Fear of dying: 3 strategies to manage it

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 crisis (more or less intense) difficult to manage, and sometimes it becomes a obsessive thinking.

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 of life arrives. Nevertheless, what most rejection produces is the existential anguish of thinking about the disappearance of oneself or of 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 lived. 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 too much. That is to say, makes us think of a planet in which everything that our vital trajectory has been denied.

The idea that our life trajectories are not one of the fundamental pillars of reality and that this lifestyle full of elements that are familiar to us will disappear at some point collides with the way in which we have learned to interpret the stuff. Time passes, whether we like it or not, and we get smaller and smaller.

Live in the present

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

If we focus our attention on the unique experiences that we live in each moment, what we experience stops being a degraded copy of our past or a beginning of the end that later or early will arrive. The trick to face 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 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-delusion, since that is the only time that we can know directly and in a genuine way. In fact, what is delusional is believing that what we know about who we are and what we have done is pure and perfectly true.

Mindfulness

The 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 among other things on omitting hasty judgments about the past and the future; it's about experiencing the moment. It promotes a type of attentional management that leads us to experience memories for what they are, something that we live through the present. This causes that, in some way, we de-dramatize the idea of ​​death, since the more we are capable of distancing ourselves from our life trajectory, the less emotional impact the idea of ​​the end of is.

Acceptance in the face of death

Another factor that can be used to cope with the fear of death is to work on acceptance. Stop thinking from unrealistic expectations It helps the experiences related to death to be lived in a much better way.

And it is that many times, a good part of the psychological pain that we experience is the result of comparing our interpretation of what happens to us with what we would expect to happen to us in a lifetime ideal. In that sense, death should be part of our plans.

In fact, this is something that the author Atul Gawande already points out in his book Be mortal: Many times, accepting death and renouncing very aggressive medical measures that lengthen life a bit is the best option in terms of the well-being of patients. The last moments of life are spent with greater serenity and well-being when death is accepted and you stop thinking that fighting for the preservation of your own 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 because of the fact that it present in addition to having the company of loved ones and enjoying relationships that go beyond words.