Death Anxiety w/Professor David Veale (Episode 113)
Disordered: Anxiety Help
Josh Fletcher and Drew Linsalata
4.9 • 665 Ratings
🗓️ 13 June 2025
⏱️ 40 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Death anxiety - an obsessive fixation on death, dying and existence driven by intense fear of the inevitability of death - is a very common experience for listeners of Disordered.
This week Josh and Drew were lucky enough to have a chat with Professor David Veale, one of the leading authorities in in the UK on the topic of death anxiety and mental health issues related to death and existence. David helped spread some light and some much-needed humor on this topic that might help you change the way you approach your death-focused anxiety and fear.
The highlights:
Death is in fact an un-solvable problem. This creates discomfort for all humans, and fear is some kind for most humans. That is also unavoidable. Being uncomfortable with death is part of living. Approaching death anxiety means coming to grips with this reality.
We can all experience discomfort around the idea of death because it really is an important topic, however importance and urgency are not the same things. Please keep this in mind. Death might be important, but that does not make it a topic you need to tend to immediately as if it is a current emergency.
Compulsively searching for answers or solutions when it comes to death is a pointless exercise that just makes things worse than they have to be.
Overcoming death anxiety is an exercise is doing what we can do to prepare for death (writing wills, making funeral arrangements, talking about our feelings, etc.), then bring our discomfort or fear with us as we do our best to return to living the best life we can while we have it!
If you are struggling with death anxiety, this episode is worth a listen.
For more on Professor David Veale visit his website:
Find David’s book about death anxiety (co-authored with Rachel Menzies):
https://www.veale.co.uk/news/free-yourself-from-death-anxiety-book-published/
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Death anxiety is the negative feelings or excessive fear that some people may have about death or dying. |
| 0:11.0 | It is thought to be what we call transdiagnostic, it cuts across various types of emotional problems. |
| 0:19.0 | Health anxiety, OCD, panic disorder, PTSD, things like that. |
| 0:25.1 | As they say, nothing is certain but death and taxes. |
| 0:29.2 | At the other end of the spectrum of those individuals that we're talking about now, |
| 0:32.6 | we really are very anxious and trying to sort out death in their head, but not actually living life now. |
| 0:39.4 | Fully embrace and accept that this is coming, but now actually you need to prepare for it |
| 0:46.4 | and live life to the full now. |
| 0:53.5 | Welcome to Disordered. This is episode 113 of the podcast. Lucky 113. Today we're going to talk about |
| 0:59.5 | OCD, death anxiety, health anxiety, body dysmorphic disorder, all the good stuff. Disorder, |
| 1:06.1 | listen to me, live from New York. It's disordered. So I am Drew Linsalada. |
| 1:11.1 | I am one of the co-hosts of This Vine podcast. |
| 1:13.6 | I'm a therapist specializing in the practice of anxiety and anxiety disorders, |
| 1:16.9 | a former suffer of these problems, |
| 1:19.2 | doing much better now, a three-time author on the psychoeducator advocate. |
| 1:23.9 | Dude with the microphone. |
| 1:25.5 | I'm Joshua Fletcher, also known as anxiety Josh. |
| 1:28.5 | I'm a psychotherapist based in Manchester in the UK. |
| 1:31.6 | We specialize in anxiety disorders, namely panic disorder, OCD, esteem-based stuff. |
| 1:38.8 | A previous sufferer of several anxiety disorders, author on it, you get the gist. |
| 1:44.6 | We're very lucky to be joined by another guest today, a big hitter in the field, |
| 1:50.6 | and we love having big hitters in the field on this. |
... |
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