If you’re one of the many people who sail through life without irrational fears every day, then you’re lucky. For some of us, every hour of the day is filled with a little voice inside our heads telling us that we or our loved ones are doomed.
It may seem ridiculous to many of you, but the fear of death follows me every day.
Where it Began
In the centre of town on a Saturday afternoon, I waited for my friend to arrive. We were supposed to meet at 2:30 pm to have lunch. It was 2:45 pm. My mind immediately conjured up ridiculous ideas of where she was. She could have crashed her car on the way or fallen down the stairs and banged her head before leaving.
When she arrived, only twenty minutes late, I was so relieved to see her alive. She had simply gotten stuck in traffic, but in my mind, she had narrowly escaped some imaginary demise.
Like most people out there, my thoughts were not always clouded by dread. I was able to conclude rational explanations for almost everything. If someone wasn’t answering their phone or was late to an event, I knew that they were probably just held-up with something else. That day, however, had changed something inside of my head and would grow worse every day.
A Never-Ending Cycle
Anxiety does not take a break. It is with you every second of the day, controlling everything that you do. The more you try to do to ease the fear, the more it grows and takes over.
If your child has a cough, you begin to worry that it’s something more serious. You go online and look up the symptoms, hoping that you will be wrong, only to find ten or twenty horrendous diseases that your child could possibly have. It doesn’t matter that the doctor said that it’s just a chest infection, maybe that doctor was wrong, and your child is in a fatal condition.
The next time your child is sick, you immediately think of those diseases that you read about online. What if this time they really have one of them? The fear that your child could die all because of a wrongly-diagnosed cough will torment you for the rest of their childhood, all because you wanted to prove yourself wrong the first time that they were sick.
My Message to You
If you suffer from anxiety and the fear of losing a loved one then it may be futile in saying this to you, but life is short. We cannot spend our lives worrying about how short they may be, but instead, we need to learn to fill them with love and happiness.
Getting professional help is the greatest step that you can take to rid yourself of these inner demons. A therapist will help you learn to rationalize your fears and understand negative thinking patterns. They may prescribe you with medication but try not to be scared of them. A trained medical professional will not prescribe anything that they don’t think will help you.
Through the help of people around you, and by helping yourself, you can silence the troublesome thoughts inside of your head. You can learn to be less afraid of possibly devastating scenarios and instead focus on reality.
Living with the fear of death affects your daily life in terrible ways. It can make some things impossible to accomplish and will take over your thoughts and actions. Living a life without this fear is completely possible, but only with the right help.
If you have a loved one who suffers from this fear, share this article with them and let them know that there is hope that they will return to a normal life.
