鈥淭IS better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all,鈥� wrote Alfred Tennyson. Try telling that to someone in the throes of grief. 鈥淚t鈥檚 so awful and so debilitating. People don鈥檛 eat and they don鈥檛 sleep, and they don鈥檛 function,鈥� says . Aside from the overwhelming emotional pain and sadness, grief is bad for our physical health too: those who have been recently bereaved are .
Evolution is famously all about survival (see 鈥淲hy does evolution happen?鈥�). So if grief is so debilitating that it leaves us unable to cope with life, why did we evolve this trait? 鈥淚t doesn鈥檛 make that much sense for people to be so dramatically impaired for so long,鈥� says Nesse.
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One popular explanation starts with childhood. When we are young and vulnerable, forming strong attachments and staying close to others is a smart survival move. The reactions of children separated from their mothers 鈥� an intense 鈥減rotest鈥� phase, followed by a withdrawn period known as 鈥渄espair鈥� 鈥� are also seen in grieving adults. More recently, . When grieving people think about the deceased, a reward centre in the brain associated with social bonding lights up.
The protest phase of loss is also characterised in behaviours like grieving people needing to find or see the body, thinking they have seen the deceased alive and even believing in ghosts.
This 鈥渟earching鈥� behaviour for someone you know is dead might sound pointless, but it may have been different in our evolutionary past. 鈥淚f you鈥檙e a hunter-gatherer and your 3-year-old disappears, you鈥檙e not just going to say, 鈥楾oo bad鈥�, you鈥檙e going to go looking for that 3-year-old for days and weeks and months,鈥� says Nesse. 鈥淵ou鈥檙e not going to give up.鈥�
More counter-intuitively, the withdrawn despair phase may also serve a purpose, by disconnecting us from the past and helping us to seek out a new future. 鈥淚n evolutionary terms, there would be no value in somebody being celibate for the rest of their life,鈥� says . From grieving our loss, we move on to cutting our losses.
Other factors give grief more survival value than might immediately be apparent. A mother whose child drowns after she lets it play too close to the surf, for example, will never make the same mistake again, says Nesse 鈥� and nor will any other parent who shares that grief. Grieving behaviours, such as crying, can help to elicit support from others at a time when we are alone, with clear survival benefits. Social bonding en masse might also explain outpourings of communal grief for public figures few people have ever met, such as Princess Diana, says Wilson.
In which case, we can turn the question around and ask why, if grief brings such survival benefits, don鈥檛 we all grieve equally? In a , Nesse and his colleagues found that about a third of people don鈥檛 experience much grief.
He believes that is simply because evolution is a blunt instrument. 鈥淣atural selection shapes things that are jury-rigged at best. It鈥檚 not a fine-tuned system,鈥� he says. In much the same way, just because some people experience chronic pain doesn鈥檛 mean that pain has no survival value.
Not everyone buys the idea of grief鈥檚 evolutionary benefits. Psychologist , UK, has argued that it is an accidental 鈥渆piphenomenon鈥�, resulting from bonding behaviours, that natural selection hasn鈥檛 found a way to ditch.
The ultimate test of this idea would be to invent a drug that did away with grief altogether. If it were an epiphenomenon, the drug would have no downsides. Nesse suspects that this would be about as wise as inventing a drug that did away with all pain: people who don鈥檛 experience pain are normally dead by the time they reach their 30s, he says. Would he take such a drug? The answer to that is a decided 鈥渘o鈥�.
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