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What if the grief you feel in your heart is also being carried by your nervous system and beyond,
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and showing up as migraine pain?
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Welcome to Migraine Heroes, a podcast for people living with chronic migraines with years of pain,
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misunderstanding and lack of answers. I'm Diane Ducarme. I've helped more than a thousand people
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reduce the burden of migraines and feel more in control. My mission in life? To help a million
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people. Each episode brings you grounded insight into what your body might be asking for and what
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can truly help. Just to keep you fully supported, this podcast is educational. For diagnosis or
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medication, always work with your doctor. Now take a breath and let's dive in. In this episode,
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you will learn why grief can affect your whole body and potentially change your migraine pattern,
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why your brain may still expect what you have lost to be there even when you consciously know it's
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gone, and how Eastern philosophy can help you move with grief rather than feeling pressured to simply
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get over it. Stay with me till the end because if there's one thing I hope this episode gives you,
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it's a little bit more kindness. And that is exactly why I wanted to be here with you today.
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So the reason why I'm writing this episode is because some of my loved ones are going right now
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through grief and I find it really hard to help them. And I was thinking about them and through
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empathy, my heart is also in a grief state. So that's my emotion of the moment, quite a
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little sadness. And when I speak of grief, I really mean it in a wide sense. Grief can come
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from losing a loved one, but it can also come from losing an animal companion, a dog, a cat,
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a life that has shared yours and become part of your family. We can grieve the end of a relationship,
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the departure of a partner, or the rupture of a love that once mattered deeply. We can also
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grieve a place, a home, a community, or a chapter of your life that you're leaving behind. Grief is not
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only about death, it's also about separation, it's about transition, it's about learning to
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live without something or someone that was woven into our lives. In my own case, this is the kind
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of grief I'm moving through and I will share more in the next episodes. So when you're grieving,
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people often ask you how you're doing emotionally. They may ask whether you're sad, whether you're
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coping, whether you're beginning to move on. But they do not always ask how your body doing. Are
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you sleeping? Are you eating? Did you lose weight? Is your throat tight? Does your chest feel heavy?
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Are your shoulders constantly raised? Are you exhausted even after doing almost nothing?
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And if you already live with migraine, you may notice something else. Your familiar migraine
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pattern suddenly changes. Perhaps attacks become more frequently. Perhaps they feel stronger.
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Perhaps they feel longer. Perhaps you survive several incredibly difficult days and then
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strangely the migraine arrives when everything finally became quiet. And this is important
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because grief is not simply an emotion floating somewhere above the neck. Grief is a whole body
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experience. There was a major review that was published in the Lancet in 2007, examined the
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health consequences of bereavement. And their review showed that bereavement is associated with
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measurable changes in physical and psychological health, particularly during the early period
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following a major loss. That does not mean that grief itself is a disease. It means that losing
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someone important represents an enormous adaptive demand on the human organism. Your life has
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changed. Your expectations have changed. Your routines may have changed. And your sense of
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safety may have changed. And your nervous system has to somehow accommodate for all of it. And
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modern science is also beginning to give us a much more sophisticated picture of grief itself.
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There was a recent systematic review that was published in Neuroscience and Biobehavioral
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Reviews that examined the growing body of structural and functional brain imagining
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research on grief and bereavement. And what emerged is not the discovery of a single grief
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center in the brain. It's quite the opposite. Grief appears to engage multiple interconnected
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systems involved in attachment, in emotion, in memory, but also in reward, in pain, in attention,
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and the regulation of the body. And researchers have observed associations involving areas
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including the amygdala, the hippocampus, and the regions of the prefrontal cortex, among others.
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And so the emerging picture is therefore of grief not as one isolated emotion, but as an experience
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capable of touching many of the systems through which we understand ourselves and our world.
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Now, researchers are also cautious. Much of the science is still young, and many studies
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are relatively small. And we still need far more longitudinal research following the same people
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over months and years to understand how the brain adapts through grieving and to distinguish
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changes associated with grief from factors that may have existed beforehand. That nuance is
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essential. Science is not telling us that researchers can place you inside a scanner
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and measure exactly how much grief you're carrying. It cannot tell us that one brain pattern represents
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three months of grief, while another represents six. Nor should ordinary grief be reduced to a
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neurological abnormality. But neuroscience is beginning to tell us something profoundly
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important. Loss is not merely an idea that the mind has to understand. It's a new reality that
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the brain and body have to learn. And perhaps one of the most beautiful ways of understanding this
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comes from another strand of grief neuroscience. There are psychologists and neuroscientists that
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are called Mary Frances O'Connor and Sarah Sealy, and they have proposed thinking about grieving
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partly as a form of learning. So this idea helps explain something that many grieving people
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intuitively understand, is that your conscious mind may know perfectly well what has happened,
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and yet another part of you continues to expect the world to be the way it was.
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And so for years, perhaps decades, your brain has been learning the presence of someone you love.
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It has learned this person exists, this person answers the phone, this person sleeps beside me,
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this person walks through that door, this person knows what I mean when nobody else does,
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this person will be there at Christmas, this person will grow older with me,
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this person is part of tomorrow. These are not simply thoughts. They are patterns,
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patterns that are built through thousands upon thousands of ordinary experiences. Every breakfast,
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every message, every familiar footstep, every disagreement, every embrace, every mundane
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Tuesday evening. And our brains are constantly learning patterns and making predictions about
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what comes next. And much of this happens outside conscious awareness. When someone
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becomes deeply woven into our lives, their existence becomes part of that predictive world,
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then loss occurs and reality changes suddenly. But the internal model built over years does not
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disappear suddenly with it. That may explain one of the strangest features of grief, the momentary
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expectation that the person will still appear. You reach for the phone, you hear something funny
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and instinctively think, I must tell them. You walk into a house and for a fraction of a second,
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you expect them to be there. You wake in the morning before remembering, you see someone
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across a crowded room whose movement resembles theirs, and your attention turns before conscious
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thought has caught up. And for one brief instant, the old world is still running, and then reality
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arrives again. They are not here. This can happen hundreds, perhaps thousands of times. And in that
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sense, grief may involve an extraordinary process of neurological and psychological updating.
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The brain has to encounter the changed world repeatedly before its expectations gradually
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begin to reflect it. Not because we have forgotten what happened, but because intellectual knowledge
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and deeply learned expectations are not necessarily the same thing. You can know something and still
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not yet have fully learned how to live inside it. This may also explain why grief can feel so
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exhausting. The grieving person is not simply feeling sad. They may be continually negotiating
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between two realities, the world the brain learned and the world that now exists. And again and again,
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those two worlds are going to collide, and gradually and often really painfully,
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unevenly, unpredictably, the brain begins to accommodate to the new one. This does not
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necessarily mean that the attachment disappears. In fact, contemporary grief research has moved
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considerably beyond the old assumption that healthy grieving requires completely letting
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go of the person who has died. The relationship can continue internally, in memories, in habits,
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in stories, in values, and the ways in which the person changed us. Even while the brain slowly
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learns that the physical relationship has changed. That's really difficult, as you can feel,
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speaking from lived experiences. You know, if you listen to prior podcasts, you will hear,
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I lost my godfather when I was seven, and then I lost my boyfriend when I was 17. And so,
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these are topics that are always, you know, somewhere inside of me, like inside of you,
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probably, today. Now, there's another dimension to this, and I thought I'd teach that to you.
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It's a bit intellectual, but it's quite interesting. It's that attachment is connected
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to motivational and reward systems in your brain. So, happy systems. And research into prolonged
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grief, in particular, has explored activity in neural systems associated with yearning,
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attachment, and reward. And so, there's another dimension to this. It's a bit intellectual,
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bear with me, a little bit nerdy, but it's quite interesting to understand. It helps process.
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It's that attachment is connected to motivational and reward systems in the brain. Research into
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prolonged grief, in particular, has explored activity in neural systems associated with
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yearning, attachment, and reward. And researchers have proposed that when we are bonded to another
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person, the brain does not represent that person merely as information. Their presence is
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motivational and emotional significance. We seek them, we respond to them, and we orient towards
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them. And that gives the word yearning a different meaning. Yearning is not simply excessive sadness.
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It may partly reflect an attachment system continuing to search for someone it has learned
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to seek. Perhaps this is why grief can feel sometimes so physical. You don't simply remember
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someone. You can feel drawn towards them. You can ache for them. You can momentarily search for them.
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And your whole organism seems to ask, where are you? And there's no satisfactory answer.
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And the emerging neuroscience therefore invites us to look at grieving with much greater compassion.
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When someone continues to reach mentally toward a person who's gone, when they momentarily forget,
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when an anniversary suddenly overwhelms them, or when a smell, a song, or a familiar street brings
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an apparently disproportionate wave of emotion, this does not necessarily mean they are failing
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to move on. Their brain may simply be encountering another piece of a world it once learned in the
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presence of that person, and learning painfully what that piece of the world means now.
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And importantly, like I was mentioning before, this framework should not be restricted only to
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death. Grievement is where much of the neuroscience has been conducted. So scientifically, we need to
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be careful about extending findings beyond the populations actually studied. But psychologically,
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the broader concept of loss is relevant to many forms of attachment. We can grieve a person who
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has died, but we can also grieve a dog or a cat whose footsteps once formed part of the rhythm
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of our home. We can grieve the departure of a partner who's still alive. We can grieve a marriage,
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a friendship, a community, a version of our family, a career, a home, a country, a future we had
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imagined. Sometimes we grieve a place. Now there's another way of understanding grief that is much
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older than neuroscience. Eastern philosophy has spent thousands of years contemplating a truth
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that modern life often encourages us to resist. Everything changes. People arrive and they leave.
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Bodies grow and decline. Children become adults. Homes are inhabited and then emptied.
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Relationships take form and sometimes they dissolve. Animals enter our lives, walk beside us
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for a precious stretch of time, and then they're gone. Seasons turn whether we're ready or not.
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And in Daoist philosophy this movement is not seen as failure of life. It is life. But we want to say
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stay. Remain exactly as you are. Let this house always be my house. Let this relationship remain
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what it was. Let this dog always sleep at the foot of my bed. Let this person continue answering the
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telephone. Let this version of my life continue indefinitely. And love makes that desire entirely
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understandable. But nature does not make that promise. The tree does not hold onto its leaves
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because they were beautiful. The tide does not remain on the shore because we loved the shape
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it made on the sand. And autumn does not negotiate with winter. The wisdom of the Dao is not that we
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should become indifferent. It's almost the opposite. Because something will not remain forever, we are
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invited to encounter it more completely while it's here. Impermanence does not make love meaningless.
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Impermanence makes love precious. In the Tao teaching there is a recurring image of return.
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Things flourish, change, and eventually return toward their root. One translation of chapter 16
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describes this return to the root as stillness. There's something profoundly confronting in that
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image. Grief often feels as though life has been interrupted. Eastern thought offers another
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possibility. Perhaps life has not been interrupted at all. Perhaps we have encountered one of its
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deepest rhythms. Arrival, attachment, flourishing, separation, and return. And then eventually
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something new. Not something that replaces what was loved. Something that grows besides memory.
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Buddhist philosophy approaches the same terrain through the idea of impermanence.
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Everything that arises through causes and conditions will change. This can initially
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sound bleak, but Buddhist teachers do not present impermanence merely as bad news.
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Without impermanence, a seed could never become a tree, and a child could never become an adult.
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Winter could never become spring. A wounded heart could never soften. Put it very simply, life is
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impossible without impermanence. We usually notice impermanence when it takes something from us.
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But impermanence also gives us almost everything we love. It allowed a stranger to become a friend.
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It allowed two people to fall in love. It allowed an empty house to become a home.
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It allowed a puppy to become the companion who followed you room to room.
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It allowed an unfamiliar city to become your place. Change created the attachment we are
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now grieving, and change is transforming it again. This does not mean we should be grateful
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for every loss. It means that love and loss are not opposites. They belong to the same movement.
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We grieve precisely because something mattered. Sometimes grief is love adapting to a new form.
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The person is no longer at the table, but remains in the sentence you still hear yourself saying.
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The dog is no longer beside the door, but your body remembers looking down before stepping outside.
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The partner has gone, but years of shared habits remain embedded in ordinary moments.
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The house has been sold, yet you can still walk through every room with your eyes closed.
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What disappears physically may continue psychologically, relationally and symbolically.
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Eastern traditions often use nature to help us understand this.
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And a Buddhist philosopher often speaks about the lotus in the mud.
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The beautiful lotus does not grow despite the mud. It grows from it.
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He used this image to describe how suffering can become material for understanding,
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compassion and love. This does not mean suffering is desirable. No one needs to romanticise grief.
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Mud is still mud. There are losses we would never have chosen. But what happens to us
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and what grows from what happens to us are not necessarily the same thing.
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Grief can deepen tenderness. It can rearrange priorities. It can make ordinary mornings
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precious. It can make us more aware of the people still sitting at our table.
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It can teach us that postponing love is a dangerous habit. It can make us notice the
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astonishing fragility of an ordinary day. Perhaps the Eastern response to grief is therefore not
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get over it, nor even let it go. It's closer to let it move. Let sorrow come when it comes.
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Let joy return without guilt when it returns. Let the memory eventually comfort. Let the old
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life recede. Let the new life arrive before you feel completely ready for it. Do not demand that
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the river stop. Some days grief feel like a storm. Some days like a tide. Some days like mist. Some
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days you may feel almost nothing. And then a smell, a song, a street, a corner or a familiar
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season will bring the entire landscape back. This is not necessarily regression. Nature moves in
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cycles too. Autumn returns. Rain returns. Certain flowers return. Perhaps grief does that as well.
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Not because we have failed to heal, but because love has memory. There is something I hope you
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can carry away from this episode. If you're grieving and your migraines have changed,
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please do not reduce your experience to I'm just too emotional. You are a biological human being
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responding to loss. Your sleep may change. Your appetite may change. Your nervous system may
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change. Your routines may change. Your pain threshold may change. And healing does not
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mean pretending the person, the relationship, the identity or future you lost did not matter.
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Sometimes healing begins with recognizing of course this affected me. And perhaps instead
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of demanding that your body return immediately to the person you were before the loss,
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you can begin asking a gentler question. What does my body need while I learn how to live
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this new reality? And today I'm not going to close with my usual sentences.
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I'm just going to close with all my love.
