Life’s Little Mysteries
By Mary Frances O’Connor
Author of The Grieving Brain
- Why does grief impact people the way it does? Why is it, for the majority of people, all-encompassing? Is there an evolutionary reason why we feel this way?
Grief is the natural response to loss, but grief as a response may have evolved originally as a response to separation. In order to help us maintain our connections to our loved ones when we go off and explore our world each day (like your kids going off to school or your spouse to work), powerful neurochemicals in the brain make us yearn for them, and reward us when we are reunited again. The death of a loved one is actually a very rare event (thank goodness). But initially, the brain seems to keep responding as though they are simply “missing”—we even describe it as having “lost” them. That means the brain wants us to search for them, to find them or make such a fuss that they come and find us. This isn’t necessarily conscious, although bereaved people often describe the feeling that their loved one will simply walk through the door again one day, or may start to text a loved one before realizing they can no longer do this. It’s all encompassing because our connections to our loved ones are as important to our survival as food and water, and our brain tries everything it can to search them out, while simultaneously learning that this is no longer possible. Eventually, we become more likely to predict their absence than their presence, even though we may have a wave of grief any time we become aware of that important loss.
- Why does grief often result in people being unable to carry out simple tasks, such as writing an email or reading a book?
Grieving can be thought of as a form of learning. Your brain is doing a lot of learning, trying to understand every situation where your loved one should be there, but somehow isn’t. I think of it like a computer that is updating a program in the background. It can be very difficult to type in a word document while it’s churning in the background, making the words appear slowly on the screen. I think our brain similarly is distracted when we are trying to do simple tasks in life, and certainly when we are trying to do complicated ones. This means we also don’t encode situations as readily, which can make it hard to remember them later, and feel that our memory is poor. Fortunately, distractedness and difficulty concentrating due to grief usually resolves itself over time.
- Are there ‘stages’ of grief in terms of how the brain is affected? If so, what are they, and how long do these stages tend to last?
We no longer use a model of grief stages to understand the trajectory of grieving. Instead, data suggests that acceptance gradually increases over time, and yearning gradually decreases over time. But this isn’t a linear process—one day will feel better and the next one might feel worse, even with an overall trajectory of less intense grief. We know from studies, for example, that holidays and anniversaries of the death tend to make us feel worse. There are quite a few studies of “grief” now, the moment in time when a bereaved participant has a neuroimaging scan. But we have very few studies of “grieving” yet, where the same person comes to an imaging center multiple times across several months so we can see changes in the way the brain is functioning. I really look forward to what we will learn about grieving from future neuroimaging research!
- What are the best ways of coping with grief? Are there particular techniques people can use to help them cope?
I think it’s important to have a big toolkit of ways to cope with waves of grief. There isn’t one strategy that is the “best” one, because every situation we encounter requires a coping response that makes sense for that situation. For example, denial can be a good strategy in a moment when we might be cheering for our child at a football match. Pretending that there is nothing wrong in that moment so that we can really focus on them, and get involved in the emotion of the crowd and the game, is appropriate. But if we use avoidance every time we start to feel a wave of grief, we know this can cause difficulty in the long run, because we also need to understand the painful reality of the death, and what the loss of this important person means for our life now. So, trying out many different ways of responding to our thoughts and feelings, and asking others who have known heartbreaking grief what they did to cope, is the best strategy of all.
- Are there certain sections of the brain that are most impacted by grief? If so, what are they, and why is this the case?
Grief is a complex response to loss, including emotional, cognitive, behavioral and physiological changes. Not surprisingly, there are many parts of the brain involved in generating the grief response. I think a surprising finding has been that the reward system of the brain is very much involved in grief—the bond we make with our loved ones initially seems to be encoded there, and thus, our yearning for our loved one also correlates with brain activity in this reward network. The reward network includes a few areas distributed across the brain, but examples from grief studies include the nucleus accumbens and the orbitofrontal cortex.