Everyone will experience grief at some point in their life. It can be hard to understand the death of a loved one. What is happening to a person's brain when they're grieving?
Our brains see traumatic loss as a threat to our survival according to Dr. Shulman.
"Our brains developed to preserve our survival, so anything perceived as a threat to this causes a massive response from the brain that has repercussions for many regions of the body," she said. We're used to thinking of physical trauma as a threat, but serious emotional trauma has the same effect.
The brain responds to different threats the same way. It has a default reaction that is triggered by any type of emotional trauma, including grief, divorce, the loss of a job or involvement in combat.
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Shulman said that the amygdala is always on the lookout for threats. "When triggered, it sets off a cascade of events that puts the entire body on high alert, with the heart racing, breathing rate increasing and blood circulation increasing to the muscles to prepare to fight or flee."
Shulman said that this isn't a one-off event. The amygdala becomes sensitized and hypervigilant when days, weeks and months are filled with reminders.
She said that the primitive brain is strengthened at the expense of the advanced one. The brain works overtime to protect itself from emotional trauma.
Mary-Frances O'Connor is an associate professor of psychology at the University of Arizona.
She said that grief may have evolved as a response to separation. Powerful neurochemicals in the brain make us yearn for our loved ones when we are away and reward us when we come back.
According to O'Connor, the death of a loved one is very rare and that the brain often responds as though the loved one is missing.
She said that the brain wants us to find them or make a big deal out of it. People who have lost a loved one often describe the feeling that their loved one will simply walk through the door again one day.
Time is a healing agent, but can grief affect the brain?
The repetitive stress of the fight or flight response and the remodeling of the brain in response to experience and changes in our environment result in profound changes to brain function.
She said that the changes can be reversed by therapy. Post-traumatic growth is a technique that allows people to live their lives differently than before they were traumatised.
According to an associate professor of Psychiatry at the University of Florida, certain events, locations or dates can cause a wave of grief, but the brain can recover from it.
New neural connections are formed in the brain as people heal. Prolonged grief disorder is a condition where the symptoms last for a long time, but it is not permanent.
O'Connor suggests that grieving can be thought of as a form of learning, and that this learning plays a part in both coming to terms with grief and being able to carry out everyday tasks.
She said that your brain tries to understand every situation where your loved one should be. I think of it as a computer that is updating its software. It can be difficult to type in a document while it's in the background, because the words are hard to see. The brain is distracted when we are trying to do simple things in life and when we are trying to do complicated things.
She said that this distractedness and difficulty concentrating usually resolves over time.
There is a complex response to grief. Many parts of the brain are involved in generating the grief response. The neuroscience of grief is still in its infancy.
She said that there may be different areas of the brain that show changes based on the stage, symptom and severity of grief. The anterior cingulate cortex and the medial prefrontal cortex are activated when a person remembers a loved one who died. In cases of complicated grief where the person is longing for the dead, nucleus accumbens can be activated.
Some aspects of grief are understood, but there is more to learn.
She said that there were few studies of "grieving" where the same person came to the same center multiple times. I'm looking forward to what we learn about grieving from future research.
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