Ep #381: The Widowhood Effect: Can You Die of a Broken Heart?

Welcome to The Widowed Mom Podcast, Episode 381: The Widowhood Effect: Can You Die of a Broken Heart?

Welcome to The Widowed Mom Podcast, the only podcast that offers a proven process to help you work through your grief, to grow, evolve, and create a future you can truly look forward to. Here’s your host, Master Certified life coach, grief expert, widow, and mom, Krista St-Germain.

Can you actually die of a broken heart? You have probably heard stories about couples who were married for 50 or 60 years, one person died, and then the other shortly afterward and someone says, “They died of a broken heart.” Turns out there is actually some science behind that idea. There’s something researchers call the widowhood effect. And there’s also a real medical condition commonly called broken heart syndrome. So those are two different things. We’re going to talk about both today.

But before we do, I want to tell you where we’re going with this because the last thing I want you to do is to give your brain one more thing to worry about. So, I don’t want you leaving this episode thinking, “Oh, great. Now, my person died and I need to worry that I’m going to die too.” That is not what the research says. Here’s what I want you to take away. Grief is hard on our systems. Knowing that gives us a reason to take our health seriously. It does not mean that we need more reasons to be afraid. Okay? So let me put your heart at ease, your mind at rest before we even jump into this episode. All right?

Okay. So what is the widowhood effect? Let’s talk about that first. Researchers have been studying for decades what happens to people after the death of a spouse, and they have found an association between spousal bereavement and an increased risk of mortality. And sometimes they call this the widowhood effect. So again, before your brain runs away with that sentence, let’s talk about what that actually means.

This is population-level research. So researchers take very large groups of people who have experienced the death of a spouse and compare them with people who haven’t. And across those large groups, they sometimes find an increased mortality risk after the death of a spouse, particularly in the months closest to the death. So one large meta-analysis looked at 15 studies involving more than two million people and found that the increased risk was greatest during the first six months after the death.

Another very large analysis found an increased mortality risk among widowed people overall. But there’s quite a lot of variation in these studies. So we’ve got age and sex and health before the loss, how much time has passed, right? And the effect has often been found to be stronger in men than in women. In fact, some studies have not found a statistically significant increased risk in mortality for women at all.

So, this is not, “My husband died, therefore I’m in danger.” It is, when researchers look at large populations, they can see evidence that losing a spouse can affect physical health and mortality. So, to me, that is not terribly surprising. We know as widows that grief is not just an emotional experience. We are living it. We know that grief happens in a body. It happens to the body.

Think about what your body has been through since your person died. Your sleep might have changed dramatically. Your appetite might have changed dramatically. Maybe you’re eating much less than you used to. Maybe you’re eating more because you’re getting relief from food or looking for it there, like I was. Maybe you’re exercising less. Maybe you’re drinking more. A lot of us are using alcohol to cope. Maybe you aren’t remembering to take your medications consistently. Maybe you haven’t scheduled the mammogram or the physical or the dental appointment. Maybe you spent months or years caregiving before your person died and your own health went to the bottom of the list, right? And this isn’t even including the stress.

Your body has had a whole lot to deal with. Your nervous system has had so much to deal with. Your brain is trying to understand something that does not match its predictions, does not make sense to it. So your life may have changed in dozens of ways at the same time. And all of this matters. All of this impacts. We want to think about it as a whole system experience. Not to say that everybody experiences all of those things, they don’t. But thinking about the most stressful parts of life too, finances and parenting and household responsibilities and relationship stress and identity loss and now we don’t know necessarily what we want our future to even look like. Our routines are all upended. Our sense of safety can be a mess, right? And our body is a part of all of that.

So we’ve talked on this podcast about widow fog. We’ve talked about sleep, we’ve talked about the nervous system, we’ve talked about the full body nature of grief. We’ve talked about, gosh, all the things, right? How difficult decision-making can become. None of those things are happening in isolation. Our brain and our body are one interconnected system. And we want to think about it that way. So yes, of course, grief can have physical effects. No surprise here.

Knowing this, I think, can help us have more compassion for ourselves and can help us take better care of ourselves. But it doesn’t need to scare us.

So what about broken heart syndrome? What is that? This one is super fascinating to me. There’s actually a medical condition commonly called broken heart syndrome. Its medical name is Takotsubo cardiomyopathy or Takotsubo syndrome. It can cause sudden chest pain, shortness of breath. It can look very much like a heart attack. There can even be changes on an EKG and blood tests showing injury to the heart muscle.

So, this condition was first described in Japan. In the classic version, part of the heart’s main pumping chamber takes a different shape in a way that reminded Japanese physicians of a pot that they used to trap octopuses called a Takotsubo pot. And that’s where the name came from. So Takotsubo is more common in women, particularly postmenopausal women. It can be triggered by intense emotional or physical stress, including the death of someone that we love. And researchers think that a surge of stress hormones plays an important role, although they don’t completely understand why it happens. So it is a very real thing. Most people recover, but it can cause serious complications and rarely it can be fatal.

And of course, the really important part, if you are having symptoms that could be a heart attack, don’t try to decide whether it’s grief. Don’t try to diagnose yourself. Don’t try to diagnose whether it’s broken heart syndrome or something else. Get emergency medical attention. Let the professionals do that.

I also think it’s worth noting that broken heart syndrome is not the same as the widowhood effect, right? Broken heart syndrome is a specific medical condition that some people experience. The widowhood effect is describing a statistical association that researchers have observed between spousal bereavement and mortality. So if somebody says, “She died of a broken heart,” they could be talking about two very different ideas, right? It’s kind of a general phrase that people use. Most widows are not going to develop broken heart syndrome.

So what are we supposed to do with this information? This is the part I’m most interested in, right? I don’t want you to become afraid of your body. I want you to take care of it. We don’t need to be afraid of things to take care of ourselves. There is a difference between taking our health seriously and being hypervigilant, overly worried about our health. Taking your health seriously might mean scheduling the doctor’s appointment that you’ve been putting off. It might mean getting some recommended screenings or taking your medications as prescribed. It might mean getting your blood pressure checked, paying attention to your sleep, moving your body. The basic things that we know to do but sometimes struggle to do in grief: eating foods that support and nourish us.

Also, you might consider looking at your alcohol consumption without judgment. You are not alone. If you are using alcohol to numb those feelings or get away from those feelings, I just want you to hear, there is no shame in that. We can look at that and say, “Oh, that makes sense.” If I wasn’t taught how to deal with my emotions, it makes sense that I would turn to the coping mechanisms that I can find.

Now, we can un-shame something and that is what helps us change it if we want to. For me, I ate a lot after Hugo died because nobody had taught me how to feel my feelings. I didn’t know how to create safety in my nervous system or feel my feelings. I just knew it was really uncomfortable and somehow I felt some relief when I ate ice cream or something salty or crunchy. And so that’s what I did. Do I need to judge myself to change that? No. In fact, the opposite is true. The less I judge myself, the easier it is to change a behavior like that and learn a new way, which is one of many things I love helping widows do.

So, we want to let people support us. We want to not judge ourselves. We want to pay attention when something is changing in our body. And if you’ve got some symptoms that are concerning you, let’s seek appropriate medical care. So don’t assume something is just grief. Let the appropriate medical professionals figure that out. That’s what we pay them for.

And taking your health seriously does not mean monitoring every sensation in your body and wondering if you’re dying. It doesn’t mean we have to Google everything at 2 a.m. It doesn’t mean we have to check our heart rate 37 times a day, right? It doesn’t mean that we need to take a population-level study or meta-study and turn it into some sort of prediction about our future. That’s just not helpful. That’s fear talking. Fear isn’t necessarily good fuel for self-care. We know this. So, statistics are not your destiny. Researchers might say that a population has an increased risk. That does not tell us what happens to any one individual. Our fearful brains love to forget that.

And especially after someone we love dies, right? Because once your person dies, your brain now has evidence that terrible things actually do happen. It’s not theoretical anymore. I see this come up a lot of times with widows who are moms, right? Their brain now says, “My kids already lost one parent. I can’t let them lose another. I can’t die.” And then suddenly every unusual sensation feels extra scary. “So what is that? I got to know. Should I be worried? What if something happens to me?” And then you listen to a podcast like this and I tell you about something called the widowhood effect and then your brain might very likely go, “See? We should definitely worry. We should definitely treat this like a problem.” And that’s not what I want you to hear. You can take this information seriously without using it against yourself.

I really do get that we want certainty. I really do get that we want someone to promise us that nothing else terrible will ever happen. I wish we could have that promise, but the truth is that we just can’t. But what we can do is we can take really good care of ourselves. We can recognize that our body has been through something significant. And I think this is what I would really love us to normalize, is that yes, our person died and yes, there is the emotional impact of that. And also, our body experienced that loss too. And so, if we tend to treat grief as something that’s just emotional, we miss out on the opportunity to take care of the whole person. Maybe we just decide, “Oh, go back to work, take care of the kids, do all the things.” And then we forget that our entire system is trying to adapt to a world that it didn’t expect.

And maybe you’re exhausted and maybe you’re forgetful or your sleep is a mess. Maybe routines that used to be easy are suddenly requiring a whole lot of extra effort. Instead of making those things mean that you’re doing anything wrong or that something is wrong with you, we can just get curious and we can ask ourselves, what does my system need? Maybe today it needs a little sunshine. Maybe it needs more water. Maybe it needs an earlier bedtime or more protein or a doctor’s appointment. Maybe it needs connection with another human being. Maybe it needs a body-based tool, like a lot of the tools that I love teaching, right, that help us feel better in our bodies. Maybe it needs you to stop expecting it to perform exactly the way it did before your life changed.

Obviously, none of these things make grief disappear. That is not the goal. It’s not possible. The goal is, can I support the human that is carrying this? So, can you die of a broken heart? There is a real condition called broken heart syndrome. There is research showing an association between spousal bereavement and mortality that researchers sometimes call the widowhood effect. Neither one means that because your person died, that you should now be afraid for your own health. But grief is hard on our systems. It does affect more than our emotions. It is a full-body experience. And that means taking care of our physical health as we are grieving matters.

So we don’t need to do it perfectly. We don’t need to suddenly become the world’s healthiest widow. We don’t need to add to our already long to-do list. But we do want to remember that our body deserves care. So that we take our health seriously and that we get support when we need it. And we pay attention to what our body is telling us without becoming afraid of it. And that we give ourselves some grace. Your system has been asked to carry so much. So give yourself some grace.

All right, a little disclaimer from me. You know, I’m a coach. I am not a medical professional who diagnoses anything. So please don’t take anything I said on this podcast as a diagnosis of anything, right? Ask the medical professionals. That is what they are there for. Remember, no one is going to advocate for your health but you. So sometimes we just got to do it, right? If something doesn’t feel right with us, we don’t have to be paranoid and worried and hypervigilant and stress ourselves out. And we can take action to get answers and make sure that we’re supporting our bodies in the best way we can.

All right. That’s what I have for you this week. Remember, I love you. You’ve got this. Take care and I’ll see you next week. Bye-bye.

If you like what you’ve been hearing on this podcast and want to create a future you can truly get excited about even after the loss of your spouse, I invite you to join my Mom Goes On coaching program. It’s small group coaching just for widowed moms like you where I’ll help you figure out what’s holding you back and give you the tools and support you need so you can move forward with confidence.

Please don’t settle for a new normal that’s less than what you deserve. Go to coachingwithkrista.com and click Work With Me for details and next steps. I can’t wait to meet you.