The 3 Types of Death Anxiety

[Created with MidJourney]

There may be nothing more human than our fear of death. It reflects an irony at the heart of the human condition: we value knowledge, but we can also be burdened by it. Alongside language or religiosity, the defining human trait may be this: the creature that knows too much.

But our fear of death also reflects the human condition in another way. Like any other crisis, it can be faced in a way that allows us to emerge from it stronger than we were before. Confronting death with the uniquely human capacity to adapt can lead us to a more meaningful and resilient life.

My experiences in hospice care, with psychotherapy clients, and with psychedelic states of consciousness, have convinced me that what we call ‘death anxiety’ actually exists as three separate types, each with its own potential value to us.

The Pain

Death rarely comes alone. It’s usually accompanied by the process of dying, which may involve experiences like pain, dread, and loss of autonomy. These are the dimensions of death that are usually attended to by a so-called ‘psychosocial’ approach to the care of the dying.

This first type of death anxiety is the fear of this aspect of death: broadly speaking, the fear of the pains of dying. We can speculate that this fear has been ‘programmed’ into our mental landscape, since it…