My guest is Dr. Mary-Frances O’Connor, PhD, Professor of Clinical Psychology and Psychiatry at the University of Arizona and a world expert on the science of grief and loss. We discuss what happens in the brain and body when we grieve, the role of dopamine and yearning in the grieving process, the health risks of getting stuck at particular stages of grief and how to move through loss while also deeply honoring the person, animal or thing that is no longer with us. Dr. O’Connor explains that grief involves cycling back and forth between protest and despair (often guilt and anger too) and explains science-supported ways to move through that process in the healthiest possible way. Everyone experiences grief and loss at some point. Dr. O’Connor provides valuable knowledge and tools to help you navigate grief under any circumstance. Read the episode show notes at hubermanlab.com. Thank you to our sponsors AG1: https://drinkag1.com/huberman Wealthfront**: https://wealthfront.com/huberman BetterHelp: https://betterhelp.com/huberman Helix Sleep: https://helixsleep.com/huberman Function: https://functionhealth.com/huberman **This experience may not be representative of the experience of other clients of Wealthfront, and there is no guarantee that all clients will have similar experiences. Cash Account is offered by Wealthfront Brokerage LLC, Member FINRA/SIPC. The Annual Percentage Yield (“APY”) on cash deposits as of December 27, 2024, is representative, subject to change, and requires no minimum. Funds in the Cash Account are swept to partner banks where they earn the variable APY. Promo terms and FDIC coverage conditions apply. Same-day withdrawal or instant payment transfers may be limited by destination institutions, daily transaction caps, and by participating entities such as Wells Fargo, the RTP® Network, and FedNow® Service. New Cash Account deposits are subject to a 2-4 day holding period before becoming available for transfer. Timestamps 00:00:00 Mary-Frances O’Connor 00:02:22 Grief vs Grieving; Love & Bonding, Gone Yet Everlasting 00:07:42 Sponsors: Wealthfront & BetterHelp 00:10:29 Sudden vs Slow Death, Attachment, Reframing Relationship 00:14:52 Religion, Integrating the New Relationship 00:20:46 Yearning, Dopamine, Brain, Addiction 00:27:58 Culture & Grief Literacy; Protest, Despair & Hope, New Relationships 00:40:09 Sponsors: AG1 & Helix Sleep 00:43:21 Protest, Despair & Transmutation; Changing Attachment Hierarchy 00:52:04 Bereavement Support, Medical Risk 01:05:27 Culture, Alcohol & Death; Dying of a Broken Heart, Medical Risk 01:13:40 Sponsor: Function 01:15:28 Navigating Grief, Emotions & Body, Tool: Progressive Muscle Relaxation 01:23:57 Grief Stages; Permission & Coping, Judgment & Guilt; Lessons from Grief 01:35:44 Grieving Suicide, Rumination, Tool: Shifting Environment 01:47:24 Belief Systems, Religion & Grief 01:54:17 Afterlife, Contemplating Death 01:58:35 Tools: Contemplating Death; Life Celebration, Terror Management, Empathy 02:07:46 Mental Oscillation, Dual Model of Bereavement 02:14:00 Avoidance; Remembering a Loved One, Resilience; Getting Worse & Seeking Professional Help 02:22:15 Time Perception & End of Life, Motivation & Energy 02:30:01 Zero-Cost Support, YouTube, Spotify & Apple Follow & Reviews, Sponsors, YouTube Feedback, Protocols Book, Social Media, Neural Network Newsletter Disclaimer & Disclosures Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Chapter 1: What is the main topic of this episode?
Welcome to the Huberman Lab Podcast, where we discuss science and science-based tools for everyday life. I'm Andrew Huberman, and I'm a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine. My guest today is Dr. Mary Frances O'Connor.
Dr. O'Connor is a professor of clinical psychology and psychiatry at the University of Arizona, where she directs the Grief, Loss, and Social Stress Laboratory. Today, we discuss the neuroscience of attachment and loss and why grief literally feels painful in our bodies. We also discuss the very real and serious health risks to being in a state of grief.
Throughout the episode, we discuss ways to navigate and recover from grief, either from the death of a person, the death of an animal, or from the loss of a relationship, job, or other role in our lives. As you'll soon learn, Dr. O'Connor's research is both fascinating and incredibly surprising.
She discovered, for instance, that grief is best understood through the lens of human attachment and that dopamine, a molecule that we normally hear about in the context of motivation and pleasure, creates a sense of yearning that is central to the grieving process. She explains it to effectively move through grief. We have to work with both our feelings of protest and our feelings of despair.
Those two things, the feelings of protest that we refuse to let go or our mind and body just don't want to let go, as well as the feelings of despair that we don't know what to do, that we feel like it's an endless sense of loss. Both of those feelings have to be acknowledged
And then we have to transmute those feelings into actions and feelings that maintain the memory of the person or role that we played in an active way and yet move forward.
By the end of today's conversation, you'll have a much deeper understanding of grief, something that everyone goes through at some point in their lives, not just as an emotion, but as a specific psychological and physiological process. The idea is not to intellectualize grief,
but rather to better equip you to deal with it in more direct ways so you can honor the loss more completely and be able to move forward having grown from the experience. Before we begin, I'd like to emphasize that this podcast is separate from my teaching and research roles at Stanford.
It is, however, part of my desire and effort to bring zero cost to consumer information about science and science-related tools to the general public. In keeping with that theme, this episode does include sponsors. And now for my discussion with Dr. Mary Frances O'Connor. Dr. Mary Frances O'Connor, welcome.
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Chapter 2: What is the difference between grief and grieving?
And I wonder, based on what you told us about the risk of heart attack, whether or not this is some attempt to lower blood pressure in the short term and basically just keep the person from dying. Yeah. is a drink or two, assuming you're of age and you're not an alcoholic, upon hearing the devastating news, is it the worst thing in the world?
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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Chapter 3: How does attachment affect our grief process?
Thank you for that. I don't think there are any – clear solutions or roadmap for this suicide issue, which unfortunately is more common now, as I understand, unless it's more just a better detection. I think the statistics tell us that suicide rates are increasing.
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.
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.
This increase in suicide rate cuts across all communities and level of academic prowess and athletic prowess. And it's always just kind of baffling.
Yeah.
It's just like, so I don't think we're going to solve it in this discussion, but thank you for shedding light on the importance of allowing oneself to grieve it in the way that feels right. Yeah. And that takes us back to this notion of taking oneself from the understandable response of protest and despair to a place of adaptive grieving.
I'm very curious about belief systems and moving through grief. And it's sometimes challenging on a podcast where we emphasize science and health to bring up notions of faith and religion, belief in afterlife and God and so forth. But I think we can do it in a way that's neither reducing any of that to neurons and neurochemicals because, yes, there are studies of, you know,
Where is God in the brain and these kinds of things? But those studies always leave me personally feeling pretty underwhelmed. That's just my own response. But it's very clear that for many, many of the 8 billion plus people on this planet, they believe in something larger than the experience we can see. They have true faith. Mm-hmm.
In God, Christ, Allah, whatever particular religion they happen to orient toward or some larger spirituality that's not nested in any of those things. Yeah. And that it can provide an enormously powerful structure to their thinking around loss. Yeah.
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Chapter 7: How can we support ourselves and others in grief?
Yes.
The other thing is that I'm not such a huge fan of Hunter Thompson for any particular reason related to the drug taking or the wild stories. I mean, I'm amused by him. And certainly he did some interesting creative work. I love the stories about him. I have friends that live in Aspen and stories about Hunter are everywhere still.
Yeah.
But I learned that his wish for his funeral was that his ashes be shot out of a cannon over Aspen and that there be a giant celebration. And when I learned about that – this was some years ago – I decided to write out a document, which was not a will of assets. I have that separately. But – Just a note to people.
Yeah.
And it literally starts, if I die, here's some things I'd like you to know. And I did that because I sort of wish people had done that for me.
Yes.
And for the other people in their lives because I see how much confusion and sadness and time is lost of life by people. In the relatives and friends and loved ones of people that I have to believe didn't want that for the people they loved because they loved them.
Right.
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