How to Manage Grief
4/27/202641 min
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.
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Where to find Arthur Brooks:
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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
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Referenced:
• The Meaning of Your Life: Finding Purpose in an Age of Emptiness: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
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Transcript preview
First 90 secondsArthur Brooks· Host0:00
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, 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 in understanding what it is, why it happens, how it's normal, and how to deal with it, and that's my goal here. [gentle music] 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, 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, 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