Fear of Movement

I still remember my headstands from 10 years ago. Photo: Brite Vilgo

Fear of movement isn’t the first thing that comes to mind when we talk about good health. For some, the simple act of standing up, stretching, or walking across a room can ignite a wave of dread. It’s not laziness or avoidance—it’s a very real experience where the body and brain react as if they are in danger. Living with this fear of movement can be isolating, confusing, and exhausting, yet it deserves to be spoken about with care and compassion.

I am an Alexander Technique teacher overcoming a form of kinesiophobia, or fear of movement, which I developed during years of focusing on the trauma healing side of self-development. During this time, I worked with my habitual state of increased sympathetic arousal (fight or flight) and many defensive behaviours such as muscle guarding, over-gripping, or compensatory movements. My posture shifted from one of protection from perceived harm to a more open, loose, and unlocked version of me.

Trauma Work

Learning to feel my feelings and embody my experiences cleared up much of the emotional energy, regulating me in many ways, but it also pushed me to the other side of physical immobility. From chronic tension and shutdown, I moved to fatigue and overwhelm by everything I had now learned to experience. My muscles no longer reacted with tension (a huge neurological change), but neither did I feel relaxed, uplifted, or well. I went home from a training course in physical pain and tears of deep sadness. This happened while training in psychophysically aware Alexander Technique teacher training courses. I acknowledge here that there is some supportive, but limited, evidence of Alexander Technique working for pain and motor issues, and that more studies are needed.

Although I gained a great deal in many ways and felt confident it was the right path forward for me, I also experienced physical pain that was difficult to understand or find support for. At the time, there was limited awareness of pain science, connective tissue, and trauma, which made it challenging to encounter teachers with the specific knowledge I later came across. Another challenge has been the general lack of empathy that often surrounds pain, as it is not always taken seriously by those around sufferers.

Exercising

After many years of failed attempts to build sustainable movement habits, and at least two more years of severe fear and panic around exercising, I am now consciously and very gently re-introducing safety for my body. I used to offer safety only for my wounded heart and mind, the body kept its protective role, just learning to do it in new ways.

Taking on a viewpoint I hadn’t come across in trauma-healing communities, I believe a common side effect in these circles may be a lack of exercise and physical activity. We want to offer so much care and safety to the nervous system that we become afraid of overdoing it in life. I hope that my deep reliance on protection may help shed some light on why this issue might occur and why we should continue to prioritize healthy exercise alongside non-invasive, gentle methods of body–mind re-education.

Kinesiophobia

When the brain associates movement and physical activity with the source of physical discomfort, kinesiophobia may develop. The whole organism tries to defend itself by immobilizing with pain or fear signals to prevent more agony. Avoidance of a threatening situation is reinforced as it reduces fear, anxiety, and pain—yet fear returns when the avoidance behaviour cannot be performed. In the long term, this causes functional disability as well as depression and disuse, both of which reduce pain tolerance and promote further pain.

The advantages and pleasant hormones that regular exercise usually produces are absent. Thus, we learn to use movement-avoidance as a pain-avoidance tactic, which quickly results in gradual muscle deconditioning. I only learned about this during the pain science course provided to Alexander Technique teachers after my training. I wish I had been more prepared to notice something like that developing at a time when I dismissed my reluctance as simply making excuses to avoid more pain.

Anxiety and Hypermobility

I cannot be entirely sure, but I suspect the deep neural training of Alexander Technique—without my hypermobility being acknowledged—exaggerated the pain signals. In my case, it wasn’t just a bit of tiredness or staying in my comfort zone out of laziness, but an intolerable sense of everything hurting in my body after a training day. All I could do was sleep. Adding any other physical movement on top of the overwhelm in my system either made it worse or wasn’t even doable. I came to anticipate pain even with simple daily tasks like walking home (I preferred cycling from the train station to the front door), getting groceries (I had to nap first), ironing (it took me days to find the energy), or cycling on sunny weekends (this became increasingly rare).

As I considered myself deep in the self-healing journey, I didn’t acknowledge what was happening to me physically—even though the approach was hands-on and practical. I simply assumed I was getting better, that this was what the technique was for, and that I needed to focus on handling emotions along the way. Fear and anxiety have been my companions for as long as I can remember. However, only now have I learned how intimately they are related to physical pain, both resulting in similar activation of the sympathetic nervous system. Many studies show how persistent pain is more commonly associated with anxiety disorders than with other psychiatric diagnoses.

Another area of research that has clarified things for me is Hypermobility Spectrum Disorders. Studies affirm that HSD and anxiety disorders share autonomic alterations, higher anxiety sensitivity, abnormal pain perception, and greater somatic sensitivity compared to control groups. Hypermobile individuals with high levels of anxiety traits are more prone to fears and to developing avoidance behaviours. The mechanisms of pain perception* in relation to weak soft tissue are complex, but my body–mind picture began to come together. Understanding of chronic pain—how its development and persistence are caused by altered nervous system function—confirms the possibility of severe pain even in the absence of tissue damage.

I also cannot leave out the aspect of fatigue, which is often acknowledged but reassured to diminish with time as we get more experienced in the practice. Fatigue was recognized but normalized, which I often used as an excuse to withdraw further from life. Yet recent research (2025) shows that fatigue strongly correlates with increased pain interference, avoidance behaviours, and distress in youth with hypermobile Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome. This points to the importance of addressing fatigue directly, especially in pacing and trauma-informed movement practices.

Cocooning

In the training course, we recognized that healing from trauma necessitates a period of cocooning, which involves being present and still while the process of change takes place. It is a necessary stage where there is a stronger need to sleep more and cancel plans, while feeling overwhelmed or heavy. There is a lot to process before recovery, and that takes energy, even if it looks like stillness. Rather than retreat or shutdown, cocooning is like melting from the freeze or feeding the undernourished areas.

I was simply unaware of how my protective behaviours were oversensitizing me during that period. In Alexander language: I was overdoing it, something we see with beginners all the time. Trying hard to accomplish the non-doing. We knew very little about my sensitive neurological system and very lax connective tissue. On the contrary, I received praise for “going up so well” and being easy to work with. A visiting graduate student once told me there was nothing to do with me since I was already done and ready. I didn’t share with her the multiple invisible problems I was constantly dealing with. Only now am I aware of something called peripheral sensitization: how trauma, inflammation, or nerve damage can cause changes to nociceptive neurons that result in increased sensitivity to pain.

Deconditioning

Becoming afraid of experiencing symptoms that would always follow physical activity, I fell into an underactivity cycle. I did just a little bit and then stopped because I wanted to avoid flare-ups. I learned to rest just in case. Over time, this meant not achieving very much at all. That created more deconditioning and more pain.

Deconditioning means that the body is no longer robust enough to cope with the activities of daily life. There is an energy cost to everything we do—even attempts to overcome fear of movement. Resting is important, but it is clearly a one-sided answer for a healthy life.

You might have heard of the boom-and-bust, or overactivity-and-underactivity, cycle. That is how it works. I wake up feeling good, with energy. Needing to get things done, I keep going until the pain or fatigue kicks in. Then I need to stop and recover. But next time I am a little bit more sensitized, and the pain arrives sooner. The recovery time is also longer. So, I find myself doing less and less because I have slowly been sensitized to pain.

Now the pain is in control. On a good day, we do too much; on a bad day, we do nothing. Periods of rest become longer, which contributes to deconditioning. That, in turn, feeds back into pain.

I started writing this while enjoying a Mediterranean holiday of salty seawater and constant heat. These have been wonderful reminders of safety and the body’s self-healing powers. Now, back in the chilly and damp autumn of Estonia, I feel the pain return mainly in my joints, and I look for ways to create conditions that help me grow stronger despite the discomfort and avoidance habit. Writing a diary of my progress, I am encouraged to look for answers from even deeper inside myself, guiding myself back to safety and the pleasure of natural movement.

Learning About Pain

The Alexander Technique is a method to help us find ease in what we do by learning ways of moving more efficiently, building resilience, and developing confidence in our ability to move with ease. For me, the process has not been straightforward—as with hypermobility, for example, letting go of restrictive muscle-guarding patterns left me feeling unsafe in new ways, perpetuating the cycle of fear.

While many practitioners, including myself, find great value in the Alexander Technique’s approach to movement and awareness, it is important to note that clinical evidence supports its benefits primarily for chronic spinal pain and some Parkinson’s symptoms, with limited data elsewhere. More robust studies are needed to clarify its broader applications. Still, I am convinced there is more to explore within this technique.

I think I’m onto something important by figuring out how my own pain signals, mentality, and trauma-healing systems connect my brain and body. I wish there were broader awareness of these links, and I am grateful for the dedication of the Alexander Technique Science team and the wider Alexander community for continuing to deepen our understanding together.'

*The evolution of the symptom complex associated with HSD untreated can be seen as a slowly developing crescendo of painful short-lived soft tissue traumatic incidents, occurring sequentially and building up a momentum of severity, frequency and duration over time. Slow and often incomplete healing of individual lesions results in a blurring of their margins, so that pain transforms from discontinuous to continuous, from recurrent acute to sub-acute and ultimately, to chronic. - „Hypermobility, Fibromyalgia and Chronic Pain“ Edited by Hakim, Keer, Grahame

References

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2.       Bulbena, A., Duro, J. C., Porta, M., Faus, S., Vallescar, R., & Martin-Santos, R. (1993). Anxiety disorders in the joint hypermobility syndrome. Psychiatric Research, 46(1), 59–68. doi:10.1016/0165-1781(93)90008-S

3.       Smith, T. O., Easton, V., Bacon, H., Jerman, E., Armon, K., Poland, F., & Macgregor, A. J. (2014). The relationship between benign joint hypermobility syndrome and psychological distress: A systematic review and meta-analysis. Rheumatology, 53(1), 114–122. doi:10.1093/rheumatology/ket317

4.       Baeza-Velasco, C., Pailhez, G., Bulbena, A., & Baghdadli, A. (2015). Joint hypermobility and the heritable disorders of connective tissue: Clinical and empirical evidence of links with psychiatry. General Hospital Psychiatry, 37(1), 24–30. doi:10.1016/j.genhosppsych.2014.10.002

5.       Simmonds, J. V., & Keer, R. J. (2007). Hypermobility and the hypermobility syndrome. Manual Therapy, 12(4), 298–309. doi:10.1016/j.math.2007.05.009

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