My Obsession Over Ageing

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This is actually my first thread to post, but I am just so desperate for help that this seems like no worse of a time than any other.
I am a 21 year old junior year college student and for the past four days I have been completely distraught and obsessed with the idea of my body's eventual decline and death. I believe it was triggered by my lifespan psychology class where I really had to think about the whole process of people getting older. It's become so bad that it's hard for me to function and life feels pointless and meaningless. It seems strange to think that just a week ago I felt very different about the whole subject. I mean sure I didn't want to get old and die and I was trying to be conscious about monitoring my diet and trying to prolong good health, but I thought about it in passing and was for the most part happy. And when I wasn't happy it was because of things happening in the present like doing well on my tests, getting good grades, trying to make new friends and working hard at my job. I had so many things I was looking forward to like seeing my friends at home over winter break, starting a new relationship, and even coming back to school because I had gotten in to some really great classes.
Now, however, none of that seems to matter anymore. Every time I try and enjoy something my brain immediately tells me how pointless it all is because it will all be over eventually anyway. I can't get my mind over the fact that I can't enjoy how things are right now forever. I just want my brain to go back to the way it was where that wasn't important. I want to be able to enjoy life again. I have obsessed about things in my life before and was misdiagnosed with OCD before eventually being diagnosed with general anxiety and asperger's so I assume that my reaction to my lifespan class is in someway related to my diagnoses.
I guess what I'm asking for is just general advice if you've gone through this yourself and/or have found your own solution to accepting this fact of life. I appreciate any help you can offer. Thanks

At 40, I'm in better shape physically, mentally, emotionally and spiritually than I was at 21. Yes, I no longer have the same POTENTIAL as a 40 year old than as a 21 year old, but I'm satisfied with my overall fitness and expect to keep improving myself well into my 50s and 60s.

Your fear seems to be that you've peaked at the age you are and it's nothing but downhill from here. Well I beg to differ. You can get stronger, smarter and wiser every day for decades to come. Yes, eventually the body will break down beyond its ability to repair itself, but we're a lot more than a bag of blood and bones, as we will all discover in time.

Did you get to the part where they tell you that it is abnormal to get senile and really sick when you get older? If you take care of your body you can live a very long time and not have a lot of health issues. You have a choice. Take care of your body and you will do fine. Live an unhealthy lifestyle in your 20's and start paying for it when you get to be middle aged.

Hi, you might want to look at a little zen. For example, a biology professor used treats and much patience to win the trust of black bears in Michigan's upper peninsula, writing a book entitled "Walking With Bears," and he included the line of poetry, "To a bear, a summer's afternoon is eternal."

And you generally want to build a team and contribute to a team, both pursuing your own projects and helping other people achieve their projects, without being overbearing, or making too big a deal, and all this can be a lot easier said than done.

I do have experience with OCD, health precautions, overchecking, responsibility OCD. If I can wind to a place where it's okay to do a precaution and okay not to, that's a pretty good place to be. And zen helps here, too, for I don't want to give a thought more power by trying to push it out of my mind, nor try and hold onto it.

To which the only thing to say is: You are around a quarter of your life span. For God's sake enjoy it.



You're twenty f*****g young.

If you think you have anywhere live your life, go down the local old folk's home and have a chat with them.




This is good. Focus on this and things like it.



You could always try bonding with some old folk, if you haven't any grandparents yourself. Try doing some voluntary work at the local old age ward, or something like that. Most elderly people (If they are compos mentis) will be more than glad to provide you with perspective on how much life you have ahead of you, and what they regret not doing. (If you're a med student, chances are you will end up doing something like this anyway).



I wish you all the luck in the world. You are terrified of death and therefore can see no reason in living now if you could be snuffed out at any moment. Life's not like that. You may even come to believe in an afterlife (but if you do, that would be through anecdotal evidence, not through wishful thinking).

You'll be fine, it's just a phase you're going through. I went through similar aged 13-25, but it never bothered me as much as it obviously does you.

Good luck.

I'm almost 50 and I can now start to see some signs of aging. My body is still good and I'm just getting a few sags and wrinkles around my face, but I'm really working doubletime now to try and catch it and reverse or slow or stop it. I know now that this is something that I should have worked on all my life. I didn't because when I was younger I couldn't imagine getting old.

I would suggest getting some books from the library about how to prevent age related problems and skin problems etc. Mainly I'd suggest not smoking, not drinking too much, not doing recreational drugs very much if at all, eating right with the occasional binge for something good, regular moderate exercise where you keep yourself toned, take care of your facial and neck skin, take care of your hair and teeth.

For your exercise I'd suggest a health club, not a gym type place. You want to stay toned and fit, maybe put on some muscle but not the big huge body wearing out bulking that goes on in the gym. For your face (I don't know if you are male or female), but still go to a good cosmetics counter at the mall and get them to show you a skin care routine for your skin type. Keep up with that. You may also want to look into face exercises which keep the muscles toned in your face and prevent sagging.

As for the death thing, I never thought about it until I was about 22 or 23. I remember the exact moment when it hit me that I was actually going to die one day. It was panic inside me. I felt that way for days. I would think of something and then remember that I was eventually going to die, which I didn't want to do even 80 years later, and it would ruin it for me. I obsessed over it a lot. I would force myself to think of something else right then and promise myself that I'd think about the death thing later. I'd even set a time to sit down and think about it. That helped me. If I knew that I was going to sit down and think about the fact that I'm gonna die, every night from 830 to 9, then I could put off thinking about it. I'd write about it in a journal. Just random thoughts and such. I would start spacing out the time between my sit down to think about death time too. But having that time devoted to thinking about it helped me put it out of my mind for the time being. That's very different than "just don't think about it", which is impossible sometimes. I had a "just don't think about it right now, I have time to think about that set up later on". Also, remember too that advances are made every day to extend life expectancy. Don't research them right not. That would be too much to obsess about. Give it about six months and then start researching if you still feel the need to. Right now just think of them as vague scientific stuff they are doing and that it will benefit you, and by the time you are old, there's no telling what they will have.

Good luck. Set a time for thinking of death and stick to it. Then space out the time between doing it until you don't need to do it anymore. What it is, I think, is that while you have always known in theory that you are going to die one day, it's real to you now. The farther away you get from thinking about it so much, the less real it will be. It will never be that "just in theory" way again, but it's a whole lot less worrisome once you get past this initial panic and obsession and frantic worry over it.

You have made it to 21 so probably you have gotten distraught and obsessed about other things...?but I encourage you to get really fit... it changes, or I should say I guess, that getting really fit changed me more than anything else in a very positive way. Aerobically fit.

You're right, nothing we do matters in the long run because we'll all be gone eventually.
However, this also means that the only thing that really does matter is what we choose to do with the time we have.

Dwelling on the inevitable and unavoidable is pointless and counterproductive.

Live your life, take pleasure in the simple things, strive to better yourself, try to be good to both yourself and others whenever possible, and try not to take yourself so seriously.
A little existential angst, like you seem to be experiencing currently, is perfectly normal as you are exposed to some of the more unpleasant realities of our existence through your education and experiences as a young adult.
Just so long as you keep it in perspective and don't allow yourself to get completely overwhelmed by it, it's probably not anything to be too cocerned over.

If you really can't stop thinking about it, my best advice is to distract yourself by immersing yourself in one of your special interests.
Might as well get some utility out of your obsessive nature, right?
Once you're hyperfocused on it, everything else will go away, including this.
Repeat as necessary until it beomes less of an issue.

Frankly, I'm glad I'm going to die eventually.
This life is very stressful, painful, tiring, and frustrating, and it's comforting to me to know that eventually all that will end.

My own brush with existential angst was more about the feeling of being thrown into this world unprepared and without any real idea of what I was doing or even should be doing given that feeling.
I got over it, sort of, eventully.
Although the nagging feeling is still there, I almost never think about it, and when I do it doesn't really bother me as I've just accepted it as one of those things I can't change.

As somone older and wiser once said to me: This too shall pass.

Most definately. Your whatchamacallit has latched onto this thingamabob.

Nature does not completely ignor the latter stages of life. You can gain some things of value, that you don't have in youth, like wisedom and insight, that help you along and give it a different 'feel' then youth. In other words, the changes are not all bad and can help keep it interesting. And life is such a long and tiring afair, that for many who reach old age, a rest starts to not sound all that bad.

But in general, it does no good to worry about things in advance. I mean after you have done whatever is practical and can be done in advance, thinking about it further just keeps you uselessly anxious, and will wear you down in time. One thing I do is remind myself that there will be plenty of time to worry about it when the day comes. But I have general anxiety/aspergers too, so I know what you are experiencing. And when logic alone is insufficent to prevent bad feelings, I go to the doctor and may use meds, or perhaps a change in meds, to keep things in balance. It works for me.

I don't know if this is applicable to your situation, but if you are afraid of that there is no afterlife, I posted this to two other people, in another thread:

Of course, if you feel this way, despite believing in the afterlife, you could of course keep in mind that it seems unreasonable for our souls to exist if there is no meaning. I myself do claim to know what that meaning is, but I think I have lost hope on finding it in this life. I don't know why I am alive, anymore, honestly..... it sort of feels like I am just procrastinating my inevitable death.

It seems that you are more concerned with dying, rather than the aging process. I myself am not concerned with "dying", but rather look forward to it.... rather, I am concerned with getting old and ugly. Beauty obsesses me to such a degree that I all too often cannot even go outside. I have to look like a model to do it. I have managed to be a bit less strict with it, recently, however, but it's still far from not being a concern of mine. I also intend to kill myself by my own hand, before I grow old and ugly. I have to always look good... beauty means so much to me.... -_- I keep wishing that some miracle solution to this will present itself to me, soon, but.... I know that that is just a silly wish that won't happen. :/ So... I guess I need to die by... 39, or something. Not many years left, in other words.... v_v

Hello, and welcome! I'm brand new here myself.

What you describe has been a regular part of my life since I was maybe seven or eight years old (I'm in my late 30s now). The term I use for it is "thanatopsis," which roughly comes out to "death-gazing" -- seems as good as anything. It's not a phobia, as phobias are by definition irrational, while death seems to me to be the most rational of fears.

The moment at which you become viscerally aware of your eventual and inevitable end throws a permanent switch in the mind, I think. It's something many people don't seem to experience, and which I suppose many people are shielded from by a supernatural worldview or a general lack of inquisitiveness, but for those of us who do experience it as an epiphany, it does often come to serve as a standard by which everything else then must be re-evaluated.

Death becomes the logical end of any train of thought, and conscious effort is required to bring the mind back from the precipice. Thanatopsis has been with me for 30 years now and is the place my mind goes to by default if nothing else is in its way.



I have no solution, but I have some thoughts and ideas that are helpful to me when it gets bad.

- Understand that this is not a delusional ideation. It is just the opposite. It is your mind beginning to understand scale.

- We are small and we are brief. This is OK. Because...

- We are also not as important as we think we are. We are attached to an idea of a continuous self, but that idea can't hold up to serious scrutiny. Who and what we are is always already impermanent.

I'm not a particularly quoty person, but I carry a few with me, and most of those have to do with this phenomenon. Milton, in Paradise Lost, has Satan remark that,



That is relevant, because:

- The problem is not the fact of death. The problem is the discomfort you are experiencing as a result of your thought processes. The reality of death is no more present than it was before you gazed into the abyss.

The only difference is in what your mind is doing. You’ve fed it the one problem it cannot solve, but it’s still trying, churning around trying to process that data. At some point your short-term storage runs out, and the end of the tape is left spinning on the take-up reel, making that awful ticking noise.

Your task, as the realized abyss-gazer, is to learn to stop that empty reel from spinning, to rein in your mind like any other erratic limb or organ, and ultimately to construct a mental process that will attempt to predict when this crisis is likely to take place, and divert your thoughts to something plausibly similar but not unmanageable. Your brain is just another organ. It is not you, and what you're experiencing is not an inseparable part of you any more than drunkenness is, or vertigo, or rage. It is a mental state, and one which derives from a process which is ultimately under conscious control.

I’ve found some success with the most basic of Buddhist-derived insight meditation, just learning to monitor breathing, heartbeat, muscle tension, and mental activity. This involves no more than noting when a sensation arises, then letting it go: “breathing, breathing,” when you note a breath, “twitch” when a muscle twitches, “thinking” when a thought crosses your mind. It’s not trivial — there’s a reason they call it “practice” — but it can be immensely helpful in this situation, and it has the additional benefit of allowing you to begin to see your mind as “its own place” distinct from the real world and also distinct from your “self”, which is in essence the blanket input-output interface for the vast number of software processes running on the hardware that is your mind.

By now, I have a monitor process more or less running at all times, that, when the “gonna die gonna die gonna DIE” thoughts start going, answers them immediately with “but not today”. This works a lot of the time, but it took a lot of insight meditation and some use of the basic aversion therapy wristband (put a thickish rubber band on your non-dominant wrist; when you catch your mind thinking something you don’t want it to, SNAP!) to get to the point I’m at today. (When learning some of these techniques, I also put myself through other exercises such as going through a day speaking only in words of two syllables or less, or writing essays which did not include certain letters, or deciding I would find a dollar in change on the ground each day - the usual stuff, I guess, but it all helps to make it abundantly clear that the map is not the territory, the brain is not the mind, and the mind is not the self).

I have had success, at the very worst of moments, trying to locate the thing which will be lost when I die. Trying to point to it, mentally; to localize it behind my eyes, between my ears, in my tongue or the top of my head; trying to pin it down in this memory or that, this idea or that one. I’ll go through all the places “I” could be and rule them out, and once you’ve ruled out your whole body, and your whole mind, there’s nothing really left to mourn, or to fear.

Yes, everything you experience will be "lost in time, like tears in rain", but then again, everything already is. You are not the same as you were last week, a year ago, ten years ago. The difference between these gradual changes, and complete dissolution, is only a difference of degree.

If nothing else helps, I’ll watch Blade Runner again. It’s the best movie ever made, maybe the only movie ever made, about what it is like to know you are going to die.