Why Are Goodbyes So Hard?
- The Mary Word
- Sep 15
- 3 min read
By Stephanie Ma
By now, almost everyone understands that saying goodbye is hard. Whether it’s saying goodbye to a loved one, or saying goodbye to something that has been a prominent part of your life, it’s a difficult process. No matter what age, ethnicity or gender, everyone is bound to go through a painful goodbye, despite any type of front they try to put on.
With the end of term 3 up and coming, there’s bound to be lots of goodbyes being said, to people, places and memories alike. So, I wanted to do some research into what makes the process of saying goodbye so emotionally draining.
The obvious answer is: you’re leaving something behind, something that was important to you and will most likely still be an important point of your life in the future. It’s having to let go of the things that held you up for so long and even if school wasn’t the most exhilarating experience for you, it’s the aspect of being thrown off the only schedule you’ve had for almost all your life. In short, it’s change. However, like I mentioned, this is the obvious answer. I wanted to know what exactly in our minds made this change so hard.
Recent studies on rodents show that physiological loss has an impact on how well your brain functions. This, in turn, causes molecular changes in the bastolateral amygdala, a small part in the amygdala, the central hub of the brain responsible for processing emotions and emotional adaptability. It also plays a part in learning, especially in emotional situations.
Additionally, leaving something behind or losing something has a high probability to cause stress. This can mostly be due to the fact that there’s a change in your life, however big or small it may be. This causes your amygdala to send a distress signal to the hypothalamus, which in turn activates your ‘fight or flight’. This can then lead to faster breathing and increased alertness, as well as your body accommodating the new situation at hand, however this all happens before you can even really comprehend what’s happening. Of course, this is mostly for the more extreme situations, however it can help to explain why some people panic so easily upon leaving something.
Honestly, when I first started writing this, I wanted to research how to make goodbyes less hard, which is why the research portion is so limited, but I quickly realised, there’s no real way of reducing the amount of emotion behind the process. You can try to postpone the feelings as much as you want but eventually, the dam is going to break. Of course, there are strategies to make it better, focusing on the good and thinking of it as the beginning of a new chapter, rather than the end but they won’t completely get rid of the feelings.
Even if you could completely subside the emotions that arise from goodbyes, they’re not inherently a bad thing. After all, you wouldn’t be sad to leave something behind if there were no good memories that came from it. It’s like how grief is a healthy response to being sad about losing someone that held an important place in your heart. Sure, you could argue that most of the sadness is from the fear of having to start something new, but that’s not all bad either. The fear comes, mostly, from the unknown, new places, people and responsibilities are all part of this and yes, it’s scary, but it also means moving forward in your life, and getting more freedom to go off on your own, to explore who you are.
So, to any year 12’s that might be reading this, I wish you luck for the next chapter of your life. There’s so much out there to explore for the brilliant minds that attend this school and, as cheesy as it is, the motto we’ve heard time and time again throughout our time at this school remains true; ‘first Loreto, then the world’.
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