Many people fear death and/or dying. These fears can be summarized as fearing the pain and loneliness of dying, the fear of non-existence, and the fear of the unknown after death. The most common fear, in Western society, is that the process of dying will be painful, prolonged, and will reduce the quality of life.
It's natural to feel some sense of worry about death or dying. After all, it's normal to fear the unknown. You might think dying will be scary, painful or lonely. But if you have thanatophobia, your fear of death affects your daily life.
“It is healthy and normal to be afraid of death." Fear of death may be the most primal human fear, one we all experience differently. People who are older, in committed relationships, physically healthy, and either very religious or not religious at all tend to be less afraid of death.
Obsessive thoughts of death can come from anxiety as well as depression. They might include worrying that you or someone you love will die. These intrusive thoughts can start out as harmless passing thoughts, but we become fixated on them because they scare us.
Fearing death also makes it harder for us to process grief. A recent study found that those who were afraid of death were more likely to have prolonged symptoms of grief after losing a loved one compared to those who had accepted death.
For anyone struggling to cope with death anxiety, there are a variety of therapies that can offer relief. Talk therapy can encourage healthy coping skills, while cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT) can help by reframing catastrophic thoughts.
Death fears related to one's physical, mental, or spiritual annihilation (the core fear of terror management theory; see Greenberg, Solomon, & Pyszczynski, 1997) may increase temporarily in mid-old age and then decline with increasing acceptance of inevitable death.
3) Death is not the end (for a small part of you)
There is life after death. No, science hasn't discovered proof of an afterlife or how much the soul weighs. But our genes keep going after our demise.
This statistic shows the results of a 2019 survey on respondents' fear of death. During the survey, 11 percent of respondents stated they were very afraid of death, while 25 percent stated they were not at all afraid of death.
Existential death anxiety is the belief that everything ceases after death; nothing continues on in any sense. Seeing how people deeply fear such an absolute elimination of the self, they begin to gravitate toward religion which offers an escape from such a fate.
Your body stiffens, first, at your face and neck. The stiffening progresses to the trunk of your body and gradually radiates outward to your arms and legs and then your fingers and toes. Your body loosens again. A few days after death, your body's tissue breaks down, causing the stiff parts to relax again.
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.
Our minds have a negativity bias for survival reasons. As discussed above, we're more motivated to pay attention to negative things to be better prepared for worst-case scenarios. This is why people experiencing depression, anxiety, pain, and illness are likely to think that death is near.
The presence of death anxiety is reported to peak in middle age and disappear in the elderly (20, 24, 25).
Patricia Furer and John Walker summarize the findings in an article published in the Journal of Cognitive Psychotherapy. Share on Pinterest Women are more likely than men to experience death anxiety, and this tends to peak twice: once in their 20s and again in their 50s. The majority of individuals are afraid of death.
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.
Jules Howard explains why that might be a mistake. According to data from the company Statista, just 11 per cent of us consider death in our daily lives. Most of us are clearly busy with the subject of life, perhaps only considering the subject three or four times a year.
If your stress response continues after the fact, and if it goes unmanaged (i.e., becomes chronic), it can lead to mental and physical health problems, including anxiety and depression, heart disease, and even death.
You can also have obsessions about the process of dying. Death obsessions can be caused by various underlying factors such as anxiety, depression, or OCD. If you're having obsessions about death, these are often unwanted, intrusive thoughts that interfere with your daily functioning.
As the blood pools, patches appear on the skin within 30 minutes of death. About two to four hours postmortem, these patches join up, creating large dark purplish areas towards the bottom of the body and lightening the skin elsewhere. This may be less apparent on darker skin. This process is called livor mortis.
Heaven and Hell
According to the beliefs of some religions, heavenly beings can descend to earth or incarnate, and earthly beings can ascend to heaven in the afterlife, or in exceptional cases, enter heaven alive.