16. Gardening Through Grief — What We Actually Know About Loss, Trauma & Cannabis

Grief isn't just sadness; neuroscience shows it activates the same reward circuitry as craving, and complex grief overlaps heavily with trauma responses like PTSD. This episode widens the lens to include climate grief and "lost future" mourning for millennials, digs into what the actual cannabinoid research on PTSD and nightmares shows, and gets personal about the different shapes grief can take including estrangement, pet loss, and the loss of a chosen family member. Plus the evidence-backed, zero-cost case for getting outside, moving your body, and gardening through grief, and our new segment Burnout Book Club, reviewing Desmond Manderson's High Time.

What we cover:

• The neuroscience of grief: why it feels like craving, not just sadness

• Climate grief, eco-anxiety, and "lost future" mourning for millennials — and its links to depression
• Why complex grief and PTSD overlap so heavily, and what grief rumination has in common with trauma responses
• The endocannabinoid system's evidenced role in fear extinction, amygdala regulation, and stress
• What the actual human trials on cannabis and PTSD/trauma show, including a targeted study on cannabinoids and nightmares
• The difference between numbing grief and processing it
• Personal reflection: ambiguous loss/estrangement grief, losing a mother figure, and disenfranchised grief for a companion animal
• Disenfranchised grief more broadly — miscarriage, infertility, friendship loss, career loss, and other millennial losses that don't get a ritual
• Gardening, movement, and time in nature as evidence-backed, non-pharmacological grief support
• Burnout Book Club: High Time by Desmond Manderson

Content note: This episode discusses death, bereavement, loss, trauma responses including PTSD, and family estrangement related to abuse/neglect, in a medical/scientific and personal context — not as advice. Skip or save it if that's not where your head's at right now.

Citations:

Happy to provide them - just ask :)

BURNOUT BOOK CLUB:

Manderson, D. (2024). High Time: How Australia Changed Its Mind About Illegal Drugs.

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