Your Brain on Grief

Seeing how COVID-19 has affected so many people in the last year and a half, grief is becoming more and more relevant in the global community.

People know grief to be a huge psychological problem, so we empathize with those in grief by telling them, “just don’t think about it”. But grief doesn’t just affect a person’s mind; it also affects the brain and body. There’s something called Grief Brain, which is a real medical condition where neurochemical and anatomical things in the body change when someone feels intense grief. 

The neural network of grief

Neuroimaging is something researchers can do when they want to see the brain without surgical methods, like opening someone up. Functional magnetic resonance imaging, or fMRI, is a commonly used one, and it’s a non-invasive method that uses magnets to measure oxygen levels in the brain. The higher the oxygen, the higher the activation of that region, and (theoretically) the more important that structure is to perform the task. Researchers have used fMRI to pinpoint a neural network of grief- a group of brain structures that are activated and “online” during the grieving process. 

Through neuroimaging mechanisms, researchers have found the posterior cingulate cortex (PCC) to have strong activation during grieving. This neural region is located slightly above the middle of the brain, towards the spine. The PCC receives major hippocampal (the structure of the brain known to be the “center” for memory) projections and shares white matter tracts (basically, brain cell connections) with the parahippocampal gyri and prefrontal cortices. In simpler terms, this region is super important in our experience of pain, memory, and decision-making. More importantly, during grief, it’s strongly activated. Knowing this, researchers think the PCC is strongly involved in emotion-laden memories. 

Grief, especially that from losing a loved one, also activates a network of regions important for visual recognition. The fusiform gyrus is one of these activated regions, and it is a structure located near the bottom of the brain, in a region known as the inferior temporal lobe. It is essential in object and face recognition and patients with damaged or dysfunctional fusiform gyri generally experience some degree of visual agnosia, which is a disorder that makes the patient unable to recognize the meaning of visual images, even though they can see just fine and they have normal IQ levels. 

Another highly active region is the insula. Known to be important in internal perception and the processing of visceromotor information, this little structure is nestled within the midbrain and is also important in emotional arousal. Putting two and two together, we might say that grief deals a lot with internal emotions and feelings.

Neurochemical changes in the brain

Now scientists are studying biomarkers of grief to see if we can actually understand what’s going on in the body. Grieving people show higher levels of a hormone called cortisol, and higher levels of molecules called inflammatory cytokines. These cytokines usually show up when the immune system of the body is up and running. So that’s a good thing. But too many of these little cytokines also have been associated with anemia, hyper-inflammation, and cardiovascular dysfunction (heart problems). And grief creates too many of these cytokines, so that’s not good.

Cortisol’s nickname in the scientific world is the “stress hormone.” It’s created when the stressed-out brain sends signals to these little glands that sit on top of your kidneys, called adrenal glands. People with high cortisol usually show negative symptoms like metabolic failure, hippocampal (as a reminder, this is the part of the brain that deals with memories) damage, or weight gain. The fact that cortisol is usually pretty high in people who are grieving is again, not good.

Conclusion

Many only see grief as an emotional problem, hence the stigma “It’s all in your head.” Technically, yes, grief is a result of your brain, but the brain is a super important organ that does super important things, like activate the rest of your body. The “grief network” is all the brain regions that activate during grief, especially areas for memory, attention, and emotional regulation.

Because the brain is so powerful, neurochemical changes like what happens in stressful situations can create very bad health effects. Truly, Grief Brain is something that takes over your whole body, and if you’re not careful, will seriously affect you.

— Allie Yuxin Lin