I want to start with a small confession.
For most of my twenties and early thirties, I described myself, when asked, as an anxious person. I would say it casually. I would say it as if I were describing my eye color. The anxiety was, in my own internal accounting, simply a feature of who I was. Some people were calm. Some people were anxious. I had drawn the anxious card. The drawing had happened, presumably, at conception, and the rest of my life was the working-out of that initial allocation.
It took me until my mid-thirties to consider the possibility that this might not be quite right. The consideration was prompted by a specific moment. I was in my apartment in Bangkok, on a perfectly ordinary Tuesday, and I caught myself doing a thing I had been doing my entire adult life without noticing it. The thing was: I was scanning the apartment for problems. Not for any particular reason. There was no problem to be found. The dogs were fine. The kettle was off. The door was locked. I was, at that moment, perfectly safe.
I was, nonetheless, scanning. The scanning was running in the background of my consciousness like a small fan. I had been doing it, I realized, for as long as I could remember. The scanning was so consistent, so present, so ambient, that I had simply assumed it was me. The constant low-grade vigilance was, in my self-description, my personality.
What I want to write about, in this article, is the moment I started to suspect that the constant low-grade vigilance was not, in fact, my personality. The vigilance was, more accurately, an inheritance. I had been carrying it, on someone else’s behalf, for as long as I had been alive.
The mother in the kitchen
I want to describe my mother, briefly, because the description is the article.
My mother is, by any external measure, a calm woman. She is not, to my knowledge, on medication for anxiety. She has not, in any explicit sense, ever described herself as anxious. She does not panic. She does not have visible attacks. She is not, by the standard cultural definitions, an obviously anxious person.
What she is, and what I noticed somewhere in my thirties when I started paying attention, is a woman who has spent her entire adult life running a low-grade scanning protocol almost identical to the one I was running in my Bangkok apartment. She scans for problems. She scans for the next thing that might go wrong. She scans for the small details in a room that need adjusting before the larger order can be considered intact.
This is not, in her case, framed as anxiety. It is framed as conscientiousness. She is, in family lore, the responsible one. The one who notices. The one who gets things done. The framing is positive. The framing has been positive for fifty years. The positive framing has obscured, even to her, what the scanning is actually costing.
What it has cost her, in my estimation, is the ability to be at rest in any room she occupies. She cannot, that I have ever observed, simply be in a room. She is always also working in the room. The working is invisible. The working is constant.
And it is, I now believe, what I inherited. Research on physiological synchrony between anxious parents and their infants shows that the children of more anxious mothers display stronger and more continuous physiological synchrony with their parent across the day—their nervous systems literally calibrating to the parent’s state moment by moment, hour by hour, year by year. The child does not just observe the parent’s vigilance. The child becomes the parent’s vigilance, in a smaller body, with a longer life ahead of it to carry it through.
The loan you didn’t take out
I want to think about this in terms of inheritance, because the framing has changed something for me.
When we talk about what parents pass on to children, we usually mean either money, property, or, in the more enlightened versions, “values.” We do not usually mean the actual nervous-system configuration that the parent has been operating on without naming it. But this, I am now convinced, is the most consequential thing many of us have inherited from our parents. Not the assets. Not the lessons. The autonomic baseline.
The transfer happens, mostly, in early childhood. The mechanism is not mystical. It is, in fact, well-documented. Studies of parental anxiety and infant arousal consistently find that parental anxiety levels, measured even before the child is born, predict autonomic hyperarousal in their infants by four months of age, which in turn predicts more fearful temperament through toddlerhood. The infant’s nervous system calibrates itself to the parent’s nervous system. The calibration sets a baseline. The baseline persists.
By the time you are old enough to think of yourself as an anxious person, the calibration is so deeply established that it does not feel like a calibration. It feels like you. The vigilance is, by then, part of the operating system. You assume you came with it factory-installed. You don’t, generally, consider the possibility that the factory was your mother’s nervous system, and the installation happened before you had words.
This is the loan I’m describing in the article’s frame. You did not take out the loan. The loan was taken out by a parent who was struggling without naming it, and the payments have been coming out of your account every month of your life since.
The most painful part of this, in my view, is not the inheritance itself. It is the fact that most parents who pass it on do not know they are passing it on. They are not being malicious. They are not, in many cases, even aware that what they are operating on is anxiety. My mother, if you asked her today, would not describe herself as anxious. She would describe herself as a person who likes things done properly. The two descriptions, in her dictionary, are not the same. In her body, they are.
What I started to notice, once I knew
I want to describe what changed, after I started suspecting that my personality was, in part, an inheritance.
The first thing that changed was small. I started to notice, in real time, when the scanning was happening. The scanning had previously been so continuous that it had been invisible. Once I had a frame for it, I could spot it. I would catch myself, in my apartment in Bangkok, scanning for problems that were not there. I would catch myself, in conversations with friends, monitoring the temperature of the room in a way the room did not require. I would catch myself, when traveling, performing a low-grade audit of every potential thing that might go wrong, in conditions where almost nothing was likely to.
The noticing did not, at first, stop the scanning. The scanning is too deeply installed for noticing to turn it off. But the noticing did, slowly, begin to introduce a small distance between me and it. I could observe the scanning rather than just being inside it. The observing felt, for the first time, like I was standing outside a system rather than just being a system.
The second thing that changed was that I started, very tentatively, to wonder what would be left of me if the scanning stopped. The scanning had been, for so long, a major component of how I knew I was me. If you removed it, I was not sure what would be there. The question alarmed me. The question also, I now think, was the right question to be alarmed by.
What I have figured out, slowly, in the last few years, is that what is underneath the scanning is a calmer person than the one I had assumed I was. The calm person was always there. The calm person was just, throughout my entire life, having to operate underneath the constant background fan of inherited vigilance. The fan was loud enough that I had not, for thirty-five years, met the calm person clearly. The fan is still on. It is, however, slightly less loud now than it used to be. The calm person, in the moments when the fan briefly quiets, is becoming, for the first time, audible.
What the work actually looks like
I want to be honest about what working with this looks like, because I do not want to make it sound mystical or easy.
The work is mostly slow and unglamorous. It is, in my experience, a combination of three things. The first is therapy, where the inheritance can be named, described, and slowly distinguished from the person carrying it. The second is regular nervous-system practice—exercise, sleep, the small daily activities that, over months and years, retrain the body’s baseline. The third, and this is the one I find most useful, is the simple practice of catching the scanning when it happens and asking, internally, what it is currently scanning for.
Most of the time, the answer is: nothing. The scanning is running on autopilot. There is no current threat. The threat the scanning is configured to detect is not in the room. It is, in some real way, in 1973, in a kitchen my mother was standing in when she did not yet know she was passing on something other than a meal.
The asking-what-the-scanning-is-for is not a cure. The asking is, however, a form of acknowledgment that the scanning is not me. It is something I am doing. It is something I can, with effort, eventually do less of. The decoupling of “I am anxious” from “I am running an inherited scanning protocol” is, I now think, one of the more important pieces of internal work available to anyone whose parents passed something like this on.
What I’d say to anyone reading this
If you have called yourself an anxious person for as long as you can remember, and the description has felt slightly inevitable, like a fact about your face, I want to suggest the possibility that the description may not be quite right.
You may not be, in any essential sense, an anxious person. You may be, instead, a person who has been carrying a parent’s anxiety for so long that you have mistaken it for your own personality. The two are different. The first is a fact about you. The second is a debt being paid on your behalf.
The debt is not, I want to stress, your parent’s fault in any moral sense. Your parent did not, in most cases, know they were passing it on. They were doing their best with what they had inherited from their own parents, who had inherited it from theirs, and so on, in a slow accumulation of unnamed vigilance that stretches back further than anyone in your family is currently equipped to trace.
What you can do, with that information, is begin the slow work of distinguishing the inherited from the actual. The work is mostly internal. The work is mostly invisible. The work is, however, real, and it is, in my experience and the experience of friends I’ve talked to about this, the most useful piece of psychological repair a person can do in their thirties and forties.
The fan does not turn off all at once. It turns down, slowly, by increments, over years. Underneath the fan, there is a calmer person you may not yet have met. They have been waiting, patiently, for the loan to be paid down enough that they can finally be heard.
I am beginning, in my late thirties, to hear mine. I would like, in my forties, to know him better. The scanning is not him. The scanning was never him. The scanning was the small ongoing inheritance from a kitchen in 1973 that I have been carrying, in my own body, for the only adult life I have ever lived.
I am, slowly, putting it down.
