Grief Brain and the Practice of Doing Something Anyway

Picture a long stretch where nothing gets written. Not a day or two, but weeks, maybe a month. One person who works in grief support recently found herself there, sorting through a childhood home in preparation to sell it, while also carrying a string of other losses that year — not deaths, thankfully, but losses that landed harder than expected and kept her in a fog longer than she wanted to admit.

None of this means hope is gone. She has walked through this kind of darkness before and knows, rationally, that it lifts. She has survived it once, and again, and will again tomorrow. But knowing that doesn't make the darkness feel any less like it's filling every breath. Believing things will improve and feeling like they will improve are two very different states. And because working in mental health means constantly picking apart your own thoughts, moods, and behavior, she had plenty of time to examine exactly why some days refuse to feel survivable:

• You can know one thing and feel the opposite at the same time. It's maddening, but it's real.
• As writer Jenny Lawson puts it, depression lies. It tries to erase what you know to be true and replace it with a hollow feeling instead. It can feel like moving through a long, curved, pitch-dark tunnel — you trust there's an end somewhere, but you can't see it, and depression keeps insisting there isn't one.
• Believing nothing will help can turn into its own trap: you assume nothing will work, so you stop trying anything, so nothing improves, which only confirms the belief, which keeps you frozen — around and around it goes.

Writing got put off for days, then weeks, maybe a full month. Here's roughly what was going on internally before finally sitting down to write something today:

Thoughts like these make sitting down to write feel almost pointless — and make a few hours lost to reruns look much more appealing. But here she was, typing anyway. You might notice that typing isn't the same as saying anything meaningful. Fair point. This is less about the words themselves and more about proving that something got done. Sometimes the only real choice is between doing SOMETHING and doing NOTHING, and you pick something and hope.

What almost happened

What actually happened

That second drawing shows a smile. There wasn't actually a smile involved. But there was typing, and typing counts.

So how did that shift happen?

To be clear, there were plenty of other days over recent weeks where the reruns won instead. What made today different was simply forcing the typing to happen, regardless of how awful it felt. Grief and depression can build an inertia that seems impossible to push against. Even two hours earlier, sitting down to type felt unthinkable. Even mid-sentence, finishing something worth publishing still feels unlikely. But the goal was to chip away at that heavy, stubborn inertia rather than let it win outright.

Okay, but how exactly?

That's the real question, and there's no tidy answer. What follows is roughly what behavioral mental health approaches suggest, since it's worth knowing. These are reminders that get pulled out often when grief brain shows up. Some days they help, as they did today. Other days they don't, as was true yesterday. Still, as the old saying goes, knowing is half the battle.

One approach, behavioral activation, would suggest building a list of things that have helped even a little in the past. These can be big or small — nothing needs to be complicated. Something as basic as taking a shower counts if it genuinely helps. If you want to take it further, you can rank each item by how hard it is to do and how much it tends to lift your mood. The idea is to actually do these things when your mood drops, either on a set schedule or the moment you notice you need one. It isn't effortless, but having the list ready in advance makes a difference. The ranking can also serve as a nudge: even on a rough day, you can usually manage something rated a 1 or 2 on the effort scale. Another writer covering grief has explored this idea in more depth, but the short version is this: you don't have to feel better before doing something — sometimes doing something is what lets you feel better.

Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) offers a different angle: notice the unpleasant thoughts running through your head, and go ahead and do the thing anyway. That's a hard shift to make, because we're used to treating our thoughts as instructions — we feel and act based on what they tell us. ACT instead asks you to simply observe a thought, note what it's making you feel or discouraging you from doing, and if it's feeding the inertia, respond with: this is just a thought, and it doesn't control what I do. You can hold the thought I'm in no state to write, and whatever comes out will be garbage and still decide: those are only thoughts, and I'm opening the laptop regardless. You can choose to type. You can choose something over nothing. Even while writing this, the thought kept surfacing: this is going nowhere, you'll end up scrapping it. And the honest reply was: yep, probably — but that's just a thought, maybe even a lie, and it doesn't get to stop the typing.

What sets these approaches apart from strategies focused on processing emotion from the inside is that they work from the outside in: no matter what you're thinking or feeling, you can still choose to change your behavior. It's difficult, it can feel impossible when grief brain or depression is loud, but sometimes it actually works.

How do you find the motivation to act when you can't even picture finding the motivation to act?