Essentials: The Science & Process of Healing from Grief

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 ophthalmology 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.

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