Medical professionals link anxiety around death to a range of mental health conditions, including depressive disorders, PTSD, and anxiety disorders. Death anxiety is associated with a range of specific phobias.
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.
The good news is fear of death fades as a person ages. Men who experienced thanatophobia in their 20's usually overcome their fear and are less likely to feel dread towards the subject later on. Women on the other hand, have a higher chance of experiencing a re-emergence of the problem in their 50's.
One of the most helpful strategies for accepting death and resolving grief is to design a new life without the deceased. This doesn't mean pretending they were never a part of your life, but it does mean moving forward with your own as a way of honoring them and caring for yourself.
Death is a natural part of life, and it's normal to think about it from time to time. But it's very common for people experiencing mental illness to think about death more than usual. Thinking about death all the time might feel uncomfortable or scary.
Between the ages of 5 and 7 years, children gradually begin to develop an understanding that death is permanent and irreversible and that the person who has died will not return.
The presence of death anxiety is reported to peak in middle age and disappear in the elderly (20, 24, 25).
So embrace death. Remove the shackles of fear that bind you so tightly, make the arrangements you need to make so that when your time does arrive, you can go peacefully. Death doesn't happen to us, it is something we do. Furthermore, dying is a natural process, so make it as easy for yourself as possible.