What does grief maxxing really mean? Hey everyone, I’m Dr. Drew Ramsey. I’m a board-certified psychiatrist and therapist. So I spend a lot of time sitting with people talking about grief. My team and I have put out this phrase grief maxxing that’s really trending. And we wanted to talk about what we mean. We’ve already had a comment, hey, isn’t grief maxx enough? And for sure it is. In fact, that’s really why we wanted to make the video.
So many of us has experienced grief and not felt like we had the tools or have gotten stuck in it, avoided it or maybe picked up some behaviors like drinking that we don’t really think are the best. Grief maxxing is about maximizing your experience of grief through understanding the tools, the frameworks, the experts. I’m even going to say it, the grief heroes, grief inspirers, people who handle it really well, grief role models, really, I would call them. Trying to understand what those frameworks are, who those experts are to help us not get stuck.
Grief maxxing is picking up on this trend of maxxing. We’re protein maxxing. We’re trying to max all kinds of stuff. But in all seriousness, grief maxxing for me and my team and all of the people that I’ve gotten to sit with during grief, it means understanding that there’s another side to it. As hard as it can be, it’s also an inevitable part of our human experience of being loving creatures. We love to attach. We love to be inspired and to have hope and to connect. And often always, one might argue, there’s loss involved with that.
Learning to work through that is horrible and as maximum as grief can be as an emotion. And certainly in no way do we want to be offensive about this or do we want to insinuate that people are doing grief wrong. We want to make sure that you know about the tools, know about the experts. we’ve all been really inspired on my team over the past year, thinking about this, reading through some of these things, ideas like some of the gates of grief, just people haven’t heard about.
When you hear about it and you know you’re not alone in it, you know some really wonderful experts in mental health have been thinking about it for you already, I think it helps. It helps us maximize this experience of grief so we don’t get stuck as what’s the worst that happens to us? Well, then we get scared of attachment. Why why would you want to love if you know you’re going to experience such tremendous loss? We certainly don’t want that to happen to ourselves or to any of you. And that’s what the grief maxxing series is about. We wanted to respond to some of your concerns.
I hope that helps make sense of grief maxxing, how it’s not just a trend. It’s a set of tools, it’s a set of people who inspire us, it’s a set of frameworks and experts that help us make the most of grief, meaning that if we avoid grief, we’re not going to love and attach. Boy, that’s not a life worth living. If we get stuck in grief, that’s more depression, more sadness, more loneliness than maybe we need to have. And if we can mobilize and engage in our grief, we can continue doing what we all need to do more of.
Attaching, connecting, loving, creating, doing that stuff that makes humans just wonderful. I hope this helps you think through grief maxxing. Maybe it’s not something that’s on your plate right now, but some tools you could build. Maybe it’s something that you’re worried about or scared about. You’re so worried about loss. You’re so worried about death. That’s a real signal that maybe this is the series for you to think through, not to bring you down, not to make it sad, but again, to help you engage with an inevitable human experience. be better at it, to have tools and resources, and to keep doing what you need to do, to have amazing mental health and mental fitness, relationships, connections.
I’m Dr. Drew Ramsey. I hope this helps explain grief maxxing and I I hope you will share this video with anybody in your world who’s struggling with grief or or fearful about grief or loss. Please subscribe and we’ll see you in the next video. Thanks so much.
