The fear of dying is one of the psychological phenomena that most worries a good part of the people who attend psychotherapy.
The fear of physical pain and the very idea of dying sometimes produces cases of anxiety crises (more or less intense) that are difficult to manage, and sometimes it becomes an obsessive thought.
In this article We will see what the fear of death consists of and what can be done to prevent it from damaging our quality of life.
The fear of death is an emotional reaction based on the aversion that arises at the idea or expectation of dying. To some degree, it manifests itself in the emotions of most people, but in some cases it becomes a fear so intense that it constitutes a psychological problem.
When the fear of death becomes so extreme that it constantly erodes the person’s quality of life, it has probably become a psychopathology.; 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 must be addressed in psychotherapy. However, the 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 happens in some cases when that moment in life arrives. However, What produces the most rejection is the existential anguish of thinking about the disappearance of oneself or loved ones.. Why is this happening?
Almost everything we know about who we are and what exists is related to our autobiographical memory, which is the organized set of memories about what we have experienced. 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 much. That is to say, makes us think of a planet in which everything that our life path 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 in which we have learned to interpret things. Time passes, whether we like it or not, and we become smaller and smaller.
Live in the present
Everything said before 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 cause pain, but… What happens if we focus on the present?
If we focus our attention on the unique experiences we live in each moment, what we experience stops being a degraded copy of our past or a beginning of the end that will come sooner or later. The trick to facing the fear of death is, then, 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 it is very likely that we imagine it worse than it will be, and we do not remember the past perfectly either; What’s more, we constantly reinvent it. Focusing on the present is not self-deceptionsince that is the only time we can know directly and genuinely. In fact, what it is to be deceived is to believe that what we know about what we are and what we have done is pure and perfectly true.
Mindfulness
Mindfulness is one of the tools used to prevent relapses in phases of depression, something common when the fear of death becomes an inseparable companion of our lives.
Curiously, This simple form of meditation is based, among other things, on omitting hasty judgments about the past and the future.; what it’s about is experiencing the moment. It enhances a type of attentional management that leads us to live memories as what they are, something that we experience through the present. This means that, in some way, we take away drama from the idea of death, since the more we are able to distance ourselves from our life path, the less emotional impact the idea of its end has.
Acceptance in the face of death
Another factor that can be used to deal with the fear of death is to work on acceptance. Stop thinking from unrealistic expectations It helps the experiences linked to death to be lived in a much better way.
And many times, a good part 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 enter our plans.
In fact, this is something that the author Atul Gawande already points out in his book Being Mortal: many times, accepting death and giving up very aggressive medical measures that extend life a little is the best option considering the well-being of the patients. The last moments of life are spent with greater serenity and well-being when death is accepted and one stops thinking that fighting to preserve one’s life is the priority. Believe that everything is a battle and that we are to blame for our own death It is something that can make us suffer much more.
The question, then, is learn not to take responsibility for impossible tasks (like living forever) and get used to experiencing each moment as something valuable in itself due to the fact that it takes place in the present in addition to having the company of loved ones and enjoying relationships that go beyond words.
