Overcome common fallacies we tell ourselves and live in abundance
We all experience learned helplessness in our lives much to our own detriment. Yet most people don’t even know what it is. Sam breaks down what the effect is, from how it was discovered to what you can do about it.
This episode helps us learn more traits to boost our growth mindset with the goal of making you a more positive and strategic thinker able to look at the bigger picture and less caught up in the problems life throws at us.
BACKGROUND
Learned Helplessness was discovered by Martin Seligman. He restrained dogs in a box and then gave them an electric shock at the same time as ringing a bell. After repeating this the dogs learned they would get a shock every time they heard the bell.
Seligman then put them in a box with a small fence they could jump over. on the other side of the fence would not get a shock when the bell rang. However, when the bell rang they just cowered and accepted the shock.
If Seligman put a different dog in the box that had not received the electric shocks before it would try to escape and quickly learn that when the bell rang it would be safe on one side of the box and not on the other.
This has been demonstrated with other animal studies such as rats and even elephants and just in the last few years in zebrafish and tree-shrews.
They found that elephant trainers would tie a young elephant to a post and it would struggle to try and escape the rope. For hours and days, they might pull against it before giving up. However, once they gave up they wouldn’t test it again. So once the elephant becomes an adult that can rip up tree’s and knock down walls if you tie it to the post it was tied to as a child it gives up and sits down until it’s released. amazing!
LEARNED HELPLESSNESS IN HUMANS
Learned helplessness in extreme scenarios has not been experimented on with humans but it has been proven to be similar to those observed in animals although there are more complicated factors at hand and they found two types of helplessness can arise.
Original Experiment
In one experiment they had three cases for the human test subjects.
One group heard a loud noise and had a button in front of them. they needed to press the button 4 times to make it stop and they usually worked this out pretty fast.
a second group had the same noise and the same button. but when pressed the button did nothing and the subjects soon stopped bothering with the pointless button
a third group had no noise at all.
In the second test, all participants heard a similar loud noise and had a box with a lever in front of them. When manipulated the lever turned off the noise.
Groups 1 and 3 learned to turn off the noise quickly. group 2 who had become used to not being able to turn off the noise mostly didn’t try the lever and sat with an annoying noise playing.
Deficits of Helplessness
They deduced that learned helplessness creates three deficits in subjects, cognitive, motivational and emotional:
- Cognitive — the subject has the idea in their mind that their circumstances are uncontrollable
- Motivational — meaning that the subject doesn’t bother to respond to potential methods of escaping a negative situation
- Emotional — the subject takes on a depressed state when they are placed in a negative situation they cannot control
TWO TYPES OF HELPLESSNESS
Learned helplessness in humans can have two types. Universal helplessness and personal helplessness
Universal helplessness is a sense of helplessness where the subject believes nothing can be done about the situation, no one can help alleviate the pain or discomfort.
Personal helplessness is where the person believes that others may be able to find a solution or to avoid the pain or discomfort but that they are not personally capable of finding a solution.
Both can lead to a state of depression but with different qualities.
Universal helplessness leads to an explanation of the problem being due to external factors that they can’t solve, whereas personal helplessness will tend to be explained due to internal reasons.
As such personal helplessness is associated with a lower sense of self-esteem and can have a greater emotional impact.
Neither are great and experiencing either is a bad place to be. They are more likely to arise when we are anxious or under stress and then just naturally over-time we are more likely to accumulate learned helplessness traits as we get older due to two fundamental laws of nature
- as time passes we are exposed to more situations where learned helplessness can arise
- as time passes our bodies age and we experience more loss of abilities and health complications, some of which are reversible yet they get accepted.
As well as the immediate issues of not helping ourselves in the given situation it also has negative effects such as burnout, Depression, anxiety, phobias, shyness, and loneliness
COMMON LEARNED HELPLESSNESS EXAMPLES
CHILDREN IN SCHOOL.
Often a child performs badly in one topic, math or in my case languages. They perform poorly compared to the rest of the class and the teacher doesn’t provide useful examples the student can learn from or give the student any faith that they can do better. The student gets used to being bad at the subject and only get’s worse and pays less attention in lessons and completes homework in a more resigned manner expecting to do badly. They lose confidence to use the skills in the rest of their life. i.e. a bad math student never has the confidence to work with figures or a bad language student never tries to learn a new language and assumes they will not be able to.
Example
My friend who first told me about learned helplessness used to be bad at English when he was at school in Germany he had one teacher who gave him his test results back once and told him he would never be any good at English and that he was a stupid child. like seriously WTF was this guy being a teacher but the effect was really damaging on my friend’s motivation to even try and get better at English so he always approached it with an attitude that he wouldn’t learn much and struggled even more than he needed to. Luckily Germans basically have to study English forever so he went on to become pretty much fluent, however, he still had really low confidence for a long time even when he was pretty much fluent until he found out about learned helplessness and how silly his mindset was.
SHYNESS
Another common example is shyness. People who feel shy in social situations can eventually feel there is nothing they can do to overcome their symptoms. When they believe their symptoms are outside of their control this can lead to them not engaging in social situations and making the shyness even more pronounced and compounding effects of anxiety and stress around the situation so they avoid it even more.
I personally have suffered from shyness and language learning difficulties. but where I first encountered learned helplessness was with coding
MY FIRST HELPLESSNESS QUALITY — CODING
I realised my first ‘learned helplessness’ quality whilst my co-founder was teaching me some programming techniques for a new front end framework we were writing. I am more the business guy that has just got into coding and not exactly the core developer here but I can code. However, as he was teaching me and giving me tasks to do I was constantly asking more questions whenever I became stuck or didn’t understand something. I didn’t have a lot of confidence in the code I was writing and generally made the assumption that what I was doing was probably wrong. I’d literally internalised that I was a bit of an idiot. He sat down and told me I wasn’t stupid that I was showcasing learned helplessness qualities to my problems. The solutions are in front of me I just need to look for them instead of assuming I will fail.
I had developed a mindset that I am not clever enough to work things out by myself and that I need someone to show me the way every time. As a coder that is so dangerous. It causes you to be insecure about your actions and generally worse at everything from the start. It becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy of your own demise. If every time you want to learn something new you expect it will take you forever and you do a million tutorials or need to hire a mentor you will never get anywhere on your own.
He challenged me that I wasn’t as stupid as I was telling myself and that I could answer most of my questions myself. If I took more time to read the things I didn’t understand and follow all unknown paths to their end I would be able to answer any question I had. Everything was written in front of me I just needed to open my eyes and actually use my own initiative instead of depending on others.
For a coder, this is really hard to admit but it changed me completely.
I’m now reading parts of applications I would just never go into before because I just assumed I wouldn’t know what was going on. And the best thing is I’m totally getting it, I’m fixing my own problems and doing things without asking questions or without even using the internet. I literally feel like a new person.
TIPS FOR BEING AN INDEPENDENT CODER (OR THINKER)
Stuff you learn straight away and do and then forget and stop doing..:
- If trying to do something difficult. Don’t just start coding. Write out what you are going to do. The more complicated it is the more notes you should make.
- If you are going through someone else’s code. Write down what each file does and each function within that file. methodically make a map of how things work. Write down the difficult questions and don’t stop until you have found all the answers.
- Google is your best friend. Everyone knows this, but how many times have you asked someone how to do something and they had to google it for you. It’s embarrassing. Before you ask someone anything, first ask google. (and depending on what you are doing, also try turning it off and on again)
- Rubber duck philosophy — before asking your friend (or if you don’t have a friend) but Google hasn’t worked. Try the rubber duck philosophy. Have a hypothetical conversation with your rubber duck where you explain what you are doing, explain what the problem is. Maybe draw him a diagram. If you haven’t already solved the issue by just doing this you can then ask your duck the question of how to fix the problem. Then with a better map of where the problem lies break down what you do know and don’t know, this will help get to the root of the issues. You usually find that the answer is within you. So many times when explaining a problem you will say something along the lines of, ‘Well really I should just be doing x, y, z, method because this p, w, v, y, t method is a really stupid and ….’ STOP there. you’ve solved your problem.
So having seen the radical change this caused, I thought I would investigate ‘Learned Helplessness’ some more and it leads to this whole post.
Note — I am a successful entrepreneur who up to now thought he was constantly challenging himself to be healthier, wealthier, happier and wiser. And for the most part, I am. Buuuut there are whole sides of me I’ve stopped developing and opportunities I’ve simply shut out because of things I’ve learned about myself over time that I’ve accepted as fact.
Up to now I’ve broken down the problems and attributes of learned helplessness which has been a little depressing and given one example of how I dealt with it but now we are going to learn about the more scientific solutions we can use how to overcome any learned helplessness attribute so we can live happier and more successful lives. Winning!
METHODS FOR OVERCOMING LEARNED HELPLESSNESS
Martin Seligman gives the example of top athletes.
To become number one in a given sport you usually have to rank most consistently over a year including many events. (just think about tennis or formula 1). So to reach number one it is likely that the top athlete will also fail on several occasions. So their real strength is the ability to bounce back from a defeat and ‘hang in there’. If they just quit after a winning streak they would never be so successful.
Seligman showed that optimists are more successful in almost all areas including relationships, sport and general health, business and academic success. So how do we become more optimistic?
EXPLANATORY STYLES
Explanatory styles are essentially little stories we tell ourselves to make sense of life. We are interpretation machines and we continuously go about our do making up explanations and stories for life around us.
Your explanatory style is your default pattern for digesting and explaining bad events that occur. There are three main elements to each explanation, the “3P’s”, which determine if we approach problems positively or negatively.
1. Personalisation — the perception of causality
Pessimists view events as internally caused. e.g. player loses a chess match. therefore I am bad at chess.
An optimist view things as externally caused and will allow for non-personal factors e.g. this opponent is amazing or today I am not feeling so good or the opponent was lucky
2. Permanence — the perception of time
Pessimists believe setbacks are permanent and truly fixed forever. e.g. I will never be good at chess or be able to beat this opponent.
Optimists believe setbacks are only temporary e.g. I didn’t prepare well or I had a cold or I need to practice more, next time I will perform better
3. Pervasiveness — the perception of space and further impacts
Pessimists see a setback as pervasive and related to many area’s as well as the specific setback e.g. I failed at chess, I am not clever or good at anything
Optimist see a setback as narrowly contained in the one area of life e.g. I still have a life outside of chess where I am smart and capable.
PERCEPTION OF GOOD AND BAD SITUATIONS.
I just explained that a pessimist views negative situations in the opposite way to an optimist, they take them personally and as a permanent and wide-reaching thing. It is also important to see how someone explains a good situation.
When encountered with a good situation the self-explanations swap and the pessimist views this event as external and not personal and as specific and impermanent, whereas the optimist takes a good situation as internal, longer lasting and wider reaching.
An individual’s characteristic style of explaining events plays a major role in whether a learned helplessness trait will develop. A pessimistic explanatory style is associated with a greater likelihood of experiencing learned helplessness.
A NICE EXAMPLE — BILL AND BEN THE FLOWERPOT MEN
Bill and Ben apply for a promotion in the flowerpot factory. They both get rejected.
Bill is a pessimist. He assumes, rightly or wrongly, that the reason he missed out is
- personal (I wasn’t good enough), and/or
- permanent (I’ll never get ahead), and/or
- pervasive (this ruins everything -what’s the point of living).
Bill is likely to give up on himself and probably won’t try again and at risk of becoming depressed due to this explanation.
In contrast, Ben is an optimist. Faced with the identical setback he assumes the cause is
- non-personal (the boss’s nephew got it), and
- temporary (I had a hangover that day), and
- non-pervasive (this impacts my career, but not my relationship, my hobbies, my gym membership etc -life goes on).
As such life does go on and Ben is fine and more likely to try for other promotions and not carry the setback around with him into other areas of his life.