Are You Good at Unlearning?
I would consider this a skill when it comes to health. I’ve learned to “unlearn” quite a few things that were taught in my education after gaining experience in practice. And because of this, I’ve been able to help my clients achieve better results. This is an important skill for all to practice in their personal health management as well.
Life presents us with the opportunity to unlearn many things unrelated to health as well. It’s an uncomfortable process, as it should be. Growth is uncomfortable. This is still very relevant to health, though. We might be doing things that we believe are good for us and those we love when they’re actually having the opposite effect. Over time this puts a strain on our emotional and physical health.
This article covers knowing when it’s time to unlearn, how this impacts your health, and how this relates to our mindset and beliefs about ourselves. Often when people aren’t getting well, it has more to do with mindset than biology. This can be hard to see initially, but once you begin to address it, you start to see major improvements.
What We Know With Certainty
My favorite cliche quote is something I try to implement into every part of my life, and especially into my practice:
“It’s not what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for certain that just ain’t so.”
-Mark Twain
There have been a lot of things in medicine that we thought we had figured out, only to find out later that we were way off base. Unfortunately, many of these later discoveries were at the expense of people’s health.
Remember the trans fat fad of the ’90s and early 2000s? I’ve written at length about how Dietary cholesterol doesn’t raise your cholesterol levels. Several prescription drugs have been recalled for various reasons after they were “cleared” by the FDA for clinical use. This list is lengthy.
We would do well in health to remember that what we think we know is just based on the current information that we have available. And what we currently know is limited to what we’re able to identify, measure, and quantify. There are potentially thousands of health markers within the body that could offer more insights into our health status. We just don’t yet have the information needed to identify or measure them.
We are constantly learning and discovering new things. Scientists only recently discovered a “new” organ system within our body in the last few years that was previously unknown (it’s not really “new,” it’s been there the whole time). New discoveries sometimes reveal that what we thought we knew about the body is incorrect.
This can be problematic in the health space. Every practitioner goes into practice the concepts they were taught in school. From doctors and naturopaths to nutritionists, we know and trust what we’re taught, and that’s what we use to help our patients and clients.
I was taught that the optimal first-line dietary intervention was to stop consuming inflammatory foods like processed foods, sugar, gluten, dairy, beef, eggs, etc., so this is what I recommended. Processed foods and sugar are definitely on the no-go list for obvious reasons, but dairy, beef, and eggs are excellent sources of essential nutrients and protein for most people.
It took several months before I learned that most people didn’t need to eliminate all of these foods from their diet. It was making dietary changes even harder because they were so restrictive, and most people don’t have issues with these foods.
Compliance improved with fewer restrictions, and health markers improved with the protein and nutrients these foods provided. Experience is our best teacher when it comes to learning and unlearning; we just have to listen.
Getting in our own way by being stuck in our old ways
One of the most challenging things for practitioners is unlearning what they “know to be certain.” The textbooks that teach our practitioners are estimated to be about 10-15 years behind the research.
Research itself is likely 5-7 years behind anecdote/experience. What we learn in school might be 20 years outdated by the time we’re ready to implement it! It’s important to seek practitioners and providers who are avid learners, both through research and experience.
Other important traits for health providers to possess are:
- The ability to change their mind when new information is available.
- Admit when they were wrong about something (or that they didn’t have all of the information available at the time).
- Have the humility to say “I don’t know” when not well-versed on a particular topic.
In a space that’s constantly turning over new information, this is a non-negotiable.
When it’s Time to Unlearn Regarding Health
Experience over information.
When you’re not seeing improvements despite doing all of the “right things,” it might be time to start unlearning what you thought you knew.
This is where keeping a log of your health factors becomes indispensable. This can include everything from the foods you eat, calorie/macro intake, health signs and symptoms, biomarkers, blood work, emotions/mood, sleep, and stress levels.
What works for everyone else may not be what works for you. It’s sometimes impossible to know what is or isn’t working without tracking changes. With health, some changes are so subtle and gradual that you wouldn’t otherwise be aware of them without having data to look back on and compare.
My top 5 recommended health markers to track in order of importance:
- Blood work (every 6-12 months)
- Sleep patterns and habits (nightly)
- Food: calories and macro intake (for ~90 days initially to dial things in, then for at least 1 month per year following)
- Heart Rate Variability (daily/nightly – the WHOOP covers this + sleep and more)
- Blood Sugar (via CGM for 2 weeks for non-diabetics, daily for diabetics)
- Menstrual cycle patterns (for menstruating women)
I strongly recommend that you work with a practitioner in making any dietary or lifestyle changes and assessing your health data. Some apps provide helpful feedback, but before making major changes, it’s best to work with someone who can guide you through the more challenging times.
Evolved Learning
Sometimes we don’t need to unlearn. We just need to evolve what we know.
Maybe you’ve been doing the same thing for years that previously worked well for you. If you’re no longer having the same response to a particular dietary pattern, supplement regimen, workout routine, etc., it may not be that it’s “wrong”; it just might not be right for where you are at this phase of life/health.
Our bodies change as we age, primarily due to changes in hormone production and the build-up of oxidative stress that accumulates over time. We see this predominately in how much harder it becomes to lose weight the older we get.
Our metabolic rate decreases with age; thus, we need fewer calories. Along with this, our protein demands increase. It’s vital to ensure you’re eating adequate protein if your goal is to age gracefully.
Tracking the markers listed above will also help direct necessary changes that will offset and reduce the oxidative stress load that accumulates with age.
Unlearning Destructive Mindsets
It’s not only learned misinformation that can be destructive to our health. Learned mindsets can often be the driving factor that underly many health issues and the choices we make regarding them. We don’t see how certain mindsets are negatively impacting our lives until they start producing negative outcomes – and even then, it can be hard to see.
No one is immune. We all have negative learned mindsets that manifest in different ways. They’ve been programmed since childhood. They likely served us well then and made life easier. That’s why we keep them around as adults. While the details are different for everyone, the patterns that they show up as with our health are quite similar.
For example, was it a requirement for you as a child to “clean your plate?” It was for me. I was often guilt-tripped about how not eating all of my food was ungrateful, considering how there are starving children in the world.
As dark as this was, it was also well-intended at the time, but this created a belief that I have to eat all the food on my plate, all the time, no matter how I felt. This is something I, and many others, struggle with in adulthood. It can lead to unhealthy relationships with food.
Other mindsets that deserve to be unlearned are much more insidious. Circumstances in childhood can lead one to believe that they don’t “deserve” to be well, to feel good, or to nourish their body with quality foods.
Some people only received love and attention as a child when they were sick, resulting in a mindset that they have to be sick to be loved and accepted. Others feel that their role and purpose is to care for everyone else while putting their own health on the back burner.
This is certainly not an exhaustive list; it’s just some of the more common patterns that hold many people back from experiencing true wellness.
It can be incredibly healing to take a self-assessment of the mindsets that we have. Are they negatively impacting your health in any way? These are some of the hardest things to unlearn. They’ve been programmed into us so deeply that it can feel like “this is just who we are,” but that’s just an excuse we use to prevent us from facing our own hard truths.
Once we begin to recognize the unintentional role that we’ve played in sabotaging our own health, we regain a sense of agency and control in our lives. We’re no longer a victim of circumstance or of our past. It’s liberating, and the changes are dramatic.
I know these are some pretty bold statements. If it’s not clear by now, I’m speaking from experience – none of us are immune. I share this so that others can experience the healing that I know it can offer.
What beliefs and mindsets do you have that could be unlearned? How different do you think your life could be on the other side of unlearning them? What does that look like for you?
It’s healthy to be a little skeptical. I tend never to believe anything I hear until researching it myself, and I don’t believe that there’s ever any “one thing” that applies to everyone when it comes to health. Despite what any given health guru might tell you.
Uncertainty is the only thing we can be certain of. So question everything, do your research, don’t be afraid to ask why, and validate information. And at the same time, be careful not to be too cynical.
The perfect balance is when we can question our own thoughts and emotions to find out what’s driving them, invite new ideas, and stay on a quest for continued learning.
