What is “Grief Brain”?

What is “Grief Brain”? 

Those who have lost a loved one typically experience what we have come to call “grief brain.” It manifests itself a little like “long COVID,” complete with the brain fog that encumbers logical thought and keeps us from performing critically necessary actions. In fact, the more demanding the thoughtful action required, the more the grieving person is likely to avoid it and retreat into a protective shell. 

Our thinking can sound like, “I can’t do that without Charlie.” But it occurs even when we can’t really attach the procrastination and inability to act to something that other person would have gladly done for us or with us. It is as if the absence of that person’s presence has somehow severed the brain pathways that enabled both abstract and rational thought! Our brain is so hung up on its inability to accept the absence of our person that it can’t navigate anything else properly. 

Each of us experiences grief differently, which is why we were so delighted to discover a precise and thoughtful treatise on the subject by a scientist who studies the brain. The book is called The Grieving Brain: The Surprising Science of How We Learn from Love and Loss, by Mary-Frances O’Connor, PhD. 

O’Connor first affirms our experience by applying scientific principles of cognitive neuroscience, the theory of attachment and the fact that our brains hold multiple forms of knowledge simultaneously – memories with and without the person we’ve lost – to explain what is going on in the grieving brain. 

Cognitive neuroscience helps answer the question, “Why is it so hard to understand that the person has died and gone forever?” and Why am I stuck on the subject of what do I do next? The theory of attachment helps address why we experience so many emotions at once: sadness, anger, blame, guilt and yearning, to name a few. The ability of our brains to process so many different circumstances helps clarify why it takes so long to accept the fact that someone is gone forever. 

Another useful approach is that O’Connor distinguishes between grief and grieving. Grief is: “the intense emotion that crashes over you like a wave, completely overwhelming, unable to be ignored.” Grief is “a moment that occurs over and over, but those moments are distinct from grieving, which she defines as a trajectory that allows you to adapt and change that experience over time. You are empowered to learn from grief by grieving, in other words, and move on to reestablish a meaningful life. 

“Adopting the mindset that grieving is a form of learning and that we are all always learning, may make the winding path of grieving more familiar and hopeful,” she writes. 

So, now that you know “grief brain” is real, why does it matter? 

We at Clozure put so much emphasis on the issue of planning ahead for someone’s demise precisely because of grief brain. Planning what you should do when your “person” or “people” are with you, is like giving your brain the instruction and energy it needs when you know you won’t have it available to you!

You won’t have to pick that casket or urn or plan that funeral when your brain tells you it would rather not get out of bed. You won’t find yourself saying, “Whatever” whenever anyone asks you a question about what Charlie would have liked. You won’t have to live with the regret of missing important deadlines or letting paperwork pile up because you will have a cheerful little bird tweeting at you only WHEN it is time to DO something tedious but necessary. 

We’ve been there. And we want you to be prepared. 

Create an account now so you won’t have to worry about making important decisions on “grief brain” later. 

You can download O’Conner’s book in audio or her sequel The Grieving Body from Amazon.