You Learned Messages That Taught You What to be Anxious About: How This Fuels Your Anxiety

Why are you anxious about the specific things that make you anxious?

Episode Summary

In this episode, Jessica explores the third major cause of anxiety: the messages you learned throughout your life. These messages—spoken and unspoken—teach you what to worry about, what to fear, and who you believe you need to be in order to be safe, accepted, or successful.

Jessica explains how these messages come from everywhere: family, school, culture, religion, media, and the experiences you observe growing up. Over time, they quietly shape the things that trigger anxiety in your life.

Understanding these messages can help you see your anxiety in a completely different way. Instead of believing something is wrong with you, you begin to recognize how your experiences taught your brain what to worry about—and how those patterns can start to change.

In This Episode You'll Learn:

• The third major cause of anxiety: the messages you learned growing up
• How family, culture, school, media, and life experiences shape what you worry about
• Why two people can feel anxious about completely different things
• How messages about who you “should” be as a person create anxiety
• Why many of the things you feel anxious about were taught, not inherent
• How recognizing these messages begins to loosen anxiety’s grip

Main Takeaway

Many of the things that make you anxious today were learned through the messages you received throughout your life.

Those messages came from family, culture, media, school, and the experiences you witnessed growing up. They taught your brain what to worry about and what it believes might threaten your safety, acceptance, or worth.

When you begin to see anxiety through this lens, it becomes less about something being wrong with you—and more about understanding the influences that shaped how your mind learned to respond to the world.

Who This Episode is For

This episode is for you if you:

• Wonder why certain situations trigger anxiety for you but not for others
• Feel pressure to be a certain kind of person in order to feel safe or accepted
• Notice that many of your worries are connected to expectations from family, culture, or society
• Want to understand where your anxiety patterns actually came from
• Are ready to start looking at anxiety with curiosity instead of self-blame

Connect with Jessica

Get My Book: "Hi, It's Anxiety! I'm Your Problem, It's Me"

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Get My Free Guide: 3 Keys for Quieting Anxiety Now

Enjoyed This Episode?

If this episode helped you understand your anxiety in a new way, follow the show and leave a review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. 

*Disclaimer* This show is for information and inspiration. It is not professional mental health counseling or medical advice. If you're struggling, please reach out to a mental health or medical professional.

Topics Covered in This Episode

• causes of anxiety
• learned anxiety patterns
• how childhood messages shape anxiety
• anxiety and family expectations
• social and cultural influences on anxiety
• why different people worry about different things
• understanding where anxiety comes from
• anxiety triggers and life experiences
• psychology of anxiety development

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

How did you learn what to be anxious about? Who or what told you that you should be anxious about being too loud, too big, too poor? How did you get to be anxious about the things that you specifically are anxious about? This is Jessica Richards, and it's not you, it's anxiety. Think back to your childhood or growing up. Who taught you what to have anxiety about? If you spend a minute thinking about it, you'll start to notice that you received, you learned messages. You've learned messages throughout your life and into adulthood that have taught you what to be anxious about. Messages are the number three cause of anxiety. Number one is your biology, your survival system that is looking for threats all the time and reacting to protect you from those threats, from that danger. Number two is modern living, this life that's full of so much stimulation and input and exposure, and is just really too much for us and is too much for our survival system. And this is number three, the messages that you learned, the messages that you learned throughout your life that have taught you what to be anxious about. So these messages that you learned weren't necessarily spoken, but some of them were. Messages can even really be misunderstandings or misinterpretations. Like let's say your dad ignored you when you were crying, and you, you know, kind of come to the conclusion in yourself that this means you shouldn't cry. But really, that wasn't the message your dad was trying to send. He was just distracted, or you know, he had a work call or whatever, but you come to this conclusion, and it's really a misunderstanding. So messages are really broad, and they're just anything or anyone, any everything, whatever it is, that taught you what to be anxious about. Here's an example. I grew up religious, and in religion there are lots of messages to create anxiety. So one of the pretty explicit messages that I learned is you don't have sex before marriage. So obviously, well maybe not obviously, but I chose to do that to have sex before marriage, and I wanted to do it. But especially when I was younger, I still felt anxious about it. It's taken me well, it took me well into my 30s to fully overcome the anxiety that came from that message that I learned and that I received. Regardless of what I intellectually thought and still think about having sex before marriage, that message stuck with me. And part of the reason that message stuck with me is because there was an implied consequence too. What's going to happen if you have sex before marriage? It's bad, it's wrong, you could go to hell, right? So I became anxious about it, and that stuck around. So that was a very explicit message, or a way that message showed up in a really kind of direct, explicit way. But in a more subtle way, I kind of also learned to be anxious about things just related to sex. So when I wanted to have sex, who I wanted to have sex with, how I wanted to have sex, there was anxiety around that and kind of this very quiet guilt and fear in the background. That message, you know, about sex made me anxious in the moment, but it also kind of like reverberated out into all these different areas, not just sex before marriage, but how I pursued relationships or felt comfortable in my relationships, how I felt comfortable dressing and how I felt comfortable being sexual in my body, how I felt about my body and sexuality. So that's how powerful and complex a message can be. So messages can be kind of that deep. They can also just be about practical things. Um, so they can be, you know, practical safety, practical anxiety about you, or even about the world and kind of how the world is. So, an example of a practical message would be watch out for cars when you're riding in the bike lane. Very practical, like very straightforward, and makes a lot of sense, right? But also could become something you get really anxious about. A message about you could be something like um kind of learning that you're responsible for making sure everyone is happy and okay. So it's very much about you, how you are as a person, what your role is, what you're supposed to be doing, kind of what behavior is right or wrong, kind of because underneath that message too, right, is like if you're not doing that, then you're bad, or if you are doing it, you're good and right. So, you know, that's an example of a message about you. A message about the world could be um everyone is out for themselves and they're gonna screw you over. So that's sort of like this big, like far-reaching worldview, right? About like how life is. This is just how life is. People, people are selfish and they're looking out for themselves. You're gonna get screwed over, so don't trust people. So you can kind of see these different levels, right? And with the practical message, like maybe the riding your bike isn't, you know, the best example, because that is something you need to watch out for. But, you know, I don't know. Um, you always have to carry your keys in between your fingers when you're going out to the parking lot, right? There's this very like practical aspect to it, but also it's creating anxiety. So what I want you to do here is just take a quick sec and think about some of the major things that you are anxious about. Some of the anxiety, it doesn't have to be major actually, but some of the things you're anxious about, some of the anxiety in your life, and ask where ask yourself, or I'm asking you, I guess, where did you learn to be anxious about that? Or how did you learn to be anxious about that? Who taught you? What did you observe? What did you pick up? And what were the messages about those things? Even if they're just things that you picked up on your own, what's the message that you picked up? What's the meaning you picked up? Messages can also be sent very inadvertently and very accidentally. For example, just in the normal course of raising children, parents send messages that can create anxiety, even if they have the best of intentions, even if they're not meaning to do that. It's just kind of a normal part of life, right? For kids to learn messages from their parents. So it can be accidental and sort of inadvertently with no no ill intention, right? No like harm intended, parents not even trying to make their kids anxious, right? It's just sort of like it's a thing that happens. But also, messages can be very intentional, can be sent messages about anxiety can be very intentional. For example, a skincare brand, making you worry about your skin so you'll buy their product. That's a very intentional advertising message, social message message that is sent to you with the intention of making you anxious about your skin, so you will buy a product. So messages can be inadvertent, intentional, and intentionally harmful or it's intentionally abusive. So maybe your ballet teacher telling you that you are a horrible dancer and you should be ashamed of your form and you know quit ballet. Like, so there's this whole range with messages, and some of them were, you know, accidental, no ill intention. Some of them were intentional, but not necessarily intended to create harm. And some of them actually very much were intended to create harm or to be abusive or to scare you or make you afraid. For a lot of people, it can be really surprising to learn what messages you actually took in. So, you know, I work with people in counseling, and often we don't consciously walk around very aware of the messages that we learned that make us anxious. And when you're anxious, you don't necessarily stop to think like, oh wait, how did I learn to be anxious about this? Like, what taught me about this? So when I explore this with people in counseling, and we're working on identifying these messages, seeing like, okay, you're anxious. Like, how did you learn this? Like, what what's the message you learned here? And and where did you learn that from? And how did you learn it? And who taught it to you? So when we're looking at identifying these messages, people are often shocked at what they believe or what they learned. They didn't even consciously know it, or they consciously knew about the anxiety, but they didn't consciously know about the message behind it. And it can be very shocking and surprising, or on the flip side, it can suddenly make everything make a lot of sense too. But not all messages make sense. That's not how our brain works. When we learned a message, when someone sent us a message about anxiety, our brain took it in, right? Because that message was about safety. You know, a message about anxiety is essentially a message about safety. It's saying, here's what you need to do to be safe. So your brain, your survival system, that biology that we talked about as the first cause of anxiety, it takes that in. And it doesn't need to make sense. It doesn't need to be rational or logical or something that you consciously believe. If it's about keeping you safe, it's just gonna take that message in and it's gonna internalize it and it's gonna believe it and it's going to hold on to it. So a message, a belief, uh, doesn't always or often doesn't make logical sense. For example, you could realize that you got the message that you're responsible for all the bad things that happen in the world. Or you got the message that you can't trust your partner, uh, even though they say they really love you and they show you that they love you and they haven't done anything wrong, you can't trust them. So if I was working with people in counseling on anxiety around those things, and we realized that those were the messages they got, they might say to me, Wow, that just that doesn't make any sense. Like, I logically know that's not true. It doesn't make sense. So why am I so anxious about it? Because that's how messages work. We didn't take them in and evaluate them to see whether they were true or not. We just kind of took them in without knowing knowing it often and internalized it, and it got stuck in there.