This article is based on a talk I gave in my meditation class on Saturday, 4 April 2026—the first session in the Seeing Life Through a New Lens series.
How We Learn
If we want to learn to unlearn, we need to learn how we learn. And how do we learn?
To learn something, we repeat it. Let’s say you had to memorise a speech: you’d repeat it over and over again. We learn through repetition.
The other way is through a neuroscientific concept called long-term potentiation, which means you can remember an experience without repetition. Generally, that’s a high-stress experience. It could be positive high stress — a challenge, winning a race or something like that — or it could be something distressing that’s found its way into your memory and stays there.
Obviously, this is a natural trait where we vividly remember our most stressful experiences so they stay in mind for the future. Stress is an important part of advanced learning. That’s why we have competitive examinations. The greater the stress, the more deeply the long-term potentiation operates.
But what we want to unlearn through repetition. That repetition has a name. It’s called meditation.
The Problem with Strategies
We live in a world of therapy, self-help, and strategies. Go on YouTube with any problem, and you'll find a multitude of people offering solutions and strategies for working with your mind or emotions. Some of these may be fantastic. They may be just what you want. But to use them, you first need to integrate them as behavioural responses through repetition. And you also need to be aware enough to apply them when needed.
Habit Formation and How the Brain Works
Human beings have a reasoning system that can be modelled as a series of if-then statements.
- “If” this happens, “then” I respond like this.
- “If“ that happens, “then**”** I respond like that.
Much of our behaviour can be represented by that if-then system.
Notice there’s something missing. The thing that’s missing is not.
If you’ve ever had a dog, you will realise that you will never be able to teach it “no.” It doesn’t understand “no.” So how do you control a dog? You might teach it to sit, to freeze, or to stand. If your dog is misbehaving because you can’t teach it “no”, instead, teach it a more helpful action, such as sit.
You teach a dog by teaching it to replace one action (an unhelpful one) with a different and more helpful action.
Human beings aren’t any different, except for one thing: we make extensive use of a set of what are called inhibitions. These inhibitions live at the front of our brains, in a region called the prefrontal cortex, located behind the forehead. And what is an inhibition? It inhibits (stops) an if-then process.
You will see this at work when someone upsets you, and your brain flashes an image of a socially unacceptable response. It goes through your mind, and then, hopefully, you don't respond that way.
If you want to see human behaviour where the prefrontal cortex is not working, go to Bromley High Street on a Friday night when the pubs and bars are kicking out. Alcohol suppresses the activity of the prefrontal cortex, and the uninhibited, more primal, responses dominate.
So this inhibition is another layer to how the brain works. “If” this happens, “then” my brain responds like that—” but” the action gets suppressed by my inhibitions. There is no “not.”
There is no switch in the brain to “not” do something you have learned to do. You need to apply another strategy.
Science learned this about 150 years ago. There are many cases of people who have experienced permanent prefrontal lobe damage. There’s the famous case of Phineas Gage (see references), who had a very unfortunate accident that destroyed his frontal lobe. He was able to function in pretty much every way, except that he became incredibly antisocial. Prior to the accident, he was a fine, upstanding member of the community, but ended up as a hopeless drunk with all sorts of behavioural issues. That was an early insight into the existence of this inhibitory process in the frontal lobe.
All of this is studied as a behavioural science, with ACT-R cognitive modelling architecture as an example (see references).
Deprogramming our Unhelpful Responses
So, how do we unlearn something? To do that, we need to change the “then.”
Here is an example: “If” somebody cuts me up at the traffic lights, “then” I swear, bounce up and down in the driving seat, and rant.
If I change the “then” to: I breathe in deeply, and I breathe out a long extended out-breath, and I say in my mind about the impatient driver, “may he be well, may he be happy, may he be free from suffering”, and if I am still agitated I repeat “may I be well, may I be happy and may I be free from suffering”, then by the time I get to the next set of traffic lights, it’s done.
How do I do that? By repetition. But do I get cut off at traffic lights often enough to learn that new response through repetition? And can I remember to use this wonderful new response when I get cut off and after I am already experiencing my road rage tantrum? Of course not.
The Breath as the Primary Tool
Right at the top of the list for intervening in this stimulus-and-response cycle is the breath. If you breathe in and focus on your nostrils as you breathe in, you will notice the mind stops. No thoughts. And then when you exhale, you breathe slowly out with a long, extended out-breath. What I’m doing is changing my psychophysiological state. I’m instantly moving from stress to relaxation, and I have replaced the unhelpful response with a more helpful one.
When somebody’s angry, nobody ever says to them, “Don’t be angry.” They always say, “Relax. Relax, it will be fine, it’s okay.” When somebody’s upset, you say to them, “Relax.” What you’re trying to do is prompt them to move into a relaxed psychophysiological state, which is probably more helpful for them.
The reason it’s more helpful isn’t that it’s a bad thing to get angry at somebody cutting you up at the lights — that’s not the issue. The problem is that your thinking brain goes offline when you’re under stress, and you will make emotional choices. More stress, less thought, and then you’re not in such a good position to make helpful choices.
Once you’ve trained yourself to respond in this sort of way, then you can do all those clever things that the therapists and the people on YouTube tell you to do. But unless you’ve trained yourself through repetition to respond to emotions, thought patterns, and behavioural responses in a helpful way, you will continue responding in an unhelpful way.
How Long Does It Take?
How long does it take to unlearn our unhelpful responses? Well, how long did it take to learn them?
My theory is one year for every decade of your adult life to get you to a place where you’re making real progress.
The other thing is, we can only really work on one thing at a time. If you’ve got a lot of emotional baggage, for instance, you’re going to be focusing on that. If you’ve got a worrisome mind, you’ll be working on that. And if it’s taken you three decades to get there, it’s going to take you three years to unlearn it.
This is because you’re not unlearning it — you're learning something else to replace it with. You can’t unlearn it because the brain doesn’t do “not,”. The brain is not a simple system. It’s a complex system, and in a complex system, you can’t predict the outcome, so you have to approach it by making changes and testing them. This is at the heart of systems theory (the science of managing complex systems).
You can see it as a salami-slicer approach. Many small changes constantly readjusting to reach our goals. A lot like the Personal Kaizen approach I teach. We need to take that systems theory and apply it to our own complex brains.
Beneficial change then becomes a trial-and-error process of finding a way to replace the initial thought, behaviour, response, or emotion with something more helpful. And right at the top of the list is the breath.
Next Steps
That’s how we unlearn, and this is what we do. Every time we meditate, we’re unlearning.
This isn’t something where you can do everything at once. There is no silver bullet and no easy road. If you’ve got a lot of emotional baggage, you have to work through your emotional baggage. If you have unhelpful behavioural responses, you have to work through them. If you have stress triggers, you’ve got to work through the stress triggers. If you have unhelpful thought patterns, you’ve got to work through the unhelpful thought patterns. There’s actually quite a lot, unfortunately.
There are meditation practices that help us with all of these.
So you’ve got a choice. You can carry on as you are, or you can train yourself to respond in ways that help you make increasingly better choices and take better actions, and then you can take your pick of therapeutic practices if you still need to.
References
- ACT-R https://act-r.psy.cmu.edu/about/
- Phineas Gage https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phineas\_Gage
