Learnt Helplessness

The concept of learnt helplessness can best be illustrated by the following experiment conducted in the 70s:

Dogs were put in cages with a door open to the outside world. However, whenever the dogs went to leave the cage through the open door, they got an electric shock. They then retreated back into the cage. After a period of time, the experimenters turned off the electricity.

The dogs never tried to escape again, thus never learning that the electricity was off. The dogs had learnt to be helpless.

Often learnt helplessness occurs in a situation where we initially had no control over the outcome. When people feel they have no control over the outcome, they feel helpless and stop trying.

Examples:

 If you were bullied for being bad a sport at school, you may have a belief that you aren’t good at sport.

You may never try sports again and see that actually there are many types of exercise and some of them you enjoy and excel at.  

You might have a chronic illness, which you tried for years to get treated with little success. You may develop a belief that it’s pointless to even try to look after your health. Or you might be overweight and have a genetic predisposition to this, and have tried many diets, exercise routines and doctors. You may feel there is nothing you can do to change and this is just how things will always be.

You may miss out on new advances in the field that could dramatically change your quality of life.

If growing up you always experienced adults as being very dismissive of you and your feelings (e.g. telling you to pull yourself together, toughen up, that others have it worse), then you will learn not to open up to people about your feelings.

Despite the fact the people around you may respond in a much more positive way to your feelings now.

It can be hard to catch learnt helplessness in ourselves because we often don’t question our beliefs…we just believe we aren’t creative or we don’t like that certain type of food/music or you can’t trust people. Here are some questions you can ask of your beliefs to test them out:

Where did this belief come from?

When did it develop?

When was the last time I tested this belief?

It might be time to test out some of the assumptions you had.