Anxiety Support Group
Anxiety is a physical condition marked by intense and persistent feelings of distress, fear, angst or dread. General anxiety caused by routine day-to-day stresses usually passes quickly and is experienced by almost everyone at one time or another. However, such feelings that linger over time and are very difficult to cope with, and which lack a clear cause, may indicate...
Just was curious if anyone else has dealt with this issue having a fear of dying or what happens after death. The fear of death for me has been there since I could remember and it got much worse after I gave up trying to force my self to believe in heaven. I found a book that touches this subject beautifully was Staring at the sun by Dr. Irvin D Yalom which I highly recommend. I apologize if this topic makes anyone uncomfortable but I feel that people with anxiety generally have high IQ's and are very aware of finiteness of life.
There is nothing that I can do to make me live forever. Even though I believe in God, I have the fear that he will just reject me. I can't control anyone but myself and sometimes have issues doing even that, so I definitely cannot force a deity to love me and accept me.
That being said, I recognize this as my irrational fear about the situation. I think that God is love and forgiveness, just seem to have that scary thought pop up a lot lately. I hope that you find something to calm this fear in you. I haven't found much yet to calm this particular fear.
Biologically speaking we're programmed to fear death (otherwise we would all be killing ourselves and each other with extreme ease instead of passing on our genes to the next generation), so nature has devised this very cruel feelings to keep us away from whatever the brain perceives to be dangerous and hence likely to kill us. Once I see death like that then it loses that pathological power over me.
Yes, depending on how we die it might suck or not, but knowing that the feelings are going to be temporary followed by eternal nothingness also calms me down. To me death is like sleeping, only that you don't get to wake up again. Thinking like this also calms me because in death there is no suffering anymore, no bad dreams, no nightmares, no worries, no problems.
My greatest wish is that I will go quickly, but if that is not in the cards it's OK too. One of my aunts was chatting to her daughter one minute, the next minute she was on the floor, dead. Massive heart failure. That's exactly what I want, but well, let's wait and see. Maybe I will end up being devoured by a super sized whale :)