Unlearning anxiety: Bottlenecks

You’ve tried everything—so why do you still feel anxious?

Maybe it’s because you haven't been targeting your current bottleneck.

Interpersonal anxiety can be a learned behavior. In these cases, it can be unlearned by releasing the insecurities that incentivize 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 been addressed.

Crucially, they follow an approximate order. Have you tried years of attempts but made little progress? You probably aren’t targeting your 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. Imagine hiring a coach who hated you. Without skilled facilitation, you struggle to simultaneously experience emotions, catch blindspots / self-fulfilling prophecies, manage working memory, 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.

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 inner work bottleneck and almost ubiquitous among people suffering from resistant anxiety. This bottleneck is how even experienced meditators can get unblocked by skilled facilitation.

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 these becomes straightforward with fitting scaffolding.

As you release lingering triggers, your anxiety becomes vanishingly less frequent. Without triggers present, you feel a grounded calm (secure).

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, integration gets blocked, so “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 don’t have a hopelessness (#2) bottleneck now, you can acquire 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 trusted 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*.

Some 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 exactly the opposite of strategically identifying and targeting your first bottleneck. While some degree of ‘random experimentation’ can be productive, if your portfolio entirely consists of random experimentation, you’re probably going to suffer from anxiety for extra years. Scaffolding is supposed to prevent this.

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

Estimating the first bottleneck

Read the following statements, notice which resonates with you first:

• “I feel fine, but 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 don’t have the resources or support system for deep inner work right now.” → #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’m trying to do this alone but keep getting stuck.” → #5 (Lacking scaffolding)

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. Choose Unlearning.