back to indexThe Science & Process of Healing from Grief | Huberman Lab Podcast #74
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Welcome to the Huberman Lab Podcast,
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where we discuss science and science-based tools
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for everyday life.
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I'm Andrew Huberman,
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and I'm a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology
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at Stanford School of Medicine.
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Today, we are discussing grief.
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Grief is a natural emotion that most everybody experiences
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at some point in their life.
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However, grief is something
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that still mystifies most people.
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For instance, we often wonder why getting over
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the loss of somebody or a pet is so absolutely crushing.
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In some cases, it's obvious
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because we had a very close relationship
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to that person or animal.
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But in other cases, it's bewildering
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because somehow, despite our best efforts,
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we are unable to reframe and shift our mind to the idea
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that the person or animal that at one point was here
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and so very present is now gone.
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Today, we are going to discuss how we conceptualize grief,
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both at an emotional and at a logical level.
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I'm going to teach you about the neuroscience
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and the psychology of grief and incredible findings
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that have been made in just a few key laboratories
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that point to the fact that we essentially map
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our experience of people in three dimensions.
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Let's just give you a little hint
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of what those dimensions are.
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They relate to space, where people are,
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time, when people are, I'll explain what that means,
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and a dimension called closeness
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and how those three dimensions of space, time, and closeness
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are what establish very close bonds with people
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and are what require remapping, reorganization
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within our emotional framework and our logical framework
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when we lose somebody for whatever reason.
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Within that understanding, I'm confident
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that you will have greater insight into the grief process.
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And should you ever find yourself within the grief process,
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as I imagine most everyone will at some point,
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you will be able to navigate that process
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in what psychologists and neuroscientists deem to be
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the most healthy way of going through grief.
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Indeed, moving through grief requires a specific form
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of neuroplasticity, a reordering of brain connections,
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and also the connections between the brain and body.
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I'm going to teach you about all of that today.
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So you're going to learn a lot of scientific information.
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You will also learn a lot of tools
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that you can put in your kit of emotional
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and really emotional physical tools
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that will allow you to move through grief
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in this healthy way that I referred to earlier.
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I'll also point out some of the myths about grief.
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For instance, many of you have probably heard
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that there are designated stages of grief
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that everybody moves through.
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It turns out that recent research refutes that idea.
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There are different stages of grief,
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but not everybody experiences all of them.
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And hardly ever does somebody move through
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all of those linearly, meaning in the same order.
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I also want to point out that for many of you
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that are not experiencing grief in this moment,
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there's an important scientific literature
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that teaches us that how we show up to grief,
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meaning our psychological and our biological state
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that we happen to be in when a loss occurs,
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strongly dictates whether or not we end up
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in what's called complicated or non-complicated grief.
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And non-complicated grief is a form of grief
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that is very prolonged.
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And in fact, often requires that people get
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substantial professional help.
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So whether or not you're experiencing grief,
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that's mild, moderate, or very intense right now,
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or whether or not you are not experiencing
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you're going to learn scientific information
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and tools that will help you navigate
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through this process that we call grief.
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Before we begin, I'd like to emphasize that this podcast
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is separate from my teaching and research roles at Stanford.
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It is, however, part of my desire and effort
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to bring zero cost to consumer information about science
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and science-related tools to the general public.
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In keeping with that theme,
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I'd like to thank the sponsors of today's podcast.
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Okay, let's talk about grief.
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I just want to remind you that everybody at some point
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in their life experiences grief,
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either mild grief, moderate grief, or extreme grief.
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And it's somewhat obvious, but worth stating nonetheless,
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that how intense grief feels and how long it lasts
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scales with how close we were with somebody.
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And if you learn that the person who works
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at the coffee shop or that you see at the coffee shop
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on a regular basis happened to pass away
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or tragically get killed in a car accident,
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that can be quite upsetting.
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It can be somewhat disorienting to you
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if you, for instance, just saw them yesterday,
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or they seemed perfectly fine when you saw them last.
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But of course, the grief that results
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from the loss of somebody to whom you have
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that level of attachment is far and away different
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than the level of grief that you would experience
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from the death of a very close loved one,
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a sibling, a parent, God forbid, a child.
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When that type of loss occurs,
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it's often the case that our entire relationship
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to life feels different.
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Places and things that at once brought us joy and laughter
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now bring the opposite.
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They bring us intense feelings of sadness and loss.
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Psychologists and neuroscientists distinguish
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between complicated grief and non-complicated grief.
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They are very similar at the outset.
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One of the fundamental differences between them, however,
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is that complicated grief,
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which occurs in about one in 10 people,
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is a situation in which grief does not seem
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to resolve itself even after a prolonged period of time.
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Later in the episode,
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I'll point you to the actual tests that are used.
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I've provided links to those in the show note captions
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that will allow you to distinguish
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between complicated and non-complicated grief.
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These arrive through the important research
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of the world-class grief researchers that are out there
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and the psychologists that treat grief.
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The important thing to point out is that grief is a process.
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Like any biological or psychological event,
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it has a beginning, a middle, and an end.
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And I do believe that being able to orient
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in terms of where you are in that process
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can be immensely beneficial,
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not just for predicting how long it's going to last,
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but in order to conceptualize the person or animal
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that you lost in a way that allows you
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to best preserve their memory
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while maintaining your own functional capacity in life.
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Along those lines,
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I want to point out that grief and depression,
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while they can feel quite similar in certain ways
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and have overlapping symptomology, loss of appetite,
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challenges sleeping, crying in the middle of the day
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for no apparent reason, et cetera,
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they are distinctly different processes.
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The modern research teaches us, for instance,
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that grief rarely responds well to antidepressants,
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whereas depression can often respond well
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to antidepressants.
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Everything we know and understand about grief
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is that it is a distinct psychological and physiological
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event in the brain and body from depression.
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Rather, perhaps the best way to think about grief
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is that it is actually a motivational state.
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It is a yearning, it is a desire for something.
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And somewhat surprisingly,
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it's not just a desire to have that person back
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or to have that animal back.
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You might think, well, that's crazy, of course it is.
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But of course, there are instances in which
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someone passing away or an animal passing away
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is actually providing relief for that person
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because of where they happen to be in their life.
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Today, I'll teach you about grief as a motivational process
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because grief as a motivational process
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really is the way that scientists and psychologists
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now conceptualize grief and the treatments for grief
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so that people can move through them effectively.
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As we wade into this important topic,
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I'd like to emphasize some of the common myths
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and misunderstandings about grief.
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Some of the myths and misunderstanding
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arrived from the beautiful work of Elizabeth Kubler-Ross,
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a psychologist who wrote the famous book
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On Death and Dying.
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And I should emphasize that while
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Kubler-Ross was a real pioneer
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in establishing that there are indeed
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different stages of grief,
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the modern science, both psychology and neuroscience,
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point to the fact that not everybody experiences
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all of the stages that Kubler-Ross defined,
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nor do they move through those stages in a linear manner.
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Sometimes they're out of sequence.
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I'll just highlight the five stages
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that Kubler-Ross illustrated
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because some people really do experience all of them,
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sometimes in the order I'll read them,
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but again, oftentimes they don't.
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The different stages of grief very quickly
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are denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance.
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In the Kubler-Ross model,
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denial is always the first stage
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and denial is just as it sounds,
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this disbelief, it cannot be, there's no way,
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a refusal to accept the new reality
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that the person or animal is gone.
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The second stage, anger,
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is one in which the individual recognizes
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that the person is indeed gone or the animal is gone,
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but their body and their mind go into a motivated state.
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This is important.
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We're going to return to this idea of grief
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as a motivated state that involves action plans
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in more depth as we go further.
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And then the third stage is bargaining,
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what's sometimes called the negotiating phase.
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This idea that, well, if I had just done this,
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or if they had just done that,
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or if I'd called more,
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or somehow refusing to accept the reality.
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So in a way, this can be blended with denial in thinking,
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well, if I just don't think about it,
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it won't be real, this kind of thing.
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So again, stages can be blended or braided together
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because emotions are complex, right?
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Even though there are different stages to this process,
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they can sometimes be melded together.
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The fourth stage of depression that Kubler-Ross described
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is one of why go on living?
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Why should I go on living?
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Why should I continue in this grief-stricken state
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that seems to deprive me of all the richness of life
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that I experienced when the person or animal was still here?
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And then the fifth stage is acceptance,
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this internalization, not just cognitively,
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not just thinking, but emotionally,
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that it's going to be okay,
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that not just this too shall pass, but that it has passed.
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So again, the five stages of grief that Kubler-Ross defined
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were immensely important as a critical parsing
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of the different stages that one could move through.
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But unfortunately, those five stages were sort of taken
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to be gospel for a long time.
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And we now know based on neuroimaging,
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based on more in-depth psychological evaluation,
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and frankly, more researchers and clinicians
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moving into this area and observing
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that while much of what Kubler-Ross described
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does hold true, it's not always the case.
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And in fact, the contour of the grief process
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actually has a lot of dimensions
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that are not encapsulated by those five stages.
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There's also a lot of variation
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depending on whether or not the loss is due to old age,
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disease, whether or not there was suffering prior or not,
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suicide or non-suicide types, deaths and losses,
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and even grief about non-death losses,
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a relationship breakup or something of that sort,
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or even homesickness and things of that sort.
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So I do want to tip our hats to the incredible work
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of Elizabeth Kubler-Ross.
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By no means am I or do other researchers
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try and discount her incredible contributions,
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but I think nowadays we have a different
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and frankly, a better understanding
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of what the grief process is like,
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and as a consequence, better tools to move through grief.
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In order to really understand what grief is
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in your brain and body and how to best navigate grief,
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I'd like you to do an experiment with me.
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For the next five minutes or so,
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I'd like you to at least try to discard
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of all prior notions of grief as just a state of sadness.
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I want to acknowledge that it is and does involve sadness,
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but for right now, let's think about grief
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as a motivational state, as a desire for something specific.
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In fact, I'd like you to think about grief
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as an attempt to reach out and get something
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that you very much want.
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Imagine yourself extremely thirsty, for instance,
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on a very hot day,
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and a glass of water is right in front of you,
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and it's a beautiful clean glass of water,
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and it's completely full,
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and you so badly want to drink that water,
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but no matter how intensely you want it,
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and no matter how hard you try and reach it,
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it always shifts just outside your reach.
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So if you can imagine that, even just a little bit,
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you are touching into the experience of grief.
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How do I know this?
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Well, I know this because brain imaging studies
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involving what's called functional magnetic resonance
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imaging, fMRI, in which you can evaluate
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which brain areas are more active than others
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according to blood flow,
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which correlates with neural activity and so forth,
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teaches us that the brain areas that are associated
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with motivation and craving and pursuit
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are some of the primary brain areas and circuits
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that are activated in states of grief.
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I'd like to share an important paper with you.
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It's one of the first to illustrate the fact
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that grief is not just a state of sadness and pain.
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It is indeed a state of yearning and desire
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of something that is just outside your reach
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and unfortunately will always be just outside your reach
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until you remap your relationship to that person or thing.
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The title of this paper is posed first as a question,
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so that's why I'll read it as such.
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The title is Craving Love.
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Enduring Grief Activates Brain's Reward Center.
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And the first author of this paper is Mary Frances O'Connor.
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She's a professor of psychology
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at the University of Arizona and one of the world leaders
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in the study of grief from a neuroscience perspective.
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With some luck, we'll get her here
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on the podcast as a guest.
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Now, this paper has several important features.
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I'll just highlight a few.
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One of the features of this paper that's not surprising
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is they found that people who are in a state of grief
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are in a state of pain.
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That is, brain areas associated with pain,
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actual physical pain, are more active
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than in non-grieving individuals.
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However, they also found that people who are experiencing
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what's called complicated grief showed reward-related
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activity in a brain area called the nucleus accumbens.
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What is reward-related activity?
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Reward-related activity is activity of neurons
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that's associated with motivational states.
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And the nucleus accumbens is a brain center
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in which dopamine has the effect
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of creating a motivated state.
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If ever you thought that dopamine was only associated
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with feeling good, you hear about dopamine hits,
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well, this paper and papers like it
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firmly tell us that dopamine is not about feeling good.
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Dopamine is about placing us into a state
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of desiring things and seeking things.
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This is true in addiction.
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This is true when we're hungry and we want to eat.
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This is true when we want to reproduce.
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This is true in every state in which we are reaching
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for something outside our immediate ability
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to give that thing to ourselves.
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This is very important to understand
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if you want to understand grief
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and how to move through grief.
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Grief is not just about sadness.
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It is a state of sadness,
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hence the activation of brain areas associated with pain.
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And it is a state of desire and reaching for something.
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And for those of you that have experienced grief,
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I think that will resonate with you.
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In that understanding that grief is both a state of pain,
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but also a state of wanting,
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and in the understanding that when we lose somebody,
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either because of breakup or because of death,
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or if an animal dies or gets taken away or is missing,
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that state of wanting and desire
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drives an activation state within us.
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Now, the key thing to understand is that the activation
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of those reward centers and the involvement of dopamine
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puts us into an anticipatory state,
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a state of waiting for something to happen.
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It also puts us into a state of action or desiring action.
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Our body and our mind are what I like to refer to
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as center of mass forward.
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We are seeking how to resolve the craving,
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even if we know that is impossible.
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Why do I say that?
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Well, we understand also on the basis
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of brain imaging studies and also some studies in animals
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that I'll describe in a moment,
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that in order to understand grief,
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we have to understand how attachments
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are represented in our brain.
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And it turns out that both attachments
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and the breaking of attachments in healthy ways
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are governed by three important what we call dimensions.
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A dimension is just some feature of the world
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that's represented in our brain.
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So for instance, the color red doesn't exist in your brain.
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You happen to have cells, neurons in your eye
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that respond best to long wavelengths of light.
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And those long wavelengths of light happen to be
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what are reflected off things that are perceived as red.
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So in your mind, you have a notion of red.
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I know this is a little bit abstract,
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but you're not actually lighting up red neurons
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in your brain and that's why you see red.
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You are lighting up neurons in your brain
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that represent the presence of red things
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in your environment.
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Similarly, we have neurons and maps,
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or we say representations of other dimensions.
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We have dimensions of touch.
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We have dimensions of sound.
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And as I'll now teach you,
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we have three dimensions that define our relationship
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to people and animals and things.
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And when those people, animals and things
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are within our immediate vicinity,
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or if we know how we could access them, right?
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If somebody is still alive,
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there's generally some way to access them
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unless they're refusing to interact with us.
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Well, when we understand that,
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our motivational states can operate in a way that's logical.
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We know that for instance,
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if we want to find our mother, brother, sister,
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significant other, dog, cat, parrot, et cetera,
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we have to go through a certain set of steps.
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What are those three dimensions and how do they work?
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And that's what I'm going to teach you now.
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So at risk of sounding a little bit too reductionist,
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we are now going to describe your relationship
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to anything, everything,
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and anyone in these three dimensions.
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How can we do that?
link |
Why would we even want to do that?
link |
Why would we want to rob the complexity of relationships
link |
of their contour and their detail?
link |
Well, if we can understand the dimensions
link |
in which we map our relationship to people,
link |
animals and things,
link |
then we can understand why it is
link |
that when those people, animals or things
link |
are not accessible to us, why it hurts so much
link |
and why it takes a certain amount of time
link |
in order to re-understand, if you will,
link |
or remap our association to them.
link |
I promise that in grasping the information
link |
I'm about to give you,
link |
you will be able to better orient in the grief process
link |
and you'll be able to move through it more effectively.
link |
The three dimensions of relating to someone
link |
or an animal or a thing are space, time and closeness.
link |
And in order to illustrate each one
link |
and how they work together to support relationships
link |
and their involvement in the grieving process,
link |
I'm going to tell you about an experiment.
link |
This experiment was actually done.
link |
The experiment involves putting people into a brain scanner
link |
that allows the researcher to evaluate brain activity
link |
in different areas.
link |
In fact, can look in a very non-biased way,
link |
not make any predictions about which brain areas
link |
are going to be involved.
link |
And the experiment is the following.
link |
The person, I should say the research subject,
link |
first sees images of things that reside
link |
at different distances from one another.
link |
And when I say things, these are objects.
link |
So in one case, it's a beach or a parking lot
link |
with bowling balls set at different distances
link |
Their brain is imaged and as their brain is imaged,
link |
they see different pictures of different scenes,
link |
the beach, the parking lot, et cetera,
link |
bowling balls spaced in different ways,
link |
close together, far apart, regularly spaced,
link |
non-regularly spaced.
link |
When one does this sort of experiment,
link |
you see a lot of brain areas activated,
link |
not surprisingly the visual cortex,
link |
the area of the brain that is responsible
link |
for creating visual perceptions,
link |
but also a brain area that seems uniquely tuned
link |
to the distance between you and the objects.
link |
So whether or not the bowling balls are far away
link |
or close together from one another,
link |
and whether or not they are far away
link |
or close to you physically.
link |
So literally the distance between you and these objects,
link |
we'll refer to that measure, that dimension,
link |
as we call it as proximity, okay?
link |
Whether or not it's very close to you,
link |
high degree of proximity or far away, low proximity,
link |
but it's simply physical space.
link |
Then subjects listen to tones.
link |
Those tones also are spaced from one another.
link |
So it could be something as simple as my hand meeting
link |
the table top that I'm happen to be sitting in front of.
link |
they image the brain.
link |
Of course, areas of the brain they're associated
link |
with auditory perception are active, not surprisingly,
link |
but as they evaluate different types of sounds
link |
and patterns of sounds, for instance,
link |
they can start to parse brain areas that seem uniquely tuned
link |
to the spacing of sounds independent
link |
of what sounds are coming in.
link |
So whether or not it's musical notes
link |
or my hand hitting the table or human speech,
link |
they identified a brain region that is uniquely tuned.
link |
That is, it becomes active specifically in response
link |
to changes in the spacing between sounds,
link |
much in the same way as they could identify brain regions
link |
that were only activated when there were changes
link |
in the distance between objects,
link |
such as the bowling balls that I used
link |
in the previous example.
link |
And then the subjects saw a different set of images.
link |
The images that they saw were of people and of faces.
link |
And some of the images that they saw were
link |
of people's faces right up close.
link |
And other images were of people at a distance
link |
where you could see the whole body of the person.
link |
Now, they also varied the emotional relationship
link |
That is, they were able to get photographs
link |
from these research subjects lives.
link |
So they could show them pictures of, for instance,
link |
their sister or some random person off the street.
link |
They could show them pictures of a parent or of a neighbor
link |
or of a celebrity that's well-known
link |
or of somebody that they didn't know at all.
link |
So they were able to vary both the position of the person,
link |
And they were able to vary the emotional distance
link |
to the person, which is this dimension
link |
that I'm referring to as closeness,
link |
which is not physical closeness,
link |
but how attached or how well you know somebody.
link |
Now, this is maybe sounding
link |
like a somewhat complicated experiment,
link |
but the takeaway from this experiment is exquisitely simple
link |
and exquisitely important.
link |
The result was that in all three conditions,
link |
changes in the physical spacing of these objects,
link |
changes in the temporal,
link |
that is the time spacing of these sounds
link |
and changes in the emotional distance
link |
between the subject and different people,
link |
the same brain area was uniquely activated.
link |
Now, that is an incredible thing to find
link |
because what it suggests is that, yes, of course,
link |
there are brain areas that are associated
link |
with representation of visual objects.
link |
And that, yes, of course, there are brain areas associated
link |
with representation of different sounds.
link |
And of course, there are brain areas associated with faces.
link |
In fact, there's something called the fusiform face area,
link |
which is uniquely tuned to faces.
link |
But at the same time, there is a unique brain region
link |
that is activated in all three of the conditions I described
link |
that has to do with how far you are from somebody,
link |
both in space, in time, and in terms of emotional closeness.
link |
And that brain area, it turns out,
link |
is a brain area called the inferior parietal lobule.
link |
The inferior parietal lobule.
link |
Now, you don't need to know
link |
where the inferior parietal lobule is.
link |
In fact, you don't even need to know
link |
the name of this brain area.
link |
What you do need to know, however,
link |
if you want to understand grief
link |
and how to move through grief,
link |
is that your map of people is not a map
link |
of emotional closeness per se.
link |
It is a map of emotional closeness,
link |
what we call attachment, that is interwoven,
link |
that is braided in in a very intimate way
link |
with your map of where they are in physical space
link |
and where they are in time,
link |
when you saw them last,
link |
when you're likely to see them again,
link |
and if you were to want to see them,
link |
how much time it would take to reach them
link |
or for them to reach you.
link |
Now, earlier I said that one of the key functions
link |
of our nervous system is to be able to make predictions.
link |
And so it's somewhat obvious,
link |
but nonetheless important to state and restate
link |
that one of the most powerful aspects
link |
of our attachments to people, animals and things,
link |
is our ability to predict
link |
what it would take to see them again
link |
and when we are going to see them again.
link |
In fact, we could say that our ability to locate someone
link |
or an animal or thing in space and time, right?
link |
Where they are and how long it would take
link |
for us to reach them or them to reach us
link |
is a prediction of the requirements
link |
to engage in the attachment.
link |
In order to illustrate this at a little bit more depth,
link |
let's just do a fill in the blank experiment.
link |
You can do this now in real time.
link |
I want you to think of somebody that you either rely on
link |
or that you care about very, very much.
link |
And I'll just allow you to fill in the blank
link |
If I want to see blank, the person or animal,
link |
I could see them within blank amount of time, right?
link |
If right now you wanted to see this person or animal
link |
or maybe even a thing,
link |
how long would it take you to reach them?
link |
Could be a day, could be a second,
link |
could be there right next to you.
link |
All you'd have to do is turn your head.
link |
If this person were to travel halfway around the world
link |
and land in their plane,
link |
I would expect to hear from them
link |
within blank minutes of them landing, okay?
link |
The answers of this of course will differ.
link |
Now I'd like you to answer this question.
link |
If I'd like to find myself,
link |
it would take me X amount of time.
link |
And of course, if you're listening to this
link |
and you're understanding it and you're of a rational mind,
link |
the answer to that should be zero seconds, instantaneous.
link |
You are always able to locate yourself in space and time,
link |
provided you are in the appropriate state of mind,
link |
meaning not to sleep for instance.
link |
That last question might seem somewhat silly,
link |
but it's a fundamentally important one
link |
because it illustrates the extremes
link |
at which we map our relationship to ourselves
link |
relative to other people and things.
link |
Now, if all of this sounds like a bunch of neuro psycho
link |
babble parsing of the obvious,
link |
I'd encourage you to suspend that belief for the moment.
link |
Because if you understand that all relationships
link |
are mapped in the brain and body
link |
through these three dimensions,
link |
space, time and closeness or proximity of space,
link |
proximity in time and proximity of attachment,
link |
how close or rich or bonded you are to someone.
link |
Well, if you can understand that,
link |
then it almost becomes obvious,
link |
or at least it becomes intuitive as to why
link |
after the loss of somebody in particular a death
link |
or the loss of an animal, this map has to be reordered.
link |
Because if we are attached to someone or an animal
link |
it is almost always on the basis of a lot
link |
of what we call episodic experience.
link |
A lot of episodic memories,
link |
memories of things that happened.
link |
Episodic memories are literally the conscious recollection
link |
of your experience of somebody or an animal or a thing.
link |
And within that memory,
link |
you have an understanding of what has happened with them
link |
in association to you, what's going on with them,
link |
where it happened, when it happened.
link |
You have a rich knowledge database
link |
that we call implicit knowledge, right?
link |
You might not be aware of it all the time,
link |
but it's within you of what this person is like
link |
and what they're doing in their life.
link |
When somebody is taken away from us for whatever reason,
link |
episodic memories persist for some period of time,
link |
and they are still linked to our feelings of attachment.
link |
Grief is the process of uncoupling,
link |
unbraiding and untangling that relationship
link |
between where people are in space, in time,
link |
and our attachment to them.
link |
What I mean by this is when somebody or an animal
link |
or a thing is taken from us,
link |
either by decision or by death or by circumstance,
link |
well, in that case,
link |
our entire memory bank and our ability to predict
link |
where and when they will be,
link |
and therefore when we can feed our attachment to them again,
link |
that whole map is obliterated,
link |
except that the attachment itself has not been disrupted.
link |
Assuming that you are deeply attached to someone
link |
or an animal or a thing, that attachment persists,
link |
and the grief process is one in which you have to reorder
link |
your understanding of them in space and in time.
link |
This is very, very hard to do.
link |
And for some people, it's almost impossible to do,
link |
at least at the outset of grief.
link |
This, in a very neurosciency way,
link |
explains this stage that Kubler-Ross described,
link |
which many, again, not all, but many people experience,
link |
which is one of denial.
link |
Well, when we have a rich catalog of experiences
link |
with somebody or of them,
link |
ideas about them and what they do,
link |
how they spend their day, what they do and don't do,
link |
where they do it, et cetera,
link |
well, that memory bank is not just flushed out
link |
the moment that we learn that they're no longer with us.
link |
What happens is the brain continues to make
link |
these predictions that they will be in a certain place
link |
or a certain time, right?
link |
That there'll be in a certain time zone
link |
or they'll walk in the door any moment.
link |
All of those predictions still hold.
link |
The neural activity continues.
link |
We call this reverberatory activity.
link |
That explains the yearning for and the desire to interact,
link |
and yet it's just beyond our reach
link |
because once they're gone,
link |
our brain still functions in a way,
link |
these neural circuits still function in a way
link |
that put us into an action state of seeking them,
link |
looking for them in the same location,
link |
expecting them to contact us at whatever frequency
link |
that we were used to hearing from them
link |
or that we could reach out to them
link |
and reliably get a response.
link |
It is immensely disorienting, in other words,
link |
to maintain a close attachment
link |
and at the same time to not be able to make predictions
link |
about where that person and more thing is in space and time.
link |
Now, if this seems somewhat abstract,
link |
I'm going to continue to flesh it out.
link |
And actually right now,
link |
I'd like to flesh it out with a real world example
link |
of grief and loss that comes to us
link |
from perhaps one of the greatest minds in human history
link |
and somebody who was intensely grounded in reality and logic
link |
and indeed the physics of the world.
link |
And the person I'm referring to is none other
link |
than the Nobel prize winning physicist, Richard Feynman.
link |
Many of you are probably familiar with Richard Feynman.
link |
Some of you perhaps are not.
link |
Richard Feynman was a Nobel prize winning physicist
link |
known for his thick New York accent.
link |
He was actually not from Brooklyn, as many people think.
link |
He was actually from Far Rockaway in Long Island.
link |
Thick New York accent, very personable, exceptional teacher,
link |
brilliant mind, hence the Nobel prize in physics.
link |
Also a quite funny and amusing person,
link |
told great anecdotes, et cetera.
link |
Feynman had a childhood sweetheart
link |
who turned out to be his first wife.
link |
Her name was Arlene.
link |
And it was well known that Feynman
link |
was absolutely in love with her.
link |
He would talk about her all the time.
link |
She had a profound influence on him and his thinking
link |
and ultimately on his public education efforts later.
link |
If you haven't already read books such as
link |
surely you're joking, Mr. Feynman,
link |
or what do you care what other people think,
link |
I encourage you to do so.
link |
And in fact, that quote,
link |
what do you care what other people think
link |
is actually a quote, not a Feynman,
link |
but of his first wife, Arlene,
link |
who sadly died at a very young age from tuberculosis.
link |
Why am I sharing Feynman's story
link |
of loss of his first bride?
link |
Well, the reason is Feynman continued to write letters
link |
to Arlene for a long period of time.
link |
This is well known only because after Feynman died,
link |
it was discovered that he kept an archive of letters
link |
to his deceased first wife.
link |
And even though he did eventually marry
link |
and in fact had many relationships with many people,
link |
and I think was married twice more,
link |
maybe it was once, maybe it was twice,
link |
the intensity of his grief,
link |
but also his lack of ability to transition his mind
link |
to a place where he understood that Arlene had died
link |
is one of the more profound examples
link |
of this inability to reconcile the logical world
link |
and the emotional world.
link |
And I'm now going to read to you a letter
link |
that Feynman wrote to Arlene.
link |
This was discovered after Feynman's death
link |
when they went through his desk and his belongings.
link |
And as I read this,
link |
you're going to hear some of the typical narrative of grief
link |
that is not unique to Feynman and his dead wife.
link |
But there are also some elements in there
link |
that I think you'll recognize as highlighting this disbelief
link |
and this dissociation between the reality
link |
of somebody's location in space and time
link |
and the emotional attachment that they hold for us.
link |
And therein lies the information
link |
about how to better navigate grief.
link |
So now I'm reading from the letter.
link |
This was a letter dated October 17th, 1946.
link |
It's not terribly long, but bear with me.
link |
Dear Arlene, I adore you, sweetheart.
link |
I know how much you like to hear that,
link |
but I don't only write it because you like it.
link |
I write it because it makes me warm all over inside
link |
to write it to you.
link |
It is such a terribly long time
link |
since I last wrote to you, almost two years.
link |
But I know you'll excuse me
link |
because you understand how I am, stubborn and realistic.
link |
And I thought there was no sense to writing.
link |
But now I know, my darling wife,
link |
that it is the right thing to do what I've delayed in doing
link |
and that I have done so much in the past.
link |
I wanted to tell you I love you.
link |
I want to love you.
link |
I will always love you.
link |
So here we can hear the intense emotional attachment
link |
that clearly has persisted.
link |
I find it hard to understand in my mind
link |
what it means to love you after you are dead.
link |
But I still want to comfort and take care of you.
link |
And I want you to love me and care for me.
link |
I want to have problems to discuss with you.
link |
I want to do little projects with you.
link |
I never thought until just now that we can do that.
link |
What should we do?
link |
We started to learn to make clothes together
link |
or learn Chinese or getting a movie projector.
link |
Can't I do something now?
link |
No, I am alone without you.
link |
And you were the idea woman and the general instigator
link |
of all our wild adventures.
link |
When you were sick, you worried
link |
because you could not give me something that you wanted.
link |
And you thought I needed.
link |
You needn't have worried.
link |
Just as I told you then there was no real need
link |
because I loved you in so many ways so much.
link |
And now it is clearly even more true.
link |
You can give me nothing now,
link |
yet I love you so that you stand in the way
link |
of my loving anything else.
link |
But I wanted you to stand there.
link |
You dead are so much better than anyone else alive.
link |
So you can really appreciate the depth
link |
and intensity of the attachment.
link |
Despite two years time, it clearly has not waned.
link |
I'll read the final paragraph now.
link |
I know you will assure me that I am foolish
link |
and that you want me to have full happiness
link |
and don't want to be in my way.
link |
I bet you are surprised that I don't even have a girlfriend
link |
except you sweetheart after two years.
link |
But you can't help it darling, nor can I.
link |
I don't understand it for I've met many girls
link |
and very nice ones and I don't want to remain alone.
link |
But in two or three meetings, they all seem ashes.
link |
You only are left to me.
link |
My darling wife, I do adore you.
link |
P.S., please excuse my not mailing this,
link |
but I don't know your new address.
link |
So there's a lot contained in this letter.
link |
We could parse it line by line,
link |
but I think it's fair to say that clearly
link |
there's an immense attachment that's been maintained.
link |
So that's that dimension of closeness of attachment.
link |
Clearly there's an understanding that she's dead.
link |
In fact, the last line of this love letter
link |
is my wife is dead, right?
link |
He now moves her into the third person, in fact,
link |
in that final line.
link |
So he understands this and yet he maintains the attachment.
link |
And the very last portion of the letter,
link |
the P.S., the postscript,
link |
I don't know your new address, right?
link |
Somewhat humorous in the typical vein
link |
of a Feynman writing or speech.
link |
He always had an intensely amusing
link |
and playful sense of humor.
link |
And yet there's something really contained in this,
link |
I don't think we're reading into this too much,
link |
in that he doesn't know where to find her.
link |
He feels her as very real.
link |
And yet he doesn't know where to find her.
link |
He doesn't know her address.
link |
He obviously knows she's dead,
link |
so there's nowhere to mail it to.
link |
The reason I shared this letter with you,
link |
as opposed to one of the almost infinite number
link |
of other letters that have been written by poets and authors
link |
and scientists and everyday people,
link |
is that it really encapsulates all three dimensions
link |
of attachment and grief.
link |
These notions of space, where is something or somebody?
link |
Time, this dimension of how long would it take me
link |
to reach them or for them to reach me?
link |
What would it take in terms of time to be reunited?
link |
And then that last dimension of closeness.
link |
And the letter beautifully illustrates the fact
link |
that in grief we maintain that sense of closeness
link |
and yet we have to uncouple it
link |
from these other two dimensions,
link |
as we're referring to space and time.
link |
So with this current understanding in mind,
link |
a few things start to become obvious
link |
and entirely normal to us in the best
link |
and most healthy sense of the word normal.
link |
For instance, if you've lost somebody or an animal
link |
or even a thing that was vitally important to you,
link |
it should make perfect sense to you
link |
as to why you keep looking for that person.
link |
I recall this in my own life,
link |
I had the unfortunate circumstance of my graduate advisor
link |
who I was very close with, died quite young, breast cancer.
link |
And her daughter, she has two daughters,
link |
kept her cell phone and would occasionally call me.
link |
I had a quite close relationship to their family.
link |
And when it would come in,
link |
the number would pop up on my phone of not the daughter,
link |
but the name that showed up was of my graduate advisor.
link |
So for years after she died,
link |
my initial impulse when the phone would ring was,
link |
oh my goodness, she's calling.
link |
It was a reflexive excitement
link |
because I truly always enjoyed hearing from her.
link |
She was a wonderful, incredibly wonderful person,
link |
Similarly, when somebody passes away,
link |
we will find ourselves looking into a room
link |
expecting to see them there
link |
or expecting them to knock on the door any moment
link |
or to call on Sunday morning, as it were.
link |
Those expectations, those predictions that the brain
link |
is making are entirely normal
link |
because they are based on that deep catalog
link |
of episodic memory that you maintain about that person.
link |
Again, the depth and richness of that catalog scaling,
link |
of course, in direct relation to how close you were
link |
with that person, right?
link |
Closer to somebody means more information about them,
link |
more information about them means your brain
link |
has a lot of implicit, unconscious notions
link |
of when and where and how they show up.
link |
So the fact that your brain,
link |
and indeed sometimes your body,
link |
reacts to the expectation that they'll be there
link |
is entirely normal.
link |
It's simply an activation of this map
link |
that involves closeness, space, and time.
link |
Not surprisingly then, the reordering of that map
link |
that's required in order to move
link |
through the grieving process
link |
is going to involve some remapping.
link |
And you as the person grieving
link |
have the opportunity to ask which node, as it's called,
link |
which element or dimension within that map
link |
are you going to focus on?
link |
Some people really try hard to disengage with
link |
and remap their sense of emotional closeness to the person.
link |
That is, it's so unbelievably overwhelming to them
link |
that the person is no longer accessible,
link |
that they try and change their ideas
link |
about how close they really were.
link |
They try and change their emotional attachment
link |
to the person after they've died.
link |
Clearly in the example that I gave in the Feynman letter,
link |
that's not the case.
link |
The attachment seems indeed quite fixed
link |
and not going anywhere.
link |
Psychologists and neuroscientists generally agree
link |
that the best way to approach moving through grief
link |
is actually to remap these dimensions
link |
while maintaining the close sense of attachment
link |
to the person by not in any way trying to undermine
link |
the intensity of the attachment
link |
or how important it was to you.
link |
So we'll now talk about how that process works
link |
and the different entry points, as they're called,
link |
to engaging in that process.
link |
So one straightforward way to think about
link |
this state of mind and body that we call grief
link |
is that the idea that someone or an animal or a thing
link |
simply does not exist anymore
link |
is not something that the brain can easily conceptualize.
link |
And the reason for that is that we,
link |
as beings that have a brain,
link |
and a brain as an organ that makes predictions,
link |
tends to rely more on experience than knowledge.
link |
In other words, the knowledge that someone or an animal
link |
or a thing is gone, that it doesn't exist,
link |
at least not in the dimensionality
link |
that we were accustomed to relating to them in,
link |
is something that we can understand logically,
link |
but that emotionally is very hard to undo
link |
and from a memory perspective is very hard to undo.
link |
So it's not just that we are in a state
link |
of emotional disbelief, it's that we have neurons,
link |
literally nerve cells and neural circuits,
link |
connections between nerve cells that are dedicated
link |
to this vast implicit knowledge of all the things we know
link |
about that person, animal or thing.
link |
And just because they are no longer in the dimensionality,
link |
meaning in the configuration alive or present in our life
link |
that they were before, doesn't eliminate those memories.
link |
Those memories persist.
link |
And so anytime we call to mind the person's name,
link |
or we call to mind things that remind us of them,
link |
or we suddenly feel the desire to engage with them,
link |
the memories, those episodic implicit memories,
link |
as they're called, all that menu and library of knowledge
link |
slams us straight in the face and pushes us into a mode
link |
of wanting to act in a way that's consistent
link |
with them still being here in the way that all
link |
that knowledge told us they were when we acquired it.
link |
That's a very long-winded way of saying
link |
that there's nothing wrong about the emotional state
link |
when we are in a state of grief.
link |
In fact, quite the opposite.
link |
But there is something wrong about the memories
link |
because the memories are based on our prior knowledge
link |
of them and those memories actually do not apply
link |
to our current knowledge of them.
link |
And again, even though our brain is a prediction machine
link |
and it's a very good one, it's not perfect.
link |
In fact, it's far from perfect.
link |
So really moving through grief is a process
link |
of understanding how relationships are mapped in the brain,
link |
space, time, and closeness, also called attachment,
link |
understanding those three dimensions,
link |
understanding that they are closely linked,
link |
and then understanding that simply the knowledge
link |
that somebody or something or an animal
link |
isn't accessible to us does not allow us to discard
link |
of all the knowledge that we have.
link |
And as a consequence,
link |
our brain is constantly generating expectations
link |
of how to access them,
link |
even if we know that's completely irrational.
link |
Now, this should, I would hope,
link |
assist you in moving through grief.
link |
It's not a tool of the sort of like a switch
link |
that you can flip and suddenly not feel grief,
link |
but it does point to a specific set of mechanisms
link |
or a specific set of steps that you can engage
link |
in order to start to move through the grieving process
link |
in the most adaptive and effective way,
link |
and in a way that still holds in mind
link |
your close attachment to the person.
link |
So let's talk about some of the tools
link |
for adaptively moving through grief.
link |
These are tools gleaned from the research psychology,
link |
the clinical psychology, and the neuroscience literature.
link |
So I've synthesized my understanding
link |
of those three literatures to provide the tools
link |
that I'm about to describe.
link |
The first one involves the acknowledgement
link |
and really the understanding
link |
that you don't want to disengage
link |
or dismantle your real attachment
link |
to someone, an animal, or a thing.
link |
That's a real thing,
link |
and there is actually no adaptive reason
link |
to try and persuade yourself or numb yourself
link |
or somehow avoid the thinking
link |
of just how much they meant to you.
link |
What is important, however,
link |
is that you make some effort to shift your mindset
link |
and your understanding of that person
link |
in a way that holds in mind that yes, indeed,
link |
the attachment is very real,
link |
and in some cases is very, very intense,
link |
but is now going to be uncoupled
link |
from the other two dimensions of the map,
link |
namely space and time.
link |
So again, just to make absolutely clear,
link |
there's no reason to try and convince yourself
link |
that you weren't actually that close to this person
link |
There's no reason to try
link |
and reduce the intensity of that attachment.
link |
you want to anchor yourself to that attachment,
link |
but you want to make sure that your thoughts
link |
about the person and your feelings
link |
about the person are not oriented toward,
link |
or in reference to, I should say, that map,
link |
that deep catalog of memories that you had.
link |
Now, this is not simply a fancy way
link |
of saying don't live in the past.
link |
This is saying you need to maintain your sense of attachment
link |
but you need to start making predictions
link |
and understanding about how you're going to engage
link |
with that attachment,
link |
how you're going to feel those things
link |
without the expectation that things
link |
that once happened before are going to happen again.
link |
So it's a complicated process, you can imagine,
link |
but you really want to hold and register two things at once.
link |
It's sort of like spinning two plates at once,
link |
and therefore it's going to feel like effort.
link |
One way to do this is to set aside a dedicated period
link |
of time of maybe five or 10,
link |
maybe even as much as 30 minutes,
link |
or depending on your capacity, 30 to 45 minutes,
link |
in which you are going to feel deeply into your closeness
link |
and your attachment to that person, animal, or thing.
link |
But you're consciously going to try and prevent yourself
link |
from thinking about a couple of categories of things.
link |
First of all, you want to actively try and disengage
link |
from any attempt to engage
link |
in what's called counterfactual thinking, the what-ifs.
link |
What if I had called them a day earlier?
link |
What if they had taken a different route home?
link |
What if I had taken a different route home?
link |
These counterfactual modes of thinking
link |
are an infinite landscape of possibility,
link |
and they are very closely tied to guilt.
link |
Guilt is an interesting emotion.
link |
We should probably do an entire episode about guilt.
link |
But guilt, as defined by psychologists and neuroscientists,
link |
is actually a way of assigning ourselves more agency,
link |
more capability of controlling reality than actually exists.
link |
And it's a very slippery slope, and I want to be clear,
link |
it's not the case that guilt
link |
is never an appropriate response,
link |
but in the context of grieving, guilt is very precarious
link |
because in thinking I could have done this,
link |
or if I had only done that,
link |
you are essentially exploring an infinite landscape
link |
of things that you can never refute.
link |
You will never know that had you not gone
link |
down a different path,
link |
or they had not taken a particular path in life
link |
that things would have turned out different,
link |
but you can't know that it would have worked as well,
link |
meaning you actually don't know that your what-ifs are true
link |
and you don't know that they're not true.
link |
And so as an infinite space, it's a very precarious one,
link |
and it will not allow you to uncouple
link |
that intense emotional attachment
link |
that I'm telling you is actually vital to hold onto
link |
from that catalog of episodic memory that you've established.
link |
In fact, it's going to strengthen those bonds.
link |
So in this dedicated five or 10 or 30,
link |
whatever period of time you can tolerate
link |
and maintain focus,
link |
the idea is to think about your attachment in a rich way
link |
and to perhaps even experience that in your brain and body.
link |
I think if you're in a stage of grief
link |
that actually will be fairly reflexive to do,
link |
but to try as much as possible to hold that grief
link |
in the present and to be connected
link |
to your immediate physical environment.
link |
So you want to orient yourself in current space and time
link |
rather than focus on memories
link |
or what you would have liked to see happen
link |
or the wish that they were still there
link |
while at the same time thinking about the depth
link |
and richness of that attachment.
link |
This is obviously a tight rope walk, so to speak.
link |
It's an emotionally challenging
link |
and sometimes even will be experienced
link |
as a physically challenging tool or experience.
link |
But in our understanding of how attachments
link |
and grief are represented in the brain,
link |
this can be an immensely beneficial practice
link |
because it is the first step.
link |
And indeed it represents many of the steps in the voyage
link |
from the initial shock of loss
link |
to our ability to hold in mind somebody
link |
or an animal or a thing in a way that still allows us
link |
to feel the depth and fullness of connection to them
link |
without feeling the yearning,
link |
that reaching for the glass of water
link |
that unfortunately will never be resolved.
link |
Keep in mind that as you embark on this process,
link |
it is entirely normal for your mind
link |
to flip into various states of expectation
link |
that they're suddenly going to be there.
link |
In fact, because of the closeness
link |
of these three dimensions in the map,
link |
space, time and attachment,
link |
it's entirely normal that when you start to think
link |
about your attachment to somebody or an animal or a thing,
link |
that you almost start to experience them
link |
as present in that environment.
link |
I'll share with you a somewhat bizarre
link |
or it sounds bizarre to articulate out loud,
link |
but many of you perhaps will resonate with this.
link |
For years after my graduate advisor died,
link |
I would get an experience of someone touching the back
link |
of my neck when I would think about her.
link |
And that was not an experience I ever had with her, right?
link |
It was a professional relationship.
link |
I don't ever recall her touching the back of my neck
link |
or me touching the back of my neck in her presence,
link |
at least not on a regular basis.
link |
So it was very perplexing to me.
link |
And then I encountered this incredible literature on grief,
link |
which said the following.
link |
Grief in many ways is like a phantom limb.
link |
For those of you that aren't familiar,
link |
many people who experience amputation of a limb,
link |
either through surgery or accident or otherwise,
link |
will feel in a very genuine way
link |
that the limb is still present,
link |
even though when they look for the limb, it's not there.
link |
So they can feel pain in limbs.
link |
They can feel the sensation of touch.
link |
There's some famous experiments from the neurologist
link |
and my former colleague at University of California,
link |
San Diego, who goes by his last name, Ramachandran.
link |
Some people just call him Rama.
link |
He's an incredible scientist
link |
and has done a lot of really important work,
link |
in particular on phantom limb, among other things.
link |
And has done some beautiful experiments
link |
showing that people who have phantom limb pain
link |
or that are experiencing different sensations
link |
in their phantom limb, that can be very intrusive,
link |
much in the same way that expecting someone
link |
to walk through the door who you happen to know is deceased
link |
can be very intrusive.
link |
Ramachandran's done beautiful experiments
link |
showing that if you give people what's called a mirror box,
link |
this is a box in which you insert an intact limb,
link |
and there are some mirrors that give you the visual impression
link |
that the other limb is still present,
link |
and you move the intact limb
link |
and you get a mirror image of the non-existent,
link |
but nonetheless visual image of the phantom limb moving,
link |
that you can resolve some of the pain of a limb
link |
that feels otherwise cramped up.
link |
In other words, the visual perception
link |
can reverse some of these phantom sensations.
link |
In many ways, the phantom limb scenario
link |
and what I described about a sensation
link |
of being touched on the back of the neck
link |
or this feeling that we have when we engage in the thinking
link |
and the emotions of our attachment
link |
to someone, an animal, or a thing
link |
is very much like a phantom limb,
link |
only it exists in the emotional space,
link |
and it exists because it is reactivation
link |
of these maps about space, time, and person.
link |
And so if the process of moving through grief adaptively
link |
in a healthy way involves maintaining the attachment,
link |
but uncoupling that attachment
link |
from the space and time representation of that person,
link |
animal, or thing that we had before,
link |
well, then the question becomes,
link |
where should we place our expectation of them, right?
link |
Now, that of course will vary from person to person.
link |
Some people with particular religious beliefs
link |
will indeed believe that the soul of the person,
link |
the molecules of the person have been reordered
link |
and exist in some sort of either distributed domain, right?
link |
That they are in everything or they are in one location.
link |
I'm not here to speak to that one way or the other.
link |
There's no good experiment I know
link |
either to prove or disprove that, nor would I want to.
link |
It's not the job of science, frankly.
link |
However, allowing ourselves to place notions
link |
of where that person, animal, or thing is
link |
in their current new configuration, whatever that might be,
link |
ashes, dashes, dust to dust,
link |
or that the person's soul comes out of their body,
link |
these are all the different variations
link |
that people hear, or some people think,
link |
well, it's just molecules and they disintegrate
link |
and are reordered and come up as the plants and the trees.
link |
Again, a near infinite number of possibilities
link |
and it depends a lot on personal belief.
link |
It is, however, essential that no matter what you believe,
link |
that you have some firm representation
link |
of where that person, animal, or thing is
link |
so that you can plug it into this map,
link |
this three-dimensional map of space, time, and attachment.
link |
The process of moving through grief
link |
can't simply be that we hold onto the attachment
link |
and we discard with any understanding
link |
of where they are in space and time.
link |
And actually, the letter that Feynman wrote
link |
to his deceased wife, Arlene,
link |
again, so beautifully and really poignantly
link |
illustrates the fact that he doesn't really know
link |
where to find her.
link |
On the one hand, he really understands that she's gone
link |
and on the other hand, he understands
link |
that he still very much expects her to be there,
link |
that he would like to mail the letter,
link |
but then, of course, in this final, somewhat humorous line,
link |
he doesn't know where to send the letter, he tells us.
link |
What's very clear and I think is very healthy
link |
is the fact that the emotional bond is still there,
link |
that that is maintained.
link |
And so this tool, if you will, of dedicated blocks of time
link |
for really spending some effort,
link |
and it is indeed effort to access the emotional connection
link |
while starting to uncouple the other nodes of the map,
link |
as it were, is something that is hard.
link |
You should expect it to be hard,
link |
but in terms of the options one has
link |
in order to deal with grief,
link |
it is indeed the most adaptive way to go about it.
link |
You're not trying to avoid thinking about it.
link |
You're not engaging in this counterfactual thinking,
link |
the what if, what if, what if.
link |
You're not drowning it out with substances
link |
or delusion or with other ways of distracting yourself.
link |
So in that sense, it is truly adaptive.
link |
Now, of course, I don't want to imply
link |
that I'm a clinical psychologist, I'm certainly not.
link |
There is absolutely a place
link |
for working with a trained professional
link |
to move through grief, especially these situations,
link |
these one in 10 people who deal
link |
with what's called complicated grief
link |
or very prolonged grief.
link |
Those are somewhat different things,
link |
but in general point to the fact
link |
that there are people who have an exceptionally hard time
link |
moving through grief.
link |
We'll talk about who those people are
link |
and ways to move through them
link |
with or without a professional to assist you.
link |
But nonetheless, we're starting to understand
link |
on the basis of neuroscience,
link |
what some of the more adaptive and functional ways
link |
of moving through grief are.
link |
In order to really understand how a tool of the sort
link |
that we're describing ought to work
link |
and what it's designed to accomplish at a mechanistic level,
link |
I'd like to teach you about a very important aspect
link |
of your brain function that has everything to do with grief
link |
and the process of moving through grief,
link |
but has a lot to do with other aspects
link |
of our life experience as well.
link |
Some of you are probably familiar
link |
with a brain area called the hippocampus.
link |
The hippocampus is a structure that's involved
link |
in the formation of new memories,
link |
but not the maintenance of memories.
link |
I discussed the hippocampus in detail
link |
in our episode on memory and our episode
link |
with our guest, Dr. Wendy Suzuki from New York University,
link |
an expert on learning and memory.
link |
During those two discussions,
link |
I did not however touch into what the different cell types
link |
are in the hippocampus and the different roles they perform.
link |
And it turns out that there are indeed different cell types
link |
in the hippocampus and they performed very different roles
link |
that are absolutely central to the grief process.
link |
We have cells in our hippocampus,
link |
meaning you have cells in your hippocampus.
link |
These cells are neurons, nerve cells that fire anytime or,
link |
and when we say fire, I should just remind you.
link |
I mean, have electrical activity.
link |
Anytime that we enter a particular familiar location.
link |
So for instance, think about your bedroom
link |
and think about where the bed is.
link |
As you're doing that, these so-called place cells are firing
link |
not necessarily to represent that it's a bed
link |
at that location, but to represent the location itself.
link |
We also have neurons in our hippocampus
link |
and elsewhere in our brain, I should say,
link |
that represent proximity.
link |
So for instance, if you were to wake up
link |
in the middle of the night and walk into the kitchen
link |
and it's somewhat dark and you orient toward the sink
link |
to get yourself a glass of water or to the refrigerator
link |
to get yourself something to drink or to eat,
link |
as you get close to the sink or the refrigerator,
link |
there are neurons in your hippocampus
link |
that are going to start engaging electrical activity
link |
because you are in the mere expected proximity
link |
of the sink or refrigerator and you know where they are,
link |
hence the word expected.
link |
Now that all seems fine and good.
link |
You've got neurons that represent where things are
link |
and sort of goes without saying that those same neurons
link |
map to our emotional attachments.
link |
We generally know where to find our loved ones,
link |
even if they don't live with us,
link |
we generally know what city they're in.
link |
Even if they're traveling,
link |
we generally have a sense of where they're traveling
link |
or the general area in which they're traveling.
link |
Place cells and proximity cells are involved
link |
in that kind of mapping and representations as well.
link |
Now there's a third kind of cell
link |
that's particularly important for the sort of tool
link |
that we were talking about earlier,
link |
that tool of holding onto the emotional attachment
link |
to somebody and yet trying to deliberately
link |
remap our understanding of where they are
link |
in space and time.
link |
And that has to do with a category of cells
link |
called trace cells.
link |
Trace cells were discovered by a number of laboratories.
link |
I think the most renowned of those is the Moser Laboratory.
link |
The Mosers are a couple, actually,
link |
they were a couple, they're now,
link |
I think amicably separated or divorced.
link |
That's not what this episode's about.
link |
If I have that wrong, forgive me,
link |
Edvard and Brittan are their names.
link |
Their relationship isn't what's important,
link |
except what is important is the work that they did together
link |
in one form or another,
link |
which was very important work establishing
link |
this category of cells in the,
link |
not just in the hippocampus,
link |
but in an area of the brain called the entorhinal cortex
link |
that act as a sort of coordinate system
link |
to orient us in space and time.
link |
Trace cells are activated when we expect something
link |
to be at a given location, but it's not there.
link |
Experiments done in their laboratory
link |
and in other laboratories have shown that, for instance,
link |
if you give a rodent or frankly a person,
link |
a object that always resides at the same location
link |
and we reach to it in order to access it,
link |
let's say where your coffee maker is in the morning.
link |
I do a pour over coffee.
link |
If I'm drinking coffee or mate, I'll do a pour over.
link |
It's always more or less in the same location.
link |
And so there are place cells and proximity cells
link |
that relate to my being able to find
link |
that pour over coffee cone thing.
link |
However, if I were to go to that location
link |
and it wasn't there, the trace cells,
link |
these neurons in my hippocampus
link |
and an entorhinal cortex and elsewhere,
link |
because again, these cells are connected
link |
by way of circuitry, by way of connections,
link |
those trace cells would fire.
link |
We could even call it a trace circuit.
link |
It's a circuit that has an expectation
link |
that something will be in a location,
link |
but when something is not at that location,
link |
this circuit becomes active.
link |
This is important because what we're talking about here
link |
is a neural circuit and a set of neurons
link |
that are responsible not for the presence of something,
link |
but the absence of something.
link |
We have every reason to believe
link |
based on neuroimaging studies and studies in animal models,
link |
that trace cells become very active in the immediate stage
link |
after the loss of a loved one.
link |
That the brain and our maps of the person, place, or thing
link |
that we know cognitively, we understand,
link |
we even believe they are gone.
link |
They are not accessible for whatever reason,
link |
death or otherwise.
link |
And yet we have neurons that are firing
link |
to reveal that absence to us.
link |
And these neurons are closely associated with neurons
link |
that tell us where things ought to be.
link |
So if you feel the expectation or you sense
link |
that somebody should walk through the door any moment
link |
or call at any moment or be next to you when you wake up,
link |
and yet you cognitively understand that they won't,
link |
that there's no real reason why they should
link |
because they are indeed gone, you are not crazy.
link |
In fact, it's simply a reflection of the normal functioning
link |
of these trace cells and trace circuits.
link |
Now I'd like to consider why two people,
link |
both who are intensely attached to a person
link |
that is no longer there can experience the grief
link |
of the loss of that person in such different ways.
link |
This is often observed.
link |
You can have, you know, God forbid, incredibly sadly,
link |
in cases where a child is lost,
link |
where both parents are grieving intensely,
link |
but one seems to feel it at a emotional depth and level
link |
that seems distinct from the other.
link |
Now, of course, keep in mind
link |
that we never really know how other people are feeling.
link |
This is something actually that was raised in the episode
link |
where I interviewed a psychiatrist
link |
and researcher colleague of mine from Stanford,
link |
As a psychiatrist, I heard him say once
link |
that we really don't know how other people feel.
link |
In fact, a lot of the times we don't even really know
link |
how we feel, or at least describing that
link |
is quite challenging with language often.
link |
And indeed that is the case.
link |
We don't really know how other people feel.
link |
There's no clear way of knowing
link |
that the expression someone else has
link |
or whether or not they're crying or not,
link |
or their body language really represents
link |
how they feel inside.
link |
So that is important to keep in mind.
link |
Nonetheless, there does seem to be a sort of a split
link |
among people and indeed among animals as well,
link |
even within a species in terms of how intensely they feel,
link |
the yearning aspect of grief.
link |
And it appears based on a number of different lines
link |
of evidence that that relates to this molecule
link |
that some of you have probably heard of, which is oxytocin.
link |
Oxytocin is a hormone slash peptide.
link |
A peptide just means a protein, generally a small protein.
link |
And a hormone is generally something
link |
that functions at numerous locations in the body
link |
to impact numerous organs and areas of the brain.
link |
So a peptide can be a hormone and a hormone can be a peptide.
link |
They are not mutually exclusive.
link |
Oxytocin has a variety of roles in the brain and body.
link |
It's involved in milk let down during lactation.
link |
It's involved in pair bonding, both in males and females.
link |
It's involved in bonding of parent to child
link |
and indeed between romantic partners, et cetera, et cetera.
link |
Let's talk about some of the animal models that inform us
link |
about the potential roles of oxytocin
link |
in the grieving process.
link |
There's a species of animal called the prairie vole.
link |
And believe it or not, the prairie vole
link |
has been studied fairly extensively
link |
by neuroscience and psychology researchers.
link |
In fact, our former director
link |
of the National Institutes of Mental Health, Tom Insel,
link |
his laboratory focused quite heavily on prairie voles.
link |
Prairie voles are one species of animal,
link |
but depending on where they live,
link |
you find that some prairie voles are monogamous.
link |
That is, they mate with the same prairie vole for life.
link |
They raise litters of little prairie voles for life
link |
and other prairie voles generally
link |
that live in different locations in the wild
link |
are non-monogamous, sometimes called polygamous.
link |
The neurochemical and circuit basis
link |
for this monogamy versus non-monogamy are quite interesting.
link |
However, in the context of grief and attachment,
link |
the prairie voles have taught us a lot
link |
and they've taught us a lot
link |
through the following experiment.
link |
Take two prairie voles that are coupled up,
link |
so these would be monogamous prairie voles
link |
that have established a couple-dom.
link |
I guess you would call that a prairie vold-dom, anyway.
link |
Put them in a cage together, they mate together,
link |
they raise young together, and then you separate them.
link |
You literally put a physical barrier
link |
between the two of them and you can evaluate
link |
how strongly one prairie vole will work
link |
to get access to the other prairie vole, right?
link |
This is sort of the Romeo and Juliet
link |
of prairie vole experiments.
link |
And what you observe is that the monogamous prairie voles
link |
will work very hard to get back to their mate,
link |
to get access to their mate.
link |
They will lever press, they'll even walk across
link |
a metal plate that they get an electrical shock.
link |
They will work very, very hard.
link |
They will cross rivers and valleys, if you will,
link |
in the experimental context, that is.
link |
The polygamous prairie voles, and again,
link |
we don't know if they're polyamorous,
link |
we don't know what they feel, right?
link |
We don't know if they're in love
link |
or if they're motivated simply for other things,
link |
but the non-monogamous prairie voles
link |
will not work as hard to access a prairie vole partner.
link |
Now, you could argue that's because they expect
link |
that there will be other prairie vole partners,
link |
but even if they've never experienced another prairie vole
link |
partner, they won't work quite as hard to get back
link |
in connection with this other prairie vole
link |
to mate or otherwise.
link |
This turns out to be interesting
link |
when you start to explore the patterns
link |
of so-called oxytocin receptors in the brain.
link |
To make a long story short,
link |
and to also bridge to the human literature,
link |
it turns out that the monogamous prairie voles
link |
have far more oxytocin receptors in this brain area
link |
that I mentioned earlier, the nucleus accumbens.
link |
And again, to remind you, the nucleus accumbens
link |
is a brain area associated with motivation,
link |
craving, and pursuit.
link |
So it's as if the monogamous prairie voles
link |
have a capacity to link the attachment circuitry
link |
and the molecules of attachment, in this case, oxytocin,
link |
to reward pathways and to motivational pathways.
link |
Polygamous, or we should say non-monogamous prairie voles
link |
However, they have less oxytocin receptors.
link |
So in other words, non-monogamous prairie voles
link |
seem to have less yearning for attachment overall,
link |
at least to a single individual prairie vole.
link |
And when we look at the human literature
link |
in terms of oxytocin receptor expression
link |
and brain imaging experiments and so on,
link |
what you find is the same.
link |
The people that experience intense grief
link |
and a deep yearning and a motivation to reconnect
link |
with the person, animal, or thing that is lost,
link |
in many cases have heightened levels of oxytocin,
link |
specifically, or I should say oxytocin receptors
link |
to be exact, specifically within the brain regions
link |
associated with craving and pursuit.
link |
So for those of you that find yourself
link |
in this kind of stuck mode,
link |
this persistence of trying to reach into the past
link |
or wishful thinking, this counterfactual thinking,
link |
if only, if only, if only,
link |
you don't necessarily want to pathologize that thinking.
link |
First of all, we should acknowledge
link |
that it's not necessarily adaptive.
link |
And in fact, in the complete loss of somebody,
link |
or if somebody says they don't want anything to do
link |
with you ever again, by all means,
link |
if that's expressed clearly,
link |
then you need to accept that reality.
link |
But the yearning, the desire, and the impulsivity,
link |
the kind of leaning in and at a almost reflexive way
link |
to try and access that person again,
link |
to text them, to want to hear from them could,
link |
and I have to highlight could reflect the fact
link |
that you just so happen to have more oxytocin receptors
link |
or maybe more oxytocin overall in this brain area
link |
that's associated with motivation and pursuit.
link |
It does not necessarily mean that you are more capable
link |
of attachment than people who move
link |
through grief more quickly.
link |
And I should say that people move through grief
link |
at different rates, even if two people lost the same person
link |
or same animal, people move through this at different rates.
link |
And some of that is no doubt psychological,
link |
but some of it no doubt is also neurochemical
link |
And in sharing this with you,
link |
I hope it sheds some understanding
link |
and perhaps even some compassion for people
link |
who are moving through things more quickly
link |
or in a different way.
link |
And of course, it should also, I would hope,
link |
shed compassion and understanding for people
link |
that seem incapable of quote unquote, moving on.
link |
It's taking them far longer to move on.
link |
Earlier, we talked about complicated grief,
link |
non-complicated grief and prolonged grief disorder.
link |
And I should say that the precise divisions
link |
between these categories is not very precise.
link |
It takes a really trained expert to be able to identify
link |
whether or not somebody is
link |
in the prolonged grief disorder category,
link |
complicated or non-complicated grief.
link |
There's actually a set of questionnaires
link |
that I invite you to answer if you like.
link |
They were provided, or I should say I access them
link |
through a public site on Mary Frances O'Connor's webpage.
link |
We'll put them in the show note captions.
link |
You actually can submit those answers in an anonymous way
link |
to a study that she's doing.
link |
She has several surveys,
link |
one for loss of a romantic relationship,
link |
other for loss due to death of somebody,
link |
and still another one that relates to homesickness.
link |
And it's also available in several different languages.
link |
So I provide a link to that website.
link |
It's very easy to download.
link |
There's no cost to that at all.
link |
You can contribute to the scientific data collection process
link |
And I do believe that you get your scores back
link |
or an interpretation of your scores by participating there.
link |
When Mary Frances O'Connor hopefully comes on the podcast,
link |
she can tell us some more of the detail
link |
about separating out this prolonged grief disorder,
link |
complicated and uncomplicated grief.
link |
But in the meantime,
link |
it's very clear that people move through grief
link |
at different rates.
link |
And as I mentioned just a moment ago,
link |
that this is entirely normal,
link |
probably has a basis in neurochemicals
link |
and hormones such as oxytocin.
link |
There are probably other reasons as well.
link |
In fact, we can assume with almost certainty
link |
that there are other reasons as well.
link |
Nonetheless, I think it is really important to think about
link |
why some people might have a harder time
link |
moving through grief due to life circumstance,
link |
innate differences and so on.
link |
There's a very nice set of studies,
link |
but one in particular entitled
link |
Catecholamine Predictors of Complicated Grief Outcomes.
link |
Here again, the first author is Mary Frances O'Connor
link |
reminding us that she's done so much important work
link |
This paper has several conclusions,
link |
but one of the key conclusions
link |
is that this particular category of molecules
link |
we call the catecholamines.
link |
The catecholamines include epinephrine,
link |
which is also adrenaline,
link |
norepinephrine, which is noradrenaline
link |
and dopamine, which you've learned about before.
link |
Here I'm just going to paraphrase
link |
or I'll read directly actually.
link |
What they found was that participants,
link |
again, this is human subjects,
link |
with the highest levels of epinephrine,
link |
of adrenaline pre-treatment,
link |
had the highest levels of complicated grief symptoms
link |
post-treatment and that could account
link |
for their baseline level of symptoms.
link |
What this means is that people
link |
that have a lot of circulating adrenaline,
link |
we might even call these people who are
link |
or typically reside at a higher level of autonomic arousal.
link |
We have an autonomic nervous system
link |
that dictates how calm or alert or stressed
link |
we happen to be just at baseline.
link |
People who tend to be more alert and anxious at baseline
link |
prior to any grief episode tend to have,
link |
or statistically on average we should say,
link |
are more likely to experience complicated grief
link |
and maybe even prolonged grief symptoms.
link |
So if you're somebody that is anticipating losing someone
link |
or an animal or a thing at some point,
link |
and I think that really means everybody,
link |
utilizing tools to adjust your epinephrine,
link |
your adrenaline levels down has a number
link |
of important benefits, improving sleep,
link |
health metrics, et cetera.
link |
There are tools to do that.
link |
We have an episode on mastering stress
link |
that you can find at our website,
link |
humanlab.com, it has a lot of behavioral tools
link |
that are backed by science.
link |
Some of work that was done in my laboratory,
link |
but certainly other laboratories as well
link |
that will allow you to control your autonomic nervous system
link |
both in real time and reduce the overall level of stress
link |
and even chronic activation of the so-called sympathetic arm
link |
of the autonomic nervous system,
link |
which is just fancy geek speak for saying,
link |
there are tools to help you be calm,
link |
not just for sake of navigating daily stress,
link |
but as this paper illustrates,
link |
for anticipating the fact that at some point
link |
you will lose somebody, an animal or a thing.
link |
And there is a way to move through that process
link |
that we call healthy normal grieving.
link |
And then there's the so-called complicated grief
link |
or prolonged grief disorders that reflect immense challenge
link |
in moving through grief at a reasonable rate.
link |
So you can somewhat inoculate yourself
link |
against complicated or prolonged grief
link |
by reducing your resting levels of,
link |
or your pre-loss levels of epinephrine, of adrenaline.
link |
And again, there are excellent tools to do that.
link |
I won't review them here for sake of time,
link |
but they're timestamped and you can access those easily.
link |
Again, zero cost tools.
link |
Going back to this paper,
link |
catecholamine predictors
link |
of complicated grief treatment outcomes
link |
should say that not only did participants
link |
with the highest levels of adrenaline
link |
have the highest levels of complicated grief symptoms
link |
post-treatment, but the predictive relationship
link |
between these two things, adrenaline and complicated grief,
link |
was not seen in depression.
link |
And I find that incredibly interesting
link |
because it further separates depression from grieving
link |
and grieving from depression.
link |
A resounding theme again and again,
link |
grieving is not depression
link |
and depression is not necessarily grieving.
link |
They can co-exist, but they are separable as well
link |
and indeed reflect separate brain circuitries entirely.
link |
So the conclusion they draw is that the present study
link |
supports the hypothesis that catecholamine levels,
link |
again, epinephrine, dopamine, norepinephrine,
link |
are the catecholamines, are affected by bereavement
link |
and in turn can affect the ability of those
link |
with complicated grief to benefit from psychotherapy.
link |
So what does all this mean?
link |
What this means is we can prepare ourselves
link |
to be in a better state to access,
link |
yes, access grief when it's appropriate.
link |
And indeed grief is the appropriate response
link |
when we lose someone, an animal or a thing
link |
that we are closely attached to.
link |
And yet to be able to move through that at a pace
link |
and in a way that is most adaptive for us.
link |
And to just again highlight what adaptive means,
link |
it does not mean dissociating from the attachment
link |
to the person, animal or thing.
link |
I just want to pause for a second
link |
and mention why I keep repeating person, animal or thing.
link |
I'm saying that because while grieving the loss of a person
link |
or a relationship with a person doesn't have to be
link |
through death, of course, but death or otherwise
link |
is something that we all can intuitively understand
link |
even if we haven't experienced it.
link |
We are capable of achieving great attachments
link |
to animals as well.
link |
And while the loss of a thing of an object
link |
in no way, shape or form approximately
link |
the loss of a person or an animal,
link |
I would never suggest that it does.
link |
It would also be naive and unfair of me
link |
or anyone else to suggest that things can't hold
link |
immense importance to us and that the loss of them
link |
can feel quite significant and invoke the grieving process.
link |
This isn't always about materialism.
link |
Sometimes it's purely about the sentimental attachment.
link |
So for instance, the loss of a wedding ring
link |
or an engagement ring that was very meaningful to you
link |
or an article of clothing or a painting
link |
or even a small, seemingly an important object
link |
to somebody else, but something that held great meaning
link |
to you, maybe a seashell that you collected with somebody
link |
on the beach and then somehow it gets lost.
link |
And it's the relationship with that person
link |
that's contained within that object for you
link |
as a representation within that object that's important.
link |
That's the reason why I keep saying person, animal or thing.
link |
I think it's only fair to include things in that category.
link |
But of course, with the understanding that they don't hold
link |
the absolute same magnitude as the loss of a being.
link |
One thing that we ought to consider for a moment
link |
is whether or not the depth of attachment
link |
that you have to somebody predicts how long it will take
link |
for you to move through the loss of that person.
link |
We often hear this.
link |
Actually, I can remember some years ago
link |
at the end of a relationship,
link |
a friend and colleague of mine saying,
link |
for every year that you were together,
link |
it's going to take you one month to get over that person.
link |
And I thought, where in the world do those data come from?
link |
And this is what I call anic data or collective data,
link |
where this is like phrases such as,
link |
absence makes the heart grow fonder.
link |
And indeed, sometimes absence can make the heart grow
link |
fonder in the context of two living people
link |
or people in a loving relationship,
link |
or even in the context of grief and loss.
link |
But of course, there's absence makes the heart grow fonder.
link |
And then you also will hear out of sight, out of mind.
link |
And if you've been listening to this episode,
link |
clearly out of sight does not mean out of mind
link |
or out of emotional connection.
link |
So these sayings of, well, it takes X number of months
link |
for a number of years, or out of sight, out of mind,
link |
or absence makes the heart grow fonder.
link |
They really don't hold a lot of meaning,
link |
at least not for somebody like me who likes science,
link |
because science is at least geared toward
link |
or aims towards establishing things in fact, not opinion,
link |
but also because science allows you to make predictions.
link |
It allows you to orient yourself in a process
link |
and make predictions and understand.
link |
So what are we to think of people
link |
who seem very, very attached to somebody,
link |
they break up and they seem just crushed, devastated,
link |
but three weeks later, they're in a new relationship
link |
and they seem perfectly fine.
link |
Or somebody whose spouse dies
link |
and then suddenly they're in a new relationship.
link |
I think there are rates of transition, if you will,
link |
that suggests some dysfunction, pathology, et cetera.
link |
But here we aren't in a position to judge,
link |
we're only in a position to speculate about this.
link |
And I think we can reasonably speculate
link |
that it sort of makes sense
link |
why someone who has an intense attachment to somebody
link |
might be able to form intense attachments generally, right?
link |
That they aren't restricted to one person,
link |
whereas other people who have an intense attachment
link |
to somebody might find themselves entirely incapable
link |
of moving on, or it would take them a very long time.
link |
Hence the lines in the Feynman letter to Arlene
link |
about he had met various other young women,
link |
they seem perfectly nice,
link |
and yet they were meaningless to him
link |
in the shadow of her memory,
link |
or we should say in the light of Arlene's memory
link |
or the memory of Arlene rather.
link |
So these dimensionalities of attachment,
link |
they cut in every direction.
link |
And I don't think any well-trained psychologist
link |
or neuroscientist would ever say,
link |
oh, if you are somebody who becomes very attached,
link |
therefore it's very hard to move on.
link |
I think that could be true.
link |
It could also be that if you're somebody
link |
who has a great capacity for attachment,
link |
you have a great capacity for attachment overall.
link |
Neuroscience nor psychology
link |
is really in a position to judge, certainly,
link |
but it's also not in a position
link |
to make those kinds of predictions.
link |
At least the field as it stands right now
link |
of attachment and grieving
link |
can't really speak to why that's the case.
link |
So that's my attempt to de-pathologize
link |
some of what we observe,
link |
although I have to confess from a just sort of
link |
everyday stance that sometimes the rate
link |
in which people move out of attachments and grieving
link |
can be somewhat eerie.
link |
I'd like to take a moment and explore this idea
link |
that allowing ourselves to really feel
link |
the attachment to somebody can accelerate
link |
or at least support adaptive transitioning through grief.
link |
There's a really wonderful study that on the face of it
link |
appears to be what we call negative result.
link |
A negative result is when a hypothesis is posed
link |
and then turns out the hypothesis is not true.
link |
But as is the case with so many
link |
interesting scientific findings,
link |
often when there's a negative result,
link |
there's a more interesting result
link |
nested in that negative outcome.
link |
And this is the case in a particular paper
link |
I'll share with you now.
link |
There's a paper published in the journal
link |
Biological Psychology.
link |
And again, the title is posed as a question,
link |
which is emotional disclosure for whom?
link |
A study of vagal tone in bereavement.
link |
What this study explored was
link |
whether or not written disclosure
link |
of the emotional connection to somebody that was lost
link |
would be effective as a way for people
link |
to move through the grieving process.
link |
The study also explored the so-called vagus nerve.
link |
The vagus nerve is an extensive nerve pathway
link |
that is bi-directional between brain and body.
link |
So brain to body and body to brain.
link |
It generally is associated with calming effects
link |
on our brain and body,
link |
although that's certainly not always the case.
link |
The way to think about it
link |
in terms of what we're going to talk about now
link |
is heart rate and heart rate variability.
link |
And in very simplistic terms,
link |
if your heart was just allowed to beat
link |
at its sort of default rate,
link |
that rate would be rather high
link |
because of the activation of the so-called sympathetic arm
link |
of the autonomic nervous system,
link |
the alertness component of the autonomic nervous system.
link |
The parasympathetic nervous system as it's called
link |
We sometimes hear sympathetic is for stress
link |
or fight or flight.
link |
It's for a lot of other things as well, I should mention,
link |
and it is not for sympathy.
link |
Simpa simply means together,
link |
and it reflects the activity of a bunch of neurons
link |
being active at the same time or together, simpa.
link |
Whereas parasympathetic is often associated
link |
with quote unquote rest and digest functions
link |
or calming functions,
link |
although it is certainly involved in other things as well.
link |
So sympathetic nervous system drives alertness,
link |
panic, stress, et cetera.
link |
Parasympathetic nervous system,
link |
meaning a distinct set of neurons drive calming,
link |
falling asleep, digestion,
link |
sexual arousal for that matter, and so on.
link |
So you sort of like a seesaw of alertness and calm,
link |
alertness and calm,
link |
sympathetic and parasympathetic, back and forth.
link |
The vagus nerve is generally associated
link |
with parasympathetic functions
link |
and has the capacity to slow down our heart rate,
link |
in particular by exhales.
link |
And just simply because of the movement of the diaphragm
link |
and its relationship to the heart and the thoracic cavity,
link |
exhales result in slowing down of the heart rate.
link |
This is what we call an increased vagal tone.
link |
So let me explain for a moment.
link |
And actually here's a tool you can use,
link |
not just in terms of navigating grief,
link |
but in terms of stress modulation generally.
link |
We have a muscle called the diaphragm.
link |
When we inhale, whether or not it's through our mouth
link |
or nose, our diaphragm moves down.
link |
As a consequence, there is more space overall
link |
in the thoracic cavity.
link |
The heart gets a little bit bigger,
link |
believe it or not, volume-wise.
link |
Blood flows more slowly through that large volume.
link |
And there's a signal conveyed from the nervous system
link |
to the heart to speed the heart up.
link |
So inhales literally speed your heart up.
link |
And when you exhale, the diaphragm moves up.
link |
And as a consequence,
link |
there's less space in the thoracic cavity.
link |
Heart gets a little bit smaller.
link |
The existing blood volume in the heart at that time
link |
moves more quickly through that small volume, right?
link |
Given amount of blood volume,
link |
make the compartment it's in the heart smaller,
link |
and the blood moves more quickly through that volume.
link |
And as a consequence, the nervous system sends a signal
link |
to the heart via the vagus and other pathways
link |
to slow the heart down.
link |
In other words, exhale, slow the heart down.
link |
That process, that relationship between inhale,
link |
speeding the heart up and exhale, slowing the heart down
link |
is something called respiratory sinus arrhythmia.
link |
Some people are able to engage respiratory sinus arrhythmia
link |
more naturally, more reflexively than others.
link |
You can actually train this by consciously thinking
link |
about slowing your heart rate while you exhale
link |
and consciously thinking about increasing your heart rate
link |
You can literally strengthen these pathways.
link |
Now, respiratory sinus arrhythmia
link |
and the ability to slow your heart rate with exhales
link |
is one dimension of what's called vagal tone
link |
or your ability to control your overall level
link |
of activation of alertness and stress
link |
with these vagus nerve pathways.
link |
So vagal tone is something that varies
link |
from person to person.
link |
If you've trained up or you've thought about
link |
your relationship between breath and heart rate,
link |
you can improve vagal tone.
link |
Some people have very robust vagal tone
link |
without having done any training.
link |
Other people have less of it, et cetera.
link |
I'll just paraphrase from this paper
link |
and you'll see where this takes us
link |
in terms of navigating grief because it's quite important.
link |
The vagus nerve provides inhibitory regulatory influence
link |
on the heart, allowing the heart rate to increase rapidly
link |
through vagal withdrawal.
link |
That means kind of coming off the brake
link |
of the parasympathetic nervous system
link |
as in response to a stressor in one's environment, right?
link |
When you're stressed, you rarely take the opportunity
link |
if it's an immediate stress or threat to actively exhale.
link |
That would be a great tool to use.
link |
In fact, we promote that tool
link |
in our Mastering Stress episode.
link |
Vagal withdrawal usually co-occurs
link |
with an increase in sympathetic activation of the heart.
link |
You now know what that is
link |
or is known as the fight or flight response.
link |
Vagal tone reflects the degree to which there is tonic,
link |
meaning ongoing, vagal influence on the heart.
link |
So when you have a high degree of vagal tone,
link |
it means that you are always activating that brake
link |
on your stress system, just at default.
link |
And some people just happen to do that more.
link |
Other people need to practice long exhale breathing
link |
in order to build up vagal tone,
link |
something that's very useful to do
link |
whether you're grieving or not.
link |
Now, in this study, what they did
link |
is they had people, and I should say it was 35 participants,
link |
go through a writing exercise for a period of weeks.
link |
They actually wrote about three times per week.
link |
Then there was a follow-up at some period of time
link |
and then again about a month later.
link |
And there were two different groups.
link |
One group was in the so-called written disclosure group.
link |
What they did is they, on day one,
link |
they would write about what happened when a loved one died.
link |
And indeed they used people who had experienced real loss.
link |
And so they were asked to talk about
link |
and write about their deepest emotions
link |
and thoughts about it, memories of their loved one,
link |
very intense stuff if you think about it,
link |
if they're in the immediate period of having lost someone.
link |
Then they actually were asked to write a letter
link |
to the person that they lost.
link |
So again, a very intense exercise to go through
link |
if you did indeed lose somebody as these subjects had.
link |
And then of course there was the testing
link |
some period of time later.
link |
And I'll tell you what that testing involved.
link |
The other group was a so-called control group
link |
where they were simply told to write
link |
about how they use their time.
link |
So an emotionally kind of empty writing exercise,
link |
They described what they would do today
link |
after they woke up, et cetera.
link |
No heavy emotional content and so on.
link |
Now, as I mentioned earlier,
link |
the immediate results of this study were a negative result,
link |
meaning no effect.
link |
The disclosure that we should say
link |
the emotionally intense writing group
link |
and the control group did not differ at baseline
link |
on any symptom measures
link |
or psychological variables they tell us.
link |
And at least at face value, somewhat disappointingly,
link |
there really wasn't any kind of difference in outcome
link |
between the group that wrote
link |
about a very emotionally intense stuff
link |
versus non-emotionally intense.
link |
Now, what I didn't tell you thus far
link |
is why they had them do this exercise at all.
link |
They had them do this exercise
link |
because many of the effective practices
link |
for moving through grief involve, as I mentioned earlier,
link |
getting close to and actually deliberately experiencing
link |
the attachment that one has to that person that was lost,
link |
not distracting oneself,
link |
not getting into this counterfactual thinking,
link |
the what if, what if, what if,
link |
but rather thinking about, or in this case,
link |
writing about the real attachment.
link |
And so the initial idea was
link |
if people write about this attachment,
link |
that they're going to experience this attachment
link |
and that will serve them in some or many ways
link |
in terms of moving through grief.
link |
And that wasn't what they found.
link |
They found no difference between the two groups
link |
until they explored who had higher vagal tone,
link |
who had a greater degree
link |
of so-called respiratory sinus arrhythmia.
link |
In other words, who was able to modulate their state
link |
using their breathing and their body.
link |
And what they discovered was that a subset of individuals
link |
who had a high degree of vagal tone
link |
seemed to get more benefit from this writing type exercise.
link |
Now, this is one study and I would consider it
link |
fairly preliminary with 35 subjects.
link |
Although, you know, it's a study into itself
link |
and I think a quite nice one.
link |
And it really set the stage for a number of other studies
link |
that followed from this group and other groups
link |
that really point to the fact that yes, indeed,
link |
accessing these states of emotionality
link |
by writing or thinking about somebody is quite powerful
link |
in terms of engaging the bodily states
link |
and the mind states associated with the attachment.
link |
And that is very beneficial for moving through grief.
link |
That is very beneficial for sensing the attachment.
link |
And now it makes perfect sense as to why some people
link |
would benefit from that sort of practice more than others,
link |
because some people are able to access
link |
more real somatic feelings of attachment
link |
by writing about the attachment
link |
or by thinking about it than others.
link |
So this brings us back to an earlier discussion
link |
we were having where we were talking about
link |
how some people seem to move through things very quickly
link |
or don't seem to be grieving constantly.
link |
And, you know, a spouse or a family member of that person
link |
might think, gosh, why aren't you upset?
link |
How is it that you can be functional and I'm not?
link |
Or how is it that you can be functional?
link |
There can even be fractures in families and relationships
link |
on the basis of differences in rates of grieving and so on.
link |
Well, some of this, again, probably relates to psychology
link |
and the different attachments that people had
link |
to the person or animal or thing that was lost,
link |
but it no doubt also has to do
link |
with how much of a mind-body connection,
link |
how much vagal tone exists in the person
link |
when they suddenly found themselves in the grief episode.
link |
So this actually offers multiple opportunities.
link |
If you're somebody, for instance,
link |
who is grieving so intensely and so often
link |
that you're finding it immensely difficult
link |
to move through grief at a reasonable rate,
link |
and you might even say,
link |
or find yourself diagnosed with prolonged grief disorder
link |
or with complicated grief syndrome in a way
link |
that's really impairing your adaptive functioning in life,
link |
well, then it's not clear to me,
link |
at least by my read of the data,
link |
that you would want to engage in a lot of practices
link |
to increase the mind-body relationship
link |
and feeling so much of this attachment
link |
because you're already feeling an immense amount of it.
link |
Whereas other people who are feeling challenged
link |
in accessing the feelings of attachment
link |
and perhaps not functioning well as a consequence of that
link |
might find that practicing breathing
link |
in order to encourage respiratory signs of arrhythmia,
link |
again, focusing on slowing your heart rate consciously
link |
while you exhale and concentrating
link |
on increasing your heart rate as you inhale,
link |
even just as a brief practice
link |
of even just one to three minutes
link |
or one to five minutes every once in a while or per day,
link |
that could be immensely beneficial
link |
in building this mind-body relationship.
link |
Because again, what this paper really points to
link |
and set off a number of other investigations related to
link |
is that for those that can really feel the relationship
link |
between breathing, heart rate, what we call vagal tone,
link |
well, those people are going to be in a better position
link |
to move through grief,
link |
not because they are disengaging
link |
from the feelings of attachment,
link |
but because they are better able to access
link |
those feelings of attachment.
link |
So what this relates to, of course, is that tripartite map,
link |
that three-part map that we talked about earlier,
link |
that representation of space, where things are,
link |
where the person is, where their belongings are,
link |
where their car is, where their bicycle is,
link |
time, when you were expecting to see them
link |
on a regular basis, when they would call,
link |
when they would come home from work, et cetera,
link |
and that third node or that third dimension of attachment,
link |
which is literally attachment and closeness.
link |
Well, what we're talking about here is anchoring
link |
to that attachment and really feeling into that,
link |
but then disengaging from the space and time map
link |
that we call episodic memory,
link |
that menu of prior experiences that keeps us in many ways
link |
maladaptively in an expectation of what never can be again.
link |
Now I'd like to take a moment and consider some of the tools
link |
that you can access that support healthy transitioning
link |
through grief, and these are tools distinct
link |
from that neural map,
link |
that space, time, closeness attachment map
link |
that we were talking about before.
link |
Rather, it's important to remind ourselves
link |
that everything exists in a context
link |
of our baseline physiology,
link |
and I'm certainly not going to be the first or the last
link |
to tell you that everything in life, learning relationships
link |
with people that are still around,
link |
our health in every way, immune system, et cetera,
link |
function far better when we're sleeping really well,
link |
and when we are generally awake during the daytime
link |
and asleep at night.
link |
I realize there are shift workers out there,
link |
people who are traveling and are jet lagged.
link |
First of all, thank you, shift workers, we rely on you.
link |
We have an episode all about jet lag and shift work for you
link |
and for trying to maintain the best possible mental
link |
and physical health in the face of ongoing shift work
link |
You can find that episode on our website,
link |
hubramalab.com, lots of behavioral tools,
link |
some other tools as well.
link |
Nonetheless, human beings are diurnal.
link |
We were really designed to be awake mostly in the day
link |
and asleep at night.
link |
There are rare exceptions to this where people like
link |
to stay up late and sleep in late,
link |
but we are a diurnal species by way of our genetic wiring
link |
and our neural circuit wiring.
link |
There's a particular feature to our diurnal,
link |
and diurnal meaning the opposite of nocturnal,
link |
our diurnal pattern of the release of a hormone
link |
Cortisol is a stress hormone, it's sometimes called,
link |
but cortisol has a lot of other effects,
link |
many of which are positive.
link |
Cortisol, for instance, protects us against infection.
link |
It can help us in terms of waking up in the morning.
link |
In fact, the pulse as it's called,
link |
or the spike in cortisol early in the day
link |
is part of the reason we wake up.
link |
It's linked to our increase in temperature rhythms
link |
and can further increase our temperature,
link |
which leads to waking and so on.
link |
The typical pattern of cortisol in a healthy individual,
link |
and we really can say physically
link |
and emotionally healthy individual,
link |
is that cortisol is going to be somewhat high
link |
right around waking,
link |
and then is going to be highest as it ever will be
link |
in the 24 hour period, about 45 minutes post waking.
link |
Not exactly 45 minutes, but about 45 minutes.
link |
And then it will drop gradually,
link |
such that by about 4 p.m. in the afternoon,
link |
which is actually when body temperature
link |
tends to start to drop as well,
link |
cortisol tends to be very low,
link |
and then remains low in a healthy individual,
link |
such that at 9 p.m. it's very low,
link |
and throughout the night as we sleep, it's very low.
link |
In fact, spikes or pulses in 9 p.m. cortisol
link |
are a fairly reliable biomarker readout
link |
of certain forms of depression and chronic anxiety.
link |
This relates to the beautiful work of my colleagues
link |
at Stanford and Stanford School of Medicine,
link |
Dr. David Spiegel, who's been on this podcast,
link |
and Dr. Robert Sapolsky, who has also been on this podcast.
link |
There's a very interesting paper
link |
exploring the relationship between cortisol rhythms
link |
and grieving, in particular,
link |
complicated versus non-complicated grieving.
link |
Again, complicated grieving being the form of grieving
link |
that reflects a immense challenge
link |
to people moving through the grieving process
link |
such that it really needs to be dealt with, right?
link |
Again, grieving is healthy,
link |
but complicated grieving is a prolonged grieving
link |
and has other dimensions as well,
link |
hence the name complicated.
link |
The title of this paper is
link |
Diurnal Cortisol in Complicated and Non-complicated Grief,
link |
Slope Differences Across the Day.
link |
And the figure to orient to in this paper,
link |
if you do decide to check it out,
link |
and we'll put a link to it,
link |
is figure one, which beautifully shows,
link |
or I should say very clearly shows,
link |
that in individuals that are experiencing complicated grief,
link |
there's the same general contour
link |
of high cortisol upon waking,
link |
even higher about 45 minutes after waking,
link |
and then a reduction in cortisol by 4 p.m.
link |
and even further reduction by 9 p.m.,
link |
so just as it were in a typical individual
link |
or somebody who is in non-complicated grieving.
link |
However, when you compare the cortisol levels
link |
between people experiencing complicated grieving
link |
versus non-complicated grieving,
link |
what you find is the 4 p.m. and 9 p.m. cortisol levels
link |
are significantly higher
link |
than they are in the non-complicated grieving group.
link |
This raises a very interesting idea
link |
and relates very closely
link |
to what we were talking about with vagal tone.
link |
You could imagine a situation
link |
in which people who are experiencing complicated grief
link |
have higher levels of afternoon and nighttime cortisol
link |
because they are in complicated grief,
link |
but you could also imagine the opposite,
link |
that they're experiencing complicated grief
link |
because of the fact that they have elevated cortisol.
link |
Now, it's very likely that it's bi-directional,
link |
that the answer isn't one or the other, but both,
link |
that complicated grief changes patterns of cortisol
link |
and that patterns of cortisol change the likelihood
link |
that one has complicated grief.
link |
That's the most logical interpretation of data like these.
link |
However, when taken along with the data on vagal tone,
link |
that people who have a higher level of vagal tone
link |
are better able to navigate situations
link |
of the sort that we're talking about,
link |
and that some people perhaps have oxytocin receptors
link |
or patterns of catecholamines or epinephrine
link |
that position them to be more likely to grieve
link |
in a particular way,
link |
we arrive at a scenario where it makes very good sense
link |
to think about modulating,
link |
that is controlling the foundation of your life
link |
in a way that establishes cortisol rhythms
link |
and sleep patterns and patterns of autonomic arousal
link |
and catecholamine release that position you
link |
to navigate the grief process in the best possible way.
link |
If that was a complicated mouthful to digest,
link |
let me restate it in a simpler way.
link |
If you are somebody who is heading into grief
link |
or is challenged with grief, complicated grief or otherwise,
link |
prolonged grief or otherwise,
link |
getting adequate sleep at night
link |
and establishing as normal a pattern of cortisol as possible
link |
is going to be very important.
link |
And there's a very simple, straightforward way to do this.
link |
And I apologize to the listeners of this podcast in advance
link |
if I sound like a repeating record,
link |
but the most powerful way to do this
link |
is to view sunlight very close to waking.
link |
It does not have to be right at sunrise,
link |
but when you get up in the morning, if the sun isn't out,
link |
please turn on as many bright lights as possible
link |
in your environment.
link |
And then once the sun is out,
link |
try and get some bright sunlight in your eyes.
link |
Never look at any light so bright
link |
that it's painful to look at sunlight or otherwise.
link |
If you live in an area of the world
link |
where there isn't a lot of sunlight,
link |
please keep in mind that sunlight coming through cloud cover
link |
is going to still be a very effective mechanism
link |
for establishing this cortisol rhythm.
link |
Why do I say this thing about sunlight
link |
over and over and over again?
link |
Well, having an early day cortisol peak
link |
and a very low cortisol level late in the day,
link |
4 p.m. and 9 p.m. is immensely beneficial.
link |
It reflects a properly regulated autonomic nervous system.
link |
It means being alert during the day
link |
and your ability to sleep at night is tightly correlated
link |
to this viewing of sunlight in the morning.
link |
If you have additional questions about this
link |
or these protocols,
link |
please see our Mastering Sleep episode
link |
also at hubermanlab.com.
link |
But in brief, you don't want to wear sunglasses
link |
You do not want to do this through a window or a windshield.
link |
It is 50 times less effective at least
link |
because of filtering of the proper wavelengths.
link |
It is fine to wear eyeglasses,
link |
meaning corrective lenses or contacts,
link |
even if they have UV protection.
link |
Again, sunlight is best.
link |
10 minutes to 30 minutes,
link |
depending on how bright it is outside
link |
and so on and so forth.
link |
I keep coming back to this protocol
link |
because first of all, it is a zero cost,
link |
but very effective way to regulate things
link |
like cortisol rhythms, melatonin rhythms,
link |
wakefulness during the day,
link |
ease of falling asleep at night and so on.
link |
And second of all,
link |
because I want to emphasize this idea of modulation.
link |
There are processes in our brain and body
link |
which directly mediate some psychological effect
link |
or physiological effect, right?
link |
Dopamine is directly involved in motivation.
link |
If you're somebody who struggles with motivation,
link |
your dopamine system is likely to be dysregulated
link |
in some way and there are behavioral tools
link |
and other tools to adjust that.
link |
We had an episode on dopamine motivation and drive
link |
that talks extensively about those tools.
link |
However, the process of grief can't be distilled down
link |
to one molecule, one circuit such that we can say,
link |
oh, you know, take this supplement or eat this diet
link |
and or exercise in the following way
link |
and you'll recover from grief more quickly.
link |
It's simply not the case.
link |
It is the case, however, that proper sleep at night
link |
sets the foundation for the proper emotional tone
link |
to be able to navigate physical, psychological
link |
and other types of challenges.
link |
And not incidentally sleep at night,
link |
I should say sufficient duration and quality
link |
of sleep at night is the way
link |
in which you engage neuroplasticity,
link |
the reordering of neural connections
link |
and everything we've been talking about today
link |
about reordering of the maps in your mind,
link |
this tripartite three-part map of space, time and closeness
link |
involves neuroplasticity, the reconfiguring of connections
link |
between neurons, strengthening certain pathways
link |
and not strengthening others,
link |
actively trying to disengage from the what if, right?
link |
This counterintuitive thinking,
link |
actively trying to disengage from the expectations
link |
that someone will be there.
link |
Although when you find yourself doing that,
link |
understanding why it's so reflexive and normal to do that,
link |
actively trying to lean into the real attachment
link |
to somebody, animal or thing.
link |
And yet at the same time, not diluting yourself
link |
and undermining the whole process of grieving
link |
by trying to imagine that they are in fact
link |
still truly there, right?
link |
It's a very narrow knife edge of a process,
link |
which is why it's so challenging.
link |
Regulating your cortisol rhythm
link |
through viewing sunlight early in the day.
link |
And I should also say avoiding bright lights
link |
from artificial sources in the evening,
link |
generally 10 p.m. to 4 a.m.
link |
But certainly in the evening, trying to dim lights
link |
in your immediate environment,
link |
trying to avoid bright screens,
link |
bright artificial lights as much as possible
link |
and accessing that deep sleep.
link |
That's modulating, it's setting an overall autonomic state
link |
or an overall autonomic landscape
link |
would be the better way to describe it.
link |
That's going to allow you to sleep and get neuroplasticity,
link |
sleep and be in the best emotional state
link |
to navigate the grieving process.
link |
Because it's only fair to say that the grieving process
link |
as we're describing it is hard
link |
and not just because it's emotionally hard,
link |
it's cognitively hard.
link |
You just think about what's required
link |
to move through grief properly, if you will.
link |
It's thinking about and actually physically experiencing
link |
the depth, the full depth of the attachment to the person,
link |
while at the same time trying to uncouple
link |
from that rich menu, that catalog of episodic memories
link |
that can date back many, many years
link |
and have so much richness,
link |
so many predictions form on the basis
link |
of those episodic memories
link |
and actively trying to distance ourselves
link |
from those memories by being very anchored in the fact
link |
that we are present, we are the person alone in that room
link |
or in some cases with a bereavement group in that room
link |
or with other people that are mourning the loss
link |
of that individual animal or thing.
link |
And that knife edge of feeling the intense attachment
link |
while also disengaging from all the things
link |
that led to that attachment,
link |
well, it's understandable why that would be so challenging.
link |
And it should also be understandable
link |
why positioning yourself to be able to do that
link |
in the best possible way requires proper sleep.
link |
So what are the tools that we can think about using
link |
in terms of healthy adaptive moving through grief,
link |
trying to avoid complicated grief
link |
and prolonged grief disorders?
link |
I realize that word disorder implies all sorts of things,
link |
but again, those are just naming categorizations
link |
that people come up with that I think fairly reflect
link |
the fact that some people have more challenge moving
link |
through grieving than others.
link |
And for some people, it can be very extended.
link |
I think the common misunderstanding
link |
is that proper grieving involves moving
link |
through something quickly.
link |
We're certainly not saying that.
link |
However, it is very clear that some people can get stuck
link |
and that process of getting stuck,
link |
you should now understand has a lot to do with maintaining
link |
or reactivating those episodic memories,
link |
those expectations of where somebody will be
link |
in space and time.
link |
So what can we say about the tools for moving through grief?
link |
Clearly, it's a value to dedicate some period of time,
link |
perhaps every day, perhaps every other day,
link |
depending on your capacity and schedule.
link |
These could be periods of time ranging anywhere
link |
from five to 45 minutes, maybe longer.
link |
These blocks of time would be appropriately described
link |
as rational grieving, right?
link |
Rational grieving is a clear acceptance of the new reality
link |
that the person, animal, or thing no longer exists
link |
in the same space-time dimensionality
link |
that we knew them before, and yet holding onto
link |
and anchoring to the attachment that we had.
link |
This is, again, not an unhealthy anchoring
link |
to the attachment.
link |
This is really anchoring to the depth and the intensity
link |
of the attachment that existed as a way to,
link |
for lack of a better way to put it,
link |
push off from those episodic memories,
link |
to distance ourselves from them,
link |
because those episodic memories are the ones that lead us
link |
to look for the person in our current reality.
link |
And assuming this is a real and complete loss,
link |
those sorts of expectations are maladaptive.
link |
They do not serve us well.
link |
The second aspect of this is to understand
link |
that the node of the map,
link |
the component of the neural map that you're anchoring to
link |
is a very real component of you.
link |
These are literally cells
link |
that represent the depth of attachment.
link |
They are linked up with your emotional centers in the brain,
link |
and indeed they're linked up with your body.
link |
I think one of the things that comes up so often
link |
when people are grieving is why does it hurt so much?
link |
Well, that hurt is that yearning.
link |
It's that anticipation of action that you want to engage in,
link |
but some part of you at least knows that it leads nowhere.
link |
It's that reaching for that glass of water
link |
in a kind of desert of thirst,
link |
and you know you can't have it.
link |
That's why it hurts so badly
link |
because the systems of your brain and body
link |
are in a place of anticipation of readiness.
link |
And given the activation of these brain reward systems
link |
like the nucleus accumbens,
link |
given your now understanding of oxytocin
link |
being more enriched in the, excuse me,
link |
in the nucleus accumbens of some individuals
link |
and as opposed to others,
link |
it should make perfect sense as to why it's so painful
link |
We talked a moment ago about the importance
link |
of accessing quality sleep on a regular basis,
link |
gave you at least one tool to do that.
link |
There, again, a rich array of tools to do that
link |
in the Mastering Sleep episode.
link |
And again, highlighting the importance of sleep
link |
for not just emotion regulation and autonomic control,
link |
which is so vital, but also for making sure
link |
that neuroplasticity takes place,
link |
because again, neuroplasticity is a two-part process.
link |
There's the triggering of the plasticity,
link |
which in the case of the things we're talking about today
link |
will be naturally activated by the practice
link |
of a dedicated focusing on the attachment,
link |
feeling the attachment to the person,
link |
maybe even writing about the attachment to the person
link |
as was described in that previous study.
link |
But also just the plasticity is triggered
link |
by the mere loss of that person,
link |
the intensity of that experience.
link |
But neuroplasticity, the literal rewiring of connections
link |
occurs during deep sleep
link |
and in what I call non-sleep deep rest or NSDR.
link |
And you can find NSDR scripts.
link |
These are short behavioral protocols that you do
link |
for 10 to 30 minutes at some point throughout the day,
link |
maybe even multiple times a day
link |
that have been shown to accelerate neuroplasticity.
link |
So having such a practice can be very useful
link |
and understand that it involves some cognitive work.
link |
We have to hold onto the attachment
link |
and imagine and feel as much as we can the attachment
link |
while also being extremely rationally grounded
link |
and trying to not try to hold onto the past,
link |
trying to not anticipate the person walking in the room.
link |
because when we think about the attachment,
link |
the attachment tends to drag with it
link |
those episodic memories, that rich catalog of experiences.
link |
The expectation that they will walk in the room
link |
is perfectly natural.
link |
The hard cognitive work
link |
is to experience the deep emotional attachment
link |
while at the same time severing from
link |
or distancing ourselves from these expectations
link |
that they'll suddenly show up in our reality
link |
when in fact they won't.
link |
And we talked about preparing ourselves for grief, right?
link |
If we have a loved one that's dying
link |
or we anticipate that at some point
link |
we are going to have a loss of some sort,
link |
could be death, could be a loss of another type,
link |
breakup, et cetera,
link |
that we can prepare ourselves to grieve more adaptively
link |
by regulating the level of catecholamines,
link |
in particular epinephrine.
link |
That was well-described in the study
link |
that I referred to earlier.
link |
And tools such as the one found
link |
in our Mastering Stress episode
link |
and tools of the sort that we talked about today,
link |
increasing that vagal tone
link |
by actively building up the relationship between exhales
link |
and slowing down of the heart rate,
link |
so-called respiratory sinus arrhythmia,
link |
those things can be very useful tools.
link |
So we can actually encourage our nervous system
link |
and build our nervous system
link |
and build our mind to prepare for grief
link |
when it inevitably will come.
link |
Again, this is not about buffering ourselves
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from the realities of life.
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This is not about engaging from grief
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as a real and important process.
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And indeed it is a real and important process to engage in.
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Those that enter denial
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or trying to distract themselves with substances
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or thinking or distracting of behavior,
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substances or otherwise,
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won't move through grief as well,
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as adaptively as those who embrace a process
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of the sort that I'm describing here.
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And of course, I want to restate again,
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that even though grief and depression
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are now known to be fundamentally different,
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even though people move through the different stages
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of grief at different rates
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and sometimes skip stages, et cetera,
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it is often important to access
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a trained professional psychologist or psychiatrist
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or both or bereavement group or all of the above
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in order to get the proper support for grieving.
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So this is a podcast about science and science-based tools,
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but I absolutely want to emphasize
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that there are terrific resources out there
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that you can access.
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I don't say this in any kind of glib
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or kind of pass the buck kind of way.
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There are wonderful trained therapists, bereavement groups,
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psychiatrists that are expert
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in navigating these sorts of things.
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I like to think that the tools that we've talked about today
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would be not only compatible,
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but would be complimentary
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to the sorts of approaches that they take.
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And as we think about this process of grief,
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as we all should at some point in our lives,
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because we all indeed will experience grief
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in one form or another,
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I would hope that the information that we discussed today
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would not only give you some tools,
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but hopefully give you a better understanding
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of not just the people that you've lost
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or that you stand to lose,
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not just the animals that you've lost and stand to lose,
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but also give you a sense of why it is
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that the people who are still in your life
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and that you're attached to,
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the animals that are still in your life
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and that you're attached to
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have such profound meaning for you.
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And I would encourage you to not lean away from,
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but rather to lean into
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the building of those episodic memories,
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to build up a richer and richer set of experiences
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and emotional attachments.
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Because while the process of grieving
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is in direct relation to how close we are attached to people,
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there are ways to move through it.
link |
And of course it is the depth of our attachments
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and the number and the depth of meaning of experiences
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that we share with others and with animals
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that makes life so rich and worth living.
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So I just want to take a moment and say thank you
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for being willing to explore this rather complicated
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and sometimes extremely challenging thing
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that we call grief from the perspective
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or through the lens of neuroscience and psychology.
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I certainly learned a lot in exploring this literature.
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I also really look forward to hosting
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people like Dr. O'Connor on the podcast
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and others on the podcast
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who've done such beautiful work in this area.
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I've put out the request and hopefully they'll join us soon
link |
to further elaborate and teach us about
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this fundamental component of our lives.
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If you're learning from and are enjoying this podcast,
link |
please subscribe to us on YouTube.
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That's a terrific zero cost way to support us.
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In addition, please subscribe to the podcast
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on Spotify and Apple and at both Spotify and Apple,
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you can leave us up to a five-star review.
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If you have comments and suggestions, feedback,
link |
or you'd like to see a particular guest on this podcast,
link |
please put those suggestions, comments and feedback
link |
in the comment section on YouTube.
link |
In addition, please check out the sponsors mentioned
link |
at the beginning of today's podcast.
link |
That's the best way to support us.
link |
Not during today's episode,
link |
but on many previous episodes of the Huberman Lab Podcast,
link |
we've discussed supplements.
link |
While supplements aren't necessary for everybody,
link |
many people derive tremendous benefit from them
link |
for things like easing and accelerating the transition time
link |
into sleep and getting better, deeper sleep,
link |
as well as things such as focus, et cetera.
link |
We've partnered with Momentous Supplements
link |
because Momentous Supplements, first of all,
link |
are of extremely high quality.
link |
That's obviously important.
link |
Also, they ship internationally.
link |
We had heard from many of you
link |
that you were having trouble accessing
link |
some of the supplements that were described
link |
on the Huberman Lab Podcast
link |
because you did not live in the US.
link |
Momentous ships both within the US and abroad.
link |
And many of you have also requested
link |
that there be a single site where you could access
link |
all of the supplements that we've talked about
link |
on the Huberman Lab Podcast.
link |
Right now at livemomentous.com slash Huberman,
link |
you can find a subset of the supplements
link |
that have been described on this podcast.
link |
Again, all of the very highest quality,
link |
each single ingredient supplements,
link |
that turns out to be very important
link |
if you're trying to develop
link |
the proper array of supplements for you.
link |
It's not helpful to have supplements
link |
that include many ingredients.
link |
So we encourage Momentous
link |
to have single ingredient supplements
link |
with dosages that allow you to build up
link |
from the minimal effective dose and so on.
link |
And the catalog of supplements
link |
they are going to add to that location,
link |
livemomentous.com slash Huberman,
link |
is going to expand in the weeks and months to come.
link |
And we expect that in fairly short amount of time,
link |
all of the supplements that we've described
link |
on the Huberman Lab Podcast will be there.
link |
If you're not already following Huberman Lab
link |
on Instagram and Twitter,
link |
I post science and science-related tools
link |
at Huberman Lab on Instagram,
link |
also at Huberman Lab on Twitter.
link |
Oftentimes that material will overlap somewhat
link |
with the content covered on this podcast,
link |
but more often than not,
link |
what I'm covering on Instagram and Twitter
link |
is distinct from the information I cover
link |
on the Huberman Lab Podcast.
link |
We also have a newsletter that has summaries of podcasts
link |
and points to specific protocols
link |
and links that could be useful to you.
link |
That is the Neural Network Newsletter.
link |
And you can find it at HubermanLab.com.
link |
Go to the menu, go to newsletter.
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You can sign up simply by giving us your email.
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We do not share your email with anybody else.
link |
Our privacy policy is there and is made very clear.
link |
You can also see some newsletters of months past.
link |
So you can assess whether or not
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you really do want to sign up.
link |
Although I like to think that you will.
link |
Again, zero cost, total privacy of your email account.
link |
And many people find those summaries and takeaway tools
link |
to be very useful in navigating
link |
these admittedly long podcast episodes.
link |
And last, but certainly not least,
link |
thank you for your interest in science.