Transcript
00:00:00I want to introduce you to a way to think about something that's incredibly inevitable.
00:00:05I mean, totally inevitable.
00:00:07We all will experience grief because sadness is part of life and sadness based on loss,
00:00:13which is grief of course, is something that we don't have to go looking for in point of
00:00:17fact we'll find us.
00:00:18Grief is losing something or someone that you love.
00:00:21We typically think about it as because our loved one's dying, but it could be your company
00:00:26goes bankrupt.
00:00:27It could be being fired from your job.
00:00:29These could be real sources of grief and it can be little or big.
00:00:32As a matter of fact, it's the loss, the involuntary loss of something you cherish.
00:00:37Now, why am I talking about it?
00:00:39Because when we talk about it, the research can give us a tremendous amount of value and
00:00:44understanding what it is, why it happens, how it's normal, and how to deal with it.
00:00:51That's my goal here.
00:00:59Hi friends, welcome to Office Hours.
00:01:00I'm Arthur Brooks.
00:01:01I'm dedicated to lifting people up and bringing them together in bonds of happiness and love
00:01:05using science and ideas.
00:01:07I'm a behavioral scientist and that's what I get to do all day.
00:01:10That's what this show is all about.
00:01:11That's what I write about and teach about as well.
00:01:13I'm so glad to have you here.
00:01:15Thank you for joining me this week and I hope every week for ideas on how you can learn how
00:01:20to live a better life using science, how you can change your habits, and just as importantly
00:01:24as anything else, how you can teach these ideas to other people.
00:01:27One way that you can lift other people up is by sharing the show with others, which I appreciate
00:01:31you doing very much.
00:01:32That's why I do it, is to get the broadest possible audience of people who are dedicated
00:01:36to the pursuit of happiness in our lives and the lives of other people as well.
00:01:40Please do share this episode or any episode that you want with your friends.
00:01:45Like and subscribe to the podcast wherever you're watching or listening to it and give
00:01:49us some ideas about how we can make the podcast better and topics you'd like me to talk about
00:01:54in the coming weeks and months.
00:01:56You can do all that by writing a comment wherever you're getting this content or writing to me
00:02:01at offershowers@arthurworks.com, the email address for the show.
00:02:06Don't forget to leave a review on Spotify or Apple and subscribe on the platform of your
00:02:10choice because that helps us to reach more people.
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00:04:08Today I want to talk about a very hard topic that sounds like not a topic of happiness but
00:04:13rather quite the opposite.
00:04:15That's grief.
00:04:16And if I do my job, I want to introduce you to a way to think about something that's incredibly
00:04:23inevitable.
00:04:24I mean, totally inevitable.
00:04:25We all will experience grief because sadness is part of life.
00:04:30And sadness based on loss, which is grief, of course, is something that we don't have
00:04:34to go looking for in point of fact will find us.
00:04:37I want to talk about what's happening when you're feeling grief.
00:04:41How long it's likely to last.
00:04:42But most importantly, when it inevitably does come knocking at your door, what you can actually
00:04:48do to turn grief from unmitigated loss into a means of growth, a means of development as
00:04:57a person, and how you can actually help other people in subsequent areas of grief in their
00:05:02lives.
00:05:03In other words, how we can make what seems like a terrible curse, maybe even into a blessing.
00:05:09So that's today's show.
00:05:10I was struck some years ago in 2010, to be specific, of something I read about the terrible
00:05:18Fukushima earthquake and tsunami that overwhelmed the nuclear plant on the coast of Japan and
00:05:25wound up killing 20,000 people.
00:05:27You remember this.
00:05:28It was just, maybe you don't remember it, but it was horrible.
00:05:30It was like one of the worst in a developed country, an unimaginable disaster.
00:05:36There was an artist in Japan named Itaru Sasaki, who had members of his family that perished
00:05:43in this terrible tragedy.
00:05:45And he was trying to figure out some way to make that loss more meaningful.
00:05:49He made an art installation that wound up having a profound impact on the entire region.
00:05:53He created something he called the kaze no denua, or the wind phone.
00:05:59What it was, was in his town, which had lost 10% of his population, by the way, I mean,
00:06:04what a joke, everybody lost somebody in his town.
00:06:07He set up a phone booth, with a phone that recorded people's calls, but wasn't hooked
00:06:14up to anybody else.
00:06:17And in the wind phone, he asked people to come and to call their dead relatives and leave
00:06:24them a message.
00:06:2530,000 people have done it today.
00:06:2830,000 people have gone, and it'll be old men who are totally stoic and will be weeping
00:06:35into the phone as they're talking to their wives or their children or something.
00:06:38And it was this incredible opportunity to create a means of communication where one hadn't
00:06:44existed, even though everybody doing it knows they weren't talking to their family member,
00:06:48but they were expressing something that probably they had never been able to express.
00:06:52And it was an emblem of this universal human experience.
00:06:57It tied people all around the world when they saw this, crazy art installation.
00:07:03No, it was an example of the experience that we all have in life.
00:07:09It was a humanness that was exhibited in that.
00:07:15Grief that those people felt, that you have felt, that you will feel, creates a psychological
00:07:22or physiological disequilibrium.
00:07:27It is the case in which you are supposed to be with someone or have some set of circumstances
00:07:35permanently.
00:07:36You've accommodated yourself to a kind of a permanence with someone or something, and
00:07:40it's taken away.
00:07:42Grief is losing something or someone that you love.
00:07:45We typically think about it as because our loved one's dying, but it could be your company
00:07:50goes bankrupt.
00:07:51It could be being fired from your job.
00:07:53These could be real sources of grief.
00:07:55And it can be little or big, as a matter of fact, is the loss, the involuntary loss of
00:08:01something you cherish.
00:08:02That's what grief is all about.
00:08:03Now, when it comes to the death of a loved one, I mean, it's as normal as can be.
00:08:09Look, 3 million people die each year in the United States alone, one hundredth of the population.
00:08:15And according to pretty good research, this is research in the Journal of the American
00:08:19Medical Association, an article called Treatment of Complicated Grief, a randomized controlled
00:08:23trial, each person who dies on average leaves five people bereaved.
00:08:29And that means that at any given time, 15 million Americans are experiencing fresh grief.
00:08:3415 million Americans.
00:08:36That's extraordinary.
00:08:37That's five percent of the population.
00:08:39You look right, you look left, one in 20 people is freshly grieving, which shows how ubiquitous
00:08:47it is, and yet it feels so, it feels so strange and it feels so unusual and people feel so
00:08:54uniquely unfortunate when it actually happens, even though it's almost the most normal thing
00:08:58that we could expect.
00:08:59When we talk about prolonged grief, which is lasting, where the ill effects are lasting
00:09:04psychologically lasting more than a year, that afflicts about one in 10 bereaved people where
00:09:09the mourners suffering really remains high over an extended period.
00:09:13Now, why am I talking about it?
00:09:15Because when we talk about it, the research can give us a tremendous amount of value and
00:09:20understanding what it is, why it happens, how it's normal, and how to deal with it.
00:09:27That's my goal here.
00:09:28Let's distinguish between a couple of different things.
00:09:32Bereavement and grief are not the same thing.
00:09:35Bereavement is the experience of loss.
00:09:37There's the experience of losing somebody that you love, for example, a parent dying, God
00:09:42forbid a child dying.
00:09:44Grief is the physiological or psychological or social response to that experience.
00:09:50You see how this works is you experience the loss and then you have an experience subsequent
00:09:55to that loss.
00:09:56What do you do?
00:09:57The response to that experience, that's what grief actually is.
00:10:02There have been some pretty famous studies on this that probably you have heard of.
00:10:09The most famous study of grief comes from the Swiss psychiatrist, Elisabeth Kubler-Ross,
00:10:15who wrote "On Death and Dying," a very, very famous book that has actually taken a lot of
00:10:20criticism over the years because it's not perfect.
00:10:22I'll talk about that a little bit probably more in a minute.
00:10:26But she did fundamental work in this book, "On Death and Dying," where she talked about
00:10:30the fact that people who are experiencing grief, they typically pass through five stages.
00:10:35Now, this is really interesting because the idea that there's an algorithm to grief, it
00:10:40just shows how funny we are as people, right?
00:10:42People feel uniquely unfortunate when they're grieving, but they don't behave uniquely is
00:10:49what Elisabeth Kubler-Ross found.
00:10:51She was studying people who learned they were going to die.
00:10:55I'm going to die, that kind of thing.
00:10:56By the way, you're going to die, so am I. But they were given a death sentence for whatever
00:11:01reason, the cancer diagnosis that was terminal or whatever, but it applies to all sorts of
00:11:05grief.
00:11:06You know, somebody dies that you're close to, it's the same basic process.
00:11:10The five stages are when something creates grief in your life, the first thing you naturally
00:11:16do is deny it.
00:11:17Like, no, it can't be real, it can't be real, no, no, it can't be real.
00:11:21That goes by pretty quickly and it goes into anger, where you're angry that this is befalling
00:11:25you, the universe has treated you unfairly.
00:11:28The third stage is bargaining.
00:11:30It's weird because people will actually bargain and say, "Okay, God," or whomever.
00:11:34"If you'll take this away, then I'll behave in a particular way," and they'll fantasize
00:11:38often about what if they actually could change something?
00:11:41What would I give?
00:11:42They'll say, part of the bargaining will be like, "What would I give to not have this happen?"
00:11:46And they'll be like, people will say this all the time when they're in the bargaining phase
00:11:49of grief, "I would literally give everything I own if I had not incurred that loss, to not
00:11:55incur that loss."
00:11:57That's evidence of this kind of bargaining.
00:11:58Even though they realize they can't do it, they're still thinking in that way because
00:12:01that's a natural part of the cognitive algorithm of grief.
00:12:04The fourth is just when sadness comes in, when there's this activity of the part of the limbic
00:12:10system that experiences affective pain is there.
00:12:15And last but not least is acceptance, where you accept that this is actually going to happen.
00:12:19Newer research has suggested that not everybody goes through denial, anger, bargaining, and
00:12:24depression in the same order, and furthermore, that they actually go by pretty quickly for
00:12:30most people.
00:12:31And the newer research shows that most people get to acceptance pretty fast when there's
00:12:35something like this.
00:12:36They accept that somebody has died.
00:12:37They accept that they're going to die.
00:12:39And that acceptance is a period of tremendous generativity, typically.
00:12:43Now, I want to talk about that later because I want to talk about how you can prepare yourself
00:12:47for acceptance in a way that you grow as a person, and that in point of fact, can enhance
00:12:53the joy of life for whatever time that you've got left.
00:12:56The medical providers in the literature, and this comes from a pretty interesting article
00:13:02from 2017, as always, I'll put it in the notes.
00:13:04They see a pretty common symptoms of grief, which is a separation response.
00:13:08One is yearning for that with which you've been separated.
00:13:12One is longing, and yearning and longing are sort of different, aren't they?
00:13:17There's sadness, of course.
00:13:18And then here's the interesting part, there's hallucinations.
00:13:22This is typically the case that there's disorientation.
00:13:25When you lose something that you consider to be part of your life, it's like losing a bit
00:13:30of your cognitive ability.
00:13:32That's what we often see, which is why when one of your aging parents dies, the other one
00:13:36might talk about the person like they're still alive.
00:13:38That's a benign hallucination, very, very common.
00:13:43You'll be alarmed if that happens to one of your aging parents, but it shouldn't alarm
00:13:46you because it's extremely normal that that would actually happen.
00:13:50Acute grief, really acute grief in its early stages, can actually resemble mild dementia
00:13:55in this way.
00:13:56It's not dementia.
00:13:57Don't worry.
00:13:58There's not a destruction of the neurons and the substantia nigra.
00:14:01This is not, you know, we're not talking about that, but it is extreme disorientation because
00:14:06permanent became impermanent all of a sudden.
00:14:09And that discrepancy between perceived reality and experienced reality leads to this disorientation
00:14:16that we're talking about here, yearning, longing, sadness, and even hallucinations.
00:14:20And you'll see this, you know, I remember this and I remember my family lost her mother and
00:14:24she said that her mother was actually walking around on the roof.
00:14:27I'm like, what are you talking about?
00:14:29Yeah, she's up there.
00:14:30Like what?
00:14:32With no history of hallucinations.
00:14:35It's just common is the way that this turns out.
00:14:38Now what's the brain's response to grief?
00:14:40And the answer to this actually comes if you've been following my work for a long time, affective
00:14:44pain.
00:14:45The sensory pain is the ouch part of something that happens to you physically.
00:14:48The affective part is I hate that part.
00:14:51Different parts of the brain for the two kinds of pains, as a matter of fact, that affective
00:14:54response involves a part of the brain called the anterior cingulate cortex.
00:14:59Often that's actually narrowed down to the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex.
00:15:02It's a part of the limbic system designed to make you feel pain and mental pain, sadness.
00:15:08So which is weird.
00:15:09Like why did we evolve sadness?
00:15:12And it makes sense, doesn't it, because we're evolved to have an aversive response to losing
00:15:18things and people that we love.
00:15:20You have sadness because it's supposed to be really, really uncomfortable, terrible as a
00:15:25matter of fact, so that you will avoid the loss.
00:15:29When you can't avoid the loss, it becomes an inevitable source of pain is what it turns.
00:15:35But if you can't avoid the loss, you will because you don't want to feel sad, which is why if
00:15:40you didn't have any sadness or you weren't worried about sadness, you didn't feel discomfort
00:15:43with your sadness.
00:15:44You would say everything that you think all the time to your loved ones and you'd be fired
00:15:48and friendless and divorced in like a week.
00:15:51And that would be bad for you.
00:15:52So we've evolved sadness so that we will avoid loss.
00:15:56So that we avoid grief is what it comes down to.
00:16:00And that thing that we've evolved is the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex, which is the part
00:16:05of the brain dedicated to that kind of pain.
00:16:07Now, there's also, I'm going to come back to that in a second.
00:16:11But there is also a set of experiments that are able to measure grief with respect to skin
00:16:19electrical conductivity, believe it or not.
00:16:23How well your skin conducts electricity will be indicative of how much interior pain you're
00:16:29feeling as a kind of a physical measurement of how they do that article called behavioral
00:16:34triggers of skin conductance responses and their neural correlates and the primate amygdala.
00:16:40And why is that?
00:16:41Because you're amped up.
00:16:42And when you're really amped up in sadness, we can actually put wires on your skin and
00:16:47see how much current is passing through your skin or how well your skin conducts electricity.
00:16:55I guess that's neither here nor there.
00:16:56But it basically shows once again what I've been talking about over and over again, which
00:16:59is psychology is biology here.
00:17:02It's all one thing.
00:17:03It's not just in the ether.
00:17:06When we say it's in your head, we literally mean it's in your head.
00:17:10Now, you might think once again that debilitating grief is like a glitch, but it's actually a
00:17:16feature how we feel this pain.
00:17:18Once again, we need to feel pain because that's a survival imperative.
00:17:22So we're not left alone.
00:17:23So that we have an aversion to loss.
00:17:27Grief is loss that we can't remediate and we can't avoid.
00:17:31When somebody dies, you can't get them back.
00:17:34And so the result of that is unremitting mental pain.
00:17:37Your dorsal anterior cingulate cortex is not calming down.
00:17:40Well, it actually is, but it just takes time.
00:17:44So when you lose something that you love, it's like a jetliner has crashed and there's a pinging
00:17:49black box in the bottom of the ocean.
00:17:51Ping, ping, ping, but the battery wears down.
00:17:56And so the pinging is less and the pinging is less.
00:17:59And sooner or later you will recover.
00:18:00I'm going to talk about that in a second.
00:18:01I'm going to talk about two things.
00:18:02How fast does it take for the pinging to stop?
00:18:04But I'm also going to talk about how you feel about the pinging stopping.
00:18:08Because there's a pretty interesting phenomenon where people grieve because they're not grieving.
00:18:13But more on that in a second.
00:18:14So the whole point is if you're grieving, that's completely normal.
00:18:17That's physiologically healthy.
00:18:19That's your brain working properly.
00:18:22And it's not supposed to do that forever.
00:18:24It's doing that just in case you can actually get the person back.
00:18:28And when they die, for example, and you can't, then it will wear away.
00:18:33How fast?
00:18:35How fast?
00:18:36For most people, pretty fast.
00:18:38As a matter of fact, there's one 2019 study of depression in women who were widowed.
00:18:42And women actually get over this much faster than men.
00:18:44I mean, you've probably seen this in couples that you know where women who are widowed are
00:18:48actually able to recover faster or better than their husbands.
00:18:52Men do worse.
00:18:54And part of the reason is that women have thicker social networks.
00:18:57They tend to have more friends.
00:18:58They have more people that they can rely on when they're feeling grief.
00:19:01Men way, way, way fewer.
00:19:03And if your wife dies and you're left utterly alone in the world, that's why mortality increases
00:19:09so dramatically among widowers compared to widows.
00:19:12But the study in 2019 of depression in widowed women says that in the first month after the
00:19:17death of a spouse, there's a 38% decrease in mental pain.
00:19:21Sadness decreases by 38%.
00:19:23That's a lot.
00:19:25Within one month, you know, oh, I'll never feel better.
00:19:28Yeah, probably won't like significantly in a few weeks.
00:19:31Within the next two months, there's an additional 25% decrease.
00:19:35By a year and a half later or a year later, there's an 11% decrease on top of that, meaning
00:19:41that in about a year, the average woman who loses her husband in one year will be 74% less
00:19:47sad, according to these studies.
00:19:49And that kind of figures.
00:19:50I mean, that's kind of what we see.
00:19:51And part of the reason for that is that a lot of evolutionary biology suggests that
00:19:55one of the reasons that women tend to live longer than men is not just because men, you
00:19:58know, randomly shoot guns and drive fast and take more drugs than alcohol is because women
00:20:04have been evolved past childbearing years to assist in extended family care for grandchildren,
00:20:12for example.
00:20:13It's kind of normal for women to be widowed more than it is for men to become widowers.
00:20:18And so you need a mechanism in which their sadness is not unremitting.
00:20:24It's evolution has actually provided a mechanism by which women can recover.
00:20:28They don't forget their husbands if they love their husbands, they don't forget their husbands,
00:20:32but they're not going to be disabled by the sadness for that long.
00:20:35And that's, I hope you take comfort in that, by the way.
00:20:39That's an important thing to keep in mind that we're supposed to be sad, but we're not supposed
00:20:42to be sad forever.
00:20:43Now, the second thing that's worth keeping in mind is that people who are bereaved and
00:20:49experiencing grief, they very frequently experience what's called post-traumatic growth.
00:20:55In other words, loss itself actually leads to generativity and gain.
00:20:59And a lot of people are ashamed of this, as a matter of fact, they don't want to admit
00:21:02that good things happened to them as a result of the loss, but this is nothing to be ashamed
00:21:06of at all.
00:21:07This is something to actually celebrate.
00:21:08There's five areas of life that will often get much better in the years after the loss
00:21:12of a loved one, a really bad grief experience, this is somebody you truly love.
00:21:17Number one is a greater appreciation for your own life.
00:21:20You savor life, savoring is important to happiness.
00:21:24The second is improved relationships, that you pay more attention to the relationships
00:21:28that currently exist.
00:21:30You're paying attention to the fact that your remaining relationships are scarce and it's
00:21:36important to be enjoying them.
00:21:38The third is a recognition of new possibilities.
00:21:41People don't, when they think about the permanence of their circumstances, which is embodied in
00:21:46the people around them, they don't often think about new possibilities in their lives and
00:21:50they have an impetus, they have a stimulus to think about new possibilities when the
00:21:54permanent becomes impermanent, if you know what I mean.
00:21:57So that's not a question of using somebody's death as an excuse to do new stuff.
00:22:01It's a recognition that there are possibilities in your life and people find that as a source
00:22:05of post-traumatic growth.
00:22:07The fourth is personal strengths.
00:22:09People find they have strengths that they didn't know that they had because they have
00:22:12to do something they never thought they'd have to do.
00:22:15I've talked to women, for example, they lose their husbands and they have to take care of
00:22:19finances and maybe take care of a family member and provide for family and do arrangements
00:22:26and I didn't know I could do that.
00:22:28I didn't know I could do the family taxes.
00:22:31It's new strengths because they had never done that before or vice versa.
00:22:35Personally, I don't do the family finances.
00:22:39Number five is spiritual development.
00:22:40People most frequently become more spiritually adroit in loss and there are some hypotheses
00:22:47about what that might be the case.
00:22:49Loss illuminates the same hemisphere of your brain, the right hemisphere in which you have
00:22:53transcendent religious experiences and so loss itself when it's unremitting and especially
00:22:58when you submit to the loss.
00:23:00You don't fight the pain.
00:23:01You don't fight the pain.
00:23:03You practice non-resistance to the pain.
00:23:05You finally say, "No mas."
00:23:07It's weird when you're helpless.
00:23:10In helplessness, there lies a little bit of bliss.
00:23:13When you give in to it, this is why Christian people often say, "Lord, I leave this grief
00:23:19at the foot of your Holy Cross."
00:23:23That's a kind of bliss, isn't it?
00:23:25And there's a version of that in your philosophy.
00:23:27There's a version of that in your faith.
00:23:28Your spiritual development is part and parcel with the religious experiences that you're
00:23:32going to have.
00:23:34Your grief might lead you into the enlightenment and the transcendence that you seek.
00:23:41That's common.
00:23:43That's good.
00:23:44So what are you going to do?
00:23:45How are you going to use all this information?
00:23:46How are you going to change your life with this?
00:23:48There are four ways, based on the science I've talked about, that you can find meaning in
00:23:54grief and grow through grief, how you can be better at grief because, again, the wrong answer
00:24:00is to avoid grief.
00:24:02It's not going to happen.
00:24:03Look, if you're a normal person, if you're not a sociopath, you're going to grief because
00:24:06you're going to experience loss.
00:24:08The question is not whether you will, but what you'll do when it does, when this happens,
00:24:11when this befalls you.
00:24:13And I'm going to give you four things to keep in mind right now, four very practical suggestions
00:24:17plus one more.
00:24:21So number one is look for meaning, is actually look for meaning.
00:24:26What does this mean when you lose something?
00:24:29What does this experience actually mean?
00:24:30This is a search for coherence.
00:24:32Why do things happen the way that they do?
00:24:34And again, you're not going to be able to answer this question perfectly.
00:24:37On the contrary, these are mysteries.
00:24:39The book of Job in the Hebrew Bible, where Job suffers and suffers and suffers and his
00:24:44children are taken from him and everything he owns and his relationships are destroyed
00:24:48and his friends show up to explain he must have done something wrong, and this goes through
00:24:52chapter after chapter.
00:24:53But the 38th chapter of Job, God and Job talk.
00:24:59God comes to Job in a whirlwind, right?
00:25:02And Job, I mean, he's got some stones, man.
00:25:04I mean, he puts God in a dock and he says, like, I was everything.
00:25:09I was, I did everything right.
00:25:10I was your servant and you took everything away from me.
00:25:14Explain yourself.
00:25:15And God says, it's very funny actually, because God is actually is, I've mentioned this before
00:25:20on the podcast, but it's worth mentioning again.
00:25:21God is sarcastic with Job.
00:25:23He says, Oh, okay.
00:25:24Okay.
00:25:25I'll give you an explanation.
00:25:26If you're so smart that you deserve an explanation from God, obviously fine.
00:25:31I will explain your loss and your grief and your pain after you explain to me why I created
00:25:38the heaven and the earth.
00:25:39You're so smart.
00:25:40Tell me why did I create the fishes, fishes in the ocean and the stars in the sky.
00:25:44You're so smart.
00:25:45Lay down me, Einstein.
00:25:48And what he's saying is it's a mystery.
00:25:51It's a mystery.
00:25:53In mystery, we can actually find meaning, look for meaning.
00:25:56There's a wonderful study from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst that interviewed
00:26:00college students who had recently lost a parent and asked them their sense of meaning in the
00:26:04world.
00:26:06How just the world is, how random, how controllable.
00:26:09It asked them meaning questions of coherence and purpose and significance.
00:26:13And what do they find?
00:26:14They found that the students that had, that were asked to look for meaning in their grief,
00:26:22that their grief was less intense, that a search for meaning itself was one of the ways, as
00:26:29I talked about a minute ago, that that pain per se was the source of generativity.
00:26:34And that was, that provided relief itself, these big why questions.
00:26:38A common way to deal with this is to ask spiritual religious questions.
00:26:42Why does this happen?
00:26:43What is the mystery?
00:26:45And then to lay it at the foot of the Holy Cross or whatever is your means for doing just
00:26:50that, the version of that.
00:26:52Number two, change your identity.
00:26:56This was interesting that when a loved one dies, you change.
00:27:01Why?
00:27:02Because it's an illusion that you are two people.
00:27:05Let me tell you, my wife, Esther, and I, we're one flash, man.
00:27:08We're two right hemispheres of our brain.
00:27:10We're two hearts beating as one.
00:27:12We are.
00:27:13It's an illusion.
00:27:14You know the old Zen Buddhist colon, what is the sound of one hand clapping?
00:27:19That's an absurd question, except it's not because what it is, that answer to the colon
00:27:25is the sound of one hand clapping is an illusion.
00:27:29There's only a sound when you add a second hand, and that is the illusion of your individuality
00:27:34and especially with your soulmate, with a person that you love the most or anybody that you
00:27:39truly love, that is your second hand clapping.
00:27:42And when that hand is taken away, that trueness of the unit is changed.
00:27:50You're different.
00:27:51You're a different person when you're experiencing grief.
00:27:54So be different.
00:27:56That's what this research talks about, about older adults when they lose somebody, that
00:28:00they would consciously embrace a different kind of identity.
00:28:03They would do different things.
00:28:04Often they would never have gone cycling.
00:28:08They would never have joined a bridge club.
00:28:10They never would have gone square dancing, ever, because the old man, he wasn't into
00:28:16it.
00:28:17And because that's not who they were.
00:28:18Well, that's not who they are anymore.
00:28:19Now, that makes people feel guilty.
00:28:22And by the way, that leads to lots of resentment among adult children when an aging parent dies
00:28:27and the other one actually starts going out and having fun for the first time, but is completely
00:28:30healthy.
00:28:32It's not any sort of casting of aspersions on the dead spouse.
00:28:34On the contrary, it's an example of somebody actually using grief as a force for good and
00:28:40a recognition that, "Yeah, we were one.
00:28:43We were one.
00:28:44He died.
00:28:46And now I'm not the same person anymore.
00:28:47I'm truly meaningfully changed."
00:28:50Now there's lots of things that you can do where you change your identity that are not
00:28:53so great.
00:28:54You can race into a brand new marriage.
00:28:56I recommend that.
00:28:58That often leads to grief itself if it's a mistake.
00:29:01But going out more with friends or getting into new activities, but becoming a new person
00:29:06through it can be generative.
00:29:08There's number three, and this comes from the work of my colleague at the Harvard Business
00:29:11School, Mike Norton, who talks about adopting rituals.
00:29:14He has a wonderful new book about rituals per se.
00:29:17I'll put it in the show notes.
00:29:19That when people adopt mourning rituals, by that I don't mean like in the morning, I mean
00:29:25like morning, M-O-U-R-N-I-N-G, even trivial sounding ones, that they're tremendous meaning
00:29:31making things in the lives of a grieving individual, almost certainly because they interact with
00:29:35the functioning of the brain.
00:29:37When you're doing something in a repetitive way, it creates a sense of meaning in the brain
00:29:42that's actually experiencing this unremitting pain in the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex.
00:29:46Again, this research has not been done.
00:29:48I'm only triangulating across a couple of different areas of science, but it makes perfect sense
00:29:53that this could be the case.
00:29:55Some people, they'll have religious rights.
00:29:57If you're Jewish, you'll set Shiva when somebody dies.
00:30:01As a Catholic, when somebody dies, I will pray a rosary for their holy soul for a certain
00:30:05number of days, or a novena for a person's soul.
00:30:09Maybe you'll play a favorite song on particular days to remember the person.
00:30:12Maybe you'll write letters to the loved one, or maybe you'll go to the Japanese wind phone
00:30:17and leave a message.
00:30:19But people who do this, by the way, they get not just relief, they get understanding.
00:30:25They get comprehension of what this is all about.
00:30:27This mystery, this complex mystery becomes easier to comprehend than it was before.
00:30:33One of the studies that Mike Norton and his colleagues have done shows that when rituals
00:30:37become part of the grief process, that people tend to, believe it or not, they've estimated
00:30:42that people actually experience 28% less grief, or 28% greater understanding of grief, or something,
00:30:48relief in some way, shape, or form.
00:30:51Here's number four.
00:30:52This one's really important.
00:30:53I mentioned it before, and I want to come back to it.
00:30:55I wanted to come back to it.
00:30:58Grief doesn't have to be permanent, and you shouldn't grieve the loss of your grief.
00:31:01What a lot of people do is they say, "I miss the pinging of the black box in the bottom
00:31:05of the ocean.
00:31:06Something's wrong with me, and I don't feel it anymore."
00:31:08Part of the reason is because the last memory that they feel that they have of a person,
00:31:13for example, that they lost, was the sadness of the loss of that person.
00:31:18They feel like they're being disloyal almost, or that they're forgetting that person because
00:31:23they're losing the intense grief.
00:31:25It's like the person's fading, they're fading, I don't want it to fade, and I feel guilty
00:31:29because it's fading.
00:31:30But the truth of the matter is that this is supposed to happen.
00:31:34Your dorsal anterior cingulate cortex shouldn't be lit up like a Christmas tree for the rest
00:31:37of your life.
00:31:38That's not the way it's supposed to work.
00:31:39The person you loved and lost wants you to be happy again.
00:31:44This is normal.
00:31:45You have to let yourself actually become happy again and not hold on to grief through a sense
00:31:51of guilt or a sense of loss of the memory itself.
00:31:55When grief starts to subside, that's a signal that things are working correctly, not that
00:32:00things are working incorrectly.
00:32:03You're not supposed to suffer forever.
00:32:04Allow yourself to recover.
00:32:06Here's one more idea.
00:32:09One of the most effective ways to treat grief is by treating other people with grief.
00:32:15The kind of grief that is typically the worst is when somebody loses a child.
00:32:19I lost both my parents.
00:32:20Many of you have lost your parents.
00:32:22And it's sad, but it's not a tragedy in its way, unless it happens way, way, way too young.
00:32:27But even then, it's natural that the older generation dies before the younger generation.
00:32:32But there's something that feels profoundly unnatural and thus is extremely psychologically
00:32:37and even physiologically disequilibrating about the experience of losing a child.
00:32:42And this is the kind of grief that people say that is hardest to recover from.
00:32:45Lots and lots of studies actually show this.
00:32:47But there's one thing that consistently helps people suffering the most intense grief and
00:32:54loss of a child, and that's helping other people who've lost children.
00:32:56I've recommended this a lot because I've seen it in literature, but I've also seen it in
00:32:59real life, that when somebody loses a child, there'll be an intense pain a year later.
00:33:05But it will be better if they find people who have had fresh loss and say, "I understand.
00:33:09I understand."
00:33:11And they hold their hand, and they listen.
00:33:15Listening turns out to be the way to actually do that.
00:33:17When somebody is grieving and you're helping them, whether it's the loss of a child or a
00:33:21kind of grief, if you're relieving your own grief by helping somebody whose grief is fresher
00:33:26you've got to know the best way to do that.
00:33:29And the best way to do that is very clear in the literature as well, which is listening,
00:33:34sitting in silence, holding somebody's hand.
00:33:37There's a tendency to want to chatter and chatter and chatter and help and talk and talk and
00:33:40talk.
00:33:41And that's completely unnecessary.
00:33:42I don't have to show you the studies.
00:33:44You know in your heart that it's true.
00:33:46Just listen, be present, and listen to somebody whose grief is fresher.
00:33:52And this will help them.
00:33:54And this will help you.
00:33:57The Japanese wind phone simulated a healing listener.
00:34:01Your attentive silence can be the real thing.
00:34:04A couple of questions before we finish.
00:34:07This is from Ryan Othas, who wrote into the website.
00:34:12Do you know of any evidence that shows how successful people may be more inclined to be
00:34:17sure that they will succeed again if any venture is undertaken?
00:34:20Yeah, there's a whole lot of literature from the world of entrepreneurship that shows that
00:34:24when people have a couple of failures, that they're actually better at dealing with failure.
00:34:30And when they've had a couple of successes, they get better success.
00:34:33And this is really important because that means that you need a couple of failures so that
00:34:37you can avoid future mistakes.
00:34:39And that's good for your success, but also you have kind of an emotional fortitude.
00:34:42But once you've succeeded a couple of times, you know how that feels.
00:34:45That's reps is how it works out.
00:34:47It's also the case in careers.
00:34:49I mean, my first career when I left the classical music business and I went back to graduate
00:34:53school to become an economist, this was brutal.
00:34:55I didn't know if I was going to succeed, but each career changed after that when I would
00:34:59quit and start again, take it down to the studs.
00:35:01Those earlier successes made it gave me the reps so that I kind of know how to succeed.
00:35:06So that's absolutely the case.
00:35:07So what I'm telling you is you need both failure and success is what it comes about.
00:35:12You need lots and lots and lots of experiences for you to get the success that you seek.
00:35:16You need to be good at failure and good at success.
00:35:19And trying a lot of stuff and not being afraid is the way that you deal with that.
00:35:24Okay.
00:35:25Here's from anonymous.
00:35:26Once again, this comes to the email address.
00:35:28Kind of a long note, but I'll read it to you nonetheless.
00:35:30I was raised in a strong Catholic family, but I've decided to stop attending Catholic church.
00:35:35And I'm in a struggle to find what it is that makes me feel small or helps me ascend like
00:35:39you suggest in your faith and spiritual practices.
00:35:43As I prepare to propose to my girlfriend, congratulations.
00:35:45My parents strongly opposed the idea of us not marrying in a church, but it doesn't feel
00:35:49right to do so.
00:35:50When I'm no longer an active member, I'm struggling to balance my excitement with the anxiety of
00:35:54potentially hurting them.
00:35:55I hear this a lot.
00:35:56I got a question.
00:35:58How do you think you might feel in 10 years?
00:36:00The great maybe the greatest hockey player who ever lived Wayne Gretzky.
00:36:05He was asked, how do you know where to go all the time?
00:36:09You're always like magically in the right place on the ice.
00:36:11He said, no, no, I just skate to where the puck is going to be.
00:36:14It's funny because it sort of makes sense, but, you know, you see the puck and you skate
00:36:18toward the puck.
00:36:19You know, he goes, he looks where the puck is going to be and he skated there.
00:36:22That's good advice for life.
00:36:25So I get it.
00:36:26You're not going to the church.
00:36:27You're not going to church.
00:36:28You don't want to go to church.
00:36:29You decided not to go to church.
00:36:30Probably bumming out your mom, but, you know, just don't.
00:36:32You'll have no schism as long as you don't tell her that her values are stupid.
00:36:36You know, live your life and let other people live theirs.
00:36:39I've talked about this on the show before, but ask yourself this.
00:36:42Have I ruled it out for the rest of my life?
00:36:45Or have you said, I don't want to go to church now?
00:36:47In 10 years, where do you think you're going to be?
00:36:50Now that's a strategic decision for you to think a little bit about what you'll be glad
00:36:55you did earlier.
00:36:56There is no hypocrisy in getting married in the church.
00:36:59Look, there's no hypocrisy in not getting married in the church.
00:37:03This is a decision you have to make, but remember life is long.
00:37:06I would discuss this with your fiance.
00:37:09Where do we think we want to be?
00:37:12We'll be that now.
00:37:14Or at least set yourself up to be comfortable being that later.
00:37:17And that might help you inform your decision and to proceed in a spirit of peace.
00:37:23Finally, Alon asks, how can I move past recent failures and regret that fuel constant self-doubt
00:37:30and paralysis, especially if I take radical responsibility and self-blame for everything
00:37:36that's gone wrong?
00:37:37I hear this a lot.
00:37:38I get it.
00:37:39You know, self-blame and condemnation.
00:37:41And people are prone to this.
00:37:43Now, I could dig into your childhood and make all kinds of predictions about when you were
00:37:47a little kid, yada, yada, yada.
00:37:48It doesn't matter.
00:37:49We are where we are right now.
00:37:51There's three things to do.
00:37:52When something doesn't go right and you go into the cycle of self-blame, what are you
00:37:55doing?
00:37:56You're treating yourself like your worst enemy.
00:37:57You're treating yourself that, Alon, I bet you'd never treat anybody else this way.
00:38:01I bet you'd never say to anybody that in your life, you moron, you're single-handedly responsible
00:38:07for everything that's going wrong.
00:38:08You wouldn't do that because you're not a jerk, you're a good person, right?
00:38:11So that requires that you start treating yourself like that.
00:38:15You need to be metacognitive, which is to say, see yourself in the third person and treat
00:38:21yourself as if you were in the third person.
00:38:24This is how you heal this.
00:38:25What do you do?
00:38:26Number one, something goes wrong.
00:38:27Got it.
00:38:28You know what?
00:38:29Something's going to go wrong for me today.
00:38:30Guaranteed.
00:38:31You too.
00:38:32Number one is understanding.
00:38:34What happened?
00:38:35Why did it happen?
00:38:36Coldly.
00:38:37I mean, you have to suss it out.
00:38:39There's no blame.
00:38:41Understanding is not blame.
00:38:42Write it down.
00:38:43Two, acceptance.
00:38:45It went wrong.
00:38:46It went wrong.
00:38:47Right?
00:38:48Still no blame.
00:38:50Number three, forgiveness instead of blame.
00:38:53I'm going to forgive myself, right?
00:38:54That doesn't mean I don't understand.
00:38:56It doesn't mean I don't.
00:38:57I don't.
00:38:58I'm not going to try to be better because only then after forgiveness could you actually make
00:39:01resolutions for future action.
00:39:03Now what have I done?
00:39:04I've understood the problem.
00:39:05I've accepted the situation, which is very important.
00:39:08I've forgiven myself for screwing up, if I even did screw up by the way, and I made a
00:39:13resolution for actually how I can be better in the future.
00:39:17This by the way is the great way that in religions you confess your sins.
00:39:21Okay, what happened?
00:39:24I get it.
00:39:25I accept it.
00:39:26I'm sorry I did it and I'm going to forgive myself, but most importantly, I'm going to
00:39:29make a resolution not to do it again.
00:39:31That's what you need to do.
00:39:32Until this becomes natural, you need to go through the algorithm one, two, three, four,
00:39:37and metacognitively, consciously thinking about thinking, work this into the way that you're
00:39:42living your life.
00:39:43Come to the end of Office Hours, another episode.
00:39:46I hope you've enjoyed it.
00:39:47I hope it's been useful to you.
00:39:49If you know somebody who's experiencing grief, please do share if you find it useful because
00:39:55we need to help each other through this.
00:39:57Let me know your thoughts at officehours@authorworks.com or write your comments anyplace where you're
00:40:02seeing this or listening to this.
00:40:05Like and subscribe on Spotify, YouTube, or Apple and leave a comment.
00:40:08Please do.
00:40:09I mean on anything, for example, comments, criticisms, suggestions, questions, love it
00:40:13all.
00:40:14Follow me on social media platforms on Instagram and LinkedIn, anyplace else where you get your
00:40:17content.
00:40:19Scroll me and let's learn together a little bit.
00:40:21And order The Meaning of Your Life, Finding Purpose in the Nation of Emptiness, my brand
00:40:25new book on the meaning of your life and the meaning of mine as well.
00:40:28I hope you have a wonderful week.
00:40:30I hope that you have a generative week, whether you're grieving or not.
00:40:33I hope that you find meaning in everything that you do.
00:40:36You lift other people up in the bonds of happiness and love that you need and so do they.
00:40:39We'll see you in a week.