Priscilla Xu

What is grief?

• Grief is getting something you want but cannot get it.
  • Imagine you want to eat food, but the food keeps going outside your reach. 
  • Dopamine is about desire and more. And Dopamine is involved in the emotional pain of grief and the intentions of actively seeking out for that person.
  • Grief is different from depression.
    • Antidepressants does not work well with grief. It is physiologically different.
• The five stages of grief are: denial, anger, braining, depression, and acceptance. Not everyone goes through all of them though, but emotional attachment can still be there.
  • You dead is so much better than anyone alive – Richard Feynman ‘s Letter to his passed away wife

Three Dimensions of Relationships

• Relationship has three dimensions: space, time, and closeness (Inferior lobule).
  • Space: how close are you physically to the person. 
  • Time: how long do you take to meet that person. When will you be likely to meet the person again?
  • Closeness: emotional attachment. 
• Grief is the remapping of the reverb of neural circuits of actions to maintain a relationship with the person.

Episodic Memory and Grief. 

• Deep catalog of episodic memory. 
  • Implicit memory of how and where the person is.
• Experience is better for predictions rather than knowledge. 
  • It’s tough to believe emotionally and experientially. 

How to remap the three dimensions? 

• You don’t want to detach your attachment to the person. 
• It is hard! Very hard. 
• Set aside 30 minutes. Think about your attachment with the person or thing. 
  • No what-ifs and counterfactual thinking. 
    • This type of thinking activates guilt and counters act the recovering of grief.
    • Guilt is a way how you can control reality more. There are infinite numbers of space and possibilities.  
  • Orient yourself in the current space and time. 
  • Hold the grief in the present. 
    • It is emotionally and physically challenging. 
  • Detach from space and time of the person/animal that you are grieving for.
  • You have to put a belief of space and time into the map’s nodes. 
    • It’s okay to be emotionally attached to the person even after remapping the expectations of the relationship.
• Grief is like a Phantom limb. You expect someone to wake through the door or call you. 
  • You can have prolonged, complicated grief. It might be better to work with psychological professionals. 

Memories, Hippocampal Trace Cells & Feeling An Absence

• Place cells and proximity cells. 
  • This is related to the space and time of a relationship. 
• Trace cells become active of a lost one. 
• You cognitively understand the person is gone, but you still expect. You are not crazy. It is just normal for you to experience this. 

Yearning & Oxytocin, Individualized Grief Cycles 

• People feel different loss intensities. 
• Prairie voles experiment on polyamory or monogamy 
  • Let the voles marry. And block their access to the other one. 
  • Polyamory voles will not spend more effort to find the other mate. 
  • More oxytocin receptor= more effort to yearn. 

Why do Some People Grieve More Quickly? Individual Attachment Capacity.

• People with a higher baseline of anxiety are more likely to go through complicated grief
• People who experience more grief compared to other people have more oxytocin in the nucleus acumbens that create craving and pursuit