Unlearning is the step after learning: letting a habit you learned well stop running where it no longer fits, while the knowledge stays yours. Nothing you know has to be forgotten, and nothing that keeps you well has to go.
Two days after landing in Dubai, Bronwyn rides the escalator down into BurJuman station and stands on the left.
Behind her, someone coughs politely. Then "Excuse me," and a young man with a lanyard squeezes past, then another, then a woman with a laptop bag who says nothing at all. By the bottom, half a dozen people are bunched on the steps above her. She steps off, laughing at herself, a little embarrassed.
Thirty-four years in Brisbane taught her to keep left: on footpaths, on stairs, on every escalator in the city. It's good manners there, and she has it down perfectly. Nobody would call it a mistake.
Here, though, the left side of the escalator is for walking. So for weeks yet, she'll keep finding herself in the walking lane.
The lesson is good. It's just a Brisbane lesson.
What is unlearning?
Unlearning is letting a learned habit or rule stop running where it no longer fits, while the knowledge behind it stays yours. It comes after learning, because there's nothing to unlearn until something has gone in. Bronwyn doesn't need to forget her manners. She needs her feet to stop choosing the left.
Some people mean forgetting when they say unlearning. Here it means something narrower: a habit losing its hold while what you know stays. Most people have done it already without a name for it, after a move, a new job or a new team.
Unlearning never means dropping treatment, medication or anyone who supports you. Those stay, along with every learned habit that keeps you well, and any change to your care is one to make with your doctor. Nor does it ever mean giving up a habit that keeps a present danger away. If someone is putting you at risk, or you're in crisis, contact your local emergency services.
Why does unlearning come after learning?
Because there has to be a habit before there's anything to unlearn, and most of what learning brings is worth keeping: reading, a recipe, the quickest way home. None of that needs undoing.
Habits are learned the same way, through repetition. A nurse who spent ten years on nights may go on setting three alarms on a Saturday. Someone who worked for years in an open-plan office may keep whispering at their own desk at home. Neither chose the habit. It came with the years.
Some habits grow into whole selves: the dependable one, the one who smooths things over. What is a survival identity explains how they take shape.
If thinking about these learned selves brings up pain, a doctor or a close friend comes before any quiz; in a crisis, contact your local emergency services. The free quiz Who Did You Become to Survive? puts twenty-one questions to you on the self you took on. Or read on.
Unlearning depends on a habit like that, and it has no quarrel with the learning behind it. If it's the how-to you're after, how to unlearn conditioning is the companion piece.
How is unlearning different from forgetting?
Forgetting loses what you knew. Unlearning keeps it, and gives a lesson back its true size.
In chapter 13 of Unbecome, my book, there's a bird that has flown into a windowpane a few times, and the chapter is careful about what the bird took from it: "And I want you to see precisely what the bird has learned, because it has not learned that the sky is gone." Then: "The bird has learned that this one pane is where it stops, and that is the entire content of the lesson."
On that reading, unlearning doesn't ask the bird to forget the window. It asks that one pane stop standing in for the whole sky.
Bronwyn won't forget how Brisbane does escalators, and nobody would want her to. Her feet just need to leave that habit in Brisbane.
Why does some writing put unlearning first?
Writing about work and training often does. A team moving to new software is told to unlearn the old system first, so the new one has space, and unlearning gets described as the opening step. For a training plan, that's a fair picture.
In one person's life, the order usually runs the other way. Years of learning come first, most of it good, and only much later does anyone notice that a habit has outlived its place. Three alarms on a Saturday, or a whisper at a desk at home, are what years of good work left behind. By then it may trip you up only now and then, the way Bronwyn's did on the escalator.
That's why I call it the step after learning. Until a habit has settled, unlearning has no work, and it leaves everything else you learned alone.
What does unlearning leave alone?
Nearly everything. Your skills stay. Your knowledge stays. So does every habit that serves you or keeps you safe: locking the door at night, taking your medication on time, the walk you never skip. When you're unsure whether a habit protects you, assume it does, and keep it unless your doctor advises otherwise. Learning is still the answer whenever you lack something, such as the know-how for a new job, and I'd never want you to stop. Unlearning concerns a single thing: a habit still running somewhere it no longer belongs. Even then, the habit isn't a fault. Bronwyn's keeping left was never wrong. Brisbane is where it belongs.
What does a fully learned habit feel like?
Usually like nothing at all: it runs without asking you, and a signature shows it well. This article isn't therapy or medical care. Nothing in it stands in for any treatment you're having. Keep this exercise to small, harmless habits. Leave out anything that harms you, such as drinking, drugs or hurting yourself, anything that might be a sign of illness, and anything to do with someone who mistreats you. A doctor or a helpline is the right place for those, and so is anybody you lean on. If you're in crisis, contact your local emergency services. Painful memories have no part in this exercise. A single one is reason enough to stop the exercise and phone a helpline or your doctor's clinic.
Any pen and any paper will do.
- Sign your name as usual. The quick version you'd give a delivery driver. Notice how little of it you decide.
- Sign it again without looking at the page. Look across the room while you write, and let the hand do what it does.
- Compare the two signatures. Notice what the hand kept of the shape by itself. That's years of practice folded into one movement: learning that worked, with no fault in it.
- Notice one other habit today that needs no instructions from you. The word you answer the phone with, say, or the way you hold a cup.
Then throw the paper away.
The practice that taught your hand its shape taught the other habit you noticed too, and every habit like it, the useful ones and the ones you'd rather put down. In chapter 14 the book adds: "It is only that practice has no opinion about what it is practicing."
What has my book got to do with unlearning?
The word itself never appears in Unbecome. What the book does have is a long study of the layers people carry without having chosen them, and a firm view of where they came from. Chapter 9 says of them: "Every layer has a history. Things with histories arrived. Things that arrived can leave." The same chapter is kind to the reading that came before it, my own included: "I read those books too; some of them taught me real things, and I am not going to pretend otherwise just to win an argument."
Learning has given me nearly everything I know how to do.
Anne wrote this about Unbecome in her review on Amazon: "This book is so much more than a read."
Robert Simic, guiding the remembering.
P.S. Hundreds of things you once learned will see you through today, and you get to keep them all. Get The Paperback when you'd like the book.