My near-death experience was good for me – everyone should have one

“We human beings take life for granted,” says psychologist Dr Steve Taylor. “We live in a world of familiarity and have become disconnected from reality. We almost seem to doze off and forget that we are alive in the world and that our lives are temporary and fragile.”

At Leeds Beckett University, where Taylor lectures, he gives his students an exercise to focus on that fact.

“I give them a date – one year from now – which is ‘your date of death’,” he says. “Then I tell them: ‘You’ve got one year left as your last. You need to decide how you would you spend those last 365 days most valuably with relationships, activities, achievements, hobbies, and so on.’”

The results are intriguing.

“Even though they seem like fairly typical students – young people and quite hedonistic – they still say they’d spend more time with their loved ones and in nature,” says Taylor. “Most of them are very mature and spiritual about it. Occasionally some say they will have as many drugs, drink and sex as possible. But that’s quite rare. They say travelling, of course, and some would take up a new hobby like surfing or paragliding. They sometimes say that they’ll mend broken relationships or tell people that they love them. They all put down different, interesting things.”

It’s something that was witnessed in the passing of former England football manager Sven Goran Eriksson, who died in August after announcing in January this year that he ‘had about a year’. He was able to use his “date of death” to fulfil his wish of managing a “Liverpool Legends” team, which included Steven Gerrard and Fernando Torres, for a charity fundraising charity match in March.

Taylor has done years of research into people who have had to face their own mortality, and talking to him reminds me of my own brush with death. Fifty years ago this summer, when I was in my fourth year of secondary school, I was moments away from being blown up by a bomb at the Tower of London.

I can still remember walking back from the Tower towards the Underground with my French exchange school friend Françoise and hearing the bang. We said to each other, “What was that?”

It wasn’t until the train journey home that evening that we realised what had happened.

“Were you there?” a woman asked, as she heard my friend and I talking animatedly about our fun day out at the Tower.

“Yes,” I replied.

She raised her copy of the London Evening Standard. “Tower of London bomb blast,” the front page read.

I was horrified. Then a number of other people in the carriage raised their copies too.

Forty-one people were injured in the blast – a dozen of them children. Many lost limbs, and a woman was killed. The bomb had gone off at 2.30pm in peak summer season, when the Tower was thronging with tourists. It was suspected the IRA had carried out the attack, although no one has ever claimed responsibility.

Of course, in the days before mobile phones, it wasn’t until we were home that we appreciated how worried our families had been. The blast had made international news and our relatives all knew we had been planning to go to the Tower.

I’ve never thought of this close shave as beneficial to me – recalling it naturally induces a feeling of dread. But reflecting on it could actually help me better appreciate my life, says Taylor. In fact, he says “everyone should have a close brush with death at some point in their life to make sure that they don’t live their whole life in a subconscious state of ‘taking for grantedness’, as I call it”.

The result of thorough research with “people who have been told that they are going to die of cancer or people who have had a serious brush with death”, his conclusion is that it has “a very powerful positive effect. It makes death real to them, and most of the time human beings aren’t really aware of death. We subconsciously assume we are immortal.”

He adds: “There was one guy in my research who had a serious heart attack and afterwards everything was different. He totally transformed – in the way he sees the world, the way he lives his life. He became much less materialistic and much more aware of the value of other things in his life.”

However, he says that sometimes people’s egos – for instance, Donald Trump’s – can be too strong for the individual to be fundamentally changed by a brush with death.

“At first, some people did think Trump might change,” Taylor says. “But it doesn’t look like he has. It depends on the strength of a person’s ego. If the ego is so strong, even an encounter with death won’t bring change, just as a well-structured house with strong foundations will withstand an earthquake.

“I think Trump’s ego is so powerful and so disconnected from the world, that it’s impossible to break through.

Taylor says that people who react positively to near-death experiences “don’t put things off for another day, delay or avoid opportunities”.

He adds: “They have a new and wider sense of perspective. Their personality is more open – welcoming and taking every new experience that comes their way. Trivial matters and emotions don’t concern them anymore, and petty jealousies, even competitiveness, tends to fade away – replaced by more of a feeling of connection to other people.”

Taylor emphasises that women are more receptive to the changes offered by near-death than men.

“I have found that women seem more likely to have altered states of increased awareness and these kinds of transformations than men. I think women generally tend to be a little bit more open to unusual experiences and consciousness, whereas there’s this idea that if you’re a man you ought to have strong boundaries.”

For these people, “Things look more beautiful, because you don’t take the world itself for granted,” he says. “Flowers, the sky, the trees. Before, you weren’t valuing them or even really looking at them. You were half asleep!”

If you haven’t been provoked by a near-death experience – or a “date of death” – watching certain films is a safer way to make us more conscious of our mortality, Taylor says.

“Films can wake us up,” he says. “They can remind us of aspects of our lives we take for granted. They can widen our vision of reality.”

It has been long said – all the way back to Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius in the second century, apparently – that we should “live each day as if it were our last”, but Taylor feels such a short length of time could encourage people to be irresponsible, so opts for a year.

“One of my favourites is Groundhog Day. It has an element of if you were to – literally – adopt a living ‘each day as if it were your last’ mentality, the repetition would, presumably, take the shine off. So that’s why perhaps taking the principle over a year is better. I also like a lesser known film called Fearless, starring Jeff Bridges, about a near-death experience.”

Similarly, time-twisters such as It’s a Wonderful Life and Back to the Future give us a new perspective on everyday life. And in the road-trip film Thelma and Louise, a doomed adventure, Thelma (Geena Davis) says, oddly prophetically: “I feel awake! Wide awake! I don’t ever remember feeling this awake… Everything looks different.”

Today I never talk about the near miss that Françoise and I had. Nobody in my life now knows anything about it. It’s been pushed to the back of my mind.

But I now realise it has become part of who I am. I can still feel a sense of living on borrowed time. And I can conjure up the feeling I had in that train carriage: being unable to reconcile the shock with reality. It’s as if one part of me stopped there in the Tower.

After this, my default state has been to live in the present moment and be aware that I am here. Such an experience does give a wider perspective and this can feel like having a secret, subconscious stash of supercharged medicine that blitzes most of life’s problems away. It even provides a sense of “a higher purpose” that brightens every day.

But most of us do not know how long we have. We may do well to heed American Founding Father Benjamin Franklin, who said – in a line reprised in the film Gone with the Wind – “Do not squander time, as that is the stuff life is made of.”