“When your will power is gone, you are helpless!!”

At some point or the other in our life, we have experienced a feeling of helplessness wherein we feel powerless and hopeless about changing a particular negative situation by doing something. But this is usually a temporary phase, and we come out of it after some time and with some efforts. So, now the question arises what exactly is “learned helplessness”?

There is an interesting experiment behind this term. American psychologist Martin Seligman and his colleague were conducting research experiments on classical conditioning using dogs at University of Pennsylvania. They discovered that when the dogs were given repetitive stimuli in the form of low intensity tolerable shocks without any opportunity to escape, they learn to accept that the situation is unchangeable and stop trying to escape from the situation even when they have the chance to escape. Seligman, therefore concluded that prior learning of painful experiences can result in a drastic change in behavior wherein the dogs believe the outcomes to be uncontrollable and stop the efforts to come out of the painful situation. Seligman coined the term “learned helplessness” to describe the phenomenon.

Later on, Seligman correlated this phenomenon to humans too. When individuals face challenging situations constantly, they believe that they have no control over the negative situations in their life and therefore, stop fighting for relief or changing the situation and instead remain inactive, thus strengthening their belief that life full of challenges is their fate and they can’t do anything about it! When a student studies hard bit still fails in his maths paper repeatedly, he may acquire a learned helplessness and stop studying for the subject believing that he will never pass the subject even if he tries hard. May be changing the strategies of study, getting help from expert teachers or fellow students who are good at maths can help the child to get through the exam, but learned helplessness prevents the child from taking necessary steps to deal with the difficulty. Similarly, a person having experienced failed relationships for quite a long time may stop perusing new relationships and believe that they are destined to stay alone forever.

Getting exposed to difficult and stressful situations for long period of time, facing physical or emotional abuse, domestic violence over years etc. are some of the causes that lead to learned helplessness. Learned helplessness can impact mental health as well as physical health of an individual in a significant way. Learned helplessness can result in symptoms of depression, anxiety disorders, chronic stress and also chances of getting ill frequently due to low motivation and high stress.

Now that we have learnt about what exactly learned helplessness is, what are the causes behind it and how it impacts the life, the next question is can it be overcome? The answer to this question is definitely “yes”. First step to do this is, acceptance that we can “do” something to change this feeling of helplessness. We can then train our mind to focus on the things in our control and take some actionable steps to move past the phase of inaction. Of course, this journey is a long but can be fruitful with the help of a therapist who can guide us through this. Seligman has given another concept called “learned optimism” to deal with “learned helplessness” where we can reframe our thoughts about failures/challenges from being permanent, personal, and pervasive to temporary, external, and specific. This can prove helpful.

When you feel helpless in the face of a challenge, taking help from trustworthy loved ones can also prove helpful as they can offer much needed encouragement and motivation to keep going!!!

“Optimism is not a belief that things will automatically get better; it is a conviction that we can make things better!!”

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