The Science & Process of Healing from Grief
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Welcome to the huberman lab podcast, where we discuss science and science space tools for everyday life. I am ander huberman and am a professor of nerve ology and optimal gy at stanford school of medicine. Today we are discussing grief.

Grief is a natural emotion that most everybody experiences at some point in their life. However, grief is something that still mystifies most people. For instance, we often wonder why getting over the loss of somebody or a pet is so absolutely crushing.

In some cases, it's obvious because we had a very close relationship to that person or animal. But in other cases, it's bewildering because somehow, despite our best efforts, we are unable to reframe and shift our mind to the idea that the person or animal that at one point was here and so very present, is now gone. Today we are going to discuss how we conceptualize grief, both at emotional and at a logical level.

I'm going to teach you about the neuroscience and the psychology of grief and incredible findings that have been made in just a few key laboratories that point to the fact that we essentially map our experience of people in three dimensions. H just give you a little hint of what those dimensions are. They relate to space where people are, time when people are, and explain what that means in a dimension called closest, and how those three dimensions of space, time and closeness are what established very close bombs with people and are what require remapping reorganization within our emotional framework and our logical framework.

When we lose somebody, for whatever reason, within that understanding, i'm confident that you will have greater insight into the grief process. And should you ever find yourself within the grief process, as I imagine most everyone will, at some point, you will be able to navigate that process in what psychologists and neuroscientists deem to be the most healthy way of going through grief. Indeed, moving through grief requires a specific form of neuroplasticity dering of brain connections, and also the connections between the brain and body.

I'm going to teach you about all of that today. So you gonna learn a lot of scientific information. You will also learn a lot of tools that you can put in your kit of emotional, and really emotional, physical tools that will allow you to move through grief in this healthy way that I referred to earlier. I'll also point out some of the myths about grief for the since many of you probably heard that there are designated stages of grief that everybody moves through IT turns out that recent research refutes that idea. There are different stages of grief, but not everybody experiences all of them, and hardly ever does somebody move through all of those linearly, meaning in the same order.

I also want to point out that for many of you that not experienced in grief in this moment, there is an important scientific literature that teaches us that how we show up to grief, meaning our psychological and our biological state, that we happen to be when a loss occurs strongly, dict ates, whether or not we end up in what's called complicated or non complicated grief. And non complicated grief is a form of grief that is very prolong and in fact, often requires that people get substantial professional help. So whether not you're experiencing grief that mild, moderate or very intense right now, or whether not you are not experiencing any grief at all, you're going to learn scientific information and tools that will help you navigate through this process that we call grief.

Before I begin, i'd like to emphasize that this podcast is separate from my teaching and researchers. Stanford IT is, however, part of my desire and effort to bring zero cost to consumer information about science and science related tools to the general public. In keeping with that theme, i'd like to thank sponsors of today's podcast.

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Okay, let's talk about grief. I just want to remind you that everybody at some point in their life experiences grief, either mild grief, moderate grief or extreme grief. And it's somewhat obvious, but worth stating nonetheless, that how intense grief feels and how long IT last scales with how close we were with somebody.

And if you learn that the person who works at the coffee shop, or that you see at the coffee shop on a regular basis, happened to pass away or tragically get killed in a car accident, that can be quite upsetting, that can be somewhat disorienting to you if you, for instance, just saw them yesterday, or they seem perfectly fine when you saw them last. But of course, the grief that results from the loss of somebody to whom you have that level of attachment is far and away different than the level of grief that you would experience from the death of a very close loved one, a sibling, a parent, got forbid, a child. When that type of loss occurs, it's often the case that our entire relationship to life feels different places and things that at once brought us joy and laughter now bring the opposite.

They bring us intense feelings of sadness and loss. Psychologist and neuroscientist distinguished between complicated grief and non complicated grief. They are very similar at the outset.

One of the fundamental differences between them, however, is that complicated reef, which occurs in about one in ten people, is a situation in which grief does not seem to resolve itself even after a prolog period of time. Later in the episode ll point you to the actual tests that are used. I've provided links to those in the shown o captions that will allow you to distinguish between complicated and non complicated grief.

Of these arrive through the important research of the world class grief researchers that are out there on the psychologist that treat grief. The important thing to point out is grief as a process like any biological or psychological event, IT has a beginning, middle and an end. I do believe that being able to orient in terms of where you are in that process can be immensely beneficial, not just for predicting how long it's going to last, but in order to concept ze the person or animal that you lost in a way that allows you to best preserve their memory while maintaining your own functional capacity in life.

Along those lines, I want to point out that grief and depression, while they can feel quite similar in certain ways and have overlapping symptoms, logy, loss of appetite, chAllenges, sleeping, crying in the middle day for no apparent reason, sa they are distinctly different processes. The modern research teaches us, for instance, that grief rarely responds well to entire depressions, where as depression can often respond well to entire depression. Everything we know and understand.

About grief is that IT is a distinct psychological and physiological event in the brain and body from depression. Rather, perhaps the best way to think about grief is that IT is actually a motivational state. IT is a earning IT is a desire for something.

And somewhat surprisingly, it's not just a desire to have that person back where to have that animal back. You might think, well, that's crazy. Of course, IT is. But of course, there are incenses in which someone passing away or an animal passing away is actually providing relief for that person, because where they happen to be in their life today, i'll teach you about grief as a motivational process.

Because grief as a motivational process really is the way that scientists and psychologists now consumption ized grief and the treatments for grief, so that people can move through them effectively. As we weight into this important topic, i'd like to emphasize some of the common miss and misunderstandings about grief. Some of the most misunderstanding arrive from the beautiful work of Elizabeth kubler ross, a psychologist who wrote the famous book on death and dying.

And I should emphasize that, well, couple, ross was a real pioneer in establishing that they are R N D different stages of grief. The modern science with psychology, neuroscience point to the fact that not everybody experiences all of the stages that cuba ross defined, nor do they move through those stages in a linear manner. Sometimes they're out of sequence, are just highlighted five stages that goober us illustrated, because some people really do experience all of them, sometimes in the order or will read them, but again, often times they don't.

The different stages of grief very quickly are denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. In the coupler ross model, denial is always the first stage, and denial is just as IT sounds. This disbelief IT cannot be.

There is no way a refusal to accept the new reality that the person or animal is gone. The second stage, anger, is one in which the individual recognizes that the person is indeed gone, or the animal is gone, but their body, in their mind, going into a motivated state. This is important.

We're onna return to this idea of grief as a motivated state that involves action plans in more depth as we go further. And then third stage is bargaining, what sometimes called the negotiating face, this idea that, well, if I just done this, if they had just done that, or if I called more, or somehow refusing to accept the reality. So in a way, this can be blended with denial in thinking, well, if I just don't think about IT, IT won't be real, this kind of thing.

So again, stages can be blended or graded together because emotions are complex, right? Even though they're different stages to this process, they can sometimes be melted together. The four stage of depression that cool OS described is one of why go on living? Why should I go on living? Why should I continue in this grief?

Chicken state, that seems to deprive me of all the richness of life that I experiences when the personal animal was still here. And then the first stage is acceptance. This internalization not just cognitively, not just thinking emotionally, that it's going to be OK, that not just this too, shall pass, but that IT has passed.

So again, the five stages of brief, the couple are ross to find, were immensely important as a critical parsing of the different stages that one could move through. But unfortunately, those five stages were served, taken to be gospel for a long time. And we now know, based on neuro imaging, based on more in the psychological evaluation, and Frankly, more researchers and clinicians moving into this area and observing that while much of what kubo s described does hold true, it's not always the case.

And in fact, on tour of the grief process actually has a lot of dimensions that are not encapsulated by those five stages. There's also a lot of variation depending on whether not the losses due to old age disease, whether not they were suffering prior or not suicide or non suicide types, death than losses and even grief about non death losses, a relationship break up or something of that sort or even home sickness and things of that sort. So I do want to tip our hats to the incredible work of eliza cuba.

Ross, by no means am I or do other researchers trying discounter incredible contributions, but I think nowaday, we have a different and Frankly, a Better understanding of what the group process is like and as a consequence, Better tools to move through grief in order to really understand what grief is in your brain and body and how to best navigate grief. I'd like you to do an experiment with me for the next five minutes or so. I'd like you to at least try to discard of all prior notions of grief as just a state of sadness.

I want acknowledge that IT is and does involve sadness. But for right now, let's think about grief as a motivational state, as a desire for something specific. In fact, i'd like you to think about grief as an attempt to reach out and get something that you very much want.

Imagine yourself extremely thirsty, for instance, on a very hot day, and a glass of water is right in front of you, and it's a beautiful, clean glass of water, and it's completely full. And you so badly want to drink that water. But no matter how intensely you want IT, and no matter how hard you trying to reach IT, IT always shifts just outside your reach.

So if you can imagine that even just a little bit, you are touching in to the experience of brief, how do I know this? Well, I know this because brain imaging studies in involving what's called functional magnetic resonance imaging, F M R I, in which you can evaluate which brain areas are more active than others according to blood flow, which correlates with the neural activity and so forth, teaches us that the brain areas that are associated with motivation and craving and pursuit, or some of the primary brain areas in circuits that are activated in states of grief. I'd like to share an important paper with you, is one of the first to illustrate the fact that grief is not just a state of sadness and pain.

IT is indeed a state of yearning and desire of something that is just outside you're reach, and unfortunately, will always be just outside your reach until you remap p your relationship to that person or thing. The title of this paper is posed first as a question, so that's why I read IT. As such, the title is craving love, enduring grief, activates brains, reward center.

And the first author, this paper is mary Francis so conner. She's a professor, psychology at the university of arizona and one of the world leaders in the study of grief from a neuroscience perspective. With some luck will get her here on the podcast as a guest.

Now, this paper has several important features. Just highlight a few. One of the features of this paper that's not surprising is they found that people who are in a state of grief are in a state of pain, that is, brain areas associated with pain.

Actual physical pain are more active than in non grieving individuals. However, they also found that people who are experiencing what's called the complicated grief showed reward related activity in a brain area called the nuclear occupants. What is reward related activity? Reward related activity is activity of neurons that associate with motivational states and the nucleus.

A comment is a brain center in which dopamine has the effect of creating a motivated state. If ever you thought that doping was only associated with feeling good, you hear about doping hits. Well, this paper and papers like IT firmly tell us that dopamine is not about feeling good.

Dopamine is about placing us into a state of desired things and seeking things. This is true in addiction. This is true when we're hungry and we want to eat.

This is true when we want to reproduce. This is true in every state in which we are reaching for something outside our immediate ability to give that thing to ourselves. This is very important to understand if you want to understand grief and how to move through grief.

Grief is not just about sadness. IT is a state of sadness, hence the activation of brain areas associated with pain, and is IT is a state of desire and reaching for something. And for those of you that have experienced grief, I think that will resonate with you in that understanding that grief is both a state of pain, but also a state of wanting.

And in the understanding that when we lose somebody, either because of break up or because of death, or if an animal dies or gets taken away or is missing, that state of wanting and desire drives an activation state within us. Now the key thing to understand is that the activation of those reward centers and the involvement of doping puts us into an anticipatory state, a state of waiting for something to happen. IT also puts us into a state of action or desire, action, our body in our mind, or what i'd like to refer to, a center of mass forward.

We are seeking how to resolve the craving, even if we know that is impossible. Why do I say that? Well, we understand also on the basis of brain imaging studies, and also some studies in animals that are described in a moment, that in order to understand grief, we have to understand how attachments are represented in our brain.

And IT turns out that both attachments and the breaking of attachments in healthy ways are governed by three important, what we call dimensions. A dimension is just some feature of the world that represented in our brain. So for instance, the color red doesn't exist in your brain.

You happen to have cells, neurons in your eye, that respond best to long way lives of light. And those long wavelength of light happened to be what are reflected off things that are perceived as red. So in your mind, you have a notion of red.

I know this is a little bit abstract, but you're not actually lighting up red neurons in your brain. And that's why you see red. You are lighting up neurons in your brain that represent the presence of red things in your environment.

Similarly, we have neurons and maps, or we say, representations of other dimensions. We have dimensions of touch. We have dimensions of sound. And as all now teach you, we have three dimensions that define our relationship to people and animals and things. And when those people, animals and things are within our immediate vicinity, or if we know how we could access them, right, if somebody still live, there's generally some way to access them unless they're refusing to interact with us.

Well, when we understand that our motivation states can Operate in a way that's logical, we know that, for instance, if we want to find our mother, brother, sister, significant, another dog, cat, parrot, seta, we have to go through a certain set of steps. What are those three dimensions and how do they work? That's what i'm going to teach you now. So at risk of sounding a little bit too reductionist, we are now going to describe.

Your relationship to anything, everything and anyone in these three dimensions, how can we do that? Why would we even want to do that? Why would we want to rob the complexity of relationships of their contour and their detail? Well, if we can understand the dimensions in which we map our relationship to people, animals and things, then we can understand why IT is that when those people, animals are, things are not accessible to us, why IT hurts so much, and why IT takes a certain amount of time in order to retain stand, if you will, or remap our association to them.

I promise that in grasping the information of about to give you, you will be able to Better or end in the grief process, and you'll be able to move through IT more effectively. The three dimensions of relating to someone or an animal or a thing are space, time and closely. And in order to illustrate each one and how they work together to support relationships and they're involvement in grieving process, i'm going to tell you about an experiment.

This experiment was actually done. The experiment involves putting people into a brain scanner that allows the researcher to evaluate brain activity in different areas, in fact, can look in a very known n bias way, not make any predictions about which brain areas are going to be involved. And the experiment is the following, the person which say the research subject first sees images of things that resided different distances from one another.

And when I say things, these are objects. So in one case, it's a beach or a parking lot with bowling ball set at different distances from one another. Their brain is image.

And as their brain is image, they see different pictures of different scenes. The beach, the parking lot is set a bowling balls. Space in different ways, close together, far apart, regularly space, non regularly space.

When one does this sort of experiment, you see a lot of brain areas activated. Not surprisingly, the visual cortex area, the brain that is responsible for creating visual perceptions, but also a brain area that seems unique ly tuned to the distance between you and the objects. So whether not the bowling balls are far away or close together from one another, and whether not they are far away or close to you physically.

So literally, the distance between you and these objects will refer to that measure, that dimension, as we call IT, as proximity. Okay, where are not is very close to you. High degree proxim ity are far away, low proximity, but it's simply physical space.

Then subjects listen to tones. Those tones also are space from one another. So IT could be something as simple as my hand meeting the table top that i'm happening sitting in front.

So it's the image of the brain. Of course, areas of the brain are associated with auditory perception are active, not surprisingly, but as they evaluate different types of sounds and patterns of sounds, for instance. They can start to pass brain areas that seem uniquely tuned to the spacing of sounds, independent of what sounds are coming in.

So whether not musical notes on my hand hitting the table or human speech, they identified a brain region that is uniquely tuned. That is, IT becomes active specifically in response to changes in the spacing between sounds, much in the same way as they could identify brain regions that were only activated when there were changes in the distance between objects, such as the bowling ball that I used in the previous example. And then the subjects saw a different set of images.

The images that they saw were of people and of faces. And some of the images that they saw were of people's faces right up close. And other images were of people.

At a distance, we can see the whole body of the person. Now they also varied the emotional relationship to those people. That is, they were able to get photographs from these research subjects lives so they could show them pictures of, for instance, their sister or some random person off the street.

They could show them pictures of a parent, or of a neighbor, or of a celebrity that's well known, or of somebody that they didn't know at all. So they were able to vary both the position of the person close or far, and they were able to vary the emotional distance to the person, which is this dimension that are referred to as closely, which is not physical closely, but how attached, or how well, you know somebody. Now, this may be sounding like a somewhat complicated experiment, but the takeaway from this experiment is exquisitely simple and exquisite ly important.

The result was that in all three conditions, changes in the physical spacing of these objects, changes in the temporal, that is, the time spacing of the sounds, and changes in the emotional distance between the subject and different people. The same brain area was uniquely activated. Now that is an incredible thing to find, because what IT suggests is that, yes, of course, their brain areas that associated with representation of visual objects, and yes, of course, the our brain is associated with representation of different sounds, and of course, their brain areas associated with faces.

We now know this. In fact, there's something called the abusive form face area, which is uniquely tuned to faces. But at the same time there is a unique brain region that is activated in all three of the conditions are describe bed that has to do with how four you are from somebody, both in space, in time and in terms of emotional closest.

And that brain area, IT, turns out, is a brain area called the inferior parao lobo, the inferior prior al. Now you don't need to know where the inferior pride ole is. In fact, you don't even need to know the name of this brain area. What you do need to know, however, if you want to understand grief and how to move through grief, is that your map of people is not a map of emotional closest per, say, IT is a map of emotional closest, what we call attachment that is interwoven, that is traded in in a very intimate way with your map of where they are in physical space and where they are in time.

When you saw them last, when you're likely to see them again, and if you were to want to see them, how much time IT would take to reach them or for them to reach you? Now, earlier, I said that one of the key functions of our nervous system is to be able to make predictions. And so it's somewhat obvious, but none's important to state and restate that one of the most powerful aspects of our attachments to people, animals and things is our ability to predict what IT would take to see them again and when we are going to see them again.

In fact, we could say that our ability to locate someone or an animal or thing in space and time, right where they are and how long they would take for us to reach them or them to reach us, is a prediction of the requirements to engage in the attachment. In order to illustrate this at a little bit more depth, let's just do a fill in the blank experiment. You can do this now in the real time.

And when you think of somebody that you either rely on or that you care about, very, very much. And i'll just allow you to fill in the blank on this sentence. If I want to see blank the person or animal, I could see them with blank amount of time, right?

If right now you wanted to see this person or animal, or maybe I think, how long would that take you to reach them? Could be a day, could be a second, could be the right next to you, or you'd have to do is turn your head. Now, answer this.

If this person were to travel halfway around the world and land in their plane, I would expect to hear from them within blank minutes of them landing. The answers of this, of course, will will differ. Now i'd like to answer this question if i'd like to find myself.

IT would take me x amount of time. And of course, if you're listening this and you're understanding IT and you're of a rational mind, the answer to that should be zero seconds, instantaneous. You are always able to locate yourself in space and time, provided you are in the appropriate state of mind, meaning not asleep, for instance.

That last question might seem somewhat silly, but it's a fundamentally important one because IT illustrates the extremes at which we map our relationship to ourselves relative to other people and things. Now, of all of this sounds like a bunch of bible parsing of the obvious. I encourage you to suspend that belief for the moment, because if you understand that all relationships are mapped in the brain and body through these three dimensions, space, time and closest, or proxim ity of space, proxim ity in time and proximity of attachment, how close or rich or bonded you are to someone?

Well, if you can understand that, then IT almost becomes obvious, or at least IT becomes intuitive as to why, after the loss of somebody, in particular a death, through the loss of an animal, this map has to be reordered. why? Because if we are attached to someone or an animal at a deep level, IT is almost always on the basis of a lot of what we call episode experience, a lot of epithetic memories, memories of things that happened, episodes memories are literally the conscious recollection of your experience of somebody or an animal or a thing.

And within that memory, you have an understanding of what has happened with them, in association to you, what's going on with them, where IT happened, when IT happened. You have a rich knowledge database that we call implicit knowledge, right? You might not be aware of IT all the time, but it's within you of what this person is like and what they're doing in their life when somebody is taken away from us.

For whatever reason, episodes memories persist for some period of time, and they are still linked to our feelings of attachment. Grief is the process of uncoupling, unbraid and untangling that relationship between where people are in space, in time and our attachment to them. What I mean by this is when somebody or an animal or a thing is taken from us either by decision or by death or by circumstances.

Well, in that case, our entire memory bank in our ability to predict where and when they will be, and therefore, when we can feed our attachment to them again, that whole map is obliterated, except that the attachment itself has not been disrupted. Assuming that you are deeply attached to someone or an animal thing, that attachment persists. And the grief process is one in which you have to reorder your understanding of them in space and in time.

This is very, very hard to do. And for some people, it's almost impossible to do, at least at the outset of grief. This, in a very neuroscience cy way, explains this stage that couple ross described, which many, again, not all, but many people experience, which is one of denial.

How would IT be? why? Well, when we have a rich catoche of experiences with somebody or of them, right, ideas about them, and what they do, how they spend their day, what they do and don't do, where they do at at ta, well, that memory bank is not just flushed out the moment that we learn that they're no longer with us.

What happens is the brain continues to make these predictions that they will be in a certain place or a certain time, right? They'll be a certain time zone. They're walk in the door any moment.

All of those predictions still hold. The neural activity continues. We call this reverbed ory activity that explains the yearning for in the desire to interact. And yet it's just beyond our reach because once they're gone, our brain still functions.

In a way, these neural circuit still functions in a way that put us into an action state of seeking them, looking for them in the same location, expecting them to contact us at whatever frequency that we were used to hearing from them, or that we could reach out to them and reliably get a response. IT is immensely disorienting, in other words, to maintain a close attachment, and at the same time, to not be able to make predictions about where that person, animal thing, is in space and time. Now, if this seems somewhat abstract, i'm going to continue to flush IT out.

And actually right now, i'd like to flush IT out with a real world example of grief and loss that comes to us from perhaps one of the greatest minds in human history and somebody who was intensely grounded in reality and logic, and indeed the physics of the world. And the person are referred to no other than the nobel prize winning physicist, Richard fineman. Many of you are probably familiar with Richard fine men.

Some of you perhaps are not. Richard finmin was a nobel prize winning physicist known for his thick new york accident. He was actually not from rookley, as many people think.

He was actually from far rockaway in long island, thick new york accent, very personable, exceptional teacher, brilliant mind, hence the nobel prize in physics. Also, a quite funny and amusing person told gradante totes at seta. Fineman had a childhood sweetheart who turned out to be his first wife.

Her name was arlean. And IT was well known that finland was absolutely in love with her. He would talk about her all the time.

He had a profound influence on him and his thinking, and ultimately on his public education efforts. Later, if you haven't already read books such as, surely you're joking, mr. fineman. Or what do you care what other people think? I encourage you to do so.

And in fact, that, quote, what do you care what other people think is actually a quote, not a fine man, but of his first wife, arlean, who sadly died at a very Young age from tuberculosis. Why am I sharing fineman story of loss of his first bride? Well, the reason is fine man continued to write letters to our lean for a long period of time. This is well known.

Only because after five man died, he was discovered that he kept an archive of letters to his deceased first wife, and even though he did eventually marry, and in fact had many relationships of many people, and I think was married twice more, maybe once, maybe was twice the intensity of his grief, but also his lack of ability to transition his mind to a place where he understood that our lean had died, is one of the more profound examples of this inability to reconcile the logical world in the emotional world. And i'm now gona read to you a letter that finland wrote to arleen. This was discovered after fine man's death when they went through his desk in his belongings.

And as I read this, you're going to hear some of the typical narrative of grief that is not unique to find me and is a dead wife. But there are also some elements in there that I think you'll recognize, highlighting this disbelief and this association between the reality of somebody's location in space and time, and the emotional attachment that they hold for us. And there realize the information about how to Better navigate grief.

So now i'm reading from the letter. This was a letter dated october seventeen, one thousand nine hundred and forty six. It's not terribly long, but bear with me. Dear arleen, I adore you sweet heart. I know how much you like to hear that, but I don't only write IT because you like IT.

I write IT because IT makes me warm all over inside to IT to you IT is such a terribly long time since I last wrote to you almost two years. But I know you excuse me because you understand how I am stubbing and realistic, and I thought there was no sense to writing. But now I know my darling wife, that IT is the right thing to do, what I have delayed in doing, and that I ve done so much in the past.

I wanted to tell you, I love you, I want to love you. I will always love you. So here we can hear the intense emotional attachment that clearly is persisted.

I find IT hard to understand in my mind what IT means to love you after you are dead. But I still want to comfort and take care of you, and I want you to love me and care for me. I want to have problems to discuss with you.

I want to do little projects with you. I never thought until just now that we can do that. What should we do? We started to learn to make close together, or learn in SE, we're getting a movie projector.

Can't I do something now? No, I am alone without you. And you were the idea woman and the general, the gator of all our wild adventures.

When you were sick, you worried because you cannot give me something that you wanted and you thought I needed. You need to have worried just as I told you. Then there was no real need because I loved you in so many ways, so much.

And now IT is clearly even more true. You can give me nothing now yet. I love you so that you stand in the way of my loving anything else.

But I wanted you to stand there. You dead are so much Better than anyone else alive. So you can really appreciate the depth and intensity of the attachment despite two years time, IT clearly has not wind.

I'll read the final paragraph now. I know you all sure me that I am foolish and that you want me to have full happiness and don't want to be in my way. I bet you are surprised that I don't even have a girlfriend except you sweet heart after two years.

But you can't help IT darling, nor can I. I don't understand IT, for I met many girls and very nice ones, and I don't want to remain alone. But in two or three meetings, they all seem ashes.

You only are left to me. You are real. My darling wife, I do adore you.

I love my wife. My wife is dead. Rich PS, please excuse my not mAiling this, but I don't know your new address.

So there's a lot contained in this letter. We could pass IT line by line. But I think it's fair to say that clearly, there's an immense attachment that's been maintained.

So that's that dimension of closest of attachment. Clearly, there's an understanding that she's dead. In fact, the last line of this love letter is my wife is dead, right? He now moves her into the third person, in fact, in that final line.

So he understands this. And yet he maintains the attachment and the very last portion of the letter of the P. S. The post script.

I don't know your new address, right? Somewhat humorous in the typical vein of a fineman writing or speech, you always had a intense, amusing and playful sense of humor. And yet there's something really contained in this.

I don't think we're reading into this too much in that he doesn't know where to find her. He feels her as very real, and yet he doesn't know where to find her. He doesn't know her address. He obviously know she's dead. So there's nowhere to mail IT to the reason I share this letter with you as opposed to one of the almost infinite number of other letters that have been written by poets and authors and scientists and everyday people, is that IT really capsule tes all three dimensions of attachment and grief, these notions of space, where is something or somebody, time.

This dimension of how long would you take me to reach them, or for them to reach me, what would you take in terms of time to be reunited? And then that last dimension of closely, and the letter beautifully illustrates the fact that in grief, we maintain that sense of closing. And yet we have to uncouple IT from these other two dimensions as we're furring to do space and time.

So with this current understanding in mind, a few things start to become obvious and entirely Normal to us in the best and most healthy sense of the word Normal. For instance, if you've lost somebody or an animal, or even a thing that was vitally important to you, IT should make perfect sense to you as to why you keep looking for that person. I recall this in my own life.

I had the unfortunate circumstances. My graduate advisor, who I was very close with, died quite Young, breast cancer. And her daughter has two daughters, kept her cell phone and what occasionally call me.

I had a quite close relationship to their family. And when IT would come in, the number would pop up on my phone of not the daughter, but the me that showed up was of my graduate advisor. So for years after he died, my initial impulse when the phone would ring was, oh, my godness.

She's calling IT was an IT was a reflexive excitement because I truly always enjoyed hearing from her a wonderful, incredibly wonderful person, I should say. Similarly, when somebody passes away, we will find ourselves looking into a room expecting to see them there, or expect them to knock on the door any moment, or to call on sunday morning as IT were. Those expectations, those predictions that the brain is making are entirely Normal because they are based on that deep catalogue of episodes, memory that you maintain about that person.

Again, the depth and ricans of that catoche scaling, of course, indirect relation to how close you were with that person, closer to somebody, means more information about them. More information about that means your brain has a lot of implicit, unconscious notions of when and where and how they show up. So the fact that your brain, and indeed sometimes your body, reacts to the expectation that we'll be there is entirely Normal.

It's simply an activation of this map that involves closest space in time, not surprisingly. Then the reordering of that map that's required in order to move through the gripping process is going to involve some remapping. And you, as the person grieving, have the opportunity to ask which node, as it's called, which element or dimension within that map are you going to focus on?

Some people really try hard to disengage with and remap their sense of emotional closeness to the person that is, is so unbelievably overwhelming to them that the person is no longer accessible that they try and change their ideas about how close they really were. They try and change their emotional attachment to the person after they've died. Clearly, in the example that I gave in the fineman letter, that's not the case.

The attachment seems indeed quite fixed and not going anywhere. Psychologist and neuroscientist generally agree that the best way to approach moving through grief is actually to remap these dimensions while maintaining the close sense of attachment to the person by not in any way trying to undermine the intensity of the attachment or how important IT was to you will now talk about how that process works and the different entry points, as they are called to engaging in that process. So one straight forward way to think about this state of mining body that we call grief is that the idea that someone or an animal or a thing, simply does not exist anymore is not something that the brain can easily conceptualize.

And the reason for that is that we, as beings that have a brain, and a brain as an organ that makes predictions, tends to rely more on experience than knowledge. In other words, the knowledge that someone were an animal or a thing is gone, that IT doesn't exist, at least not in the dimensionality that we were accustomed to relating to them in, is something that we can understand logically. But that emotionally is very hard to undo and from a memory perspective is very hard to undo.

So it's not just that we are in a state of emotional disbelief is that we have neurons, literally nerve cells and neural circuits, connections between nerve cells that are dedicated to this vast implicit knowledge of all the things we know about that person, animal are thing. And just because they are no longer in the dimensionality meaning in the configuration alive or present in our life that they were before doesn't eliminate those memories. Those memories persist.

And so any time we call to mind the person's name, or we call to mind things that reminds us of them, or we suddenly feel the desire to engage with them, the memories, those episodes, implicit memories, as they're called, all that menu and library of knowledge slams are straight in the face and pushes us into a mode of wanting to act in a way that's consistent with them still being here, in the way that all that knowledge told us they were when we acquired IT. That's a very long winded way of saying that there's nothing wrong about the emotional state when we are in a state of of grief. In fact, quite the opposite.

But there is something wrong about the memories because the memories are based on our prior knowledge of them, and those memories actually do not apply to our current knowledge of them. And again, even though our brain is a prediction machine and it's a very good one, it's not perfect. In fact, it's far from perfect.

So really moving through brief as the process of understanding. How relationships are mapped in the brain, space, time and closely, also called attachment, understanding those three dimensions, understanding that they are closely linked, and then understanding that simply the knowledge that somebody or something or an animal isn't accessible to us does not allow us to discard of all the knowledge that we have. And as a consequence, our bring this constantly generating expectations of how to access them, even if we know that's completely irrational.

Now this should, I would hope, assist you in moving through grief. It's not a tool of the sort of like a switch that you can flip and suddenly not feel grief. But IT does point to a specific set of mechanisms or a specific set of that you can engage in order to start to move through the grieving process in the most adaptive, effective way and in a way that still holds in mind your close attachment to the person.

So let's talk about some of the tools for adaptively. Moving through brief, these are tools cleaned from the research psychology, the clinical psychology and the neuroscience literature. I've synthesized my understanding of those three literature to provide the tools that i'm about to describe.

The first one involves the acknowledged and really the understanding that you don't want to disengage or dismantle your real attachment to someone, an animal or a thing. That's a real thing. And there is actually no adaptive reason to try to persuade yourself or numb yourself, or somehow avoid the thinking of just how much they meant to you.

What is important, however, is that you make some effort to shift your mindset and your understanding of that person in a way that holds in mind that, yes indeed, the attachment is very real and in some cases is very, very intense, but is now going to be uncoupled from the other two dimensions of the map, namely space and time. So again, just to make absolutely clear, there is no reason to try and convince yourself that you weren't to actually that close to this person or them to you. There's no reason to try and reduce the intensity of that attachment.

To the contrary, you want to anchor yourself to that attachment, but you want to make sure that your thoughts about the person and your feelings about the person are not oriented toward, or in reference to, I should say, that map, that deep catalogue of memories that you had. Now, this is not simply a fancy way of saying don't live in the past. This is saying you need to maintain your sense of attachment, but you need to start making predictions and understanding about how you're going to and engage with that attachment, how you're going to feel those things without the expectation that things that once happened before are going to happen again.

So it's a complicated process, you can imagine, but you really want to hold in register two things at once, sort like spinning two plates at once. And therefore it's going to feel like effort. One way to do this is to set aside a dedicated period of time of maybe five or ten, maybe even in as much as thirty minutes, or, depending on your capacity, thirty to forty five minutes, in which you are going to feel deeply into your closest in your attachment to that person, animal thing.

But you are consciously going to try and prevent yourself from thinking about a couple of categories of things. First of all, you want to actively try and disengage from any attempt to engage in what's called counterfactual thinking. The what if, what if I call them a day earlier? What if they had taken a different road home? What if I had taken a different road home? These counterfactual modes of thinking are an infinite landscape of possibility, and they are very, very closely tied to guilt.

Guilt is an interesting emotion. We should probably do an entire episode about guilt. But guilt, as defined by psychologist, energy scientists, is actually a way of assigning ourselves more agency, more capability of controlling reality than actually exists.

And it's a very slippery slope. And I want to be clear, it's not the case that guilt is never inappropriate response. But in the context of grieving, the guilt is very precarious.

Because in thinking I could have done this, or if I only done that, you are essentially expLoring an infinite landscape of things that you can never refute. You will never know that had you not gone down a different path where they had not taken a particular path in life, that things would have turned out different. But you can't know that he would have worked as well, meaning you actually don't know that you are what if are true and you don't know that they're not true.

And so as an infinite space is a very precarious and IT will not allow you to uncouple that intense emotional attachment ment that i'm telling you is actually vital to hold onto from that catalogue of epithetic memory that you've establish. In fact, it's going to strength in those bonds. So in this dedicated five or ten or thirty, whatever a period of time you can tolerate and maintain, focus the ideas to think about your attachment in a rich way, and to perhaps even experience that in your brain and body.

I think if you're in a stage of grief that actually will be fairly reflexive to do, but to try as much as possible to hold that grief in the present and to be connected to your immediate physical environment. So you want to orient yourself in current space and time, rather other than focus on memories or what you would have like to see happen, or the wish that they were still there. Well, at the same time, thinking about the depth and richness of that attachment, this is that obviously a tight rope walk, so to speak.

It's an emotionally chAllenging and sometimes even will be experience as a physically chAllenging tool or experience. But in our understanding of how attachments and grief are represented in the brain, this can be an immensely beneficial practice, because this is the first step, and indeed, IT represents many of the steps in the voyage, from the initial shock of loss to our ability to hold in mind somebody or an animal or a thing, in a way that still allows us to feel the depths and fullness of connection to them without feeling the yearning that reaching for the glass of water that unfortunately will never be resolved. Keep in mind that as you embark on this process, IT is entirely Normal for your mind to flip into various states of expectation that they're suddenly going to be there.

In fact, because of the closest of these three dimensions in the map, space, time and attachment, it's entirely Normal that when you start to think about your attachment to somebody, you, an animal or thing, that you almost start to experience them as present in that environment. I'll share with you a somewhat bizarre or IT sounds of bizarre, articulate out lab, but many view perhaps will resonate with this. For years after my graduate advisor died, I would get an experience with someone touching the back of my neck when I would think about her, and that was not an experience I ever had with her right there was a professional relationship.

I don't ever recall her touching in the back of my neck or me touching the back of my neck in her presence um at least not on a regular basis so he was very perplexing to me. And then I encounter this incredible literature on grief, which said the following grief in many ways is like a phantom limb. For those who that aren't familiar, many people who experience amputation of a limb of those through surgery or accident or otherwise, will feel in a very genuine way that the lime is still present, even though when they look for the limb is not there, so they can feel pain in limbs, they can feel the sensation of touch.

There are some famous experiments from the neurologist and my former college university, california, and ago, who goes by his last name, roman chen. Some people just call him rama. He's an incredible scientist and has done a lot of really important work, in particular on phantom ym, among other things, and has done some beautiful experiments showing that people who have phantom in pain, or that are experiencing different sensations in their fantasy.

M, that can be very intrusive, much in the same way that expecting someone to walk through the door who you happen to know is deceased, can be very intrusive. Roma, cher and beautiful experiments showing that if you give people what's called the mirror box, this is a box in which you insert an intact limb. There are some mirrors that give you the visual impression that the other limit still present, and you move the intact live, and you get a miro image of the nonexistent, but nonetheless, visual image of the phantom m.

Moving that you can resolve some of the pain of a limb that feels otherwise cramped up in others. Ds, the visual perception can reverse some of these phantoms sensations in many ways. The phantom limb energy, and what I described about a sensation of being touched on the back, in the neck, or this feeling that we have when we engage in the thinking, in the emotions of our attachment to someone, an animal or thing, is very much like a phantom m.

Only IT exists in the emotional space, and IT exists because IT is reactivation of these maps about space, time and person. And so if the process of moving through grief adaptively in a healthy way involves maintaining the attachment, but uncoupling that attachment from the space and time representation of that person thing that we had before, well then the question becomes, where should we place our expectation of them right now? That, of course, will vary from person to person.

Some people with particularly religious beliefs will indeed believe that the soul of the person, the molecules of the person, have been reordered and exist in some sort of either distributed domain, right, that they're in everything or they are in one location. I'm not here to speak to that one way or the or the other. There's no good experiment.

I know either to prove or disprove that, nor would I want to. It's not the job of science, Frankly. However, allowing ourselves to place notions of where that person, animal thing is in our, in their current new configuration, whatever that might be, ashes dashes is dust to dust, or that the persons soul comes out of their body.

These are all the different variations that people here, some people think, well, is just molecules. And they disintegrate in a real and come up as the plants in the trees. Again, a new, infinite number of possibilities. And IT depends a lot on personal belief.

IT is, however, essential that no matter what you believe, that you have some firm representation of where that person, animal thing is, so that you can plug IT into this map, this three dimensional map of space, time and attachment. The process of moving through grief can't simply be that we hold onto the attachment and we discard with any understanding of where they are in space, in time. And actually, the letter that finland wrote to his deceased wife, arlean, again so beautifully and really pointed tly.

Illustrates the fact that he doesn't really know where to find her. On the one hand, he really understands that she's gone, and on the other hand, he understands that he still very much expects her to be there, that he would like to mail a letter. But then course, in this final, somewhat humorous line, he doesn't aware to send the letter.

He tells us what's very clear, and I think is very healthy, is the fact that the emotional bond is still there, that that is maintained. And so this tool, if you will, of dedicated blocks of time for really spending some effort and IT is indeed effort to access the emotional connection while starting to uncouple the other nodes of the map as IT. Where is something that is hard? You should expect you to be hard.

But in terms of the options one has in order to deal with grief, IT is indeed the most adaptive way to go about IT. You're not trying to avoid thinking about IT. You're not engaging in this counterfactual thinking.

What if? What if? What if you're not drowning IT out with substances or delusion or with other ways of distracting yourself? So in that sense, that is truly adaptive. Now of course, I don't want to imply that a clinical psychologist, i'm certainly not.

There is absolutely a place for working with a train professional to move through grief, especially these situations, these one in ten people who deal with what's called complicate degree for very prolly grief. Those are somewhat different things. But in general, point to the fact that there are people who have an exceptionally hard time moving through grief. Talk about those. People are in ways to move through them with or without a professional to assist you, but none of less.

We're starting to understand on the basis of neuroscience what some of the more adapt of and functional ways of moving through grief are in order to really understand how a tool of the sort that we're describing on to work and what is designed to accomplish at a mechanistic level, like to teach you about a very important aspect of your brain function that has everything to do with grief and the process of moving through grief, but has a lot to do with other aspects of our life experiences as well. Some of you are probably familiar with the brain area called the hip campus. The hip campus is a structure that's involved in the formation of new memories, but not the maintenance of memories.

I discuss the hip a campus in detail in our episode on memory and our episode with our guest, dr. Wdnesday zuko from new york university and expert on learning and memory. During those two discussions, I did not, however, touch into what the different cell types are in the hip campus and the different rules they perform.

And IT turns out that there are indeed different cell types in the hippocampus, and they performed very different roles that are absolutely central to the grief process. We have cells in our hippocampus, meaning you have cells in your hippocampus. Mells are neurons and nerve cells that fire any time or and when we say fire, I should just remind you, I mean, have electrical activity any time that we enter a particular familiar location. So for instance, think about your bedroom and think about where the bed is as you're doing that these so called play cells are firing, not necessarily to represent, that is, a bed at that location, but to represent the location itself. We also have neurons in our hippo campus and elsewhere in our brain, I should say, that represent proximal ity.

So for instance, if you were to wake up at the middle night and walk into the kitchen and it's somewhat dark, and you orient told the sink to get yourself a glass of water or to the refrigerator to get yourself something to drink, her to eat, as you get close to the sink or the refrigerator, there are neurons in your hip campus that are going to start engaging electrical activity because you are in the mere expected proximity of the sinker refrigerator, and you know where they are, hence the word expected. Now that all seems finding good. You've ve got ten ons that represent where things are and sort of goes without saying that those same neurons map to our emotional attachment.

We generally know where to find our loved ones, even if they don't live with us. We generally know what city they're in, even if you're traveling. We generally have a sense of where they're traveling or the general in which they're traveling. Play cells and proximately cells are involved in that kind of mapping and representations as well.

Now there's a third kind of cell is particularly important for the sort of tool that we're talking about earlier, that tool of holding on to the emotional attachment to somebody and yet trying to deliberately ream up our understanding of where they are in space, in time. And that has to do with a category of cells called trace cells. Trace cells were discovered, but by a number of laboratories.

I think the most um renowned of those is the moser laboratory. The mosses are a couple, actually they were a couple there. Now I think amicably separated or divorced is not what these episodes about. If I have that wrong, forgive me, Edward in britain are their names. The relationship is in what's important. What is important is that the work that they did together in one former another, which was very important, work establishing the category of cells in, not just in the hippocampus, but in an area that being called the internal cortex, that act is a sort of coordinate to orient us in space, in time. Tay cells are activated when we expect something to be at a given location, but it's not there.

Experiments done in their laboratory and and other laboratories have shown that, for instance, if you give a rodent, or Frankly, a person, a object that always resides at the same location and we reach to IT in order to access IT, let's say where your coffee maker is in the in the morning um I do a pour over coffee. If i'm drinking coffee or mote, i'll do a poor over it's always more less than the same location. And so there are play cells and proximately cells that relate to my being able to find that poor over coffee cone thing.

However, if I were to go to that location and IT wasn't there, the tray cells, these neurons in my hip campus and an internal cord text and elsewhere, because, again, these cells are connected by way of circuitry, by way of connections, those trace cells would fire. We could even call IT a trace circuit. It's a circuit that has an expectation that something will be in a location, but when something is not at that location, the circuit becomes active.

This is important because what we're talking about here is a neural circuit and a set of neurons that are responses, not for the presence of something, but the absence of something. We have every reason to believe based on neural imaging studies and studies and animal models, that trace cells become very active in the immediate stage after the loss of a loved one, that the brain and our maps of the person, place or thing that we know cognitively, we understand. We even believe they are gone.

They are not accessible for whatever reason, death or otherwise. And yet we have neurons that are firing to reveal that absence to us. And these neurons are closely associated with neurons that tell us where things ought to be.

So if you feel the expectation or you sense that somebody should walk through the door any moment or call at any moment or be next when you wake up, and yet you cognitively understand that they won't, that there is no real reason why they should, because they are indeed done. You are not crazy. In fact, it's simply a reflection of the Normal functioning of these tray cells and trace circuits.

Now i'd like to consider why two people, both who are intensely attached to a person that is no longer there, can experience the grief of the loss of that person in such different ways. This is often observe. You can have, you got forbid, incredibly sadly, in cases where a child is lost, where both parents are grieving intensely, but one seems to feel IT at a emotional depth and level that seems distinct from the other.

Now, of course, keep in mind that we never really know how other people are feeling. This is something actually that was raised in the episode where I interviewed a psychiatrist and research, or colleague of mine from stanford, carl dior, off as a psychiatrist. I heard him say once that we really don't know how either people feel.

In fact, a lot of times we don't even really know how we feel, at least describing that is quite chAllenging with language often. And indeed, that is the case. We don't really know how either people feel.

There is no clear way of knowing that the expression someone else has or whether not they're crying or not, or their body language really represents ts, how they feel inside. So that is important to keep in mind none's. There does seem to be a sort of a split among people, and indeed among animals as well, even within a species, in terms of how intensely they feel.

The yearning aspect of grief and IT appears based on a number of different lines of evidence that that relates to the molecule that some of you have probably heard of, which is oxytocin. Oxytocin is a hormones slash peptide. Peptide just means a protein, generally a small protein.

And a hormone is generally something that functions at numerous locations in the body to impact numerous organs and areas of the brain. So appetite can be a hormone, and a hormone can be a peptide. They're not meur exclusive.

Oxytocin has a variety of roles in the brain, and body, is involved in milk let down during action. It's involved in pair bonding both in males and females. It's involved in bonding of parent to child and indeed between romantic partners.

And let's talk about some of the animal models that inform us about the potential roles of oxytocin. The gripping process there is a species of animal called the praise vole. And believe in or not, the praise wall has been studied very extensively by neuroscience, psychology, researchers, fact, our former director of the national institutes of mental health, tom insel, his labatt focused quite heavily on prae voles.

Prayer s are one species of animal, but depending on where they live, you find that some prey voles are monogamous, that is, they met with the same prae wall for life. They raise letters of little pary voles for life, and other party VS generally that live in different locations in the wild are non yon August, sometimes called ams. The newer chemical and circuit basis for this monogamy, y versus non monogamy, are quite interesting.

However, in the context of grief and attachment, the prey VS have ve taught us a lot. And they're taught us a lot through the following experiment. Take two prey VS that are coupled up so there would be monogamous.

Preval that have established a couple doom. I guess you could call that at a puri volume. anyway.

Put them in a case together. They made together. They raise Young together, and then you separate them.

You literally put a physical barrier between the two of them, and you can evaluate how strongly one prae val will work to get access to the other prae val. right? This is sort of that romeo and july yet of prairie ball experiments.

And what you observe is that the monogamous puri balls will work very hard to get back to their mate, to get access to their mate. They will ever press they've to walk across a middle plate that they get an electrical shock. We'll work very, very hard.

They will cross rivers and values, if you will, in the experimental context, that is the political prevs. And again, we don't know if they're Polly emas. We don't know what they feel right. We don't know if they are in love or they're motivated simply for other things. But the nononono gmc paribas will not work as hard to access a prae vole partner.

Now you could argue that because they expect that there will be other praise vole partners, but you know, if they've never experiences another puri vole partner, they won't work quite as hard to get back in connection with this other period, al, to mate or otherwise. This turns out to be interesting when you start to explore the patterns of so called oxytocin receptors in the brain, to make a long story short, and to also bridge to the human literature IT turns out that the monogamous parables have far more oxytocin receptors in this brain area that I mentioned earlier, the nucleus. And again, to remind you that nuclear accompanies the brain area associated with motivation, craving and pursuit.

So IT is if the monogamous parry walls have a capacity to link the attachment circuitry and the molecules of attachment, in this case oxytocin, to reward pathways into motivational pathways. Polygamous, or we should say, nony, mon, aug. Mous prey VS do as well. However, they have less oxytocin receptor. So in other words, non monograms pary VS seem have less yearning for attachment overall, at least to a single individual people.

And when we look at the human literature in terms of oxytocin, recept expression and brain imaging experiments and so on, what you find is the same, the people that experience intense grief and a deep earning and a motivation to reconnect with the person, animal or thing that is lost, in many cases, have higher levels of oxytocin, specifically, where, I should say, oxytocin receptors, to be exact, specifically within the brain regions associated with craving and pursuit. So for those of you that find yourself in this kind of stuck mode, this persistence of trying to reach into the past, or wishful thinking, this counterfactual thinking, if only, if only, if only, you don't necessarily want to pathologies that thinking. First of all, we should acknowledge that it's not necessarily adaptive.

And in fact, in the complete loss of somebody or somebody says they don't want anything to do with you ever again, by all means, you know, if that's expressed clearly, then you need to accept that reality. But the earning, the desire and the impulsivity, the kind of leaning in and at a almost reflective way to try and to access that person again, to text them, to want to hear from them, could, and I have to highlight, could reflect the fact that you, just so happen, have more oxytocin receptors, or maybe more oxytocin overall, in this brain area that associated with motivation and pursuit does not necessarily mean that you are more capable of attachment than people who move through grief more quickly. And I should say that people move through grief at different rates.

Even if two people lost the same person or same animal, people move through this a different rates. And some of that is no dout psychological, but some of IT, no doubt, is also neurochemical and biological. And ensuring this with you, I hope IT shed some understanding, and perhaps even some compassion for people who are moving through things more quickly or in a different way.

And of course, you should also, I would hope, shed compassion and understanding for people that seem incapable of, quote, quote, moving on. It's taking them far longer to move on. Earlier, we talked about complicated grief, non complicated grief and prolonging ef disorder.

And I should say that the precise divisions between these categories is not very precise. IT takes a really trained expert to be able to identify whether not somebody is in the prolonging ef disorder category. Complicated, non complicated grief. There's actually a set of questionnaire that I invite you to answer if you like.

They were provided um I should say I access them through a public site on mary ferenci so corners web page will put them in the shower note captions you actually can submit those answers and an anonymous way to a study that she's doing. SHE has uh several surveys, one for loss of a romantic relationship, other for lost due to death of somebody and still another one that relates to home sickness. And it's also available in several different languages.

So provide a links to that websites, very easy to download, is no cost to that at all. You can contribute to the scientific data collection process, if you like, and I do believe that you get your scores back or an interpretation of your scores by participating there. When mary Frances sicker hopefully comes on the podcast, SHE can tell us some more of the detail about separating out this prolonged rip disorder, complicated, non complicated grief.

But in the meantime, it's very clear that people move through grief at different rates. And as I mentioned just a moment ago, that this is entirely Normal, probably has a basis in new chemicals and hormones such as oxytocin. There are probably other reasons as well.

In fact, we can assume with almost certainty that there are other reasons as well. none's. I think this is really important to think about why some people might have a harder time moving through grief due to life, circumstance in eight differences and so on. There's a very nice set of studies, but one in particular entitled category predictors of complicated grief outcomes. Here again, the first author is mary Francis so conner, reminding us that she's done so much important work in this area.

This paper has several conclusions, but one of the key conclusions is that this particular category, molecules we call the categories, the catelan ans, include appen afra, which is also a general, nor appan ephron, which is nor a journey and doping, which you've learned about before. Here i'm just going to paraphrase where i'll read directly actually what they found was that participants against with human subjects with the highest levels of epinephrine, a journal pretreatment, have the higher levels of complicated grief symptoms post treatment, and that could account for their baseline level of symptoms. What this means is that people have a lot of circulating a gentleman.

We might even called these people who people who are were typically resided at a higher level of automation ic arousal. We have an automated ic novices in the detects how calm or alert or stress we happen to be just at baseline, people that who tend to be more alert and anxious at baseline prior to any grief episode tend to have, or statistically on averages to say are more likely to experience complicated grief and maybe even prolonged grief symptoms. So if you somebody is that is anticipating losing someone or an animal or a thing at some point, and I think that really means everybody utilizing tools to adjust your eyes, ephor journal in levels down has a number of important benefits.

Improving sleep health metric. Could a there are tools to do that. We have an episode on mastering stress that you can find in our website, human lab. Dota has a lot of behavioral tools that are backed by science, some of work that was done my laboratory, but other certainly other laboratories as well, that will allow you to control your automation ic nervous system both in real time and reduce the overall level of stress and even chronic activation of the so called sympathetic r of the autonomic eric system, which is just fancy. eg.

Speak for saying there are tools to help you be calm, not just for sake of navigating daily stress, but, as this paper illustrates, for helping the fact that at some point you will lose somebody in animal or a thing. And there is a way to move through that process that we call healthy, Normal grieving. And then there is the so called complicated degree for prolonging grief disorders that reflect immense chAllenge in moving through grief at a reasonable rate.

So you can somewhat inoculate yourself against complicated or prolonged grief by reducing your resting levels of, or your ploss levels of epinephrine. A journey. And again, there are excEllent tools to do that. I won't review them here for sake of time, but their time stamped, and you can access those easily. Again, zero cost tools.

Going back to this paper, cattle mean predictions of complicated grief treatment outcomes should say that not only did participants with the highest levels of a journey have the highest levels of complicated grief symptoms of post treatment, but the predictive relationship between these two things are journal and complicated grief was not seen in depression, and I find that incredibly interesting, because IT further separates depression from grieving, and grieving from depression is rebounding theme again and again. Grieving is not depression, and depression is not necessarily grieving. They can coexist, but they are separable as well, and indeed reflect separate brain circuit aries entirely.

So the conclusion they draw that the present study supports the hypothesis that catalog y levels, again, eef an dopy nor epa effort, other catered means are affected by bereavement and in turn can affect the ability of those with complicated grif to benefit from psychotherapy. So what does all this mean? What this means is we can prepare ourselves to be in a Better state to access, yes, access grief when it's appropriate.

And indeed, grief is the appropriate response when we lose someone, an animal or a thing that we are closely attached to and yet to be able to move through that at a pace and in a way that is most adapted from. And to just again highlight what adapted means that does not mean associating from the attachment to the person, animal or thing, I just want to pause for a second and mention why I keep repeating person, animal or thing. I'm saying that because while grieving, the loss of a person or a relationship with a person doesn't have to be through death, of course.

But death or otherwise is something that we all can intuitively understand. Even if we have an experienced, we are capable of achieving great attachments to animals as well. And well, the loss of a thing, of an object in no way, shape or form, approximate the loss of a person or an animal.

I would never suggest that he does IT would also be naive and unfair of me or anyone else to suggest that things can't hold immense ve importance to us and that the loss of them can feel quite significant and invoke the grieving process. This is not always about materialism sometimes it's purely about the sentimental attachment. So for instance, ince, the loss of a wedding ring or an engagement ring that was very meaningful to you.

Or an article of clothing, or a painting, or even a small, seemingly in important object to somebody else, but something that held great meaning to you, maybe c shell that you collected with somebody on the beach. And then somehow he gets lost. And it's the relationship with that person that's contain within that object for you as as a representation within that object, that's important.

That's the reason why I keep saying person, animal or thing. I think it's only fair to include things in that category. But of course, with the understanding that they don't hold the absolute same magnitude as the loss of a being, one thing that we ought to consider for a moment is whether or not the depth of attachment that you have to somebody predicts how long this will take for you to move through the loss of that person. We often hear this um actually I can remember some years ago at the end of a relationship um a friend and colleague of mine saying you know for every year that you were together, it's going to take you one month to get over that person and I thought, where in the world those data come from and this is what I call annic data or collective data where this is like phrases such as absence makes the heart profounder and indeed sometimes absence can make the heart grow fonder in the context of two living people, people in a loving relationship, or even in the context of grief and loss. But of course, there's absence makes the heart grow fonder and then you also will hear out of sight, out of mind.

And if you have been listening to this episode, clearly, out of sight does not mean out of mind or out of emotional connection so these things of well IT takes x number of months for a number of years or outside out of mind or absence makes the heart growth under um they really don't hold a lot of meaning, at least not for somebody like me who like science because science is at least uh gear tard or aims towards establishing things, in fact not opinion but also because science allows you to make predictions IT allows you to orient yourself in a process and make predictions and understand so what are we to think of people who seem very, very attached to somebody, they break up and they seem just crush, devastated by three weeks later, they're in a new relationship and they seem perfectly fine, or somebody who spouse dies and then suddenly they're in a new relationship. I think there are rates of transition, if you will, that suggest some dis function pathology at at a but here, we aren't in a position to judge. We're only in a position to speculate about this.

And I think we can reasonably speculate that IT sort of makes sense why someone who has an intense attachment to somebody might be able to inform intense attachments generally, right, that they aren't restricted to one person. Where are other people who have an intense attachment to somebody might find themselves entirely capable of moving on where IT would take him a very long time. Hence, the lines in the fineman letters are lean about, he admit, various other Young women.

They seemed perfectly nicer. Yet they were meaningless to him in the shadow of her memory, or we should say, in the light of orleans memory, or the memory of alien, rather. So these dimensionalities of attachment, they cut in every direction.

And I don't think any well trained psychologist or neuroscientists would ever say, oh, if you are somebody who becomes very attached, therefore, it's very hard to move on. I think that could be true. IT could also be that if you somebody has a great capacity for attachment, you have a great capacity for attachment.

Overall neuroscience, news psychology is really in a position to judge, certainly, but is also not in a position to make those kinds of predictions. At least the field, as IT stands right now of attachment and grieving can't really speak to why that's the case. So that's my attempt to d pathologies some of what we observe, although I have to confess um from a just sort of everyday things that sometimes they rate in which people move out of attachments and grieving can be someone ery.

I'd like to take a moment to explore this idea that allowing ourselves to really feel the attachment to somebody can accelerate or at least support adaptive transitioning through grief is a really wonderful study that on the face of IT appears to be a what we call negative result. A negative result is when a hypothesis is posed and then turns out the hypothesis is not true. But as is the case with so many interesting scientific findings, often when there's a negative result, there's a more interesting result nested in that negative outcome.

And this is the case in a particularly paper i'll share with you now there's a paper publishing the general biological psychology. And again, the title is posed as a question, which is emotional disclosures for a study of vegal tone in briefing. What this study explored was whether not written disclosure of the emotional connection to somebody that was lost would be effective as a way for people to move through the grieving process.

The study also explorer the so called vegas nerve. The vegas nerve is an extensive nerve pathway that is by directional between brain and body, so brain to body and body to brain IT generally associated with coming effects on our brain and body. Although that's certainly not always the case.

The way to think about IT in terms of what we're going to talk about now is heart rate and heart rate variability. And in very simply, list c terms, if your heart was just allowed to beat at its sort of default rate, that rate would be rather high because of the activation of the so called sympathetic ARM of the autonomic nervous system. The alertness component of the autonomic nervous system, the parasympathetic nerve system is, it's called, involves coming.

We sometimes here, sympathetic is for stress or fighter flight, for a lot of other things as well, I should mention, and is not for sympathy, sympathize, ly means together. And that reflects the activity of a bunch of neurons being active at the same time or together same, whether parasympathetic is often associated with coin quote, rest and digest functions or coming functions, although IT is certainly involved in other things as well. So sympathetic nervous system drives alertness, panic, stress at at a parasympathetic nova system, meaning a distinct set of neurons drive, coming, falling, a sleep, digestion, sexual arise for that matter, and so on.

So he sort like a sea saw of alertness and calm alertness and com sympathetic comparison, MPA theft, back and forth. The vegas nerve is generally associated with paris sympathetic functions and has the capacity to slow down our heart rate, in particular by x hails. And just simply because of the movement of the dire frame and its relationship to the heart and the thash cavity, x hails result in slowing down of the heart rate.

This is what we call an increased vegal tone. So let me explain for a moment. And actually, here's a tool you can use, not just in terms of navigating grief, but terms of stress modulation.

Generally, we have a muscle called the dire frame. When we inhale, whether not to our mouth or nose, our dire frame moves down. As a consequence, there is more space overall in the trash cavity.

The heart gets a little bit bigger. Believe or not, volume was blood flows more slowly through that large volume. And there's a signal conveyed from the nervous system to the heart to speed the heart up.

So in hils, literally speed your heart up. And when you x hail, the die frame moves up. And as a consequence, there's less space in the thash c cavity. Heart gets a little bit smaller.

The existing blood volume in the heart at that time moves more quickly through that small volume, right? Given amount of blood volume make the compartment is in the heart smaller, and the blood was more quickly through that volume, and as a consequence to the nerve system sends a signal to the heart via the veggies and other pathways to slow the heart down. In other words, X, L, slow the heart down.

That process, that relationship between inhale speeding the heart up and exile slowing the heart down is only called respiratory sinus rythmic. Some people are able to engage respiratory son as a rithmetic more naturally, more reflexively than others. You can actually train this by consciously thinking about slowing your heart rate while you exile, and consciously thinking about increasing your heart rate as you in hill.

You can literally strengthen in these pathways. Now, respiratory science say rythmic and the ability to slow your heart rate with x sales is one dimension of what's called vegal tone, or your ability to control your overall level of activation of alertness and stress with these vegas of pathways. So vehicle tone is something that varies from personal person.

If you've trained up or you've thought about your relationship between breath and heart rate, you can improve vehicle tone. Some people have very robust vehicle tone without having done any training. Other people have less of IT, at cetera.

I'll just preface from this paper and you'll see where this takes us in terms of navigating grief because it's quite important the vague st nerve provides inhibitory regulatory influence on the heart, allow the heart rate to increase rapidly through vegal withdraw, that means coming off the break of the person of the nervous system as in response to a dresser in one's environment, right? When you're stress, you rarely take the opportunity for a an immediate stress or threat to actively excell that, that would be a great tool to use. In fact, we promote that tool in our mastering stress episode vegal, which raw usually co occurs with an increase in sympathetic activation of the heart.

You know know what that is, or is known as the fighter flight response. A vegal tone reflects the Derek to which there is tonic, meaning ongoing vegal influence on the heart. So when you have a high degree of legal tone, IT means that you are always activating that break on your stress system, just that default.

And some people just happen to do that. More other people need to practice long x hae breathing in order to build up vehicle tone. Something is very useful to do, whether you're grieving or not.

Now in this study, what they did is they had people, and I should say, was thirty five participants go through a writing exercise for a period of weeks. They actually wrote about three times per week. Then there was a follow up at some point of time, and then again about a month later.

And there are two different groups. One group was in the so called the written disclosure group. What they did is they, on day one, they would write about what happened when a loved one died.

And indeed, they use people who had experienced real loss. And so they were asked to talk about and write about their deepest st emotions and thoughts about IT. Memories of their loved on very intense stuff.

If you think about IT, if they're in the immediate period of having lost someone, then they actually were asked to write a letter to the person that they lost. So again, a very intense exercise to go through if you did indeed lose somebody as the subjects had. And then, of course, there was the testing some period of time later and all tell you what that prior testing involved.

The other group was a so called control group, where they were simply told to write about how they use their time. So an emotionally kind of empty writing exercise, if you will, they described what they would do today after they woke up. It's that are no, no heavy emotional content and so on.

Now as I mentioned earlier, the immediate results of this study were a negative result, meaning no effect. The disclosure that we should say the emotionally intense writing group and the control group did not differ baseline on any symptom measures or psychological variables. They tell us. And at least at face value, somewhat disappointingly, there really wasn't any kind of difference in outcome between the group that wrote about a very emotionally intense stuffers is non emotionally intense. Now what I didn't tell you thus far is why they had them do this exercise at all.

They had them do this exercise because many of the effective practices for moving through grief involve, as I mentioned earlier, getting close to, and actually deliberately experiencing the attachment that one has to that person that was lost, not distracting oneself, not getting into this counterfactual, thinking the what if, what if, what if, but rather thinking about her, in this case, writing about the real attachment. And so that the initial idea was, if people write about this attachment, that they are going experience the attachment, and that will serve them in summer, many ways, in terms of moving through grief. And that wasn't what they found.

They found no difference between the two groups until they explored who had higher vehicle tone, who had a greater degree of so called respiratory sy rythmic, in other words, who was able to modulate their state using their breathing in their body. And what they discovered was that a subset of individuals who had a high degree of vegal tone seem to get more benefit from this riding type exercise. Now this is one study, and I would consider this fairly preliminary with thirty five subjects, although, you know, it's a study into itself, and I think a quite nice one.

And IT really set the stage for a number of other studies that followed from this group and other groups that really point to the fact that, yes, indeed, accessing the states of emotionality by writing or thinking about somebody is quite powerful in terms of engaging the bottling states and the mind states associate with the attachment. And that is very beneficial for moving through grief. That is very beneficial for sensing the attachment.

And now IT makes perfect sense as to why some people would benefit from that sort of practice more than others, because some people are able to access more real thomaz feelings of attachment by writing about the attachment or by thinking about IT than others. So this brings us back to an earlier discussion we were having, where we are talking about how some people seem to move through things very quickly or don't seem to be grieving constantly in a, you know, a spouse or a family member of that person. I can cash a, why aren't you upset? How is that that you can be functional and i'm not? Or how is that you can be functional? There can even be fractured s and families and relationships on the basis of differences and rates of grieving and so on.

Well, some of this, again, probably relates to psychology and the different attachments that people had to the person or animal, or thing that was lost. But IT, no doubt also has to do with how much of a mind body connection, how much vehicle tone exist in the person when they suddenly found themselves in the grief episode. So this actually offers multiple opportunities. If you're somebody, for instance, who is grieving so intensely and so often that you're finding a immensely difficult to move through grief at a reasonable rate and you might even say or find yourself diagnosed with prolonging ef disorder with complicated grif american away, that's really in impairing your adapt of functioning in life.

Well, then it's not clear to me, at least by my read of the data, that you would want to engage in a lot of practices to increase the mind body relationship and feeling so much of this attachment because you're already feeling in a mense amount of IT where other people who are feeling chAllenge in accessing the feelings of attachment and perhaps not functioning well as a consequence of that, might find that practicing breathing in order to encourage respiratory science today, with the me again, focusing on slowing your heart rate, consciously value x, il. And concentrating on increasing your heart rate as you inhale, just as a brief practice of even just one to three minutes or one to five minutes, everyone, while or per day, that could be immensely beneficial in building this mind body relationship. Because, again, what this paper really points to and set off a number of other investigations related to, is that for those that can really feel the relationship between breathing, heart rate, what we call vehicle tone, well, those people are going to be in a Better position to move through grief, not because they are disengage from the feelings of attachment, but because they are Better able to access those feelings of attachment.

So what this relates to, of course, is that try part type map, that three part map that we talked about earlier, that representation of space, where things are, where the person is, where their belongings are, where their car is, where their bicycle is, time when you were expecting to see them on a regular basis, when they would call, when they would come home from work at sara. And that third node, or that third dimension of attachment, which is literally attachment and closest. Well, what we're talking about here is anchoring to that attachment and really feeling into that.

But then from the space and time map that we call episode memory, that many or prior experiences that keeps us, in many ways, adaptively in an expectation of what never can be again. Now I D like to take a moment and consider some of the tools that you can access that support healthy transitioning through grief. And these are tools distinct from that neural map, that space, time and closest attachment map that we're talking about before.

Rather, it's important to remind ourselves that everything exists in a context of our baseline philology. And i'm certainly not can be the first or the last to tell you that everything in life, learning relationships with people that are still around our health in every way, immune system is set function far Better when we're sleeping really well. And when we are generally awake during the daytime and a sleep at night, I realized there are shift workers out there, people who are traveling in our jet lag for so well.

Thank you. Shift workers. We rely on you. We have an episode all about jet lag and shift work for you and for trying to maintain the best possible mental and physical health in the face of ongoing shift work and jet lag.

You can find that epo de on our website, you brm lab outcome, a lot of behavioral tools, some other tools as well. None's human beings are diagonal. We were really designed to be awake mostly in the day and a sleep at night, rare exceptions to this, where people like to stay up late and sleep in late.

But we are a diagonal species by way of our genetic wiring and our neural circuit wiring. There's a particular feature to our diagonal and diagonal, meaning the opposite of doctor are Diana pattern of the release of a hormone called cortical cortisol. L is a stress hormones, is sometimes called, but court is all, has a lot of other effects, many which are positive.

Court is all, for instance, protects us against infection. IT can help us in terms of waking up in the morning. In fact, the pulse says it's called or the Spike in quarters all early in the day is part of the reason we wake up bit linked to our increase in temperature orthes and can further increase our temperature, which leads to waking and so on.

The typical pattern, of course, all in a healthy individual, we really can say physically and emotionally healthy individual, is that court is all is going to be somewhat high right around waking and then is going to be highest as IT ever will be in the twenty four hour period, about forty five minutes, post waking, not exactly forty five months, but about forty five minutes, and then IT will drop gradually, such that by about four P. M. In the afternoon, which is actually when body temperature tends to start to drop as well, court is all tends to be very low and then remains low in a healthy individual such that nine pm, it's very low.

And throughout the night as we sleep, it's very low. In fact, Spikes or pulses in nine pm cortisol are a fairly reliable biomarker read out of certain forms of depression. And chronic anxiety relates to the beautiful work of mi colleagues at stanford and stanford school of medicine, doctor David, people who's been on this podcast.

And doctor rubber is a post he who has also been on this podcast. There is a very interesting paper expLoring the relationship between courtisolles thames and grieving, in particular, complicated versus non complicated. Grieving again, complications rieving being the former grieving reflects a immense chAllenge of people moving through the grieving process such that IT really needs to be dealt with right again. Grieving is healthy but complicated rieving is a prolongation eve and as other dimensions as well, hence the name complicated.

The title of this paper is diagonal corner in complicated and non complicated grief slope differences across the day and the figure to order to in this paper, if you do decide to to check IT out and we will put a link to IT, is figure one, which beautifully shows, or should they very clearly shows, that in individuals that are experiencing complicated grief, there is the same general control of high court. Is all upon waking, even higher, about forty five minutes after waking. And then a reduction in court is all by four P.

M. And even further reduction by nine pm. So just as IT were in a typical individual or somebody who is a non complicated grieving, however, when you compare the courts as all levels between people experiencing complicated grieving versus non complicated grieving, what you find is the four pm and nine pm quarter sl levels are significantly higher then they are in the non complicated grieving group.

This raises a very interesting idea and relate very closely to what we are talking about with vegal tone. You could imagine a situation in which people who are experiencing complicated grief have higher levels of afternoon and nighttime. Court is all because they are in complicated grief. But you could also imagine the opposite, that they're experiencing complicated grief because of the fact that I have elevated court as all. Now it's very likely, that is, by directional, that the answer isn't one or the other, but both that complicated grief changes patterns of cortical.

And that patterns, of course, changed the likelihood that one has complicated grief, that the most logical interpretation of data like these, however, when taken along with the data on vegal tone, that people who have a higher level of vegal tone are Better able to navigate situations that of the source they were talking about, and that some people perhaps have oxytocin receptor ors or patterns of capital means or evenement, that position them to be more likely to grieve in a particular way. We arrive at a scenario where IT makes very good sense to think about modulating that is controlling the foundation of your life in a way that establishes cortisol idms and sleep patterns and patterns of automatic rosal and catalonia release, positioning you to navigate the grief process in the best possible way. If that was a complicated and awful to digest, let me restate IT in a simpler way.

If you are somebody who is heading into grief, or is chAllenge with grief complicated, a gree for otherwise prolong grief or otherwise getting adequate sleep at night and establishing as Normal a pattern of cortisol as possible is going to be very important. And there's a very simple straight ward way to do this. And I apologize to the listeners of this podcast in advance if I sound like a repeating record.

But the most powerful way to do this is to view sunlight very close awaking IT does not have to be ready at sunrise, but when you get up in the morning, if the sun is in doubt, please turn on as many bright lights as possible in your environment. And then once the sun is out, try and get some bright sunlight in your eyes. Never look at any light so bright that it's painful to look at sunlight or otherwise.

If you live in an area of the world, weather isn't a lot of sunlight. Please keep in mind that sunlight coming through cloud cover is going to still be a very effective mechanism for establishing this court is already them. Why do I say this thing about sunlight over and over and over again while having an early day cordial peak and a very low cortisol level late in the day?

Four P M and nine P M is immensely beneficial. IT reflects a properly regulated autonomic nervous system that means being alert during the day in your ability to sleep at night tightly correlated to the viewing of sunlight in the morning. If you have additional questions about this or these protocols, please see our mastering sleep episode.

Also, he remained ved up calm, but in brief, you don't want to wear some glasses when you do this. You do not want to do this through a window or a when shield IT is fifty times less effective, at least because of filtering of the proper wavelength is fine to wear eye glasses, mean corrective lenses or contacts, even if they have U. V.

Protection against sunlight is best ten minutes to thirty minutes, depending on how wide is outside, and so on and so forth. I keep coming back to this protocol because, first of all, IT is a zero cost, but very effective way to regulate things like courtille ytm military in rythm wakefulness during the day, easy falling asleep at night and so on. And second of all, because I want to emphasize this idea of modulation, there are processes in our brain, in body, which directly mediate some psychological effect or physiological effect, right? Do women is directly involved in motivation? If you're somebody who's struggles with motivation, your dog ming system is likely to be disregard ted in some way.

And there are behavioral tools and other tools to adjust that. We had an episode on dopamine motivation and drive that sively about those tools. However, the process of grief can be still down to one molecule, one circuit, such that we can say, oh, you take this supplement, or eat this diet and or exercise in the following way, and you recover from grief more quickly.

And simply not the case. That is the case, however, that proper sleep at night sets the foundation for the proper emotional tone to be able to navigate physical, psychological and other types of chAllenges, and not, incidently, sleep at night. I should say, sufficient duration and quality of sleep at night is the way in which you engage neural plasticity, the recording of neural connections and everything we've been talking about today, about reordering of the maps in your mind, this tripartite three part map of space, time and closely involves neuroplasticity the reconfiguring of connections between neurons, strengthening certain pathways and not strengthening others. Actively trying to disengage from the what if write this contractual thinking, actively trying to disagree ge from the expectations that someone will be there, although when you find yourself doing that, understanding why it's so reflective and Normal to do that, actively trying to lean into the real attachment to somebody, animal or thing, and yet at the same time not deluding yourself and undermining the whole process of grieving by trying to imagine that they are, in fact, still truly there, right?

It's a very narrow knife edge of a process, which is why it's so chAllenging, regulating your courters of rhythm through viewing sunlight early in the day, and I should also say, avoiding bright lights from artificial sources in the evening, generally ten P M to four A M, but certainly in the evening, trying to stimulate in your immediate and environment, trying to avoid bright screens, bright artificial lights as much as possible, and accessing that deep sleep that's modulating at setting an overall automation ic state or an overall atomic landscape would be the Better way to describe IT that's going to allow you to sleep and get neural plastics to sleep and being the best emotional state to navigate the grieving process because it's only fair to say that the grieving process, as we're describing IT, is hard and not just because it's emotionally hard. It's cognitively hard. You just think about what's required to move through grief properly, if you will.

It's thinking about and actually physically experiencing the depth, the full depth of the attachment to the person while at the same time trying to uncouple from that rich menu, that catalogue of epithetic memories that can date back many, many years and have so much rich as so many predictions form on the basis of those episodes memories, and actively trying to distance ourselves from those memories by being very anchored in the fact that we are a present. We are the person alone in that room, or in some cases, with a beaver ment group in that room, or with other people that are mourning the loss of that individual animal thing and that knife edge of feeling the intense attachment, while also disengage from all the things that LED to that attachment. Well, it's understandable why that would be so chAllenging.

And IT should also be understandable why positioning yourself to be able to do that in the best possible way requires proper sleep. So what are the tools that we can think about using in terms of healthy, adaptive, moving through grief, trying to avoid complicated grief and prolonged grief disorders, realize that where disorder implies all sorts of things. But again, those are just naming categorization that people come up with.

That, I think, fairly reflect the fact that some people have more chAllenge moving through grieving than others, and for some people can be very extended. I think the common misunderstanding is that proper breathing involves movie in through something quickly. We're certainly not saying that.

However, IT is very clear that some people can get stuck. And that process of getting stuck, you should now understand, has a lot to do with maintaining or reactivating those episodes memories. Those expectations are where somewhere somebody will be in space, in time.

So what can we say about the tools for moving through grief? Clearly, it's a value to dedicate some period of time, perhaps every day, perhaps every other day, depending on your capacity and schedule. This could be periods of time ranging anywhere from five to forty five minutes, maybe longer.

These blocks of time would be appropriately described as rational grieving. Rational grieving is a clear acceptance of the new reality that the person, animal, thing, no longer exists in the same spacetime dimensionality that we knew them before, and yet holding on to an anchoring to the attachment that we had. This is, again, not an unhealthy anchor to the attachment.

This is really enquiring to the depth and the intensity of the attachment that existed as a way to, for lack of, a Better way to put IT push off from those epithetic memories, to distance ourselves from them. Because those episodes, memories are the ones that lead us to look for the person in our current reality. And assuming this is a really complete loss, those sorts of expectations are more adapted.

They do not serve as well. The second aspect of this is to understand that the node of the map, the component of the neural map that you're anchor ring to, is a very real component of you. These are literally cells that represent the depth of attachment.

They are linked up with your emotional centers in the brain, and indeed, they are linked up with your body. I think one of the things that comes up so often when people are grieving as why does IT hurt so much? Well, that hurt is that yearning, is that anticipation of action that you want to engage in.

But some part of you at least knows that IT leads nowhere. It's that reaching for that glass of water in A A desert of thirst. And you know, you can't have IT. That's why IT hurt so badly, because the systems of your brain and body are in a place of anticipation of readiness.

And given the activation of these brain reward systems like the nucleus a cubans, given your now understanding of oxytocin being more enriched in the oxy, excuse me, in the nucleus, accuse of some individuals and as opposed to others, you should make perfect answer to why it's so painful in your body. We talk a moment ago about the importance of accessing quality sleep on a regular basis, gave you at least one tool to do that there. Again, a richer ray of tools to do that in the mastering sleep episode, and again, highlighting the importance of sleep for not just emotion regulation in autonomic control, which is so vital, but also for making sure that neuroplasticity takes place.

Because, again, neural plastic is a two part process. There's the triggering of the plasticity, which, in the case of the things we're talking about today, will be naturally activated by the practice of a dedicated focusing on the attachment, feeling the attachment to the person, maybe even writing about the attachment to the person, as was describing that previous study, but also just the plasticity is triggered by the mirror loss of that person. The intensity of that experience, but neuroplasticity the literal require ing of connections, occurs during deep sleep.

And what I call non sleeve deeps rest, or n sdr, you can find N S D R scripts. These are short behavioral protocols that you do for ten to thirty minutes at some point throughout today, maybe in multiple times three day, that have been shown to accelerate noral plasticity. So having a such a practice can be very useful and understand that IT involves some cognitive work.

We have to hold onto the attachment and imagine and feel as much as we can the attachment, while also being extremely rationally grounded and trying to not try to hold onto the past, trying to not anticipate the person walking in the room. This is very hard, because when we think about the attachment, the attachment tends to drag with IT. Those episodes, memories, that rich catalogue of experiences, the expectation that they will walk in the room is perfectly natural.

The hard cogniac work is to experience the deep emotional attachment, while at the same time, several ing from our distinctive ourselves, from these expectations that they'll suddenly show up in our reality, when in fact, they won't. And we talked about preparing ourselves for grief if we have a loved one that's dying, or we anticipate that at some point we are going to have a loss of some sort, could be death, could be a loss of another type break up at sea, that we can prepare ourselves to grieve more adaptively by regulating the level of category means, in particular, eef ran that was well described in the study that are offered to earlier. And tools such as the one found in our mastering stress episode and tools are the sort that we talked about today.

Increasing that vehicle tone by actively building up the relationship between x sales and slowing down of the heart rate, so called respiratory synthia. Those things be very useful tools, so we can actually encourage our nervous system and build our nervous system and build our mind to prepare for grief when IT inevitably will come again. This is not about buffering ourselves from the realities of life. This is not about this engaging from grief as a real and important process. And indeed, IT is a real and important process to engage in those that enter denial or trying distract themselves with substances, or thinking or distracting of behavior substances or otherwise won't move through grief as well as adaptively as those who embrace a process of the sort that i'm describing here.

And of course, I want to restate again that even though grief and depression are now known to be fundamentally different, even though people move through the different stages of grief at different raids and sometimes skip stages at sea, IT is often important to access the train professional psychologist or psychiatrist or both, or believe ment group or or all of the above in order to get the proper support for grieving. So this is a podcast about science and science based tools. But I absolutely want to emphasize that there are terrific resources out there that you can access.

I don't say this in any kind of glib or pass the about away. There are wonderful trained therapies, beuve's groups, psychiatrists that are expert in navigating ing these sorts of things. I like to think that the tools that we ve talked about today would be not only compatible, but would be complimentary to the sort of approaches that they take.

And as we think about this process of grief f as we all should at some point in our lives, because we all indeed will experience grief and one former another, I would hope that the information that we discuss today would not only give you some tools, but hopefully give you a Better understanding of not just the people that you've lost or that you stand to lose. Not just the animals that you ve lost and stand to lose, but also give you a sense of why is that the people who are still in your life and that you're attached to the animals that are still in your life, the you attached to, have such profound meaning for you. And I would encourage you to not lean away from, but rather to lean into the building of those episodes, memories, to build up a richer and richer set of experiences and emotional attachments.

Because while the process of grieving is in direct relation to how close we are attached to people, they're our ways to move through IT. And of course, IT is the depth of our attachments and the number and the depth of meaning of experiences that we share with others and with animals that makes life so rich and worth living. So I just wanted take a moment and say thank you for being willing to explore this rather complicated and sometimes extremely chAllenging thing that we call grief from the perspective or through the lens of neuroscience and psychology.

I certainly learned a lot in expLoring this literature. I also really look forward to hosting people like doctor or corner on the podcast and others on the podcast who've done such beautiful work in this area. I put out the request and hopefully they will join us soon to further elaborate and teach us about this fundamental component of our lives.

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