🎯 **认识八大焦虑瓶颈：** 文章将阻碍焦虑消退的因素归纳为八个“瓶颈”，并将其分为“准备工作”（包括否认、绝望、生活失控、害怕打破平衡）和“内在工作”（包括缺乏支持、情绪失明、自我排斥、触发点）两个阶段。理解这些瓶颈的性质和顺序是解决问题的第一步。

🚦 **按顺序解决瓶颈的重要性：** 文章强调，解决这些瓶颈的顺序至关重要。如果顺序颠倒，可能会导致“短暂的突破”后迅速复发，产生“习得性无助”，或在准备不足的情况下进行深度内在工作而感到不知所措。按部就班地处理每个瓶颈，才能实现持久的改变。

💪 **“准备工作”是基础：** 在开始深入的“内在工作”之前，必须先解决“准备工作”阶段的四个瓶颈。这包括诚实面对自身问题（否认），相信改变的可能性（绝望），确保生活基本稳定（生活失控），以及克服对改变可能带来的负面影响的恐惧（害怕打破平衡）。

🧠 **“内在工作”的深度挑战：** 一旦准备就绪，就需要着手“内在工作”的四个瓶颈。这涉及寻求专业指导（缺乏支持），培养情绪觉察能力（情绪失明），处理深层羞耻感和自我怀疑（自我排斥），以及识别并消解具体的生活场景触发点（触发点）。

💡 **策略性而非随机尝试：** 文章批评了“头痛医头，脚痛医脚”式的随机尝试各种疗法。作者认为，有效的焦虑管理策略在于精准识别并优先解决当前最主要的瓶颈，这能带来更快速、更可持续的进步，避免不必要的痛苦和时间的浪费。

Published on September 19, 2025 7:10 PM GMT

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

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 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 therapy, meditation, and inner work but made little progress on anxiety? You likely 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, 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.

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 less and less frequent until it rarely arises. Without active triggers, 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. Excellent scaffolding prevents this.

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

Estimating your 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 can’t deal with this right now.” → #3 (Life on fire)“I don’t have friends or family who can scaffold my growth, and I also can’t afford to hire a coach.” → #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 a skilled coach I trust.” → #5 (Lacking scaffolding)“I cry in therapy but nothing shifts.” → #5 (Lacking scaffolding)

Find your first bottleneck, target it, and resolve it fully. Then move onto the next, one by one. Maybe your interpersonal anxiety isn’t “you”, but something you’ve learned — so unlearn it.