Cherophobia and The Rewired Brain

These days, I’ve been noticing this anxiety around having positive thoughts. It’s as though the moment I start thinking of an optimistic future, my brain immediately shuts it down. So I did a little research and found the term cherophobia, the fear of happiness. It’s when someone avoids positive experiences because they associate them with vulnerability, loss, or disappointment.

I can’t pinpoint the exact moment I started feeling this way, but I’ve known the pattern since childhood. What’s new is how intense it got after I quit gambling. For almost five years, I gambled, nearly every day for the last three. And when I finally stopped, something strange happened. My brain didn’t know how to feel good anymore.

Gambling, excuse my language, seriously fucks with your brain’s reward system. It floods you with dopamine every time there’s uncertainty, not just when you win but when there’s a chance you might. That uncertainty becomes the high. Over time, your brain adapts. It stops responding to normal joys. You start needing risk to feel alive.

When you quit, your dopamine crashes. Your nervous system, used to chaos, suddenly sits in silence. That silence can feel terrifying. Calm starts to feel unsafe. Positivity feels fake or fragile. That’s what cherophobia became for me, not just fear of happiness, but fear of what comes after happiness.

And I know I’m not alone in that.

You don’t have to have an addiction to feel it. Maybe you’ve been living under constant stress, or heartbreak, or just a general sense that the world could collapse any minute. When good things happen, your mind whispers, “Don’t relax. Don’t jinx it.”

But here’s something I realized, and this is what grounded me when I felt that doom: it’s all chemistry.

It’s literally the brain doing what it does best, trying to predict danger based on old data. It’s the same reason a Xanax can make everything feel weightless. Not because the world suddenly fixed itself, but because the anxious part of your brain finally quieted down.

I’m not saying take anything. I’m saying understand it.

Because once you see that it’s science, dopamine, amygdala, central nervous system, whatever you want to call it, you stop taking the thoughts so personally. You stop believing the voice that says happiness isn’t safe.

The only way to resolve that heaviness is to sit down and look at it.

Not distract, not suppress, just observe. Ask why you feel that way.

That’s what I’m doing right now, writing this, dissecting it, trying to understand my own negativity around happiness. Because when you shine light on what scares you, it starts to lose its power.

If you’re reading this and you feel the same, the constant sense of doom, the uneasiness when things get too quiet, just remember:

It’s not that happiness is dangerous. It’s that your brain is still healing.

Be patient with it. Let it recalibrate.

And when that fear creeps in, don’t run from it. Just sit with it, and find the truth beneath it.