How To Scare Someone To Death

Source: Jovani Carlo Gorospe | Dreamstime

Woody Allen famously quipped, "I'k not afraid of death; I just don't desire to be there when it happens."

There are many rational things to worry about when we contemplate our own expiry—perhaps foremost amongst those is the concern virtually how our surviving loved ones will cope emotionally and materially without us. Only many of our worst fears near death are less realistic and based more on how we imagine death to be. This post is well-nigh those unfounded fears.

In modern Western society, virtually people have trivial direct experience of expiry, and we don't like to talk nigh the subject. Our society is organized in such a way that the dead are chop-chop removed from us, and those traditions that practise encourage viewing the expressionless do so only after conscientious cosmetic preparation past specialized morticians, often resulting in the dead looking more than like an elegant wax model replica of the living person. Attendance of children at funerals and cemeteries is generally non encouraged, adding to the sense of dreaded unfamiliarity with expiry with which many of us grow upward.

Fear of pain

There'southward no reason to expect that the actual process of dying is any worse physically than what you or other withal-living people have already previously experienced.

For nigh people, the terror of the bodily process of dying probably involves a fearfulness of physical pain. It too probably involves fearful incomprehension of the seemingly mysterious process by which the consciousness that is our "self" is extinguished, or fades away.

Let's bargain start with our fear of a painful decease. We are all afraid of pain. We accept all had much experience of physical hurting, some more others, and nosotros are quite likely to accept witnessed more extreme hurting and agony in others than we have experienced ourselves. All this makes us fear pain. Physical hurting arises from damage to our living tissue. Since decease is the ultimate destruction of our living tissues, we naturally assume that decease must exist the ultimately painful experience. Since nobody who has actually died can tell u.s. what it felt like physically, nosotros naturally have a terror of dying.

Only in fact, rationally and from a medical point of view, there is no particular reason to suppose that the intensity of hurting (or other forms of discomfort or harm) from various causes of death is greater than the intensity of pain from various illnesses and injuries that we ourselves may already have previously experienced, or the pain that others have experienced and survived to tell the tale. Furthermore, dying in and of itself does not necessarily involve painful processes—some forms of death are painful and others are not. And many acute injuries are actually more painful later (in people who survive them) than they are at the moment of injury.

However, not to carbohydrate-glaze this subject—certainly many of the people who have survived more extreme forms of agonizing injury or illness would never want to re-experience it, and some are psychologically traumatized by the experience for a long fourth dimension subsequently (comport with me—nosotros are talking just for a moment nigh worst-case scenarios). There's every reason to expect that the pain and suffering are just every bit bad if non worse for those who survived such injury or illness than those who died. Yet even the most traumatized survivors accept in very many cases gone on to alive fulfilling lives and are able to talk about the experience.

So, while we certainly wish to never experience such a matter, fifty-fifty in the worst of our nightmarish death scenarios the actual pain in and of itself is something that can certainly be endured and survived, as shown by our boyfriend human beings. The extent of the man capacity to endure suffering is ofttimes very surprising. And what we take just spoken nearly are the most extreme cases of hurting and suffering, non the more common scenarios.

• What Is Fear?
• Discover a therapist to combat fear and anxiety

Abeyance of consciousness¹

What about the process by which our self-aware consciousness and the entirety of our subjective experience abruptly ends? Since death, from a biological point of view, entails a complete and utter extinguishing of consciousness, being dead will not feel similar anything—no more so than you felt, say, a twelvemonth before you were born. There simply will be no y'all to do the feeling (It tin be hard for us egotistical creatures to imagine that the earth exists independently of whether we ourselves exist to experience it).

Every bit evolutionary psychologist Jesse Bering reminds us, "Consider the rather startling fact that you volition never know you have died. You may experience yourself slipping away, but it isn't as though at that place will be a 'you' around who is capable of ascertaining that, once all is said and done, it has actually happened."² This point was made some 2,300 years agone past the Greek philosopher Epicurus, who wrote: "Why fright decease when we can never perceive it?"³ The Roman Epicurean philosopher Lucretius later pointed out that our state of non-existence for the eternity of time afterwards our decease is the same state as for the eternity of fourth dimension before our birth.

Fear Essential Reads

Autonomously from the nightly experience of falling asleep (especially deep, dreamless sleep), the actual process of losing consciousness due to injury or disease, as well as induced past anesthesia⁴, whether sudden or gradual, is an experience that many of us have had. In that location is no reason to think that the experience of temporarily losing consciousness is any unlike from the experience of permanently losing consciousness, in terms of how the bodily process of slipping away feels.

People may feel themselves losing consciousness, only if it is gradual, but nobody actually experiences unconsciousness itself, unless they are in a lite state of unconsciousness with partial sensation, or dreaming. Indeed, people who take been resuscitated after technically being dead for a few minutes practise non depict the experience of how it felt every bit they were losing consciousness whatsoever differently compared with those who lost consciousness from other, transient causes. And why should they?

So our sense that the process of dying is something completely conflicting from any living human's experience is really mistaken. Nosotros have a pretty practiced sense of what dying feels like, either from our own first-mitt experience or from the accounts of others (accounts of living people, no need for a séance! No magical beliefs are required in this practice of reality-checking reassurance). And once one has actually died, being dead doesn't feel like anything whatsoever, obviously. At that place'due south merely no y'all to do the feeling.

Grabbing life by the horns

Sensation of our mortality tin exist a profound challenge to our self-prototype of existence an all-important, indispensable, contained entity in the universe. Or it can make full us with a sense of the preciousness and fragility of this opportunity, the value of a life. It can inspire us and motivate the states to live life to the fullest, with a sense that we should non waste our days—to feel, to learn, to grow, to connect, and to contribute to those around us and those who will follow united states of america.

Or, as the psychiatrist Irvin Yalom put it, in Staring at the Sun: Overcoming the Terror of Death: "The way to value life, the way to experience compassion for others, the style to beloved anything with greatest depth is to exist aware that these experiences are destined to exist lost."⁵

Our mortality and finitude remind usa of the urgency of living here and now, with total date in life and with dedication to those around u.s.a.. When death comes for united states of america, allow it find u.s.a. among the living.⁶

References

one. Parts of this article are taken from: Ralph Lewis, Finding Purpose in a Godless Globe: Why We Care Even If The Universe Doesn't (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2018).

Finding Purpose in a Godless World addresses, among other things, how consciousness is a transient phenomenon in complexly evolved living creatures, how mind emerges from mindless matter, and why our human intuition stubbornly insists that consciousness is some sort of mysterious, ghost-like, immortal phenomenon—why it's so hard for us to accept that our mind / personhood / self is purely the production of our finite physical encephalon. The book is about how cutting edge science shows that consciousness, human purpose and caring, like absolutely everything else in existence, could have emerged and evolved unguided, bottom-up, in a spontaneous and purely physical universe. The book also provides an empathetic psychological and philosophical understanding of how people cope with death and dying as well as other forms of arduousness in a fundamentally random, unguided universe without relying on supernatural belief.

See this YouTube video link for an engaging Power Point presentation in which Dr. Lewis explains how a family health crisis focused him on coming to terms with the outsized part of randomness in life, and to wrestle with the question of whether the scientific worldview of a fundamentally random universe is nihilistic. He summarizes how science has come to view the universe and absolutely everything in it equally the production of entirely spontaneous, unguided processes, and why this is a highly motivating realization for humankind. Or see this link for a very brief video providing a synopsis of the book.

2. Jesse Bering, "The Finish? Why so many of u.s.a. think our minds go along on later we die," Scientific American Listen, Oct/Nov 2008, 34-41. Mayhap the most startling fact is that we actually need Bering to point out to us something that is equally obvious equally this… I am repeatedly taken aback by how frequently an intelligent adult patient of mine tells me that they have been lying awake at dark worrying about "what it will feel similar to exist dead," or fearing the experience of beingness buried after they have died...

3. Quoted past Irvin D. Yalom, Staring at the Sun: Overcoming the Terror of Decease (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2008), p. 81. These ideas were further elaborated beautifully by the Roman Epicurean philosopher-poet Lucretius in the first century BCE, in his not bad poem "De rerum natura" ("On the Nature of Things")

[CLICK 'MORE' TO VIEW FOOTNOTES 4-vi, INCLUDING AN IMPORTANT POINT FOR PEOPLE WHO ARE SUFFERING FROM DEPRESSION AND FEELING SUICIDAL]

4. Deep anesthesia might peradventure be more similar to death than information technology is to sleep, in terms of the mechanisms of consciousness and its cessation. Meet for example Linda Geddes, "Banishing consciousness: the mystery of anaesthesia," New Scientist, no. 2840 (November 23, 2011): 48-51. And in countries like Canada, where (carefully regulated) euthanasia is available, the feel of dying tin can be practically identical to anesthesia—gentle and swift.

5. Yalom, Staring at the Sun: Overcoming the Terror of Decease, p. 147.

6. In case you are someone suffering from depression, and just in example your depression leads y'all to misinterpret anything said here to somehow reinforce any suicidal thoughts you may exist experiencing, please notation i of the near important points about depression and suicidality: in the vast majority of cases it is a temporary and distorted state of heed. People alter their minds and wait back in puzzlement at how they once felt that mode: Run across https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-do-people-kill-themselves/ So, if y'all are suffering from depression and feeling suicidal, delight seek help—tell a family fellow member or friend, or talk to your dr., or call a distress helpline, such as the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at ane-800-273-8255 in the Usa. And don't act on the thoughts—wait it out.

Source: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/finding-purpose/201811/facts-calm-your-fear-death-and-dying

Share this post