The neuroscience and psychology of grief, and how to move through it adaptively
Andrew Huberman presents a solo episode on the science of grief, drawing on neuroscience and psychology research.
Summary
Andrew Huberman explains that grief is a biological and psychological process with a beginning, a middle, and an end — and that understanding its neural basis can help people navigate it more adaptively. The central scientific claim is that the brain maps all close relationships across three dimensions — space, time, and closeness — and that grief is fundamentally the process of remapping those dimensions after a loss, while preserving the attachment itself. Huberman draws on brain imaging research, prairie vole studies of oxytocin and bonding, and a study on vagal tone and written emotional disclosure to explain why some people experience more intense yearning and become stuck in grief, and why others move through it more quickly. He distinguishes between normal grief and complicated grief, and presents practical tools — including dedicated rational grieving sessions, sleep regulation, cortisol rhythm management, and non-sleep deep rest — to support healthy progression through loss.
Key Takeaways
FULL TRANSCRIPT
Introduction: What grief is and why understanding it matters
Andrew Huberman: Today we are going to discuss how we conceptualize grief both at an 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. I'll give you a little hint of what those dimensions are. They relate to space — where people are — time — when people are, and I'll explain what that means — and a dimension called closeness. Those three dimensions of space, time, and closeness are what establish very close bonds with people, and are what require remapping, reorganization within our emotional framework and our logical framework, when we lose somebody for whatever reason.
The important thing to point out is that grief is a process. Like any biological or psychological event, it has a beginning, a middle, and an end. 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 conceptualize 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 symptomology — loss of appetite, challenges sleeping, crying in the middle of the day for no apparent reason — they are distinctly different processes.
Common myths about grief and what the research actually shows
As we wade into this important topic, I'd like to emphasize some of the common myths and misunderstandings about grief. Some of those myths arrive from the beautiful work of Elizabeth Kübler-Ross, a psychologist who wrote the famous book on death and dying. The different stages of grief — very quickly — are denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. But unfortunately, those five stages were taken to be gospel for a long time. We now know, based on neuroimaging, based on more in-depth psychological evaluation, and frankly more researchers and clinicians moving into this area, that while much of what Kübler-Ross described does hold true, it's not always the case.
How do I know this? Brain imaging studies involving what's called functional magnetic resonance imaging — fMRI — in which you can evaluate which brain areas are more active than others according to blood flow, which correlates with neural activity, teach us that the brain areas associated with motivation and craving and pursuit are some of the primary brain areas and circuits activated in states of grief.
The three-dimensional neural map of attachment
We also understand, on the basis of brain imaging studies, that in order to understand grief, we have to understand how attachments are represented in our brain. It turns out that both attachments and the breaking of attachments in healthy ways are governed by three important dimensions. The three dimensions of relating to someone, or an animal, or a thing, are space, time, and closeness.
In order to illustrate each one and how they work together to support relationships and their involvement in the grieving process, I'm going to tell you about an experiment. The experiment involves putting people into a brain scanner that allows the researcher to evaluate brain activity in different areas — in fact, to look in a very non-biased way, without making any predictions about which brain areas are going to be involved.
The experiment works as follows. The research subject first sees images of things that reside at different distances from one another. In one case it's a beach or a parking lot with bowling balls set at different distances from one another. Their brain is imaged as they see different pictures of different scenes — the beach, the parking lot — with bowling balls spaced in different ways: close together, far apart, regularly spaced, non-regularly spaced. When you do this sort of experiment, you see a lot of brain areas activated. Not surprisingly, the visual cortex — the area of the brain responsible for creating visual perceptions — but also a brain area that seems uniquely tuned to the distance between you and the objects. We'll refer to that measure, that dimension, as proximity.
Then subjects listen to tones. Those tones are also spaced from one another — something as simple as a hand meeting a tabletop at different intervals. Areas of the brain associated with auditory perception are active, not surprisingly. But as they evaluate different types of sounds and patterns of sounds, they can start to parse brain areas that seem uniquely tuned to the spacing of sounds, independent of what sounds are coming in. That area 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 balls.
Then the subjects saw a different set of images — images of people and of faces. Some of the images were of people's faces right up close, and other images were of people at a distance where you could see the whole body of the person. They also varied the emotional relationship to those people. They were able to get photographs from these research subjects' lives — pictures of, for instance, their sister or some random person off the street, a parent or a neighbor, a celebrity, or somebody they didn't know at all. So they were able to vary both the position of the person — close or far — and the emotional distance to the person, which is this dimension I'm referring to as closeness: not physical closeness, but how attached or how well you know somebody.
This may be sounding like a somewhat complicated experiment, but the takeaway is exquisitely simple and exquisitely important. The result was that in all three conditions — changes in the physical spacing of objects, changes in the temporal spacing of sounds, and changes in the emotional distance between the subject and different people — the same brain area was uniquely activated. That brain area is called the inferior parietal lobule.
You don't need to know where the inferior parietal lobule is. You don't even need to know the name of this brain area. What you do need to know, if you want to understand grief and how to move through grief, is that your map of people is not a map of emotional closeness per se. It is a map of emotional closeness — what we call attachment — that is interwoven, braided 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.
Why the brain keeps searching for someone who is gone
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. If all of this sounds like a bunch of neuropsychological parsing of the obvious, I'd 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 closeness — then it almost becomes obvious, or at least intuitive, as to why after the loss of somebody, in particular a death or 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 episodic experience — episodic memories. Memories of things that happened. Episodic memories are literally the conscious recollection of your experience of somebody or an animal or a thing. 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.
When somebody is taken away from us for whatever reason, episodic memories persist for some period of time and they are still linked to our feelings of attachment. Grief is the process of uncoupling, unbraiding, and untangling that relationship between where people are in space, in time, and our attachment to them. This is very, very hard to do. And for some people, it's almost impossible to do, at least at the outset of grief.
When we have a rich catalog of experiences with somebody, that memory bank is not just flushed out the moment we learn that they're no longer with us. What happens is the brain continues to make predictions that they will be in a certain place at a certain time — that they'll be in a certain time zone, or they'll walk in the door any moment. All of those predictions still hold. The neural activity continues. We call this reverberatory activity. That explains the yearning for and 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 circuits still function in a way — that puts us into an action state of seeking them, looking for them in the same location, expecting them to contact us at whatever frequency we were used to hearing from them, or expecting that we could reach out to them and reliably get a response.
It is immensely disorienting to maintain a close attachment and at the same time to not be able to make predictions about where that person, animal, or thing is in space and time.
With this understanding in mind, a few things start to become obvious and entirely normal in the best and most healthy sense of the word. If you've lost somebody, or an animal, or even a thing that was vitally important to you, it should make perfect sense as to why you keep looking for that person. Those expectations, those predictions that the brain is making, are entirely normal because they are based on that deep catalog of episodic memory that you maintain about that person. It's simply an activation of this map that involves closeness, space, and time.
How to begin remapping: the practice of rational grieving
Not surprisingly, the reordering of that map required in order to move through the grieving process is going to involve some remapping. Psychologists and neuroscientists generally agree that the best way to approach moving through grief is to remap these dimensions while maintaining the close sense of attachment to the person — not in any way trying to undermine the intensity of the attachment or how important it was to you.
The first tool involves the acknowledgement and 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 and persuade yourself, or numb yourself, or somehow avoid thinking about 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, the attachment is very real and in some cases very intense, but it is now going to be uncoupled from the other two dimensions of the map — namely space and time.
One way to do this is to set aside a dedicated period of time — maybe five or ten, maybe even as much as thirty minutes — in which you are going to feel deeply into your closeness and your attachment to that person, animal, or thing. But you are consciously going to try and prevent yourself from thinking about a couple of categories of things. First, you want to actively try and disengage from any attempt to engage in what's called counterfactual thinking — the what-ifs. What if I had called them a day earlier? What if they had taken a different route home? What if I had taken a different route home? These counterfactual modes of thinking are an infinite landscape of possibility, and they are very closely tied to guilt. As an infinite space, it's a very precarious one. And it will not allow you to uncouple that intense emotional attachment — which is actually vital to hold on to — from that catalog of episodic memory. In fact, it's going to strengthen those bonds.
So in this dedicated five, ten, or thirty minutes — whatever period of time you can tolerate and maintain focus — the idea is to think about your attachment in a rich way and to perhaps even experience that in your brain and body. This tool of dedicated blocks of time for really spending effort — and it is indeed effort — to access the emotional connection while starting to uncouple the other nodes of the map is hard. But in terms of the options one has in order to deal with grief, it is the most adaptive way to go about it.
Why people grieve differently: oxytocin and the neuroscience of yearning
Now I'd like to consider why two people, both intensely attached to a person that is no longer there, can experience the grief of that loss in such different ways. We don't really know how other people feel. There's no clear way of knowing that the expression someone else has, or whether or not they're crying, or their body language, really represents how they feel inside. Nonetheless, there does seem to be a sort of 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 this relates to a molecule that some of you have probably heard of: oxytocin.
Oxytocin is a hormone and peptide. A peptide just means a protein, generally a small protein. A hormone is generally something that functions at numerous locations in the body to impact numerous organs and areas of the brain. Oxytocin has a variety of roles in the brain and body. It's involved in milk letdown during lactation. It's involved in pair bonding in both males and females. It's involved in bonding of parent to child and between romantic partners, and so on.
Let's talk about some of the animal models that inform us about the potential roles of oxytocin in the grieving process. There's a species of animal called the prairie vole. The prairie vole has been studied fairly extensively by neuroscience and psychology researchers. Prairie voles are one species of animal, but depending on where they live, some prairie voles are monogamous — they mate with the same prairie vole for life and raise litters together — while others, generally living in different locations in the wild, are non-monogamous, sometimes called polygamous.
The neurochemical and circuit basis for this monogamy versus non-monogamy are quite interesting. In the context of grief and attachment, the prairie vole has taught us a lot through the following experiment. Take two prairie voles that are coupled up — monogamous prairie voles that have established a pair bond. Put them in a cage together. They mate together, they raise young together. Then you separate them. You literally put a physical barrier between the two of them. You can then evaluate how strongly one prairie vole will work to get access to the other. What you observe is that the monogamous prairie voles will work very hard to get back to their mate, but the non-monogamous prairie voles will not work as hard to access a partner.
This turns out to be interesting when you start to explore the patterns of oxytocin receptors in the brain. To make a long story short, and to also bridge to the human literature, the monogamous prairie voles have far more oxytocin receptors in the brain area I mentioned earlier — the nucleus accumbens. The nucleus accumbens is the brain area associated with motivation, craving, and pursuit. So it's as if the monogamous prairie voles have a capacity to link the attachment circuitry and the molecules of attachment — in this case oxytocin — to reward pathways and to motivational pathways. The non-monogamous prairie voles seem to have less yearning for attachment overall, at least to a single individual.
When we look at the human literature in terms of oxytocin receptor expression and brain imaging experiments, what you find is the same: people who experience intense grief and a deep yearning and a motivation to reconnect with the person, animal, or thing that is lost in many cases have heightened levels of oxytocin receptors specifically within the brain regions associated with craving and pursuit.
So for those of you who find yourself in this kind of stuck mode — this persistence of trying to reach into the past, wishful thinking, counterfactual thinking, the yearning, the desire, the almost reflexive impulse to try and access that person again, to text them, to want to hear from them — this could reflect the fact that you happen to have more oxytocin receptors, or maybe more oxytocin overall, in this brain area associated with motivation and pursuit. This does not necessarily mean that you are more capable of attachment than people who move through grief more quickly. People move through grief at different rates even if two people lost the same person or same animal, and some of that is no doubt psychological, but some of it is also neurochemical and biological.
Vagal tone, emotional disclosure, and who benefits from writing about grief
I'd like to take a moment and explore this idea that allowing ourselves to really feel the attachment to somebody can accelerate or at least support adaptive transitioning through grief. There's a really wonderful study that on the face of it appears to be a negative result. A negative result is when a hypothesis is posed and then turns out not to be 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.
This is a paper published in the journal Biological Psychology, and the title is posed as a question: "Emotional Disclosure for Whom? A Study of Vagal Tone in Bereavement." What this study explored was whether or 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 explored the so-called vagus nerve. The vagus nerve is an extensive nerve pathway that is bidirectional between brain and body. The way to think about it in terms of what we're going to discuss now is heart rate and heart rate variability. The vagus nerve is generally associated with parasympathetic functions and has the capacity to slow down our heart rate — in particular through exhales, and simply because of the movement of the diaphragm and its relationship to the heart and the thoracic cavity. Exhales result in slowing down of the heart rate. This is what we call increased vagal tone.
In this study, 35 participants went through a writing exercise over a period of weeks, and there were two different groups. One group was in the written disclosure group. On day one they would write about what happened when a loved one died — and indeed they used people who had experienced real loss. They were asked to write about their deepest emotions and thoughts, memories of their loved one. Very intense material. They were also asked to write a letter to the person that they lost. The other group was a control group where they were simply told to write about how they use their time — an emotionally empty writing exercise, describing what they would do after they woke up, with no heavy emotional content.
The initial idea was that if people write about their attachment, they will experience that attachment, and that will serve them in moving through grief. And that wasn't what they found. They found no difference between the two groups — until they explored who had higher vagal tone, who had a greater degree of what's called respiratory sinus arrhythmia. In other words, who was able to modulate their state using their breathing and their body. What they discovered was that a subset of individuals who had a high degree of vagal tone seemed to get more benefit from this writing exercise.
Now this is one study, and I would consider it fairly preliminary with 35 subjects, although it is a quite nice study and it really set the stage for a number of other studies that followed from this group and other groups. These studies really point to the fact that yes, accessing states of emotionality by writing or thinking about somebody is quite powerful in terms of engaging the bodily states and the mind states associated with the attachment, and that is very beneficial for moving through grief.
It now 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 somatic feelings of attachment by writing about the attachment or by thinking about it than others. What this paper really points to is that for those who can really feel the relationship between breathing, heart rate, and vagal tone, those people are going to be in a better position to move through grief — not because they are disengaging from the feelings of attachment, but because they are better able to access those feelings of attachment.
This relates, of course, to that tripartite map — that three-part map of space, where things are, where the person is, where their belongings are; time, when you were expecting to see them on a regular basis, when they would call, when they would come home from work; and that third dimension of attachment, which is literally closeness.
Practical tools for moving through grief adaptively
Now I'd like to consider some of the tools that support healthy transitioning through grief. These are tools distinct from the neural map — that space, time, closeness, attachment map — and it's important to remind ourselves that everything exists in a context of our baseline physiology.
Everything in life — learning, relationships with people who are still around, our health in every way including the immune system — functions far better when we're sleeping really well. When we are generally awake during the daytime and asleep at night, there's a particular feature to our diurnal pattern — meaning the opposite of nocturnal — of the release of a hormone called cortisol. It's linked to our increase in temperature rhythms and can further increase our temperature, which leads to waking. The typical pattern of cortisol in a healthy individual — and we can really say physically and emotionally healthy individual — is that cortisol is going to be somewhat high right around waking, and then is going to be at its highest point in the 24-hour period about 45 minutes post-waking. Then it will drop gradually such that by about 4 p.m. in the afternoon — which is actually when body temperature tends to start to drop as well — cortisol tends to be very low. It remains low in a healthy individual such that at 9 p.m. it's very low, and throughout the night as we sleep it's very low.
Cortisol rhythms and complicated grief
There's a very interesting paper exploring the relationship between cortisol rhythms and grieving — in particular, complicated versus non-complicated grieving. Complicated grieving is the form of grieving that reflects an immense challenge in moving through the process such that it really needs to be dealt with. Grieving is healthy, but complicated grieving is prolonged and has other dimensions as well — hence the name complicated.
The title of this paper is "Diurnal Cortisol in Complicated and Non-Complicated Grief: Slope Differences Across the Day." The figure to orient to in this paper, if you do decide to check it out, is Figure 1, which very clearly shows that when you compare cortisol levels between people experiencing complicated grieving versus non-complicated grieving, the 4 p.m. and 9 p.m. cortisol levels are significantly higher in the complicated grieving group than in the non-complicated grieving group.
This raises a very interesting idea. It makes very good sense to think about modulating — that is, controlling — the foundation of your life in a way that establishes cortisol rhythms and sleep patterns and patterns of autonomic arousal and catecholamine release that position you to navigate the grief process in the best possible way. If you are somebody who is heading into grief or is challenged with grief, getting adequate sleep at night and establishing as normal a pattern of cortisol as possible is going to be very important.
There's a very simple, straightforward way to do this. The most powerful way is to view sunlight very close to waking. It does not have to be right at sunrise, but when you get up in the morning, if the sun isn't out, please turn on as many bright lights as possible in your environment. Having an early-day cortisol peak and a very low cortisol level late in the day — at 4 p.m. and 9 p.m. — is immensely beneficial. It reflects a properly regulated autonomic nervous system. It means being alert during the day, and your ability to sleep at night is tightly correlated to this viewing of sunlight in the morning.
Summary of tools and closing thoughts
So what are the tools we can think about using in terms of healthy, adaptive moving through grief — trying to avoid complicated grief and prolonged grief disorders?
Clearly, it's of value to dedicate some period of time — perhaps every day, perhaps every other day, depending on your capacity and schedule — ranging anywhere from five to 45 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, or thing no longer exists in the same space-time dimensionality that we knew them before, and yet holding on to and anchoring to the attachment that we had. This is really anchoring 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 episodic memories, to distance ourselves from them. Because those episodic memories are the ones that lead us to look for the person in our current reality. And assuming this is a real and complete loss, those sorts of expectations are maladaptive. They do not serve us well.
The second aspect of this is to understand that the node of the map — the component of the neural map that you're anchoring to — is a very real component of you. These are literally cells that represent the depth of attachment.
We talked a moment ago about the importance of accessing quality sleep on a regular basis — a rich array of tools for that. And again, highlighting the importance of sleep not just for emotion regulation and autonomic control, which is so vital, but also for making sure that neuroplasticity takes place. Neuroplasticity 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 dedicated focusing on the attachment, feeling the attachment to the person, maybe even writing about the attachment to the person as was described in that previous study. But also, plasticity is triggered by the mere loss of that person and the intensity of that experience. The literal rewiring of connections, however, occurs during deep sleep and in what I call non-sleep deep rest, or NSDR. NSDR scripts are short behavioral protocols that you do for ten to thirty minutes at some point throughout the day — maybe even multiple times through the day — that have been shown to accelerate neuroplasticity. Having such a practice can be very useful.
Understand that it involves some cognitive work. We have to hold on to the attachment and imagine and feel as much as we can the attachment, while also being extremely rationally grounded and trying not to hold on to the past, trying not to 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 episodic memories, that rich catalog of experiences.
We can prepare ourselves to grieve more adaptively by regulating the level of catecholamines — in particular epinephrine — and tools such as those found in our mastering stress episode, and tools of the sort that we talked about today: increasing that vagal tone by actively building up the relationship between exhales and slowing down of the heart rate, so-called respiratory sinus arrhythmia. Those things can be very useful tools.
Of course, I want to restate again that it is often important to access a trained professional psychologist or psychiatrist, or both, or a bereavement group, or all of the above, in order to get the proper support for grieving. I like to think that the tools we've talked about today would be not only compatible but complementary to the sorts of approaches that they take.
I would encourage you to not lean away from, but rather to lean into, the building of episodic 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 closely we are attached to people, there are ways to move through it. And of course, it is the depth of our attachments and the number and depth of meaning of experiences that we share with others and with animals that makes life so rich and worth living.
I just want to 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 of neuroscience and psychology. And last, but certainly not least, thank you for your interest in science.