After pregnancy loss, bereaved parents may find that their ability to concentrate, process information or remember conversations is different from usual.
They may ask the same question more than once, lose track of a conversation, or find that information they would normally take in easily simply isn’t sticking. They might not take much in at all.
These changes can be unsettling and confusing for bereaved parents.
Research into grief and the brain helps us understand some of the reasons this can happen. It also gives practitioners useful insight into how we can adapt the way we communicate and provide care.
How Grief Affects the Brain and Body
Grief isn’t only an emotional experience. It also involves changes in the brain and body.
Research into bereavement has identified changes across a number of biological systems, including the endocrine, immune, autonomic nervous, and cardiovascular systems. These changes can affect sleep, energy, concentration and other aspects of physical and cognitive functioning.
Mary-Frances O’Connor, a neuroscientist at the University of Arizona and author of The Grieving Brain, has spent more than two decades researching what happens in our brains during bereavement. Her work helps us understand the neurological changes that occur as we adapt to a world that has been changed by loss.
Grief is our own unique inner experience of a loss. Mourning is how we express and respond to that loss outwardly, and involves a process of adaptation. This includes neurological adaptation as the brain adjusts to a changed reality, learning, over time, to navigate a world in which our person or baby is no longer there.
Understanding these changes shouldn’t reduce grief to biology. It gives us another way to understand what a bereaved parent may be experiencing, and can help us think differently about how we communicate, provide information, and plan care.
Also read: Postpartum Psychosis & Perinatal Loss: What Practitioners Need to Know
How Grief Affects Brain Function
Research into bereavement has identified changes in brain activity, connectivity, and structure, including networks involved in cognitive control, emotional processing and reward. These changes may affect how we concentrate, process information, make decisions and form memories.
O’Connor’s research helps us understand why these changes can affect everyday functioning. When the brain is processing the emotional and physical demands of bereavement, attention and memory may not work in the way they usually do. This can make it harder to take in, process and retain new information.
Bereavement can also affect the body’s stress-response and autonomic nervous system. Research into grief, the brain and body has found changes in measures such as heart rate, blood pressure, and cortisol, particularly during early bereavement. These physiological changes are also associated with disrupted sleep and may contribute to fatigue and difficulty concentrating.
Also read: Anger after Pregnancy Loss: What It May Be Communicating and How We Can Respond
What Bereaved Parents May Be Experiencing
Parents may experience difficulty with attention and memory, changes in emotional processing, disrupted sleep and fatigue. These effects can influence how they process conversations, make decisions and respond to what’s happening around them.
For mothers who have given birth, these changes can occur alongside the significant hormonal and physiological changes that accompany the postpartum period. Changes in reproductive hormones, physical recovery from pregnancy and birth, where applicable, and the physiological stress response may all be occurring at the same time as the neurological and physiological effects of bereavement. These overlapping changes may add to the cognitive and physical demands a bereaved parent is already experiencing.
O’Connor’s work offers another way of understanding the confusion and disorientation that can accompany grief. Our brains are continually building and updating an internal map of the people and relationships that make up our world. We learn where our loved ones are, what they look like, how they sound, and where we expect them to be in space and time.
Loss disrupts that internal map. A bereaved parent can know cognitively that their baby has died, while still having deeply learned expectations that their baby will be there. This mismatch can contribute to the intense yearning and searching that can accompany grief, and may help explain experiences such as thinking we have seen the person we have lost, expecting to find them somewhere, or momentarily experiencing sensations associated with their presence.
This disruption can also contribute to what many bereaved parents describe as brain fog, difficulty concentrating, losing their train of thought, forgetting information or feeling unable to process things as they normally would.
The brain needs time to develop a new map of a world in which the baby is no longer physically present. This isn’t a failure to understand the reality of the loss. It’s part of the process of adapting to it. Our brains need to make a new map. And that takes time.
Understanding all of this gives us a broader picture of what bereaved parents may be experiencing. It helps us recognise that seemingly contradictory experiences such as knowing the baby has died while still expecting them to be there can coexist. It can also help us understand confusion, disorientation, brain fog, difficulty concentrating, changes in emotional responses and the physical effects of bereavement as part of a complex interaction between the brain and body. These experiences may persist while the brain adjusts to the reality of the loss.
Also read: How to Support Bereaved Parents Who Blame Themselves after Pregnancy Loss
What This Means for Our Practice
Understanding the relationship between grief and the brain can change how we pace care, how we interpret behaviour, and how we communicate with bereaved families.
Slow down and expect to repeat things
A bereaved parent who has difficulty retaining what was said at an appointment may be experiencing difficulty processing and storing new information.
Allow more time where circumstances permit, return to important information across multiple contacts, and check understanding rather than assuming information has been retained.
Put important information in writing
Where possible, provide written information that parents can return to later, including what has happened, what happens next, appointments, contact details and practical options.
Leaflets, written summaries and clear follow-up information reduce that amount parents need to remember at a time when processing and memory may be affected.
Prioritise rather than overload
More information isn’t always more helpful.
Consider what the parent needs to know now, what can wait, and whether some explanations, choices or decisions can be revisited at another contact. Breaking information into manageable parts can reduce unnecessary cognitive demands.
Repeat and reinforce key information
Important information may need to be communicated more than once.
Consistent messages across the team and across different contacts are particularly important when several practitioners are involved. Clear documentation of key conversations, decisions and plans can also reduce the need for parents to repeatedly explain what has happened or rely on their own memory to communicate this.
Follow up
A follow-up contact can provide an opportunity to revisit information, answer questions that have emerged later and clarify what happens next.
This might be a planned conversation, a phone call, written information or another agreed point of contact. Recognising that information given at one appointment may not be fully accessible to the parent until later is an important part of planning care.
Check understanding without making it a test
“Do you understand?” can be difficult to answer when someone is overwhelmed.
A more useful approach may be to ask, for example, “Just so I know I’ve explained that clearly, can you tell me what you understand will happen next?” This gives us an opportunity to identify what needs to be clarified or repeated.
Acknowledge the physical alongside the emotional
Grief affects the body as well as the brain. Asking a bereaved parent about sleep, appetite, energy and physical wellbeing recognises the physiological dimensions of bereavement alongside the emotional experience.
For mothers who have given birth, this may also need to be considered in terms of postpartum physical recovery and hormonal changes.
Recognise yearning as part of the brain’s adaptation to loss
Yearning for a baby who has died can be an intense part of grief.
O’Connor’s work helps explain how the brain’s expectations about the people who belong in our world can persist even when we know cognitively that they have died. Yearning, searching and moments of expecting the baby to be there can be understood as part of this process of adaptation.
Understanding this can help us respond to yearning without trying to redirect or minimise it.
Understand that adaptation takes time
The brain doesn’t immediately develop a new map of a world changed by loss. This adaptation unfolds over time.
Our role is to provide care that recognises what bereaved parents may be experiencing, and reduce unnecessary demands on them while they adjust to a changed reality.
Also read: How We Can Strengthen Support for Families Experiencing Pregnancy Loss
Deepening Your Practice
Understanding grief and the brain is one part of providing effective, grief-informed care. Putting this knowledge into practice develops through learning, reflection, and experience.
Supporting Families Through Pregnancy Loss and Infant Death is our live online education series for practitioners who want to strengthen their knowledge and skills in perinatal loss and bereavement care.
The series covers grief literacy, companioning, communication, cultural and systemic influences on grief, ritual and remembrance, postpartum recovery following loss, and professional sustainability. It is open to practitioners across healthcare, therapeutic, community, and wellbeing settings.
If you’d like to join us, you can book your place in the November 2026 series here.
Also read: Men and Miscarriage: Understanding Fathers’ Grief after Pregnancy Loss
People Also Ask
Does grief actually change the brain?
Yes. Research on grief and the brain has identified differences in brain activity, connectivity and structure in people experiencing bereavement. Findings involve networks associated with emotion regulation, cognitive control and attachment, although the precise neurological mechanisms of grief are still being studied.
Much of this research comes from general bereavement populations rather than pregnancy loss specifically. It gives us useful insight into how grief can affect the brain and body, but it doesn’t provide a simple neurological explanation for every experience of grief.
Can grief cause brain fog or memory problems in bereaved parents?
Bereavement can affect concentration, attention and memory, particularly during acute grief. This can make it harder to take in new information, follow a conversation or remember what was discussed. People commonly describe this experience as feeling like ‘brain fog’.
For practitioners, this has practical implications. Important information may need to be written down, repeated and revisited rather than relying on a single conversation.
Is grief after pregnancy loss different from other grief, at a brain level?
We don’t yet know. There is very little neuroimaging research examining grief following pregnancy loss, and the existing research is limited to specific circumstances.
There is also evidence that pregnancy itself involves substantial changes in the maternal brain, including changes in grey matter, cortical thickness and white matter.
This raises important questions about how pregnancy loss may interact with the neurological and physiological changes already underway during pregnancy and the transition to parenthood. However, this remains an area for further research rather than an established mechanism.
How long can grief-related cognitive changes last?
There is no fixed timeline. Difficulty concentrating, remembering information or processing conversations may be particularly noticeable during acute grief, but experiences vary considerably between individuals and can change over time.
Persistent or worsening difficulties should not automatically be attributed to grief. Sleep disruption, physical recovery, medication, mental health difficulties and other factors may also affect concentration and memory and may warrant further assessment.
This is why clear communication, appropriate onward referral and follow-up are important. If a parent’s presentation changes, difficulties persist, or there are concerns about their physical or psychological wellbeing, it is important to look beyond grief alone and consider whether further assessment or support is needed.
References
Demarchi, L., Pawluski, J. L., Bosch, O. J. (2021). The brain oxytocin and corticotropin-releasing factor systems in grieving mothers: What we know and what we need to learn. Peptides, 143. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.peptides.2021.170593
Evstigneev, R., et. al. (2026). Grief and bereavement: A pre-registered systematic review of neuroimaging studies. Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews, 182, 106535. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neurobiorev.2025.106535
Kersting, A., et. al. (2009). Neural activation underlying acute grief in women after the loss of an unborn child. Am J Psychiatry, 166(12), 1402-10. https://doi.org/10.1176/appi.ajp.2009.08121875
O’Connor, M.-F. (2019). Grief: A brief history of research on how body, mind, and brain adapt. Psychosomatic Medicine, 81(8), 731 – 738. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6844541/
O’Connor, M.-F. (2022). The grieving brain: The surprising science of how we learn from love and loss. HarperOne.
Statharackos, N. (2025). Unraveling the neurobiology of grief: Insights into brain and behavior-narrative review. Brain Science Advances, 11(3). https://doi.org/10.26599/BSA.2025.905001
