How I rebuilt attention, energy, and pleasure while living with loss
Grief doesn’t always arrive as a storm. Sometimes it seeps in quietly, rearranging the air around you. Months pass, years pass, and you realise the fog never really lifted, it just became the weather of your life.
For me, this fog felt like a numb hum behind everything. I could function, even work, but joy was a distant language. I forgot what curiosity felt like. My body moved through days on minimal energy, and my mind once sharp, seemed dulled, as if wrapped in cotton. I later learned that this isn’t just “emotional exhaustion.” It’s neurological.
The neuroscience of numbness
Mary-Frances O’Connor writes in The Grieving Brain that grief is a process of re-mapping, the brain must update its internal model of a world that no longer includes the person we love. While this adaptation unfolds, neural networks that regulate motivation, attention, and pleasure can temporarily go offline.
Chronic stress compounds this. Prolonged grief keeps the body’s threat systems switched on, heart rate elevated, digestion erratic, sleep disrupted. Energy is conserved for survival, not joy.
We might even label this numbness as laziness, but in truth, it is protection. My body wasn’t failing me, it was rationing its limited fuel. Neuroscientist Lisa Feldman Barrett calls this our “body budget.” When it’s depleted, even minor tasks feel monumental. It takes time, rest, and gentle consistency to replenish it.
Rebuilding steadiness from the ground up
When my energy was at its lowest, I decided to simplify everything. No grand transformation. Just five non-negotiables, small daily anchors that, over time, rebuilt my capacity for pleasure and focus.
- Sleep, nutrition, and hydration. I treated these like medicine. I stopped seeing fatigue as a moral failure and started seeing it as biology. Consistent sleep, whole foods, sufficient hydration were the most basic signals of safety to a fragile nervous system.
- Movement. In the beginning, that meant short walks and stretching. My body couldn’t do more. But movement, even minimal, reawakens the vagus nerve and signals to the brain, I am still here.
- Mindfulness and meditation. Ellen Langer’s research on mindful attention “noticing new things” helped me understand that awareness itself creates vitality. When I could observe my thoughts without judgment, I felt a subtle spaciousness return.
- Morning daylight. It sounds trivial, but exposure to natural light early in the day stabilises circadian rhythms, improving sleep and mood. Science backs what the soul already knows: light teaches the body that another day is possible.
- Nourishing company. Grief can make social energy scarce. Surrounding myself with gentle, grounded people felt like medicine for my nervous system.
These practices didn’t deliver instant results. But doing them again and again, slowly built steadier ground. I was teaching my body that life could be safe enough to feel again.
Relearning joy without guilt
Pleasure is complicated after loss. Julia Samuel describes this ambivalence as the “grief paradox”: the heart wants comfort, yet flinches when it comes.
Over time, I realised that joy doesn’t betray grief. It coexists with it. The same neural circuits that process pain are also capable of pleasure; they don’t cancel each other, they inform each other. Allowing small moments of delight like the smell of rain after a hot summer day, a child’s laugh, the texture of ripe fruit, giving a smile to a stranger… was how my brain relearned safety.
Sometimes the pleasure was subtle, almost imperceptible: the rhythm of my own footsteps, the quiet pulse of breathing. But each moment of attention was a vote for life.
Attention as an act of love
Psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi called attention “the most precious resource we have.” Where it goes, life flows. When grief hijacks attention, the world flattens. But when we begin to notice beauty again, we reclaim agency.
Dr. Rick Hanson’s research on neuroplasticity shows that deliberately taking in positive experiences for even ten seconds can strengthen neural pathways of resilience and contentment. It’s not about denying pain but expanding what the mind can hold.
That’s how joy returned for me: not as fireworks, but as a low hum of aliveness. It began with noticing, the soft edges of morning light, the warmth of a cup in my hands, the steadiness of breath after movement. Slowly, pleasure became a form of presence.
Joy as a companion, not a cure
Even now, years later, grief hasn’t disappeared. It has simply changed shape and become less of a fog, more of a quiet undertone. I’ve learned that healing doesn’t mean erasing pain. It means expanding around it until there’s space for other notes: energy, gratitude, even laughter.
People often tell me that my presence feels calm and grounding. I think it’s because I’ve practiced regulating through storms, breathing through chaos, finding stillness when nothing made sense. Regulation became my quiet devotion, a way of honouring both my losses and my life.
Joy, I’ve discovered, isn’t the opposite of grief. It’s what grows in the same soil when we stop trying to be who we were before, and let the light find us where we are now.