Simple Practice to Lower Stress While Mourning | Dr. Mary-Frances O’Connor & Dr. Andrew Huberman
Chapters
0:0 Emotional Management0:26 Understanding Emotions as Outputs
0:54 Physical & Mental State Management
2:2 Balancing Demands & Resources
2:26 Intervention Study on Grief
3:15 Tool: Progressive Muscle Relaxation Technique
4:7 Mindfulness vs. Muscle Relaxation
4:46 Toolkit for Handling Grief
6:18 Learning to Cope with Waves of Grief
00:00:00.000 | what do we know about the way to let emotion out and through and what do we know about
00:00:08.660 | healthy adaptive compartmentalization as skills and here I'm hoping that perhaps people can glean
00:00:15.680 | some tools like take an hour a day and let it wail take two hours a day and handle your stuff
00:00:24.600 | yeah I think it is helpful to remember that emotions are actually the output they're the
00:00:33.480 | product it isn't so much that we have to figure out how to deal with emotions although I will come
00:00:43.000 | back and say that differently in a moment we have to figure out how to handle what physical and mental
00:00:50.240 | state resulted in those emotions so what I mean by that is if you are in a moment
00:00:57.520 | where everything in your body is in protest you are amped up and you can't sit still
00:01:07.580 | then working with your body right maybe you are the person who needs to go for a run
00:01:16.120 | every day where that hasn't really been who you were before right uh on the other hand
00:01:24.200 | maybe you're the person who needs to develop a yoga practice to figure out how to breathe through
00:01:32.440 | that amped up feeling and soothe yourself physically soothe yourself so that you can
00:01:42.360 | bring your heart rate down right so those are two entirely different behaviors but I can tell you
00:01:49.560 | at the end of either of them your body's going to be in a different state and I bet your emotions
00:01:55.880 | are in a different state too right so there's one way to think about it which is coming at how do we
00:02:01.560 | handle the emotions but there's another way to come at it which is how do I handle all of the demands
00:02:07.800 | and resources I have when demands and resources get out of balance that stress so how do I increase
00:02:16.200 | the resources in my life how do I reduce the demands in my life because I am suddenly in a really difficult
00:02:22.840 | situation so that's one way to think about it we did an intervention study in my lab with widows and widowers
00:02:31.000 | where one arm uh received mindfulness training another arm received progressive muscle relaxation
00:02:38.200 | which is sort of like learning a really fancy body scan you contract and relax different
00:02:46.360 | muscle groups in your body and you become aware of what that feels like to really understand what
00:02:52.920 | relaxation feels like and then there was a weightless control group and we did it because the progressive
00:02:59.320 | muscle relaxation was the control group we thought mindfulness training would be very helpful
00:03:04.840 | turns out mindfulness training was helpful but progressive muscle relaxation was even more
00:03:11.400 | helpful for people's grief so what does this practice look like it's a it's you're tensing your
00:03:16.440 | fists them relaxing then forearms them so working through uh head to toe contracting for about
00:03:22.520 | how long i'm just trying to get the rough contour yeah it's a brief contraction it's you know you can
00:03:28.200 | go online there's really easy instructions it's often done with a sort of guided uh audio um to help you
00:03:35.560 | figure out but the important part is also feeling what what's the difference between my clenched fist
00:03:41.720 | and my relaxed fist oh gosh i didn't even realize i was had so much muscle tension right so what's
00:03:48.360 | fascinating is people told us in any situation i'm in the grocery store i'm in a work meeting i'm trying to fall
00:03:55.800 | fall asleep i can use this tool now to help my body to get into a different state and that helps my
00:04:06.440 | grief now mindfulness training was effective but not as effective as i said and i think some of this is
00:04:13.080 | that we have you know grieving is a form of learning i'm not kidding about that your brain is busy while you
00:04:20.200 | you are grieving and it might not be the right time to take up a new practice that requires a lot of
00:04:26.040 | concentration if you do mindfulness it can be very helpful anyway the upshot of all that is on the one
00:04:32.600 | hand it's not that we have to deal with emotions because they are an output we have to deal with our
00:04:38.360 | demands and our resources and uh developing a whole toolkit of ways to think about adapting in our life now on the
00:04:47.800 | other hand even specifically for waves of grief having a toolkit of what to do with those emotions
00:04:56.040 | i think you described it beautifully andrew that we do have the capacity for suppression
00:05:02.120 | and if you are about to walk into a pitch meeting suppression is probably the way to go in that moment
00:05:10.440 | where suddenly your deceased child has popped into your head and thinking i am not going to think about
00:05:17.320 | this right now i am completely going to pretend this has not happened and i'm going to do this pitch
00:05:23.480 | right but if it's your only strategy then you don't have the learning process going on right that at another
00:05:32.760 | moment you might be looking through a photo album and just be overcome with tears but over time realize
00:05:41.480 | i can't say stay in that puddle either when i'm doing this i need to you know if it was me i need to text my
00:05:51.880 | sister and tell her you know i'm looking at photos of mom and this is what i'm thinking about and she'll text me some
00:05:59.720 | funny story about mom or or even just say oh man i feel ya and if my sister isn't available then i'll
00:06:07.000 | text my best friend right because in that moment it is important to have that puddle it's also important
00:06:15.480 | important to know how to get out of the puddle again and so this is really a process of learning how do i
00:06:22.760 | cope with these waves of grief it's like being a basketball player one possession after another after
00:06:28.840 | another how am i going to get through this possession each possession looks different how am i going to get
00:06:34.760 | through this possession with this constellation what's the right skill to use right now