Change Your Brain Every Day - How Long Does It Take To Get Over Grief?

Episode Date: July 12, 2017

Dealing with grief is among the most difficult of all human experiences. In this episode of The Brain Warrior’s Way Podcast, Dr. Daniel Amen and Tana Amen discuss the pitfalls that can accompany grief, such as isolation, using problematic comforts (like alcohol and sugar), or using your grief as an excuse to hurt yourself. They also discuss several ways that can make the grieving experience more tolerable.

Welcome to the Brain Warriors Way podcast. I'm Dr. Daniel Amen. And I'm Tana Amen. Here we teach you how to win the fight for your brain to defeat anxiety, depression, memory loss, ADHD, and addictions. The Brain Warriors Way podcast is brought to you by Amen Clinics, where we've transformed lives for three decades using brain spec imaging to better target treatment and natural ways to heal the brain. For more information, visit amenclinics.com.

The Brain Warriors Way podcast is also brought to you by BrainMD, where we produce the highest quality nutraceutical products to support the health of your brain and body. For more information, visit brainmdhealth.com. Welcome to the Brain Warriors Way podcast. So before we get started today, I want to just read a very short, sweet testimonial. Someone who's been listening to the podcast, I love this. So I think I do this more for me, for us than anybody because I love it so much. This one says, this is by Ollie. I love Dr. Daniel and Tana Amen.

I look forward to their podcast every week. Each episode, I learn new things to apply to my life for a longer life. I would choose a brain scan with them over an all expense paid vacation. Thank you, God bless you guys for all you do. That's so awesome, yes. So we love hearing that what we're doing

is making a difference, so thank you for sending these in. Well, our friends, Joel Chambers and Michael Peterson, when they got married, they gave themselves the gift of getting scanned so they could see their brains, optimize them, and have a better marriage. Right. I think that's awesome. So it makes a great gift.

Today we're going to talk about grief because it is rampant in our society. None of us can escape it, right? I mean, we are all exposed. Nearly all of us experience it at some point. Right. And we had something at the office happen where someone near and dear to us

lost their sweetheart of a heart attack, somebody who was apparently healthy and not very very young actually very young and it's heartbreaking it's devastating and it just reminds me and she and i were just texting and it reminds me of the story of Chris and Sammy. So Chris lost her daughter Sammy to bone cancer, I think five or six years ago now. And Sammy was only 12, so even more heartbreaking. And after Sammy died, Chris, she couldn't deal with the pain and

went to bed and drank too much ate bad food gained a lot of weight and on the second year anniversary of Sammy's death Chris had planned to kill herself yeah and then uh a friend of hers gave her um my book change her brain change her body and she said well if it's a bad book i'll kill myself. And when she told me that, I'm like, that's so much pressure on me when I write these books. But she said it was a great book. And I just did everything you asked me to do. And I stopped drinking. And I stopped eating bad food. And I started to walk and she said literally within eight days

she stopped waking up with panic so this is a really good point and I don't want to I don't want to gloss over this because those of us who've experienced grief of any kind, the normal thing to do or the typical thing to do is to comfort yourself somehow. And as a society, we've learned to comfort ourselves. It's like, oh, I just want to bury this pain. And so you do that with either alcohol or food or whatever it is that we do that sort of just immediately helps to squelch that that immediate pain but the problem is with that if you're doing that over a period of time and not a very long time over a period of a few days that begins to actually affect the way your brain functions so as that happens it's actually going to magnify and people don't realize it. So it starts off sort of dulling that pain,

but then all of a sudden it increases depression. It actually affects things like anxiety. It affects your sleep. And so now all of a sudden it has this ricochet effect, right? So this is why we want you to know that when you're doing that, the long-term effect is going to be worse. Well, and I had met her two months later when she's down 24 pounds. She was running every day. And then over the next year, she ended up losing a lot more weight and getting back to where she was before Sammy died. And she said, now I know Sammy would have never wanted me to get into that state. And never let grief be your excuse to hurt yourself. But you bring up a really important point,

is the pain is so bad. And I know when I went through a period of grief, I had chest pain. I mean, I literally went to the doctor, thought I was having a heart attack. And when you lose someone you care about, your heart starts to beat funny. There's actually a thing in the literature,

your heart's not broken, but it's not beating right. And that causes chest pain and sugar is a short-term fix i mean it works and alcohol um so alcohol calms down the bad feelings and sugar raises serotonin in the brain and so it makes you feel better the problem is it also increases inflammation right which increases the risk of depression right and dementia right and i know when i went through, it's like I couldn't remember anybody's name. I mean, you just feel stupid. And so this person that works with us was just texting with her, and I'm like, get magnesium glycinate.

Yeah. 400 milligrams. Not only will it help you sleep, but it'll help your heart beat in a more normal rhythm. So the first thing, never let grief be your excuse to hurt yourself. And then there are specific things you can do. So we talked about magnesium. The other important thing that's really helpful is journaling. Absolutely. Is journal your thoughts because that will help them get out of your head and then they won't circle because you know you've already written them down.

Well, and there's something about journaling that is very healing anyways when you're able to, it helps you process. But I also, it's really interesting. One of the things that I want to add to that list is be honest with yourself about, like have a conversation with yourself about what the other person would want. And that's not always that easy to do, especially if you're a parent and we're talking about kids. Well, I know what you would want. You would want me to be awful. No, I wouldn't. You have threatened to come back and haunt me. No, seriously. Especially if it's a parent, like losing Sammy. So I went and saw the movie The Shack with my daughter. We took Chloe to see The Shack. Now, that is my greatest fear, has been my greatest fear forever. If you haven't seen the movie, it's awful.

It's a hard movie to watch because it's about a little girl who's kidnapped and basically killed by this sex offender. So that's always been my biggest fear. And why? Because I not only love my child, because I'm a sheepdog and protective by nature, and we think it's our responsibility, right? So this is that thing that's our biggest fear. And as I watch this movie, it's about forgiveness. And I kept wrestling with myself, no, I wouldn't be able to do it.

And then they make their point. And I'm like, oh, that would just hurt. That hurts so bad to think of, I'd have to forgive that person. And then all of a sudden, I'm back to no, I wouldn't be able to do it. But I'm watching this with my daughter and she saw me crying and she looked at me. It's almost like she could read my mind and because she knows how protective I am. But she said something so powerful to me. And she said, I just want to tell you right now, I know you're thinking that you would want to go find that person, I know you're thinking that you would want to go find that person. I know you're thinking that you would want to go hurt that person and do something awful to the person that hurt me if that happened to me. And she said, and I'm just going to tell

you now, you can't do that. I'm just going to tell you, you could never do that. And I'm like, you can't say that. Like, you can't say that. And she's like, no, you can't because I would be so disappointed. I would be so upset. And I'm like, take it back right now. She goes, no. She said, because, you know, if I did have any way of knowing, I would be so disappointed because it would ruin. Like she was the only thing that would ever make me happy is knowing that you found some way to make sense of it. This is my 13 year old telling me the only thing that would ever make me happy is knowing

you found some way to make sense of it and some way to be happy again. And I thought, oh my gosh, how does a kid, you know, I'm thinking my job is the only thing that would ever make sense of it is to have vengeance, to like, to be angry. Well, no, to, to get, get back for her, to get them back for her. And she's, you have to know what's in their head because she's like, no, the only thing that makes sense is you being happy again and i'm like how does a 13 year old come up with that you know i mean it's crazy so i really like that so what would that think about what they would want for you want for you would they want you to spend your life being miserable and angry and seeking revenge? Or would they want you to find peace?

Would they want you to find love and peace? And that just blew my mind. So apparently I'm not allowed to seek revenge. So I've been ordered. I'm like, take it back right now. So what are some examples of grief? Oh, dear Lord, I've got two that are just terrible. Just so painful.

One of my best friends who I was just with just minutes before I came here, Sandra. She actually now has a very large women's ministry at Saddleback Church. She's an amazing person. One of the reasons I chose her as a mentor is because she's what I'm not. She's one of those people, you know, we choose people to help us become better at the things we're not good at. Her daughter was killed by a drunk driver. And this person, he was, so I'm thinking all along that, oh, it's probably someone older. And turns out this was a 21-year-old kid, but he had been arrested multiple times for various things and didn't show a lot of remorse.

And Sandra, rather than being really angry, she was really, really depressed and didn't even come out of her house for three months. And she had a friend who helped her through this time and finally said, okay, today we're walking outside. And then a couple of days later, today we're going to get in the car and go for a drive. And then it was just, she just helped her. She just sat with her in quiet for months and just helped her sort of through it. And then she said, today we're going to the store. You know what I mean? She just kind of helped her through that grief. But Sandra, what I thought was so interesting, Sandra ended up pleading for mercy for this kid. Now, they threw the book at the kid. The judge did because he already had priors.

He was, you know, three strikes. But she ended up saying, you know, there's no reason to ruin another life. Let's figure out a way to rehabilitate him. And I thought that that was amazing. I mean, talk about grace. That was incredible. So losing someone you love yeah animals animals oh my gosh it's a big

deal for a lot of people my dad lost his dog that he had for eight years to completely attached to Vinny and he was actually very sad after that losing your job yeah losing your marriage to divorce yeah oh that's actually I think people don't put enough stock in that that's a massive change. I mean, not for everybody. Some people are- Some people celebrate. Celebrate. For most normal people, even if you know it's not a healthy relationship, it's still a big loss of what you dreamed you would have, of what you expected it to be. Having a child with a disability like autism or granddaughter, who was born with a genetic microdeletion syndrome

that's involved with seizures and developmental delays. I've seen that, thank God, not for my daughter and her husband, but 85% of couples that have a sick child like that end up getting divorced because you lose the idea of what you thought would happen. And it's very hard and is often the cause of sadness and depression.

And really what it is, it's grief. Right. So if you are the family member of someone trying to support someone going through a major loss, or you're a friend and you're trying to support someone going through a major loss, let's talk about what that looks like,

and maybe you're also experiencing it. Say it's you're the child and you've lost a parent, but you've also, you've lost, you know, one of your parents and the other parent is going through this horrible grief. What can you do to support that? So we should write an article, 10 things you should never do.

Right. When someone's going through grief, tell them not to feel that way. Or they're in a better place. Like that's not what they really want to hear at the time. You know, usually just being there with them is a lot more helpful. Don't go get drunk with them. You know, one thing that I noticed, so my mom recently went through terrible grief a couple years ago. She was very much in love and her husband died. They did everything together. They

were really, really close. And when he died, she just went through a terrible, terrible grief. And I noticed something. She was so lonely that her, do you remember that? Her depression was overwhelming for her. I do. She began to scare me that she went into this deep depression and just didn't really care about much, her business, nothing. And so I noticed this and I could tell that she was really lonely. And I knew she wanted to do something to sort of change this feeling. It's really interesting. She started thinking about going on to some online sort of dating site, not so much to date, just to meet someone, to hang out with. But she was so worried about what everyone was going to think.

And she was really worried about what I was going to think or what other people were going to think. And if you are in that position, I remember stepping back and thinking, well, number one, what I really think and what I care about is that my mom is healthy, right? I want my mom to stay with us for as long as possible. And depression is not how it's going to happen, right? She's more likely to get really sick. Right. Depression, social isolation, they all negatively affect your immune system, making it more likely you're going to get sick. Right. And if you've lost a parent, that can be really painful. But do you want to lose the other parent? So I just want you to think about that. As you're judging.

As you're judging. It's like you can't go out with someone else or you can't meet someone else or even be friends with someone of the opposite sex. Just stop and think for a minute because it's so lonely for someone who's older to be alone and isolated. You're likely to take years off of their life. So it's just something to think about. And I'm not saying that, you know, you're going to have to process it your own way. But I selfishly want to keep my mom here. So I actually helped her. I helped her figure out how to, you know, and she actually has someone who's a friend. I mean, they're mostly just friends. They hang out, they do things together. I mean mean it's amazing but they it works out really well and he had lost his wife and um so was going through something very similar

so you know i don't want to lose her because of grief so um so don't engage in bad behaviors with them. Connected, stay connected. You don't have to talk, but sending a text, sending an email. Just sit with them. Yes. Connected. Right.

And it's okay to talk about when you lost someone that's important just so you have that common bond. And I think some of the things that are helpful are, I'm here for you. I'm sorry. You know, as opposed to they're in a better place or, you know, it's something like that that is really hard for people to hear. And mostly people mean well.

I know when my aunt lost, oh, it was just so awful. My 20-year-old cousin, this is years ago, but my 20-year-old cousin was in a military accident. He was killed in the military. And it was just awful. But his two best friends, she didn't get, same thing, she didn't get out of bed for a long time. She was just devastated. And I remember her on the phone saying, I just don't know if I can take my next breath. It's everything I can do to take my next breath. So his friends came over and didn't say one word. They went into her dark room where she had everything blacked out and was just laid in bed for months, actually. They just

went in her room and just laid down on the bed next to her didn't say a word but she's to this day remembers that being the thing that was probably the most supportive um just being with her you know so be with them bring them healthy food right um it's really trying to engage in those brain healthy habits that help you feel the most and one of the things my good friend Byron Katie told me is don't block your feelings I think it was actually when you were torturing me when you were in our beginning of our relationship tana tortured me a lot i did not torture him i wanted to be clear okay oh no it's clear she tortured me a lot uh and one of those times that you had left and and i just adored you cannot say that without explaining i had been through a really bad divorce and I needed to know that I wasn't going to pretend

and commit to something before I knew that I didn't trust my own judgment. Now, can we move on? But there's a point to this besides torturing you. And the point is that the most important thing she said to me is don't block your feelings. Feel what you're feeling. And if you cry, cry as much as you need to.

So feel what you feel. Don't block it. Don't try to push it away and then confront whatever thoughts are there, which is why journaling is such an important thing to do. Yeah. I love one of her lines, argue with reality and welcome to hell. Argue with reality and welcome to hell.

So when you block it, that's really what you're doing is you're arguing with reality. So argue with reality, welcome to hell. And so the journaling can be so helpful. The other thing is, the other reason I like journaling is because you want to acknowledge the truth of the feelings and the truth of what happened. You don't want to make it worse than it was. So you don't want to minimize it and you don't want to make it worse than it was. And we can sometimes do that as well so the most important thing i mean there is a cycle of life that i mean one of the most beautiful parts of life is being able to breathe and being connected and uh being in love and all of us die right so We're all dying just at different rates.

Just at different rates. And so it helps. So cherish each moment, each day. That when something like this happens, that it just is a reminder to cherish each moment you have and not take each other for granted. Stay with us. You're listening to The Brain Warrior's Way. Thank you for listening to The Brain Warrior's Way podcast. We have a special gift for you. It's an opportunity to win an evaluation at the Amen Clinics. All you have to do is subscribe to this podcast, leave a review, and rate us on iTunes. To learn more about Amen Clinics and the work we do, go to

amenclinics.com. You can also learn about our nutraceutical products at brainmdhealth.com. Thanks for listening.