The Anxiety Source Code:  The Primal Learning Loop

As the car began to slip sideways down the slick, gentle slope, I realized I might have a rare opportunity if I survived. We began to spin, the driver made the mistake of turning away from the spin too soon – a common and understandable mistake, I thought to myself. First one concrete wall, then spinning across the 3-lane highway and smashing into another, finally spinning back again across the highway into a metal guard rail until finally coming to rest in the middle lane, airbags deployed. The car was crushed on all sides except the two doors (thank you, German engineers). We exited the vehicle without a scratch, not even whiplash.

There are precisely zero activities in life that carry zero risk of physical harm. But we do not walk around acting on our feelings that everything we do might kill us, because most risks are extremely low. Did you know, for example, that sleeping in your own bed is statistically riskier than flying in a commercial jet? But that doesn’t feel true. Being a passenger in a jet feels riskier, but it is less risky than sleeping in your bed. If you’ve never been in a car accident, you likely feel safer in a car than in a commercial jet. Just because something feels risky does not mean it is risky, and vice-versa.

Adrenaline and cortisol course through your body when you face an actual life-threatening situation. But I have long suspected that it is not adrenaline/cortisol that creates anxiety, it is what happens immediately after the adrenaline wanes that causes the more-difficult-to-overcome anticipatory anxiety. Your body learns what it “should” be anxious about early in life. There may be a way to hack that system.

And let me be clear that there is a difference between anxiety and panic. I am not talking about panic attacks. Anxiety is the emotional experience of facing a threat. You get overwhelmed, to the point of shaking, sweating, confusion, compelled to run or hide. That is not a panic attack. During a panic attack, you cannot speak, you only hear muffled words. When someone speaks, it sounds like muffled noises. Panic is a not-quite psychotic break from reality (but closer to psychosis than to reality). Actual panic attacks and intense, chronic anxiety from normal living requires medication. But taken without psychotherapy, you can become physically dependent on the medication, and extremely dangerous withdrawal symptoms can result from taking them for too long. (Seek the guidance of a psychiatrist if you have questions about all of this, as it is not the focus here.)

Anticipatory anxiety is intractable. Ask any psychotherapist and they will confirm this. You can get over almost any fear, but there will remain a bothersome anxious state just before you do that thing you once avoided at all costs.

As an executive coach who specializes in adult development, I deal with anticipatory anxiety every working day. I check the level of anticipatory anxiety my clients feel about doing a behavior change experiment. A 2/10 is usually too low (except when starting), because they will probably not learn enough from that experiment. A 7/10 is too high – it becomes unreasonable. The “costs” of running an experiment are not limited to objective blow-back from colleagues, they include the cost of performing poorly because you are so fearful that your brain may sabotage you. Think of a teenager taking their first driving test – most people make mistakes they would never make if driving alone. 4-6 out of 10 is the sweet spot, the gray area, which is precisely the area people won’t consciously explore because of the “identity risk.” Cognitively, you cannot create nuance in areas you avoid. You just don’t have the practice.

What do I mean by “identity risk?” You likely have a good guess in your mind but it’s worth exploring. In the Pulitzer Prize winning book from 1973, “The Denial of Death,” Ernst Becker took Freud’s psychoanalytic theory to its most extreme implication:  everything humans have ever built is because we are afraid to die. Our refusal to face our mortality as individuals becomes a shared agreement on a collective level:  “Don’t think about it, don’t talk about it; let’s BUILD!” The problem with Becker’s hypothesis, in my opinion, is that clinical evidence shows us that people are more motivated by the “death” of their identity than they are of their physical demise.

In 2004, IBM’s “Global Innovation Outlook” conference focused on improving health care at a systemic level. Most of the conference was about the avoidable behavioral issues that generate 80% of health care costs – smoking, drinking, bad diet, too much stress, and not enough exercise. The CEO of John’s Hopkins Hospital and dean of their medical school said that 90% of heart disease patients who are at-risk for dying do not change their lifestyle. They know they can add years to their lives, but they cannot change their behavior. Around the same time as the IBM conference, CVS-Caremark commissioned adult development specialists to investigate a seemingly easier health goal – getting severely at-risk patients to take lifesaving medication. “What makes you feel bad about taking your medication?” This novel question seems absurd (read it again), but the participants had been taken through a process that is designed to show them the logic of the question. The wide majority answered with an identity-protecting statement like, “If I take my medication, it means that I am a sick person!”

Lifesaving behavior changes are no match for protecting our identity. The threat of “identity death” is a more powerful anti-change motivation than our physical demise. We avoid anticipatory anxiety and we protect our identity – both at high costs. Let that sink in for just a moment – you are more likely to protect your identity (how you see yourself and how you prefer to be seen) than you are to protect your very life.

Using these two ideas – the power of anticipatory anxiety and the power of identity preservation – I have been able to achieve much more success than with any other psychological, philosophical, or medical model of behavior change. Which brings me back to the Source Code of Anxiety. How does anticipatory anxiety form, and what does this have to do with identity?

The Primal Learning Loop

I needed a bridge, something that could connect anxiety and identity beneath the surface. My hypothesis was this:  “There may be an automatic, survival-instinct, neural pathway that ‘burns’ the most important lessons into the brain – and it obsessively repeats these lessons ad nauseum soon after a life-threatening event, for a few days (and periodically will ‘invade’ to reaffirm itself when stimulated.” This is not “software,” and it is not “hardware.” Our brain is the hardware, and the perspectives we gravitate towards are the “software.” This is “firmware” – somewhere between hardware and software, a “hard coded, primary” system. I called this “The Primal Learning Loop,” because it is ancient, and it loops incessantly during creation and when activated.

The clinical confirmation for me came from an unlikely place:  a psychotherapeutic technique known as “The 5-4-3-2-1 Process.” This is a common anti-anxiety process where you notice the sight, sound, and tactile sensations of objects in your immediate environment. Its various forms are all mindfulness practices that almost anyone can do. They take your attention from an imagined and overwhelming future to the reality of the present moment.

My hypothesis was this:  since this process is so powerful therapeutically, it should be a powerful prophylactic as well. A prophylactic prevents disease. Well, anxiety is the most common dis-ease for all humans. But how could I ever find a way to test this?

It was over two years before I found myself spinning to potential doom in a car, thinking, “Oh… I think I finally have a chance to test my hypothesis.” When the adrenaline waned, as we stood between the north and south lanes, I waited for the “Primal Learning Loop” to arise. I was not disappointed:

• Oh my god… I could have DIED!
• What if we had been ONE INCH closer to the wall?
• What if the airbag malfunctioned?
• What if…
• What if…
• What if…

That is the Primal Learning Loop in action, and that is the source code of anticipatory anxiety. Most of us have had experiences where we “escaped” a threat – to our body or our identity – and to this day those memories will intrude your thoughts. You cringe at what happened or what might have happened. Your brain is reminding you that you should be anxious in the future.

That is anticipatory anxiety!  The Primal Learning Loop is all about the lifesaving lessons you should store and use for the rest of your life.

It was not until I was comfortably seated in the tow truck, carrying the carcass of my almost-coffin, that the Primal Learning Loop began its lessons. Recognizing the voice, I immediately began doing the 5-4-3-2-1. It worked; the “lessons” stopped. But it took less than a minute for the Primal Learning Loop to return. Again, I grounded myself with the 5-4-3-2-1. The grace period began to increase, first in minutes, then in hours. Every time the Primal Learning Loop returned, I would ground myself: “I see the brown chair, I see the blue shirt, I see the gray pigeon….”

I was poised to live a life of fear around being a passenger in a car, but I interrupted the Primal Learning Loop and therefore the anticipatory anxiety it creates. This year I was a passenger in a “dune busting” experience in Dubai. Think of this like a roller coaster with zero safety beyond the driver’s experience. The burnt carcass of a Toyota Land Cruiser that had rolled down to the bottom of the first ravine we entered was a nice touch. The driver didn’t even mention it, he just slammed the gas pedal and hopped us sideways over a high ridge. I should have been terrified, but I was equal parts excited and nervous. And that is okay, that is “good enough.” It was one of the highlights of the trip.

Overcoming Identity Anxiety

But I still have anticipatory anxiety for some “lessons” I learned when I was a teenager. For example, I shouldn’t publish this article, because I am at-risk for “flying above the radar,” and that is too costly! My level of anticipatory anxiety is around a 6/10 for everything I publish. Each time nothing bad happens, I reduce the anticipatory anxiety of publishing the next piece.

My identity is the guy who is behind the scenes, helping others – in private – to overcome their identity protection behaviors. The behaviors of avoiding change. Once the Primal Learning Loop has created well-worn paths in your psyche, the 5-4-3-2-1 can only be used to calm the symptoms. The only way to reduce it on behalf of the behavior changes you want to make is to create an alternative neural pathway. You must gather evidence from small behavior changes – those 4-6 out of 10 anticipatory anxiety behavior changes. This new neural pathway competes with the Primal Learning Loop.

Primal Learning Loop Lesson	Behavior Change Competing Lesson
“You can’t delegate AND be liked.”	“Hmmm… maybe they won’t dislike me if I delegate to them?”
“My thought/view/voice is not welcome.”	“It seems that speaking up doesn’t mean they will criticize me.”
“If they do the work, they will screw it up.”	“It is not always true that trusting them to complete the work results in poor outcomes.”

Our identity as likeable, or an imposter, or as “the hero,” seen in the above examples (respectively) is often driven by the Primal Learning Loop. Some unsophisticated life lesson we learned long ago. It can get absurd, how we protect ourselves:  the same person who has no problem receiving delegated work, assumes that other people will hate them for the same. We do not grant others the same flexibility of mind or feelings or ethics that we ourselves use at work. In other words, we turn others into a caricature, we objectify them in our own story – the story of our identity – and we go about unconsciously protecting it.

The two ways of overcoming the Primal Learning Loop and the anticipatory anxiety that it creates are to interrupt it when it arises, or chip away at it after it has become a part of your identity. No amount of positive thinking, motivational posters, cheerleading, vision-boarding, magical-thinking, prosperity preaching, or any other scam is going to help you make the lasting changes you want to make. Your identity is a structure, which you can temporarily leave through willpower, but without structural changes, you will return to it and to defending it. The changes won’t last unless you connect new lessons to old defenses.

Most anxiety does not take the form of clinical anxiety or panic attacks. Most anxiety is about threats to your desired image of yourself or the desired image you want others to believe about you. In other words, it is about your identity – “This is who I am” or “This is who you should see” or both. It is more powerful a motivation than death, it is created by the Primal Learning Loop, and it can be overcome by creating a new neural pathway. The new neural pathway competes with the Primal Learning Loop, and over time the anticipatory anxiety fades. If you don’t feed the Primal Learning Loop, it eventually dies.

Some structures are oppressive, but some are liberating. The peace and freedom you stand to receive when taking on the liberating structure of behavior change experiments that compete with the Primal Learning Loop is worth facing your anticipatory anxiety. “Step into the Punch,” any martial arts master will tell you. Life is going to punch you, but you don’t have to avoid it or hit back – you can stand your ground, you can block, you can advance, and you can learn.

What Can I Do Now?

There is a way for you to try this at home. Better yet, try it with the support of a friend, colleague, or coach. There are some “usual suspects” in our personal and professional lives, where enough people have taken a risky change that you can model your own. For example, you might try to overcome a tendency to put other people first:

• Do I belong on my list of “People to Take Care of?”

Conversely, you might need the opposite, to open up and trust others more:

• Will I really “lose” if I trust them a little more?

In both cases, you are tinkering with boundaries. In the first case (self-interest), you can tinker with setting a stronger boundary. Say “no” to something small, like advocating for a restaurant that you prefer, or opting to not rescue people you care about who are fighting (let them hash things out).

In the second case (trust others), you can tinker with opening a little bit. Again, start small. Follow someone else’s preference on a decision that you care about. Not the most important decisions, but the small ones that you fear are a slippery slope to losing (control, or power, or influence).

You can learn something important about reality itself from small changes like the ones suggested here. The more you can accumulate these types of lessons – part of transformational learning, which I’ll distinguish from informational learning – the more you see that there is less to be anxious about than you believe. Things will not always be perfect, and that is why you should take small risks. I can imagine no better way to avoid deathbed regrets than engaging in a life of healthy lessons that free you from illusions and delusions. Such is a life worth living, a quality improvement that lasts.

You might find, when you “step into the punch” this way, that there was no opponent, no punch to avoid. You were shadow boxing the whole time.