Fear of dying: 3 strategies to manage it

A very recurrent phobia that can lead to depressive disorders.

The fear of dying is one of the psychological phenomena that most concern a good part of the people who attend psychotherapy.

The fear of physical Pain and the idea of dying itself sometimes produces cases of anxiety crises (more or less intense) that are difficult to manage, and sometimes becomes an obsessive thought.

In this article we will see in what consists the fear to the death and what can be done to avoid that it damages our quality of life.

What is the fear to the death?

The fear to the death is an emotional reaction based on the aversion that arises before the idea or the expectation of dying. To some degree, it manifests itself in the departure of most people, but in some cases it becomes such an intense fear that it constitutes a psychological problem.

When the fear of death becomes so extreme that it constantly depletes a person's quality of life, it has probably become a psychopathology; specifically, an anxiety disorder.specifically, an anxiety disorder.

Thanatophobia is the type of phobia based on an extreme fear of the possibility of dying, and as a disorder, it should be addressed in psychotherapy. However, pathological fear of death can also be part of other anxiety disorders, such as panic disorder.

Why does the fear of death appear?

The idea of death is associated with physical pain, something that occurs in some cases when that moment of life arrives. However, what is most repugnant is the existential anguish of thinking about the disappearance of oneself or of one's loved ones.Why does this happen?

Almost everything we know about what we are and about what exists is related to our autobiographical memory, which is the organized set of memories about what we have lived through. The idea of death, on the other hand, forces us to think about reality as if it were something in which neither we nor our loved ones matter very much. That is to say, it makes us think of a planet in which everything our life trajectory has been denied..

The idea that our life trajectories do not constitute one of the fundamental pillars of reality and that this lifestyle full of elements that are familiar to us will disappear at some point clashes with the way we have learned to interpret things. Time goes by, whether we want it or not, and we get smaller and smaller.

Living in the present

Everything said above may seem very sad, but it is only sad if we understand our existence as something that depends on time to be there. Certainly, thinking about the future and the past when death is near can produce pain, but.... but what if we focus on the present?

If we focus our attention on the unique experiences we live in each moment, what we experience ceases to be a degraded copy of our past or a beginning of the end that sooner or later will come. The trick to dealing with the fear of death, then, is to stop taking the past and the future as reference points from which to appreciate things.

In any case, we cannot know the future and if we are sad or depressed we are very likely to imagine it worse than it will be, and we do not remember the past perfectly either; in fact, we are constantly reinventing it. Focusing on the present is not self-deception.For that is the only time we can directly and genuinely know. In fact, what is self-deception is believing that what we know about what we are and have done is pure and perfectly true.

Mindfulness

Mindfulness is one of the tools used to prevent relapses in phases of depression, something frequent when the fear of death becomes an inseparable companion of our lives.

Curiously, this simple form of meditation is based on this simple form of meditation is based, among other things, on omitting hasty judgments about the past and the future.It is all about experiencing the moment. It promotes a type of attentional management that leads us to live the memories as what they are, something that we live through the present. This somehow takes the drama out of the idea of death, since the more we are able to distance ourselves from our life trajectory, the less emotional impact the idea of its end has.

Acceptance in the face of death

Another factor that can be used to face the fear of death is to work on acceptance. To stop thinking from unrealistic expectations helps the experiences linked to death to be lived in a much better way.

Many times, much of the psychological pain we experience is the result of comparing our interpretation of what happens to us with what we would expect to happen to us in an ideal life. In that sense, death should be part of our plans.

In fact, this is something that the author Atul Gawande has already pointed out in his book Being Mortal: many times, accepting death and renouncing very aggressive medical measures that extend life a little is the best option for the well-being of patients. The last moments of life are spent with greater serenity and well-being when one accepts death and stops thinking that fighting for the preservation of one's own life is the priority. Believing that everything is a battle and that we are to blame for our own death is something that can make us suffer much more.

The question, then, is to learn not to take responsibility for impossible tasks (such as living forever) and to become accustomed to experiencing each moment as a moment of life. and to get used to experiencing each moment as something valuable in itself for the fact of being in the present, as well as having the company of loved ones and enjoying relationships that go beyond words.