The Stages of Grief
The stages of grief are five feelings (denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance) that Elisabeth Kübler-Ross described in 1969 in people who were dying [1]. Many mourners feel some or all of them, but research does not show a fixed order [2]. Feelings come and go, often several in one day [3].
Where am I right now?
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Numb, or it doesn't feel real
Shock and numbness are a common first reaction. They are a way of taking the news in slowly.
What often helps: Keep tasks tiny for now. Let someone else handle what can be handed over.
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Missing them, longing
Longing for the person is the main feeling for many people, and it can come in waves for months.
What often helps: Keep a note on your phone of things you want to tell them. Share one with someone who knew them.
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Angry
Anger can point at doctors, family, God, yourself or the person who died. Not everyone feels it.
What often helps: Move your body: a fast walk, stairs, cleaning. Write the angry letter you will never send.
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Guilty, "if only"
"If only I had called" is the mind trying to undo the loss. It rarely matches what you could have known then.
What often helps: Write the "if only" down. Next to it, write what you actually knew at the time.
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Deep sadness, crying a lot
Heavy sadness after a death is expected. It usually comes in waves rather than all day, every day.
What often helps: Cry when it comes. Ask one person to sit with you, even in silence.
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Calm moments, even laughing
Breaks from grief are part of grieving. Laughing at a joke does not mean you loved them less.
What often helps: Let the good hour be good. You do not need to earn it back with sadness later.
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Relief
Relief is common after a long illness or a hard relationship. It can sit right next to love.
What often helps: Name it to yourself or one trusted person. Relief that their suffering ended is not a betrayal.
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Anxious about the future
A death can take away a partner in daily life, money, a home or a role. Worry about new tasks is part of grief too.
What often helps: Pick one practical task for this week. Ask someone who has done it before to walk you through it.
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Exhausted, not sleeping
Grief is physical. Tiredness, poor sleep and low appetite are common in the first months.
What often helps: Lie down and rest even if sleep will not come. Keep naps short.
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Foggy, can't focus
Trouble concentrating and making decisions is a common part of grief.
What often helps: Use lists and phone reminders. Ask someone to double-check forms and bills.
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Lonely, cut off
Loneliness can grow after the first busy weeks, when everyone else goes back to normal.
What often helps: Name one person and one time: "Can you call me Sunday at 7?" A grief group can also help.
Nothing here is right or wrong, and nothing is sent or saved. Printable feelings map (one page).
Quietarium editorial team Updated Sources: 9
What are the 5 stages of grief?
The five stages are denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. The right-hand column adds what studies of bereaved people found about each one.
| Stage | What it can sound like | What research adds |
|---|---|---|
| Denial | "This can't be real." Numbness, going through the motions, half expecting them to walk in. | In a Yale study of 233 bereaved adults, disbelief was highest in the first month and fell from there [2]. |
| Anger | "Why didn't the doctors catch it?" Anger at family, at God, at yourself or at the person who died. | Common, but not universal: some mourners never feel it [1]. |
| Bargaining | "If only I had called that night." Going over and over what you could have done. | The NHS ties it to guilt and questions like "If only I had done more" [4]. |
| Depression | "What's the point of getting up?" Heavy sadness, tiredness, pulling away. Here it means grief, not the illness. | On average it peaked about 6 months after the death in the Yale study [2]. |
| Acceptance | "She's gone, and I'm still here." Living with the loss, which is different from being fine with it. | It was the most common response from the first month on, long before the other feelings faded [2]. |
The UK's NHS lists the same five and adds that you may not feel all of them, or in this order [4].
One feeling is missing from the list: longing. In that same Yale study, yearning for the person was the strongest painful feeling at every point from 1 to 24 months after the death [2].
Where the stages of grief came from
Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, a psychiatrist, set out the five stages in her 1969 book On Death and Dying. She was describing patients who were dying, not people mourning someone else [1]. The model then spread to every kind of loss, and in 2005 she and David Kessler applied it to bereavement in On Grief and Grieving [1].
Kessler, who now runs grief.com, writes that the stages "were never meant to help tuck messy emotions into neat packages" and that "there is not a typical response to loss as there is no typical loss" [3].
Are the stages of grief real? What research found
Partly. The feelings are real and common, but the idea that people move through them one after another has limited support. Four sources weigh the question directly.
| Study | Who | What it found | What it did not show |
|---|---|---|---|
| Maciejewski and colleagues, 2007 [2] | 233 adults in Connecticut after a death from natural causes, interviewed 1 to 24 months after the loss | Acceptance was the most common response from the first month on. After rescaling the data, the peaks came in stage order: disbelief at 1 month, yearning at 4, anger at 5, depression at 6. | That people pass through one stage at a time. Acceptance was there from the start, so the feelings overlapped. |
| Holland and Neimeyer, 2010 [5] | 614 young adults: 441 after a natural death, 173 after a violent one | Limited support for the stages. Whether people could make sense of the loss predicted their grief better than time since the death. | Clear support for a sequence in either group. |
| Bonanno and colleagues, 2002 [6] | 205 older adults, followed from years before a spouse died to 18 months after | Five different patterns. The most frequent was resilience: low, steady distress. | That a rise and fall of grief is the usual path. |
| Stroebe, Schut and Boerner, 2017 [1] | Review of stage theory and the studies above | No sound evidence for stages. Expecting them "can be harmful to those who do not" go through them. | Not a new study: it weighs the existing ones. |
The 2017 review notes that the 2007 JAMA paper, the main empirical support for stages, "was met with strong criticism" in letters to the journal [1]. Its own data show acceptance leading from month one, and the stage order shows up only in when each feeling peaked.
In Bonanno's study of older adults who lost a spouse, the 2017 review counts 46% as resilient and only 11% grieving along the classic path of low distress, then high, then low again [1]. That is about 1 in 9.
Do the stages of grief go in order? How long does each one last?
"Am I stuck in anger?" Stages are not places you get stuck. There is no fixed order and no set length.
Kessler writes that the stages can last minutes or hours, as people flip in and out of one and then another [3]. On average, the painful feelings in the Yale study were highest within about 6 months of the death [2], but averages hide a wide spread. Holland and Neimeyer found some signs of more distress and less acceptance in people nearing the second anniversary of the death [5].
Plenty of people skip a stage. Anger in particular is frequent after a death, but studies cited in the 2017 review found that not everyone feels it [1].
A more useful map: the dual process model
Where the stages describe a line, the dual process model describes a back-and-forth. Margaret Stroebe and Henk Schut proposed it in 1999 [7]. It names two kinds of stress after a death:
- Loss: missing the person, crying, going over memories.
- Restoration: new tasks, money, a changed role, and time off from grief.
In this model, coping well means moving between the two, which the authors call oscillation, and resting from both now and then is part of it [7]. The 2017 review names it among the models that describe grief better than stages [1], though it sets no timetable either. One day on this map might look like this:
- Morning Open her recipe box and let yourself cry. That is the loss side.
- Afternoon Call the bank about the joint account, then watch a show. Restoration, and a break.
- Evening Tell a friend one story about her over dinner. A bit of both.
If today is all one side, try a little of the other.
The 7 stages of grief and other lists
Seven-stage lists are a remix of the five, and we could not find research behind the extra steps. Popular versions add shock, guilt, an "upward turn" or "reconstruction."
Grief researchers have proposed phases with 3, 4 and 7 steps over the decades [1], and Kessler later added a sixth stage he calls meaning [3]. None of these lists has been tested as an order that people follow.
If a list helps you name a feeling, use it. The table of five above works the same way.
Stages of grief after a breakup
At 2 a.m. you reread old texts, block their number, then unblock it. Breakup articles often use the same five stages, and the feelings do overlap: disbelief, anger, "if only," sadness.
One thing is different. The person is still alive and may still be in your feed, which keeps the longing alive. Muting them for a while gives it less to feed on.
If a breakup leaves you unable to work, eat or sleep for weeks, it deserves support as much as a death does.
What helps at any stage
Whatever name fits today's feeling, a few small moves help with most of them.
- Numb? Shock and numbness are usually the first reaction to loss, and the NHS notes that these feelings become less intense over time [4]. You do not have to force anything.
- Anger or guilt on a loop: give it 10 minutes on paper, then close the notebook.
- A day that is all grief needs one ordinary task you can finish. That is the restoration side of the dual process model [7].
- Bad nights: breathe out longer than you breathe in for 2 minutes. Our page on calming your nervous system has a timer.
- Want a plan? How to deal with grief goes through the first days, weeks and months, with a printable week of small things.
If friends keep asking how to help, you can send them our page on what to say to someone who is grieving.
Frequently asked questions
What is the hardest stage of grief?
No stage is hardest for everyone, and the feeling bereaved people report most strongly, longing, is not on the list at all. In the Yale study, the painful feelings peaked on average within about 6 months of the death [2].
Is the depression stage the same as clinical depression?
No. In the stage model, "depression" means the heavy sadness of grief. For most people it eases over time and does not take over daily life [8]. Sadness that fills every day for weeks, with no breaks at all, is worth a talk with a doctor.
Can you skip a stage of grief?
Yes. The NHS says you may not feel all of the stages and they may not come in a particular order [4]. Many people never feel angry, and that is not a sign of grieving wrong.
Is there a printable 5 stages of grief PDF?
Our grief feelings map is one page: the feelings, their stage-model names and small things that often help. Open it and choose "Save as PDF" in the print window.
Do the stages apply to divorce, job loss or illness?
People use them for every kind of loss, and the feelings often look alike. The model was not built or tested for those losses, so treat it as vocabulary, not a schedule.
When to see a professional
Stage names describe ordinary grief; they are not a test you pass or fail. For most people the pain eases over time [8]. A doctor or grief counselor can help when:
- a year or more on, the longing and pain have hardly changed and your world has shrunk around them. The American Psychiatric Association diagnoses prolonged grief disorder in adults only after at least a year [8]; the WHO's ICD-11 uses at least 6 months, adjusted for cultural and religious norms [9];
- you feel empty or numb nearly all the time, or life seems to have no point without them;
- alcohol, pills or other drugs are how you get through the evenings.
You can ask for help long before any of these.
If you feel very bad right now
Emergency, US and Canada 911
If you are thinking about suicide or are afraid you might hurt yourself, call or text now. You do not have to wait until it gets worse.
- Updated
This page does not replace advice from a doctor. Medical disclaimer · Editorial policy
Sources: 9
- Stroebe M, Schut H, Boerner K. Cautioning health-care professionals: bereaved persons are misguided through the stages of grief. Omega (Westport). 2017;74(4):455-473. doi:10.1177/0030222817691870. Review. PubMed 28355991, full text PMC5375020.
- Maciejewski PK, Zhang B, Block SD, Prigerson HG. An empirical examination of the stage theory of grief. JAMA. 2007;297(7):716-723. doi:10.1001/jama.297.7.716. Cohort study, 233 bereaved adults. PubMed 17312291.
- Kessler D. The Five Stages of Grief. grief.com (site of the co-author of On Grief and Grieving, 2005). Author's guide. grief.com (accessed October 19, 2026).
- NHS (UK). Grief after bereavement or loss. Health service guidance. nhs.uk (accessed October 19, 2026).
- Holland JM, Neimeyer RA. An examination of stage theory of grief among individuals bereaved by natural and violent causes: a meaning-oriented contribution. Omega (Westport). 2010;61(2):103-120. doi:10.2190/OM.61.2.b. Comparative study, 614 young adults. PubMed 20712139.
- Bonanno GA, Wortman CB, Lehman DR, et al. Resilience to loss and chronic grief: a prospective study from preloss to 18-months postloss. J Pers Soc Psychol. 2002;83(5):1150-1164. doi:10.1037//0022-3514.83.5.1150. Prospective cohort study, 205 adults. PubMed 12416919.
- Stroebe M, Schut H. The dual process model of coping with bereavement: rationale and description. Death Stud. 1999;23(3):197-224. doi:10.1080/074811899201046. Theory paper. PubMed 10848151.
- American Psychiatric Association. Prolonged Grief Disorder (medical review by H. Prigerson, August 2025). Patient guide based on DSM-5-TR (2022). psychiatry.org (accessed October 19, 2026).
- Killikelly C, Maercker A. Prolonged grief disorder for ICD-11: the primacy of clinical utility and international applicability. Eur J Psychotraumatol. 2017;8(Suppl 6):1476441. doi:10.1080/20008198.2018.1476441. Review of the ICD-11 criteria. PubMed 29887976.