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Why should you not be afraid of death?

You exist, but one day you won’t. An Epicurean perspective can help you feel less afraid, and even grateful for life’s finitude – by Sam Dresser + BIO Young Man and Skull (1896-98) by Paul Cézanne, Courtesy the Barnes Foundation Your demise is inevitable.

I hope that doesn’t come as too much of a shock. I agree that the brevity of human existence is bothersome. Thankfully, for most of us, this frightful fact usually hovers somewhere beyond the margins of our consciousness: we’re ‘aware’ of our death without constantly fearing it. Inevitably, though, there are moments when the reality of our eventual death strikes us in a new, chillier light.

A close call demonstrates the tenuousness of life, or the death of a loved one reminds us that no one is exempt from humanity’s ultimate destination. Even talking about death, as we are now, can be enough to bring on a ruminative contemplation of the end, and with it a shudder of fear about one’s own extinguishment.

In these moments, when your pending dissipation presents itself afresh, the fact of death is experienced in a new way. Rather than merely being ‘known’ like one more quotidian statement about the world – ‘The sky is blue. I will die’ – the sense of one’s ending is felt more deeply and more immediately.

In these moods, the terror of death seeps into your awareness of yourself as a person; its awesome inevitability and finality makes you feel small and powerless. This is the fear of death at an existential level, brought on by the almost unthinkable notion that there is and only ever will be one of you – and sooner or later it will flicker out of existence, leaving little more than memories in other soon-to-be-gone beings.

The fear of death as I’m discussing it here is not about the practical worry of who will pay off your credit card debt after you’re gone: it’s about the unsettling fact that the person who earned that debt in the first place is but a fleeting speck of an event in the infinite history of the Universe.

The fear of death is also heightened by thinking about how harmful mortality is to us – how there is no greater blow in life than for life to cease. As the philosopher Thomas Nagel observed, death is the great deprivation. There is always more life to be lived, and it is painful to have that taken away.

The best way to get at this fear, perhaps, is to contemplate the almost unbearable thought of your future absence: one day, at family dinners, a place will no longer be set for you.
The day after you die, the newspaper will still be published just as it was the day before.
And the morning after your funeral, friends will make their morning coffee.

You will be gone for good, though, and that certainly is a terrifying impediment. So the fear of death is awful to behold – and therefore, naturally, something to overcome. Indeed, the striving to overcome the fear of death, I would suggest, has stimulated a great deal of thinking over the course of humanity’s time on Earth: one could go so far as to say that working out how to thwart, or perhaps accommodate, death sits at the root of a vast number of cultural achievements.

The fear of finitude is a powerful propellant. So how can the fear of death be overcome? One popular strategy is to plan for a sequel to life, which, it’s usually expected, will take place in another, happier realm. Resurrection, whether as a human or otherwise, has won a great many adherents. And there have been several religions, as well as philosophers, that have promulgated a view of time as cyclical: we’ve done this before, and we’ll do this again.

Death as a mere interlude. These tactics and ideas have something to recommend them, certainly. But for now, let’s set aside all possibility of life after death so that we are left with the often horrifying thought: you exist, but one day you won’t. Are there any good philosophical reasons not to fear that gulf – between being and not-being? In this Guide, I will suggest several philosophically inspired reasons not to be fearful of your own death – and so, in that sense, I hope that there is something helpful here to lighten the weight of the deeply unsettling existential state in which we are all lucky enough to find ourselves.

The life of the city-dwelling Ancient Greek philosopher Epicurus straddled the 3rd and 4th centuries BCE.
His philosophy nowadays is popularly packaged as a kind of light hedonism: sensualist, joyful, a hint of luxury, a naughty second glass of wine.
Though Epicurus himself was probably not quite the blinkered and unimaginative pleasure-seeker that these clichés suggest, they do give a flavour of his outlook.

For him, the purpose of human life is to achieve happiness. Epicurus construed this as an absence of pain rather than a positive programme of indulging oneself by, say, keeping up a rigorous schedule of orgies or downing flasks of opium on Tuesday mornings.

He recognised that whatever temporary excitement such pursuits yield in the moment will probably be well counterbalanced by a severe price to pay later on.
So instead, Epicurus recommended (somewhat disappointingly) that it is moderation that will lead to a release from pain and suffering, which in turn will bring a respectable measure of happiness and therefore a good life.

Our limitations, our meagre certainties, are at the centre of Epicurus’ system of thought, and it is in this context of mitigating pain and accruing a gentle happiness that he believed the fear of death needs to be understood. Epicurus and his followers held that the fear of death is harmful to the enjoyment of our lives, and so showing why this fear isn’t well-founded contributes to the overall hedonic project of living well.

According to this tradition, the first thing to do to overcome the fear of death is to try to articulate to yourself what it would be like to be dead. Imagine yourself, but rather than alive – dead. (Remember, we’ve cast aside the afterlife.) As you’ll swiftly appreciate, there is an intractable contradiction right at the centre of this first actionable item.

You cannot imagine what it would be like to be dead, because death is an absence of existence. There is, literally, nothing to imagine – because nothingness itself cannot be imagined. There is no perspective, no view from nothingness, nothing to which it can be approximated.

So that is the first recommendation: realise that being dead isn’t an experience.
Death itself isn’t really a thing at all.
In Epicurus’ words: ‘Death is nothing to us.’ To drive the point home, let’s turn to the Roman poet Lucretius.
He was a saltier and more ironic Epicurean of a later generation, the 1st century BCE, whose unexampled poem On the Nature of Things fell afoul of early Christians because of its crypto-atheism.

In the poem, Lucretius proposes an idea, later termed the ‘Symmetry Argument’, that hints at the second thing you should do to overcome the fear of death: try to recall what it was like before you were born. Not how the world was, which is the task of historical imagination, but what it was like to be you – before you were created.

You’ll discover that prenatal existence isn’t something that can be thought about, much less experienced.
The symmetrical part of the argument, of course, is that you have the very same difficulty in imagining what it is like to be dead.
Indeed, according to Lucretius, you-pre-existence is the same thing as death or post-existence: both involve the absence of you.

No doubt you don’t fear your prenatal existence and logically speaking, given their equivalence, it follows that you should fear death the exact same amount, as in not at all. (As the novelist Vladimir Nabokov put it in his memoirs: ‘common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness.’) This brings us to the third thing to do to calm your existential angst: examine how much ‘nothing’ – nonexistence – can reasonably be feared.

That is, are there any good reasons for your pending death to trigger the emotion of fear? It is reasonable to be fearful of things to the extent that those things can cause you harm.
It was reasonable to be jittery about nukes during the Cold War era; it is reasonable to be scared that humanity is turning the globe into a sauna; and it is reasonable for your heart to launch as from a trebuchet into your throat when your partner says to you the words ‘We need to talk.’ These are all identifiable threats that foretell awful experiences.

None of them would help us in our Epicurean goal of being happy, and so are reasonably feared. But death itself – not the process of dying, which is something different – doesn’t seem to be the sort of thing that one can reasonably be fearful of because it isn’t anything.

It’s not uncomfortable or hurtful to be dead.
It’s not as if you’re being deprived of life or of more contented years because, again, you simply aren’t there to be deprived in the first place.
For you, there is nowhere to locate the harm of being dead since being dead isn’t a state of being.
It’s not something that strictly speaking happens to you and so it can’t be harmful.

(No one would say St Francis of Assisi is more dead than the punk rocker ‘GG’ Allin because St Francis died longer ago.) Death is the absence of an event; it’s not a happening or a thing at all because there isn’t such a thing as you any longer. Even something that you dreamed or imagined – say, a stranger standing silently by your bed as you wake – has a kind of existence necessary for it to be the reasonable object of a fear, even if it turns out to have been the shadow of a tree.

Death itself doesn’t have this quality.
And Lucretius would add: it is just as unreasonable to fear nonexistence after life as it is to fear nonexistence before birth.
This is the heart of Epicurus’ and Lucretius’ argument for why there is no good reason to fear death.
Note that their argument doesn’t speak to the fear that others will die, which is a perfectly reasonable anxiety and one that we should arguably heighten, given that fearing the death of fellow humans can make us more empathetic of their needs.

No, the Epicurean argument against the fear of death concerns only your own self and its dissolution. When I think through these steps, I find that their efficacy is largely dependent upon my mood. I like the idea of being able to intellectualise away the fear of death, as if merely thinking philosophical thoughts would be enough to give me courage.

And when I’m particularly despondent or detached from the world, perhaps there are glimmers of comfort from the argument that death is nothing. But commonly this line of thinking doesn’t completely allay the fear of death (I hazard to guess that for you, too, the fear is still somewhat present). Epicurus recognised this.

His argument by itself isn’t strong enough to completely release us from the dread of a terminal existence. I doubt that anything is – or rather, I wouldn’t trust anything that, truly and fully, did free one from fear of death (there are certain brands of fanaticism, for instance, that appear to do just this, with obviously horrific results).

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The end of your existence is inevitable. The question is whether or not you should fear it.Epicurus, and many others besides, have argued that there are reasons not to fear death.His argument, essentially, is this: when you are alive, death is nothing. When you are dead, life is nothing.The argument is meant to relieve only some of the fear of death and to give you a new vista from which to enjoy your own fleeting time on Earth. Banishing all fear of death would turn you into something barely human, as fanatics the world over have amply demonstrated.Philosophy can be a useful meditation on what it is to live well. Thinking about one’s own death can focus one’s attention on what it is that makes life so valuable.

Epicurus’ argument against the fear of death has been challenged far and wide. Perhaps the best-known counterpoint in modern times comes from Nagel, in his esteemed ‘Death’ (1970), which did much to renew philosophical attention on the problems of not-being.

The gist of Nagel’s argument is that there is something to fear in our own non-existence. Their disagreement goes right to the heart of the Epicurean view. Nagel says that Epicurus is wrong: death obviously does deprive us of the possibility of the joys of life; only airy-headed philosophers indulging in their wanton complexities would deny so simple a truth.

An example: the brilliant philosopher and mathematician Frank Ramsey died at 26. It is reasonable to hold that his death deprived him – and the world – of uncountable, perhaps now-inconceivable, philosophical insights. But it also took away from him the quiet charms of growing older, the wisdom of age (such as it is), the elation of having children, and so on.

That is, it eliminated the possibility of him living what we often call a ‘full life’. In that sense, death was very bad for Ramsey, as it is for all of us. Outside of the most extreme supercentenarian or those with wretchedly debilitating and incurable diseases, death removes something that we would have otherwise enjoyed, had death not made its unwelcome intervention (‘it may be that a bad end is in store for us all,’ writes Nagel wearily towards the end of his paper).

For the great majority of lives, death deprives. That alone is a good enough reason to fear death, or so Nagel would say. Nagel’s argument involves a shift of perspective made clear by his reliance on the death of other people, using their ends as a way of demonstrating the badness of death for everyone.

His stance was elaborated in 2009 by the philosopher Ben Bradley the terminology of possible worlds, the basic gist of which is to compare possibilities, treat each possibility as real, and then decide which possible world is better.
It seems intuitive that the possible worlds in which Ramsey lives longer are better than the possible (and, unfortunately, actual) world in which he died at 26, and it suitably follows that death is bad and should be feared.

But this perspective, however compelling, abandons the first-person – indeed, existential – vista of the Epicureans, whose philosophy, like that of most other ancients, is inextricable from their ethical outlook. Because the Epicurean argument can in theory make life itself more enjoyable, and pleasure is the purpose of life, then their argument is more likely to be true, according to them.

To the Epicurean, pontificating about possible worlds is of doubtful value when it comes to the lived enjoyment of one’s own life, especially when the end result is to increase the fear of death. Of course, there are further objections to be made against the Epicurean view but, more interesting for our purposes, there is a side to the ‘death-is-nothing’ approach that makes the inherent value of life more noticeable.

This idea finds a much fuller appreciation in 20th-century philosophy than among the ancients, though it was present even then. I’m referring to the startling notion that there is a positive good in one’s own death. Since death limits us absolutely, it gives shape to our existence.

We are here only briefly, and because of this transience, we are more likely to value our time. This is made most clear by considering the alternative: corporeal immortality. The Epicureans, Lucretius especially, thought that everlasting bodily life would be hell on Earth, and I think they’re on to something.

Without death, life would be nothing but a dire repetition, pointless and endless. Immeasurably long lives would eventually deflate into the most banal tedium. Millennia upon millennia upon millennia would have to be lived out and, even then, there would be an eternity to go.

Eventually the most sublime and wondrous experiences possible would become punishing in their drab familiarity. Fortunately, this isn’t a possibility that need concern us too much. But confronting the alternative to death brings home the point – no matter how terrifying it might be, the fact of death makes life more brilliant and precious.

The time we have together in this place is fleeting: let’s spend it well. For an approachable introduction to the philosophy of death, Shelly Kagan’s free, offered through Yale University, is excellent. Packed with material, a comprehensive syllabus and compelling lectures, it’s a great place to start.

Another solid introductory text is Steven Luper’s (2012), which is probably the academic standard right now.
The wonderful Simon Critchley in 2009 delivered a to the New School in New York City entitled ‘To Philosophise Is to Learn How to Die’.
When I first watched it, I found it spellbinding and I’m glad to say that it still is.

For a deeper dive – and for deeper pockets – (2012) is an invaluable resource, with essays covering many of the primary topics in the philosophy of death, though mostly from an analytic perspective (so not a lot of crosscultural work going on here). Phillip Mitsis’s on Epicurus and John Broome’s on the badness of death are highly recommended.

The best recent book on Epicurus is called (2019) by Catherine Wilson (who is also an Aeon ).James Warren is also a premier scholar of Epicureanism; for a more demanding and academic treatment of the subject, you could hardly do better than (2004).We’ve also published a wonderful short on Aeon about Epicurean ideas in the modern world by Temma Ehrenfeld.A short and easily digestible video on Epicurus’ wider philosophy – beyond his overcoming the fear of death – can be found, by the online ‘philosophical entertainer’ Einzelgänger.Finally, Aeon Video featured a very moving and thought-provoking on the last few months of the philosopher Herbert Fingarette’s life as he grapples with the imminence of death – and whether or not Epicurus’ views really do hold up when the end is, at last, here.

: How to not fear your death

Why is death the biggest fear?

F2ar #13: “That it is truly the end of being” – Jason – Fact: Infamous Buddhist Monk Thich Nhat Hanh spent most of his life teaching about this concept, and you can read about his teachings specific to death in our blog here, Here’s our favorite quote: “Our greatest fear is that when we die we will become nothing.

Many of us believe that our entire existence is only a life span beginning the moment we are born or conceived and ending the moment we die. We believe that we are born from nothing and when we die we become nothing. And so we are filled with fear of annihilation. The Buddha has a very different understanding of our existence.

It is the understanding that birth and death are notions. They are not real. The fact that we think they are true makes a powerful illusion that causes our suffering. The Buddha taught that there is no birth; there is no death; there is no coming; there is no going; there is no same; there is no different; there is no permanent self; there is no annihilation.

Why is dying so scary?

Frequently Asked Questions –

Why are we scared of death? The reasons why death is scary are often related to the fears of the unknown, of non-existence, of eternal punishment, of the loss of control, and fear of what will happen to the people we love.
Is death the greatest fear? While research indicates that just over 20% of people report having a fear of dying, this fear varies depending on a person’s sex, age, and health status. Other fears, including the fear of public speaking, affect approximately the same percentage of people.

Verywell Mind uses only high-quality sources, including peer-reviewed studies, to support the facts within our articles. Read our editorial process to learn more about how we fact-check and keep our content accurate, reliable, and trustworthy.

Chapman University Survey of American Fears. America’s top fears 2017,
New York Post. Here are Jerry Seinfeld’s 10 funniest jokes,
Tsai JS, Wu CH, Chiu TY, Hu WY, Chen CY. Fear of death and good death among the young and elderly with terminal cancers in Taiwan, J Pain Symptom Manage,2005;29(4):344-51. doi:10.1016/j.jpainsymman.2004.07.013
Goranson A, Ritter RS, Waytz A, Norton MI, Gray K. Dying is unexpectedly positive, Psychol Sci,2017;28(7):988-999. doi:10.1177/0956797617701186

Additional Reading

Chapman University. America’s Top Fears 2017.2017.

By Angela Morrow, RN Angela Morrow, RN, BSN, CHPN, is a certified hospice and palliative care nurse. Thanks for your feedback!

Is death peaceful or scary?

Since he watched his mother drop dead, Richard Bridgman’s fear of death has left him emotionally paralyzed. It was right around Thanksgiving — nearly 45 years ago — and Bridgman was sleeping overnight on his mom’s living room couch. “In the middle of the night, she walked into the room and said, ‘Richard, I’m dying,'” recalls Bridgman, who tried to reassure his mom that she’d be okay.

But his mother, who had a heart condition, was suffering a massive heart attack.
She looked at me and fell over on her head.
I didn’t know what to do.
She was dead.” Death haunted much of Bridgman’s early years.
His stepfather died when Bridgman was 15.
His father, an alcoholic, died when Bridgman was 17.

And Bridgman was 26 when his mom died before his eyes. Now, 72, and long retired from the bill collection business he once owned in the Springfield, Ill., area, he has spent most of his adult years trying to cope with — if not overcome — his immense fear of death. Kelvin Chin (Courtesy of Kelvin Chin) “Everybody has a fear of death, no matter what culture, religion or country they come from,” said Kelvin Chin, author of “Overcoming the Fear of Death” and founder of the Overcoming the Fear of Death Foundation and the non-profit turningwithin.org,

Fear is simply an emotion caused by the anticipation of unhappiness.” But wait.
What if death isn’t actually unhappy? What if it simply — is? For Bridgman, whose fear of death was overwhelming, that simple question was a critical step in learning to emotionally deal with death.
That question was posed to him by Chin, who he discovered via a Google search.

Several supportive phone consultations with Chin — combined with a simple meditation process that Chin teaches — have helped to keep Bridgman’s fears under control. “I spent so much money on psychiatrists and psychotherapists — none of them did any good,” says Bridgman.

But Chin steered Bridgman towards meditation.
Meditation is better than medicine,” Bridgman said.
Everyone must figure out their own way to handle the fear of death.
One expert, who overcame her own fear through years of attending to the dying, says death is rarely the terrible thing that most folks fret about,

“Death is usually a peaceful process,” explains Donna Authers, a professional caregiver, motivational speaker and author of the book “A Sacred Walk: Dispelling the Fear of Death and Caring for the Dying.” “Very few people die screaming. They just go to sleep.” But it took Authers years to learn the lesson that death need not be frightening. Donna Authers (Courtesy of Donna Authers) It was Authers’ grandmother — while dying from cancer — who taught Authers the most critical lesson in accepting death’s inevitability. Authers brought her grandmother home to tend to her during her final days.

But her grandmother could sense her granddaughter’s terrible fear.
That’s when her grandmother took her by the hand and, unafraid, reminded Authers, “Death is part of life.
You, too, will be where I am someday, and you can’t face death with fear,” she said.
That changed everything.
Seeing her grandmother bravely face death caused her own fears to dissolve.

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“I was no longer afraid of death and dying,” recalls Authers. Authers ultimately left her job as an IBM marketing executive to become a caregiver. Through the years, she has found that faith is the most important quality among those who face death without fear.

People who have faith in something don’t grieve like those who have no hope,” said Authers. Increasingly, however, Chin has found that Millennials — more than any other demographic — fear death the most. “It’s the downside of social media,” said Chin. “The bombardment and speed of communication leads to an overload that can trigger a fear of death.” Perhaps even the world of politics can play a role, suggests Sheldon Solomon, professor of psychology at Skidmore College and author of “The Worm at the Core: On the Role of Death in Life.” In times of political upheaval— particularly when people are reminded of their mortality — the fear of death increases even as they tend to be attracted to political figures who promise them more security, said Solomon, who has conducted numerous experiments on this issue.

“When people are reminded of their own mortality, in an effort to bolster faith in their own view of reality, they become more hostile to anyone who is different.” Even then, says Solomon, perhaps nothing alleviates a dying person’s fear of death more than love.

A terminally-ill grandmother he knew was distraught at the prospect of death.
No doctor and no medicine could help her.
Then, she received a short phone call from her granddaughter, begging her for her cupcake recipe.
No one can make them like you,” her granddaughter said.
That call did more in five minutes than anything else could have,'” says Solomon.

“It reminded the grandmother that she will live on in the memories of the people she loves. That was all she needed to know.” KHN’s coverage of end-of-life and serious illness issues is supported by The Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation,

Is death the number 1 fear?

Neuroscience for Business Expert | Founder The Essential Experts & Inward Learning® | Expert Trainer & Facilitator – Published Oct 4, 2019 Glossophobia – the fear of speaking in public – a very common phobia, which is believed to affect up to 76% of the human population.

Is it normal to fear death in your 20s?

Thanatophobia risk factors – According to a 2017 survey by Chapman University, up to 20.3% of Americans are afraid or extremely afraid of dying. The UK shares similar figures in regards to the prevalence of fear of dying, approximately 20%. Although death anxiety is common, certain demographics are more prone to developing the phobia.

These include: Young people. A study in 2007 revealed that death anxiety peaks for both men and women during their 20’s and declines as they age. Women in their 50’s. The same study showed that women in their 50’s often experience a resurgence of their fear of death. Men however, do not. People with health issues.

People who struggle with their health, geriatrics in particular, also have a deeper fear of death. Children of aging parents. While the elderly tend to be anxious about the process of dying, it is actually their children that fear actual death (theirs and their parents) more.

Does fear of death get easier?

D eath, in the view of many theorists, is a good thing, at least for a society that aspires to be creative. When you’re on the clock, you accomplish more. Cultural anthropologist Ernest Becker, author of The Denial of Death, called mortality “a mainspring of human activity.” If you want to invent a light bulb or paint a Mona Lisa, you’d best get started, because checkout time is coming.

That’s perfectly fine when you’re contemplating the human species as a whole, but our personal mortality is a different matter, right? Not always.
A 2017 study in Psychological Science tallied the number of positive and negative words in blog posts written by the terminally ill and compared them with essays by people who were asked to imagine being near death and then write about it.

The dying people, it turned out, were more positive. People are able to come to terms with death as they age, thanks to what psychologists building on Becker’s work dubbed Terror Management Theory. Equal parts denial and self-soothing, courage and fatalism, TMT is what kept Cold War Americans going despite fear of nuclear annihilation, and got New Yorkers out to work on that Sept.12 following the terrorist attack.

Some TMT techniques involve what psychologists call constructive distraction: busying ourselves with a lifetime of meaningful things.
When faced with acute reminders of death–say, a funeral–we push back with something that prolongs life, like going for a run.
We also become good at flippancy, making death benign or comical–think Halloween costumes.

We get better at this as we age. A 2000 meta-analysis found that fear of death grows in the first half of life, but by the time we hit the 61-to-87 age group, it recedes to a stable, manageable level. Terror management happens not just individually but collectively, through our affiliation with social systems that define us, especially religion, nation and family.

Religion is the most direct, because so many faiths sidestep fear of death by promising eternal life.
But along with nation and family, religion provides something subtler too: a community that gives a kind of constitutional order to a cosmos that otherwise makes no sense.
Death is typically on the fringes of our awareness,” says Thomas Pyszczynski, a professor of psychology at the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs.

“When reminded of their mortality, people cling to their worldviews more and react more warmly to people and ideas that comfort them.” A post-9/11 study in the journal Identity by psychologist Curtis Dunkel of Western Illinois University supports this idea.

He found that people who have established an “identity commitment,” or an allegiance to a group or worldview, exhibit less anxiety when reminded of death than people still engaging in “identity exploration.” The risk of such an allegiance is that it may make us less tolerant of other people.
That may partly explain why we have religions that promise eternal life, but only for members of the faith.

Meanwhile, the ability to live in the moment is something that brings older people a sense of calm. “The elderly become more present-centered,” says Steve Taylor, a lecturer in psychology at Leeds Beckett University in Leeds, England, “and research shows that being present-centered leads to enhanced well-being.” Most important is what developmental psychologist Erik Erikson dubbed generativity–the process not of achieving and keeping things, but giving them away.

You can’t take the house you built or the songs you wrote with you, to say nothing of the family you created.
They are all your body of work, your mortal oeuvre, and there can be joy in handing them on.
The idea of one generation replacing the next becomes a buffer against anxiety,” says Pyszczynski.

If there’s peace to be had at the approach of death, it comes from knowing that the world you’re exiting is at least a bit richer than the one you found when you arrived. This appears in the February 26, 2018 issue of TIME. More Must-Reads From TIME

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Write to Jeffrey Kluger at [email protected],

What does death feel like?

Nearing death – This can be a time when relatives and friends feel they are waiting with a sense of anticipation. You may feel like you’ve ‘had enough’. Thoughts and feelings like this are normal and very common among family members and people providing care.

Sometimes the dying process happens over a few days.
This can be distressing for some people.
If you are in a hospital or residential care facility, ask what they have available for visitors.
Access to tea and coffee or extra chairs can make your time more comfortable.
As someone approaches the end of their life they may become more drowsy.

As a person is dying they will have less energy and become easily tired. They are likely to become weaker and may spend more time asleep. They may become detached from reality, or unaware of what is happening around them. They may be less interested in eating and drinking.

They may need changes in medications and visits from health professionals. No one can give an exact answer of when someone will die. However, the timing of someone dying can be easier to predict the closer the person is to death. Rather than dwelling on how long it might be, this time is best used to express feelings and share cherished moments together.

There are some common indicators that death may be near, within days or weeks. Usually more than half the following signs will be present:

spending large amounts of the day in bed being unable to move from bed to chair without help difficulty swallowing solid food sleeping for many hours not talking very much occasional confusion with time, the past and with people restlessness being unable to ask to go to the toilet changes in breathing.

Ask the palliative care team if you want more information or help identifying if death is close. Sometimes death may still occur without much warning, with some or many of these signs not occurring.

How rare is it to be scared to death?

We often look forward to scary movies, and we’ll casually talk about being “scared to death” if we’re suddenly surprised or startled. Cleveland Clinic is a non-profit academic medical center. Advertising on our site helps support our mission. We do not endorse non-Cleveland Clinic products or services.

Who are the most fearful of death?

Sex – The connection between death anxiety and one’s sex appears to be strong. Studies show that females tend to have more death anxiety than males. In 1984, Thorson and Powell did a study to investigate this connection, and they sampled men and women from 16 years of age to over 60.

The Death Anxiety Scale, and other scales such as the Collett-Lester Fear of Death Scale, showed higher mean scores for women than for men. Moreover, researchers believe that age and culture could be major influences in why women score higher on death anxiety scales than men. Through the evolutionary period, a basic method was created to deal with death anxiety and also as a means of dealing with loss,

Denial is used when memories or feelings are too painful to accept and are often rejected. By maintaining that the event never happened, rather than accepting it, allows an individual more time to work through the inevitable pain. When a loved one dies in a family, denial is often implemented as a means to come to grips with the reality that the person is gone.

Closer families often deal with death better than when coping individually. As society and families drift apart so does the time spent bereaving those who have died, which in turn leads to negative emotion and negativity towards death. Mothers hold greater concerns about death due to their caring role within the family.

It is this common role of women that leads to greater death anxiety as it emphasize the ‘importance to live’ for her offspring. Although it is common knowledge that all living creatures die, many people do not accept their own mortality, preferring not to accept that death is inevitable, and that they will one day die.

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What age is most afraid of death?

4. The fear of death declines with age – It seems counter-intuitive to think that we would fear death less as we get older, but studies run in the United States have shown this is the case. One study found that people in their 40s and 50s, expressed greater fears of death than those in their 60s and 70s.

Similarly, another study found that people in their 60s reported less death anxiety than both people in middle age (35 to 50 years) and young adults (18 to 25 years).
Yet another study found that after a peak in their 20s, participants’ death anxiety tended to decline with age.
For men, the decline plateaued in their 60s, whereas for women, there was some evidence for a slight bump between their 40s and 50s.

I found similar patterns in my own research for a forthcoming book – but only in the United States. I saw no such trends in Brazil, the Philippines, Russia, and South Korea. All of these studies also survey people of different ages but fail to follow individuals across their lifespans.

What age fears death the most?

The presence of death anxiety is reported to peak in middle age and disappear in the elderly (20, 24, 25).

Who has no fear of death?

Skulls and bones in Paris Catacombs Home News Study into who is least afraid of death A new study examines all robust, available data on how fearful we are of what happens once we shuffle off this mortal coil. They find that atheists are among those least afraid of dying.and, perhaps not surprisingly, the very religious.

Religion has long been thought to be a solution to the problem of death.
Notions of an afterlife are nearly universal, though there is great diversity in the details.
Given this close association between religion and death, researchers have long supposed that religion lessens fear about death.
It stands to reason that religious believers should be less fearful of death than nonreligious individuals, or does it? A systematic review of high quality international studies led by researchers at the University of Oxford paints a more complicated picture.

It shows that the very religious and atheists are the groups who do not fear death as much as much as those in-between in a paper published in the journal, Religion, Brain and Behavior, ‘Meta-analyses are statistical procedures used to extract and combine the findings of multiple studies.

This produces a better estimate of the consensus in a field than looking at individual studies,’ explains Dr Jonathan Jong, a Research Associate at the Institute of Cognitive and Evolutionary Anthropology and Research Fellow at Coventry University.
Jong led a team of researchers from Oxford, Coventry, Royal Holloway, Gordon College, Melbourne University and Otago University to search systematically for research on the relationship between death anxiety and religious belief.

Religious people are less afraid of death than nonreligious people. It may well be that atheism also provides comfort from death Dr Jonathan Jong, Research Associate of the Institute of Cognitive and Evolutionary Anthropology The team found 100 relevant articles, published between 1961 and 2014, containing information about 26,000 people worldwide.

Combining this data, they found that higher levels of religiosity were weakly linked with lower levels of death anxiety. The effects were similar whether they looked at religious beliefs such as belief in God, and an afterlife, or religious behaviour like going to church, and praying. Some studies also distinguished between intrinsic religiosity and extrinsic religiosity.

Extrinsic religiosity is when religious behaviour is motivated by pragmatic considerations such as the social or emotional benefits of following a religion, whereas intrinsic religiosity refers to religious behaviour driven by ‘true belief’. The meta-analysis showed that while people who were intrinsically religious enjoyed lower levels of death anxiety, those who were extrinsically religious revealed higher levels of death anxiety.

The findings were mixed across the studies, with only 30% of the effects showing this finding. Surprisingly, perhaps, 18% of the studies found that religious people were more afraid of death than non-religious people; and over half the research showed no link at all between the fear of death and religiosity.

This mixed picture shows that the relationship between religiosity and death anxiety may not be fixed, but may differ from context to context. Most of the studies were conducted in the United States, with a small number carried out in the Middle East and East Asia.

This makes it difficult to estimate how the pattern varies from culture to culture, or religion to religion, says the paper. Based on previous research, the team also checked for curvilinear patterns in the data. Rather than assuming that the religiosity is either positively or negatively related to death anxiety, some researchers have posited that the relationship is like an upside-down U shape, with religious believers and disbelievers showing less death anxiety than people in between.

Out of the 100 studies, the team only found 11 studies that were robust enough to test this idea; however, of these, almost all (10) formed this pattern. Dr Jong commented: ‘It may be that other researchers would have found this inverse-U pattern too if they had looked for it.

Why do I think about death so much?

Intrusive or Obsessive Thoughts – If you constantly have obsessive, intrusive thoughts about death or dying, it might be a sign of a condition such as obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) or post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), OCD involves experiencing obsessions and/or compulsions that interfere with your daily life or cause distress.

Some people engage in behaviors (compulsions), but the condition can also involve thoughts, such as those centered on death, without compulsions. Research has found that having OCD significantly increases a person’s risk of experiencing suicidal ideation. PTSD is a condition that can occur after a person has experienced a traumatic event.

In addition to flashbacks, anxiety, and nightmares, people also experience intrusive thoughts. Research has found that PTSD is a risk factor for suicide.

Why is it so hard to accept death?

Effect of Advances in Medical Care – Advances in health care make death more difficult to accept than ever before. Death is no longer an inevitable reality for many, the end point of having been born. Death is viewed as a defeat, and anything less than heroic measures to keep someone breathing is considered a failure to treat fully.

As I surpass the age at which three of my four grandparents died, I marvel at the advances that have kept me healthy, active, and relatively free of pain.
Luck and genetics play a large part in my healthy condition, but equally so have been the advances in all aspects of medical care, from dentistry to pharmaceuticals to prostheses and surgical equipment, and now artificial intelligence,

There is a downside to this, though. There is a disconnect between ourselves and nature, a hubris that believes that with enough effort and determination, nature itself can be vanquished; death can be postponed indefinitely.

Is it normal to think about dying everyday?

Picking up the pieces – So how do you put your life back together once you’re finished grieving? Here are a few questions to ask yourself to get started:

What do you still have left? It may sound corny, but taking time to think about what you still have, and being grateful for it, can have a real positive impact on your mental health. What can you still hold on to? Maybe you defined yourself in terms of something that you’ve lost. That can be really disorienting. But whatever it was, it wasn’t the whole picture. You’re still here—what does that look like, and what does that say about what makes you, you? What makes you feel good? Take a moment to think about your self-care. What makes you feel good? What do you enjoy? What would you like to spend more time doing, seeing, hearing, tasting, experiencing? Start with things that are small and within your reach. What have you learned? Making mistakes—even really big ones—is how we grow. Nobody who is really successful has gotten there by never making a mistake. Whether you’re going to try again at the same things, or find a new goal to pursue, you’ll be approaching it with more knowledge and experience than you had before.

Image source: Wikimedia Foundation This photograph shows a ceramic dish that has been broken—and repaired with gold. (This is a Japanese technique called kintsugi,) The cracks represent a permanent loss but they also allow the dish to be more beautiful than it was before—and a lot more interesting,

Why do I think about death so much?

In addition to flashbacks, anxiety, and nightmares, people also experience intrusive thoughts. Research has found that PTSD is a risk factor for suicide.

What does God say about fear of death?

Psalm 23:4 – Getty Images “Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for you are with me; your rod and your staff, they comfort me.” Advertisement – Continue Reading Below 4

What do humans fear more than death?

Surprisingly, the fear of public speaking ranks in the number one spot of all fears, higher even than death, which takes the second spot on the list of top ten fears. The fear of public speaking can steam from a variety of sources. While it is a common fear, when you are involved in business, the fear of public speak can severely limit your professional opportunities.

Is fear of death the root of all fear?

Is death the root of all anxiety? Anxiety By a verified Counsellor or Therapist Published on 4th March, 2016 Late last year, Erica Jong published a book called ‘Fear of Dying’. I thought it interesting that Jong, whose ‘Fear of Flying’ tackled a lot of sexual taboos had now turned her attention to one of the last remaining taboos in our society – death.

Around this time, a famous singer in the UK spoke about her anxiety around death in an interview, triggering much talk in the media about this hitherto undiscussed topic.
Had death become ‘the new sex’? Death anxiety, or to give its clinical name, Thanatophobia, is not unusual.
Indeed, some level of it is hardwired into our DNA.

Our ancestors formed groups and lived collectively primarily out of a fear of separateness and what might be lurking in the dark. The fear of death in those times was very real when every day could be a battle for survival. Now, with cctv on most street corners, our loved ones seemingly always present through digital communication surely we have no need to worry about our imminent demise? Actually I think it’s the opposite.

Once our basic needs have been fulfilled – most of us, at least in the west, have more than enough food and comfort to keep us satisfied – we start to address the bigger questions. Why are we here? What’s it all for? Does it all end when I die? You could call it existential angst and behind it is a fear of death.

However, to be anxious about one’s demise, ultimately, is to fear life in itself as one cannot separate one from the other. Existential theorists would argue that at the root of all anxiety is ultimately a fear of death. Whether or not you agree with that (and for me the jury is still out), I would argue that confronting this question and grappling with it is the first step to creating meaning in our lives. : Is death the root of all anxiety?