Mainul H Khan said,

“Imagine a person has come to know today that he will die within six months. Maybe he is on death row, or the doctor has informed him of a terminal disease, or whatever the reason might be. I guess his preferences of life would change significantly just as a result of the new information that entered his brain today. 

If he is a family-oriented person, he would like to spend the rest of his life as close to his family as he can. If he is a workaholic, he would do his best to finish off the projects that he has started. If he is a materialist, he would probably see the benefit in enjoying life to the fullest. If this person believes in life after death, he would try to do good deeds till the end of his life on earth so that he can have some definite advantage in the afterlife as per his belief system. 

Would it also impact his mental state? What about other anxieties such as bank balance and family he is going to leave behind? Would he still care about the 100K that he lost on a recent share market crash? Would he still be scared of losing the house that is facing foreclosure?

I think bigger anxieties always overwhelm the smaller anxieties. A family in a warzone never would worry about how the breakfast could be better with salad and coffee, they would be just content with life if they had something to eat today. A boy living on one dollar a day in the streets of Dhaka would never complain about not being able to get into a soccer team. Then why would not the serious anxiety surrounding death not make other anxieties just go away? 

And if that is so, could death anxiety be used in a constructive way to reduce modern-day anxieties of everyday life? Also what steps would be needed at the personal level and at the community level to make it happen?

Are there levels of death anxiety that fit the criteria to be constructive tension, and other levels may not fit the criteria?

Last question, how existential crisis plays a role here? I mean, if someone does not believe in an afterlife, is it possible that no level of death anxiety would be beneficial for that kind of person and he would be better off just forgetting it?” 

M Samir Hossain said in reply,

“I have always seen anxiety as also a product to sell while others requested help just to eliminate it. Nevertheless, anxiety can be a huge problem when it is over the limit or of an abnormal pattern, like in clinical diagnoses. If anxiety is of the normal pattern but beyond the limit for a person, that usually indicates errors or mismatches in that person’s life components. Any sort of normal anxiety within the limit for that person is something that we are discussing in this dialogue.

Primarily, useful anxiety works for our mind just like friction does in the physical world. At a glance, anxiety seems bad, but after analysis, it proves to be mandatory for life. Even our anxiety of death keeps us safe at many levels, for example, while driving or when eating. However, the kind of death anxiety that we are conversing about is something that is generally beyond our limit. That’s why we tend to deny death during our everyday life as we cannot cope with it. According to my earlier statement, such a normal kind of anxiety beyond the limit probably indicates some kind of mismatch or error on our part. As you know, especially through Death and Adjustment Hypotheses (DAH), I believe we are not adjusted to the fact or phenomenon of dying at some point in our life. With this kind of maladjustment, that is, anxiety, we get more problems. Nevertheless, if we can bring the level of death anxiety within our limit, yes, then we can utilize it too, just as you said. Just to be clear, by adjustment to death I always meant about such a state where there will be anxiety around death but within our limit.

As you see in the above diagram, the balls represent different kinds of stress/anxiety in normal life. The first and the smallest ball represents the average stress of a normal life. If we decide to expect only that size of stress/anxiety in our life, clearly the later bigger ones will create huge stress on our caliber. It is true for all the balls except for the last one that represents the anxiety of death. Again, this death anxiety must be within the limit, that is, with proper death adjustment. Once someone accommodates that kind of death anxiety in life, he/she should be well-calibrated for most other patterns of anxiety as even after adjustment, death anxiety is still bigger than most other normal anxieties.

Adjustment to death (detail in DAH), that is, normal death anxiety, requires a stable and acceptable concept of death in humans (further detail in my “Concept of Death” research). Therefore, as explained in DAH, for those who perceive death as our very end, it would be practically impossible to keep the death anxiety within that expected limit. As a result, for that group, death anxiety is not even an option to be included in the list of utilizable anxieties.    

I can see that you are thinking of a hugely positive step for mankind by attempting to accommodate death anxiety in life for a simpler, thereby, happier lifestyle even in the presence of death and its thoughts. But to achieve that dream status in life, death adjustment is the key factor that ultimately brings in morality, materialism, and above all an adaptable practical concept of death in the picture as prerequisites.”