3 Ways to Lower Death Anxiety (and Increase Hope)

As the old adage goes, “the two things guaranteed in life are death and taxes!”
And while this article won’t diminish your stress about a reduced paycheck, it does focus on our common struggle with death. End-of-life worries are a burden we all  must wrestle with. But when the inevitability of death prevents us from living, and living well, we need some extra help coping with it. Therefore, here are three things you can start doing to help you lower your death worries and start enjoying life more:

1.    Accept That You Are Not Alone

I want you to understand how common of a struggle this is, no matter what
age you are. Many people would read this title about death anxiety and assume this is an article for the elderly. While I hope it is useful to those in older age, this article may apply more to a younger audience! It is statistically shown that younger adults actually worry about death more than older adults! Ironically, many elderly people are coping with death better than those further back in the lifespan.

Especially if you are younger, I want you to start accepting that you are not alone. You are not novel in your worries about mortality. You are not bizarre in having this struggle at your age. Anxiety tends to leave us feeling very isolated. We say things like, “no one understands how I feel” or “I am the only one going through this, and everyone else has it together. I must be pathetic because I am alone in this struggle.” We so easily let our negative mindset reduce our struggles to the self, when the reality is that others like us are fighting the same fight. The numbers don’t lie. Whether you are knocking on deaths door, or you are young and healthy, people like you worry about the end all the time. You are not alone, I promise.

2.    Increase Your Knowledge of Aging

One thing that most anxiety types have in common is that they make us obsess
over the future in the worst ways. When that canvas is blank, we tend to fill the space with all the worst-case scenarios we can imagine. We catastrophize!

And while we commonly worry about what happens after death, we may also be focused on our future leading up to, and right before death. Especially when we are younger or middle aged, we worry about how our lives will pan out as we move closer towards the end. Will my life just be increasingly miserable as I go towards death? Will the aging process for me be agonizing and painful? Will I be alone when I die? What if I get to the end and I have lots of regrets and have not lived a good life?

Increasing your knowledge of the aging process is a great way to steer our minds towards a healthier view of the future. The idea is to help us understand what it means to age well and move towards our latter years in a healthy manner. Courses on human development can be useful to get a bird’s eye view of our life and increase this knowledge.

But even if you do not have access to such classes, a very practical thing to do is find someone you know that is aging well. Not in the way of their physical looks, but someone who is moving towards the latter stages of their lifespan and seems happy, content, and not bogged down by the fact that they are going to die in the future.

As I mentioned earlier, the elderly are actually managing with death anxiety better than the young. Find someone who is moving towards death and coping well with it. Find someone who is doing things right and learn their secrets. Learn what gives them life satisfaction in older age. Learn what gives purpose to their life. They exist as a proof of concept that death does not rob all meaning from life. Explore that proof of concept to increase your knowledge and adapt it to your development.

3.    Focus on Social Relationships

People often look to heaven and the afterlife as a means for coping with death anxiety. This thought is comforting because we believe a part of ourselves lives on after we die. Death is not the end of our being. We are connected to something transcendental, beyond our physical limitations.

This same comfort is present when we focus on social relationships. Deepening
the bond we have with spouses, children, friends and other family members
connects us to something beyond ourselves. It assures that we continue living within the memories, feelings and legacy of the loved ones we leave behind.

This is likely a reason why younger people stress more over death. Generally, the older you are the more you come to value and appreciate your social relationships. In youth, we do not always comprehend the importance of our connection to others. If death anxiety has you in its grips, spend more quality time with the people you love the most. Develop those bonds and create connections that will outlive you.