Allergic to fear

by Amy | Oct 29, 2026

My mom used to break out in hives every time she went in the sun. Here’s a cute one of us on vacay at Niagara Falls.

I was a skeptic. How can a person be allergic to the sun? It’s the sun.

For context, I’m lucky. I can go out in the sun and I just get a tan. I have sun privilege.

And yet.

My whole life I’ve had this weird bladder condition. It happens anytime I try to sleep. I get crampy. I feel like I have to pee. I go to the bathroom. I can barely go. So I go back to bed and the whole thing happens over and over again. Then, if I fall into a deep sleep, my bladder gets unbearably full I am up for hours trying to empty it.

Not. Fun.

I’ve long suspected it might be psychosomatic. Even though the pain and discomfort are very real.

It gets worse when I travel. It gets worse when I’m stressed. And lately it’s just been getting worse.

Long story short, I found a book called The Way Out by Alan Gordon.

And now I’m pretty sure I have something as ridiculous-sounding as my mom’s sun allergy.

An allergy to fear.

Psychologists call it anxiety sensitivity. It means being scared of the sensations of fear itself. The racing heart. The tight chest. The twinge. In my case, it’s a fear of having to go through the whole bladder sleep deprivation loop. Whatever it may be, the body sounds an alarm, and then a bigger one about the first one.

To break it down:

All pain comes from the brain. You stub your toe, your toe sends a report, and your brain decides whether you’re in danger. If it says yes, your toe hurts so you can deal with the danger.

Most of the time, the system works. But sometimes it gets stuck. The brain learns to sound the alarm after the danger’s gone, or when there was never any danger at all. Gordon calls this neuroplastic pain.

I know how that sounds. Like “it’s all in your head.” But being up all night with a bladder that doesn’t work is very fricken real. It hurts exactly as much as it hurts. Your brain is just the source of it.

Here are some clues, according to Gordon, that you may be dealing with neuroplastic pain:

It started during a stressful time. Or out of nowhere, with no injury. Or it was an injury but continued long past the injury’s healing window.
It’s inconsistent. Better some days, worse others, and you can’t say why.
It moves around. One week it’s your back. The next it’s your neck.
It shows up with triggers. Stress. Emotions. Certain places, times of day, positions.

I read that list and laughed. Then I cried a little.

Travel? Check. Stress? Check. No rhyme or reason? Check.

And then there’s the trigger…For me, it’s lying down to go to sleep.

For years I got panic attacks right before falling asleep.

Many people with chronic pain experienced trauma very early in life. Sexual trauma. Violence. Abandonment. For some of us, all of the above.

Others can’t point to anything that looks like trauma. Trauma is subjective, though. A young nervous system can’t put things in perspective the way an older one can. Something an adult would shrug off can register to a child as real danger. That’s plenty to start the pain-fear loop.

Gordon says the brain can learn to pair a harmless situation with danger. Same way Pavlov’s dogs learned to drool at the sound of a bell. Nothing about my bed is dangerous now. My adult brain just doesn’t seem to agree.

And every time I brace against the pain, my brain takes this as proof it’s right.

I think some of us have this “fear allergy” without the pain…

I see it in my coaches all the time. One wants to raise her rates. She’s done the math. She knows she’s undercharging. She tells me she’s ready.

And then she isn’t. Every time she sits down to update her sales page, something comes up. A sudden urge to reorganize her inbox. A headache. A vague dread that makes her close the laptop.

Her conscious mind wants it. Her nervous system has other plans.

Psychologists have a name for this too. Experiential avoidance.

It’s an unwillingness to stay in contact with uncomfortable feelings, even when avoiding them costs you what you want. It shows up as a common thread across anxiety, depression, OCD, and PTSD. And the people who get hit hardest seem to be the ones with high anxiety sensitivity. The folks who are scared of the feeling of being scared.

In so many words, that’s the fear allergy.

The sales page is just a web page. The rate increase is just a number. The potential client is just another human…

And yet if we are fear allergic our body can react like my mom at the beach. (I don’t actually know if my mom’s thing was neuroplastic. But it very well could have been.)

Here’s the very good news:

If the fear allergy can be learned, it can be unlearned.

In a clinical trial on chronic back pain, Gordon found that about two-thirds of the people who tried his treatment were pain-free or nearly pain-free a month later.

I think the same tools could work on the fear allergy. Pain or no pain. And when I look at them closely, I see David Hawkins’ Map of Consciousness all over them.

On the Map, Fear sits at 100. It’s a way of seeing the world where everything looks like a threat. Your bed. A sales page. Your own body.

Gordon’s tools borrow from the levels above it. Each one asks you to see the same moment from somewhere higher up the Map.

Here is how you can start to unlearn your fear allergy:

1. Track it. (Willingness) When the fear shows up, get curious about the sensation itself. Where is it? Hot or cold? Tight or buzzy? Moving or still? Watch it like weather. You don’t have to fix anything. Gordon calls this somatic tracking. Hawkins would call it Willingness. Fear judges the sensation as dangerous. Willingness says, okay, I’ll look.
2. Tell your brain the truth. (Courage) Your brain thinks you’re in danger. You can update it. Something like: This feels scary. I’m safe. My brain is being overprotective. Say it lightly. Your brain can smell panic. On the Map, Courage at 200 is where truth becomes possible. It’s the first level where you stop letting fear do the narrating.
3. Stop needing it to leave. (Acceptance and Love) This is the hard one. If you wait for the fear to go away before you act, you’ll wait forever. And fighting it tells your brain there’s something to fight. Gordon calls this outcome independence. Acceptance lets the fear be here. Love makes room for it, the way you’d make room for a scared kid in the passenger seat. Let the fear ride along. Send the email anyway.
4. Expect a flare. (Neutrality) Right after progress, the old alarm can sometimes get louder. That’s your brain noticing something changed. Neutrality doesn’t get attached. It just notices.

Incidentally, exposure therapy and ACT have been helping people move toward what scares them for decades.

The truth is, I don’t know if this will work for me. Ask me in a month.

What I do know is that I’ve spent years fighting my own body at bedtime. And fighting hasn’t gotten me anywhere.

So I’m trying something else. Curiosity. Truth. A little love for a nervous system that’s been working overtime.

I’ll let you know.