You Can’t “Unlearn” Anxiety, But you Can Learn Something New

No one is born anxious; babies have fear reactions, but they don’t create a habitual fear response to imagined threats. Anxiety is a learned mental behavior.

Okay, so the solution is easy, right? Tell your cortex that the threat is unfounded and the anxiety will disappear. Unhelpfully, we try to allay another person’s anxiety: “Oh! You’ll be fine! X can’t hurt you!” 

Alas, brains don’t work that way. Our brains do not “unlearn.” They learn something new that eventually changes the erroneous cognizance. Learning is a process of building understanding through the brain’s making meaning of experience over time. That’s why it’s so difficult to correct yourself if you learn someone’s name wrong. 

Brains create and heal anxiety in the same way - by making meaning of experience over time. So if real or imagined fearful experiences create anxiety, intentionally corrective experiences reduce it. Over time, the brain builds an understanding of safety to replace the original anxiety-producing perspective*. 

Keeping in mind that anxiety is a response to an imagined threat, convincing the brain of its actual safety requires repeated interaction with the fear-inducing trigger with conscious awareness that the danger is imagined. More succinctly, anxiety is neutralized by doing whatever terrifies you while you tell yourself you’re okay. 

And there’s the rub - we logically avoid doing what terrifies us. Each time we imagine our triggered fear response, we actually reinforce it, increasing our anxiety over time.  So, it takes enormous motivation and courage to intentionally engage with one’s trigger.

Anxiety is about the brain telling us something is scary when it necessarily isn’t. Learning how to self-talk a different and safer message is critical; awareness of what you are saying to yourself is the first and most crucial step. Cognitive Behavioral Therapy teaches this process.

For anxious learners, schoolwork is the triggering stimulus that creates the fear, but it doesn’t generally start that way. Most of my learners have good memories of their early years in education. The problems begin when the curriculum’s complexity shifts beyond the learner’s ability to succeed based on intelligence alone and their neurodivergent learning style does not align with how schools are organized. 

For students for whom academics came easily, the shift to inability to succeed leads to frustration, shame, and sub-par performance. If you are a person who cares about school success, the inability to achieve that success despite all your efforts feels really terrible. That feeling, triggered by schoolwork, terrifies my anxious learners. No wonder they avoid schoolwork! It makes them feel crummy.

My work with students addresses the root cause of the barriers, eventually creating success for the learners. Over time, the stimulus of academics changes from fearful to neutral/positive. Essentially, the anxious student’s brain has over-ridden the negative messages it was previously sending itself.

Anxiety is “rewired” in courageous baby-steps. Anxious learners and their support team need enormous patience and trust in the process. Over time, by learning something new, our brains can and do reduce anxiety when we bravely lean into it. The courage of my learners truly takes my breath away.

*This is the premise behind Exposure Response Prevention therapy.