Death Anxiety / Fear of Dying

Death anxiety — the specific dread that arises from confrontation, direct or indirect, with the fact of one's mortality — is a phenomenologically distinctive emotional state that psychedelic experience reliably surfaces, often intensely, and often with unexpected therapeutic value. It differs from ordinary anxiety in its object (nonexistence rather than any specific threat) and in the specific bodily quality with which it arrives (a cold vertigo, a felt collapse of ordinary reference points, a sense that the ground beneath one's sense of self has become unreliable).

Existentialist philosophy — Martin Heidegger's analysis of Sein-zum-Tode ('being-toward-death'), Ernest Becker's The Denial of Death (1973), the Terror Management Theory tradition in social psychology — has argued that a substantial portion of ordinary human motivation is organised, unconsciously, around the management of this specific anxiety. Cultural symbols, religious systems, achievement drives, and identity structures all serve, in these analyses, partly as immortality projects — ways of managing the underlying awareness that any of them may one day be taken from us.

In psychedelic experience, death anxiety commonly surfaces as one component of the ego dissolution passage: as the ordinary sense of self begins to lose its edges, the specific fear that this loss is (or resembles) actual death typically arises. Rick Strassman's DMT participants, Ross et al.'s (2016) cancer-patient psilocybin cohort, and Griffiths et al.'s wider psilocybin research have all documented the specific arc — initial encounter with death-fear, followed (with appropriate set and setting) by a passage through it into a state experiencers describe as not a defeat of the fear but its integration.

Contemporary psychedelic-assisted therapy for end-of-life anxiety in cancer patients has produced some of the most striking clinical results in the whole field: single-session psilocybin experiences have produced sustained reductions in death anxiety, depression, and existential distress that follow-up studies have found still present six months later. The specific mechanism appears to involve not the elimination of death-anxiety but the direct experiential encounter with what participants describe as what happens after the self ends — an encounter that, whatever its metaphysical status, appears to render the anticipatory fear of death substantially less compelling.

Sources:
Wikipedia — Death anxiety (psychology)
Wikipedia — Ernest Becker