How I Stayed Healthy During Grief: The Habits That Held When Everything Else Fell Apart

On October 7, 2023, my husband Doug died in a paragliding accident. He was gone in an afternoon, and the life I had built with him over decades was reordered in a way I am still learning to understand.

In the months that followed, people asked me how I was taking care of myself. Honestly, in the beginning I could not have told you. Grief has its own logic and its own time, and most of what I did in those early weeks I did without thinking. Which turned out, I came to understand, to be exactly the point.

I joined Shay on the Best Life podcast to talk about something that surprised me: what it actually looks like when the habits you have built over a lifetime carry you through the worst of what life brings.

Listen: [Spotify] | [Apple Podcasts]

Resilience Is Not Something You Summon. It Is Something You Build.

There is a version of resilience that gets told as a story of willpower: the person who, in the face of crisis, summoned the discipline to keep going. I understand why that story is appealing. It makes resilience feel available, something you can decide to have when you need it.

But in my experience, and in the research I have spent thirty years studying, it does not work that way. The habits that protected my biology during grief were not habits I created in grief. They were habits I had been practicing for years before Doug died. What grief revealed is that they had become part of the structure of my days, not something I decided to do each morning, but something I did because that is what I do.

You cannot build the foundation during the storm. You build it before.

What My Body Was Doing While I Was Grieving

This is the part that took me some time to fully understand. In August 2024, nearly a year after losing Doug, I tested my biological age through GlycanAge, a glycan-based measure of how old your cells actually are, as distinct from the number on your passport. My biological age came back at 53, seven years younger than my chronological age.

By March 2025, it had dropped to 49.

I was not doing anything dramatically different from what I had always done. I was eating the same whole plant foods. Taking the same concentrated blend of fruits, vegetables, and berries in capsule form I have taken for 32 years. Moving my body every day. Cold plunging in the mornings, which, I would later read, activates the anterior mid-cingulate cortex, the part of the brain tied to the will to live. Sleeping. Fasting in the way that has felt right to my system for a long time.

None of these things erased the grief. But they held the container that grief was living inside.

The Conversation No One Wants to Have About Grief and Inflammation

Grief is a physical event. This is not a metaphor. Acute grief triggers a measurable inflammatory response, elevates cortisol, disrupts sleep architecture, and suppresses immune function. If you have ever found yourself sick in the weeks after a significant loss, this is the biology behind it.

What the research also shows is that the baseline you arrive at grief with matters enormously. A body carrying lower baseline inflammation, better sleep quality, and a well-supported gut microbiome has more resilience to absorb an inflammatory spike without tipping into chronic disease territory. The habits you build before crisis are not preparation for crisis. They are the infrastructure that determines how much capacity you have when crisis arrives.

I did not know, in October 2023, that any of this would be tested. Nobody does. That is the nature of grief: it does not announce itself.

What I Actually Did — and What I Let Go

One of the things I talked with Shay about is the difference between the habits that held and the ones I had to release for a while. Not every practice survived intact, and I think it is important to say that.

What held: the plant foods, the supplements, the cold water, the daily movement in whatever form I could manage, the basic structure of time-restricted eating. These were so embedded that they required no decision-making.

What I released: optimization. The tracking, the fine-tuning, the pursuit of perfect sleep hygiene. In grief, you do not optimize. You survive, and then gradually you rebuild. The foundation held. The structure around it softened, and then came back.

For anyone navigating loss right now, that distinction carries something I want you to hold onto. You do not have to do everything. You have to protect the foundation.

The Protocol Behind the Habits

Several people who found this podcast episode reached out asking for the specifics: what I actually take, what my fasting window looks like, how I approach hormones and collagen and the supplements I consider non-negotiable.

I wrote those details out in full in a separate post here on this site. You can find the complete protocol at the link below. It covers everything from my approach to Juice Plus+ to how I think about hormone replacement therapy, intermittent fasting, and the supplements I have used for decades. Shay’s show notes link there for exactly this reason.

[READ: What I Actually Take: My Protocol for Hormones, Collagen, Fasting, and the Supplements I Won’t Skip]

What I would add here, that the protocol page does not say: the value of any protocol is not in the individual elements. It is in the consistency. The years. The fact that your body has had time to adapt and recalibrate around these inputs so that when something disrupts your life, the system has a baseline to return to.

Listen to the Full Conversation

The full episode is just over an hour and covers everything from my early NIH-funded research at Stanford to the specific protocol I use to protect my cognitive health now. Justine is a thoughtful interviewer and this conversation went places I did not expect.

[LISTEN: Essential Ingredients, Episode 02 — Longevity Habits That Reversed My Biological Age]

https://substack.com/home/post/p-208783160

If this conversation resonates, you can also read more about the science behind these habits on The Elder’s Evolution, my Substack publication, where I write about what it means to age well with full attention to both the biology and the deeper questions biology alone cannot answer.

[READ: The Elder’s Evolution on Substack → eldersevolution.substack.com]

Listen to the Full Conversation

Shay is a generous and perceptive host and this conversation went somewhere I did not expect. We spent time on the things that are harder to put in a protocol: the emotional architecture of resilience, what grief teaches you about the body, and why paying close attention to your health is not selfishness but an act of radical care for everyone who depends on you.

[Listen on Spotify | Listen on Apple Podcasts] 

If you want to go deeper into the biology of longevity and aging well, The Elder’s Evolution is where I write at length about the science and the questions the science alone cannot answer.

[READ: The Elder’s Evolution on Substack → eldersevolution.substack.com]

Dr. Mitra Ray holds a PhD in Cell Biology from Stanford University, where her research was funded by the NIH, the American Cancer Society, and the Alzheimer’s Association. She has spent more than 30 years translating longevity science into practical guidance for women navigating midlife and beyond.