Episode 5: The brain’s response to pain
Intro with music
Hello and welcome to episode 5: the brain’s response to pain. In this episode, I share the 3 ways the brain naturally reacts to emotional pain, and a fourth option that’s a game changer in grief.
Music
In episode 3, I shared that our primitive brain’s main goal is to keep us alive. It does this in just three ways: by prompting us to (1) avoid pain, (2) seek pleasure, and (3) be efficient.
In episode 4 I shared that, generally speaking, life is a 50/50 mix of comfortable and uncomfortable emotions. Difficult or uncomfortable emotions come with the experience of being alive, and it’s perfectly normal to have a wide range of those emotions, from frightened to lonely, from disappointed to distressed.
Yet our primitive brains equate negative, difficult, or uncomfortable emotions with potential danger. And it urges - in fact demands that we - avoid pain. At all costs. And that’s what I’m sharing today. The brain’s response to emotional pain.
I want you to understand this so that you’ll understand yourself better. So that you can be kind to yourself as you navigate your life after loss. So let’s dive in.
When we experience a difficult emotion, the primitive brain naturally urges us to find an escape button, whether by resisting it, reacting to it, or avoiding it.
Resisting emotions is to push them away, sweep them under the rug, or try to will ourselves to feel differently. We attempt to fake it until we make it.
Reacting to emotions is to snap, fly off the handle, or stay in bed all day because we think that the emotions are too tough to bear.
Avoiding an emotion is to attempt to buffer or numb it with some sort of numbing agent. The brain suggests that, rather than feel the pain, we should escape it and seek pleasure instead.
“Escapes” can include excessive social media scrolling, binging your favorite show, overeating, overdrinking, overspending, just to name a few. I often refer to these actions as buffering.
Here’s the truth: It simply isn’t possible to successfully resist, react, or avoid to make our feelings go away.
Difficult feelings wait patiently. They demand to be felt.
When we turn to buffering, we now have to deal with the negative consequence of the numbing agent and the difficult emotion that is still pursuing us, demanding our attention.
Now to this mix we add grief—an unprecedented level of difficult emotions. Soul-shattering. Unthinkable. Horrific. And, our primitive brains would have us think, unbearable.
So our primitive brains shift into overdrive, demanding that we hit the escape-button-of-choice like never before. We go on the run. We avoid. We react. We resist. We hold on to hope that, if we can stay on the run long enough, time will heal. And we wonder exactly how much time it will take.
My escape-button-of-choice was busy. At the time my husband passed away, I had a career that required significant travel. After days on the road, I came home to our ten acres that needed my attention and then I caught the next outbound plane. I was on the run for years, knowing that those emotions were just one step behind me, and fearing that they would overtake me.
A few years ago, I spoke to a wonderful person who was quite new to her grief. After her husband passed, she stayed busy with work. Later she retired and was busy with volunteer work and activities she enjoyed. It wasn’t until the pandemic removed her escape button that her feelings caught up with her. Her husband had passed nearly thirty years ago. She ran in fear for thirty years, and yet those feelings were all still waiting for her, demanding her attention.
Time, by itself, does not heal.
There is no true escape from the difficult feelings that profound loss dumps on our lives.
Reaching for an external solution to an internal problem simply does not work.
There is no such thing as speed-grieving, but there is a more efficient way, which is to process difficult emotions as we learned in episode 4.
So, if you’ve felt like a failure with every pound gained, dollar spent, and episode binged, please recognize that you are actually not failing.
In reality, your primitive brain is on overdrive, doing its job, keeping you seeking pleasure, avoiding pain, and doing it all on repeat, which is its way of being efficient. Your panicky primitive brain is running the show. Which is completely normal. But there is another option.
Facing your feelings is one of the most courageous things you can do in life, and especially in life after loss.
Next time your brain insists that you urgently reach for your escape-button-of-choice,
• ask yourself, What feeling am I not wanting to feel right now?
• Allow that urge to be there, without reaching for numbing agent, for just two minutes.
• During those two minutes, walk through the steps in episode 4 to process the emotion you’re feeling.
• After two minutes, decide whether you still want to reach for the buffer.
• Don’t expect perfection. It’s a journey.
Grieving is learning. Be kind to yourself as you learn. If you are judging yourself, you are not learning. Allowing yourself to learn this new reality is to love yourself. You deserve that love. Know that I believe in you and I’m here for you.
