How Grief Affects the Brain & How to Heal | Mary Frances & Jim Kwik

Grieving is normal. It's natural. It involves a lot of really painful experiences, but that's okay. That is part of the process.

Did you know that when we grieve the loss of a loved one, our brains activate the same regions that are also involved in learning and problem solving?

It is some of the reward pathways actually that are affected when we're grieving.

Grief is one of life's most challenging and inevitable journeys. The deep sorrow we feel when someone dear to us passes away.

2 things that people sort of naturally do initially are avoidance and rumination.

While grief is universal, the way our brains process this loss has remained somewhat of a mystery.

Grief is never gonna go away. It's just a normal human reaction.

What advice would you give to someone who's currently navigating through their grief?

To find other people who have been through loss.

Are there specific activities that can foster greater levels of resilience in a grieving brain?

Finding ways for our body to get a break gives our system a chance to be more resilient.

How important is social support?

There is nothing you are going to do that is going to cheer this person up. And that's okay. What's more important is—

Welcome back, Kwik Brains. I'm your host and your brain coach, Jim Kwik. Today, our guest is Dr. Mary Frances O'Connor, who will take us on a journey through the neuroscience of grief, explaining why it's so difficult for our brains to accept that a loved one is truly gone, why we experience such intense emotions like sadness and anger or yearning. Whether you've experienced some profound grief yourself or are supporting someone going through it, this discussion will change how you think about love and loss and the remarkably resilient human brain. So don't miss this insightful look at the grieving brain. She is the author of The Grieving Brain: The Surprising Science of how we learn for loss and love. Welcome to this show, Mary Frances.

It's really good to be here. Thank you.

So good to have you here. This is a topic that has come up, and we have a private Facebook group of maybe 150,000 people, and this is a topic that comes up on a regular basis. So we wanted to reach out to your team to talk to you about, about your research. Maybe we could start by sharing What is the most surprising insight of your research? Maybe we could start there.

Yeah, the, boy, I tell you, neuroscience is not the first thing that people think about when they think about grief and grieving. And so when I started this work over 20 years ago, I think people were a little uncertain why I would take this perspective. But, you know, I think that we can think of grieving as a form of learning. We have to understand what the heck has happened. This person who is incorporated into every part of our life is suddenly gone, and that is a steep learning curve. I think one of the things that neuroscience has brought to us is that historically we thought about grief the loss of a loved one as a stressor, as something, you know, you can think of a stressor sort of something added to your plate, right? So work is a stressor, maybe caring for a pet is a stressor, and here's one more stressor that you have to add to your plate. But I think what neuroscience really focused us on in a study that I did in 2008, we discovered that It is some of the reward pathways actually that are affected when we're grieving. And the way we think about it now from an attachment perspective, rather than sort of a cognitive stress perspective, from an attachment perspective, we think of the fact that when you bond with someone, you have all this reward learning. You become one with this other person that gets encoded deeply in the brain.

Mm-hmm.

And then after a loss, we have to understand what it means that that thing in the world, that way in the world that we interact, has had something taken away, has had something people describe, it feels like there's a hole where this person should be. And I'm not sure that's entirely metaphorical. So I think that one of the most surprising things was that this is maybe a reward process that is being affected as we try to understand how to navigate without this person. More surprising than I would have thought at the beginning.

And there's this— we have these neurotransmitters like dopamine, right? It was the oxytocin that we're used to from being with individuals, serotonin, these endorphins. We were talking before we started recording Maybe we could talk a little bit about grief's impact on learning. So, like, how does grief affect our brain's ability to learn new information and retain memories? Like, what are the cognitive repercussions of intense emotion, of these intense emotional experiences, when it comes to our learning and our memory, our performance?

The brain is really using the most powerful chemicals it has in its arsenal To motivate us to seek out our loved ones. This is how attachment works. And that's a very normal process. We all have attachment figures. If we survive to adulthood, we know that we've been attached to someone, right? Because we're so helpless as individuals. But together we provide care and love and support. And so all of these are involved, just the ones you mentioned, dopamine and oxytocin and Cortisol as well. And what we find even in animal neuroscience studies is that when a bond is formed, 'cause you can't really talk about loss unless you first talk about love, right? You have to know what the bond is in order to figure out what got broken, what changed. So when we bond with a loved one, we know that it sets up particular encoding in the brain. In fact, in voles, which are these little rodents that run around in North America, who pair bond for life, we find that there's actually an epigenetic change that happens in a specific region called the nucleus accumbens. This is some work by Zoe Donaldson at the University of Colorado Boulder. And that epigenetic change means that in the nucleus accumbens, in that 24 hours when one vole falls head over heels for another vole, We have actual changes in the way the proteins are folded in that region of the brain. And what we think of as happening there is that this we has been formed. You and me is now also encoded as we. And so what it means is it's almost like you've cocked a gun, so to speak. The, the encoding is there. And when we have separation from our one and only, It automatically sets off a reaction. Now that you are a we, it means that you're going to respond if that other one is missing. And that's gonna be in the form of cortisol surge. That's gonna be in the form of a decrease in oxytocin binding. You can think of, you know, if you've ever been in the grocery store and you look down and your toddler isn't there next to you, but where they should be by your leg. That sort of panicky, what's happened? Where are they? That's that automatic reaction that happens in the brain. And so over time, your brain goes through that panicky protest, wait, what's happening? Over and over, and also goes through what we call a despair reaction, which is, oh no, this isn't just they're lost, this means they're not coming back. And that has its own set of changes. And so over time, we do update. We do begin to see that we're not going to have that loved one with us. They're not coming back. But to learn that, you have all this stuff that's going on in the background, right? I like to say that, you know, your processor is doing all sorts of updates in the background. And I don't know, like on a computer, it's very hard to write a Word document, you know, if, If the, in the background, it's try— your computer's trying to upload something, right? Like the letters don't come out and then they spurt out. And I think that living life when you're bereaved is a little like that too. Your brain is doing so much work in the background to figure out what's happening that we know it's often hard for people to remember something that just happened or to concentrate, or they feel like time is slowed down or sped up. And I think it is really this sense that there's so much going on. So we know that those cognitive changes happen. We also know that nothing is broken. It's not that something went wrong in your brain, it's just that your brain is busy. And as that learning curve sort of, as you sort of get further along that learning curve, we don't expect those cognitive changes to persist.

Before we get into some of the tools to navigate grief, in as empowering a way as we can, maybe we could compare grief to other states. So how does the brain's response to grief compare with its response to other intense emotions like love or joy or fear? Do you see a difference?

It's such a great question, and I think this really leads me to a distinction that We don't usually make in regular conversation, but I think it's very helpful to distinguish between grief and grieving, right?

Yeah.

So grief is just the thing you were asking about, just another human emotion. Grief comes, a wave of grief comes over us when we're aware that we've had a really profound loss. That's our reaction to it. That natural response is what we call grief. And that really happens in the moment, doesn't it? And, you know, so I could say to you, what's your grief on a scale of 1 to 10, for example, and you would be able to give me sort of a number how much of that emotion you're feeling, just like you could tell me how much anger or how much sadness. Grieving, on the other hand, is the way that grief changes over time. Right? So grieving is a verb. You would have to ask the same person what their grief is like on more than one occasion to figure out what's changing, right? And so when you think of it that way, I think it helps people who have had loss because on the one hand, grief is never gonna go away. It's just a normal human reaction. And, you know, it can be 10, 20 years later. And if I'm thinking about, you know, my mom, who died when I was in my mid-20s, and there's some reason that she's really on my mind, I'm gonna have a wave of grief that day, even though it's been 20 years. That doesn't mean there's anything wrong with my grieving, because grieving, for the vast majority of us, just as you said, who are very resilient, grieving means that over time, those waves of grief tend to be less intense, Mm-hmm. They tend to be less frequent. They become more familiar. You sort of, you know, the first 100 times you have a wave of grief, you're like, oh my God, I had no idea it was gonna be like this. This is so awful. I'm not gonna get through this moment, you know? And the 100th wave of grief may still feel just terrible, but you do know what it is, right? Like, it feels familiar. And eventually we— We discover how to comfort ourselves in those moments. And so if we think of those as being different, then grieving suggests that grief will change over time, but it won't actually go away. That is a normal reaction, just like anger or fear, as you described.

And I wanna go into the coping and the comforting of ourselves, like these tools. Are there stages of grieving? explicit stages that are universal, or is it kind of like one abstract, more experience?

The stages, the 5 stages of grieving are something that a lot of people recognize. This was developed by Dr. Elisabeth Kübler-Ross in 1969. And, you know, science has come a long way since 1969, thank goodness. You can think of all the changes that have happened in science So Dr. Kübler-Ross, who was a real pioneer, was talking with people who were experiencing loss, initially loss in the sense of a terminal illness, and then later in terms of grief. But what she was talking with them about led her to be able to describe the different emotions, the range of emotions that people have during grief. So they do feel depressed sometimes, sometimes they feel angry, Sometimes they have just denial or acceptance. So she was not wrong in that those are accurate descriptions of some of the experiences that people have. It came to be used as a prescription rather than a description. And so people started to believe that you would go through these stages in a particular order, and then once you'd gotten through the stages, you were done. And that's not right. Really how it works. We know now from much larger studies where, like I say, we have the same person that comes in more than once and we ask them about their grief experience. What we know is that the vast majority of us show a decrease in that intensity and frequency over time. Yearning tends to lessen and acceptance tends to increase. But it's a little like the stock market, right? Even if the stock market is getting better, there's lots of ups and downs and the ups and downs are completely They are very typical, and they look different for each person. So even though the overall trajectory tends to be in a positive direction, we know that it's not able to be put, forced into sort of stages, or that we know exactly what it's gonna look like in advance.

And then the tools for managing that grief, like, so based on your research, what are some of the effective cognitive strategies or tools that people can use our listeners can use to navigate grief more— I don't know if the word is healthfully, but what have your research shown in terms of what could help those who are going through this process?

There are a couple of things that can get in the way when we're grieving. So the first and most important thing to remember is that grieving is normal. It's natural. It involves a lot of really painful experiences, but that's okay. That is part of the process. So if people take nothing else away, I want them to consider the fact that what they're experiencing is probably totally typical and normal, even if you didn't know that it was gonna feel like this.

Hmm.

But if we think of grieving as a form of learning, I think that helps us to see why there's a few things that might get in the way. So 2 of the things that we think about that are very common early on, but that we wanna develop a whole toolkit of coping strategies, right? And if we keep using a hammer, it's not really gonna fit in every situation. Can't use a hammer to, you know, fix a broken window. So the 2 things that people sort of naturally do initially are avoidance. And rumination. So I'll tell you about those a little bit separately. So avoidance is pretty much what the word sounds like. People, because grief is so painful, people avoid being reminded that this person is gone. And that, you know, if you're at work and you have to make a presentation about the budget, it's totally fine to think, you know what, for the next 30 minutes, I am not gonna think about this. I'm gonna pretend this hasn't happened. I'm just gonna get on with this. presentation I have to make. That's totally normal. So it's not that avoidance is never appropriate, but if we keep avoiding things that will remind us of our loss, or if we find that we're trying to avoid the feeling of sadness or grief or yearning, um, some people avoid by doing things like drinking a lot or staying extremely busy so that they can sort of force it out of their mind. If grieving is a form of learning, your brain really does have to have experiences in this new reality that you're in, in order to help us make good decisions about how to restore life now. And so avoidance, when it goes for too long or it's used too much, and there's no, you know, I can't give you a specific percentage of time or anything, but what we find is that if people are using avoidance too much, Then eventually we find they're not really adapting usually very care— very healthily, as you described it. The other strategy that we use is rumination. And so rumination, what I mean by that is just those thoughts that go round and round and round in your head. Like often when you're not doing something else, you're sitting at the stoplight or you get into bed at night and your brain is just going, right?

Yeah.

For grief, these, the form this rumination takes is sometimes the guilty feelings, what we call the would've, should've, could've. So the, you know, if only I would've gotten them to the hospital sooner, this wouldn't have happened. Or if only the doctor would've run another test, then, you know, we would've known about this. And the trouble here is that Again, if we think about learning each of those stories, and we can make up an infinite number of those stories with the amazing human brain we have, but the end of each of those stories is, and then my loved one would've lived. But your loved one didn't live. And the reality that you are in now is something we have to learn To deal with. And so in order to do that, we have to have experiences where we're in the present moment, where we're interacting with our grandchild, you know, who's telling us some ridiculous story, or we're just standing in line at the coffee shop. And, you know, if you're in the present moment, maybe you notice someone gives you a really nice smile for no apparent reason. And in the present moment, there are painful feelings, But there's really wonderful feelings as well. And that I think is what helps us to restore, really responding to what makes sense now. Who am I now? What do I like? What do I want to be spending my time doing? And if we're ruminating, you know, if we're lost in our head all the time, we're not really in contact with the present moment where we can learn those things.

You mentioned the word adaptation or adapting. Is there— we talk a lot about on our podcast, and I don't know, we've come close to 400 episodes about neuroplasticity. How, from your research, how does neuroplasticity play a role in recovering from loss? Like, are there specific maybe activities that can foster greater levels of resilience in a grieving brain?

I think that it is very clear to me that we have to update the neural maps that we have because everything we have known and have planned usually involves our loved one, right?

Mm-hmm.

And so I think it is, while it is very clear that neuroplasticity is important, and probably the small piece of evidence I can tell you about that is in a study of older adults that was done in the Netherlands, very large study, they found that people who had more mild cognitive impairment tended to have more severe grief and that it tended to, to not improve in the way that we would expect. Now, that's mild cognitive impairment. That's not the same as having difficulty just concentrating, for example, which is very normal. But it does suggest to us that brain health is important when we are grieving. And given that we know that grief is very stressful, right? Despite what I said at the beginning, it is of course also a stressor. And we know people's heart rate goes up, their blood pressure goes up a little bit, They're at increased risk for things like stroke and heart attack. And the reason I say this is it's important to attend to our physical body. It's really important to give our body a break. So finding ways to relax, finding ways to exercise, even if that's just going for a walk or, you know, taking a yoga class, finding ways for our body. to get a break gives our, it gives our, our system a chance to be more resilient. So it's not that you have to be sort of actively contemplating grief all of the time. It's partly that your brain is going to adapt, but we want to support it as much as possible.

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Social support is really critical during grieving, and that's for a few different reasons. I think the experience of really profound loss is very isolating for a lot of people. They often lose the person that they would turn to in a time of stress. So it's sort of this double whammy. They're dealing with the loss of this person and also the loss of the person they would turn to. Under a situation of extreme stress. And because we don't have a lot of grief literacy in our society, where we don't really know what people are going through, or the range of individual responses that we have, not every grief looks the same. For those reasons, it can be really hard to describe to someone what you're going through. As those who are sort of grief adjacent, it also can be Very difficult to listen to someone who's grieving, especially if you think that your job as the person supporting is to cheer them up. So there is no, there is nothing you are going to do that is going to cheer this person up. And that's okay. What's more important is that you witness what this person is going through, that you say to them, I know that you can't see that you will eventually restore a life that is meaningful and makes sense to you, but I can see that that will happen for you someday, and I'll be here until we get there. None, no, neither of us know what it's gonna look like, but I will be here until you get there, and you can tell me anything, whatever is happening.

Hmm.

The reason I think that's so important is that As people feel this isolation, they feel like people don't understand them. They're walking around kind of predicting the presence of this person every time they walk in the room, and no one else is having that experience. No one else is walking into a room and thinking, gosh, Bob's not here today, you know, but the bereaved person, every time they walk in the room, is thinking, oh geez, right, Bob's not going to be here, you know. So I think the problem is that over time, we can continue to remain more disconnected. We can actually start to feel lonely, and that is really problematic in grieving. We try to find a way to shift to feeling connected, to recognizing how universal grief is, and feeling like we can understand other people who are grieving in a way we never did before, maybe.

Yeah, I was having a conversation with a friend of mine who's been on the podcast a few times, Simon Sinek, and just talking about the power of just having somebody sit in the mud with you.

Yeah.

Just going through that and just not necessarily trying to fix it, but just feeling seen and heard. So having studied grief so extensively as you have, I'm wondering how has this impacted your personal view on loss And recovery? And I guess the second part of that question would be, what advice would you give to someone who's listening, who's currently navigating through their grief?

Well, I mentioned a little bit ago that my mom died when I was 26, and we had known she had had metastatic breast cancer for quite a long time. So we, we definitely knew it was coming. But at the age of 26, I didn't really understand a lot about grief. I didn't know what it would feel like, and I didn't know what was gonna be the best way to sort of navigate, as you described it. And over the years, I ended up, because of my clinical psychology degree, and then because of focusing on grief specifically in my research, I ended up talking with just hundreds and hundreds of people who were grieving. And when my dad died about 8 years ago, I realized how different it was to go through the process when I knew so much more about how normal these reactions are. And when I knew that even though I was crying every day, that wasn't gonna be true for the rest of my life, that that was true just for now. And so I think if I had something to suggest, it would be To find other people who have been through loss and maybe a little further away from loss than you are, so you can sort of anticipate a slightly different future than what you're experiencing right now. And especially people who seem to be resilient, who, you know, have had loss, but it's not like the first thing they're always talking about. I think when we seek out those people, it genuinely makes us feel more normal when they say things like, oh yes, I cried every day. For a long time. And just to hear that and to know there's nothing wrong with you, you're not broken, you're just on a learning curve. And if you think about, there's a tradition in some Native American tribes where they cut their hair off when a loved one dies. I think if you think about how long it takes for our hair to grow, then I think it helps us to realize this is a natural process, but it takes a long time. No one says, why isn't your hair growing faster? You know, it just takes the time that it takes. So having someone that you can really connect with is important, even if that's really the only thing that you share in common. Just having that person to talk with, so important.

If you're tuning in, we're here with Dr. Mary Frances O'Connor, who is a neuroscientist and a psychologist, the author of The Grieving Brain. Which is really wonderful research. And also, I think, you know what, I think a lot of people should go out and get this book and put it into practice, or maybe even gift it to somebody. Talks about how, kind of, we touched on it here, how to go about restoring a meaningful life while going through this grieving. process? Who did you write the book for, and what are you hoping that they, they get out of it?

I am steeped in grief research every day. You know, I'm designing studies and looking at data and talking with colleagues who are doing their studies. And I realized at some point that this information was not actually getting into the hands of people who could use it. If I sat next to someone on an airplane, they didn't know grief was being researched. And I thought what a complete shame that was. So writing the book really was about how do I give you the information that I have in a way that is understandable, but that would empower you then to know kind of what we think about how the brain processes grief, and that might help you to make different decisions in your life, to sort of borrow my glasses for a while and sort of see the world through my lens, because some things may come into focus that might help you. might not have been before. So it really is a book for the general public. You don't have to have any background in medicine or neuroscience, and people tell me that it's very understandable. So that is, it is my hope that people, by understanding a little bit of the why and the how, that the what of grief will make a little bit more sense.

And reminds what I got out of it, I was going through it, is that it just reminds us that we're not alone. And, you know, what we're going through sometimes, you know, thinking about loss that I've had in my life, I go through this process and maybe I even at another level, like judge myself for going through that process.

Yes.

Right. And so the grieving brain, it really has wonderful storytelling and very, as you mentioned, accessible science and practical knowledge that could help us better understand what happens when we grieve. Because there was no courses, you know, that we went through in school describing this process and really giving us hope and help to navigate loss, which is universal, you know, with a little bit more, um, I don't know, ease, a little bit more, more grace. Where, where can people get their copy of the book?

So the book is available everywhere books are sold in paperback and audiobook and, uh, for an e-reader. Uh, you can also go to maryfrancesoconnor.org and find Fantastic.

And we'll put, as we always do, everything in the show notes at jimkwik.com/notes. We'll put a link to Mary Frances' website, social media, a link also to the book. And Mary Frances, I want to thank you so much for the work that you do. I know you spent decades researching this subject matter. And I'm hoping that for anyone who's listening, if this resonates with you, that they'll go deeper. And as they do from listening to our show, that it exposed them to potentially more hope and more help. And if somebody's going through this process, just from my heart to yours, I just wish you a lot of love and grace. Because it's difficult, obviously. And it's interesting as I reflect on— I had a traumatic brain injury when I was 5 years old and I had these learning difficulties. But my primary caregiver, because my parents had so many jobs having immigrated to the States, was my grandmother, who was my whole world. She started showing early signs of dementia when I had my head injury. And she passed of Alzheimer's when I was 7. And I still think about that. And we hear a lot about post-traumatic stress. We don't hear a lot about post-traumatic growth. Through it, I found a mission. I found a deep sense of— it shaped my values in terms of the things that I hold dear. And I'm just hoping grace for anyone who's listening is going through it. And there's resources like this book that could help you be able to go through and process it in a way. So I want to thank you, Mary Frances, so much for being on our show. Thank you for the work that you do.

Yes. And thank you, Jim, for bringing this conversation to people. It takes bravery to talk about these things. And I really appreciate you opening that for people to really think about.

Thank you, everybody who's listening. I remember we put the extended version on our YouTube. All the audio platforms like Spotify and Pandora and iTunes, we keep it to 20 minutes because it's quick, quick brain. But we, you know, please join our 1.5 million plus subscribers on YouTube to see the extended version. Again, to go deeper, go to jimkwik.com/notes and we'll put links again to Dr. O'Connor's There's a website to the book and so much more, as well as a summary of this conversation. So Mayor Hanses, thank you so much again. And everyone who's listening, we'll see you in our next episode. Until then, be limitless.

Thank you.