How Does the Difficulty Adjustment Period Mitigate the Risk of a Mining Death Spiral?

The difficulty adjustment period is the set interval after which the network recalculates the difficulty target (e.g. 2016 blocks for Bitcoin).

While a death spiral involves a rapid drop in hash rate, the adjustment period ensures that the difficulty will eventually be lowered to match the remaining hash rate. This makes the network usable again, halting the spiral, though the recovery time can be lengthy and painful.