07/29/2026
How anxiety effects Learning
I rode two horses the other night, two very different horses. One of the things I’ve realized in the last couple of years – and these two horses highlight spectacularly – is how easy it is to underestimate what kind of barriers anxiety create for the horse.
It’s kind of like asking someone to help you set the table.
Someone who has never set a table before but also hasn’t had any bad experiences setting a table will probably just go to trying things. They might try arranging the cutlery a certain way and need to be told where the spoon should rest. They might fold the napkins incorrectly at first. You can tell them “hey, that should actually go here” and they’ll say “oh, got it, thanks” in response because they’ve no experience of it being a crisis if they got it wrong. They just fix it and move on. Pretty soon the table is set.
Someone who has plenty of experience setting a table and hasn’t had any bad experiences is going to just get to work setting the table. They know where things go, generally speaking. Maybe you have a certain way of doing things and you let them know that and they’ll say “oh, got it, thanks” because it’s not a crisis if they need a reminder. They just fix it and move on. Pretty soon the table is set.
But someone who has experience setting a table and gotten their hand slapped about it, or pushed to set the table faster than they had the ability to, or were bullied into setting the table when it really wasn’t their idea to set that table…that person is going to fumble all over themselves and feel pretty miserable doing it. They might know perfectly well where things need to go but they can’t access that information because of the overwhelm and the pressure and the anxiety it all provokes. They’ve experienced getting it wrong to be a crisis, so they can’t just fix a mistake and move on because every correction feels like a whiplash.
You might never get the table set.
The first horse I rode doesn’t have much anxiety about anything despite not having done a lot of table setting. I say “put the spoon there” and he says “okie dokie”. If he forgets to put the spoon where I need it, I remind him and he says “right, my bad”. There’s no crisis about any of it, it’s just learning.
The other horse, while he generally understands what I am asking, has a lot of anxiety about all the various parts and pieces. I have to break it down one step at a time. Sometimes those steps require sub-steps, or going back over the previous ones until he feels secure enough to move on. We’ve got the cutlery in a pile and the plates are where they need to be, but some assembly is still required. If I say “hey, not quite” he still hears that as criticism instead of support. It’ll take some time and deconstruction before that really changes and he too can respond with “right, got it” and not have it be tinged with worry. The undoing of this previous experience and the lessons the horse gleaned from it is harder to navigate than just learning how to do it right - and be alright with it.
Those barriers, they’re about what happens right after I say “not quite.” The first horse hears it and just goes looking for the right answer. The second horse hears it and goes looking for the exit - not physically, necessarily, but somewhere in his head he’s already checked out and decided this is going bad. So even when he knows where the spoon goes, he can’t get to that knowledge, because he’s busy bracing for something that isn’t actually coming.
That’s the part I can’t skip past. He’s not confused about cutlery. He’s convinced, somewhere underneath it, that this is the moment it all goes wrong again, and no amount of me knowing better does anything for him until he’s had enough small, boring, uneventful corrections that he starts to suspect I might be right.
These are the barriers: not about what is hard to learn, but what's hard to unlearn.
