The Brain and Grief: When Stress Floods

 The Brain and Grief

When Stress Floods

Part Six

      Years ago I was part of a mission's team that ventured into the deep hollers of Kentucky.  A part of my life will always love the coal fields of Appalachia.  The rolling hills, the sounds of a coal car, the slow paced life, and the sweetest people will always have a part of my heart.  This particular trip focused on helping people after one of the worst floods in state history.  The Kentucky River rose from three feet to nearly thirty eight feet.  It laid waste to several communities.  The devastation left our team speechless.  Homes were destroyed, entire trailer parks disappeared, and the terrible smell of the mud and the silt was rank in the summer air.  Our team broke up into groups, my team was assigned to evaluate the damage on a home and try to fix it.  The house was painted white, but clearly hadn't seen a new coat of paint in quite some time.  It was nestled close to the river, so needless to say it took the full brunt force of the flood.  We stepped into the house and started looking around.  It was the only house this family had and to be honest, it wasn't much of a home.  It didn't have running water and was already in disrepair.  They didn't have insurance and FEMA wasn't coming to save the day.  Mud was everywhere.  We opened the breaker box and mud covered every breaker.  We opened the electrical plate covers, more mud.  I needed to wear a respirator due to the pungent odor.  The only thing I did on that trip was shovel load after load of mud out of the home.  The flood touched every recess of that home causing untold damage.

      Grief has a similar affect on the brain.  This the sixth part of a seven part series that examines how grief affects brain function.  Again, let me place the disclaimer that I'm not a therapist or a counselor.  Instead I am a participant in grief.  I don't pander pre-mature theology and I don't try to 'sermonize' situations.  Instead I bear the weight of grief due to the loss of my wife.  My loss pressed me into grief ministry and understanding the deep affect that grief has on a whole person.  This article moves beyond the brain to the whole body. 

      Grief is the big stone that lands in the middle of a lake, but there are ripples that come from that experience.  One of those ripples is stress, but a unique stress....a fully body stress.  I previously wrote about how the brain sends cortisol, a stress hormone, to certain parts of the brain, but it also increases adrenaline too.  Loss creates a biological storm in the brain, literally flooding it with stress hormones and overwhelming the Hypothalamic Pituitary Adrenal Axis (HPA).  I'm sure we have all seen the cartoons of the inner working of the brain.  The cartoon portrays little people pulling levers, pushing buttons, and frantically running amuck.  That isn't an overexaggerated image to how our neurological system reacts to grief.  Our brain almost seems to register grief as a threat, dangerous, and it responds in like fashion.  The increase of cortisol and adrenaline are made for short term problems....but grief isn't a short term issue.  The brain becomes a hospital and each cell tries to be a doctor.

      Stress levels are understandably up for the mourning soul.  On a normal day stress can be unbearable, but adding grief to the mixture can destabilize a person.  Some of this might sound redundant from earlier articles, but stress can cause restlessness in a person's life, despite the fact that they are exhausted.  It can cause increased heart rate.  Many professional counselors notice that the stress can cause flight, fright, or freeze (three dangerous things).  It can change our daily food habits, cause us to emotionally eat, and the stress can also create digestive issues.  I know for me personally I felt abdominal discomfort multiple times during Tiffanie's cancer journey and post losing her.  It wasn't what I ate, to be fair with you, I barely ate at times.  It was a physical consequence of stress.  It can also cause headaches, muscle tension (which for me was made worse by panic attacks), and stress can lower your immune system, making your more prone to sickness.  Let me give you an example.  I've seen the doctor more in the past two years then I have the previous forty years of my life.  My body's ability to fight sickness was dampened.  Those stress levels lower the production of white blood cells which help us fight infection.

      I want to look at one more physical trait that is affected by the increased stress, the heart.  The average grieving person at times feel like they are having a heart attack.  Some brush it off as something in their mind, when it all honestly the stress is changing things in their heart.  There is a syndrome called Takotsubo Cardiomyopathy, better known as Broken Heart Syndrome.  The surge of these hormones sort of stun the heart.  The left ventricle of the heart temporarily balloons out, which can mimic chest pain, shortness of breath, and can make a person feel like they are having a heart attack.  I was diagnosed with this syndrome during the first few months of grief.  My heart rate and blood pressure were constantly high.  My family doctor was concerned about the possibility of me having a heart attack.  Stress can also affect our blood chemistry.  Stress can cause increased viscosity, basically the blood becomes thicker.  This is especially noticeable during the first thirty days post loss, which can increase the risk of heart attack and stroke.

      How is the Christian supposed to response with this unnatural increase in stress?  There are multiple different things that a believer needs to practice in order to combat this flood of stress.  We need to daily cast our cares on Him because He cares for us (1st Peter 5:7), we need to rest (Matthew 11:28), but I think that most powerful thing that we can do is to be still.  Psalm 46:10 says "Be still and know that I am God."  Grief makes the mind race, it makes it SO loud.  Stress prevents us from being still and resting in the presence of our Savior.  There isn't some spiritual formula of how we do this.  This isn't something mystical, but instead it is an acknowledgement that we are overloaded emotionally, wore our physically, and spiritually in distress.  We come before the Lord and ask Him to quiet our life, to give us permission to rest.