Live life to the fullest. Ultimately, it’s best to avoid spending too much time worrying about death and dying. Instead, fill each day with as much joy as possible. Don’t let little things get you down. Go outside, play with friends, or take up a new sport. Just do anything that will take your mind off dying. Instead, focus your mind on living.
Many people with the fear of death think about it daily. It means that you have a lot of things you want to do in life. Let the fear work through and ask yourself, “What is the worst thing that will happen today?” Today you are alive, so go and live.
2
Spend time with your loved ones. Surround yourself with people that make you happy and vice versa. Your time will be well-spent – and well-remembered – when you share yourself with others.
For example, you can rest assured that your memory will live on after you die if you help your grandchildren develop happy memories of you.
3
Keep a gratitude journal. A gratitude journal is a way for you to write down and acknowledge the things you’re thankful for. This will help keep your focus on the good things in your life.[22] Think of good things about your life and cherish them.
Take some time every few days to write down a moment or thing that you’re grateful for. Write in depth, savoring the moment and appreciating the joy you’ve received from it.
4
4
Take care of yourself. Avoid getting involved in bad situations or doing things that can raise your chances of dying. Avoid unhealthy activities like smoking, drug or alcohol abuse, and texting while driving. Staying healthy removes some of the risk factors that can lead to death.
Look for Part 1 HERE! Look for Part 2 HERE! Look for Part 3 HERE!
Consider how life and death are part of the same cycle. Recognize that your own life and death, as well as the lives of other creatures, are all parts of the same cycle or life-process. Life and death, rather than being two completely different events, are actually always occurring at the same time. The cells in our bodies, for example, are continuously dying and regenerating in different ways throughout an individual lifetime. This helps our bodies adapt and grow within the world around us.[16]
2
Think about how your body is part of a complex ecosystem. Our bodies serve as fertile ecosystems for countless different life forms, especially after our own lives come to an end.[17] While we are alive, our gastrointestinal system is home to millions of micro-organisms. These all help our bodies stay healthy enough to support proper immune functioning, and, in certain ways, even complex cognitive processing.[18]
3
Know the role your body plays in the grand scheme of things. On a much larger, macro level, our lives fit together in unique ways to form societies and local communities which depend upon our bodies’ energy and actions in order to sustain some degree of organization.[19]
Your own life is composed of the same mechanisms and materials as other lives around you. Understanding this point can help you become more comfortable with the thought of a world without your particular self still being around. [20]
4
Spend time in nature. Go on meditative walks in nature. Or, you can simply spend more time outside around many different life forms. These activities can be great ways to become more comfortable with the realization that you’re a part of a larger world. [21]
5
Consider the afterlife. Try thinking that after you die you will go somewhere happy. Many religions believe in this. If you ascribe to a particular religion, you may find comfort in considering what your religion believes about the afterlife.
Focus on what you can control. Death can be an especially frightening thing to think about, primarily because it exposes the limits of life and what we are able to conceive. Learn to focus on what you can actually control while still engaging with what you cannot.
For example, you may be worried about dying from a heart attack. There are certain factors that you can’t control about heart disease, such as family history, race and ethnicity, and age. You will make yourself more anxious by focusing on these things. Instead, it’s far healthier to focus on the things you can control, like quitting smoking, exercising regularly, and eating well. In fact, you are at higher risk for heart disease when you have an unhealthy lifestyle than just by the uncontrollable factors alone.[8]
2
Guide your life. When we want to control the direction of our lives, we are often met with disappointment, frustration and anxiety about things that don’t go as planned. Learn to loosen your grip on how tightly you control the outcomes of your life. You can still make plans, of course. Guide the course of your life. But allow some room for the unexpected.[9]
A fitting analogy is the idea of water flowing in a river. Sometimes the river bank will change, the river will curve, and the water will slow down or speed up. The river is still flowing, but you have to let it go where it takes you.
3
Eliminate unproductive thought patterns. When you try to predict or imagine the future, you find yourself asking, “What if this happens?” This is an unproductive thought pattern known as catastrophizing.[10] An unproductive thought pattern is a way of thinking about a situation that ultimately causes you to have negative emotions. How we interpret an event will result in the emotion we feel from it. For example, if you are worried that you’re late for work, you might tell yourself, “If I’m late, I will get reprimanded by my boss and I’ll lose my job.” Having unproductive thought patterns can put you on edge if you feel like you want to control the outcome so strongly.
Replace unproductive thinking with positive thinking. Reason through your unproductive thought patterns. For example, say to yourself, “If I’m late, my boss might get mad. But I can explain that there was more traffic than normal. I’ll also offer to stay late after work to make up the time.”
4
Have a worry time period. Devote five minutes during the day when you will allow yourself to worry about something. Do this at the same time every day. Try not to schedule this worry period for bedtime, because you don’t want to lay in bed fretting over things. If you have a worrying thought any other time during the day, save it for your worry time period. [11]
5
Challenge your anxious thoughts. If you are struck with anxieties about death, ask yourself about the chances of dying in certain scenarios. Arm yourself with statistics about dying in a plane crash, for example. You will likely find that your worries are inflated beyond the reality of what could possibly happen. [12]
6
Think about how you’re affected by others. When other people’s worries start taking over your mind, you’ll think more about risks too. Perhaps you have a friend who is particularly negative about diseases and illnesses. This causes you to feel nervous about getting ill yourself. Limit time you spend with this person so that these thoughts don’t enter into your head so frequently. [13]
7
Try something you’ve never done before. We often avoid trying new things and putting ourselves in new situations precisely because of fears regarding what we do not yet know or cannot yet understand.[14] In order to practice letting go of control, pick an activity you’d never consider doing and commit to giving it a try. Start by doing some research on it online. Next, maybe talk to people who have participated in the activity before. As you start to become more comfortable with the idea of it, see if you can’t give it a try once or twice before making an especially long commitment to it.
This method of experimenting with life and new activities can be a great tool for learning how to focus on producing joy in life as opposed to worrying about death and dying.
As you participate in new activities, you will likely learn a lot about yourself, especially in regard to what you can and cannot control.
8
Develop an end-of-life plan with your family and friends. When it comes to death, you will likely come to realize that most of the process will be completely out of your control. There’s no way we can ever know for sure exactly when or where we can die, but we can take some steps so as to become more prepared. [15]
If you are in coma, for example, how long would you want to remain on life support? Do you prefer to pass in your home or remain in the hospital as long as possible?
It might be uncomfortable about these issues with your loved ones at first talking, but such conversations can be incredibly helpful for both you and them if an unfortunate event arises and you are unable to express your desires in the moment. Such discussions might potentially help you feel a little less anxious towards death.
[T]hanatophobia, or “fear of death,” affects millions of people worldwide. For some people, it can produce anxiety and/or obsessional thoughts. [1] While thanatophobia is the fear of death and/or one’s own mortality, a fear of dying people or dead things is known as “necrophobia,” which is different from thanatophobia. Both of these fears, however, can be similarly related to a fear of the unknown aspects related to death, known as “xenophobia.” In another sense, it is the possibility of encountering something beyond what is already known. [2] This can be especially true for people who are nearing the end of life, as uncertainties around the death process can multiply as the reality of death becomes more imminent.[3] In order to become more comfortable with the unknown end of life, you need to understand your phobia and work to overcome its hold on you.
1
Write down the times when you think about death. The first thing to determine when dealing with a fear of death is how – and how much – your fear affects your life. We are not often immediately aware of the environmental triggers or causes of our fears and anxiety. Writing about the situations in which they arise can be a helpful tool for working through these issues.[4]
Start by simply asking yourself, “What was going on around me when I started feeling afraid or anxious in that moment?” For a number of reasons, this can be a very difficult question to answer at first. Start with the basics. Think back over the last few days and write down as many details as you can remember about the times you thought about death. Include exactly what you were doing when the thoughts arose.
The fear of death is very common. Throughout human history, people have been concerned and preoccupied with the idea of death and dying. This can happen for several reasons, including your age, your religion, your level of anxiety, the experience of loss, and so on. For example, during certain transitional phases in your life, you may be more prone to having a fear of death. People may have a deeper preoccupation with death in the ages 4-6, 10-12, 17-24, and 35-55.[5] Scholars have long philosophized about the prospect of death. According to the existentialist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, death can be a source of fear for people precisely because it is that which “comes to us from the outside and transforms us into the outside.” [6] The process of death, therefore, represents to us the most radical unknown dimension imaginable (or, in a sense, unimaginable). As Sartre points out, death has the potential to transform our living bodies back into the non-human realm from which they initially emerged.
2
Make note of when you feel anxious or afraid. Next, write down any of the times you can remember deciding not to do something because you were afraid or anxious. Write down instances even if you aren’t sure about whether or not the emotions were necessarily related in any way to death or dying.
3
Compare your anxiety with thoughts of death. After you have one list of thoughts of death and one list of anxious moments, look for commonalities between the two. For example, you might notice that every time you see a particular brand of candy you feel some degree of anxiety, but you’re not sure why. Then you realize that you think about death during these same situations. You might remember that the brand of candy in question was served at your grandparent’s funeral. Then you also began feeling some degree of fear at the thought of death in general.
Such connections, between objects, emotions, and situations, can be quite subtle, sometimes even more so than the scenario described above. But writing them down can be a great way to start becoming more aware of them. Then you can better influence how you manage the way you’re affected in such moments.
4
Recognize the link between anxiety and anticipation. Fear is a potent force that can potentially influence just about anything you do. If you can start to look beyond your fear, you may find that the actual event you’re dreading is not as terrible as think it is. Anxiety is usually wrapped up in anticipation about how things will or won’t go. It is an emotion that looks to the future. Keep reminding yourself that fear of death is sometimes worse than death itself. Who knows, your death may not be as unpleasant as you imagine it to be.[7]
5
Be honest with yourself. Be completely honest and fully face the fact of your own mortality. It will eat away at you until you do. Life becomes much more valuable when its temporarily is realized. You know that you will face death sometime, but you don’t have to live life in fear. When you are honest with yourself and face your fear head-on, you will be able to start deconstructing this phobia.
It could be a helping hand for the terminally ill.
The moment of death: Researchers first used headset to trick participant’s brain into thinking their VR body is real. Then, they were taken out of the body to simulate an out of body experience.
[R]esearchers have revealed a virtual reality simulation that can help people comes to terms with death.
It teaches then how to become ‘disconnected’ from their physical bodies.
Mel Slater at the University of Barcelona, Spain, and his team used an Oculus VR headset on 32 patients.
‘Immersive virtual reality can be used to visually substitute a person’s real body by a life-sized virtual body (VB) that is seen from first person perspective,’ they wrote.
Researchers fool the volunteers into thinking the virtual body was their own.
While wearing a headset, the body would match any real movements the volunteers made.
They were also fitted with movement sensors and vibrating units on their hands and feet.
When a virtual ball was dropped onto the foot of the virtual body, a vibration was triggered on the person’s real foot.
Once they became ‘in sync’ with the virtual body, participants were then transported to a virtual living room in which they could move their legs and kick balls thrown at them from a distance.
Then, they were taken out of the body.
‘The viewpoint of the participant was lifted out of the virtual body towards the ceiling of the virtual room, and just behind the body, so that the body could be seen below,’ the team wrote.
‘When the viewpoint is lifted up and out of the VB so that it is seen below this may result in an out-of-body experience (OBE).’
‘Fear of death in the experimental group was found to be lower than in the control group.
‘This is in line with previous reports that naturally occurring OBEs are often associated with enhanced belief in life after death.
People who had felt totally disconnected from their body – and the virtual body – reported having a significantly lower fear of dying.
‘The effect was quite strong,’ Slater told New Scientist.
He hopes the experience might give a feeling that a person’s consciousness is separate from their physical body.
‘It gives a sense that it’s possible to survive beyond death,’ he says.
The virtual experience is similar to some kinds of near-death out-of-body experiences.
Some people who survive heart failure have described seeing the hospital room from the ceiling during critical moments, says Slater.
‘Our results open up the possibility that the virtual OBE experience provides an implicit learning that consciousness in the sense of the centre of perception can be separate from the physical body, and that therefore death of the physical body is not necessarily the end of consciousness,’ the researchers concluded.
A nurse reveals how she became a ‘death doula’ and volunteers to help people ‘let go’ at the end of their life
Rebecca Green was devastated when she lost both of her parents before she turned 16, but she’s never been afraid of death
As told to Cynthia Lawrence
REBECCA Green, 46, is a nurse and lives in Edinburgh. She says:
As I sat on the sofa, tension filled the air.
Rebecca Green was a nurse for 20 years before becoming a death doula
‘What if the ambulance doesn’t get here in time?’ a man in his 70s asked me anxiously.
He was suffering from a chronic lung illness, which meant that if his condition took a turn for the worse, he’d need immediate resuscitation or he would die.
He had always been told by family and medics to keep fighting death, but I asked if he’d ever considered letting go instead.
Rebecca decided to train as a nurse when she was 20 years old and started working in intensive care
Instantly, all traces of his fear disappeared.
He admitted he didn’t want to die, but had never thought of simply giving in when the time came.
As an end of life doula – or death doula – my job is to support people in facing their fears and coming to terms with their own passing.
As odd as it sounds, people tend to want ‘permission’ to die without upsetting their family, and as I’m a stranger, they feel more able to tell me when they’re ready.
Often chatting to them over a cup of tea at home, I encourage my clients to express how they feel, share memories and see the beauty of their lives.
If they want to die at home, I help organise it with family support and act as a link between their loved ones and the NHS.
I’ve never been afraid of death, despite losing both parents as a child.
Despite losing both of her parents when she was young, Rebecca has never been afraid of death and enjoys helping others come to terms with letting go
Mum died of cancer when I was 11 and my dad died of a heart attack four years later. After that, I went to live with my aunt.
I remember being very angry – how could people carry on when my world had ended?
I wasn’t offered counselling, and while my school was sympathetic, no one wanted to talk about it.
At 20, I realised I loved being around people and didn’t want a typical nine-to-five job, so I trained as a nurse and started working in intensive care, A&E and later hospices, becoming familiar with the fragility of life.
But it wasn’t until 2010 that I became a death doula.
I mentioned to a friend that I’d love to take care of people through the dying process, and she told me she’d heard that people did that as a job.
While there are training courses, I decided to draw from 20 years’ nursing experience and my understanding of what to expect from patients living with a terminal illness.
Rebecca with her pet dog Baloo: She isn’t paid for supporting people through the dying process and still works full-time as a nurse
I first started doing it through word of mouth, helping a friend of a friend, but soon began working with a local charity Pilmeny Development Project, which put people in touch with me. I’ve even had people contact me on Twitter.
Although it can be a paid job, I do it voluntarily, and it ranges from once a week to once a month.
Mostly it involves simply talking to someone, but I might run the odd errand, such as popping out for a packet of biscuits.
I try not to get emotionally attached – if my feelings are involved, I’d be doing clients a disservice. But of course, I’ve been incredibly saddened by their stories.
One man in his 50s was devastated he wouldn’t live to see his sons grow up.
As he spoke, I burst into tears and we were both crying together.
Through her work, Rebecca has an appreciation for life and urges everyone not to waste it
I’ve helped 12 clients in total, but I’ve never been with one when they died – usually I don’t find out until the family informs me.
It can be hard to balance the job with a social life, as whenever a client needs me, I’m happy to help – unless I’m nursing, which I still do full-time – so I’ve cancelled many nights out.
Sometimes it’s hard to switch off, so I make sure I unwind by going to the gym, painting or walking my dog Baloo.
Some partners have found it scary, but most were supportive.
Being a death doula has made me realise we take the time that we have for granted.
It’s about making the most of the simple things and doing what we love.
[R]amses II, also known as Ramses the Great, was born about 3,000 years ago and is widely regarded as the most powerful pharaoh of the Egyptian Empire. The Greeks called him Ozymandias. When he died in 1213 B.C.E., he left a series of temples and palaces that stretched from Syria to Lybia, and countless statues and monuments commemorating his impressive reign. By the 19th century, when European colonization reached Egypt, most of these statues were gone, and the ones that remained were in ruin. In 1816, the Italian archaeologist Giovanni Belzoni discovered a bust of Ramses and acquired it for the British Museum. This is when Ozymandias’s life, in one respect, truly began.
“Ozymandias,” perhaps the most famous sonnet Percy Byshe Shelley ever penned, was written in 1817, as the remains of the famous statue were slowly transported from the Middle East to England. Shelley imagines a traveler recounting a journey in a distant desert. Like Belzoni, Shelley’s character discovers a great bust, half-buried in the windswept sands. Next to the wreckage is a pedestal where the monument once stood. Inscribed in shallow letters on the slab of rock: “My name is Ozymandias, king of kings: Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!” Of course, as Shelley’s poem tells us, nothing remained of these works or the king of kings. Just sand.
The poem’s message is perennial: All of this will be over soon, faster than you think. Fame has a shadow — inevitable decline. The year 2016 has delivered a string of deaths that serve as bracing reminders of this inevitability: Prince, Nancy Reagan, David Bowie, Elie Wiesel, Bill Cunningham, Muhammad Ali, Gordie Howe, Merle Haggard, Patty Duke, John Glenn. Of course, it has also been a year that has ushered in a new empire and, simultaneously, the specter of apocalypse. The year’s end is a time to take account of kingdoms built, but also the sheer rapidity of their destruction. It is a chance to come to terms with the existential fragility that is overlooked in most of our waking hours and that must be faced even by the greatest among us.
We tend to defer the question of living or dying well until it’s too late to answer. This might be the scariest thing about death: coming to die only to discover, in Thoreau’s words, that we haven’t lived.
Facing death, though, is rarely simple. We avoid it because we can. It’s easier to think of “dying” as an adjective than a verb, as in a dying patient or one’s dying words. This allows us to pretend that dying is something that is going to happen in some distant future, at some other point in time, to some other person. But not to us. At least not right now. Not today, not tomorrow, not next week, not even next decade. A lifetime from now.
Dying, of course, corresponds exactly with what we prefer to call living. This is what Samuel Beckett meant when he observed that we “give birth astride the grave.” It is an existential realization that may seem to be the province of the very sick or very old. The elderly get to watch the young and oblivious squander their days, time that they now recognize as incredibly precious.
When dying finally delivers us to our unexpected, inevitable end, we would like to think that we’ve endured this arduous trial for a reason. Dying for something has a heroic ring to it. But really it’s the easiest thing in the world and has little to do with fame and fortune. When you wake up and eat your toast, you are dying for something. When you drive to work, you’re dying for something. When you exchange meaningless pleasantries with your colleagues, you’re dying for something. As surely as time passes, we human beings are dying for something. The trick to dying for something is picking the right something, day after week after precious year. And this is incredibly hard and decidedly not inevitable.
If we understand it correctly, the difficulty is this — that from the time we’re conscious adults, maybe even before that, we get to choose how we’re going to die. It is not that we get to choose whether we contract cancer or get hit by a bus (although certain choices make these eventualities more or less likely) but that, if we are relatively fortunate (meaning, if we do not have our freedom revoked by circumstance or a malevolent force we can’t control), we have a remarkable degree of choice about what to do, think and become in the meantime, about how we go about living, which means we have a remarkable degree of choice over how we go about our dying. The choice, like the end itself, is ultimately ours and ours alone. This is what Heidegger meant when he wrote that death is our “own-most possibility”: Like our freedom, death is ours and ours alone.
Thinking about all of our heroes and friends and loved ones who have died, we may try to genuinely understand that death is coming, and to be afraid. “A free man thinks of death least of all things,” Spinoza famously wrote, “and his wisdom is a meditation not of death but of life.” But we don’t even begin to think about life, not really, until we confront the fact that we are doing everything we can not to think about death. And perhaps we’re not so much afraid of dying, in the end, as of not living and dying well.
Everyday life has no shortage of things with which to waste our time: the pursuit of money, intelligence, beauty, power, fame. We all feel their draw. But the uncomfortable, claustrophobic truth is that dying for something like money or power tends not to be a choice at all. David Foster Wallace argued that for most of us dying in the pursuit of wealth or prestige is simply our “default setting.” The problem isn’t that we’re picking the wrong things to die for, but that we aren’t actually picking. We chose to live by proxy. We allow ourselves to remain in a psychological trap that prevents us from seeing what might be genuinely meaningful in our own lives. In doing so, we risk, according to Wallace, “going through (our) comfortable, prosperous, respectable adult life dead, unconscious, a slave to our heads and to (our) natural default setting of being uniquely, completely, imperially alone day in and day out.” We might call this the Ozymandias Trap — Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair! — and be on guard against falling into it ourselves.
Most days we discover that we’re not quite up to the heroic task of extricating ourselves from the Ozymandias Trap. Others, we fear we’ve failed miserably. It is not realistic to love in the awareness that each day might be your last. But at least we can stop pretending that we will endure forever.
In Tolstoy’s famous story “The Death of Ivan Ilyich”, the dying hero reluctantly accepts his own mortality, albeit only once he can no longer avoid the truth:
It’s not a question of appendix or kidney, but of life and … death. Yes, life was there and now it is going, going and I cannot stop it. Yes. Why deceive myself? Isn’t it obvious to everyone but me that I’m dying … it may happen this moment. There was light and now there is darkness … When I am not, what will there be? There will be nothing …
Ivan Ilyich can’t pretend that he’s not dying. He recognizes what Ramses II apparently did not: With his death, there is no justification of his life, there is no proof of himself to leave behind, there are no monuments where he is going. He has lied to himself all of his life about the fact that he’s going to die.
In the end, Ivan is liberated from his self-deception. And we, too, can free ourselves from this delusion. As soon as today. Right now.
If we succeed, we may find that confronting the fact of our own impermanence can do something unexpected and remarkable — transform the very nature of how we live.
