Posted on by johanne_marais

Allow yourself the freedom to grieve

“… In the end, maybe absence is just an invitation for something greater: a chance to leave the dead alone, to put new flowers in a vase. All this lack just leaves an opportunity to atone, to adore.” – @hammuraber

Life is a series of moments between birth and death. Across all cultures, the beauty of how life begins and ends is acknowledged differently. Death could be celebrated as a rebirth, or a divine returning. The constant is that life – at least as we experience it – begins and ends.

Life is also an amalgamation of cycles: cellular division from one cell to two to four and eight; infancy, adolescence, adulthood, and senescence. The great golden glow of sunlight, the 28-day moon dance, and the celebration of a year every 365.25 days all reiterates the cyclical nature of what it means to be alive.

To be in symbiosis is to be in association with another. In this breath, symbiosis is a constant reconstitution of matter: organisms borrowing molecules from each other; fungi doing the ever-important work of decomposing organic materials; new life sprouting from the substrate of what once was…  What an honour it is to be in association with the world around us – to be born and know that our fate is to return to the ground that facilitates our liveliness. I welcome the reality that this may be the ultimate freedom: not that death is a part of life, but rather life is a part of death.

Please do not think that I reduce the heartache and weight of loss to be light, or bearable, or even tolerable. Loss can feel cruel. You spend your time building a sandcastle made of memories, laying the most meaningful ones as bricks in towers where they are surely safe. Without warning or consideration, grief – with the impact of a tumultuous tide – disintegrates every instant of joy you have ever known. I imagine grief is where life and loss are in symbiosis.

Grief is embedded within the death of a loved one, but also in the change of seasons or feeling the end of a long-term friendship. I have lost stored data and grieved nostalgia’s absence in flipping through photographs. You may need to grieve the job you dreamed of but weren’t offered. Even as we adopt new behaviours, we may grieve for ourselves no longer being the last to leave a party. Mourning is akin to a mirror of celebration.

The neuroscience of grieving supports that grievance may be considered a type of learning. As you acknowledge how much adaptation is required in accepting one’s new reality, it makes sense that this is learning how to find peace in mourning. The attachment pattern needs to be reworked as the brain reconstitutes a new symbiosis with the subject and context of bereavement.  This adaption engages networks of the brain involved in self-soothing, emotional processing, remembering, and imagining the future.

Psychology derives that there are seven stages of grief. Though these criteria have value, I maintain that to stage grief implies that the experiences are not personalized, cyclic and profoundly overwhelming. Grieving is non-linear. It unravels without time, without a clear beginning or end. It washes over the griever in waves.

It is common practice to relish milestones like birthdays or victories. We may even celebrate freedom of movement, expression, choice… On paper, the South African constitution outlines these freedoms as human rights. Why then, do we often shy away from grieving transparently; rather, convinced that we must be our own lifejacket as we struggle to stay afloat?

I offer myself this: “Allow yourself the freedom to grieve.”

Create freedom for yourself around the why and how and when. Let the pragmatic thinker be soothed as you exercise your birth right to feel. Engage on the ritual of remembrance that comes with grieving, for active participation in honouring what you have lost yields the immortalization of love and memory. It births a capacity to recreate.

In grief’s ebb and flow, we are not free from temporary suffering. We are not free of emptiness. Rather, the freedom comes from feeling our grief completely – without time, without a clear beginning or end.

Posted on by johanne_marais

Polysomnography: A word long enough to put you to sleep!

So, how did you sleep?

I ask with a greater level of intrigue than simply for the commitment of connecting with you. I ask, because I care. I ask because I am a scientist.

A hundred or so years ago, what we knew about sleep was that we sleep to alleviate sleepiness. Considering that humans spend nearly a third of our lives in the sleeping state, it should come as no surprise that I (and many sleep researchers before me) remain unsatisfied with that deduction. The velocity of sleep research had been exponentiated by Hans Berger’s measurements of the brain’s electrical activity, depicted as waveforms, which he called an electroencephalogram.

Since the tool of electroencephalography (or, EEG) came to the slumber party in the 1920’s, sleep scientists began inquiring into the effects of sleep deprivation on the body, the role of sleep on cognitive power and, remarkably, observing that different stages of sleep occur in cycles through the night. All this is possible with the understanding of the brain as a battery – a component in a circuit that has a finite capacity for work with the inevitable outcome of needing a recharge.

When you are in a state of wakeful awareness, following demands of “to-do” lists and preparing for meetings, your brain may be functioning at maximum capacity. Daydreaming on a walk through a park during lunchtime requires the brain to be far less acutely involved in paying attention. As you read, meditate, or begin drifting off to dreamland, the output of your brain slows down sequentially and allows the initiation of sleep.

A person’s sleep and wakefulness is partially at the mercy of the usual “sleep-hygiene” factors:

  • timing and amount of caffeine intake
  • the stimulation of light exposure and humidity of the sleep environment
  • stressful events in one’s day
  • the body’s apparent chronobiology
  • what was eaten before bed…

The phenomenon of sleep is as unique to your body and lifestyle as the print on your fingertips!

Yet, there are numerous internal decision-makers for adequate or disturbed sleep – some of which the sleeper may not even be aware of.

I work as a collaborator with a team of remarkable clinicians at Ezintsha, a research centre located adjacent to Wits Health Sciences campus, for patients with illnesses like TB or HIV that drive major public health issues in South Africa. The HIV epidemic is currently rather well managed by the early-stage intervention and widespread distribution of antiretroviral therapies across South Africa. This follows nearly three decades of devastation. However, with the prolonged life expectancy and improved quality of life available to people living with HIV, epidemiologists observed the inflation of other devastating epidemics like hypertension, diabetes, metabolic syndrome, and heart attacks.

Cardiometabolic risk indicators like high blood pressure, sugar intolerance and cholesterol imbalances are on the rise, and researchers in HIV-related trials begin to engage with a new class of reported symptoms: those of obstructive sleep apnoea. Obstructive sleep apnoea describes the short-lived but repeated pauses in breathing during sleep, often indicated by snoring. This is frightening to both the patient and housemates who have heard the gasping snores that accompany the breathless event but fear not! Obstructive sleep apnoea is treatable.

So, why is this story important?

Sleep apnoea remains underdiagnosed in the general South African population, despite as many as 30% of people being at risk for this sleep-related breathing disorder. Its side effects include daytime sleepiness, chronic inflammation, reduced motivation, brain fog, changes in mood and of course a further rise in those nasty cardiometabolic risk factors. Cardiometabolic diseases are responsible for one out of every five deaths in South Africa. This is a public health crisis, which we can aim to mitigate with routine diagnostics for obstructive sleep apnoea.

Without the foundation of an EEG, an even more comprehensive sleep measurement tool would never have been possible. Cue, polysomnography! Polysomnography measures brainwaves in various sleep stages, but the addition of other physiological measurements like heart rate, chest and belly movement, blood oxygen levels and air moving through the nose opens the door to diagnosing obstructive sleep apnoea through overnight sleep observation – which is exactly what I do! Polysomnography tells the story of how we sleep – I am simply the reader.