Terrified of something that happened to me recently..

[Faith No More]

Same here. It shits the life out of me knowing, knowing that one day something is going to happen that is so awful that I'm not going to survive it. And I don't have any way of knowing what it will be, or when it will happen. It could be in 30 seconds, later today, tomorrow, next week, by the end of this year, or in another 50 years from now. It's like being chased by some unknown thing in the dark and you don't know when it will catch you, but you know it definitely will because you've seen it catch other people, even some who you expected to outrun it longer than you did. How can anyone not be terrified by that?

I think a good way to overcome that is to try and grasp a pragmatic viewpoint through rationalization. So, you're running from this thing, but you do know it will eventually catch you. Why not mentally prepare yourself for that inevitability as you run? You only propagate your fear by refusing to confront reality head on. Once you accept that reality, the fear dissipates. I've heard that the ancient Samurai used to dedicate time on a daily basis to imagine and contemplate themselves being killed in order prevent fear from taking over in battle.

I read a book once by a Buddhist(can't remember the name) that suggested an interesting mental exercise in which you relax with your eyes closed while sitting on the ground and imagine your body buried under the ground below you, decaying back into nature. It sounds morbid, but it helps you picture and understand that death is merely a return to the state you were in before you were born. The only thing to fear about death is the unknown, so the more you refuse to face it, the greater the fear.