How can a small iron chain keep a 5-tonne elephant fixed in place? Because, as a baby, it couldn’t break free — and in the end it stopped trying. In other words, it taught itself that it couldn’t. That is called learned helplessness. In the same way, we sometimes teach ourselves that we can’t, because once upon a time we couldn’t. But the two are not necessarily the same thing — because time has only made us wiser, more experienced and better equipped to succeed.
In 1965, the American psychologist Martin Seligman made some remarkable discoveries in experiments with dogs. By repeating a particular sound together with an electric shock, he got the dogs to associate the sound with the shock. In the end, they were startled merely by hearing the sound.
At first the sound was played to them while they were on a lead. After a while the lead was taken off, and the only thing they had to do to escape the sound was to move away. Instead, they lay down and whimpered.
They developed what has since become a widely recognised psychological concept: “learned helplessness”.
This kind of helplessness shows up in people who have experienced repeated failure and see the problem as personal, all-consuming and permanent. That is to say:
They see themselves as the problem (personal)
They see the problem affecting everything (all-consuming)
They see the problem as unsolvable (permanent)
Learned helplessness explains why some people seem apathetic and make themselves completely dependent on the help of others — because they believe their circumstances make their own choices in life insignificant. In some cases it can even trigger depression, because we let things slide instead of taking action.
The truth is that problems are only personal, all-consuming and permanent because we let them be. However locked a situation may seem, we always have the option to choose in and choose out.
Enjoy!
/Martin
