The Science & Process of Healing From Grief

KEYPOINTS

• 01

  Grief is a motivational state, not just sadness

  Huberman frames grief the way modern researchers do: as yearning for something just out of reach. He likens it to reaching for a glass of water when you are desperately thirsty, only to have it shift just beyond your grasp every time. That anticipation of action that leads nowhere is part of why grief hurts physically, not only emotionally.

• 02

  Grief and depression overlap but are distinct processes

  Both can bring loss of appetite, poor sleep and sudden crying. But grief rarely responds well to antidepressants, while depression often does. The adrenaline–complicated-grief link described below is not seen in depression either. Huberman repeats that the two can coexist but involve separable brain circuits.

• 03

  Complicated grief affects roughly 1 in 10 people

  Complicated (or prolonged) grief starts out like ordinary grief but fails to resolve even after a long time, to the point of impairing daily function. Huberman stresses that grief is a process with a beginning, middle and end. Validated questionnaires exist to distinguish complicated from non-complicated grief.

• 04

  The five stages are useful, not gospel

  Elisabeth Kübler-Ross described denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. Huberman notes that anger is already a motivated state and that bargaining overlaps with denial. Neuroimaging, deeper psychological evaluation and more clinicians in the field now show that stages blend, braid together and vary between people rather than proceeding in a fixed order.

• 05

  Dopamine drives the craving in grief

  Dopamine is about desire and pursuit, not feeling good. That applies to hunger, sex, addiction and, it turns out, loss. In grief the brain's reward and motivation circuitry, particularly the nucleus accumbens, is engaged alongside pain areas, keeping you in an anticipatory state of reaching for the person.

• 06

  Relationships are mapped on three dimensions: space, time and closeness

  An imaging experiment had people view objects at different distances, hear tones at different time intervals, and see faces that varied in physical distance and emotional closeness (a sister versus a stranger or celebrity). The same brain region tracked distance in all three. Huberman's model: deep attachment rests on a rich catalog of episodic memories that predict where and when you can next reach someone. Loss destroys the space and time parts of that map while the attachment remains.

• 07

  Healthy grieving keeps the attachment but uncouples it from space and time

  There is no adaptive reason to numb yourself or argue that the person mattered less. The task is to hold the full depth of the bond while no longer expecting past patterns to repeat. Huberman calls it spinning two plates at once, which is why it feels effortful and cognitively hard as well as emotionally hard.

• 08

  'Trace cells' may explain feeling someone's absence

  Work from the lab of Nobel laureates Edvard and May-Britt Moser on navigation cells in the hippocampus and entorhinal cortex includes trace cells. These fire when something expected at a location is missing, like a coffee cone not in its usual spot. Huberman says there is reason to believe this circuit is very active soon after a loss, producing the sense that the person might walk through the door any moment.

• 09

  Guilt and 'what ifs' strengthen the wrong connections

  Counterfactual thinking ('if I'd called a day earlier') explores an infinite space you can never verify or refute. Psychologists describe this kind of guilt as granting yourself more control over reality than existed. It reinforces the bond to the old memory map rather than letting it reorganize.

• 10

  Oxytocin receptor density may set how intensely you yearn

  Monogamous prairie voles have far more oxytocin receptors in the nucleus accumbens than non-monogamous ones. In experiments they will press levers and even cross a shock plate to reach their partner. Human work suggests people with intense grief may likewise have more oxytocin receptors in craving circuits. Huberman's point: grieving at different rates is normal, with probable biological roots, and can cause friction within families.