Stop being sad, your brain has been affected!

Almost everyone experiences grief at some point in their life. It can be overwhelming and confusing, and it can make the death of a loved one difficult to grasp. But what exactly is going on in a person's brain when they are experiencing grief?

Our brains interpret traumatic loss as a threat to our survival. From an evolutionary perspective, our brains were developed to protect our survival, so anything that is perceived as a threat to [this] triggers a massive response in the brain that affects many areas of the body. We are conditioned to interpret physical trauma as a threat, but severe emotional trauma has similar effects.

The brain responds to different perceived threats in the same way. In other words, it has a default response that is triggered by any type of severe emotional trauma, whether it's related to grief, divorce, job loss, or being involved in a fight.

The amygdala [the emotional center of the brain], located deep in the primitive part of the brain, is always on the lookout for threats, and when it is triggered, it sets off a chain of events that puts the entire body on high alert—heart rate increases, breathing rate increases, blood circulation to muscles increases in preparation for fight or flight.

But in the case of grief, it’s not a single isolated event. Rather, days, weeks, and months are filled with reminders that trigger this response, causing the amygdala to become increasingly sensitized and hypervigilant.

The strengthening of the primitive brain comes at the expense of the higher brain, the seat of judgment and reasoning, which works overtime to cope with the threat of emotional trauma, summoning psychological defense mechanisms such as denial and dissociation.

There’s also a strong evolutionary component to how and why we tolerate grief. Grief as a response may have originally evolved as a reaction to separation, to help us stay connected to our loved ones as we go about our daily lives navigating our worlds — like when the kids go off to school or your spouse goes off to work — with powerful neurochemicals in the brain making us crave them and respond when we’re reunited.

Accepting Grief It’s often said that time is good healer, but does grief have any lasting effects on the brain?

Image source: Pixabay

The emotional trauma of grief causes profound changes in brain function due to the repeated stress of the fight-or-flight response and neuroplasticity, which is the reshaping of the brain in response to experience and environmental changes. Over time, these mechanisms lead to a strengthening of the brain’s primitive fear centers and a weakening of the higher brain [cerebral cortex].

These changes are lasting but can be reversed through therapy and post-traumatic growth, a technique that enables individuals to find a way to derive new meaning from their experiences and thus live a different life than they did before the trauma.

While certain events, places or dates can trigger a wave of grief, the human brain does eventually recover, although the time it takes varies from person to person. As people heal, the brain forms new neural connections and compensates for the trauma, and some people do experience 'prolonged grief disorder', where symptoms last for a long time but are not usually permanent.

Grief can be thought of as a form of learning, and this learning plays a role in both accepting grief and being able to perform daily functions.

Your brain tries to comprehend every situation your loved one should be in, but somehow doesn't. I think of it like a computer that's updating programs in the background. It can be very difficult to type a word document while it's churning in the background, making the words appear slowly on the screen. I think the brain is similar in that we get distracted when we try to do simple tasks in life, and certainly when we try to do complex tasks.

This distraction and difficulty concentrating usually goes away over time.

Image source: Pixabay

Understanding Grief and the BrainGrief is a complex response to loss. It includes emotional, cognitive, behavioral, and physiological changes, which means that many parts of the brain are involved in generating grief responses. Research into the neuroscience of grief is still in its early stages.

This is further complicated by the fact that different areas of the brain may show changes depending on the stage, symptoms, and severity of grief. For example, when a person thinks about a deceased loved one and tries to process the emotions associated with the loss, the posterior cingulate cortex and medial prefrontal cortex are activated. In cases of complicated grief where people are remembering a deceased person, the nucleus accumbens (which regulates emotional and motivational processing) may be activated.

While some aspects of grief are relatively easy to understand, there is still much to learn.

Source: Chongqing Tianji Network Co., Ltd. Source: Live Science "How does grief affect the brain?"
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