How to Manage Grief

Grief is part of the human experience. If you love, you will lose. And when you do, the pain is inescapable. It can be disorienting, overwhelming, and in the case of acute grief, the symptoms can even resemble something like psychosis. In this episode of Office Hours, I explore what grief actually is, how it is lived and felt by those who are bereaved, and why these reactions—however unsettling—are not signs of dysfunction. They are, in fact, evidence of something profoundly good: the depth of our love and devotion to one another. The aim is not to eliminate grief—that is neither possible nor desirable—but to approach it with understanding. In doing so, we can move toward our suffering rather than away from it, extend compassion to others walking a similar path, and begin to discover meaning within our loss. — Brought to you by: • David Protein—The most effective portable protein on the planet https://davidprotein.com/arthur — Where to find Arthur Brooks: • Website: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://arthurbrooks.com/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ https://arthurbrooks.com/ • Newsletter: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.arthurbrooks.com/newsletter⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ https://www.arthurbrooks.com/newsletter • X: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://x.com/arthurbrooks⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ https://x.com/arthurbrooks • Instagram: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.instagram.com/arthurcbrooks/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ https://www.instagram.com/arthurcbrooks/ • Facebook: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.facebook.com/ArthurBrooks/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ https://www.facebook.com/ArthurBrooks/ • YouTube: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCGuyFRjJQFGCKzfHTBvWM6A⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCGuyFRjJQFGCKzfHTBvWM6A • LinkedIn: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/arthur-c-brooks/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ https://www.linkedin.com/in/arthur-c-brooks/ • Email: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠[email protected]⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ mailto:[email protected] — Timestamps: (00:00) Intro (05:13) The story of Itaru Sasaki’s wind phone (07:26) What grief is (09:33) Grief vs. bereavement (10:03) Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’s five stages of grief and newer research (14:42) The brain’s response to grief (18:24) How long does it take to get through grief (20:45) Post-traumatic growth and the five areas that often improve (23:45) #1. Look for meaning (26:56) #2. Change your identity (29:15) #3. Adopt rituals (30:53) #4. Let yourself be happy again (32:10) #5. Help others with grief (34:10) Q&A: How failure helps your career (35:24) Q&A: Getting married in a church after leaving it (37:24) Q&A: Breaking the cycle of self-blame — Referenced: • The Meaning of Your Life: Finding Purpose in an Age of Emptiness:http://themeaningofyourlife.com/themeaningofyourlife.com http://themeaningofyourlife.com • Meaning Membership:https://hub.arthurbrooks.com/the-meaning-membership • Arthur’s newsletter:https://www.arthurbrooks.com/newsletter • The Happiness Scale:https://learn.arthurbrooks.com/the-happiness-scale • The Pursuit of Happiness with Arthur Brooks:https://www.thefp.com/s/the-pursuit-of-happiness-with-arthur • My Wind Phone (wind phone directory): https://www.mywindphone.com • Treatment of complicated grief: a randomized controlled trial: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/15928281 • ... References continued at: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.arthurbrooks.com/office-hours⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ https://www.arthurbrooks.com/office-hours — Production and marketing by ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://penname.co/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ https://penname.co/⁠.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Speaker 00

  Low energy, unfocused, foggy? You might be dehydrated. Whether it's hot yoga, over 100 degree weather, or too much sun. Gator Light, with a specialized blend of five electrolytes, was scientifically designed to help move fluids into the body faster for rapid rehydration. Shop now at retailers nationwide. Gator Light: Hydrates Faster Than Water. Is it in you? Symptoms noted are signs of mild to moderate dehydration. Consult a healthcare professional if symptoms persist.

• 0:29Arthur Brooks?

  I want to introduce you to a way to think about something that's incredibly inevitable. I mean, totally inevitable. We all will experience grief. Because sadness is part of life. And sadness based on loss, which is grief, of course, is something that we don't have to go looking for. In point of fact, will find us. Grief is losing something or someone that you love. We typically think about it as because our loved one's dying. But it could be your company goes bankrupt. It could be being fired from your job. These could be real sources of grief. And it can be little or big, as a matter of fact. It's the loss, the involuntary loss of something you cherish. Now, why am I talking about it? Because when we talk about it, the research can give us a tremendous amount of value

• 1:14Arthur Brooks?

  in understanding what it is, why it happens, how it's normal, and how to deal with it. And that's my goal here.

• 1:29Arthur Brooks?

  Hi friends, welcome to Office Hours. I'm Arthur Brooks. I'm dedicated to lifting people up and bringing them together in bonds of happiness and love using science and ideas. I'm a behavioral scientist, and that's what I get to do all day. That's what this show is all about. That's what I write about and teach about as well. I'm so glad to have you here. Thank you for joining me this week and I hope every week for ideas on how you can learn how to live a better life using science, how you can change your habits, and just as importantly as anything else, how you can teach these ideas to other people. One way that you can lift other people up is by sharing this show with others, which I appreciate you doing very much. That's why I do it, is to get the broadest possible audience of people who are dedicated to the pursuit of happiness in our lives and the lives of other people as well. Please do share this episode or any episode that you want with your friends.

• 2:14Arthur Brooks?

  Like and subscribe to the podcast wherever you're watching or listening to it and and give us some ideas about how we can make the the podcast better and topics you'd like me to talk about in the coming weeks and months. You can do all that by writing a comment wherever you're getting this content or writing to me at [email protected]. The email address for the show. Don't forget to leave a review on Spotify or Apple and subscribe on the platform of your choice because that helps us to reach more people. Hey friends, a lot of you know that I keep a very high protein diet. That's important for me in my 60s because I want to maintain a good level of muscle protein synthesis. And I don't always have time to eat as much protein as I want from whole foods. That's the ideal, but it's just not manageable all the time.

• 2:58Arthur Brooks?

  For that reason, I'm always looking for supplements that can actually get me where I need to go with respect to my macronutrient profile. A bunch of my friends were telling me that David Protein is a really good source. The reason is because protein bars in general, they're handy, they're convenient, but they can be very high in calories. And they can actually be really high in carbohydrate, especially in the form of sugar. David Protein, I heard, was better. And sure enough, it's got a great profile, has 40% more protein, 57% fewer calories than most of the protein bars you find out there. 28 grams of protein, 150 calories, zero grams of sugar. That's actually quite a feat to put that together. And by the way, they taste great.

• 3:38Arthur Brooks?

  David Protein has a new bronze line with 20 grams of protein, 150 calories and zero grams of sugar. That comes to 53% calories from protein, another industry-leading protein to calorie ratio. As most leading protein bars on the market average 40% or lower. Each bronze bar features a smooth decadent marshmallow base with a flavor-filled layering, airy crisp and a chocolate flavored coating, providing a different taste and texture profile compared to our Hero Gold line. I started buying David Protein bars and now I'm pleased that they're sponsoring this show as well. So whether you're on the go or hitting the gym, if you're trying to meet your protein targets, David Protein is a good way for you to do it. That's why I'm doing it and it's what I'm carrying when I'm on the road.

• 4:22Arthur Brooks?

  So head over to davidprotein.com/Arthur. They've got a special offer for you. If you buy four cartons, they'll give you the fifth carton for free. You're gonna love that. And you can also find David Protein in stores by looking for the store locator. So enjoy.

• 4:38Arthur Brooks?

  Today, I want to talk about a very hard topic that sounds like not a topic of happiness, but rather quite the opposite. That's grief. And if I do my job, I want to introduce you to a way to think about something that's incredibly inevitable. I mean, totally inevitable. We all will experience grief because sadness is part of life. And sadness based on loss, which is grief, of course, is something that we don't have to go looking for, in point of fact, will find us. I want to talk about what's happening when you're feeling grief, how long it's likely to last, but most importantly, when it inevitably does come knocking at your door, what you

• 5:17Arthur Brooks?

  can actually do to turn grief from unmitigated loss into a means of growth, a means of development as a person, and how you can actually help other people in subsequent areas of grief in their lives. In other words, how we can make what seems like a terrible curse, maybe even into a blessing. So that's today's show. I was struck some years ago, in 2010, to be specific, of something I read about the terrible Fukushima earthquake and tsunami that overwhelmed the nuclear plant on the coast of Japan and wound up killing 20,000 people. You remember this? It was just, maybe you don't remember it, but it was horrible.

• 6:00Arthur Brooks?

  It was like one of the worst in a developed country, an unimaginable disaster. There was an artist in Japan named Itaru Sasaki, who had members of his family that perished in this terrible tragedy. And he was trying to figure out some way to make that loss more meaningful. He made an art installation that wound up having a profound impact on the entire region. He created something he called the Kazee No Dennois, or the wind phone. What it was, was in his town, which had lost 10% of his population, by the way. I mean, no joke. Everybody lost somebody in his town. He set up a phone booth with a phone that recorded people's calls, but wasn't hooked up to anybody else.

• 6:46Arthur Brooks?

  And in the wind phone, he, he asked people to come and to call their dead relatives and leave them a message. Thirty thousand people have done it to date. Thirty thousand people have gone.

• 7:00Arthur Brooks?

  It'll be old men who are totally stoic and will be weeping into the phone as they're talking to their wives or their children or something. And it was this incredible opportunity to create a means of communication where one hadn't existed, even though everybody doing it knows they weren't talking to their family member, but they were expressing something that probably they had never been able to express. And it was an emblem of this universal human experience. It tied people all around the world when they saw this. It, you know, crazy art installation. No, it was an example of the experience that we all have in life. It was a humanness that was exhibited in that.

• 7:44Arthur Brooks?

  Grief that those people felt, that you have felt, that you will feel, creates a psychological or physiological disequilibrium. It is the case in which you are supposed to be with someone or have some set of circumstances permanently. You've accommodated yourself to a kind of a permanence with someone or something, and it's taken away. Grief is losing something or someone that you love. We typically think about it as because our loved one's dying, but it could be your company goes bankrupt. It could be being fired from your job. These could be real sources of grief and it can be little or big.

• 8:27Arthur Brooks?

  As a matter of fact, it's the loss, the involuntary loss of something you cherish. That's what grief is all about. Now, when it comes to the death of a loved one, I mean, it's as normal as can be. Look, three million people die each year in the United States alone. Now, one, one hundredth of the population. And each, according to pretty good research, this is research in the Journal of the American Medical Association, an article called Treatment of Complicated Grief, a randomized controlled trial. Each person who dies on average leaves five people bereaved.

• 8:59Arthur Brooks?

  And that means that at any given time, 15 million Americans are experiencing fresh grief. 15 million Americans. That's extraordinary. That's 5% of the population. You look right, you look left, 1 in 20 people is freshly grieving, which shows how ubiquitous it is. And yet it feels so, it feels so strange. And it feels so unusual. And people feel so uniquely unfortunate when it actually happens, even though it's almost the most normal thing that we could expect. When we talk about prolonged grief, which is lasting, where the ill effects are lasting psychologically, lasting more than a year. That afflicts about 1 in 10 bereaved people, where the mourner's suffering really remains high over an extended period.

• 9:43Arthur Brooks?

  Now, why am I talking about it? Because when we talk about it, the research can give us a tremendous amount of value in understanding what it is, why it happens, how it's normal, and how to deal with it. And that's my goal here. Let's distinguish between a couple of different things. Bereavement and grief are not the same thing. Bereavement is the experience of loss. There's the experience of losing somebody that you love, for example, a parent dying, God forbid, a child dying. Grief is the physiological, or psychological, or social response to that experience. But you see how this works. It's like you, you experience the loss and then you have an experience subsequent to that loss.

• 10:26Arthur Brooks?

  What do you do? The response to that experience, that's what grief actually is. There have been some pretty famous studies on this that probably you have heard of. The most, the most famous study of grief comes from the, the Swiss psychiatrist, Elizabeth Kübler-Ross, who wrote On Death and Dying, a very, very famous book that has actually taken a lot of criticism over the years because it's not perfect. I'll, I'll talk about that a little bit, probably more in, in a minute. But, but she did fundamental work in this book On Death and Dying, where she talked about the fact that, that people who are experiencing grief, they typically pass through five stages. This is really interesting because, you know, the idea that there's an algorithm to grief, it just shows

• 11:10Arthur Brooks?

  how funny we are as people, right? People feel uniquely unfortunate when they're grieving, but they, they, they don't behave uniquely, is what Elizabeth Kübler-Ross found. She was studying people who learned they were gonna die. I'm gonna die, that kind of thing. By the way, you're gonna die, so am I. But it was, they were given a death sentence for whatever reason. The cancer diagnosis that was terminal or whatever. But it applies to all sorts of grief. You know, somebody dies that you're close to. It's the same basic process. The five stages are when something creates grief in your life, the first thing you naturally do is deny it. Like, no, it can't be real, can't be real. No, no, it can't be real. That goes by pretty quickly and it goes into anger. Or you're angry that this is befalling you.

• 11:55Arthur Brooks?

  The universe has treated you unfairly. The third stage is bargaining. It's weird because people will actually bargain and say, okay, God, or whomever. If you'll take this away, then I'll behave in a particular way. And they'll fantasize often about what if they actually could change something? What would I give? They'll say, the part of the bargaining will be like, what would I give to not have this happen? And they'll be like, people will say this all the time when they're in the bargaining phase of grief. I would literally give everything I own if I had not incurred that loss, to not incur that loss. That's evidence of this kind of bargaining. Even though they realize they can't do it, they're still thinking in that way because that's a natural part of the cognitive algorithm of grief. The fourth is when they, is just when sadness comes in, when there's this activity of the part of the limbic system

• 12:40Arthur Brooks?

  that experiences affective pain is there. And last but not least is acceptance. Acceptance, where you accept that this is actually gonna happen. Newer research has suggested that not everybody goes through denial, anger, bargaining, depression in the same order. And furthermore, that they actually go by pretty quickly for most people. And the newer research shows that most people get to acceptance pretty fast when there's something like this. They accept that somebody's died. They accept that they're going to die. And that acceptance is a period of tremendous generativity typically. Now, I want to talk about that later because I want to talk about how you can prepare yourself for acceptance in a way that you grow as a person and that in point of fact can enhance your, the joy of life

• 13:24Arthur Brooks?

  for whatever time that you've got left. When medical providers in the literature, and this comes from a pretty interesting article from 2017. And once, as always, I'll put it in the notes. They see a pretty common symptoms of grief, which is a separation response. One is yearning for that with which you've been separated. One is longing. Or yearning and longing are sort of different, aren't they? There's sadness, of course. And then, and then here's the interesting part. There's hallucinations.

• 13:51Arthur Brooks?

  This is typically the case that that there's disorientation. When you lose something that you consider to be part of your life, it's like losing a bit of your cognitive ability. That's what we what we often see, which is why when one of your aging parents dies, the other one might talk about the person like they're still alive. That's a benign hallucination, very, very common. You'll be alarmed if that happens to one of your aging parents, but it shouldn't alarm you because it's extremely normal that that would actually happen. Acute grief, really acute grief in its early stages, can actually resemble mild dementia in this way. It's not dementia, don't worry. There's not a destruction of the neurons in the substantia nigra. This is not, you know, we're we're not talking about that.

• 14:33Arthur Brooks?

  What it is is extreme disorientation because permanent became impermanent all of a sudden. And that discrepancy between perceived reality and experienced reality leads to this disorientation that we're talking about here. Yearning, longing, sadness, and even hallucinations. And you'll see this, you know, I remember this and remember my family lost her mother. And she said that her mother was actually walking around on the roof. I'm like, what are you talking about? Yeah, she's up there like, what? With no history of hallucinations. It's just common is the way that this turns out. Now, what's the brain's response to grief? And the answer to this actually comes if you've been following my work for a long time. Affective pain. In other words, sensory pain is the ouch part of something that happens to you physically.

• 15:18Arthur Brooks?

  The affective part is I hate that part. Different parts of the brain for the two kinds of pains, as a matter of fact. That affective response involves a part of the brain called the anterior cingulate cortex. Often, that's actually narrowed down to the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex. It's a part of the limbic system designed to make you feel pain and mental pain. Sadness, so which is weird, like, why did we evolve sadness? And it makes sense, doesn't it? Because we're evolved to have an aversive response to losing things and people that we love. You have sadness because it's it's supposed to be really, really uncomfortable, terrible, as a matter of fact, so that you will avoid the loss. When you can't avoid the loss.

• 16:01Arthur Brooks?

  It becomes an inevitable source of pain is what it turns. But, but if you can't avoid the loss, you will because you don't want to feel sad. Which is why, you know, if you didn't have any sadness or you weren't worried about sadness, you didn't feel discomfort with your sadness, you would say everything that you think all the time to your loved ones and you'd be fired and friendless and divorced in like a week. And that would be bad for you. So we've evolved sadness so that we will avoid loss. So that we avoid grief is what it comes down to. And that thing that we've, that we've evolved is the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex, which is the part of the brain dedicated to that kind of pain. Now, there's also, I'm going to come back to that in a second.

• 16:40Arthur Brooks?

  But there is also a set of experiments that, that are able to measure grief with respect to skin electrical conductivity, believe it or not. How well your skin conducts electricity will be indicative of how much interior pain you're feeling. That's a kind of a physical measurement of how they do that. Article called Behavioral Triggers of Skin Conductance Responses and Their Neural Correlates in the Primate Amygdala. And why is that? Because you're amped up. And when you're really amped up in sadness, your brain, I mean, you're, we can actually put wires on your skin and see how electrically, how, how much currents is passing through your skin or how, how well your skin conducts electricity.

• 17:24Arthur Brooks?

  I guess this neither here nor there, but it basically shows once again, what I've been talking about over and over again, which is psychology is biology here. It's all one thing. It's not just in the ether. When we say it's in your head, we literally mean it's in your head. Now, you might think, once again, that debilitating grief is like a glitch, but it's actually a feature, how we feel this pain. Once again, we need to feel pain because that's a survival imperative. So we're not left alone. So that we have an aversion to loss. Grief is loss we, that we can't remediate and we can't avoid. When somebody dies, you can't get them back. And so the result of that is unremitting mental pain.

• 18:07Arthur Brooks?

  Your dorsal anterior cingulate cortex is not calming down. Well, it actually is, but it just takes time. So when you lose somebody that you love, it's like a jetliner has crashed and there's a pinging black box in the bottom of the ocean. Ping, ping, ping. But the battery wears down and so the pinging is less and the pinging is less. And sooner or later you will recover. I'm going to talk about that in a second. I'm going to talk about two things. How fast does it take for the pinging to stop? But I'm also going to talk about how you feel about the pinging stopping because there's a a pretty interesting phenomenon where people grieve because they're not grieving. But more on that in a second. So the whole point is if you're grieving, that's completely normal. That's physiologically healthy.

• 18:49Arthur Brooks?

  That's your brain working properly and it's not supposed to do that forever. It's doing that just in case you can actually get the person back. And when they die, for example, and you can't, then it will wear away. How fast? How fast? For most people, pretty fast. As a matter of fact, there's one 2019 study of depression in women who are widowed. And women actually get over this much faster than men. I mean, you've probably seen this in couples that you know where women who are widowed are actually able to recover faster or better than their husbands. Men do worse. And part of the reason is that the women have thicker social networks. They tend to have more friends. They have more people that they can rely on when they're feeling grief. Men, way, way, way fewer.

• 19:33Arthur Brooks?

  And if you're, when, if your wife dies and you're left utterly alone in the world, that's why mortality increases so dramatically among widowers compared to widows. But the study in 2019 of depression in widowed women says that in the first month after the death of the spouse, there's a 38% decrease in mental pain. Sadness decreases by 38%. That's a lot. In one month? You know, oh, I'll never feel better. Yeah, probably won't like significantly in a few weeks. Within the next two months, there's an additional 25% decrease. By a year and a half later, or a year later, there's an 11% decrease on top of that, meaning that in about a year, the average woman who loses her husband in one year will be 74% less sad, according to these studies.

• 20:18Arthur Brooks?

  And that kind of figures. I mean, that's kind of what we see. And, and part of the reason for that is that a lot of evolutionary biology suggests that one of the reasons that women tend to live longer than men is not just because men, you know. Randomly shoot guns and drive fast and take more drugs than alcohol is because women have been evolved past childbearing years to assist in extended family care for grandchildren, for example. It's kind of normal for women to be widowed more than it is for men to be to become widowers. And so you need a mechanism in which their sadness is unremitting. It's evolution has actually provided a mechanism by which women can recover. They don't forget their husbands if they love their husbands, they don't forget their husbands.

• 21:01Arthur Brooks?

  But they're not going to be disabled by the sadness for that long. And that's I hope you take comfort in that, by the way. That's an important thing to keep in mind that we're supposed to be sad, but we're not supposed to be sad forever. Now, the second thing that's worth keeping in mind is that people who are bereaved and experiencing grief, they very frequently experience what's called post-traumatic growth. In other words, loss itself actually leads to generativity and gain. And a lot of people are ashamed of this, as a matter of fact. They don't want to admit that good things happened to them as a result of the loss. But this is nothing to be ashamed of at all. This is something to actually celebrate. There's five areas of life that will often get much better in the years after the loss of a loved one.

• 21:43Arthur Brooks?

  A really bad grief experience is somebody you truly love. Number one is a greater appreciation for your own life. You savor life. Savoring is important to happiness. The second is improved relationships that you pay more attention to the relationships that currently exist. You're paying attention to the fact that your remaining relationships are scarce and it's important to be to be enjoying them. The third is a recognition of new possibilities. People don't, when they, when they think about the permanence of their circumstances, which is embodied in the people around them. They don't often think about new possibilities in their lives and they have an impetus, they have a stimulus to think about new possibilities when the permanent becomes impermanent. You know what I mean?

• 22:27Arthur Brooks?

  So that's not a question of using somebody's death as an excuse to do new stuff. It's a recognition that there are possibilities in your life and people find that as a source of post-traumatic growth. The fourth is personal strengths. People find they have strengths that they didn't know that they had because they have to do something they never thought they'd have to do. You know, I've talked to women, for example, they lose their husbands and, and they have to take care of finances and maybe take care of a family member and, and provide for family and, and do arrangements. And I was like, I didn't know I could do that. I didn't know I could do the family taxes. It's new strengths because they had never done that before. Or vice versa. Personally, I don't do the family finances, so. Um, number five is spiritual development.

• 23:10Arthur Brooks?

  People most frequently become more spiritually adroit in loss. And, and there are some hypotheses about what that might be the case. Loss illuminates the same hemisphere of your brain, the right hemisphere, in which you have transcendent religious experiences. And so loss itself, when it's unremitting, and especially when you submit to the loss, you don't fight the pain, you don't fight the pain. You, you, you practice non-resistance to the pain. You finally say, no mas. It's weird, you know, when you're, when you're helpless. In helplessness, there, there lies a little bit of bliss. When you give into it, this is why Christian people often say, Lord, I leave this grief at the foot, at the foot of your holy cross. See? That's a kind of bliss, isn't it?

• 23:54Arthur Brooks?

  And there's a version of that in your philosophy. There's a version of that in your faith. Your spiritual development is part and parcel with the religious experiences that you're going to have. Your grief might lead you into the enlightenment and the transcendence that you seek. That's common. That's good. So what are you going to do? How are you going to use all this information? How are you going to change your life with this? Here are four ways, based on the science I've talked about, that you can find meaning in grief and grow through grief. How you can be better at grief. Because, again, the wrong answer is to avoid grief. It's not going to happen. Look, if you're a normal person, if you're not a sociopath, you're going to grieve because you're going to experience loss.

• 24:38Arthur Brooks?

  The question is not whether you will, but what you'll do when it does, when this happens, when this befalls you. And I'm going to give you four things to keep in mind right now. Four very practical suggestions, plus one more.

• 24:50Arthur Brooks?

  So number one is look for meaning is actually look for meaning. What does this mean? When you lose something is what does this experience actually mean? This is a search for coherence. Why do things happen the way that they do? And again, you're not going to be able to answer this question perfectly. And the contrary, these are mysteries. You know, the, the book of Job in the Hebrew Bible where Job suffers and suffers and suffers. And, you know, his children are taken from him and everything he owns and his relationships are destroyed and, and his friends show up to explain, he must've done something wrong. And this goes through chapter after chapter, but the 38th chapter of Job, God and Job talk. God comes to Job in a whirlwind, right? And, and Job, I mean, he's got some stones, man.

• 25:34Arthur Brooks?

  I mean, he puts God in a dock and he says, like, I was everything. I was, I did everything right. I was your servant and you took everything away from me. Explain yourself. And God says, it's very funny actually, because God is actually is, I've mentioned this before on the podcast, but it's worth mentioning again, God is sarcastic with Job. He says, oh, okay, okay, I'll give you an explanation. You're so smart that you deserve an explanation from God. Obviously, fine, I will explain your loss and your grief and your pain after you explain to me why I created the heaven and the earth. You're so smart. Tell me, why did I create the fishes, fishes in the ocean and the stars in the sky? You're so smart. Lay it on me, Einstein.

• 26:17Arthur Brooks?

  And, and what he's saying is it's a mystery. It's a mystery. In mystery, we can actually find meaning, look for meaning. There's a wonderful study from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst that interviewed college students who had recently lost a parent and asked them their sense of meaning in the world, how just the world is, how random, how controllable. It asked them meaning questions of coherence and purpose and significance. And what did they find? They found that, that the students that had, that, that were asked to look for meaning in their grief, that their grief was less intense.

• 26:55Arthur Brooks?

  That a search for meaning itself was one of the ways, as I talked about a minute ago, that that pain per se was the source of generativity and that was, that provided relief itself. These big why questions. A common way to deal with this is to, is to ask spiritual religious questions. Why does this happen? What is the mystery? And then to lay it at the foot of the holy cross or whatever is your means for doing just that, the version of that. Number two, change your identity. This was interesting that when a loved one dies, you change. Why? Because it's an illusion that you are two people. Let me tell you, my wife Esther and I, we're one flash, man. We're two right hemispheres of our brain.

• 27:40Arthur Brooks?

  We're two hearts beating as one. We are. It's an illusion. You know, the old Zen Buddhist koan, what is the sound of one hand clapping? That's an absurd question, except it's not, because what it is, that answer to the koan is, the sound of one hand clapping is an illusion.

• 27:59Arthur Brooks?

  There's only a sound when you add a second hand. And that is the illusion of your individuality, and especially with your soulmate, with the person that you love the most, or anybody that you truly love, that is your second hand clapping. And when that hand is taken away, that trueness of the unit is changed. You're different. You're a different person when you're experiencing grief. So be different. That's what this research talks about, about older adults, when they lose somebody, that they would consciously embrace a different kind of identity. They would do different things. Often that, that they would never have gone cycling. They would never have joined a bridge club. They never would have

• 28:41Arthur Brooks?

  gone square dancing, ever. Because the old man, he wasn't into it. And because that's not who they were. Well, that's not who they are anymore. Now, now, that makes people feel guilty. And by the way, that leads to lots of resentment among adult children when an aging parent dies and the other one actually starts going out and having fun for the first time. But it's completely healthy. It's not any sort of casting of aspersions on the dead spouse. On the contrary, it's an example of somebody actually using grief as a, as a force for good and a recognition that, yeah, we were one, we were one. He died and now I'm not the same person anymore. I'm truly meaningfully changed. Now, there's lots of things that you can do where you change your identity that are not so great. You can, you know, race into a brand new marriage.

• 29:26Arthur Brooks?

  I recommend that. That often leads to grief itself, um, if it's a mistake. But going out more with friends or getting into new activities, but becoming a new person through it can be generative. Here's number three. And this comes from the work of my colleague at the Harvard Business School, Mike Norton, who talks about adopting rituals. He has a wonderful new book about, about rituals per se. I'll put it in the show notes. That when people adopt mourning rituals, by that I don't mean like in the mourning. I mean like mourning, M O U R N I N G, even trivial sounding ones, that they're tremendous meaning-making things in the lives of a grieving individual, almost certainly because they interact with the functioning of the brain. When you're doing something in a repetitive way, it, it creates a sense of meaning, um,

• 30:11Arthur Brooks?

  in the brain that's actually experiencing this unremitting pain in the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex. I mean, again, this research has not been done. I'm only triangulating across the different, couple of different areas of science, but, but it makes perfect sense that this could be the case. So, you know, some people, they'll, they'll have religious rights. If you're Jewish, you'll, you'll sit shiva when somebody dies. As a Catholic, when somebody dies, I will pray a rosary for their holy soul for a certain number of days, or a novena for the, for, for a person's soul. Maybe you'll play a favorite song on particular days to remember the person. Maybe you'll write letters to the loved one, or maybe you'll, you go to the Japanese wind phone and leave a message. But people who do this, by the way, they get not just relief, they get understanding, they get comprehension of what this is all about.

• 30:56Arthur Brooks?

  This mystery, this complex mystery becomes easier to comprehend than it was before. One of the studies that Mike Norton and his colleagues have done shows that when rituals become part of the grief process, that people tend to, believe it or not, they estimated that people actually experience 28% less grief, or 28% greater understanding of grief, or something, relief in some way, shape, or form. Here's number four, this one's really important, and I mentioned it before, and I want to come back to it, I wanted to come back to it. Grief doesn't have to be permanent, and you shouldn't grieve the loss of your grief. Now, what a lot of people do is they say, I miss the pinging of the black box in the bottom of the ocean. Something's wrong with me, and I don't feel it anymore. And part of the reason is because

• 31:39Arthur Brooks?

  the last memory that they feel that they have of a person, for example, that they lost, was the sadness of the loss of that person. And they feel like they're being disloyal, almost, or that they're forgetting that person because they're losing the intense grief. It's like the person's fading, they're fading, I don't want it to fade, and I feel guilty because it's fading. But the truth of the matter is that this is supposed to happen. Your dorsal anterior cingulate cortex shouldn't be lit up like a Christmas tree for the rest of your life. That's not the way it's supposed to work. The person you loved and lost wants you to be happy again. This is normal, you have to let yourself actually become happy again, and not hold on to grief through a sense of guilt, or a sense of loss of the memory itself.

• 32:24Arthur Brooks?

  When grief starts to subside, that's a signal that things are working correctly, not that things are working incorrectly. You're not supposed to suffer forever, allow yourself to recover. Here's one more idea. One of the most effective ways to treat grief Is by treating other people with grief. The kind of grief that is typically the worst is when somebody loses a child. I lost both my parents. Many of you have lost your parents and it's sad, but it's not a tragedy in its way. Unless it happens way, way, way too young. But even then it's natural that the older generation dies before the younger generation. But there's something that feels profoundly unnatural. And thus is extremely psychologically and even physiologically disequilibrating about

• 33:09Arthur Brooks?

  the experience of losing a child. And this is the kind of grief that people say that is hardest to recover from. Lots and lots of studies actually show this. But there's one thing that consistently helps people suffering the, the most intense grief for the loss of a child. And that's helping other people who've lost children. I've recommended this a lot because I've seen it in literature, but I've also seen it in real life, that when somebody loses a child, they'll be in intense pain a year later, but it will be better if they find people who have had fresh loss. Say, I understand, I understand. And they hold their hand and they listen. Listening turns out to be the way to actually do that. When somebody is grieving and you're helping them, whether it's the loss of a child or

• 33:50Arthur Brooks?

  any other kind of grief, if you're relieving your own grief by helping somebody whose grief is fresher, you gotta know the best way to do that. And the best way to do that is very clear in the literature as well, which is listening, sitting in silence, holding somebody's hand. There's a tendency to want to chatter and chatter and chatter and help and talk and talk and talk. And that's completely unnecessary. I don't have to show you the studies. You know in your heart that it's true. Just listen, be present and listen to somebody whose grief is fresher and this will help them. And this will help you. You know, the Japanese wind phone simulated a healing listener. Your attentive silence can be the real thing.

• 34:34Arthur Brooks?

  Couple of questions before we finish. This is from Ryan Offas, who wrote into the website. Do you know of any evidence that shows how successful people may be more inclined to be sure that they will succeed again if any ventures undertaken? And yeah, there's a whole lot of literature from the world of entrepreneurship that shows that when people have a couple of failures, that they're actually better at dealing with failure. And when they've had a couple of successes, they get better success. And this is really important because that means that you need a couple of failures so that you can avoid future mistakes. And that's good for your success, but also you have kind of an emotional fortitude. But once you've succeeded a couple of times, you know how that feels. That's reps is how it works out. It's also the case in careers.

• 35:18Arthur Brooks?

  I mean, my first career, when I left the classical music business and I went back to graduate school to become an economist. This was brutal. I didn't know if I was going to succeed. But each career changed after that, when I would quit and start again, take it down to the studs. Those earlier successes made it, gave me the reps so that I kind of know how to succeed. So that's absolutely the case. So what I'm telling you is you need both failure and success is what it comes about. You need lots and lots and lots of experiences for you to get the success that you seek. You need to be good at failure and good at success. And trying a lot of stuff and not being afraid is the way that you deal with that. Okay, here's from anonymous. Once again, this comes to the email address. Kind of a long note, but I'll read it to you nonetheless.

• 35:59Arthur Brooks?

  I was raised in a strong Catholic family, but I've decided to stop attending Catholic church. And I'm in a struggle to find what it is that makes me feel small or helps me ascend like you suggest in your faith and spiritual practices. As I prepare to propose to my girlfriend, congratulations. My parents strongly opposed the idea of us not marrying in a church, but it doesn't feel right to do so when I'm no longer an active member. I'm struggling to balance my excitement with the anxiety of potentially hurting them. I hear this a lot. I got a question. How do you think you might feel in 10 years? The great, maybe the greatest hockey player who ever lived, Wayne Gretzky. He was asked, how do you know where to go all the time? You're always like magically in the right place on the ice. He said, no, no, I just skate to where the puck is gonna be.

• 36:44Arthur Brooks?

  And it's funny because it sort of makes sense, but you know, you see the puck and you skate toward the puck. You know, he goes, he looks where the puck is gonna be and he skated there. That's good advice for life.

• 36:55Arthur Brooks?

  So I get it. You're not going to the church. You're not going to church. You don't want to go to church. You decided not to go to church. Probably bumming out your mom, but you know, just don't. You'll have no schism as long as you don't tell her that her values are stupid. You know, live your life and let other people live theirs. I've talked about this on the show before. But ask yourself this. Have I ruled it out for the rest of my life? Or have you said, I don't want to go to church now? In 10 years, where do you think you're going to be? Now, that's a strategic decision for you to think a little bit about what you'll be glad you did earlier. There is no hypocrisy in getting married in the church. Look, there's no hypocrisy in not getting married in the church. This is a decision you have to make, but remember, life is long. I would discuss this with your fiance. Where do we think we want to be?

• 37:42Arthur Brooks?

  Go be that now. Or at least set yourself up to be comfortable being that later. And that might help you inform your decision and to proceed in a spirit of peace. Finally, Alon asks, "How can I move past recent failures and regret that feel constant self doubt and paralysis? Especially if I take radical responsibility and self blame for everything that's gone wrong? I hear this a lot. I get it. You know, self blame and condemnation, ah.

• 38:12Arthur Brooks?

  And people are prone to this. Now, I could dig into your childhood and make all kinds of predictions about when you were a little kid, yada, yada, yada. It doesn't matter. We are where we are right now. There's three things to do. When something doesn't go right and you go into the cycle of self blame, what are you doing? You're treating yourself like your worst enemy. You're treating yourself that, Alon, I bet you never treat anybody else this way. I bet you never say to anybody that in your life, "You moron. You're single-handedly responsible for everything that's going wrong." You wouldn't do that because you're not a jerk. You're a good person, right? So that requires that you start treating yourself like that. You need to be metacognitive, which is to say, see yourself in the third person and treat yourself as if you were in the third person. This is how you heal this. What do you do? Number one, something goes wrong.

• 38:57Arthur Brooks?

  Got it. Look, something's going to go wrong for me today. Guaranteed. You too. Number one is understanding. What happened? Why did it happen? Coldly. I mean, you have to suss it out. There's no blame. Understanding is not blame. Write it down. Two. Acceptance. It went wrong. It went wrong? Right? Still no blame. Number three. Forgiveness instead of blame. I'm going to forgive myself, right? That doesn't mean I don't understand. It doesn't mean I don't, I don't, I'm not going to try to be better. Because only then, after forgiveness, can you actually make resolutions for future action. Now, what have I done? I've understood the problem. I've accepted the situation, which is very important. I've forgiven myself for screwing up, if I even did screw up, by the way.

• 39:42Arthur Brooks?

  And I've made a resolution for actually how I can be better in the future. This, by the way, is the great way that in religions, you confess your sins. Okay, what happened? I get it. I accept it. I'm sorry I did it, and I'm going to forgive myself. But most importantly, I'm going to make a resolution not to do it again. And that's what you need to do. And until this becomes natural, you need to go through the algorithm, one, two, three, four, and metacognitively, consciously, thinking about thinking. I'll work this into the way that you're living your life. Come to the end of Office Hours, another episode. I hope you've enjoyed it. I hope it's been useful to you. If you know somebody who's experiencing grief, please do share if you find it useful, because we need to help each other through this.

• 40:26Arthur Brooks?

  Let me know your thoughts at [email protected], or write your comments, any place where you're seeing this or listening to this. Like and subscribe on Spotify, YouTube, or Apple, and leave a comment, please do. I mean, on anything, for example. Comments, criticisms, suggestions, questions, love it all. Follow me on social media platforms, on Instagram and LinkedIn, anyplace else where you get your content. Scroll me, and let's learn together a little bit. And order The Meaning of Your Life, Finding Purpose in a Nation of Emptiness, my, my brand new book on the meaning of your life and the meaning of mine as well. I hope you have a wonderful week. I hope that you have a generative week, whether you're grieving or not. I hope that you find meaning in everything that you do. You lift other people up in the bonds of happiness and love that you need, and so do they. We'll see you in a week.

• 41:18Speaker 02

  Hey, it's Brianna Stewart here with Ally Bank. Whether it's at work or with family, life never calls a timeout. Sometimes you're ready, and sometimes you have to react on your feet. Unexpected travel, retail therapy, and of course, the kids need new kicks right now. Ally gets it, and they build banking around real life. So even in those clutch money moments, you can spend and save confidently with the bank that's got your back. Ally, do it right. Ally Bank, member FDIC.