[The following is mostly meant to be tongue in cheek, but roughly resembles the thought process I went through.]

If you have been raised to believe in an afterlife of some sort and have been reconsidering its existence, you may find the process of contemplating a final death distressing. I’m here to help. Below are some things you may want to consider; feel free to take them in any order as your mileage may vary.

Be clear about the lack of an afterlife. In Western culture, allusions to an afterlife or spiritual world are many and varied, and can range from stories about the undead or ghosts and zombies, to literary depictions of heaven, hell, or reincarnation (see: the Bible, the Qu’ran, Dante’s Divine Comedy, etc.), to stories of near-death encounters with a spiritual world (see: 90 Minutes in Heaven, 23 Minutes in Hell). While you may have been accustomed to thinking of some of these as fanciful and unsure of others, it will be helpful to try to regard any such assertions about the afterlife as unfounded or subjective. If you need help imagining how specific experiences that suggest an afterlife might be misconstrued, read about our knowledge of death and near death experiences. Unfortunately, even after your journey to acceptance is complete, you will encounter these cultural items again and again, but fortunately after a while they seem sillier and sillier.

Take your time considering what it means for you. You may have experienced the death of someone close to you, and as a result wondered about the ultimate fate of the person who died. When thinking about your own death, you may imagine an analogous person wondering the same thing about you. The difficulty comes when imagining what you yourself will experience. All we know for sure about death is that, after it, the person who used to inhabit their body is gone, and does not return. (Unfortunately, we observe the same thing happening with sufferers of degenerative brain diseases, such as Alzheimer’s, even though their bodies remain physically alive.) In effect, then, you must try to imagine an experience that is a complete lack of experience.

You might start by trying to imagine an existence without any senses, such as a completely dark room with no sound and nothing to touch, perhaps even with no air. When that gets boring, you may think that dreamless sleep is a closer analogy, until you remember that you always have woken up from such a sleep, and only knew that you had been sleeping afterwards. You may then spend some time trying to imagine a dreamless sleep from which you don’t wake up. After a while, you will probably have grasped the idea that it is very hard to imagine consciously a state without consciousness. The best you can come up with is that slipping into a dreamless sleep might be like one way to die, but not like what it is to be dead.

Certain Zen practices like meditation may help here, to the extent that they help turn off the stream of conscious thought. They won’t be a perfect example, since you won’t be dead, but successfully abdicating your consciousness for a little while may help calm you down about losing it irrevocably.

Expect to be in denial for a little while. If you become frustrated about imagining your own death, you may wish to pretend that it can be avoided, perhaps by thinking (depending on your age) that you have quite a long while left, or taking hope in the gradual increase in human longevity thanks to science. This may lead into some interesting philosophical speculation about immortality in your own body, including whether you could live long enough that you would eventually want to die, or something of that nature. When you have finished that line of thought, remember that there is good reason to believe the universe will eventually die a heat death, and that long before then our sun will explode and our planet will be destroyed. There’s no getting around it: you’re going to die at some point, whether you like it or not.

Don’t despair. At some stage in your struggle to cope with a disappearing afterlife, you may feel a sense of losing meaning. What, indeed, does it all mean? There are many different ways of answering this question, and quite a lot of them have been debunked or rejected by somebody. If and when you fail to find an objective source of meaning, remember that it’s all right to have a subjective sense of fulfillment all your own. If you can be happy and fulfilled with the good things in life, like the pleasures of love, friendships, family, and fulfilling work, then you will have embraced all that life has to offer. Whatever source of meaning you choose, only remember that it is yours and yours only, and that other people have to find their own.

Don’t worry about it. You may have been disposed before to think of the afterlife as terribly important, and this will heighten the cognitive dissonance produced when you decide to stop believing in it. The best solution is also the simplest one: don’t worry about death. This life is all you have, and it can only become more precious if you thought there was something beyond. Live to the fullest, live as hard as you can; stay in the present, and think often of the future but rarely of a future without yourself in it. One day there will be a universe without you, just like there was a universe without you for a long time, but what is that to you? Do what you can with what you have, stay in the present always, and when that’s over, you have nothing to fear.

Repeat. You will often return to thoughts of death, particularly after the first few major life events after you have forsaken the afterlife. Remind yourself of the above points, and over time, your acceptance will get easier, and you may even gain fresh insight as you live without fear of death.

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