What is learned helplessness? Well when Indian elephant trainers capture a baby elephant, they begin their training by tying its leg with a rope to a small stake. While still a baby the elephant doesn’t have the strength to break free, and after fighting for several days it simply gives up.
In its mind anything the elephant does is useless. It is trapped there, forever. But interestingly when that same elephant is fully grown and can literally tear the ground apart, it is still tied with the same rope and stake.
Sadly it learned from its past trials that anything it does is in vain, so it just stopped trying. And maybe you did too. You wanted to accomplish something, a goal of yours, achieve an athletic body, be healthier, happier but just couldn’t do it.
It’s possible that sometime in the past you were exposed to aversive stimuli, stimuli that were unpleasant or painful, you were unable to change them or willingly avoid any subsequent encounters, so you became conditioned to simply accept them as they are. YOU accepted that you’re not good enough, and just like the fully grown elephant - you simply stopped trying. THIS ….
is the theory of learned helplessness, the science and its antidote. But how do we know learned helplessness really exists? Well In the year 1967, while at the university of Pennsylvania, American psychologist Martin Seligman conducted a research shocking dogs in harnesses.
The research consisted of 3 groups of dogs. The first one was a control group, dogs were simply put in a harness for a period of time and were later released. Groups 2 and 3 consisted of "joint pairs" meaning they received the same stimuli.
Dogs in the second group were given electric shocks at random times, which the dog could end by pressing a lever. However dogs in group 3 received the same shock as their paired dog in group 2, but its lever did not stop the shock. To a dog in Group 3, it seemed that the shock ended at random times because it was their paired dog in the second group that was causing it to stop.
Thus, for dogs in the third group, the shock was simply "inescapable". To conclude the experiment, the same three groups of dogs were tested in a box containing two rectangular compartments divided by a barrier a few inches high. All of the dogs were shocked, but could escape shocks simply by jumping over the barrier to the other compartment.
The dogs in Groups 1 and 2 quickly learned this task and escaped the shock. Most of the Group 3 dogs – which had previously learned that nothing they did stopped the shocks – simply laid down passively and whined while they were shocked. The dogs did not try to escape because they expect that nothing they do will stop the shock.
To disrupt the expectation, experimenters physically picked up the dogs and moved their legs, imitating the actions the dogs would need to take in order to escape from the electrified grid. This had to be done at least twice before the dogs would start wilfully jumping over the barrier on their own. The impact of learned helplessness has been demonstrated in different animal species, but its effects is also seen in people.
Some of the symptoms in children include, failure to ask for help, frustration, giving up, poor motivation and procrastination. And these symptoms can propagate further in life as we grow older. As people age learned helplessness can become something of a vicious cycle.
When encountering problems such as anxiety or depression, people may feel that nothing can be done to ease these feelings. Luckily, that's not true. The antidote - LEARNED OPTIMISM.
Martin Seligman published this in his book Learned Optimism. The benefits of an optimistic outlook are many: Optimists are higher achievers and have better overall health. Learned optimism techniques were found to significantly reduce depression in a class of college freshmen.
So how do you practice learned optimism? You simply need to focus on the 3 steps, or 3P’s. First is **Permanence**: Optimistic people believe bad events to be more temporary than permanent and after a failure they bounce back quicker, whereas others may take longer or may even never recover.
They also believe good things happen for reasons that are permanent, rather than seeing them as something short-lived. In other words, optimists point to specific temporary causes for negative events; while pessimists tend to look for permanent causes. Second is **Pervasiveness**: Optimistic people categorize helplessness.
If they fail at one particular area and feel helpless they don’t let it affect other areas of their life, whereas pessimistic people generalize failure, so that failure in one area of life means failure in life as a whole. Optimistic people also allow good events to brighten every area of their lives rather than just the particular area in which the event occurred. And finally **Personalization**: Optimists blame bad events externally, on causes outside of themselves, whereas pessimists blame themselves for the events that occur.
Optimists are generally more confident and quickly internalize positive results while pessimists externalize them, they credit outwards, and blame inwards. These are the 3 P’s. Permanence, Pervasiveness and Personalization.
I encourage you to practice these 3 steps in your next situation when you feel overwhelmed and helpless. If you fail your next exam, that doesn’t mean you’re not good enough for your degree, it just means you didn’t prepare as much as you’d liked, it is a simple temporary cause rather than permanent. Also this failure in that particular exam, doesn’t necessarily mean you’re bad in other areas or subjects, isolate the problem and don’t extrapolate it to other areas, because literally that is not true.
You need to stop generalizing failure. And if you do pass your exam, don’t belittle yourself and say: im not that good, the exam was just easy. Stop the vicious cycle of crediting outwards and blaming inwards.
As we close this video, I just want to remind you that, whatever situation you are in, and you think that this is how things are and always been, is not true. You are just the puppy that's being shocked, while peace and success is right on the other side of the barrier. Don’t let negative events from the past, determine your future.
