Bottlenecks to unlearning your anxiety

You’ve been in therapy for years—so why do you still feel anxious all the time?

Maybe it’s because you’ve been targeting the wrong bottlenecks.

Interpersonal anxiety is a learned behavior. As such, it can be unlearned. Instead of acquiring new coping mechanisms, you can remove the underlying insecurities that create your anxiety.

Through my client work, I’ve identified eight bottlenecks to unlearning therapy-resistant anxiety. Think of these bottlenecks like valves in a pipe: each bottleneck restricts natural flow until it’s addressed.

Crucially, they follow an approximate order. Do you know anyone who’s tried years of therapy, meditation, and inner work but made little progress on their anxiety? They probably aren’t targeting their current bottleneck.

These bottlenecks naturally cluster into two phases: Readiness Work and Inner Work.

Readiness Work

Readiness bottlenecks prevent you from starting—and finishing—the deep inner work of unlearning anxiety:

1. Denial: You call yourself “introverted”, not realizing that you’re avoiding social interaction because it feels bad. Insecurities strongly influence your daily decisions and actions, but you haven’t noticed.

2. Hopelessness: You’re aware of your anxiety, but you treat it as an immutable trait. “This is just who I am.” It feels unfixable, so why act on it?

3. Life on fire: Your life has more pressing issues than how you feel around others. Crisis, financial scarcity, severe mental illness; or physical factors, like poor sleep or nutrition, undermine your neuroplasticity. Deep inner work requires time, money, and other resources you don’t have right now. You need more stability first.

4. Fear of rocking the boat: Your life isn’t on fire, but you worry working on your anxiety could make it worse: “What if change decreases my productivity, harms my relationships, or reduces my free time?” You perceive risks in resolving your anxiety and haven’t committed to the work yet.

When readiness bottlenecks are present, it can be difficult, if not impossible, to sustain lasting growth. And even if you do experience a “breakthrough”, relapse is likely because you’re unable to invest in long-term integration.

Once Readiness bottlenecks are addressed, you’re ready for the deeper work.

Inner Work

The work of actually unlearning your anxiety has several bottlenecks. The approximate order:

5. Lacking scaffolding: You’re trying to perform surgery on yourself! Without skilled guidance, you struggle to simultaneously experience emotions, track patterns, manage working memory, catch self-fulfilling prophecies, spot blindspots, and implement solutions.

6. Emotional blindness: When asked how you feel, you go blank or intellectualize. You’re disconnected from subtle somatic signals that carry crucial emotional information: a tight chest, hollow stomach, or clenched jaw. Without this felt sense, you’re navigating in the dark.¹

7. Self-rejection: Deep shame and self-doubt create feedback loops that derail your inner work: shame about feeling shame, contempt towards your own emotions, self-sabotage because secretly you feel like you don’t deserve to get better. Self-rejection is the trickiest and most common inner work bottleneck.

8. Triggers: All earlier bottlenecks have been addressed, but specific situations still trigger anxiety: flirting feels stressful, talking to strangers triggers neck pain, thinking about the future brings dread. You may have hundreds of tiny triggers like these. Fortunately, unlearning each one is easy now.

As you release lingering triggers, your anxiety becomes less and less frequent until it rarely arises. Without active triggers, you feel a grounded calm.

Why order matters

Unlearning your anxiety is significantly easier when bottlenecks are targeted in order. It’s significantly harder when they’re targeted out of order, due to the following factors:

• Flaky breakthroughs: When earlier bottlenecks go unaddressed, “breakthroughs” tend to be flaky.

• Learned helplessness: Experience enough flaky breakthroughs and you may come to feel that lasting growth is impossible. Even if you didn’t have a hopelessness (#2) bottleneck before, you can learn it later.

• Overwhelm: A common experience when attempting deep inner work (#6–8) while experiencing crisis (#3).

• More anxiety: If you increase your emotional awareness (#6) while having readiness bottlenecks (#1–4), you’ll just feel your existing anxiety more intensely without being ready to work on it.

• Loops of deep shame: If you attempt deep inner work (#6-8) without scaffolding (#5), it’s common to enter unhelpful feedback loops like endless rumination.

• More triggers: If you work on triggers (#8) before self-rejection (#7), your anxiety may shape-shift: public speaking fear becomes email fear becomes… *endless morphing*.

Many people attempt to resolve their anxiety by throwing spaghetti at the wall: “How about I try breathwork? How about I try TRE? How about I try…?” This is the exact opposite of strategically identifying and targeting your first bottleneck. While some degree of ‘random experimentation’ can be productive, if your entire strategy is random experimentation, you’re probably going to suffer from anxiety for extra years.

On the flip side, targeting your current bottleneck allows for rapid progress.

Determining where to start

To gauge your first bottleneck, read through the following statements and see which resonates first:

• “I feel fine, although some of my close friends/family have expressed concern.” → #1 (Denial)

• “I’m just an anxious person.” → #2 (Hopelessness)

• “I tried to resolve my anxiety before and ‘it didn’t work’, so there’s no point to any of this.” → #2 (Hopelessness)

• “I can’t deal with this right now.” → #3 (Life on fire)

• “I can’t afford to hire scaffolding.” → #3 (Life on fire)

• “I genuinely don't have the time.” → #3 (Life on Fire)

• “I don’t have time.” (but really I'm afraid) → #4 (Fear of rocking the boat)

• “What if inner work disrupts my career?” → #4 (Fear of rocking the boat)

• “What if inner work disrupts my relationships?” → #4 (Fear of rocking the boat)

• “I don’t have scaffolding.” → #5 (Lack scaffolding)

• “I’ve read every book but nothing sticks.” → #5 (Lack scaffolding)

• “I cry in therapy but nothing shifts.” → #5 (Lack scaffolding)

• “I don’t know what ‘feeling your feelings’ means.” → #6 (Emotional blindness)

• “I don’t feel emotions in my body.” → #6 (Emotional blindness)

• “I wish I didn’t feel negative emotions.” → #7 (Self-rejection)

• “Something always blocks my inner work.” → #7 (Self-rejection)

• “I don’t like myself.” → #7 (Self-rejection)

• “I don’t deserve to feel better.” → #7 (Self-rejection)

• “I’m mostly fine except when…” → #8 (Triggers)

As you unlearn your insecurities, you will feel that grounded calm more often. Find your first bottleneck, target it, and resolve it fully. Then move onto the next, one by one. Your anxiety isn’t you, it’s something you’ve learned — now unlearn it.

1. In rare cases, emotional blindness can be entwined with self-rejection and triggers. To achieve a stable breakthrough, all must be resolved together.