Structures consisting of three-layer shells are widely used in various fields of engineering and technology, the construction of nuclear power plants, power and chemical engineering and other areas of the national economy. The aim of the work is to study the issue of energy dissipation during natural vibrations of viscoelastic composite cylindrical shells. The paper considers a general technique for wave propagation in multilayer viscoelastic cylinders. Based on the energy approach, formulas are obtained for the energy dissipation coefficients corresponding to each vibration mode of multilayer cylindrical shells. As an example, a three-layer viscoelastic shell is considered. The relationship between stresses and strains satisfies the hereditary Boltzmann-Volterra integral. When solving the problem, the Green-Lemb expansion, the method of special functions of mathematical physics, and the Muller method are used. The non-monotonic nature of the dependence of the damping coefficients on the geometric and physical-mechanical parameters of three-layer structures is shown. A technique and algorithm have been developed for studying energy dissipation during natural vibrations of viscoelastic composite cylindrical shells. It is found that the energy dissipation depends on the number of layers, and the energy dissipation intensity can take minimum values depending on the angular coordinate.