Healing From Grief & Loss | Dr. Mary-Frances O'Connor

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 discussed 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 that 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.

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