What Learned Helplessness Says About You — And How To Change Your Ways For Good
What does it mean when you feel powerless to help yourself? If you’re asking this question, you may be one of the many of people who experience learned helplessness each year in the US. People who experience learned helplessness may often feel overwhelmed, hopeless, and feel as though they are out of options to change or improve their lives' adverse circumstances.
In this article, we explain the theory of learned helplessness that can occur in humans. We also talk the effects of learned helplessness on depression and discuss ways to ultimately overcome learned helplessness. Lastly, we provide resources for those with experience learned helplessness to get support.
The Theory Of Learned Helplessness In A Nutshell
Learned helplessness theory was discovered in 1967 by famous psychology researchers Martin Seligman and Steven Maier. The theory of learned helplessness took shape when Seligman and Maier conducted research on animals (and subsequently human beings) that showed the concept of how learned helplessness applies to both humans and animals.
The learned helplessness model was developed when the researchers realized that learned helplessness in humans mirrors the experience of learned helplessness in animals exposed to the same conditions. As a result, the concept of learned helplessness in humans also applies to animals. In fact, almost the same number of humans and animals developed learned helplessness during the research studies.
The learned helplessness model shows that when humans and animals are presented with adverse circumstances from which they feel they have no escape, they are likely to stop trying to help themselves and accept the negative consequences without protest, despite the fact that escape may be, in fact, (and often is) possible.
The Factors Studied That Contribute To Learned Helplessness In Humans And Animals Are:
- Exposure To Adverse Circumstances Or Pain. (In this case, a loud noise like a siren.) Researchers conducted a study to show how people develop learned helplessness. In the experiments of the development of learned helplessness in people, participants were exposed to adverse circumstances that caused temporary discomfort.
- Removal Of An Exit Or A Way To Stop The Discomfort. When participants were exposed to negative external stimuli, their options for escaping the situation were limited or non-existent. Research studies show that the participants who had limited opportunities to escape chose to use those options more often than participants who believed they had no options.
- The Eventual Development Of Learned Helplessness. In humans and animals, this development is seen when subjects in the study stopped trying to help themselves or escape the adverse environment.
The Seligman and Maier experiments showed that learned helplessness is a theory in which animals learned that outcomes were independent regardless of their responses, which in turn undermined their attempts to escape.
Learned helplessness in children and adults is apparent when people are presented with adverse circumstances from which they eventually stop trying to escape. According to psychology researchers, the concept of learned helplessness applies to learned helplessness in children, adults, and animals.
Research on learned helplessness shows that if persistent adverse outcomes are a factor, the concept of learned helplessness applies regardless of age. According to research, the generality of learned helplessness means that people become “conditioned to accept pain and suffering” without trying to find a means to escape it.
When people experience learned helplessness, the idea that they can actually escape their situation no longer affects their behavior.
Psychology researchers believe that feelings of helplessness, lack of motivation, and the perceived inability to escape contribute to learned helplessness development. The generality of learned helplessness applies regardless of age or gender. Seligman’s research studies on learned helplessness suggest that learned helplessness can be unlearned.
Alleviation of learned helplessness symptoms and behaviors usually requires professional support from medical professionals and therapists. Studies on learned helplessness treatments show that learned helplessness in children and adults can be mitigated with medical and therapeutic intervention.
The Link Between Learned Helplessness And Depression
The early research on learned helplessness in adults, children, and animals shows a direct link between learned helplessness and depression. When people and animals are repeatedly exposed to negative circumstances (from which they can’t escape), they may learn to become helpless in similar situations. In extreme cases, a person affected by learned helplessness may erroneously assume that they are helpless in all areas of their lives.
Learned helplessness in children and learned helplessness in adults is often related to feelings of helplessness and not having the power to change or overcome negative situations. Many people who have developed learned helplessness may also develop depression due to feelings of powerlessness associated with this condition.
Effects Of Learned Helplessness On Depression Development
Depressive symptoms may aggravate a sense of helplessness. Symptoms of learned helplessness in children include:
- Inability or unwillingness to participate in age-appropriate responsibilities.
- Refusal to make an effort in academics.
- Lack of responsibility for older children.
- Strong emotional reaction to failure.
People who experience the effects of learned helplessness may often feel powerless over their own lives and incapable of making a positive change. As a result of their persistent beliefs, people who experience learned helplessness often have concurrent mental health issues such as anxiety and depression.
Research shows that individuals with learned helplessness have become accustomed to failing or losing in one or more areas of their lives. People living with this condition may apply their inability to perform in one area to all areas of their lives. This means that people with learned helplessness often go through life feeling like a failure — and powerless to do anything to change it.
The Opposite Of Learned Helplessness
The opposite model of learned helplessness is the theory of learned optimism. This opposite theory of learned helplessness emphasizes changing the mindset of people experiencing learned helplessness to optimism. Seligman’s book Learned Optimism explains that the effects of learned helplessness can be reversed by incorporating optimistic alternatives and solutions into the equation. The main premise is that people who experience learned helplessness can benefit from being presented with optimistic alternatives.
How Did I Become So Helpless?
Some people may progressively succumb to the effects of learned helplessness over time due to life circumstances and experiences. In some cases, early childhood or adult trauma can contribute to learned helplessness in adults. For example, a child who grew up in a home where they were continually told, “you’re not good enough,” may eventually come to believe this to be true about themselves. People who experience learned helplessness were often “taught” or influenced by external events that led them to believe they are helpless or powerless.
Living with learned helplessness may feel like an unbearable burden for the person experiencing learned helplessness, as well as for their loved ones. Accommodating helpless behavior daily may at times feel overwhelming for spouses, children, and other support people in their life. Meaningful relationships can experience difficulties when we become conditioned to accept pain, suffering, or other negative consequences due to a belief in our inability to help ourselves or escape the situation.
How Do I Change My Ways?
The first step to changing learned helplessness behavior is to accept that you have the ability to change by using optimistic solutions and that you will likely need the help of a licensed therapist for support and guidance. Depression often results when people feel that it is impossible or improbable that their circumstances will change. A therapist may be able to help you develop realistic solutions and a customized blueprint for achieving your goals.
Understanding the drivers of learned helplessness proposed by psychologists Martin Seligman and Steven Maier can help you, and a therapist may help you find the best motivational, emotional, and cognitive solutions for your unique situation. Following is an overview of how learned helplessness can be further broken down into the categories of universal or personal helplessness.
Universal Helplessness – An individual may feel that a situation as a whole cannot be changed on a global scale. Universal helplessness directly links to depression and can occur when an individual experiences repeated negative impacts or situations in their internal and external lives. People who experience universal helplessness where they feel that external consequences are causing negative outcomes beyond their control often experience severe depression as a result.
Personal Helplessness – In this model of helplessness, an individual may feel that others have the power to influence their circumstances — but not themselves. As a result, people who experience personal helplessness may experience negative self-talk and engage in negative behaviors. They may believe that they are personally at fault for what has happened to them and have no power to change.
Talking to a licensed therapy expert can help you undo the damage learned helplessness has caused in your life.
Conclusion
If you are experiencing challenges in your life and you feel helpless and feel as though things won’t improve, it’s important to remember you’re not alone. ReGain is an online therapy platform that can match you with a licensed therapist who understands what you're going through. They can provide tools and guidance to help you overcome obstacles you’re facing and develop positive strategies to get through life’s adversities in the future. Reach out today to begin your journey to a better you.
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs):
What Are The Three Elements Of Learned Helplessness?
Learned helplessness occurs when someone believes they have no control over their situation. Three components make up learned helplessness: These helplessness elements include:
Contingency
- A contingency is a relationship between a person’s actions and how their surroundings respond. For example, when someone pushes a doorbell, the bell will ring. When someone is in a state of learned helplessness, there is no perceived response in the environment to their actions.
Cognitions
- Cognitions allow people to observe their contingency and understand how it works. In people experiencing learned helplessness, this cognition is often impaired.
Behavior
- This is how a person can explain environmental contingencies.
Therefore, someone is in a state of learned helplessness when they feel that none of their actions will produce a satisfactory result. For example, if a doorbell does not ring after being pushed, and someone rings the bell over and over again only for the bell to not ring, they may conclude that the bell will never ring again and feel helpless, forgetting that they can also knock.
What Is The Learned Helplessness Theory Of Depression?
Psychologist Martin Seligman and his colleagues came up with the learned helplessness theory of depression while studying dogs’ response to fear, which prompted them to continue the study on people. They discovered that people with depression often learned to be helpless. Essentially, those with depression may feel that their actions will not produce a result that will make them feel happy no matter what they do. As such, they do not believe they have control over their environments. Their helpless behavior may cause them to overlook or dismiss opportunities that could help to improve their mental health.
However, Seligman and his team could not explain why so many people did not become depressed after living through many unsatisfactory life events. Seligman later altered his helplessness theory of depression to factor in a person’s way of thinking. He suggested that people with depression may tend to rely on a pessimistic explanatory style when thinking about distressing moments.
Another form of Seligman’s theory argues that depression also results from hopelessness. In theory, depression may be attributed to a pattern of negative thinking in which people see themselves as the reason behind their unfortunate past experiences. Thus, they perceive themselves as losing control over a situation they think could have been better if they had made other choices. So, they see themselves as being defined by their action or inaction during these past events.
What Is A Learned Helplessness Example?
An example of learned helplessness that is frequently referenced would be Martin Seligman’s study involving dogs. In early 1965, he and his team watched what happened when a dog could escape a harmless shock after hearing a tone. Their first experiment consisted of ringing the tone and then administering the harmless shock to the dog. Seligman then placed the dog into a box with two compartments divided by a low fence. When the dog would hear the bell, instead of jumping over the fence and escaping the pain, the dog did nothing. When they tried harmlessly shocking the dog without the bell, nothing happened.
The dog not only learned of the connection between the bell and shock, but the dog also learned that trying to escape was futile. The dogs believed that they could not avoid the shock, so instead of escaping their enclosure, they became helpless.
Who Discovered Learned Helplessness?
Martin Seligman and Steven F. Maier discovered learned helplessness by accident when he and his colleagues examined the relationship between fear and learning in dogs. See the description of the experiment that sparked learned helplessness above. In summary, when dogs learned and decided that they were helpless, they did not change behavior even once the situation changed and action actually was possible.
How Do You Fix Learned Helplessness?
You may be able to fix learned helplessness by acknowledging that you can change your perception of anything through trial and error and changing the way you think. Thus, you can unlearn the theory of helplessness by trying these activities:
- Focus on what you know you can control.
- When people feel helpless, they often do not believe that they have any control over their situation. For example, if a student fails multiple math exams, they may believe that they are not good at math. Because of this, they may have difficulties with any math-related problems in their life and may not try as hard due to the expectation that they would inevitably fail.
- One way to override this mentality is by focusing on what you can control. A student can improve their academic performance by seeing a tutor, scheduling an office visit with their professor, or asking more questions during class. While this might not result in a better grade, the idea of trying something new could show someone that they have the potential to excel in math. Simply changing one’s attitudes and perspectives about the possibilities is a start at overcoming helplessness.
- When people feel helpless, they often do not believe that they have any control over their situation. For example, if a student fails multiple math exams, they may believe that they are not good at math. Because of this, they may have difficulties with any math-related problems in their life and may not try as hard due to the expectation that they would inevitably fail.
- Try being optimistic
- Another way to reverse learned helplessness is by viewing situations in a more positive light. If someone experiences a severe failure, they may be able to understand how they failed and what they can do to improve themselves for the next time. While there is no guarantee that being optimistic will improve your chances of success, sometimes changing one’s outlook on a situation can illuminate options that may have been hidden beforehand.
Life is often about mentally picking yourself up. It may be easy to imagine how people may react when they win. However, the same cannot be said when people fail. No one else can truly change how you think or respond to either positive or negative life events. Only you can make choices that will positively affect your life, and challenge yourself to shift your perspective.
Is Learned Helplessness A Mental Illness?
Learned helplessness describes a mental state in which an individual is repeatedly exposed to a seemingly unwinnable encounter, learns that they cannot control the situation, and possibly starts applying this to other situations preemptively and becomes hopeless. While learned helplessness isn’t technically a mental illness, it has been linked to some mental health disorders, including depression and post-traumatic stress disorder.
How Would A Behaviorist Explain Learned Helplessness?
Behaviorism is a theory of learning whereby all behaviors are learned through interactions with one’s environment. Behaviorists are concerned with observable stimulus-response behaviors. While they accept cognition and emotions, they consider them separate from the study of behaviors altogether.
Therefore, a behaviorist could explain that learned helplessness occurs when an individual responds to a specific event. Let’s take the three components of learned helplessness: contingency, cognition, and behavior. From a behaviorist’s perspective, they would not necessarily factor in cognition as part of learned helplessness. Since they do not consider that thoughts and feelings influence one’s physical behaviors, they would only examine the contingency and behavior involved in learned helplessness. A behaviorist may only examine the observable parts of learned helplessness. Instead of thinking about someone’s feelings about feeling helpless, behaviorists may focus on how an individual does nothing in response to a certain event.
Why Is Learned Helplessness Unethical?
The unethical nature of learned helplessness derived from the original experiment that gave birth to the idea. Since Martin Seligman and Steven F. Maier conducted their studies on dogs by giving them shocks, many may have seen this research as an unethical approach. Many historical facets of psychology have difficulties with this contradiction that experiments that may be considered unethical, especially by modern scientists, have contributed to an important understanding of the human mind.
However, the learned helplessness theory may be able to help people understand their sense of helplessness and overcome it.
What Is The Opposite Of Learned Helplessness?
If we consider that learned helplessness is when someone teaches themselves that they are helpless, then the opposite would be teaching themselves that they control their situation or that they can choose to look at situations in a more positive and productive light. There are many ways to describe this process: learned mastery, learned optimism, and internal pride, to name a few possibilities.