Physiological Foundations and Tools for Healing

Welcome to Huberan Lab Essentials, where we revisit past episodes for the most potent and actionable science based tools for mental health, physical health and performance Hi,'m Andrew Huberan and I'm a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine Today we are going to discuss how we conceptualize grief bothoth at an emotional and at a logical level going to teach you about the neuroscience and the psychology of grief. incredible findings that have been made in just a few key laboratories point to the fact that we essentially map our experience of people in three dimensions just give you a little hint of what those dimensions are. They relate to space, where people are time when people are 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. Any biological or psychological event, it has a beginning, a middle and an end. 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 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, etceta 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 of misunderstanding arrive from the beautiful work of Elizabeth Kubler Ross, a psychologist who wrote the famous book on Death and Dying. The different stages of grief Very quickly our denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. But unfortunately, those five stages were sort of taken to be gospel for a long time. And we now know based on neuroimaging, based on more in depth psychological evaluation, and frankly, more researchers and clinicians moving into this area and observing that while much of what Kublar Ross described does hold true, it's not always the case. How do I know this Well, I know this because brain imaging studies involving what's called functional magnetic resonance imaging, FMRI, in which you can evaluate which brain areas are more active than others, according to blood flow, which correlates with neural activity and so forth teaches us that the brain areas that are associated with motivation and craving and pursuit are some of the primary brain areas and circuits that are activated in states of grief. We understand also on the basis of brain imaging studies that In order to understand grief, we have to understand how attachments are represented in our brain And it turns out that both attachments and the breaking of attachments in healthy ways are governed by three important what we call dimensions the three dimensions of relating to someone or an animal or a thing ace time closeness And in order to illustrate each one and how they work together relationships and their involvement in the grieving process. I'm going to tell you about an experiment The experiment involves putting people into a brain scanner that allows the researcher to evaluate brain activity in different areas. in fact can look in a very non bias way Not make any predictions about which brain areas are going to be involved Berman is the following. person I say the research subject first sees images of things that reside at different distances from one another. So in one case, it's a Beach or a parking lot with bowling balls set at different distances from one another brain is imaged And as their brain is imaged They see different pictures of different scenes, the beach, the parking lot, et cetera Bowling balls spaced in different ways, close together, far apart regularly spaced, non regularly spaced. When one does this sort of experiment, you see a lot of brain areas activated Not surprisingly the visual cortex, the area of the brain that is responsible for creating visual perceptions but also a brain area that seems uniquely tuned to the distance between you and the objects. We'll refer to that meeasure that dimension as we call it as proximity then subjects Listen to tones Those tones also are spaced from one another So it could be something as simple as my hand meeting the table top that I'm happing to be sitting in front of. so it's They image the brain Of course, areas of the brain that arere associated with auditory perception are active, not surprisingly as they evaluate different types of sounds and patterns of sounds for instance They can start to parse brain areas that seem uniquely tuned to the spacing of sounds independent of what sounds are coming in. That is it becomes active. spepecifically in response to changes in the spacing between sounds much in the same way as they could identify brain regions that were only activated when there were changes in the distance between objects, such as the bowling balls that I used in the previous example And then the subjects saw a different set of images The images that they saw were of people and of faces And some of the images that they saw were of people's faces right up close and other images were people at a distance where we could see the whole body of the person Now they also varied the emotional relationship to those people. That is, they were able to get photographs from these research subjects' lives so they could show them pictures of, for instance, their sister or some random person off the street they could show them pictures of parent. or of a neighbor, or of a celebrity that's well known or of somebody that they didn't know at all So they were able to vary both the position of the person clloser far And they were able to vary the emotional distance to the person. which is this dimension that I'm referring to as closeness, which is not physical closeness, but how attached or how well you know somebody This is may be sounding like a somewhat complicated experiment, but the takeaway from this experiment is exquisitely simple exquisitely important The result was that in all three conditions Changes in the physical spacing of these objects, changes in the temporal that is the time spacing of these sounds and changes in the emotional distance between the subject and different people The same brain area was uniquely activated And that brain area, it turns out, is a brain area called the inferior parietal lobule inferior Parietal lobvual. Now you don't need to know where the inferior parietal lobual is In fact, you don't even need to know the name of this brain area What you do need to know, however, if you want to understand grief and how to move through grief is that your map of people is not a map of emotional closeness per se. It is a map of emotional closeness. what we call attachment that is interwoven, that is braided in in a very intimate way, with your map of where they are in physical space, and where they are in time When you saw them last, when you're likely to see them again And If you were to want to see them how much time it would take to reach them or for them. reach you Now earlier, I said that one of the key functions of our nervous system is to be able to make predictions And so it's someomewhat obvious, but nonetheless important to state and restate One of the most powerful aspects of our attachments to people animals and things is our ability to predict what it would take to see them again and when we are going to see them again Now if all of this sounds like a bunch of neuro psycho Babel parsing of the obvious I'd encourage you to suspend that belief for the moment. Because if you understand that all relationships are mapped in the brain and body through these three dimensions, space, time, and closeness where proximity. space, proximity in time and proximity attachment, how close or rich bonded you are to someone If you can understand that then it almost becomes obvious or at least it becomes intuitive as to why after the loss of somebody, in particular a death or the loss of an animal This map has to be reordered. Why because If we are attached to someone, or an animal at a deep level It is almost always on the basis of a lot of what we call episodic experience, a lot of episodic memories, memories of things that happen Episodic memories are literally the conscious recollection of your experience of somebody or an animal or a thing And within that memory you have an understanding of What has happened with them in association to you what's going on with them, where it happened, when it happened, when somebody is taken away from us for whatever reason. Episodic memories persist for some period of time. and they are still linked to our feelings of attachment. Grief is the process of uncoupling, unbraiding and untangling that relationship between where people are in space in time and our attachment to them. This is very, very hard to do. And for some people almost impossible to do at least at the outset of grief. When we have a rich catalog of experiences with somebody or of them, that memory bank is not just flushed out at the moment that We learn that they're no longer with us. What happens is the brain continues to make these predictions that they will be in a certain place or a certain time, right? that they'll be in a certain time zone or they'll walk in the door any moment All of those predictions still hold. The neural activity continues. We call this reverbatory activity. That explains the yearning for and the desire to interact, and yet it's just beyond our reach because once they're gone brain still functions in a way. these neural circuits still function in a way put us into an action state of seeking them, looking for them in the same location. expecting them to contact us at whatever frequency that we were used to hearing from them. or that we could reach out to them and reliably get a response It is immensely disorienting, in other words to maintain a close attachment And at the same time, to not be able to make predictions about where that person, animal or thing is in space and time I'd like to take a quick break and acknowledge our sponsor, Aight Sleep Eight Sleep makes smart mattress covers with cooling, heating and sleep tracking capacity. 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For instance, the Pod five has a feature called autopilot, which is an AI engine that learns your sleep patterns and then adjusts the temperature of your sleeping environment across different sleep stages. It'll even elevate your head if you're snoring, and it makes other shifts to optimize your sleep. If you'd like to try eight sleep, go to eight sleep dot com slash Hubberman to get up to doll three hundred fifty dollars off the new Pod five eightight sleep ships to many countries worldwide, including Mexico and the UAE. Again, that's eight sleep d. com slash Hubberman to save up to three hundred and fifty dollars So with this current understanding in mind, few things start to become obvious and entirely normal to us in the best and healthy sense of the word Normal. For instance, if you've lost somebody or an animal or even a thing that was vitally important to you, it should make perfect sense to you as to why you keep looking for that person. Those expectations, those predictions that the brain is making are entirely normal because they are based on that deep catalogue of episodic memory that you maintain about that person. Ag, it's simply an activation of this map that involves closeness, space, and time. Not surprisingly then. the reordering of that map that's required in order to move through the grieving process is going to involve someome remapping. Psychologists and neuroscientists generally agree that the best way to approach moving through grief is actually to remap these dimensions while maintaining the close sense of attachment to the person. by not in any way trying to undermine the intensity of the attachment or how important it was to you So we'll now talk about how that process and the different entry points, as they're called to engaging in that process These are tools gleaned from the research psychology, the clinical psychology, and the neuroscience literature. The first one involves the acknowledgement and really the understanding that You don't want to disengage or dismantle your real attachment to someone, an animal or a thing That's a real thing and there is actually no adaptive reason to try and persuade yourself or numb yourself or somehow avoid the thinking of just how much they meant to you. What is important, however, is that you make some effort to shift your mindset and your understanding of that person in a way that holds in mind that Yes, indeed, the attachment is very real And in some cases is very, very intense is now going to be uncoupled from the other two dimensions of the map nameamely space and time So it's a complicated process, you can imagine, but you really want to hold and register two things at once. One way to do this is to set aside a dedicated period of time, mayaybe five or ten, maybe even as much as thirty minutes in which you are going to feel deeply into your closeness and your attachment to that person, animal or thing. you are consciously going to try and prevent yourself from thinking about couple of categories of things. First of all you want to actively try and disengage from any attempt to engage in what's called counterfactual thinking The what ifs What if I called them a day earlier What if They had taken a different route home What if I had taken a different route These counterfactual modes of thinking infinite landscape of possibility and they are very closely tied to guilt. So as an infinite space, it's a very precarious one and it will not allow you to uncouple that intense emotional attachment that I'm telling you is actually vital to hold ont to from that catalog of episodic memory that you've established. In fact It's going to strengthen those bonds So in this dedicated five or ten or thirty, whatever period of time you can tolerate. and maintain focus. The idea is to think about your attachment in a rich way and to perhaps even experience that in your brain and body. this tool, if you will, of dedicated blocks of time for really spending some effort and it is indeed effort to access the emotional connection. while starting to uncouple the other nodes of the map as it were is something that is hard But in terms of the options one has in order to deal with grief It is indeed the most adaptive way to go about it Now I'd like to consider why two people Both to intensely attached to person that is no longer there can experience the grief of the loss of that person in such different ways We don't really know how other people feel. There's no clear way of knowing that the expression someone else has or whether or not they're crying or not or their body language really represents how they feel inside. So that is important to keep in mind Nonetheless, there does seem to be a sort of a split among people And indeed Among animals as well, even within a species in terms of how intensely they feel the yearning aspect Grief It appears based on a number of different lines of evidence that that relates to this molecule that some of you have probably heard of, which is oxytocin Oxytocin is a Hormone slash peptide a peptide just means a protein, generally a small protein and Hormone is generally something that functions at numerous locations in the body to impact numerous organs and areas of the brain. Oxytocin has a variety of roles in the brain and body. It's involved in milk letdown uring lactation, it's involved in pair bonding both in males and females It's involved in bonding of parent to child and indeed between romantic partners etcera, etcetera Let's talk about some of the animal models that inform us about the potential roles of oxytocin in the grieaving process There's a species of animal called the Prairie Vole. And believe it or not, the prairie vole has been studied fairly extensively by neuroscience and psychology researchers Prairie voles are one species of animal, but depending on where they live, you find that some prairie voles are monogamous, that is, they mate with the same prairie vll for life They raise litters of littleittle prairie voles and other prairie voles generally that live in different locations in the wild are non monogamous, sometimes called polygamous the Neurochemical and circuit basis for this monogamy versus non monogamy quite interesting. However, in the context of grief and attachment, the prairie Bols have taught a lot theyve taught a lot through the following experiment two prairie voles that are coupled up. So these would be monogamous prairie voles. that have established them I guess you would call that a prairie Voldum. Anyway Put them in a cage together, they mate together, they raise young together And then You separate them You literally put a physical barrier between the two of them and you can evaluate How strongly One prairie vowl will work to get access to the other prairie vowl And what you observe is that the monogamous prairie voles will work very hard to get back to their mate. But The non monogamous prairies will not work as hard to access a Prairie Vle partner. This turns out to be interesting when you start to explore the patterns of so called oxytocin receptors in the brain. To make a long story short and to also bridge to the human literature It turns out that The monogamous prairie bols have far more oxytocin receptors in this brain area that I mentioned earlier than nucleus accumbents And again, to remind you, the nucleus ofcumbens is the brain area associated with motivation, craving and pursuit So it's as if the monogamous prairie vols have a capacity to link the attachment circuitry and the molecules of attachment, in this case, oxytocin, to reward pathways into motivational pathways. So in other words non monogamous prairie vols seems to have less yearning for attachment overall. att least to a single individual perie bolt And when we look at the human literature in terms of oxytocin receptor expression brain imaging experiments and so on What you find is the same, that people that experience intense grief and he yearning and a motivation to reconnect person, animal or thing that is lost. in many cases have heightened levels of oxytocin specifically Wh I should say oxytocin receptors to exact. specifically within the brain regions associated with craving and pursuit So for those of you that find yourself in this kind of stuck mode persistence of trying to reach into the past or wishful thinking, this counterfactual thinking the yearning, the desire and the impulsivity leaning in and at a almost reflexive way. to try and access that person again, to text them, to want to hear from them and I have to highlight could reflect the fact that You just so happen to have more oxytocin receptors or maybe more oxytocin overall in this brain area that's associated with motivation and pursuit. does not necessarily mean that you are more capable of attachment than people who move through more quickly. And I should say that peopleeople move through grief at different rates, even if Two people lost the same person. or same animal. People move through this at different rates and some of that is no doubt psychological But some of it, no doubt is also neurochemical and biological I'd like to take a quick break and acknowledge one of our sponsors, Element. Element is an electrolyte drink that has everything you need and nothing you don't That means the electrolytes, sodium, magnesium, and potassium in the correct amounts, but no sugar. Proper hydration is critical for optimal brain and body function Even a slight degree of dehydration can diminish cognitive and physical performance. It's also important that you get adequate electrolytes. 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I hate to say that I love one more than all the others, but this lemonade flavor is right up there with my favorite other one, which is raspberry or watermelon. Again, I can't pick just one flavor, I love them all If you'd like to try element, you can go to drink element. com slash hubberan, spelled drinklmNT d. com slash Hubberman to claim a free element sample pack with a purchase of any element drink mix. Again, that's drink element d. com slash hubberman to claim a free sample pack. I'd like to take a moment and explore this idea allowing ourselves to really feel the attachment to somebody can accelerate or at least support adaptive transitioning through grief is a really wonderful study On the face of it appears to be a what we call negative result. A negative result is when a hypothesis is posed and then it turns out the hypothesis is not true As is the case with so many interesting scientific findings Often when there's a negative result, there's a more interesting result nested in that negative outcome This is the case in a particular paper I'll share with you now. This is a pap published in the Journal Biological Psychology And again, the title is posed as a question, which is emotional disclosure for whom A study of vagal tone in bereavement. What this study explored was whether or not written disclosure of the emotional connection to somebody that was lost would be effective as a way for people to move through the grieving process The study also explored the so called vagus nerve. The vagus nerve is an extensive nerve pathway that is bidirectional between brain and body. So brain to body and body to brain The way to think about it in terms of what we're going to talk about now is heart rate and heart rate variability. The vagus nerve is generally associated with parasympathetic functions. and has the capacity to slow down our heart rate, in particular, by exhales and just simply because of the movement of the diaphragm and its relationship to the heart and the thoracic cavity exhales result in slowing down of the heart rate This is what we call an increased vagal tone. Now in this study, what they did is they had people And I should say it was thirty five participants Go through a writing exercise for a period of weeks. And there were two different One group was in the so called written disclosure group. What they did is they On day one, they would write about what happened when A loved one died And indeed, they used people who had experienced real loss. And so they were asked to talk about and write about their deepest emotions and thoughts about it. Memories of their loved one veryy intense stuff. if you think about it, if they're in the immediate period of having lost someone Then they actually were asked to write a letter to the person that they lost. The other group was a so called control group where they were simply told to write about how they use their time. So an emotionally kind of empty writing exercise, if you will They described what they do today after they woke up, etcetera. no heavy emotional content, and so on What I didn't tell you thus far is why they had them do this exercise at all They had them do this exercise because many of the effective practices for moving through grief involve, as I mentioned earlier, getting close to and actually deliberately experiencing the attachment that one has to that person that was lost, not distracting oneself, not getting into this counterfactual thinking, the what if, what if, what if, but rather thinking about it or in this case, writing about the real attachment And so the initial idea was if people write about this attachment, that they're going to experience this attachment and that will serve them in some or many ways in terms of moving Grief And that wasn't what they found. They found no difference between the two groups until They explored who had higher vagal tonone who had greater degree of so called respiratory sinus arrhythmia. In other words, who was able to modulate their state using their breathing in their body. And what they discovered wasas that? a subset of individuals who had a high degree of vagal tone. seem to get more benefit. from this writing type exercise. Now this is one study and I would consider it fairly preliminary with thirty five subjects Although it's a study uo itself, and I think a quite nice one And it really set the stage for a number of other studies that followed from this group and other groups that really point to the fact that yes, indeed accessing these states of emotionality by writing or thinking about somebody is quite powerful in terms of engaging Bodily states and the mind states associated with the attachment and that is very beneficial That is very beneficial for sensing the attachment And now it makes perfect sense as to why some people would benefit from that sort of practice more than others. because some people are able to access more real somatic feelings of attachment by writing about the attachment or by thinking about it than others becausecause again, what this paper really points to and set off a number of other investigations related to is that for those that can really feel the relationship between breathing, heart rate what we call vagal tone Well, those people are going to be in a better position to move through grief, not because They are disengaging from the feelings of attachment but because they are better able to access those feelings of attack So what this relates to, of course, is that tripartite map, that three part map that we talked about earlier representation of space, where things are where the person is, where their belongings are, where their car is, where their bicycle is. Tim when you were expecting to see them on a regular basis. when they would call. When they would come home from work, etceta. and that third node or that third dimension of attachment, which is literally attachment and closeness Now I'd like to take a moment and consider some of the tools that you can access that support healthy transitioning through grief And these are tools distinct from that neural map, that spaceet time closeness attachment map that we were talking about before Rather, it's important to remind ourselves that Everything exists in a context of our baseline physiology. and I'm certainly not going to be the first or the last to tell you that everything in life learearning, relationships with people that are still around Our health in every way, immune system, etceta function far better when we're sleeping really well. and when we are generally awake during the daytime and asleep at night There's a particular feature to our diurnal and diurnal meaning the opposite of nocturnal. diurnal pattern of the release of a hormone called cortisol. It's linked to our increase in temperature rhythms can further increase our temperature which leads to waking and so on typical pattern of cortisol in a healthy individual and we really can say physically and emotionally healthy individual is that Cortisol is going to be somewhat high right around waking and then is going to be highest ever will be in the twenty four hour period, about forty five minutes post waking. Not exactly forty five minutes, but about forty five minutes And then it will drop gradually such that by about four PM in the afternoon which is actually when body temperature tends to start to drop as well. Cortisol tends to be very low and then remains low in a healthy individual. such that at nine PM it's very low And throughout the night as we sleep, it's very low There's a very interesting paper exploring the relationship between cortisol rhythms And grieving in particular, complicated versus non complicated grieving. Ag complicated grieving being in the form of grieving that reflects a immense challenge of people moving through the grieving process such that it really needs to be dealt with, right Again, grieving is healthy, but complicated grieving is a prolonged grieving and has other dimensions as well, hence the name complicated. The title of this paper Diurnal cortisol in complicated and non complicated grief, slope differences across the day And the figure to orient to in this paper, if you do decide to check it out is Figure one, which beautifully shows should say very clearly shows that when you compare the cortisol levels between people experiencing complicated grieving versus non complicated grieving, what you find is the four PM and nine PM cortisol levels are significantly higher than they are in the non complicated grieving group. This raises a very interesting idea. We arrive at a scenario where it makes very good sense to think about modulating. That is controlling the foundation of your life in a way that establishes cortisol rhythms and sleep patterns and patterns of autonomic arousal chamine release that position you to navigate the grief process in the best possible way If you are somebody who is heading into grief or his challenged with grief, getting adequate sleep at night and establishing as Normal a pattern of cortisol as possible is going to be very important And there's a very simple, straightforward way to do this. And I apologize to the listeners of this podcast in advance if I sound like a repeating record, but the most powerful way to do this is to view sunlight Very close to waking. It does not have to be right at sunrise, but When you get up in the morning, if the sun isn't out turnurn on as many bright lights as possible in your environment. Why do I say this thing about sunlight over and over and over again? Well, having an early day cortisol peak in a very low cortisol level late in the day, four PM and nine PM is immensely beneficial. It's reflects a properly regulated autonomic nervous system. It means being alert during the day and your ability to sleep at night is tightly correlated to this viewing of sunlight in the morning Have additional questions about this or these protocols Please see our Mastering sleep episode also at Hubbermanlab. com As many of you know, I've been taking AG one for nearly fifteen years now I discovered it way back in twenty twelve, long before I had a podcast and I've been taking it every day since AG one is to my knowledge, the highest quality and most comprehensive of the foundational nutritional supplements on the market. It combines vitamins, minerals, prebiotics, probiotics, and adaptogens into a single scoop that's easy to drink and tastes great. 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Again, that's drinkagG one dot com slash Hubberman to get a weak supply of AGZ and a bottle of D three K two with your subscription So what are the tools that we can think about using in terms of healthy adaptive moving through grief trying to avoid complicated grief and prolonged brief disorders Clearly, it's a value to dedicate some period of time. Perhaps every day, perhaps E other day, depending on your capacity and schedule These could be periods of time ranging anywhere from five to forty five minutes, maybe longer. These blocks of time would be appropriately described as rational grieving. Rational grieving is a clear acceptance of the new reality person animal or thing no longer exists in the same spacetime dimensionality that we knew them before, and yet holding ono and anchoring to the attachment that we had This is really anchoring to the depth and the intensity of the attachment that existed as a way to For lack of a better way to put it, push off from those episodic memories, to distance ourselves from them because those episodic memories are the ones that lead us to look for the person in our current reality and assuming this is a real and complete loss, Those sorts of expectations are maladaptive. They do not serve us well The second aspect of this is to understand that the node of the map component of the neural map that you're anchoring to is a very real component of you. These are literally cells that represent the depth of attachment We talked a moment ago about the importance of accessing quality sleep on a regular basis. They're again, a rich array of tools to do that in the mastering sleep episode. And again highlighting the importance of sleep not just emotion regulation and autonomic control which is so vital, but also for making sure that neuroplasticity takes place because again, neuroplasticity is a two part process. There's the triggering of the plasticity, which In the case of the things we're talking about today will be naturally activated by the of a dedicated focusing on the attachment, feeling the attachment to the person, maybe even writing about the attachment to the person as was described in that previous study but also just plasticity is triggered by the mere loss of that person, the intensity of that experience. but Neuroplasticy, the literal rewiring of connections occurs during deep sleep and in call called non sleve deep rest or NSDR. and you can find NSDR scripts Th these are short behavioral protocols that you do for ten to thirty minutes at some point throughout the day, maybe even multiple times through day that been shown to accelerate neuroplasticity So having such a practice can be very useful. and Understand that it involves some cognitive work. We have to hold on to the attachment and imagine and feel as much as we can the attachment while also being extremely rationally grounded and trying to not try to hold ono the past to not anticipate the person walking in the room. This is very hard because when we think about the attachment, the attachment tends to drag with it those episodic memories, that rich catalog of experiences. And we talked about preparing ourselves for grief. We can prepare ourselves to grieve more adaptively by regulating the level of catecholamines in particular epinephrine and Toolols such as the one found in our mastering Stress episode and tools of the sort that we talked about today increasing that vagal tone actively building up the relationship between exhales and slowing down of the heart rate, so called respiratory sinus arrhythmia. Those things to be very useful tools. and of course I want to restate again, it is often important to access a trained professional psychologist or psychiatrist or both or bereavement group or all of the above in order to get the proper support for grieving I like to think that the tools that we've talked about today would be not only compatible. but would be complimentary to the sorts of approaches that they take And I would encourage you to not lean away from, but rather to lean into the building of those episodic memories build up a richer and richer set of experiences and emotional attachments becausecause while the process of grieving is in direct relation to how close we are attached to people, there are ways to move through it. And of course, it is the depth of our attachments and the number and the depth of meaning of experiences that we share with others and with animals that makes life so rich and worth living I just want to take a moment and say thank you for being willing to explore this rather complicated and sometimes extremely challenging thing that we call grief. from the perspective or through the lens of neuroscience and psychology. and last, but certainly not least, Thank you for your interesting science