Choose Unlearning

There are two ways to manage your anxiety. The first one is to learn a bunch of techniques to subdue it every time it comes up. The second is to unlearn the insecurities that trigger your anxiety in the first place so that form of anxiety simply never arises again. Which would you prefer?

Now, these two approaches don’t just apply to anxiety. In fact, they’re fully general. They’re the two ways you can grow: by learning and by unlearning.

• Learning: Acquiring new skills: how to ride a bike, new communication techniques, new breathing techniques. Like “adding code” to the mind.

• Unlearning: Removing harmful patterns: Deleting social anxiety, stopping self-loathing, undoing the tensions that create chronic pain. “Deleting code” from the mind.

Often people over-index on learning at the expense of unlearning.

Similarly, most growth advice focuses on learning, not unlearning. You’ve probably heard advice like “learn to set boundaries”, “learn nonviolent communication”, “learn to be present”, “learn to say No”, “learn to handle conflicts well”, “learn to accept yourself”. Maybe you've even given this advice yourself.

But… none of these—setting boundaries, being present, saying no…—require much learning! Actually, they mostly require unlearning: unlearning the insecurities that stand in the way of these natural capacities.

You have to actually like people, be present, and set down whatever stands between you and vibrant, pulsing reality. It's a lot more like practicing how to free fall than learning how to act in a movie. —Carmen

When people feel safe, they excel at being present, expressing desires, and saying no, even if they never studied ‘how to set boundaries’ or learned ‘authentic communication’ techniques! These so-called “skills” are totally natural.

Relaxation, love, self-acceptance, happiness, flow… all of these are effortless defaults that get papered over by learned tensions. Unlearning, then, requires integrating these incentives so you don’t have to be so tense anymore.¹

It’s possible! First a personal example: I used to have immense trouble with saying No, being in conflict, “accepting myself”, etc., and now I just… don't. The same is true for what used to be my largest insecurities: dating. I’d get anxious and weird, overthink, and be extremely risk-averse. Then I unlearned my insecurities and, finally, when my current girlfriend and I got together, my body had so little tension it just felt pleasantly… “hollow”. (Almost²) no insecurities arose.

Another example:

Show tweet | All @ChrisChipMonk tweets about unlearning.

Carmen describes a similar phenomenon here.

When someone completely resolves their anxiety, they don’t just “learn” to manage it; their system forgets the triggers that used to create it. When patterns and insecurities get deeply unlearned, they stop arising entirely.

In some cases, people can literally forget they ever had the issue. I see this with clients: it is often necessary to remind them what they used to feel insecure about, lest they think no progress has happened at all.

So, choose unlearning. You’ve learned too much. It’s time to unlearn!

Next: Bottlenecks to unlearning.

1. You may wonder, “But, if they’re ‘natural’, why are they so uncommon?” Answer: because there are incentives to be bad at them. Example.

2. There were two, but they were very small. They evaporated once I noticed them.