If you’ve recently lost an animal companion, you may feel as though your brain isn’t working properly. Indeed, a common question from bereaved pet carers is, “Am I losing my mind?”
Feeling forgetful, struggling to concentrate through the brain fog, restlessness, agitation, lack of focus, and ongoing confusion are all very common aspects of the grieving process.
Although grief is an emotional experience, it also affects us physically and neurologically. Researchers now know that bereavement can influence memory, concentration, decision-making, sleep, appetite, and even our sense of who we are in the world.
In other words, grief doesn’t just affect your heart. It affects your brain too.
Understanding why this happens won’t take away the pain of your loss, but it may help you be gentler with yourself during one of life’s most difficult experiences.
Your brain was built for attachment
We humans are social creatures (and, yes, that includes those of us who are introverts). Throughout our evolutionary history, forming close bonds with others helped us survive.
Researchers such as John Bowlby, the founder of attachment theory, argued that our brains are wired to seek connection and proximity to those who help us feel safe. When we lose someone important to us, that attachment system reacts.
Although attachment theory was originally developed to explain human relationships, many grief researchers now recognise that the same principles apply to the bonds we form with animals.
After all, your brain doesn’t measure a relationship by species. It doesn’t care whether the individual you loved had two legs, four legs, feathers, fur, scales, or a tail.
What matters is the role they played in your life.
Your animal companion may have been the first face you saw every morning and the last one you saw every night. They may have comforted you when you were sad, celebrated your return home every day, shared your routines, and provided a sense of safety and companionship.
When a bond like that is broken, it makes sense that your brain would react.
Why grief can make you feel like you’re losing your mind
Many bereaved people experience what is sometimes called “grief brain“.
This is when you may find yourself:
- Forgetting appointments
- Losing things
- Struggling to focus
- Reading the same sentence repeatedly
- Feeling detached or unreal
- Finding it difficult to make decisions
- Becoming overwhelmed by simple tasks
Experiences like these can be frightening, especially if you’ve always seen yourself as organised, capable or practical.
Neurologist Lisa Shulman became interested in grief after the death of her husband and has written extensively about the profound disorientation many bereaved people experience. Although the world remains recognisable, it can suddenly feel unfamiliar and strangely difficult to navigate.
Part of the reason for this may lie in how the brain responds to attachment and loss.
From an evolutionary perspective, the loss of a loved one represents a significant threat. Human beings evolved in social groups where close relationships were often essential to survival. Losing a key attachment figure could mean losing protection, companionship, shared resources or help raising children. Because of this, our brains appear to treat separation and loss as events that require immediate attention.
Researchers have found that grief activates areas of the brain associated with emotion, memory, attachment and threat detection (Shulman writes that “Grief is a normal protective process”). At the same time, the systems responsible for planning, organising, concentrating and decision-making may have fewer resources available to them, so they temporarily downsize.
In simple terms, your brain is focusing on the loss.
This doesn’t mean your brain is damaged or malfunctioning. In many ways, it may be doing exactly what it evolved to do. The difficulty is that while this response may once have helped our ancestors survive significant losses, it can leave modern grievers feeling exhausted, distracted and overwhelmed.
If you’ve been worried that you’re not coping well because you can’t think clearly, it may help to remember that grief itself demands an enormous amount of mental and emotional energy.
Why you keep expecting them to be there
One of the strangest aspects of grief is that part of you knows your animal companion has died or gone missing while another part seems unable to fully accept it.
You may find yourself listening for their footsteps in the hallway, expecting to hear them from another room, or glancing towards their favourite sleeping spot before reality catches up with you once again.
Many bereaved people describe moments when they think they have seen their companion out of the corner of their eye, only to realise a split second later that what they saw wasn’t possible.
Grief researcher Mary-Frances O’Connor suggests that this happens because the brain creates an internal map of our important relationships.
Over months and years, your brain learns where your companion is likely to be, what sounds they make, when they need feeding, where they sleep, and how they fit into the rhythm of your daily life. This learning becomes deeply embedded through repetition. Thousands upon thousands of ordinary interactions teach your brain what to expect from the world.
Then suddenly, everything changes.
The thinking part of your brain may understand immediately that your companion has died, but the attachment systems that have spent years expecting their presence cannot update overnight.
According to O’Connor, part of grieving involves repeatedly learning and relearning this new reality: “Grief is a heart-wrenchingly painful problem for the brain to solve, and grieving necessitates learning to live in the world with the absence of someone you love deeply, who is ingrained in your understanding of the world”.
Every time you expect your animal friend to be waiting by the door and discover they’re not there, your brain is gathering new information. Every time you instinctively reach for a dog’s lead or a cat’s toy, for example, or prepare to share a piece of food with them before remembering they’re gone, your brain is slowly adjusting its map of the world.
This is one reason why grief can feel so repetitive. We often assume that acceptance is something we achieve once and for all, but the brain appears to learn through countless small moments of correction.
Why grief comes in waves
If grief were simply a matter of understanding that someone has died, it would probably be much easier to navigate.
But grief is woven into memory, emotion, routine, habit and meaning.
You might be coping reasonably well one moment and then find yourself in tears because you discover a toy under the sofa, hear a familiar sound, or walk past a place you used to visit together. Many people experience a sudden surge of grief on anniversaries or significant dates, while others are caught off guard by seemingly random triggers.
This unpredictability can make it feel as though you’re moving backwards.
In reality, grief researchers suggest that these waves are often part of the brain’s ongoing process of adaptation and caused by fluctuations in stress hormones, neural pathways, and immune function.
Our memories are stored alongside sights, sounds, smells, emotions and experiences. When one of these connections is activated, it can bring a flood of associated memories and feelings to the surface. In some ways, this reflects just how integrated your animal companion was into your life.
The fact that grief resurfaces doesn’t mean you’ve failed to heal. More often, it’s a testament to how much the relationship mattered.
Is grief part of healing?
For a long time, grief was often viewed as something that needed to be overcome, resolved or left behind. This wasn’t helped by the idea that there are five clear stages of grief (here’s a link to our article about why it’s fine to ignore this!)
Increasingly, researchers see things differently.
Although grief is undeniably painful, many now view it as a natural adaptation process. The brain is trying to make sense of a world that no longer matches the one it expected.
This process can be messy. It can involve disbelief, yearning, sadness, anger, confusion, guilt and countless other emotions. Yet these experiences may all serve a purpose as the brain gradually adjusts to the reality of the loss.
Just as physical pain alerts us to an injury that requires attention, emotional pain may draw our attention to a profound change in our lives. Grief encourages us to process what has happened, revisit memories, reconsider our assumptions about the future and slowly work out how to live in a world that has been altered by the absence of someone we love.
Of course, this doesn’t mean that loss is good for us, but it certainly seems to be something that we are hardwired to cope with, however long it takes.
Certainly, many psychologists and neurologists now believe that grief itself may be part of the way human beings have evolved to survive loss. After all, loss has always been part of the human experience. We are a long-living species that forms deep attachments, and with those attachments comes the certainty that, sooner or later, we will have to say goodbye.
What resilience research tells us
One of the questions many bereaved people ask is whether they will ever feel normal again.
Psychologist George Bonanno has spent decades studying grief and resilience, and his findings challenge some of the assumptions many of us have about bereavement.
Popular culture often portrays grief as something that inevitably leaves people permanently broken or unable to function. Yet Bonanno’s research suggests that most people are far more resilient than they realise.
This doesn’t mean that they don’t suffer. It doesn’t mean they don’t cry, struggle or miss the person or animal they have lost.
What it means is that most people gradually adapt.
The ability to adapt after loss appears to be one of the strengths of our species. Given how common bereavement has been throughout human history, it makes sense that we would evolve ways of surviving it.
Importantly, resilience isn’t the same thing as “getting over” someone.
Many bereaved people continue to think about their loved one every day. They continue to miss them and continue to feel moments of sadness years later.
What changes is not necessarily the love or the bond but the brain’s ability to carry that loss alongside the rest of life.
For most people, grief eventually becomes less all-consuming. New experiences, relationships, routines and memories begin to grow around it. The loss remains part of their story, but it no longer dominates every moment.
The key thing to remember is that grief doesn’t have a time limit; it doesn’t even have an endpoint, but we are equipped to experience loss and still move forward.
Whatever you’re feeling right now, know that you are not alone.
Shailen and The Ralph Site team
The Ralph Site, non-profit pet loss support