Anxiety as a Learned Behavior and How to Unlearn It
Recognizing that anxious beliefs are inherited can help us to challenge them.
Not all beliefs and behavioral responses belong to us. Challenging those that don't can help reduce anxiety.
Neural flexibility shows us that thought and behavioral patterns can be changed over time.
It is helpful to question beliefs and behavioral responses that do not align with our true selves.
When we conceptualize anxiety, we tend to see it as an omnipresent, immutable entity which we can neither change nor challenge. But the reality is that many of our anxious behaviors have been learned, so it stands to reason that anything which can be learned can be “unlearned.”
Consider this example: a young boy’s mother is persistently anxious, worried about everything and anything, and her running monologue is one of dread, concern, and impeding catastrophe. Her behavior is reflective of her conceptualization of life as a danger-filled proposition: she is avoidant, isolative, and tends to shelter herself from her perceived certainty of a negative outcome. When her son asks if they can go to the amusement park, she responds that it is too busy, the rides are too dangerous, and there are too many strangers. In essence, she messages that the entire experience is unsafe.
Reflective of this belief, her behavioral response is to avoid the amusement park, telling her son they are better off staying at home. The mind of a young child is malleable and impressionable: her son, in turn, learns that busy places are dangerous, strangers signal danger, and fun activities are, actually, risky. He is susceptible to inheriting his mother’s behavioral response of avoidance, and this can create a maladaptive pattern of behavior throughout his life.
Of course, all circumstances and situations are unique. It is certainly not a guarantee that the child, as an adult, will manifest all of his mother’s anxiety-driven behaviors. In fact, neural flexibility shows us that thought and behavioral patterns can be changed over time. As the child matures, he very well may form his own beliefs that may be vastly different from those of his mother.
So, how do we do this? First, we must identify that some beliefs which we carry with us actually do not belong to us; we have inherited them and, perhaps, not realized that they can be challenged and that they are ripe for reassessment. Through normal stages of development, children and adolescents begin to challenge the beliefs of their parents and form their own ways of viewing the world. The boy in this example may realize that he, unlike his mother, enjoys amusement parks and, in fact, feels completely safe on the rides and among the throngs of other visitors. His behavioral response, then, forms in a very different way that his mother’s. Where she ran from this particular stimulus, he goes toward it.
This simplistic example illustrates the way that we inherit and learn beliefs and behaviors and, more importantly, the way that we begin to unlearn these same beliefs. In implementing this concept of unlearning into your own life, start by choosing and anxious belief and asking yourself, “whose belief is this?”
Next, investigate the behavior attached to the belief and ask yourself, “whose response is this?” You have now cleared the path to asking yourself, “what is my belief?” For the boy in this example, the belief that crowded places are dangerous did not belong to him: it was his mother’s, as was the behavioral response of avoidance. His belief was that places like amusement parks are fun and safe. While we can respect that others’ beliefs and behaviors are formed from experiences, we can also allow ourselves to question and reject beliefs and behavioral responses that do not align with how we live in the world.
Phil Lane, MSW, LCSW, - Website -
