Living through COVID has provided many people with challenges that they are not necessarily equipped to deal with. Isolation is not a safe space.

If you have experienced moments of anxiety, you will inevitably have been told to breathe. There is good reason for this and substantial evidence showing the benefits of breathing exercises to decrease our heart rate, relieve physical and emotional tension and restore us to a state of equilibrium.

Having recently read On Grief and Grieving, Finding the Meaning of Grief Through the Five Stages of Loss by Elisabeth Kubler-Ross MD and David Kessler I thought to briefly explore these five stages and to clarify their usefulness in understanding the grieving process.

When we are grieving, we are expected to cry but more dynamic expressions of grief involving vocalisation, perhaps screaming or wailing, are frowned upon. It sits outside acceptable behaviour dictated to us by societal norms. The problem here is that in order to effectively deal with those emotions, vocalising is exactly what we need to do.