Holidays After Loss

Today’s edition lands where celebration and grief often meet. As weeks and years turn over, many people quietly measure time by who is missing, not just by what’s planned next. This is about recognizing that love and loss sit side by side, and learning how to let both have space, especially around meaningful dates and endings.

Today’s Quick Overview:

🔬 Science Spotlight: How personalized algorithms can shrink your learning…
🗣 Therapist Corner: Coping with loss during the first season without them…
📰 Mental Health News: Illnesses surge, mental health a key driver; AI safety leadership shifts…
🫂Community Voices: Letting go of self-blame on low days…

Let's check in with what inner season you're in right now:

What season do you meet Friday? Spring, celebrating new growth? Summer's satisfied fullness? Autumn's peaceful release? Or winter, already resting? Spring weekends explore, summer weekends play, autumn weekends reflect and release, winter weekends restore without agenda.

Grief brings up emotions we're told we shouldn't feel. Which one is hardest for you to allow or express?

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The First Holiday Season Without Them: Navigating Grief During Celebrations Answered by: Jennifer Angelone, LMHC

You can't exactly place your finger on it… you've hung up the decorations, you've baked all the treats, and you've even pulled out all the holiday sweaters. Something just isn't right. You've done all the things you normally would. Until the day actually comes and you realize… this is the first time without them.

Understanding Grief

As human beings, we are going to experience all kinds of losses throughout our life. Some loss is tangible (a valuable item, a person, or an animal), and some losses are intangible (divorce, loss of a job, loss of a kind of security, any kind of relational separation). No matter the kind, it feels real. Beyond the emotional anguish and sadness, we could also experience difficulty eating or sleeping. Cognitively, we may find it is harder to concentrate or make decisions. We call this grief.

An emotion characterized by a profound sense of sorrow or longing, grief can be experienced in so many ways. No one person feels grief like any other person, although we seem to have dedicated 5 "stages" to it. You know the ones—Depression, Anger, Denial, Bargaining, Acceptance. I caution individuals from using those as benchmarks. Grief is not linear, nor does any one of those feelings result in the following one. Unfortunately, grief isn't something that ever really goes away—it's just felt differently throughout the course of the year.

Holidays, however, are stressful enough, and a lot of people rely on traditions for a sense of regulation, making grief very pronounced during this time. Our brains thrive on predictability, consistency, and reliability. But what happens when something is off, when someone isn't there anymore, or those long-held traditions have to change?

Managing Your Feelings

The first step is to manage your feelings around the grief itself. I tell my clients, "whatever feeling comes up, let them." If one day you are sad, be sad. If the next you are angry, be angry. It's important to honor those feelings because it means you're healing. Much like a bruise that gets all shades of ugly before it heals, so too do our feelings when we've lost someone or something. You don't have to cope with these feelings alone, but you can if you choose to. Allowing yourself to move through those feelings, without judgment, helps you get to the next step.

Navigating Traditions

Next, you have to decide what traditions you want to keep, and what may have to change to fit the situation. This means you have to figure out what you have control over and what sorts of things you don't. Once you do, it's important to execute that plan, even if there is pain in doing so. This may mean that people celebrating the holidays with you will notice and have their own thoughts and feelings about it. That's okay. You could give your guests, family, and friends a heads-up to ease this process a little. At the end of the day, everyone is there to celebrate, and when it's the first time, you don't have to expect that it'll go entirely as planned because, the truth is, you've never had to do it this way before.

Final Thoughts:

And remember—there's always next year.

Jennifer Angelone is a licensed Mental Health Clinician in Massachusetts providing individual, sibling, and family telehealth counseling. She has been in the mental health field for almost 20 years and specializes in Medical Trauma and Anxiety, Depression, PTSD, and OCD. She most often uses Mindfulness, Somatic, and Expressive Interventions, as well as a solution-focused and strength-based perspective. Connect with through the following links:

Personalized Algorithms Make You Confidently Wrong, Even When You're Learning From Scratch

The Research: Psychologists studied 346 people and found that when personalized algorithms curated which information participants saw, mimicking how YouTube or streaming services recommend content, learners explored significantly less material, formed distorted conclusions, and became more confident when they were wrong than when they were right. The study used a completely fictional learning task to ensure no one had prior knowledge.

Those following the algorithm viewed content in narrow, selective patterns. When tested on new examples, they frequently misclassified them but expressed high confidence in their incorrect answers, demonstrating that limited algorithmic exposure created false certainty about incomplete understanding.

Why It Matters: This research reveals a disturbing paradox: the systems designed to personalize your learning may actually sabotage your ability to learn accurately. When an algorithm decides what you see, you naturally assume you're getting a representative sample of reality. You draw broad conclusions, missing entire categories of knowledge without realizing they exist.

Try It Today: Recognize that personalized algorithms are engagement optimization systems that may be undermining your learning. When researching a new topic, actively resist the algorithm's suggestions. Search for contradictory viewpoints or content the algorithm isn't pushing toward you. Use multiple platforms or seek non-algorithmic sources like libraries or expert recommendations.

I can accept that grief doesn't follow a schedule or resolve on command. Some days will be harder than others, and that doesn't mean I'm doing it wrong.

Think of one moment recently when you felt lighter, even briefly, despite carrying loss. Those glimpses of calm are part of the process too, not a betrayal of what you've lost.

It's okay to have good days and then suddenly struggle again. Grief isn't linear, and moving forward doesn't mean leaving your loss behind.

Check in with your grief honestly today. Ask yourself: "What wave am I in right now?" Don't try to change it. Just name it and allow it to be exactly what it is without judgment.

“I Stopped Treating My Bad Days Like Personal Failures"

Shared by Chris

I used to spiral whenever I had a bad day. Woke up feeling low? I'd immediately start diagnosing myself. Was my depression coming back? Did I mess up my sleep schedule? Should I be taking different vitamins? What was I doing wrong? Good days meant I was doing everything right. Bad days meant I'd failed at being a functional person.

My therapist finally asked me if I thought my houseplants were broken when they looked a little droopy some days. I said no, obviously, plants just have off days depending on water, light, temperature, whatever. She raised her eyebrows at me. Oh.

I'd been holding myself to this standard where I was supposed to feel good and productive every single day, and any deviation meant something was fundamentally wrong with me. But that's not how bodies or brains work. Some days you just feel off. No reason. No fix needed.

Now, when I wake up feeling blah, I don't panic and try to solve it. I just acknowledge it. "Huh, today's kind of a low day." Then I move through it without making it mean something bigger. Bad days aren't failures. They're just Tuesdays sometimes. Or Thursdays. Whatever. They pass.

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Evening Reset: Notice, Write, Settle

Picture standing at the shoreline as waves roll in. Some barely reach your ankles; others crash into your chest and knock you off balance. You can't control which wave comes next or how strong it will be. But you can learn to brace yourself, to breathe through the impact, to trust that even the biggest wave will eventually recede. Tonight you can honor wherever you are in the rhythm of your grief without rushing it or resisting it.

Spend three minutes writing: What does my grief need from me right now, and how can I make space for both the hard waves and the calmer moments without judging either?

Close your notebook and ask yourself: Where did I judge myself today for still grieving or for feeling okay? What would it mean to accept that grief comes and goes without trying to control it? How can I be gentler with myself tomorrow as I navigate whatever wave arrives?

Video: How Grieving Changes the Brain, with Mary Frances O'Connor, PhD

Watch: How Grieving Changes the Brain, with Mary Frances O'Connor, PhD

Neuroscientist Mary Frances O'Connor explains why grief feels like a physical amputation, because in your brain, it essentially is. When you fall in love or bond deeply with someone, your brain literally encodes a "we," creating overlapping neural representations that mean losing them feels like losing part of yourself. The real revelation isn't just understanding why grief hurts so intensely, but learning that grieving is actually your brain's way of learning to exist in a world where this person is gone. O'Connor's research shows that the waves of grief you experience years later don't mean you're doing it wrong; they mean you're human, and that some bonds are so profound they permanently reshape how your brain understands who you are.

"Grief is like the ocean; It comes in waves; ebbing and flowing. Sometimes the water is calm, and sometimes it is overwhelming. All we can do is learn to swim." — Vicki Harrison

You don't have to master grief; you just have to survive each wave as it comes.

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Coming Monday: A nutrient deficiency most people don't know about could be damaging brains decades before Alzheimer's symptoms appear.

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