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

**Andrew Huberman** (0:00)
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 discuss 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 it 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. By the end of today's conversation, you'll have a much deeper understanding of grief, something that everyone goes through at some point in their lives, not just as an emotion, but as a specific psychological and physiological process. The idea is not to intellectualize grief, but rather to better equip you to deal with it in more direct ways so you can honor the loss more completely and be able to move forward having grown from the experience. Before we begin, I'd like to emphasize that this podcast is separate from my teaching and research roles at Stanford. It is, however, part of my desire and effort to bring zero cost to consumer information about science and science-related tools to the general public. In keeping with that theme, this episode does include sponsors. And now for my discussion with Dr. Mary-Frances O'Connor. Dr. Mary-Frances O'Connor, welcome.

**Mary-Frances O'Connor** (2:25)
It's so lovely to be here.

**Andrew Huberman** (2:27)
I'm a huge fan of your work. It's such important work. Everybody grieves at some point. No one is immune from this process that we call grieving. And we get very mixed messages from a young age all the way up to adulthood about how best to grieve, what grieving is. And your work has really highlighted that this is a process that doesn't always play out the same way for everybody. But if we were to try and drill into some of the core elements of grief, not to be overly reductionist, but just, if you could highlight for us what grief really is as a process, what some of the hallmarks of grief are, perhaps some things that everyone experiences that they shouldn't be shocked at, and then we can leave into what your research has taught us about grief.

**Mary-Frances O'Connor** (3:20)
Perfect. I think it's good to understand that grief is the natural response to loss. It is a natural physical, emotional, mental, just reaction to the death of someone very close to us. And I think it can be helpful for people in unwinding some of these myths to think about the idea that there's a difference between grief and grieving. So grief is that in that moment, you know, I could say, Andrew, on a scale of one to 10, how much grief are you feeling right now? And you would be able to tell me right now during this wave of grief how you're doing. But grieving is the way that grief changes over time. As you were saying, it's the process part. So I think of it as sort of, you know, you can imagine the stock market, right? Each day it's up, it's down, it's up, it's down. Some days it's really down. Some days it's really up. But at the end of the year, you can still see that there's been a trajectory, right? For the year, the stock market might actually be up, even though you had some really terrible days.