You can be steady and functional enough to move through the day.
You respond to messages. You hold conversations. You complete what needs to be done.
And then something small happens.
A sentence.
A glance.
An object you were not expecting to notice.
And the reaction feels disproportionate.
Your eyes swell up.
Your chest tightens.
Your heart rate rises.
Your body shifts before you have had time to think.
This can feel confusing, even unsettling.
Why did that affect me so much?
Why so suddenly?
It can begin to feel as if something inside you is unpredictable or unreliable.
But what is happening here is neither random nor a sign of instability.
It is the brain prioritising what matters most.
The brain does not just remember, it assigns significance
When we lose someone, the brain does not only store memories of them.
It encodes them as emotionally significant. Deeply significant. (Of course!)
Memories can fade or become less accessible over time.
Emotional significance does not follow the same rules.
The person you lost becomes embedded within systems of the brain that are designed to detect relevance, guide attention, and shape your responses to the world.
One of these systems involves the amygdala.
Often simplified as a “fear centre,” the amygdala is more accurately understood as a detector of emotional salience. It continuously scans incoming information for what matters, what is meaningful, what deserves attention.
After loss, anything associated with the person becomes highly salient.
Not consciously.
But neurologically.
Why the reaction happens so fast
When something in your environment resembles your person, even loosely, the brain responds quickly.
A tone of voice.
A phrase.
A familiar object.
The amygdala flags it immediately.
This happens through what neuroscientists describe as a fast, subcortical pathway:
Sensory input → thalamus → amygdala
This route is designed for speed, not reflection.
It allows the brain to respond before the thinking centres, particularly the prefrontal cortex, have had time to interpret the situation.
This is why the reaction can feel so immediate.
And why it can feel so physical.
Your heart rate shifts.
Your breathing changes.
Your muscles tighten.
The body moves first.
Only afterwards does the prefrontal cortex begin to make sense of what has just occurred. By then, the response is already underway.
This is not the same as grief “waves”
It is important to distinguish this from the broader experience of grief coming in waves over time. (see last week’s article)
Those waves reflect the brain’s gradual process of updating reality, of integrating the absence of someone who was once deeply present.
What happens here is more precise.
A moment where the brain identifies something as emotionally significant and activates a full response in an instant.
From the outside, it can appear disproportionate.
Internally, it is a system doing exactly what it was designed to do.
Prioritise what matters most.
A different way to meet these moments
The instinct is often to question the reaction.
To analyse it.
To push it away. To judge it
To try to regain control as quickly as possible.
But there is a quieter, more stabilising approach.
To recognise the experience for what it is.
“This is activation.”
A simple sentence that introduces just enough structure into the moment.
Naming the experience engages higher-order brain regions, including the prefrontal cortex, which can help regulate the intensity of the response.
Not by removing the emotion.
But by creating a small amount of space around it.
From there, the body can begin to settle.
A slower exhale.
A softening of the shoulders.
A return of awareness to the present environment.
Just enough to remain with the experience without being fully overtaken by it.
The intensity reflects the depth of the bond
These moments are often interpreted as signs of regression.
As if something is not resolving in the way it should.
But intensity, in this context, is not a sign of being stuck.
It is a reflection of how deeply the brain has encoded the relationship.
The stronger the attachment, the more sensitive the system remains to anything that resembles it.
This is the architecture of connection.
Understanding this does not remove the experience.
But it changes the way you meet it.
And that shift, over time, can make even the most sudden moments of grief feel more navigable.
For those who experience these intense and often disorienting responses, I explore this process in more depth through my work, in particular in my short self paced online course on grief triggers, that includes practical tools to regulate these moments as they arise in everyday life.
“When we acknowledge our grief and give it space, we transform suffering into meaning. Ignoring it doesn’t make it disappear , it makes it shape us in unconscious ways.” — Dr. Lisa M. Shulman From Before and After Loss