and they seemed to generally work better than the other types of coping strategies examined.

The opposite of avoiding something is confronting it. And confrontational strategies are the other main type of strategy this study examined. If an avoidant strategy calls for you to move your attention away from whatever is causing you to feel bad, a confrontational strategy would be to force yourself to face the source of your distress.

It’s interesting that avoidance, is precisely what you are not supposed to do according to traditional grief work. Freud originated the grief work approach a century ago and it is still practiced by many therapists and counselors.

Grief work requires you to confront and work through your feelings. Avoiding stressors is supposed to lead to delayed grief. There is some question, however, as to whether the evidence supports the delayed grief hypothesis. You can read more about this at another Grief Science post: Is Delayed Grief a Real Thing?

Of course, one study doesn’t mean a century worth of practice is wrong. And this study has some limitations which I’ll discuss shortly. But it is evidence for what might be the best grief coping strategies. And that evidence is clear: If you want to feel better, avoid what’s bothering you.

The Benefit of Doing Nothing

I have seen in my interactions with other bereaved people that not everybody likes the idea of putting a loved one’s pictures away or limiting graveyard visits. Some people think it’s useless or even harmful to try to push back against or try to avoid grieving feelings. Others don’t do anything to feel better because they don’t know what to do. For these and other reasons, doing nothing to cope with grief appears to be a common approach.

This study doesn’t do anything to contradict those observations. In fact, the most common coping strategy researchers found these grieving subjects employed was no strategy at all. And that’s not all. The researchers found that doing nothing worked about as well as active coping strategies, including avoiding and confronting whatever is causing the stress.

The researchers found that doing nothing worked about as well as active coping strategies.

Basically, this finding suggests that doing nothing is not a bad idea. Being patient and bearing the pain and allowing the passage of time and the changing environment to help you out is a viable approach. Outwait it and you are likely to feel better as time goes by. It’s not necessarily easy or fun to do that, of course, but if that’s all you have, it’s still something.

Worst Times of Day

One interesting finding of this study had nothing to do with what grievers were doing to cope or how well those strategies worked. It was about the times of day people reporting feeling most distressed.

It turned out that morning was by a sizable margin the worst time for encountering situations that caused bereaved people to feel bad. About 40 percent of stressful situations happened in the morning. Afternoons and evenings were quite a bit less likely to be troublesome.

Morning was the worst time for encountering situations that caused bereaved people to feel bad.

Nighttime, to my surprise, was the right time. Only about 2 percent of stressors appeared between midnight and 6 a.m. Many people, including me, have said that nights are the worst. According to this study, that may not be right.

Study Limitations

This seemed to be a generally well-done study as far as I can tell. Death Studies, the journal where it appeared, is a reputable peer-reviewed scholarly publication. As is always the case, however, there are some limitations. It is common for researchers to discuss potential shortcomings themselves in a special section of the article and they did that here. A few other possible issues occurred to me.

One limitation is that they only looked at 40 people, which is not a large number. A sample of a few hundred or more would have been more conclusive.

Also all the subjects were elderly widows and widowers. So, if you’re younger and, like me, lost someone other than a spouse, you might well have a different experience.

The 40 subjects represented only about a quarter of the bereaved people asked to participate. And many of those who declined said they didn’t want to do it because it would be too emotional. This suggests that those who did participate were among the best-adjusted. So the results may not be relevant to the general population of grievers and, especially, to those who are suffering the most.

It’s possible that the short-term relief these people got from these coping strategies will not hold up over a longer period.

Another factor that might be the most significant limitation is that the study collected data through a diary that grievers filled out for one week. A week is not a long time. It seems possible that the short-term relief these people got from these coping strategies will not hold up over a longer period.

Some other studies have suggested that, over the long haul, avoidance is likely to make things worse. For instance, this 2007 study found that avoiding reminders of loss contributed to people developing complicated grief. These researchers theorized that, if you avoid the loss, it makes it harder for you to develop a new worldview that includes and to whatever extent is possible explains the loss.

Finally, keep in mind that grief is highly individualized. What works great for somebody else, even a lot of somebody elses, may not work as well or at all for a specific person such as yourself.

To that point, consider that four of the 40 people in this study reported encountering zero stressors in the week they filled out the diary. Overall, the group reported a total of 338 stressors, for an average of eight or so apiece for the week. And one griever at the opposite end of the spectrum encountered 32. From zero to 32 is a big difference. Be aware that you may be an outlier yourself.

What Grief Science Isn’t

The variability of grief experiences is a big reason why I don’t present Grief Science as a source for a one-size-fits-all, can’t-miss, never-fail, no-risk, instant, effortless, permanent and perfect solution to the puzzle of your pain and loss. Some publications do offer those sorts of solutions, but this is not one of them.

I try to identify evidence-based grief coping strategies. These strategies may work for some people, but they may not for you. If you find something here that suggests an approach that seems to help, great. If not, that’s okay too. I’m not interested in telling anybody how they should or should not grieve. I just want to suggest some possibilities to people who, like me, are desperate for something that might allow them to feel better.

If you try avoidance and it doesn’t seem to help, you may want to take a look at a list of 55 grief coping strategies. You can find a discussion of that list as well as a link to the full list at this blog post: 55 (Yes, 55) Grief Coping Strategies.

Thanks for reading, commenting, liking, sharing, reposting and following Grief Science. I am sorry for the losses that brought us here and hope each of us gets some peace today.