Dr. Mary-Frances O'Connor
Appearances
Huberman Lab
Healing From Grief & Loss | Dr. Mary-Frances O'Connor
Most of us, through most of history, have had a way to understand, ah, I can't see them now. I will see them eventually. Dia de los muertos. I will see them once a year. Right. Or they are in heaven now or they're in the pure lands or they're my ancestor. There is a relationship that I can have with them. I can ask them to, you know, speak on my behalf, so to speak. Right.
Huberman Lab
Healing From Grief & Loss | Dr. Mary-Frances O'Connor
Intercessory prayers and Catholicism. So historically, we've had this way of understanding this internal relationship that is so real you could put it on film. It is really happening. And they are also not present. So when I think of what it means to adjust, and I don't think of it as recovery. I don't think of it as letting go. I think of it as integration.
Huberman Lab
Healing From Grief & Loss | Dr. Mary-Frances O'Connor
When I think about those things, I think, what is my relationship? What is my internal relationship with this deceased person now? So my mother was diagnosed with stage four breast cancer when I was 13. And there were cancer cells in every lymph node they cut out of her. So they knew it had already migrated. And I think they told my dad that she would only live another year.
Huberman Lab
Healing From Grief & Loss | Dr. Mary-Frances O'Connor
She actually, her oncologist called her his first miracle. She actually lived another 13 years, which is miraculous. But what it meant was we learned to live in this state of sort of waiting for the second shoe to drop. And I think because of that, I just became really comfortable and familiar with grief.
Huberman Lab
Healing From Grief & Loss | Dr. Mary-Frances O'Connor
It doesn't bother me when my participants I'm interviewing, you know, sort of cry uncontrollably and then they apologize. And I say, this is just what grief is. This is just how it works. And so what it means is that now I have a very different relationship with my mother than I did at 26 when she died. At 26, I was really angry with her still.
Huberman Lab
Healing From Grief & Loss | Dr. Mary-Frances O'Connor
Now, my friends, you know, in our 40s, suddenly my friends seemed really accepting of their mothers, like their relationships with their mothers improved. They were like, well, I understand why she did the thing she did or now I'm so grateful for blah, blah, blah. And I had a whole lot of grief because I didn't get to do that. I didn't get to have that transformation of our relationship.
Huberman Lab
Healing From Grief & Loss | Dr. Mary-Frances O'Connor
And then I realized, wait a minute, I can still have all those thoughts. I can look in the mirror now because I look a lot like her. I can look in the mirror now and be like, I'm doing this for you, Mama. Or, you know, it's not the way I would have done things. But I get that you had a reason now. And forgive her.
Huberman Lab
Healing From Grief & Loss | Dr. Mary-Frances O'Connor
And doing that with the internal representation matters to how I function in my day-to-day life now. But it has nothing to do with letting go. Do you see what I mean? You can still adapt to a world where the person is gone and that is incredibly painful and also painful. They live on because they are deeply encoded in your brain. You cannot get rid of them.
Huberman Lab
Healing From Grief & Loss | Dr. Mary-Frances O'Connor
They are there with you, physiologically with you. And you can work with that relationship now as well. so that I can spend time with my living loved ones. I don't spend a lot of time feeling guilty about how I handled her death or something like that. I'm busy living my life now because I've integrated my relationship with her. Does that make sense?
Huberman Lab
Healing From Grief & Loss | Dr. Mary-Frances O'Connor
It's the hallmark of grieving is yearning, pining, right? These are other words for wanting, aren't they? And that dopamine – I've heard it described as dopamine and the reward system is really how much effort would you put in to get this thing you want, right? How much effort would you put in? How much effort would you put in to see your loved one again, right? One more time.
Huberman Lab
Healing From Grief & Loss | Dr. Mary-Frances O'Connor
And what that tells me – and really this came from the neuroscience – I said earlier that you could think of stress and grief as somewhat distinct. We used to think of the loss of a loved one as sort of like you can imagine you have a plate, right? You've got all the things heaped on your plate you have to deal with. You've got getting the kids to school. You've got your boss.
Huberman Lab
Healing From Grief & Loss | Dr. Mary-Frances O'Connor
You've got blah, blah, blah. And now you've got this another thing heaped onto your plate. You have the loss of your spouse or the loss of your sister. That is one way to think about it. And in our peripheral physiology, a lot of the ways we respond look like a stress response. So that makes sense. That was a good way to think about it in the 80s and early 90s.
Huberman Lab
Healing From Grief & Loss | Dr. Mary-Frances O'Connor
But the neuroimaging research, when we asked people, tell me how much you're yearning for your loved one. And then we put them in the scanner and we showed them photos of their loved one. compared those to them looking at a stranger. So what part is unique? Not looking at a person, but looking at your person that you're yearning for.
Huberman Lab
Healing From Grief & Loss | Dr. Mary-Frances O'Connor
We saw that there was this little area deep in the brain called the nucleus accumbens. Probably from other studies, we know it's sort of in the neighborhood, called a ventral striatum sort of area. And what we saw was the more people said, I'm yearning for my loved one,
Huberman Lab
Healing From Grief & Loss | Dr. Mary-Frances O'Connor
There was a direct correlation with how much activity there was in the nucleus accumbens in this reward learning area of the brain. Now, in everyone who was bereaved, regardless of how much grief severity they were having, we saw things like memory areas. Of course, they're looking at a photo of their loved one.
Huberman Lab
Healing From Grief & Loss | Dr. Mary-Frances O'Connor
They're having all sorts of memories of when the photo was taken or, you know, whatever. We had lots of emotion areas, emotion regulation areas, even some areas that had to do with autonomic physiology regulation.
Huberman Lab
Healing From Grief & Loss | Dr. Mary-Frances O'Connor
But what made it so unique was this idea that yearning is something that varies among people who are grieving and that it might be in part instantiated in this brain encoded region that says, I'm looking at this photo and what that makes me want to do is reach out for you. And I think this was a very new way to understand what is lost. It isn't something new that's heaped onto your plate.
Huberman Lab
Healing From Grief & Loss | Dr. Mary-Frances O'Connor
It's that a part of us that was formed when you bonded has been amputated. You don't have the resources. You can't function in the world. You can't walk through the grocery store without figuring out how to do that. Without this other person. And then often yearning to have them back so that you could walk through the world in the normal way again. There's nothing wrong with yearning.
Huberman Lab
Healing From Grief & Loss | Dr. Mary-Frances O'Connor
It's just that we understand better now how the brain is doing it. And I can tell you if you want – but I've gone on a bit here. I can tell you if you want – A lot of people did point out, wait, this is the same area of the brain that's related to addiction. A lot of people talked about, are we addicted to our loved ones? And it took me, I never wrote about it in the 2008 paper.
Huberman Lab
Healing From Grief & Loss | Dr. Mary-Frances O'Connor
I never wrote about it that way. But I've come up with a better maybe way to communicate, I think, what's going on. So I live in the desert southwest in Tucson, Arizona. And I can tell you, if you forget your water bottle and you are out on a hike and you're halfway through, you cannot think of anything else other than water, right?
Huberman Lab
Healing From Grief & Loss | Dr. Mary-Frances O'Connor
You are obsessed with thinking about it, getting it, imagining it, and so forth. But no one would say you were addicted to water, right? Water is something we need. And we have a homeostatic function that says you need more of it. And then once we have it, we feel satiated, right? yearning for a loved one is that kind of thirst. We need our attachment figures like we need food and water.
Huberman Lab
Healing From Grief & Loss | Dr. Mary-Frances O'Connor
They are basic to our survival. And I think we forget that in modern society where we can sort of We need our spouse. We need our children, our parents, our siblings. And we fail to thrive when we don't have them. And so I think the activation in that area is just the cue of change. You really need to reach out for this person.
Huberman Lab
Healing From Grief & Loss | Dr. Mary-Frances O'Connor
And the process of grieving is, if I'm going to reach out, it's going to look different than it did before. Maybe I'm going to have a conversation. Maybe I'm going to talk to my sister. But also, you have to find another way to get your attachment needs met. There has to be someone else in your life whom you would say, I will always be there for you. You will always be there for me.
Huberman Lab
Healing From Grief & Loss | Dr. Mary-Frances O'Connor
Because this person who's left this earthly plane cannot be that anymore.
Huberman Lab
Healing From Grief & Loss | Dr. Mary-Frances O'Connor
I think recently a lot about what is a good outcome. I've spent a lot of time in my career thinking, what is a bad outcome when we're grieving? And how might we most help people who are not integrating this in a way that's allowing them to restore a meaningful life? But And I've shied away a lot from the question of what is a good outcome because I think it has a normative quality to it.
Huberman Lab
Healing From Grief & Loss | Dr. Mary-Frances O'Connor
But I've started thinking about it in a very open way. So the first thing I would say is I really don't think of it as addiction-like. So our need for our loved ones, much like food and water, is this homeostatic process, right? You think, oh, you know, like I'm visiting you, right, for this podcast.
Huberman Lab
Healing From Grief & Loss | Dr. Mary-Frances O'Connor
And at some point, there's some push notification in my brain that says, you should text your partner, right? And I pull out my phone and I text him and I wait for a few minutes. And then he responds and I get that little, oh, he's there. He knows where I am. We're good. That's not an addiction, right?
Huberman Lab
Healing From Grief & Loss | Dr. Mary-Frances O'Connor
That is the normal homeostatic process, just like I also got up and ate breakfast because I knew that I needed that, right? So I think with addiction, the problem is those drugs of abuse override exactly these circuits. that work in a homeostatic way.
Huberman Lab
Healing From Grief & Loss | Dr. Mary-Frances O'Connor
And by overriding them, they either pare down the number of receptors or mess with the affinity of the receptors in such a way that it really does narrow what's rewarding to only this drug, because only this drug can powerfully over- fill those receptors.
Huberman Lab
Healing From Grief & Loss | Dr. Mary-Frances O'Connor
And now we have a situation where only meth, right, is the thing that makes us feel better, but not quite the same with food, water, and living loved ones. To your question of, and I think you've actually really hit on something that our culture is really struggling with right now.
Huberman Lab
Healing From Grief & Loss | Dr. Mary-Frances O'Connor
We've lost in our culture a lot of the grief literacy that was based around an understanding of what happens during bereavement, during mourning. That was very religiously focused, religiously oriented, right? So everything from sitting Shiva to having the mass after a year. Or awake. Or awake.
Huberman Lab
Healing From Grief & Loss | Dr. Mary-Frances O'Connor
With the body right there. I've been to a wake.
Huberman Lab
Healing From Grief & Loss | Dr. Mary-Frances O'Connor
That's right. With the name Mary Frances O'Connor, it will not surprise you to know that I grew up in a big Irish Catholic family. And we used to say in the summers we saw our cousins for weddings and in the winter we saw our cousins for funerals. And we had these wakes. I saw numerous births. deceased bodies as a child of my family members while running around playing tag with my cousins.
Huberman Lab
Healing From Grief & Loss | Dr. Mary-Frances O'Connor
And what that does is it is a cultural way to say... Grief happens. Death happens. This is what it looks like. And you can respond in a lot of different ways. Because I will tell you, while there is drinking and playing tag, there is also a lot of crying and a lot of leaning on shoulders. It gives you some form of... organization for how to understand the strong feelings that you're having.
Huberman Lab
Healing From Grief & Loss | Dr. Mary-Frances O'Connor
But in a different culture, they'll hire funeral singers. so that there can be singing while everyone is weeping, right? So my point here is that we stand in an unusual moment in history and culture where we don't mostly adhere to some system for how to handle death and grief.
Huberman Lab
Healing From Grief & Loss | Dr. Mary-Frances O'Connor
Perfect. I think it's good to understand that grief is the natural response to loss. It is a natural physical, emotional, mental just reaction to the death of someone very close to us. And I think it can be helpful for people in unwinding some of these myths to to think about the idea that there's a difference between grief and grieving.
Huberman Lab
Healing From Grief & Loss | Dr. Mary-Frances O'Connor
And what it means is people are left to sort of manage those intense emotions without a lot of modeling, without a lot of… philosophical understanding of what's going on and disconnected often from their families of origin because those don't make sense to us right now.
Huberman Lab
Healing From Grief & Loss | Dr. Mary-Frances O'Connor
I'm not suggesting that we go back to a time when, you know, Catholicism was the way or Judaism was the only way or, you know, I'm not suggesting that. What I'm suggesting is anyone who has attachment. So this can be prairie voles, little rodents, you know, that mate for life. This can be infants. This can be good functioning human adults like you and me.
Huberman Lab
Healing From Grief & Loss | Dr. Mary-Frances O'Connor
When there is loss, when that attachment figure is missing and deceased, it is something our brain, our body, our mind is going to react to intensely. And without some way of understanding what is that supposed to look like and how do I manage this, we are adrift.
Huberman Lab
Healing From Grief & Loss | Dr. Mary-Frances O'Connor
And what it means – so John Bowlby, who really developed this theory of attachment, right, when he was looking at infants and colleagues of his were looking at animals, right, you see these – invisible tethers, right? You think of, you know, think about the polar bear with the little baby polar bears, right, coming along behind. You always see the following. The following, those invisible tethers,
Huberman Lab
Healing From Grief & Loss | Dr. Mary-Frances O'Connor
They're not invisible. They are in the brains of those attached animals and humans in the form of neurobiology of dopamine and oxytocin and cortisol and adrenaline and in specific brain regions with receptors. Those tethers are what are keeping us searching for mom or for baby or for spouse, right?
Huberman Lab
Healing From Grief & Loss | Dr. Mary-Frances O'Connor
And so left to our own devices without any way of understanding this, all we know is we're having these intense emotions, reactions, behaviors, thoughts. And John Bowlby divided the types of reactions that we see into two. Protest. And despair.
Huberman Lab
Healing From Grief & Loss | Dr. Mary-Frances O'Connor
Now, protest is the, you know, so let's say you're in the grocery store and you look down and your toddler is not next to you and you think, oh, no, they're gone. And you can even hear the embodiment of that, right? I am primed with every hormone and neurochemical to search for that child, right? You can feel that in your body. That is protest. Oh, no? They're gone?
Huberman Lab
Healing From Grief & Loss | Dr. Mary-Frances O'Connor
Despair, on the other hand, despair is sitting in the living room, And something arrives in the mail for your spouse. And you know they are never going to open it. And in that moment, you think, oh, no, they are gone. And the gravity of that, right? You can feel that in your body as well. The giving up, the withdrawal, just the lethargy of it, right? Yeah.
Huberman Lab
Healing From Grief & Loss | Dr. Mary-Frances O'Connor
Now, notice that the information is the same. Oh, no, they're gone is something we have to learn. And one way we learn that is protesting and trying to prove that they're not gone. And. the acknowledgement, the accepting that they are gone. Now, we don't often think of despair as having a purpose, but what's interesting is in this moment, despair has the function of
Huberman Lab
Healing From Grief & Loss | Dr. Mary-Frances O'Connor
of stopping us from searching. And searching is physically very costly. The amount of energy it takes to create the blood pressure and the cortisol to reach out like that. And so that despair does actually have a function. That withdrawal is for good reason, but many people are terrified of feeling despair.
Huberman Lab
Healing From Grief & Loss | Dr. Mary-Frances O'Connor
Some people are terrified of feeling protest as well and just avoid any thoughts or reminders in any way. But here's the thing. Despair isn't the end of the story either. And this is not a stage model. These are responses we have over and over again as we're trying to understand this new world we're living in. But despair leaves out hope.
Huberman Lab
Healing From Grief & Loss | Dr. Mary-Frances O'Connor
Despair says they are really gone, and because they're never coming back, I am going to feel like this for the rest of my life. And that's not true either, right? We know that you can have grief. You can grow a life that restores meaning and that you do have other connections with people. I wouldn't say replacing, but I would say adding because now you know what it means to love someone.
Huberman Lab
Healing From Grief & Loss | Dr. Mary-Frances O'Connor
So grief is that in that moment, you know, I could say, Andrew, on a scale of 1 to 10, how much grief are you feeling right now? And you would be able to tell me right now during this wave of grief how you're doing. But grieving is the way that grief changes over time. As you were saying, it's the process part. So I think of it as sort of, you know, You can imagine the stock market, right?
Huberman Lab
Healing From Grief & Loss | Dr. Mary-Frances O'Connor
You know what it means to forgive and all those things you learned with your loved one. You can now love others as well. Or... For some people, it isn't about creating new relationships. It's about having a transcendent experience. Now I can love. nature or I can love God because I was taught how to do it by having this connection with this one vitally important person in my life.
Huberman Lab
Healing From Grief & Loss | Dr. Mary-Frances O'Connor
Or even now I know how to care for myself. I know how to love and care for and forgive and appreciate myself because my loved one taught me how to do that. This is what I mean about there's no normative outcome. Those are four very different life trajectories after the loss of someone that can all fulfill our attachment needs.
Huberman Lab
Healing From Grief & Loss | Dr. Mary-Frances O'Connor
Each day it's up, it's down, it's up, it's down. Some days it's really down. Some days it's really up. But at the end of the year, you can still see that there's been a trajectory, right? For the year, the stock market might actually be up, even though you had some really terrible days. I think knowing that helps us to see that Grief will never go away because it is a human emotion.
Huberman Lab
Healing From Grief & Loss | Dr. Mary-Frances O'Connor
Yes. And I will say there is even some proof of that. Or I think of it as proof in the following way. So you are correct that the no-go, it's not that there's no cost with no-go. You are correct. So it does stop us from the type of go which is searching.
Huberman Lab
Healing From Grief & Loss | Dr. Mary-Frances O'Connor
So it stops maybe the cortisol or the adrenaline or something like that. But it comes with its own, I think, largely things like inflammation and things that enable the withdrawal. right? Probably shifting hormones. We know prolactin changes in grieving, oxytocin changes in grieving. But think about it this way.
Huberman Lab
Healing From Grief & Loss | Dr. Mary-Frances O'Connor
So in a sort of evolutionary way, if your mate is gone or your caregiver is gone, that withdrawal allows you to save resources because you don't know where when they're coming back. And that's important for your survival, but a transition through, oh, eventually I'm going to have to get my own food. I am going to have to move again, but not in the frantic searching way.
Huberman Lab
Healing From Grief & Loss | Dr. Mary-Frances O'Connor
I'm going to have to find meaningful activity to go on, right? So here is my theoretical reason why I believe we are set up to grieve. I know that you had attachment figures as a child because you survived to adulthood. Right? Proof. Proof that someone loved you. Now... children have caregivers as their primary attachment figures.
Huberman Lab
Healing From Grief & Loss | Dr. Mary-Frances O'Connor
Whenever we're aware, whenever we remember that our loved one is gone, we're going to have a wave of grief. And that's okay 25 years later. But it doesn't mean that there hasn't been a process of grieving. I think of grieving as a form of learning, learning how to live with the loss of this person.
Huberman Lab
Healing From Grief & Loss | Dr. Mary-Frances O'Connor
But now in your life, it is most likely that your primary attachment figure is a peer, like a spouse or boyfriend, girlfriend, etc., not your parent. So something had to change, right? And developmentally, we are prepared. We come into the world prepared with a neurobiological developmental program that at some point says, my parent is no longer the peak of my attachment hierarchy.
Huberman Lab
Healing From Grief & Loss | Dr. Mary-Frances O'Connor
I'm looking around, I'm motivated to see friends, and I'm motivated to date, and I'm motivated to create these enduring relationships with people my own age. And that means that that our attachment hierarchy can shift, that we have the capacity in our neurobiology, in our hormones, to shift from a primary attachment to a parent to a primary attachment to someone else.
Huberman Lab
Healing From Grief & Loss | Dr. Mary-Frances O'Connor
And the capacity to do that... is innate. Now, I will say, of course, we are all programmed to do this at roughly the same period of our life. Parents know coming into the bargain that this is going to happen, although parents experience a lot of grief during the empty nest when it is actually occurring. When a loved one dies in, you know, a dear friend, 50 years old, her husband dies of a
Huberman Lab
Healing From Grief & Loss | Dr. Mary-Frances O'Connor
there's not a whole cohort of you going through this experience together of transitioning to a different attachment hierarchy, right? And we set up whole cultures around sending kids to college or sending them on a mission or sending them through basic training as a way to get this whole cohort, you know, of young people through this transitional period. What we need is
Huberman Lab
Healing From Grief & Loss | Dr. Mary-Frances O'Connor
is support for these individuals who are dealing with the death of a sibling or a parent or a spouse or a child who are all going through it on their own and trying to figure it out without that infrastructure to support them, to help them understand what is natural and normal during grieving. And because we know it is a medically risky time,
Huberman Lab
Healing From Grief & Loss | Dr. Mary-Frances O'Connor
Much like college is a medically risky time in other ways. Because it is a medically risky time, we need to be able to assess what's going on with them physiologically and make sure we're supporting their grieving body through this intensely, intensely stressful experience of transmuting.
Huberman Lab
Healing From Grief & Loss | Dr. Mary-Frances O'Connor
I think... It really helps us to hone in on the idea that you can't talk about grief without talking about love and bonding. Because unless you understand what you have, you don't really understand the impact of its loss, right? So absence makes the heart grow fonder is a fantastic way to describe attachment. Right?
Huberman Lab
Healing From Grief & Loss | Dr. Mary-Frances O'Connor
Yeah. There's a fairly recent movement that we might call the public health model of bereavement support. And so the idea here is that – and this largely comes out of Europe, Canada, Australia – where they're trying to actually develop health care around bereavement. Part of this is because we can talk about how we know that the physical cost –
Huberman Lab
Healing From Grief & Loss | Dr. Mary-Frances O'Connor
of the loss of a loved one is so impactful on us, it can lead to dying of a heart attack, right? So we know that, for example, the day that a loved one dies, you are 21 times more likely to have a heart attack than any other day of your life. 21 times.
Huberman Lab
Healing From Grief & Loss | Dr. Mary-Frances O'Connor
And we know that in the first three months after the death of his wife, a man is nearly twice as likely to have a fatal heart attack compared to a man who remains married during that same time.
Huberman Lab
Healing From Grief & Loss | Dr. Mary-Frances O'Connor
Yes. Isn't that just crazy? For women, it's about 1.8 times. So still just an astronomical number for medical risk. So what we know is this period of transformation –
Huberman Lab
Healing From Grief & Loss | Dr. Mary-Frances O'Connor
is incredibly risky right so we can have all this physiological change but if if our body isn't resilient enough where it actually breaks during that time this is something we need to get ahead of so thinking about this public health model of bereavement We can think of sort of at the foundation, even just understanding in a grief literacy kind of way, what can I expect? What is happening to me?
Huberman Lab
Healing From Grief & Loss | Dr. Mary-Frances O'Connor
Why is this happening to me? That is a psychoeducation level that is vitally important to people, regardless of sort of how much support they have. Now, many people will go to bereavement support groups even just to get that, right? Even just to get good evidence-based support. information, places that are no longer teaching the five stages of grieving, for example.
Huberman Lab
Healing From Grief & Loss | Dr. Mary-Frances O'Connor
And beyond that, we know how important support is, social support, having loved ones around, just as you were describing. And I think one of the reasons, I mean, imagine In that first seven days after your spouse dies, if there is someone in your house sitting Shiva, they are going to notice if you have a heart attack, right?
Huberman Lab
Healing From Grief & Loss | Dr. Mary-Frances O'Connor
So think about the idea that we might outsource our physiological regulation for a while. Think of it this way. When we bond with someone, when you fall in love with your partner, say, for example, they become your external pacemaker. Right? Think about co-regulation.
Huberman Lab
Healing From Grief & Loss | Dr. Mary-Frances O'Connor
If I go home now and I get a hug from my partner, just the way you were describing, I know that my blood pressure will drop a little bit. My heart rate will drop a little bit. Now suddenly I have to imagine walking into an empty house where that's not going to happen. My cardiovascular system has to figure out how am I going to walk into my home again and again and again and regulate my heart rate.
Huberman Lab
Healing From Grief & Loss | Dr. Mary-Frances O'Connor
all the subconscious processing. I should be, I'm doing the same motion of turning the key in the lock that I've always done. And now there's a hole in the room when I enter it.
Huberman Lab
Healing From Grief & Loss | Dr. Mary-Frances O'Connor
When you fall in love with your baby or you fall in love with the person who becomes your spouse, that bond that gets created between the two of you when you form an us, it comes with this implicit belief. I will always be there for you. You will always be there for me. And time and distance will not change that. If you are gone, it just means I have to go find you.
Huberman Lab
Healing From Grief & Loss | Dr. Mary-Frances O'Connor
Absolutely. So I think recognizing your grieving body has to figure out how to regulate again is one reason why support is so important. There's a study of – we were talking about earlier before the podcast started. There's a study of primates where, you know, as with other primates, there's a lot of infant mortality. Right.
Huberman Lab
Healing From Grief & Loss | Dr. Mary-Frances O'Connor
And in this observational study, there are troops that are being observed by scientists. And with the death of an infant primate, the mother will often carry that deceased infant, that baby monkey, for a long time after their death and spend a lot of time looking at the infant. the mother doesn't groom. She doesn't try to nurse. She's not confused that the infant is alive.
Huberman Lab
Healing From Grief & Loss | Dr. Mary-Frances O'Connor
But what is interesting is she stops grooming herself during this time. Now, that's actually medically risky for a primate because we know that grooming is so important to their health to get rid of parasites and such. And, you know, usually in these troops, there's a really strict hierarchy. Who gets to groom who is, you know, the latest Kardashian show kind of thing. And
Huberman Lab
Healing From Grief & Loss | Dr. Mary-Frances O'Connor
During this time, when the mother is trying to understand what's happened to this infant, the rules go out the window. Any member of the troop can groom this mother. Now, at some point, wide individual variation in how long the mother holds this infant, from days to months. Once she relinquishes the infant, the rules go back into effect.
Huberman Lab
Healing From Grief & Loss | Dr. Mary-Frances O'Connor
So she goes back to the troop and now she participates in social life, in medical social life, in the way that she did before. I think the analogy here, in addition to every time I think about it, it just rips my heart a little bit, right? Yeah.
Huberman Lab
Healing From Grief & Loss | Dr. Mary-Frances O'Connor
But the idea here is that it is all of our jobs to groom the mourning person, to care for them, to say, hey, how long has it been since you saw your doctor for your regular checkup? How long has it been since you had your mammogram or got your teeth cleaned, right? Often we've been caring for a loved one who's dying and we're neglecting our own medical care. Because here's the thing.
Huberman Lab
Healing From Grief & Loss | Dr. Mary-Frances O'Connor
Grief is the natural response. Our bodies are resilient. Many people are shocked by how much pain, physical pain, how they get a lump in their throat or they feel like their chest is on fire when they're grieving. But actually, our bodies are remarkably resilient. We do learn to re-regulate without this external pacemaker. But in those instances...
Huberman Lab
Healing From Grief & Loss | Dr. Mary-Frances O'Connor
Where the body isn't resilient enough to be able to do that, we need people around us supporting us. In a study in my own lab, we thought, well, probably this risk for a broken heart, this risk of dying of a heart attack, isn't, you know, 24-7 equally risky. So we brought people into the lab and had them experience a wave of grief while they were hooked up to ECG and blood pressure and so forth.
Huberman Lab
Healing From Grief & Loss | Dr. Mary-Frances O'Connor
And what we saw was everybody's blood pressure goes up during a wave of grief. That's probably not too surprising. But what we saw was the people who, when they walked in the door, told us they were having the most intense grief, their blood pressure went up the most. And then in a replication study in Germany, we saw that their blood pressure didn't recover.
Huberman Lab
Healing From Grief & Loss | Dr. Mary-Frances O'Connor
So you can see that these waves of grief that our body and our mind and our brain have to learn how to cope with and then eventually to adapt to. those require a physical body that can sustain that. They require relationships that can support us and sustain that. And this is why I think support is so important, even though it doesn't take away the pain of missing your person, right?
Huberman Lab
Healing From Grief & Loss | Dr. Mary-Frances O'Connor
Because we need every resource we can muster in the midst of this moment. Now, it does also mean that as much as we are missing our person, And it feels so isolating to try and explain that there's a hole in the room when no one else can see that hole.
Huberman Lab
Healing From Grief & Loss | Dr. Mary-Frances O'Connor
It does help at some level to talk to this other person who is seeing a different hole in the room, who's also going through grief, because we recognize grieving is a human experience. And that you're not connected because you both miss the same person, but you are connected because you're both missing.
Huberman Lab
Healing From Grief & Loss | Dr. Mary-Frances O'Connor
And so now we have this unique and terrible circumstance of death. where when we have a living loved one, the correct response to absence is to think about them more, to put more energy into going to find them or making more noise so they come and find you.
Huberman Lab
Healing From Grief & Loss | Dr. Mary-Frances O'Connor
And so I think that bereavement support can be incredibly helpful to connect with others who are going through this same process. And frankly, you know, I don't recommend and some bereavement support groups actually prohibit dating relationships from a grief support group. But the reality is the people that we connect with
Huberman Lab
Healing From Grief & Loss | Dr. Mary-Frances O'Connor
are also people potentially that we develop stronger attachment bonds with. That's how community works, right? And so I think bereavement support can be incredibly important. We do know for the 1 out of 10 who develop disordered grieving, who really are not showing any changes over time, even though time is passing,
Huberman Lab
Healing From Grief & Loss | Dr. Mary-Frances O'Connor
those people might need a very specific evidence-based psychotherapy intervention because we know that those psychology interventions can get us back on a normal or typical grieving trajectory.
Huberman Lab
Healing From Grief & Loss | Dr. Mary-Frances O'Connor
But in death, suddenly we have this circumstance that the brain is really going to struggle to wrap itself around, which is the idea that I'm not going to find you no matter how much effort I put in. I think of this as the gone but also everlasting theory, right? So, of course, we know that they are gone. We know that they've died.
Huberman Lab
Healing From Grief & Loss | Dr. Mary-Frances O'Connor
I will tell you a story, which is that, so when my mother died, she was in our very tiny hometown in Montana. And in tiny towns, rural places like this, of course, everyone knows what's going on. So the morning after my mom died, at about one in the morning, my best friend and I went downtown to a Mexican restaurant for breakfast.
Huberman Lab
Healing From Grief & Loss | Dr. Mary-Frances O'Connor
And the woman who owned the place came by the table and said, hey, I heard your mom was in the hospital. I'm so sorry. And I said, yeah, she died last night. And she said, oh, mija, what can I get you? Anything. What do you want? And I said, can I have a beer? And she said, of course you can. And I had a beer for breakfast.
Huberman Lab
Healing From Grief & Loss | Dr. Mary-Frances O'Connor
I like to think of us as needing a big toolkit of strategies to deal with waves of grief. And that was the right tool in the toolkit at that moment. Now, if I had a beer for breakfast every day for the rest of my life, probably not so good for my liver, right? And potentially for my job retention. But in that moment, it was the right tool. Do you see what I mean?
Huberman Lab
Healing From Grief & Loss | Dr. Mary-Frances O'Connor
So it was also the right tool that I was sitting with my best friend, right? And that inhibition allowed me to cry right there in the middle of the restaurant, right? I think we have always found ways to interact with the body. that may not make sense to us at some level, but probably when they are cultural ways, have come about for reasons.
Huberman Lab
Healing From Grief & Loss | Dr. Mary-Frances O'Connor
I don't have evidence for the things you were just saying, but the idea that it can bring people together who are feeling a little less inhibited so that they can talk about emotions and difficulties, the fact that it brings people together just to watch each other is vital. The fact that it impacts our cardiovascular system, is important. And here's what I would say about this.
Huberman Lab
Healing From Grief & Loss | Dr. Mary-Frances O'Connor
So people think that dying of a broken heart is a metaphor. We look at, you know, when Carrie Fisher died, her mom, Debbie Reynolds, died the next day. And we think, oh, isn't that a tragic, beautiful story? This is a piece of evidence that we have known about from huge epidemiological studies that the increased risk of all-cause mortality is much higher in newly bereaved people.
Huberman Lab
Healing From Grief & Loss | Dr. Mary-Frances O'Connor
And my question is, why do we keep just proving it over and over? What are we going to do about it? In my own lab and then replicated later in a study in Australia, we did a proof-of-concept study. Now, to be very, very clear, this was not a randomized clinical trial and not at a level that would be worthy of using it as medical advice.
Huberman Lab
Healing From Grief & Loss | Dr. Mary-Frances O'Connor
But we said, you know, when someone dies in the ICU, in the emergency department, in hospice, in a nursing home, the person standing next to them should become our patient. We know that their medical risk has just gone through the roof.
Huberman Lab
Healing From Grief & Loss | Dr. Mary-Frances O'Connor
So we gave aspirin, a baby aspirin, to people in the first two weeks after the death of their loved one and looked at whether that was cardioprotective, which, of course, it was because we understand how aspirin works. Now, the reason we need big studies is to make sure that there isn't some negative side that we would want to bar against, right? Yeah.
Huberman Lab
Healing From Grief & Loss | Dr. Mary-Frances O'Connor
We have a memory of being at their bedside maybe or getting that phone call or being at the funeral or whatever it is in our memory. We have it recorded. We know that they're gone. But the attachment neurobiology means there's also this implicit belief, but maybe they're out there, right? And those two things, those two streams of information, they're gone, they're everlasting, can't both be true.
Huberman Lab
Healing From Grief & Loss | Dr. Mary-Frances O'Connor
But my point here is if we know that bereavement is medically risky, if we know that we need to support the grieving body so that you can even get through those days and weeks and months so that you can start to restore a life again, what are we going to do about it? I think of it this way. Grief is not a disease. Grief is totally natural. But, you know, pregnancy is not a disease.
Huberman Lab
Healing From Grief & Loss | Dr. Mary-Frances O'Connor
Pregnancy is totally natural, but no one would say it's not physiological. No one would say there aren't huge hormone shifts and that it is medically risky. So that for the vast majority of people who are pregnant, they're perfectly healthy. But we have whole systems of care in place to assess whether people are healthy during this period.
Huberman Lab
Healing From Grief & Loss | Dr. Mary-Frances O'Connor
And then if they're not, if we find gestational diabetes or hypertension, we know how to treat that and intervene for that person so that they can get through this transition period. What if it was the same with bereavement? Why at our bereavement support groups do we not also take their blood pressure?
Huberman Lab
Healing From Grief & Loss | Dr. Mary-Frances O'Connor
To find out where they're at physically in addition to teaching them the many coping skills they might use in addition to having a beer so that they can learn what grief is like and how to elicit support and ultimately how to adapt and develop emotionally. A meaningful life that includes grief but includes all the other wonderful things in life as well.
Huberman Lab
Healing From Grief & Loss | Dr. Mary-Frances O'Connor
That's right. Exactly. And here's the thing that's crazy, Andrew. Every time I do a podcast or I get interviewed by a reporter, everyone has a story like this. And so, I mean, honestly, insurance companies before the 1960s figured this into their actuarial tables. They knew that life expectancy in that time was short.
Huberman Lab
Healing From Grief & Loss | Dr. Mary-Frances O'Connor
And so if we've known for this long, what stops us from really caring for grieving people?
Huberman Lab
Healing From Grief & Loss | Dr. Mary-Frances O'Connor
And when we become aware, when we have that moment where we recognize those are in conflict, we have a wave of grief.
Huberman Lab
Healing From Grief & Loss | Dr. Mary-Frances O'Connor
Yeah. I think it is helpful to remember that emotions are actually the output. They're the product. It isn't so much that we have to figure out how to deal with emotions, although I will come back and say that differently in a moment. We have to figure out how to handle what physical and mental state resulted in those emotions. So what I mean by that is if you are in a moment –
Huberman Lab
Healing From Grief & Loss | Dr. Mary-Frances O'Connor
where everything in your body is in protest, you are amped up and you can't sit still, then working with your body, right, maybe you are the person who needs to go for a run every day where that hasn't really been who you were before, right? On the other hand,
Huberman Lab
Healing From Grief & Loss | Dr. Mary-Frances O'Connor
Maybe you're the person who needs to develop a yoga practice to figure out how to breathe through that amped up feeling and soothe yourself physically, soothe yourself so that you can bring your heart rate down, right? So those are two entirely different behaviors. But I can tell you at the end of either of them, your body's going to be in a different state.
Huberman Lab
Healing From Grief & Loss | Dr. Mary-Frances O'Connor
And I bet your emotions are in a different state too, right? So there's one way to think about it, which is coming at how do we handle the emotions? But there's another way to come at it, which is how do I handle all of the demands and resources I have when demands and resources get out of balance, that stress? So how do I increase the resources in my life? How do I reduce the demands in my life?
Huberman Lab
Healing From Grief & Loss | Dr. Mary-Frances O'Connor
Because I am suddenly in a really difficult situation. So that's one way to think about it. We did an intervention study in my lab with widows and widowers where one arm received mindfulness training, another arm received progressive muscle relaxation, which is sort of like learning a really fancy body scan.
Huberman Lab
Healing From Grief & Loss | Dr. Mary-Frances O'Connor
You contract and relax different muscle groups in your body, and you become aware of what that feels like to really understand what relaxation feels like. And then there was a weightless control group. And we did it because the progressive muscle relaxation was the control group. We thought mindfulness training would be very helpful. Turns out mindfulness training was helpful.
Huberman Lab
Healing From Grief & Loss | Dr. Mary-Frances O'Connor
But progressive muscle relaxation was even more helpful for people's grief.
Huberman Lab
Healing From Grief & Loss | Dr. Mary-Frances O'Connor
It's a brief contraction. It's, you know, you can go online. There's really easy instructions. It's often done with a sort of guided audio to help you figure out. But the important part is also feeling what's the difference between my clenched fist and my relaxed fist. Oh, gosh, I didn't even realize I had so much muscle tension, right?
Huberman Lab
Healing From Grief & Loss | Dr. Mary-Frances O'Connor
So what's fascinating is people told us in any situation – I'm in the grocery store, I'm in a work meeting, I'm trying to fall asleep – I can use this tool now to help my body to get into a different state. And that helps my grief. Now, mindfulness training was effective, but not as effective as I said. And I think some of this is that we have, you know, grieving is a form of learning.
Huberman Lab
Healing From Grief & Loss | Dr. Mary-Frances O'Connor
I'm not kidding about that. Your brain is busy, right? while you are grieving. And it might not be the right time to take up a new practice that requires a lot of concentration. If you do mindfulness, it can be very helpful. Anyway, the upshot of all that is, on the one hand, it's not that we have to deal with emotions because they are an output.
Huberman Lab
Healing From Grief & Loss | Dr. Mary-Frances O'Connor
We have to deal with our demands and our resources and developing a whole toolkit of ways to think about adapting in our life now. On the other hand, even specifically for waves of grief, having a toolkit of what to do with those emotions, I think you described it beautifully, Andrew, that we do have the capacity for suppression.
Huberman Lab
Healing From Grief & Loss | Dr. Mary-Frances O'Connor
And if you are about to walk into a pitch meeting, suppression is probably the way to go in that moment where suddenly your deceased child has popped into your head and thinking, I am not going to think about this right now. I am completely going to pretend this has not happened and I'm going to do this pitch, right? But if it's your only strategy...
Huberman Lab
Healing From Grief & Loss | Dr. Mary-Frances O'Connor
then you don't have the learning process going on, right? That at another moment, you might be looking through a photo album and just be overcome with tears, but over time realize, I can't stay in that puddle either. When I'm doing this, I need to, you know, if it was me, I need to text my sister and And tell her, you know, I'm looking at photos of mom and this is what I'm thinking about.
Huberman Lab
Healing From Grief & Loss | Dr. Mary-Frances O'Connor
And she'll text me some funny story about mom or even just say, oh, man, I feel you. And if my sister isn't available, then I'll text my best friend, right? Because in that moment, it is important to have that puddle. It's also important to know how to get out of the puddle again. And so this is really a process of learning. How do I cope with these waves of grief?
Huberman Lab
Healing From Grief & Loss | Dr. Mary-Frances O'Connor
It's like being a basketball player. One possession after another after another. How am I going to get through this possession? Each possession looks different. How am I going to get through this possession with this constellation? What's the right skill to use right now?
Huberman Lab
Healing From Grief & Loss | Dr. Mary-Frances O'Connor
Absolutely. So she published on death and dying in 1969. And you're right. It was groundbreaking, the idea that grief is more than sadness. And she did what all good scientists do initially. It was descriptive. She did clinical interviews and she described. But it became a prescription, didn't it? Right? Those stages. And we know now, think how far science has come, right?
Huberman Lab
Healing From Grief & Loss | Dr. Mary-Frances O'Connor
We know now with longitudinal studies where we're looking at the same person over and over again. that we do see trajectory. So we see that acceptance increases over time. We see that yearning decreases over time, but that it's not linear and that it's not, just as you say, it's not one stage and then you're done with that.
Huberman Lab
Healing From Grief & Loss | Dr. Mary-Frances O'Connor
I've had people say to me, well, it's been 20 years, but I haven't felt anger yet, so I don't think I'm done grieving. And I just, my heart goes out to them. It's not a prescription. And modern grief, Grief research tells us so much more, not just about what happens, but why and how.
Huberman Lab
Healing From Grief & Loss | Dr. Mary-Frances O'Connor
Yeah, big time. You know, part of this is a cultural piece, right? Part of this is that We joke about, you know, there's apparently a big book of rules about grief that no one can get a hold of, but people have very strong feelings on, right? And people will talk about how, you know, I got hammered with the big book of grief rules today.
Huberman Lab
Healing From Grief & Loss | Dr. Mary-Frances O'Connor
Somebody told me I shouldn't be or I should be fill in the blank. Believe me, it's hard enough as it is without expectations around you of whether you're doing it right, you know. At one level, then, there's the social expectations. A woman contacted me about 10 days after her husband died, and she said... I just am not sad. And I'm worried something's deeply wrong with me.
Huberman Lab
Healing From Grief & Loss | Dr. Mary-Frances O'Connor
She was an older woman. We did like a neuropsych evaluation and I did a clinical interview and so forth. And I said, I think the reality is you're just OK. And she said, OK, that's what I thought. But I can't tell any of my friends that I'm not sad because I'd be a pariah.
Huberman Lab
Healing From Grief & Loss | Dr. Mary-Frances O'Connor
People think she's a sociopath. Instead, they had a wonderful relationship together. She knew that this was coming. She had a big, full life. And it was OK for her in that moment. So I think on the one hand, there's the social component about permission. It's going to look different for each person. And most importantly, it's going to look different than we think it will be.
Huberman Lab
Healing From Grief & Loss | Dr. Mary-Frances O'Connor
We try to anticipate what grief is going to feel like. But because so much of attachment is below the level of consciousness, because our physiology is below the level of consciousness, it's not like we can know how we're going to react. So the natural response is just the reacting. And then grieving is, over time, the way we react starts to feel more familiar.
Huberman Lab
Healing From Grief & Loss | Dr. Mary-Frances O'Connor
We start to develop better coping tools for the natural way we react. It's not that the grief goes away. It's that we come to understand it. We understand how to work with it. But the other piece is about permission, I think. Remember how I said you still have an ongoing internal relationship?
Huberman Lab
Healing From Grief & Loss | Dr. Mary-Frances O'Connor
I think people feel guilt about having joy, doing things that are fun, falling in love, connecting with people, going on a vacation. Because at some level, there is a piece of them that believes my loved one is out there, is everlasting, and I'm choosing to do this instead of going to seek them out. I'm choosing to do this when they can't. And you can understand how that comes about, right?
Huberman Lab
Healing From Grief & Loss | Dr. Mary-Frances O'Connor
You can understand this internal misgiving. But it's because of that everlasting encoding of this relationship. But it's not true. Your brain can believe it and it can be not true. And so working on that internal relationship to say, hey, I'm going to do these things because you can't. I'm going to do them through a body and eyes that were shaped by you so that you can come along with.
Huberman Lab
Healing From Grief & Loss | Dr. Mary-Frances O'Connor
Or, I mean, every interpretation is going to work differently for each person. Or you can say, you valued this so much. so incredibly proud that I've written books, that I am a professor. Something that she couldn't do. And I often think to myself, this one's for you, mama, right?
Huberman Lab
Healing From Grief & Loss | Dr. Mary-Frances O'Connor
And so that way of changing the internal relationship, remembering that your internal relationship can evolve with them and And similarly, if they were a less than loved one, which happens as well, it's okay to say, you know what? This chapter of my life is over. That was a tough chapter. And I'm going to wrap that up and put that in a box, and it's done now.
Huberman Lab
Healing From Grief & Loss | Dr. Mary-Frances O'Connor
And maybe it will come back at another time, and I'll deal with that relationship more later. But for right now, it's okay to put that aside. So I think permission is such a great word. Think to yourself, who is judging me for going on vacation? Who is judging me for falling in love? Is it me? Is it in the internal relationship? Is it my neighbor, my pastor?
Huberman Lab
Healing From Grief & Loss | Dr. Mary-Frances O'Connor
Figure out who's judging you and then how do you get permission?
Huberman Lab
Healing From Grief & Loss | Dr. Mary-Frances O'Connor
Yeah. I will tell you, Andrew, many people, you know, I teach a psychology of death and loss class at the University of Arizona. And my students will say to me, you are way too happy to be teaching this class. And I say to them, that's not a mistake. That's not incidental. It is because every single day I'm thinking about death and dying. I'm thinking about grief and loss.
Huberman Lab
Healing From Grief & Loss | Dr. Mary-Frances O'Connor
And so when they come to me and they got a B plus instead of an A minus, I'm sort of like, you know, big picture, right? Not the end of the world. And there's a way in which... I can say grieving is a form of learning, but I don't know what you're going to learn from this loss experience.
Huberman Lab
Healing From Grief & Loss | Dr. Mary-Frances O'Connor
But what I hope is that you learn good lessons, lessons like, wow, I am tougher than I thought I was, or wow, when I really need someone, people step up, or wow, that person utterly shaped my view of the world, and I am so grateful. Other people learn, wow, the world is an unsafe place or I can't tell anyone how I really feel. These are very different lessons that some people learn.
Huberman Lab
Healing From Grief & Loss | Dr. Mary-Frances O'Connor
And my hope is that no one grieves alone because the risk of them thinking it's my fault is is so bad for society that people walk around believing that, that we need to support others so that we come out learning better lessons about what it means that death is a part of life.
Huberman Lab
Healing From Grief & Loss | Dr. Mary-Frances O'Connor
Yeah. I can say up front that I am not an expert in suicide, and there is so much that is known scientifically about the mental health surrounding suicide and suicide attempts and so forth. But I think about it this way. I think we can separate out a conversation that I'm not expert in that says suicide You know, suicide is a permanent solution to a probably temporary problem.
Huberman Lab
Healing From Grief & Loss | Dr. Mary-Frances O'Connor
And there are lots of reasons, mental health care and so forth, that suicide may happen. And it is a tragedy. that this permanent solution seems the only one given what might be a temporary situation. But I can put all of that a little bit on a shelf, honestly, and still tackle something that I think you're getting at, which is what about the person who's grieving after a suicide?
Huberman Lab
Healing From Grief & Loss | Dr. Mary-Frances O'Connor
And I think about that in this way because we do know that grief after a sudden death, grief after a violent death, grief after an unexpected death, and all of those often describe a suicide, is more challenging. It is more difficult to adapt. It is more difficult to restore a meaningful life.
Huberman Lab
Healing From Grief & Loss | Dr. Mary-Frances O'Connor
A friend of mine who used to come to the class that I teach whose son died by suicide helped me really see the insight into the grieving process there, though. And it's something that actually probably applies even more broadly, but is very common in the thought patterns of people who are grieving someone who died by suicide. And that is what he called the would have, could have, should have.
Huberman Lab
Healing From Grief & Loss | Dr. Mary-Frances O'Connor
So this is, if only I would have picked up the phone. If only I could have gotten them to the hospital sooner. The doctor should have known to check for. And the thing is that the brain, because it is a wonder, the brain can come up with an infinite number of stories. An infinite number of reasons why this loss is your fault.
Huberman Lab
Healing From Grief & Loss | Dr. Mary-Frances O'Connor
And the reality is there is no way through those questions because there is an infinite number of them. And what he taught me, and I think the research bears this out, is that the solution is not to find answers to an infinite number of questions. If you think about it, each of those stories, if only I would have picked up the phone,
Huberman Lab
Healing From Grief & Loss | Dr. Mary-Frances O'Connor
Each of those stories ends in, and then my loved one would have lived. But the reality that we're dealing with right now, today, here, in this room, is that they didn't live. And so none of those things matter anymore because now the question is, how do I live given that it is true that they are gone?
Huberman Lab
Healing From Grief & Loss | Dr. Mary-Frances O'Connor
It's a false narrative. But the question is, why are we doing it? Right? So if grieving is a form of learning and all of this rumination, as we would call it, these perseverative thoughts, what if, if only, why are we doing it then? And I think there's a couple of possibilities. One is that it is unbearable to think that bad things happen for no reason.
Huberman Lab
Healing From Grief & Loss | Dr. Mary-Frances O'Connor
And that protest can be around, it is as painful as guilt is, it can make more sense to me than just abject, random, terrible events happening in the world. That at least there is a sense of control if I failed to do something, you know? So the question is, well, and the second possibility I sometimes think about Well, what would you be doing if you weren't ruminating right now?
Huberman Lab
Healing From Grief & Loss | Dr. Mary-Frances O'Connor
And the problem is that when we are going round and round and round in our head about these things that cannot be true, we're not in the present moment, right? We're in some other internal world. And that means that, you know, if your grandchild is telling you this hilarious story about you're not really paying attention because you're in this other world in your head.
Huberman Lab
Healing From Grief & Loss | Dr. Mary-Frances O'Connor
And so you don't get to have all the joy in life that comes from being in that moment with your grandchild. And so we miss out by being stuck in this other guilt-ridden, infinite possible, terrible world. The question is then, we have to come to understand these are thoughts that how do I deal with the thoughts?
Huberman Lab
Healing From Grief & Loss | Dr. Mary-Frances O'Connor
Not what is the answer to the thoughts, but how do I deal with the fact that I am having these repetitive thoughts? And we can learn a lot of skills around how to cope with our thoughts. For me, one of the things I had to learn was I need to shift my environment. If I realize, oh, I'm doing the rumination thing again, literally, I just need to get up and walk outside. right?
Huberman Lab
Healing From Grief & Loss | Dr. Mary-Frances O'Connor
Just that shift alone can help to change my thought patterns. So there's lots of skills we can learn. But this is really the question. It isn't, is this scenario true? It's, is this thought helpful in my ongoing life? And so I think that the solution that your friend came to around maybe they needed that
Huberman Lab
Healing From Grief & Loss | Dr. Mary-Frances O'Connor
We often have to find the story that may be true, it may not be true, but that quells the thoughts. It has to feel true to us. So there's no point in debating the truthiness of it. But it is the thing that allows us to move past the repetitive thoughts and back into the present moment.
Huberman Lab
Healing From Grief & Loss | Dr. Mary-Frances O'Connor
They are very much increasing. I can tell you, you know, I've taught psychology of death and loss since 1999. And when we talked about suicide in the class, I used to ask the students, do any of you know someone who died by suicide? And I'd get a few hands. And I will tell you, Andrew, a third of the class raises their hand now.
Huberman Lab
Healing From Grief & Loss | Dr. Mary-Frances O'Connor
And these are 20-year-olds who often had a friend in high school or a grandparent or an uncle. And so we have to talk about the epidemic itself, but we also have to talk about how do we cope with those losses.
Huberman Lab
Healing From Grief & Loss | Dr. Mary-Frances O'Connor
Yeah. Yeah. I think about this in a few different ways. I think about the idea that death is something we have to contemplate. We don't get out of doing it. And a lot of really smart, really wonderful people have gone before us who've thought about it and come up with ideas around God and the afterlife and in multiple religions, in multiple cultures, in multiple times in history.
Huberman Lab
Healing From Grief & Loss | Dr. Mary-Frances O'Connor
I don't need to know whether that's true or not to be able to see whether it's helpful or not. And I can say a couple of things. Religion often offers a community, a social support, which we've just been talking about, is so vitally important. So that's one function that it serves outside of belief, really, to some degree.
Huberman Lab
Healing From Grief & Loss | Dr. Mary-Frances O'Connor
I mean, not outside of it, because obviously you fit with these people because you belong with them, because you have a shared belief, right? Right.
Huberman Lab
Healing From Grief & Loss | Dr. Mary-Frances O'Connor
I think one of the things that's really challenging, one of my graduate students now, a professor at Emory University named Roman Politsky, looks at this idea of spirituality and religion and notes that while it can be very supportive for people who are grieving, it can also be a moment where our beliefs are challenged. how could God let this happen? How could a benevolent God let this happen?
Huberman Lab
Healing From Grief & Loss | Dr. Mary-Frances O'Connor
Those sorts of things. And what he finds is if you think about sort of spiritual quest or existential quest, that the loss of someone close to you is often this turning moment and that that actually can be incredibly difficult and sort of add a whole layer of stress and disruption in grieving. So it isn't
Huberman Lab
Healing From Grief & Loss | Dr. Mary-Frances O'Connor
universally good to have religious beliefs or community because we can find ourselves at odds suddenly with what we believed before. But I think about it in one other way as well. So, you know, I'm a dyed-in-the-wool neuroscientist. I think that when I fall head over heels for this person, that that becomes encoded in my neurons, I also think that that's proof that they are everlasting.
Huberman Lab
Healing From Grief & Loss | Dr. Mary-Frances O'Connor
They are physiologically my... There is an epigenetic change that we know happens when prairie voles, those little rodents I was talking about, in the 24 hours after they mate for life. There's epigenetic changes. The proteins around the genes in that nucleus accumbens region of the brain change. Because they fell in love. Not because they fell in love with just anyone.
Huberman Lab
Healing From Grief & Loss | Dr. Mary-Frances O'Connor
They fell in love with this vole and they will return to this vole and spend the majority of their time with this vole for the rest of their life. I cannot think of proof of something beyond the ordinary more than the idea that now two have literally become one. that literally those neurons will forever be embedded with the other. So for me, I don't need it to be organized religion.
Huberman Lab
Healing From Grief & Loss | Dr. Mary-Frances O'Connor
I am perfectly happy to see the beauty and transcendence in the neural understanding of what happens in attachment and then how that has to change during grieving.
Huberman Lab
Healing From Grief & Loss | Dr. Mary-Frances O'Connor
I think the research that speaks to this that I stick with, this is an older study now, but has always been remarkable to me. And the reason that it is remarkable is it is a truly prospective bereavement study, which is incredibly rare. So what that means, this was called the Changing Lives of Older Couples Study. It was done in Michigan, funded by NIH, and it was a 10-year study.
Huberman Lab
Healing From Grief & Loss | Dr. Mary-Frances O'Connor
So to be accepted into the study, They looked for couples where one of the members of the couple was over 65. That was the entry criteria. You're a couple. One of you is over 65. They interviewed both members of the couple about a host of different things. And then they followed the couples for 10 years. And when one of them died... They went back and re-interviewed the surviving spouse.
Huberman Lab
Healing From Grief & Loss | Dr. Mary-Frances O'Connor
I think there's a couple things there that I highlight. We can think about something being stressful and we can think about grieving for it, and those might be slightly different, but we can get there.
Huberman Lab
Healing From Grief & Loss | Dr. Mary-Frances O'Connor
So what it means is usually when we're doing grief-related studies, we're recruiting participants into the study after the death has happened or maybe shortly. shortly before the death happens. But in those cases, we know that there's going to be a death, right? So this was how are people just functioning in their life and then later what happens.
Huberman Lab
Healing From Grief & Loss | Dr. Mary-Frances O'Connor
And there was a natural control sample where they re-interviewed couples where both remained alive during that time. All of this is to say, I mean, it's a magnificent, I don't think it will ever be funded again because it was such a large and long study.
Huberman Lab
Healing From Grief & Loss | Dr. Mary-Frances O'Connor
But what it allowed us to do was look at their religious beliefs, look at their understanding of life and death before anyone was sick, and then see how that predicted how they handled grief later. And what we learned from that study is for people who had a way of understanding the role of death in life,
Huberman Lab
Healing From Grief & Loss | Dr. Mary-Frances O'Connor
which for many people was a religious understanding, having a religious faith, a religious belief. But for some people was more of a philosophical or even sort of agricultural cycle of life kind of understanding. For those who had a way to understand these life and death type issues, it predicted less grief severity after the loss of this specific individual, as though it
Huberman Lab
Healing From Grief & Loss | Dr. Mary-Frances O'Connor
Having thought through some of these existential issues in advance enables us, when one situation happens, to kind of at least hearken back to what we believed, with the caveat that it may throw your beliefs into disarray. But in this empirical study, at least, it offered a path, just as you said.
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Healing From Grief & Loss | Dr. Mary-Frances O'Connor
And so that to me suggests, you know, if we take it out of just the empirical finding, that maybe we ought to be thinking about these things. You know, maybe we need to contemplate what happens. How do we understand death and life and grief and illness? And how do we live our lives now knowing that that is a part of the future?
Huberman Lab
Healing From Grief & Loss | Dr. Mary-Frances O'Connor
But what I would say most directly to your question is, yes, it is true that sudden losses are harder for us to learn, to understand what's happened, because we don't even have sort of a conscious understanding You know, we've never run the scenario sort of through our mind. So, of course, it's more difficult for us to now imagine it. But there's something there's more to it than that.
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Healing From Grief & Loss | Dr. Mary-Frances O'Connor
Yeah. I mean, I can tell you, Andrew, your friends will still grieve. Well. Even with the document.
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Healing From Grief & Loss | Dr. Mary-Frances O'Connor
don't know i just would want everyone i think hunter had it right yeah throw a big party absolutely and i think you are right in many cultures you know you think of the new orleans jazz funeral right there are many cultures where it is very celebratory and there is nothing wrong with wanting that
Huberman Lab
Healing From Grief & Loss | Dr. Mary-Frances O'Connor
So we do know, for example, having closure conversations with someone who's in hospice care. These are helpful, actually, after the loss because we can reflect on getting to say, I love you and thank you and I forgive you. Please forgive me to say goodbye. We know that having that conscious process is helpful later on as we're reflecting on the loss.
Huberman Lab
Healing From Grief & Loss | Dr. Mary-Frances O'Connor
And there is nothing wrong with giving permission from beyond the grave to your friends and loved ones and family to feel that way. I will also say, you know, I also wish that childbirth wasn't painful, but it is, you know. So they're going to grieve because they are attached to you. It's just how it works. They don't get to pick.
Huberman Lab
Healing From Grief & Loss | Dr. Mary-Frances O'Connor
I'm sorry. But I still think that it is valuable for them. I also think it's very valuable for you. So what you said was, are we all just so terrified? And yes, the answer is yes. Even research shows us something called terror management theory.
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Healing From Grief & Loss | Dr. Mary-Frances O'Connor
tells us that we are so terrified of dying that we have all these psychological ways that we avoid the reality that we all know is true, that we do all sorts of things to keep it out of sight, keep it out of mind. And one of the ways we can do that is by not writing about it, right, not talking about it. I had an experience when my mother was in the final stages of dying.
Huberman Lab
Healing From Grief & Loss | Dr. Mary-Frances O'Connor
I was flying back and forth to this little tiny mountainous hometown over and over again because I was in graduate school at the time. And whenever there was turbulence, I would have a panic attack. Whenever the plane took off, whenever the plane landed, I would have a panic attack. And I worked with that for a long time. I was studying clinical psychology.
Huberman Lab
Healing From Grief & Loss | Dr. Mary-Frances O'Connor
I knew the first and most important thing was not to avoid flying. The exposure of doing it again and again, as brutally painful as it was, was important. I never wanted to give up flying, give up that way of living. But at some point, as time went on, I realized I was terrified of dying. And I also realized that was going to happen.
Huberman Lab
Healing From Grief & Loss | Dr. Mary-Frances O'Connor
And I also developed a practice, partly through Buddhist training, as you yourself talked about. But I developed a practice of, whenever there was turbulence, saying to myself, yes, you are not wrong. This could be the day. Are you okay with that? And if you're not okay with that, what do you need to do to get your life right so you are okay with it?
Huberman Lab
Healing From Grief & Loss | Dr. Mary-Frances O'Connor
And to live your life with the knowledge that we will die and to prepare to say, I love you, I forgive you, please forgive me, and I'm grateful as often as we need to. But also to know that we might not die. And so, of course, we also have to plan for that, too. But my point here is that terror you're talking about is real. It is physiological.
Huberman Lab
Healing From Grief & Loss | Dr. Mary-Frances O'Connor
And for many of us, I think learning how to deal with the terror around death. is in part a way of learning how to live and understand and cope with and use a toolkit to think about the pain of grief, those waves of grief that come. All of these things teach us more about how our body reacts, our unique body. Only this one, right?
Huberman Lab
Healing From Grief & Loss | Dr. Mary-Frances O'Connor
This is the one time that this instance will happen that is Mary Frances. How does it respond to loss? How does it react? What soothes Mary Frances? What actually makes Mary Frances feel more connected? Learning all of those things They teach us how to be more authentic in the world because we're the only one that gets to do this instance, you know?
Huberman Lab
Healing From Grief & Loss | Dr. Mary-Frances O'Connor
I will say that in the book that I wrote recently, The Grieving Body, some of these lessons have come to me because I have multiple sclerosis. And so learning to live in a body that I don't know when I wake up some mornings Will I be too fatigued to lecture standing up? Guess I'm going to have to, you know, change how I do today. Has meant I have a lot of empathy for people who are grieving.
Huberman Lab
Healing From Grief & Loss | Dr. Mary-Frances O'Connor
But I will say that it doesn't necessarily change the attachment biology. So the attachment is an implicit belief. It is an everlasting belief. And so I think it is actively trying to prevent us from learning that they are gone. And so what you see is a person, this will happen in studies, I ask a participant, you know, tell me about Tell me about the death of your loved one.
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Healing From Grief & Loss | Dr. Mary-Frances O'Connor
They don't get to pick that today is the day that they're going to be a basket case or today is the day they're going to be so foggy they can't remember where the heck they parked. even though they're a perfectly normal, functional human being. Or today is the day that really cereal is all they can muster for dinner, you know?
Huberman Lab
Healing From Grief & Loss | Dr. Mary-Frances O'Connor
I have a lot of empathy for that because that is just the natural reaction. You don't get to pick. You do get to pick a little bit over time how you cope with it, how you adapt to it. But it gives me a lot of empathy for people who are listening right now who are in infinite grief, even though it won't be infinite like it is today.
Huberman Lab
Healing From Grief & Loss | Dr. Mary-Frances O'Connor
I would say it does. And it is okay. There is no way to optimize your grieving. It is, you know, when people say, I say this jokingly, but, you know, I say to people sometimes, well, when did you get over your wedding day? Because that's not a question that makes any sense. Right. That's like saying, when did you get over your loss, right?
Huberman Lab
Healing From Grief & Loss | Dr. Mary-Frances O'Connor
So I think it's funny that you've really picked up on this. We talk about in the literature on grief and grieving that this idea of oscillation, that mental health is really about oscillation. We call it the dual process model of bereavement. And the idea is that when people can have the loss, feelings, thoughts, behaviors,
Huberman Lab
Healing From Grief & Loss | Dr. Mary-Frances O'Connor
Barely can make cereal and also can have the restoration stressors they have to deal with. And I don't mean this is a good thing. I mean, this is like, wait, I have to do the taxes and I've never done the taxes, but I got to figure it out because apparently life goes on. So it is stressful. But the capacity to oscillate back and forth between
Huberman Lab
Healing From Grief & Loss | Dr. Mary-Frances O'Connor
Dealing with the loss of this loved person and restoring a meaningful life, being able to go back and forth is actually the sign of health. And I will give you an example that has always stuck with me. I think knowing that people, they cry a lot when they're grieving. And it is... hard to see until you get familiar with the idea that, nope, this is just what it is, right?
Huberman Lab
Healing From Grief & Loss | Dr. Mary-Frances O'Connor
And they'll tell me the story of how they were, you know, in palliative care and they had this terminal diagnosis and so forth. And then I'll say, was the death sudden? And they'll say, oh, absolutely. I had no idea. Because I think that the belief that they will always be there does not respond to logical thinking, you see?
Huberman Lab
Healing From Grief & Loss | Dr. Mary-Frances O'Connor
And this older man that was in one of my research studies when I was at UCLA, I often will ask people, how did your loved one die at the beginning of a clinical interview? And I let them start wherever they interpret that as broadly as they want to. And
Huberman Lab
Healing From Grief & Loss | Dr. Mary-Frances O'Connor
He told me that he had fallen in love with his high school sweetheart and they had gotten married and had two kids and there was a picket fence in there somewhere. And he told me that she got breast cancer and that he cared for her while she was on hospice. And then he cried when he told me about her dying, which had been about two years ago.
Huberman Lab
Healing From Grief & Loss | Dr. Mary-Frances O'Connor
And then he told me that he had been going to dinner with this woman who was very different from his wife, but that she brought out like really different parts of his personality and that he was really enjoying having dinner with him. And he was very surprised by this. And then he looked at me and he said, the thing is, it was really good then. and it's really good now.
Huberman Lab
Healing From Grief & Loss | Dr. Mary-Frances O'Connor
And to me, that was sort of the encapsulation, you know, of mental health. Not that he didn't cry when he talked about her dying, but that he could go back and forth and fully participate in life now too.
Huberman Lab
Healing From Grief & Loss | Dr. Mary-Frances O'Connor
Oh, Andrew, that's brilliant. I may have to borrow that. The only way to prolong the process is to try and shorten it.
Huberman Lab
Healing From Grief & Loss | Dr. Mary-Frances O'Connor
I mean, I think it is true that along with rumination, that avoidance actually makes it harder. So, you know, sometimes people are avoiding a conversation. Sometimes people are avoiding driving by the hospital. You know, they'll drive an hour out of the way so they don't have to go by the place where it happened and remind it. Oh, yeah. Absolutely. Or they avoid dealing with the closet. Right.
Huberman Lab
Healing From Grief & Loss | Dr. Mary-Frances O'Connor
of the person right all of these methods of avoidance which as you said in in some way are are partially protest you know um it makes it harder for us to learn how to be in life now the classic example is the couple who used to go to dinner with their couple friends you know every friday or or whatever and one of them dies and and And she just can't go to dinner with her friends anymore.
Huberman Lab
Healing From Grief & Loss | Dr. Mary-Frances O'Connor
And so you can still pick up the phone to text your loved one, even though you have known they were going to go, even though you know they've been gone, because there's a piece of your brain that is still operating under the belief, they don't have to be in my time and space forever. for them to exist.
Huberman Lab
Healing From Grief & Loss | Dr. Mary-Frances O'Connor
You know, say that's what she's avoiding. We each have to, you know, have a come to ourselves moment and be honest with ourselves about what it is we're avoiding. But if let's say that's the case and let's say she reaches out and she says, look, I don't want to do this. It seems really painful, but I miss you guys too. And so let's try going to dinner. And I will tell you, it's going to suck.
Huberman Lab
Healing From Grief & Loss | Dr. Mary-Frances O'Connor
She is going to feel awful. And she is going to be reminded of him the whole time. And she is going to think, I never want to do that again. And then when she does it again, it's still going to suck. But maybe she also has a conversation with her friend about a book she hadn't heard of. And she thinks, well, maybe I'll get that book.
Huberman Lab
Healing From Grief & Loss | Dr. Mary-Frances O'Connor
And then there's this slow upward spiral, right, with the support of the people around us where we start to figure out what is life like with this person not on this earthly plane? How do I do things? You do the things first. The motivation, the good feelings, they come much later.
Huberman Lab
Healing From Grief & Loss | Dr. Mary-Frances O'Connor
I know. They lied. They lied. They lied.
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Healing From Grief & Loss | Dr. Mary-Frances O'Connor
And so I think in some ways the learning might actually be, how do I transform my understanding of this relationship now that they're not on this earthly plane? How do I understand where they are or how that makes sense? How can I have this continuing bond in my internal relationship with them? Right.
Huberman Lab
Healing From Grief & Loss | Dr. Mary-Frances O'Connor
Hmm. I think that it's a mystery. Why does it work this way? Except that it helps us to be more resilient, right? I think there's a lot of things where around the time of the loss, we're very zoomed in. People feel guilty. I should have done this. Right.
Huberman Lab
Healing From Grief & Loss | Dr. Mary-Frances O'Connor
They're zoomed in on the role that you played, you know, even though a hundred different people interacted or were zoomed in on how they felt during that last week instead of how they felt their whole life. You're zoomed in on. I didn't say goodbye. Right. Think of all the times you said goodbye and I love you. And so, I mean, I think it makes sense, right?
Huberman Lab
Healing From Grief & Loss | Dr. Mary-Frances O'Connor
Our brain is trying to understand this very important thing that is happening. Of course, you are zoomed in on it happening. But over time, as we adjust, we realize we sort of are able to zoom out more and we're able to see this in context of so many things.
Huberman Lab
Healing From Grief & Loss | Dr. Mary-Frances O'Connor
You know, I'm reminded that, you know, as we sleep, one of the functions of those dreams seems to be that we'll go through events again and again. But it's as though the brain is finding a way to detach some of the intensity of the emotion from the memory.
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Healing From Grief & Loss | Dr. Mary-Frances O'Connor
And so maybe this is a similar process over many, many nights and many days, right, where we're able to gain a little more perspective over time and over experience.
Huberman Lab
Healing From Grief & Loss | Dr. Mary-Frances O'Connor
If, for example, you won't allow yourself to think about those lost moments, the moment that he was struggling to breathe or when you saw the car accident or whatever it is, if you won't allow yourself to think about it, that has different implications for memory. And then often it does get more emotional so that the process of avoidance is actually sort of calling it up and then suppressing it.
Huberman Lab
Healing From Grief & Loss | Dr. Mary-Frances O'Connor
So you're actually calling it up more often than you would if you would just let it come, right? So, I mean, I don't want to make light of it. In some of those cases, it can be very helpful if people are having troubling memories, and especially if the troubling memories are getting worse over time.
Huberman Lab
Healing From Grief & Loss | Dr. Mary-Frances O'Connor
This is an important time to seek out a psychologist because we have intervention strategies of how to navigate that. It is not normal for people to get worse over time and for that to persist. So it is understandable to feel worse on the anniversary. It's understandable to feel worse on their birthday or something like that in time-limited ways.
Huberman Lab
Healing From Grief & Loss | Dr. Mary-Frances O'Connor
But if in general the stock market is getting worse consistently, that is a time to seek professional help.
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Healing From Grief & Loss | Dr. Mary-Frances O'Connor
Maybe I still tell them about my day or maybe I, you know, like when I see things, I think, oh, my mom would love that. Right. I had this moment of connection internally with my mom because that internal relationship goes on. It is everlasting. At the same time that I know. Oh, she's not going to be at my wedding or she's not going to be at graduation, right? You can have both at the same time.
Huberman Lab
Healing From Grief & Loss | Dr. Mary-Frances O'Connor
And that's good emotion regulation.
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Healing From Grief & Loss | Dr. Mary-Frances O'Connor
Yeah, small questions. Okay. I know that there is a scientific basis, although it is a very difficult time to do research during terminal illness and especially close to the end of life. But there is some research in this area. Not, again, an expert in it. But I will tell you that learning to regulate our attention is...
Huberman Lab
Healing From Grief & Loss | Dr. Mary-Frances O'Connor
is, of course, at the basis of learning to regulate a lot of things about our body, our mind, our emotions. And I think that, you know, I think of it this way. There are periods of my life where I have very little energy, where I can't shower standing up, for example. I don't have that kind of energy to spare. Because of the MS. Because of the MS.
Huberman Lab
Healing From Grief & Loss | Dr. Mary-Frances O'Connor
And what it teaches me is, first, the difference between motivation and energy. So I can be unmotivated to go to the gym, but if I can overcome the motivation problem, I often have the energy to work out. On the other hand, sometimes I don't have the energy, and then it is important for me to stop. right? Because I can do more damage than good.
Huberman Lab
Healing From Grief & Loss | Dr. Mary-Frances O'Connor
Some days I don't have energy or motivation, and that is just the worst of despair. And then some days, magically, I have both. And it is only because I have known the deprivation that the days I have both motivation and energy are such gifts, and I savor those days. So I think there's a way in which until we can know loss, we can't know abundance either.
Huberman Lab
Healing From Grief & Loss | Dr. Mary-Frances O'Connor
And when we know loss, it takes smaller and smaller things for it to feel abundant. And it sounds a lot like that's what she's describing in many ways. And what's interesting is the degree to which we can use practices like yoga nidra, like other religious or philosophical practices to teach us to regulate our emotions through shifting our attention.
Huberman Lab
Healing From Grief & Loss | Dr. Mary-Frances O'Connor
I think that's part of why grieving is so confusing and makes people feel like they're losing their mind.
Huberman Lab
Healing From Grief & Loss | Dr. Mary-Frances O'Connor
I right now can learn to make this the most enjoyable moment of the whole day right now. But that takes a lot of practice, right? I have learned to do that over time because otherwise I couldn't get through those periods of fatigue, you know? So I don't know. I think there are ways, again, that we can learn to work with our mind, with our brain, with our body.
Huberman Lab
Healing From Grief & Loss | Dr. Mary-Frances O'Connor
We don't get to pick all the parameters, but we can learn about the parameters to sort of understand how to work with them instead of against them. I think both in terms of the length of our life, the losses and separations we have to endure, and just getting to have this one wild and crazy moment.
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Healing From Grief & Loss | Dr. Mary-Frances O'Connor
I absolutely will. And Andrew, thank you for bringing the science to people. My pleasure.
Huberman Lab
Healing From Grief & Loss | Dr. Mary-Frances O'Connor
I think the question is askew in the sense that There is no letting go of the attachment part. There is transforming our understanding of what that means. So for most periods of history, periods of time, cultures, we have usually a social system, often a religion, set up to explain to us, where did they go? Are they okay now? Will I ever see them again?