Andrew Huberman explains the neuroscience and psychology of grief, and how to move through it adaptively
Andrew Huberman, neuroscientist and professor at Stanford School of Medicine, presents a solo episode on the science of grief.
Summary
Andrew Huberman presents the neuroscience and psychology of grief, drawing on brain imaging research, animal studies, and clinical psychology to explain why grief is so disorienting and how to move through it adaptively. The central finding he presents is that the brain maps relationships along three dimensions — space, time, and closeness — all processed by the same brain region, the inferior parietal lobule, and that grief requires the active remapping of those dimensions. He distinguishes grief from depression, challenges the popular five-stage model associated with Elizabeth Kübler-Ross, and explains why some people experience more intense yearning during grief than others, linking this to oxytocin receptor density in motivation-related brain circuits. He also presents research connecting disrupted cortisol rhythms to complicated grief, and outlines practical tools — including dedicated rational grieving sessions, sleep optimization, and building vagal tone — that support healthy passage through the grieving process.
Key Takeaways
FULL TRANSCRIPT
Introduction: What Grief Is and Why It Matters
Andrew Huberman: Welcome to Huberman Lab Essentials, where we revisit past episodes for the most potent and actionable science-based tools for mental health, physical health, and performance. I'm Andrew Huberman, and I'm a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine.
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 and 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. 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 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, etc. — they are distinctly different processes.
Challenging the Five-Stage Model
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 and misunderstandings 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 sort of 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 and observing, that while much of what Kübler-Ross described does hold true, it's not always the case.
How do I know this? Well, I know this because 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, teaches us that the brain areas associated with motivation and craving and pursuit are some of the primary brain areas and circuits that are activated in states of grief.
The Three-Dimensional Map of Attachment
We understand also, 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, can look in a very non-biased way, not making any predictions about which brain areas are going to be involved. The experiment is the following. The research subject first sees images of things that reside at different distances from one another. So 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, and as their brain is imaged they see different pictures of different scenes — the beach, the parking lot, etc. — bowling balls spaced in different ways: close together, far apart, regularly spaced, non-regularly spaced. When one does 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 — it could be something as simple as a hand meeting a tabletop. They image the brain. Of course, 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 is, a particular brain 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 in the previous example.
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, 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 I'm referring to as closeness: not physical closeness, 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 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. And that brain area is called the inferior parietal lobule.
You don't need to know where the inferior parietal lobule 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 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 the Lost Person
Earlier I said that one of the key functions of our nervous system is to be able to make predictions. It's somewhat obvious but nonetheless 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.
Now, if all of this sounds like a bunch of neuro-psycho babble 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, or proximity of space, proximity in time, and proximity of attachment, how close or rich or bonded you are to someone — 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 — a lot of 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. And within that memory, you have an understanding of what has happened with them in association with 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 that we learn 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 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, or thing is in space and time.
What Is Normal in Grief
So with this current understanding in mind, a few things start to become obvious and entirely normal — 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 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. Again, it's simply an activation of this map that involves closeness, space, and time.
Not surprisingly, then, the reordering of that map that's 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 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.
Tools for Moving Through Grief
We'll now talk about how that process works and the different entry points, as they're called, to engaging in that process. These are tools gleaned from the research psychology, the clinical psychology, and the neuroscience literature.
The first one involves the acknowledgement 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 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, indeed, the attachment is very real and in some cases very, very intense, but is now going to be uncoupled from the other two dimensions of the map — namely space and time. So it's a complicated process, as you can imagine, but you really want to hold and register two things at once.
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 of all, 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 I'm telling you is actually vital to hold on to — from that catalog of episodic memory that you've established. 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 some effort — and it is indeed effort — to access the emotional connection while starting to uncouple the other nodes of the map is something that is 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.
Why People Grieve Differently: The Role of Oxytocin
Now I'd like to consider why two people, both of whom are 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. And 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, etc.
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. And believe it or not, 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, you find that some prairie voles are monogamous — that is, they mate with the same prairie vole for life, they raise litters of little prairie voles — and other prairie voles, generally those that live 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. However, 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 — so these would be monogamous prairie voles that have established a pair bond. Put them in a cage together. They mate 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 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, it turns out that the monogamous prairie voles have far more oxytocin receptors in the brain area I mentioned earlier — the nucleus accumbens. And to remind you, 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 — or I should say oxytocin receptors, to be exact — 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 and the impulsivity, the leaning in almost reflexively to try and access that person again, to text them, to want to hear from them — this could, and I have to highlight could, reflect the fact that you just happen to have more oxytocin receptors, or maybe more oxytocin overall, in this brain area associated with motivation and pursuit. It 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. Some of that is no doubt psychological, but some of it no doubt is also neurochemical and biological.
The Role of Vagal Tone: Emotional Disclosure Research
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 what we call 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 the case in a particular paper I'll share with you now. It was 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 — brain to body and body to brain. The way to think about it in terms of what we're going to talk about 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, they had 35 participants go through a writing exercise for a period of weeks, and there were two different groups. One group was in the so-called 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 about it, memories of their loved one. Very intense stuff. 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, if you will. They would describe what they would do after they woke up, etc. No heavy emotional content.
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 the person that was lost — not distracting oneself, not getting into counterfactual thinking, but rather thinking about or in this case writing about the real attachment. The initial idea was that if people write about this attachment, they're going to experience this attachment, and that will serve them in moving through grief.
But 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 study unto itself and I think a quite nice one. It really set the stage for a number of other studies that followed from this group and other groups, which really point to the fact that yes, indeed, accessing these 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 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, and what it set off in a number of other investigations, 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.
So what this relates to, of course, is that tripartite map — that three-part map — 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; and that third dimension of attachment, which is literally closeness.
Cortisol Rhythms and Complicated Grief
Now I'd like to take a moment and consider some of the tools that you can access that support healthy transitioning through grief. These are tools distinct from that neural map — that space, time, closeness, attachment map — that we were talking about before. It's important to remind ourselves that everything exists in a context of our baseline physiology. Everything in life — learning, relationships with people that are still around, our health in every way, immune system, etc. — 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 — meaning the opposite of nocturnal — pattern 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 and so on. The typical pattern of cortisol in a healthy individual — and we really can 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. Not exactly 45 minutes, but about 45 minutes. And 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, and then 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.
There's a very interesting paper exploring the relationship between cortisol rhythms and grieving — in particular, complicated versus non-complicated grieving. Again, complicated grieving being the form of grieving that reflects an immense challenge of people moving through the grieving process such that it really needs to be dealt with. Grieving is healthy, but complicated grieving is a prolonged grieving 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 the 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 they are in the non-complicated grieving group.
This raises a very interesting idea. 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 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 to do this 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. Why do I say this thing about sunlight over and over again? Well, 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.
Rational Grieving and Neuroplasticity
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?
Clearly, it is of value to dedicate some period of time — perhaps every day, perhaps every other day, depending on your capacity and schedule — ranging anywhere from 5 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 to do 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. Because 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 the plasticity is triggered by the mere loss of that person, the intensity of that experience. But neuroplasticity — the literal rewiring of connections — 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 10 to 30 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.
And 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 that 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 — or through the lens — of neuroscience and psychology. And last, but certainly not least, thank you for your interest in science.