Welcome to Huberman Lab Essentials,
where we revisit past episodes for the
most potent and actionable science-based
tools for mental health, physical
health, and performance.
I'm Andrew Huberman, and I'm a professor
of neurobiology and opthalmology at
Stanford School of Medicine. Today we
are going to discuss how we
conceptualize grief both at an emotional
and at a logical level. I'm going to
teach you about the neuroscience and the
psychology of grief and incredible
findings that have been made in just a
few key laboratories that point to the
fact that we essentially map our
experience of people in three
dimensions. I'll just give you a little
hint of what those dimensions are. They
relate to space, where people are, time,
when people are, I'll explain what that
means, and a dimension called closeness.
and how those three dimensions of space,
time, and closeness are what establish
very close bonds with people and are
what require remapping, reorganization
within our emotional framework and our
logical framework when we lose somebody
for whatever reason. The important thing
to point out is that grief is a process.
Like any biological or psychological
event, it has a beginning, a middle, and
an end. And I do believe that being able
to orient in terms of where you are in
that process can be immensely
beneficial, not just for predicting how
long it's going to last, but in order to
conceptualize the person or animal that
you lost in a way that allows you to
best preserve their memory while
maintaining your own functional capacity
in life. Along those lines, I want to
point out that grief and depression,
while they can feel quite similar in
certain ways and have overlapping
symptomology, loss of appetite,
challenges sleeping,
crying in the middle of the day for no
apparent reason, etc. They are
distinctly different processes. As we
wade into this important topic, I'd like
to emphasize some of the common myths
and misunderstandings about grief. Some
of the myths and misunderstanding arrive
from the beautiful work of Elizabeth
Kubler Ross, a psychologist who wrote
the famous book on death and dying. The
different stages of grief very quickly
are denial, anger, bargaining,
depression, and acceptance. But
unfortunately, those five stages were
sort of taken to be gospel for a long
time. And we now know based on
neuroiming, based on more in-depth
psychological evaluation, and frankly
more researchers and clinicians moving
into this area and observing that while
much of what Kubler Ross described does
hold true, it's not always the case. How
do I know this? Well, I know this
because brain imaging studies in
involving what's called functional
magnetic resonance imaging, fMRI, in
which you can evaluate which brain areas
are more active than others according to
blood flow, which correlates with neural
activity and so forth, teaches us that
the brain areas that are associated with
motivation and craving and pursuit are
some of the primary brain areas and
circuits that are activated in states of
grief. We understand also on the basis
of brain imaging studies that in order
to understand grief, we have to
understand how attachments are
represented in our brain. And it turns
out that both attachments and the
breaking of attachments in healthy ways
are governed by three important what we
call dimensions. The three dimensions of
relating to someone or an animal or a
thing are space, time, and closeness.
And in order to illustrate each one and
how they work together to support
relationships and their involvement in
the grieving process, I'm going to tell
you about an experiment. The experiment
involves putting people into a brain
scanner that allows the researcher to
evaluate brain activity in different
areas. In fact, can look in a very
non-biased way, not make any predictions
about which brain areas are going to be
involved. And the experiment is the
following.
The person I should say the research
subject first sees images of things that
reside at different distances from one
another. So in one case it's a beach or
a parking lot with bowling balls set at
different distances from one another.
Their brain is imaged and as their brain
is imaged they see different pictures of
different scenes, the beach, the parking
lot, etc. bowling balls spaced in
different ways. Close together, far
apart, regularly spaced, non-regularly
spaced. When one does this sort of
experiment, you see a lot of brain areas
activated. Not surprisingly, the visual
cortex, the area of the brain that is
responsible for creating visual
perceptions, but also a brain area that
seems uniquely tuned to the distance
between you and the objects. We'll refer
to that measure, that dimension, as we
call it, as proximity. Then subjects
listen to tones. Those tones also are
spaced from one another. So it could be
something as simple as my hand uh
meeting the table top that I'm happen to
be sitting in front of. So it's
they image the brain. Of course, areas
of the brain they're associated with
auditory perception are active, not
surprisingly. But as they evaluate
different types of sounds and patterns
of sounds, for instance,
they can start to parse brain areas that
seem uniquely tuned to the spacing of
sounds independent of what sounds are
coming in. that is it becomes active
specifically in response to changes in
the spacing between sounds much in the
same way as they could identify brain
regions that were only activated when
there were changes in the distance
between objects such as the bowling
balls that I used in the previous
example and then the subjects saw a
different set of images that they saw
were of people and of faces and some of
the images that they saw were of
people's faces right up close and other
images were of people at a distance
where you could see the whole body of
the person. Now they also varied the
emotional relationship to those people.
That is they were able to get
photographs from these research subjects
lives. So they could show them pictures
of for instance their sister or some
random person off the street. They could
show them pictures of a parent or of a
neighbor or of a celebrity that's
well-known or of somebody that they
didn't know at all. So, they were able
to vary both the position of the person,
close or far, and they were able to vary
the emotional distance to the person,
which is this dimension that I'm
referring to as closeness, which is not
physical closeness, but how attached or
how well you know somebody. Now this is
may be sounding like a somewhat
complicated experiment but the takeaway
from this experiment is exquisitly
simple and exquisitly important. The
result was that in all three conditions
changes in the physical spacing of these
objects changes in the temporal that is
the time spacing of these sounds and
changes in the emotional distance
between the subject and different
people. the same brain area was uniquely
activated. And that brain area, it turns
out, is a brain area called the inferior
parietal lobule. The inferior parietal
lobule. Now, you don't need to know
where the inferior parietal lobule is.
In fact, you don't even need to know the
name of this brain area. What you do
need to know however if you want to
understand grief and how to move through
grief is that your map of people is not
a map of emotional closeness per se. It
is a map of emotional closeness what we
call attachment that is interwoven that
is braided in in a very intimate way
with your map of where they are in
physical space and where they are in
time. when you saw them last, when
you're likely to see them again, and if
you were to want to see them, how much
time it would take to reach them or for
them to reach you. Now, earlier I said
that one of the key functions of our
nervous system is to be able to make
predictions. And so it's somewhat
obvious but nonetheless important to
state and restate that one of the most
powerful aspects of our attachments to
people, animals, and things is our
ability to predict what it would take to
see them again and when we are going to
see them again. Now if all of this
sounds like a bunch of neuroscycho
babble parsing of the obvious, I'd
encourage you to suspend that belief for
the moment. Because if you understand
that all relationships are mapped in the
brain and body through these three
dimensions space, time and closeness or
proximity of space, proximity in time
and proximity of attachment, how close
or rich or bonded you are to someone.
Well, if you can understand that, then
it almost becomes obvious or at least it
becomes intuitive as to why after the
loss of somebody in particular a death
or the loss of an animal, this map has
to be reordered. Why? Because if we are
attached to someone or an animal at a
deep level, it is almost always on the
basis of a lot of what we call episodic
experience, a lot of episodic memories.
memories of things that happened.
Episodic memories are literally the
conscious recollection of your
experience of somebody or an animal or a
thing. And within that memory, you have
an understanding of what has happened
with them in association to you, what's
going on with them, where it happened,
when it happened. When somebody is taken
away from us for whatever reason,
episodic memories persist for some
period of time and they are still linked
to our feelings of attachment.
Grief is the process of uncoupling,
unbraiding and untangling that
relationship between where people are in
space, in time, and our attachment to
them. This is very, very hard to do. And
for some people, it's almost impossible
to do at least at the outset of grief.
When we have a rich catalog of
experiences with somebody or of them,
that memory bank is not just flushed out
the moment that we learn that they're no
longer with us. What happens is the
brain continues to make these
predictions that they will be in a
certain place or a certain time, right?
That they'll be in a certain time zone
or they'll walk in the door any moment.
All of those predictions still hold. The
neural activity continues. We call this
reverberatory activity. That explains
the yearning for and the desire to
interact. And yet, it's just beyond our
reach. Because once they're gone, our
brain still functions in a way. These
neural circuits still function in a way
that put us into an action state of
seeking them, looking for them in the
same location, expecting them to contact
us at whatever frequency that we were
used to hearing from them or that we
could reach out to them and reliably get
a response.
It is immensely disorienting. In other
words, to maintain a close attachment
and at the same time to not be able to
make predictions about where that
person, animal or thing is in space and
time. So with this current understanding
in mind, a few things start to become
obvious and entirely normal to us in the
best and most healthy sense of the word
normal. For instance, if you've lost
somebody or an animal or even a thing
that was vitally important to you, it
should make perfect sense to you as to
why you keep looking for that person.
Those expectations, those predictions
that the brain is making are entirely
normal because they are based on that
deep catalog of episodic memory that you
maintain about that person. Again, it's
simply an activation of this map that
involves closeness, space, and time. Not
surprisingly then the reordering of that
map that's required in order to move
through the grieving process is going to
involve some remapping. Psychologists
and neuroscientists generally agree that
the best way to approach moving through
grief is actually to remap these
dimensions while maintaining the close
sense of attachment to the person by not
in any way trying to undermine the
intensity of the attachment or how
important it was to you. So we'll now
talk about how that process works and
the different entry points as they're
called to engaging in that process.
These are tools gleaned from the
research psychology, the clinical
psychology, and the neuroscience
literature. The first one involves the
acknowledgement and really the
understanding that you don't want to
disengage or dismantle your real
attachment to someone, an animal, or a
thing. That's a real thing. And there is
actually no adaptive reason to try and
persuade yourself or numb yourself or
somehow avoid the thinking of just how
much they meant to you.
What is important however is that you
make some effort to shift your mindset
and your understanding of that person in
a way that holds in mind that yes indeed
the attachment is very real and in some
cases is very very intense but is now
going to be uncoupled from the other two
dimensions of the map namely space and
time. So it's a complicated process you
can imagine but you really want to hold
and register two things at once. One way
to do this is to set aside a dedicated
period of time of maybe five or 10,
maybe even as much as 30 minutes in
which you are going to feel deeply into
your closeness and your attachment to
that person, animal, or thing. But you
are consciously going to try and prevent
yourself from thinking about a couple of
categories of things. First of all, you
want to actively try and disengage from
any attempt to engage in what's called
counterfactual thinking, the whatifs.
What if I had called them a day earlier?
What if they had taken a different route
home? What if I had taken a different
route home?
These counterfactual modes of thinking
are an infinite landscape of possibility
and they are very closely tied to guilt.
So as an infinite space, it's a very
precarious one. And it will not allow
you to uncouple that intense emotional
attachment that I'm telling you is
actually vital to hold on to from that
catalog of episodic memory that you've
established. In fact, it's going to
strengthen those bonds. So in this
dedicated five or 10 or 30 whatever
period of time you can tolerate and
maintain focus. The idea is to think
about your attachment in a rich way and
to perhaps even experience that in your
brain and body. This tool if you will of
dedicated blocks of time for really
spending some effort and it is indeed
effort to access the emotional
connection while starting to uncouple
the other nodes of the map as it were is
something that is hard. But in terms of
the options one has in order to deal
with grief, it is indeed the most
adaptive way to go about it. Now, I'd
like to consider why two people, both
who are intensely attached to a person
that is no longer there, can experience
the grief of the loss of that person in
such different ways. We don't really
know how other people feel. There's no
clear way of knowing that the expression
someone else has or whether or not
they're crying or not or their body
language really represents how they feel
inside. So that is important to keep in
mind. Nonetheless, there does seem to be
a sort of a split among people and
indeed among animals as well, even
within a species in terms of how
intensely they feel the yearning aspect
of grief. And it appears based on a
number of different lines of evidence
that that relates to this molecule that
some of you have probably heard of which
is oxytocin. Oxytocin is a
hormone/eptide. A peptide just means a
protein, generally a small protein. And
a hormone is generally something that
functions at numerous locations in the
body to impact numerous organs and areas
of the brain. Oxytocin
has a variety of roles in the brain and
body. It's involved in milk let down
during lactation. It's involved in pair
bonding both in males and females. It's
involved in bonding of parent to child
and indeed between romantic partners etc
etc. Let's talk about some of the animal
models that inform us about the
potential roles of oxytocin in the
grieving process.
There's a species of animal called the
prairie v. And believe it or not, the
prairie v has been studied fairly
extensively by neuroscience and
psychology researchers. Prairie vos are
one species of animal, but depending on
where they live, you find that some
prairie vos are monogamous, that is,
they mate with the same prairie vole for
life. They raise litters of little
prairie bowls, and other prairie vos
generally that live in different
locations in the wild are non-
monogamous, sometimes called polygamous.
The neurochemical and circuit basis for
this monogamy versus non- monogamy are
quite interesting. However, in the
context of grief and attachment, the
prairie bowl have taught us a lot. And
they've taught us a lot through the
following experiment. Take two prairie
vos that are coupled up. So, these would
be monogous prairie bowls that have
established a coupleum.
I guess you would call that a prairie
volum. Anyway, put them in a cage
together. They mate together. They raise
young together. And then you separate
them. You literally put a physical
barrier between the two of them. And you
can evaluate how strongly one prairie
bowl will work to get access to the
other prairie bowl. And what you observe
is that the monogous prairie vos will
work very hard to get back to their
mate. But the non- monogamous prairie
will not work as hard to access a
prairie vole partner. This turns out to
be interesting when you start to explore
the patterns of so-called oxytocin
receptors in the brain. To make a long
story short and to also bridge to the
human literature,
it turns out that the monogamous prairie
bowls have far more oxytocin receptors
in this brain area that I mentioned
earlier, the nucleus encumbent. And
again to remind you, the nucleus
encumbent is the brain area associated
with motivation, craving, and pursuit.
So it's as if the monogous prairie vos
have a capacity to link the attachment
circuitry and the molecules of
attachment in this case oxytocin to
reward pathways and to motivational
pathways. So in other words non-
monogamous prairie seem to have less
yearning for attachment overall at least
to a single individual prairie bowl. And
when we look at the human literature in
terms of oxytocin receptor expression
and brain imaging experiments and so on,
what you find is the same that people
that experience intense grief and a deep
yearning and a motivation to reconnect
with the person, animal or thing that is
lost in many cases have heightened
levels of oxytocin specifically or I
should say oxytocin receptors to be
exact specifically within the brain
regions associated ated with craving and
pursuit. So for those of you that find
yourself in this kind of stuck mode,
this persistence of trying to reach into
the past or wishful thinking, this um
counterfactual thinking, the yearning,
the desire and the impulsivity,
the kind of leaning in and at a almost
reflexive way to try and access that
person again, to text them, to want to
hear from them could, and I have to
highlight, could reflect the fact that
you just so happen to have more oxytocin
receptor or maybe more oxytocin overall
in this brain area that's associated
with motivation and pursuit does not
necessarily mean that you are more
capable of attachment than people who
move through grief more quickly and I
should say that people move through
grief at different rates even if two
people lost the same person or same
animal people move through this at
different rates and some of that is no
doubt psychological but some of it no
doubt is also neurochemical and bi
biological. I'd like to take a moment
and explore this idea that allowing
ourselves to really feel the attachment
to somebody can accelerate or at least
support adaptive transitioning through
grief. There's a really wonderful study
that on the face of it appears to be a
what we call negative result. A negative
result is when a hypothesis is posed and
then turns out the hypothesis is not
true. But as is the case with so many
interesting scientific findings, often
when there's a negative result, there's
a more interesting result nested in that
negative outcome. And this is the case
in a particular paper I'll share with
you now. This is a paper published in
the journal biological psychology. And
again, the title is posed as a question
which is emotional disclosure for whom?
A study of veagal tone in bereavement.
What this study explored was whether or
not written disclosure of the emotional
connection to somebody that was lost
would be effective as a way for people
to move through the grieving process.
The study also explored the so-called
vagus nerve. The vagus nerve is an
extensive nerve pathway that is
birectional between brain and body. So
brain to body and body to brain. The way
to think about it in terms of what we're
going to talk about now is heart rate
and heart rate variability. The vagus
nerve is generally associated with
parasympathetic functions and has the
capacity to slow down our heart rate in
particular by exhales and just simply
because of the movement of the diaphragm
and its relationship to the heart and
the thoracic cavity. Exhales result in
slowing down of the heart rate. This is
what we call an increased veagal tone.
Now in this study what they did is they
had people and I should say it was 35
participants go through a writing
exercise for a period of weeks and there
were two different groups. One group was
in the so-called written disclosure
group. What they did is they on day one
they would write about what happened
when a loved one died and indeed they
used people who had experienced real
loss. And so they were asked to talk
about and write about their deepest
emotions and thoughts about it, memories
of their loved one. Very intense stuff
if you think about it. If they're in the
immediate period of having lost someone,
then they actually were asked to write a
letter to the person that they lost. The
other group was a so-called control
group where they were simply told to
write about how they use their time. So
an emotionally kind of empty writing
exercise, if you will. They describe
what they would do today after they woke
up, etc. No, no heavy emotional content
and so on. What I didn't tell you thus
far is why they had them do this
exercise at all. They had them do this
exercise because many of the effective
practices for moving through grief
involve, as I mentioned earlier, getting
close to and actually deliberately
experiencing the attachment that one has
to that person that was lost. Not
distracting oneself, not getting into
this counterfactual thinking, the what
if, what if, what if, but rather
thinking about or in this case writing
about the real attachment. And so the
the initial idea was if people write
about this attachment that they're going
to experience this attachment and that
will serve them in some or many ways in
terms of moving through grief. And that
wasn't what they found. They found no
difference between the two groups until
they explored who had higher veagal
tone, who had a greater degree of
so-called respiratory sinus arrhythmia.
In other words, who was able to modulate
their state using their breathing and
their body. And what they discovered was
that a subset of individuals who had a
high degree of veagal tone seemed to get
more benefit from this writing type
exercise. Now this is one study and I
would consider it fairly preliminary
with 35 subjects although you know it's
a study unto itself and I think a quite
nice one and it really set the stage for
a number of other studies that followed
from this group and other groups that
really point to the fact that yes indeed
accessing these states of emotionality
by writing or thinking about somebody is
quite powerful in terms of engaging the
bodily states and the mind states
associated with the attachment and that
is very beneficial. for moving through
grief. That is very beneficial for
sensing the attachment. And now it makes
perfect sense as to why some people
would benefit from that sort of practice
more than others because some people are
able to access more real somatic
feelings of attachment by writing about
the attachment or by thinking about it
than others. Because again what this
paper really points to and set off a
number of other investigations related
to is that for those that can really
feel the relationship between breathing,
heart rate, what we call veagal tone.
Well, those people are going to be in a
better position to move through grief
not because they are disengaging from
the feelings of attachment but because
they are better able to access those
feelings of attachment. So what this
relates to, of course, is that
tripartite map, that threepart map that
we talked about earlier, that
representation of space, where things
are, where the person is, where their
belongings are, where their car is,
where their bicycle is, time, when you
were expecting to see them on a regular
basis, when they would call, when they
would come home from work, etc. And that
third node or that third dimension of
attachment, which is literally
attachment and closeness. Now, I'd like
to take a moment and consider some of
the tools that you can access that
support healthy transitioning through
grief. And these are tools distinct from
that neural map, that space, time,
closeness, attachment map that we were
talking about before. Rather, it's
important to remind ourselves that
everything exists in a context of our
baseline physiology. And I'm certainly
not going to be the first or the last to
tell you that everything in life,
learning, relationships with people that
are still around.
Our health in every way, immune system,
etc., function far better when we're
sleeping really well. And when we are
generally awake during the daytime and
asleep at night, there's a particular
feature to our dural and dial meaning
the opposite of nocturnal. Our dal
pattern of the release of a hormone
called cortisol. It's linked to our
increase in temperature rhythms and can
further increase our temperature which
leads to waking and so on. The typical
pattern of cortisol in a healthy
individual and we really can say
physically and emotionally healthy
individual is that cortisol is going to
be somewhat high right around waking and
then is going to be highest as it ever
will be in the 24-hour period about 45
minutes post waking. Not exactly 45
minutes, but about 45 minutes. And then
it will drop gradually such that by
about 4 pm in the afternoon, which is
actually when body temperature tends to
start to drop as well. Cortisol tends to
be very low and then remains low in a
healthy individual such that at 900 p.m.
it's very low and throughout the night
as we sleep it's very low. There's a
very interesting paper exploring the
relationship between cortisol rhythms
and grieving. in particular complicated
versus non-complicated grieving. Again,
complicated grieving being the form of
grieving that reflects a immense
challenge of people moving through the
grieving process such that it really
needs to be dealt with. Right? Again,
grieving is healthy, but complicated
grieving is a prolonged grieving and has
other dimensions as well. Hence the name
complicated. The title of this paper is
dal cortisol in complicated and
non-complicated grief slope differences
across the day. And the figure to orient
to in this paper if you do decide to
check it out is figure one which
beautifully shows or I should say very
clearly shows that when you compare the
cortisol levels between people
experiencing complicated grieving versus
non-complicated grieving. What you find
is the 4pm and 900 p.m. cortisol levels
are significantly higher than they are
in the non-complicated grieving group.
This raises a very interesting idea. We
arrive at a scenario where it makes very
good sense to think about modulating
that is controlling the foundation of
your life in a way that establishes
cortisol rhythms and sleep patterns and
patterns of autonomic arousal and
catakolamine release that position you
to navigate the grief process in the
best possible way. If you are somebody
who is heading into grief or is
challenged with grief, getting adequate
sleep at night and establishing as
normal a pattern of cortisol as possible
is going to be very important. And
there's a very simple straightforward
way to do this. And I apologize to the
listeners of this podcast in advance if
I sound like a repeating record, but the
most powerful way to do this is to view
sunlight very close to waking. It does
not have to be right at sunrise, but
when you get up in the morning, if the
sun isn't out, please turn on as many
bright lights as possible in your
environment. Why do I say this thing
about sunlight over and over and over
again? Well, having an early day
cortisol peak and a very low cortisol
level late in the day, 4 p.m. and 9:00
p.m., is immensely beneficial. It's
reflects a properly regulated autonomic
nervous system. It means being alert
during the day and your ability to sleep
at night isite tightly correlated to
this viewing of sunlight in the morning.
If you have additional questions about
this or these protocols, please see our
mastering sleep episode also at
hubermanlab.com. So, what are the tools
that we can think about using in terms
of healthy adaptive moving through
grief, trying to avoid complicated grief
and prolonged grief disorders? Clearly,
it's a value to dedicate some period of
time, perhaps every day, perhaps every
other day, depending on your capacity
and schedule.
These could be periods of time ranging
anywhere from 5 to 45 minutes, maybe
longer. These blocks of time would be
appropriately described as rational
grieving. Rational grieving is a clear
acceptance of the new reality that the
person, animal, or thing no longer
exists in the same space-time
dimensionality that we knew them before
and yet holding on to and anchoring to
the attachment that we had. This is
really anchoring to the depth and the
intensity of the attachment that existed
as a way to, for lack of a better way to
put it, push off from those episodic
memories, to distance ourselves from
them because those episodic memories are
the ones that lead us to look for the
person in our current reality. And
assuming this is a real and complete
loss, those sorts of expectations are
maladaptive. They do not serve us well.
The second aspect of this is to
understand that the node of the map, the
component of the neural map that you're
anchoring to is a very real component of
you. These are literally cells that
represent the depth of attachment. We
talked a moment ago about the importance
of accessing quality sleep on a regular
basis. There again a rich array of tools
to do that in the mastering sleep
episode. And again highlighting the
importance of sleep for not just emotion
regulation and autonomic control which
is so vital but also for making sure
that neuroplasticity takes place because
again neuroplasticity is a two-part
process. There's the triggering of the
plasticity which in the case of the
things we're talking about today will be
naturally activated by the practice of a
dedicated focusing on the attachment
feeling the attachment to the person
maybe even writing about the attachment
to the person as was described in that
previous study. but also just the
plasticity is triggered by the mere loss
of that person, the intensity of that
experience. But neuroplasticity, the
literal rewiring of connections occurs
during deep sleep and in what I call
non-sleep deep rest or NSDR. And you can
find NSDR scripts. These are short
behavioral protocols that you do for 10
to 30 minutes at some point throughout
the day, maybe even multiple times
through day that have been shown to
accelerate neuroplasticity. So having a
such a practice can be very useful and
understand that it involves some
cognitive work. We have to hold on to
the attachment and imagine and feel as
much as we can the attachment while also
being extremely rationally grounded and
trying to not try to hold on to the past
trying to not anticipate the person
walking in the room. This is very hard
because when we think about the
attachment, the attachment tends to drag
with it those episodic memories, that
rich catalog of experiences. And we
talked about preparing ourselves for
grief. We can prepare ourselves to
grieve more adaptively by regulating the
level of catakolamines, in particular
epinephrine, and tools such as the one
found in our mastering stress episode
and tools of the sort that we talked
about today, increasing that veagal tone
by actively building up the relationship
between exhales and slowing down of the
heart rate, so-called respiratory sinus
arhythmia. Those things can be very
useful tools. And of course, I want to
restate again, it is often important to
access a trained professional
psychologist or psychiatrist or both or
bereavement group or or all of the above
in order to get the proper support for
grieving. I like to think that the tools
that we've talked about today would be
not only compatible but would be
complimentary to the sorts of approaches
that they take. And I would encourage
you to not lean away from but rather to
lean into the building of those episodic
memories to build up a richer and richer
set of experiences and emotional
attachments. Because while the process
of grieving is in direct relation to how
close we are attached to people, there
are ways to move through it. And of
course, it is the depth of our
attachments and the number and the depth
of meaning of experiences that we share
with others and with animals that makes
life so rich and worth living. So, I
just want to take a moment and say thank
you for being willing to explore this
rather complicated and sometimes
extremely challenging thing that we call
grief from the perspective or through
the lens of neuroscience and psychology.
And last, but certainly not least, thank
you for your interest in science.