I used to think about death alllll the time. I wasn't suicidal either, but my mind was just like captivated by death. I couldn't drive anywhere without imagining myself being killed in a car crash. I agree that u can think about death all the time and not want to die. My therapist called it "dark thoughts". I was really distressed over it. I felt like i was terrorizing myself all the time. I couldn't stop it.

It helped me to accept that the thoughts didn't have meaning or power. I realized that my brain was in a compromised state. The kind of state of danger and tragedy, even though there wasn't any actual danger or tragedy. So my brain made things up to make the real world match itself.

One day I was driving along and I just kind of had an epiphany. I had been contemplating the difference between reality and imagination. We think we know the difference, but our imaginations are very vivid and convincing. Anyway, I realized I was imagining a bunch of stuff that didn't exist in reality.

So since I knew my dark thoughts were imaginary, I decided to make it extra obvious to my mind that they were imaginary when they came up. So I made an imaginary place in my mind that I called the "everything is bad and wrong world" kinda like some imaginary alternate universe where I die in a car crash 40 times a day while my house is burning down.

So when my mind spit out thoughts of a car crash, I would imagine myself like looking thru a window into that imaginary world where everything is bad and wrong. And then I would be like ok, that's obviously imaginary. What is real? And I would look at what I would see and hear and smell and feel in that moment. And it was obvious that everything in the real world was ok.

So I did that consistently for a few days and then the thought just kind of quit coming up. It's like my mind realized the game wasn't worth playing anymore.

I still have an ugly thought once a week or something, but it doesn't bother me now. It doesn't have any power and it's super easy to just brush off like the thousands of other mostly meaningless thoughts I have each day about whatever.