"All fears are really the fear of death" Agree or disagree?

In My Humble Opinion
1

In the last year or so I’ve developed a real phobia, with panic attacks. It’s claustrophobia and I’m being treated and it’s going well, so that’s just background for my question.

Last week I had to fly for the first time since the phobia developed. I have NEVER had a fear of flying. I have loved flying! But the idea of being trapped in a cramped space for hours was really threatening to trigger the claustrophobia and I couldn’t help but talk to my friends a fair amount about my nervousness leading up to it.

So the flying went really well and I didn’t have a panic attack! I consider it a real step forward in beating this thing. Yesterday I was talking to one of my good friends and she expressed happiness for me and said “you didn’t die!” which I took as a sort of metaphorical statement, but she carried on, “because of course you’re not really afraid of small enclosed spaces you’re afraid of death.” I said that wasn’t really what it felt like in the moment. She said, “but you feel like you’re going to suffocate right?”

“Hmm, no I’ve never had that thought” and the conversation sort of deteriorated because of how hard it is for me to put the feelings of a panic attack in words. But she left me with her firm belief that all fears are really the fear of death, which I suppose is an idea I’ve come across before, one that’s never really rung true to me.

The thing is I don’t really fear death. I mean I don’t go out looking for it either, but the fact of my mortality does not keep me up at night (in sharp contrast to nightmares about small enclosed spaces). I’ve always felt pretty casual about the “we’re all going to die one day” fact of life.

Things I fear more than death:

small enclosed spaces
torture
losing the respect of people I respect
outliving my ability to care for myself physically and financially

What say you Dopers?

2

No.
I disagree
People are afraid of many things that are in no way fatal

3

I disagree as well. I suffer from anxiety, but most of my fears have little to do with fear of death. In fact, one way of coping with them is to remind myself that I’m not going to die because of them.

4

Fear of flying may be fear of death, but it could just as easily be fear of having a panic attack on airplane. Fear itself may be the greatest fear people have. Someone should come up with a pithy saying about that.

I also fear old age and not being able to care for myself, but to me that mostly translates to a fear of death in the sense that I’ll have to kill myself. The other part of that is worse, the fear that I won’t be able to kill myself when that happens.

So no, fear of death is not the only fear, just a very common one about an event we all know is inevitable.

5

I can’t buy it. Most fears, if not all, are the fear of suffering. Death ends suffering. Ergo, disagree with the OP.

6

Not at all.

Fear of embarassment, fear of disappointment, fear of pain/suffering (that is not fatal,) etc.

7

I agree with this.

8

To expand on your point or merely agree with it: imagine a guy who fears something so much that he kills himself instead; what would that be evidence of?

9

No. A more clinically accurate generalization might be, ‘‘All fears are really the fear of fear.’’

Panic is induced by an unpleasant physical sensation that signals danger even in its absence. What we really fear is having that unpleasant physical sensation triggered and having to endure it. This avoidance-reinforcement cycle is present in almost every anxiety disorder under the sun (I’m not as sure about GAD but it certainly applies to panic disorder, social phobia, OCD, PTSD and other phobias.) The more we avoid the bad feelings, the more we feel threatened by them, the more we avoid them, and so on and so forth. As far as I know, the only successful way to treat anxiety is to learn how to endure those awful panicky feelings we work so hard to avoid. They then lose their power to control our behavior, which results in desensitization, etc.

Fear of death might be the most universal fear, but it’s not the root of all fear.

10

I have panic issues and I’m with you, OP; all the things that can go wrong in life are what are frightening, not death. The angle I can see is that all the faulty things about life are in the same overall bag as the fact that we aren’t immortal in this life, that death is the big version of the littler small faults, suffering and losses we have along the way.

My sympathies – after I had a serious panic episode lasting a few weeks, I finally went to see someone and got stable again, but with some fragility. I had the same reaction as you to flying and even sitting in an audience – I have to be on the aisle in a theater, in church, etc., or I feel trapped and panicky.

11

Does fear have to be fear of something in particular? Or can it just be a physiological/psychological phenomenon without necessarily having an object?

12

I think the fear of suffering is as great as the fear of death.

Look at people who have anxiety over things like public speaking. They obviously aren’t afraid they’re going to literally die at the podium. Their fear is that they’ll embarrass themselves in public and suffer a loss of reputation.

13

Well, at its base, fear is a physiological response to danger. In the case of an anxiety disorder, it’s a physiological response to something our brain is erroneously interpreting as danger. In all honesty, current US culture is a pretty unfortunate place to deal with the fear instinct, since so many mundane things trip our ‘‘danger’’ wires on a day to day basis. Leaving aside the fears of heights, snakes, guns or whatever other things trigger our survival response, we also have the same basic physiological fear response to public speaking, embarrassing ourselves in social situations, getting cut off in traffic, etc. as our ancestors did to spotting a lion resting in the treetops (or whatever lions do.) Our brains, to varying degrees, now perceive survival threats everywhere. We’ve even got evidence that a verbal altercation triggers a similar physiological response as getting the shit beat out of you. It doesn’t appear our brains are very well equipped to accurately identify threats within our current modern environment.

So, if you work based on the assumption that the fear response itself is a biological survival response, that is, it’s triggered by the threat of death, then yes, I guess all fear is fear of death. But if you accept that in our current environmental context, the fear response has gone absolutely bonkers, then the fear of fear response makes more sense.

My point in boiling it down to ‘‘fear of death’’ and ‘‘fear of fear’’ is that no matter what you are afraid of, it’s the exact same physiological response, and that response exists in the first place to protect us from death. For some people there is literally no physiological difference between actually being charged by a knife-wielding maniac and even thinking about driving in the city.

14

Unless you’re a religious person. They manage to combine these fears by believing you can die and then still suffer.

15

Yes I agree. I think all fears are at root a warning signal that something is going to reduce our survival chances.

Of course this can get short circuited (people developing an intense aversion to flowers for example) but aside from phobias or anxiety conditions where our normal survival anxiety instincts get short circuited, I think all fears are fundamentally fears of death oriented behavior (decay, loss of status, damage to the integrity of the physical self, damage to the integrity of the social self, etc).

16

These are all death oriented behaviors.

Embarrassment means loss of social status. Humans are social animals with a dominance hierarchy. Loss of status = lower chances of survival = death.

Fear of disappointment = loss of ability to survive in a hostile world.

Fear of pain suffering. Most pain and suffering is damage to the integrity of the body, or damage to the integrity of the self. These reduce survival odds. You fear a needle being stuck in you because it hurts. But fundamentally you fear it because it opens you up to being unable to function, getting an infection, being easy prey, etc.

Of course it isn’t a perfect system. We fear lions and tigers, but we do not naturally fear standing next to nuclear material because we didn’t face that in our history (we have to be taught that fear). Both will destroy our physical selves, but we only fear the ones we faced in our history.

As far as OP, what I find helps with anxiety and panic disorder is getting a pill fob and then keeping some anti anxiety meds in it. You can keep xanax, hydroxyzine, propranolol, etc, in it. Knowing you always have drugs on hand that can combat or short circuit a panic attack is very helpful.

17

Absolutely disagree.

I have two things in my background which support my conclusion.

First, is just plain history. I’m just the right age, that I grew up in what may someday be referred to as “The Era Of The Over Simplified Answer.” Since the 1960’s, it’s been very popular for someone to put on their best confident Sage of the Times face, and proclaim that such-and-such is the root of all whatever. Back in the day, it was crap like “if you are restless and bored, and you aren’t sure what you want to do, it’s because you are horny.” Or “any time someone irritates you to the point of anger, it is because at your root core, you are still a killer ape, and want to commit murder.”

So now, whenever I hear or read any “all X, means Z,” I just laugh it off as the silly blather that it is. Pseudo-wisdom.

The other even more important thing is, that I also suffer from acquired panic-attacks-about-flying. Until I was FORTY, I had no special problems. Then suddenly, without warning, I got on a plane for a business trip, and just as it was about to taxi, I found myself thinking completely irrational thoughts in a rush, and I jumped out of my seat, ran to the back of the plane, and fell to my knees. They had to take me off, and send me home.

I studied what happened VERY carefully, as I suffered several more panic attacks after that, some of which were about plane rides, but some were about entirely safe, but very stressful concerns I had. On one of the flight-related ones, the first after the above “adventure,” I had to fly again, but I came prepared. I had gone to my doctor after the first attack, and acquired a prescription for Xanax,and full instructions on it’s use. He said to take a full tablet a half hour before boarding for optimum results, so I did.

But then the plane was early. They started boarding fifteen minutes after I took the pill, and I found myself hiding behind a potted plant, again thinking absurd thoughts such as “I can drive from Virginia to Colorado in ten hours! Yeah! I can do that!” But I was just in control enough to realize that was BS. I went to the stewardesses who were boarding the plane, and explained my predicament, and they offered to take me to see the pilot, so I would realize he knew his stuff. I immediately recognized that rationality has NOTHING to do with panic. Nothing at all. It’s more physiological than that.

Clearly, my “fear of flying” was not due to a logical fear of death, nor was it really “fear” at all, per se.

Bottom line, I know now that I have various fears. Most of them have nothing to do with death. I am afraid of disappointing a woman I care about. That’s got nothing to do with death, that’s more like fear of discovering I have no value, and am going through all this crap for nothing. I’m afraid of big fast creepy things, but that’s got nothing to do with death, that’s more like a cross between intense revulsion, and a strong dislike of being surprised.

Without any intent at all to drag this into politics (REALLY!!) I have found that I am increasingly fearful that instead of simply being inept, Trump and the Republicans are actually going to do so much damage to this country’s interests, that my children will suffer extra difficult lives long after I am gone. That certainly isn’t a fear of death at all.

18

Well, there again, there is no fear of death. There’s a fear of suffering before death, and a fear of suffering after death, but death itself is just getting your passport stamped at eternity’s immigration office.

19

My fear of needles isn’t a fear of death, it’s a fear of losing control.

Maybe all fears of death are just fear of losing control!

20

Disagree. My phobia is pain. I’ve has several bad accidents that resulted in more pain than I care to dwell on.
I know I’m going to die - I just hope it doesn’t hurt.