The Brain and Grief

Among the cremations services we offer are a variety of grief resources that can help you as you go the through the process of grieving the loss of your loved one.

There are profound changes that grief will bring to almost every aspect of your life. Grief, for example, can cloud your thinking, slow your reaction times, interfere with your sleep, and make concentration and focus nearly impossible.

Therefore, in addition to being a very painful emotional and physical experience, grief also creates significant neurological changes in your brain. These changes happen with any kind of grief, not just the grief of losing a loved one.

Although you may not think about it, grief occurs with loss, even those losses that that are normal transitions in life. You will experience a kind of grief, for example, when your life circumstances change.

These changes can include retirement, changing jobs, moving, or when your children leave home for college or for a job. Though these life transitions do not compare to a loved one’s death, they still represent losses of things that have been normal and familiar in your life.

When you think about how hard it can be to deal with the grief in life transitions, then it’s easier to understand how much greater the impact of grief over losing a loved one is.

You can see how much it can affect your ability to think clearly, to function, or to process the loss you’ve experienced. Grief’s effects on the brain are multifaceted and come from multiple regions, including the prefrontal cortex and areas within the limbic system.

These areas of the brain are responsible for neurological functions such as memory, learning, multitasking, and emotional regulation. When the hormones and neurochemicals that are produced by grief happen, the changes happen quickly.

Your sleep is disturbed, your desire to eat changes, your anxiety levels shoot up, and things seem overwhelming. Suddenly, your environment is a landscape that is unfamiliar, and your surroundings seem unclear and inexplicable.

Losing someone you love is new and unknown territory. Whether you’ve lost a spouse, a parent, a sibling, or a child, the prospect of life without a loved one may initially seem impossible to both accept and to live with.

All the changes that happen to your brain when you are grieving are normal. However, they make you feel as though you’re all alone in your grief. They may also make you feel like you are isolated from your friends and loved ones even when they’re close and trying to support you.

These are also normal reactions when you are grieving. Eventually, however, you will find a way through the worst part of your grief that will enable you to gradually return to your life, knowing it will be a new kind of normal.

It’s very important that in the midst of grieving, you pay close attention to taking care of yourself. This includes getting enough sleep. When you don’t get enough sleep, taking care of yourself in other ways is virtually impossible.

Additionally, you should consciously eat a healthy, take time to exercise, and carve out time to process the loss you have experienced. Finally, you need to make sure you have a good support system when you need it. This support may come from friends, family, and/or through a grief professional.

Having all of these in place will eventually ensure that you heal from your loss and are able to move forward in your life. Access to grief resources are included in the cremations services we offer, so you can depend on our compassionate and experienced team at Hopler & Eschbach Funeral Home to help you choose the ones you want.