Can We Talk About Death?
Relieve stress by accepting death rather than projecting it. Here's how.
Excuse me for bringing up this harsh topic, but I’m going to show you how to relieve stress by thinking about death in a new way.
When I was a teenager, I suddenly realized that everyone dies and I will too. It felt awful and I wondered how other people ignore this and focus on their daily trivia. But as time went by, I learned to put it out of my mind like everyone else. I our awareness of our mortality is always there, and I think it’s the prime driver of our stress. In this episode, I’ll explain 4 ways to relieve that stress, which I’ll call the 4 P’s: predation, prevention, projection, and production.
#1 Predation
When an animal sees a predator, its brain releases cortisol. When you see a car accident, your brain perceives a mortal threat, so cortisol is released, even though it’s not happening to you. When you watch a movie about someone dying of cancer, that triggers the survival-threat feeling even though you don’t consciously think you’re sick.
An animal’s cortisol stops when it escapes a predator, but it’s hard for us to stop feeling threatened by an accident or a disease. We keep finding evidence of mortal danger, so we keep sparking cortisol. The chemical creates a full-body sense of alarm, so it feels like something bad is really happening.
Animals don’t know they will die because their brains don’t process abstractions. Children are like this too. But in adolescence, your cortex grows, and it creates the abstract knowledge that something will kill you some day. Will it be a virus? A criminal? Your favorite guilty pleasure? You don’t know what will get you so you stay alert for signs.
Animals learn to notice the specific predator signals they actually experience, and we humans also get wired by our lived experience with threats. You are quick to feel threatened by anything reminiscent of a painful moment in your past. Then your big cortex tries to help by finding “evidence” to explain the cortisol surge. We are very good at finding evidence when we look, so it seems like our fears are truly objective.
Imagine a person who panics when they have a doctor’s appointment. A bad experience in their youth wired them to turn on the alarm at the slightest hint of the medical world. And since we’re not aware of our wiring, they come up with fancy arguments to justify the feeling that a doctor visit will kill them. You may not fear doctors, but you have some other early cortisol experience that sparks your survival threat feeling.
You can’t live forever, but you can stop anticipating threats so often. Shakespeare said it best: “A coward dies a thousand times before his death, but the valiant only taste of death but once.” Managing your cortisol is the subject of my book Tame Your Anxiety: Rewiring Your Brain for Happiness.
#2 Prevention
When you focus on prevention, you relieve your mortality fears for a moment. But prevention has its own way of sparking cortisol. When you focus on diet and exercise, every slice of pizza looks like a deadly killer. Every lazy moment on the couch seems like a dangerous predator. And it always feels like you haven’t done enough. You hear about a healthy person who died, so you feel like you have to diet more and exercise more.
Modern culture focuses on prevention, so every death feels like a failure of prevention. You might get angry at the government for failing to save that person. Anger masks fear, so it feels good in the short run, but you can end up with a lot of anger. It’s useful to know that traditional societies blamed the evil eye for most deaths. Instead of looking for disease vectors, they looked for revenge on the person who gave the evil eye. We have similar feelings beneath our modern veneer of science.
We’re surrounded by promises of miracle cures, so it’s hard to know which prevention efforts are worthwhile. Death is unpredictable despite our abundance of analytical tools. So we live with constant uncertainty about which vitamin is worth taking and which guilty pleasure is worth avoiding. It helps to know that our ancestors lived with far more uncertainty. When they felt a pain, they couldn’t get it x-rayed, so they didn’t know if it was the beginning of the end. When the rain didn’t come, they didn’t know if they would starve to death in a drought. We can be learn to be grateful for our prevention opportunities instead of letting them fill us with cortisol.
Sometimes our prevention decisions are irrational. Maybe you get in a car with a drunk driver because you fear offending the person. Maybe you over-medicate yourself because it gives you the feeling that you’re doing something about the danger of being alive. You can learn to notice your prevention decisions and change the ones that increase your stress.
#3 Projection
When you think about your inevitable decline, it’s tempting to project that bad feeling onto the world at large. You decide that the whole world is in decline because that’s less painful than accepting that the world will spin on without you someday. It’s comforting to think you won’t be missing much because it will all be gone when you’re gone. You don’t think that consciously, of course. Your conscious thoughts are full of “proof” that the decline is real. The verbal brain finds proof to explain emotions that it doesn’t understand. As Aldous Huxley said, "It's hard to see the world going up and up when you're going down and down."
Social bonds are strengthened by talk of decline because common enemy is what bonds a group of mammals. Animals cluster when a predator approaches, and humans have bonded around common enemies throughout history. We’re too polite to speak of enemies in today’s world, so we bond around abstract doomsday scenarios. People see you as “one of us” when you share their belief that we’re going to hell in a handbasket. Oxytocin makes it feel good, but now you have to feel bad to feel good. You can stop the bad feeling by building social bonds around something other than projecting the collapse of civilization. This is the subject of my book The Science of Positivity: Stop Negative Thought Patterns By Changing Your Brain Chemistry.
#4 Production
Mortality fears relax when you produce something that will last when you’re gone. It doesn’t have to be a pyramid or a a skyscraper. A tree house is enough to make your mark on the world if you make it sturdy. While you’re building it, you rewire the fear of disappearing from the world without a trace. Then the fear returns, which is why we’re so eager to keep producing things that last.
The biological roots of this impulse are important. Natural selection built a brain that motivates action to keep your genes alive. Animals aren’t aware of genes, but they constantly do things to spread their genes because that sparks happy chemicals. Your happy chemicals flow when you do things that promote the survival of your unique individual essence.
For most of human history, birth control was not available, so raising children consumed most of people’s energy. They had grandchildren in their thirties, and when they taught their traditions to their grandchildren, it sparked the feeling that they would survive in some way. Today, few people get to teach their traditions to their grandchildren, for a long list of reasons. So we are challenged to find new ways to spark the feeling that one’s unique individual essence will survive.
But it’s complicated, because your legacy might not get the recognition you hope for. The world may ignore your amazing invention and laugh at your brilliant poetry. Each disappointment in your quest for a legacy feels like a survival threat. And even if you do get a moment of recognition, the serotonin doesn’t last so you look for more. The solution to this conundrum is in my book, Status Games: Why We Play and How to Stop.
Some people enjoy producing their own funeral. That has no appeal for me, but it has been popular throughout history. It certainly gives you a chance to control people a little longer!
Each of us has our own way of stressing over death, so each of us needs our own way to relieve it. Let me tell you my story.
When I was young, I learned to deal with mortality it by telling myself that I would not waste time. This may sound nice, but it led to more stress when time-wasting tasks were forced on me. Finally, I realized that being in a hurry was my way of running from death, but that accepting death would actually be less stressful. Of course, it took time to rewire myself to stop being in a hurry it. I did that by telling myself, “I’ve done enough” whenever I felt stressed.
Your clock is always ticking. You will have to waste some of your precious time in traffic and in bureaucratic ordeals. You can’t stop the sands of time from flowing through your hourglass, but you can choose to enjoy that time.