A new study published in the Journal of Psychedelic Studies has found that people who have had a meaningful psychedelic experience report a significantly reduced fear of death, alongside heightened feelings of connection to themselves, others, and the world around them. Furthermore, the degree of connection closely tracks the degree of relief from death-related fear.
Researchers have long argued that anxiety about dying sits at the root of a surprisingly wide range of psychological struggles, from depression to broader existential distress. Studies have observed that psychedelic experiences—first noted in terminally ill patients in the mid-20th century and later confirmed in modern controlled research—can drastically reduce this fear, though the mechanisms behind why this happens remain unclear.
One leading explanation is increased connectedness: a heightened sense of relationship to oneself, others, and the wider world. Because psychedelics reliably enhance these feelings, researchers sought to investigate whether greater connectedness might be one of the specific pathways through which psychedelics reduce the fear of death.
Led by Noah N. Barr at the University of Wollongong in Australia, the team recruited 106 adults (59 male, 44 female, 2 non-binary; average age 31 years) who had undergone a personally meaningful psychedelic experience using a classical substance. Psilocybin (the active compound in “magic mushrooms”) was the most common, though LSD, ayahuasca, DMT, and mescaline were also represented.
Using an anonymous online survey, participants reflected retrospectively on the three months before and the three months after their experience. They completed validated questionnaires measuring their fear of death, their tendency to avoid thinking about death, their sense of connectedness (to themselves, to others, and to the wider world/universe), and the intensity of any mystical-type experiences during their psychedelic session.
The results were consistent. Participants reported a significantly lower fear of death and significantly less death avoidance after their psychedelic experience compared to before. At the same time, they reported significantly greater connectedness across all three domains.
Crucially, the study found that these changes moved together. People who gained more in their sense of connection to themselves, to others, and to the world were more likely to have also experienced the greatest reductions in their fear of death. Stronger mystical experiences—characterized by feelings of cosmic unity and transcendence—were similarly associated with greater connectedness and a lower fear of death.
However, the findings became more complex when looking at death avoidance—defined as the tendency to actively keep thoughts of death out of conscious awareness. Increases in connectedness to oneself and to others were linked to lower death avoidance. But an increased connectedness to the world, as well as intense mystical experiences, did not predict lower levels of death avoidance.
The authors suggest this split points to two very different ways people process death after a trip. Feeling more connected to oneself and loved ones seems to promote genuine existential acceptance, where a person stops avoiding the topic of death and stops fearing it.
Conversely, intense mystical experiences may promote a “defensive shift.” A person who feels cosmically connected to the universe may stop fearing death, but they still actively avoid thinking about it—likely because the drug changed their metaphysical beliefs, allowing them to bypass human mortality by believing they will merge with the cosmos when they die.
“An important unresolved question is whether reductions in death anxiety following a psychedelic experience arise through defensive denialistic bypassing or through acceptance and integration of mortality,” Barr and colleagues concluded.
There are significant limitations to keep in mind. Chiefly, the study’s retrospective design—asking participants to recall and compare their mental states from months or years prior—is inherently vulnerable to recall bias, selective memory, and the tendency for a person to unconsciously exaggerate how bad they felt before a life-changing event to make the transformation seem more profound.
The study, “Exploring associations between connectedness and death anxiety following a psychedelic experience,” was authored by Noah N. Barr, Briony Larance, Matthew J. Schweickle, and Sam G. Moreton.
