When You Lose Someone, Your Brain Actually Gets Rewired

According to brain scientists, grieving is actually a form of learning—our grief is teaching us how to be in the world without our person. When we experience a loss, our brains begin working overtime, forming new habits for the new world in which we live, reconfiguring associations we had connected to our person, rearranging our attachments, and determining new ways for us to interact.

Studies show that grief is tied to many different brain functions—from memory recall to our attunement to those around us. Grief is also connected to brain functioning that affects our heart rate and our sensations of pain and suffering.

When we experience a significant loss, the brain perceives it as a threat to survival, and it employs defense mechanisms that increase blood pressure and heart rate and even release specific hormones. Many of us undergo changes in memory, sleep, heart function, and immune response and experience cognitive effects like “brain fog.” Essentially, the brain kicks into survival mode.

Science also demonstrates that the process of grieving is an evolutionary adaptation to promote survival in the face of trauma. When we experience trauma, our brain creates connections between nerves, and it strengthens or weakens existing connections depending on the intensity of our emotional response. This ability to alter neural pathways is referred to as neuroplasticity, and it allows the brain to compensate for life-altering events like injury, illness, and loss by forming new neural connections based on these experiences—in essence, making it possible for us to adapt to new situations or circumstances.

When our brains undergo so much neurological rewiring, our thought patterns can also become disrupted. You may find yourself surprised or even alarmed by some of the strange thoughts you are having. It may help to know just how normal and common they really are.

What-if thinking

In her famed five stages of grief, Elisabeth Kübler-Ross wrote about the bargaining process a dying person goes through when they are facing the end of their life. They may bargain with the doctors, themselves, and their higher powers. When this stage of bargaining is translated to the grief process, it most often takes the shape of “what-if” thoughts.

You find yourself preoccupied with what-if scenarios. You may find that the last few months, weeks, days, and even minutes of your loved one’s life have taken on great meaning. What if they had chosen a different treatment? What if you had called another doctor? What if you had turned left instead of right? What if you had said yes instead of no?

This is a natural response to losing someone you love. Your brain is turning the sequence of events around and around like a Rubik’s Cube, attempting to solve for a different outcome. Your brain is attempting to find a scenario that would lead to your person still being here. This is your heart’s way of pleading for them not to be gone. This is you wanting them back. This is normal. This is okay. This kind of thinking will ease in time.

Magical thinking

Magical thinking is the belief that our thoughts or words have the power to cause events and outcomes. This is a common occurrence in children ages 2 to 7 who have not yet grasped how their thoughts and wishes have little effect on what happens in real life. This kind of thinking translates to a grieving person believing that their thoughts and wishes should have prevented an outcome, or that their thoughts and actions could have caused an outcome.

“I was thinking as young children think, as if my thoughts or wishes had the power to reverse the narrative.” —Joan Didion

When you find yourself cycling through this kind of magical thinking, you may realize that you are paying more attention to details that support your beliefs and leaving out evidence that would remind you that you did not have control over the outcome. It can be helpful to ask yourself two questions: What were my intentions? Did I make the best choice given the knowledge I had at the time?

Yearning

This arises when we feel an ongoing, and sometimes painful, desire to be reunited with our person. Our focus shifts entirely to what it would be like to be together again. You may find yourself yearning for them at certain times in your life together—perhaps many years ago, or more recently. You may yearn to be with them even during times when things were hard or when they were very sick. Your heart may ache, and you feel preoccupied with only thoughts of what it would be like to be together. These feelings are normal, if not frustrating and sometimes uncomfortable. The yearning is a way of feeling close to them, and it will persist for different periods of time for each of us.

Rumination

Sometimes in grief we find ourselves focusing on one aspect of a person’s life or death in an obsessive manner. This is commonly referred to as looping or ruminating. Sometimes we are doing this as a way of trying to understand what has happened—trying to know the unknowable. Sometimes this rumination is a result of a traumatic event, or it is linked to feelings of guilt or yearning.

In the short term, rumination is a normal experience, and it eventually gives way to new understandings about our loss. But sometimes we can get stuck in these looping thoughts, which can lead to a prolonged feeling of distress. Modalities like EMDR or CBT, or even just doing some simple processing in talk therapy, can help us get out of a loop.

Remind yourself that these thoughts are a normal part of grief. Remind yourself that some of these thoughts are not based in fact, and search for evidence that supports a more positive way of thinking. If these thoughts are interrupting your sleep, try getting up and writing them down as a way to release them before returning to bed.

Usually there is a reason for the rumination. Something has been left undone or unsaid, a trauma has occurred, or there is not enough information available with which to come to an understanding about an event. Addressing these blocks is the way to move forward.

Intrusive thoughts

Some of us may experience unwanted thoughts and images that seem to come up out of nowhere at random moments. This can be unsettling, but is not uncommon. Intrusive thoughts are spurred by anxiety and are typically a result of having experienced some trauma surrounding your loss.

You may find yourself experiencing recurrent imagery about your loved one’s death or last moments. This is your brain’s way of trying to comprehend and process the experience. The brain triggers these intrusive thoughts as a chemical response to the mind’s fear response to the event. The imagery you experience may come in the form of visual experience.

Similar to rumination, intrusive thoughts may require additional support in order to overcome them; techniques like EMDR and CBT are helpful. Although intrusive thoughts can be frightening to experience, remind yourself that you are safe and seek help to break the occurrences.

Dreams

Many people experience a vast array of dreams about the person they have lost. Some may be distressing, and others comforting. Some people do not dream of their loved ones, even though they wish they could.

Often these dreams can be a helpful part of the grief process, even when the dreams are distressing. Your mind is attempting to integrate your loss, even when you are unconscious. Journaling about your dreams or processing them with a therapist can aid in a deeper understanding of what your dreams are asking you to examine so that you may better heal.

All of these shifts in perspective might sound like a lot. But perhaps there is comfort to be found in knowing that your brain is growing in order to support your grief process. Let this fact serve as a reminder that you innately know how to grieve. Allow yourself to stop resisting and be present to your experience. Even when you think you don’t know what to do, there are parts of you that do.

Excerpted from Conscious Grieving: A Transformative Approach to Healing from Loss, by Claire Bidwell Smith, copyright ©2024. Used with permission of Workman, a division of Workman Publishing Co., Inc., a subsidiary of Hachette Book Group, Inc.