How learned helplessness can affect your life, career and success

Editor’s note: Depression is a medical condition, not a matter of willpower; anyone who may be affected should seek help from a health professional.

If you have ever given up in the face of difficulties, if problems have come at you one after another with no solution in sight and you have sunk, or simply if you have taken it for granted that the lifestyle you lead is the only one you will ever be able to live (even if you don’t like it), you may be a victim of learned helplessness, a psychological term discovered in 1967 by the psychologists Martin Seligman and Steven F. Maier, and one we can’t lose sight of when it comes to our personal or professional success.

First, let’s look at what the experiment involved, which is quite interesting, and then we’ll see how this behaviour affects us and, most importantly, how we can avoid it.

(See also: 10 psychology findings that explain why we make bad decisions every day)

Seligman and Maier used 2 groups of dogs for this experiment, which were shut in cages and tied up.

The first group

The first group of dogs were given a series of electric shocks, which they couldn’t escape because they were tied up. But they did have a panel, and if they pressed their head against it, the shocks stopped. So as they kept receiving shocks, the dogs learned that if they pressed the panel, the pain ended. Over time, most of the dogs learned to stop the shocks.

The second group

The second group, which was right next to the first, got exactly the same treatment: they were given electric shocks, and this group of dogs had the same panel as the other group, but pressing it didn’t stop the shocks. In other words, whatever they did, they had no control over the pain of the shocks, even when they did the same thing as the dogs in the other group.

Second part of the test: learned helplessness

In the second part of the experiment, the dogs were shut in individual cages. The cages had lights, and 10 seconds after the lights went out, the dogs started receiving electric shocks, but this time, during those 10 seconds, the door was left open so the dogs could escape.

The first group

The dogs that had learned in the previous test to stop the shocks by pressing the panel didn’t hesitate to escape from the cages when they saw the door open.

The second group

The group that, whatever they did, couldn’t control the shocks in the previous test, had given up to the point that even when they saw the cage doors open, they made no attempt to escape. In other words, they had accepted that they would suffer whatever they did, even with the door open for them to escape.

Conclusion: When animals, and people too, try to solve problems and get no results, we fall into learned helplessness, which basically means: “We believe that whatever we do, we won’t be able to change our situation.” And all of us have what is known as a “breaking point”, at which we give up and stop fighting if nothing works. But…

We are not dogs and we are not in cages. We are in control.

Many people live in extreme poverty and see people who are successful. But they assume they will never be able to achieve the same success as those people, that success is not for them.

(See: 6 things the middle class and the poor don’t quite understand about the rich)

It’s like the woman who one day is beaten by her husband and doesn’t leave him. The next day, another beating. The husband threatens to kill her if she reports him. There may come a point where the woman accepts that she will be abused for the rest of her life, falling into learned helplessness.

But we, as people, don’t even have to press a panel to make the pain stop. The door is open in every sense; we are the ones in control of our lives, because we are not dogs, because we can decide to change our lives. We just have to look for solutions and find a way out.

If you don’t like your job and you think you are falling into a kind of depression; if going every day to a job you don’t like, with a bad boss and poor pay, is torture for you, don’t assume you will retire there because you aren’t good for anything else. Press the panel and escape the cage. You’re not a dog, and you’re not a tree either.

Never assume that the life you lead is the one you were dealt, because the life you are living right now is the result of your actions and decisions, and you can change your decisions whenever you want and change your life in every respect. You may get it right or you may not, but if you feel you are receiving electric shocks all the time, remember that you are neither caged nor tied up. The door is wide open.

Even if I’m going to sound repetitive, I’ll end once again with this quote attributed to Bill Gates, which you can apply to anything: “Being born poor is not your fault, but dying poor is.”

This video shows an example of how people can be led into learned helplessness through a small experiment.

Watch: A small experiment on learned helplessness (YouTube)

Highly recommended reading:

• 17 steps to get through the worst moments of your life
• 5 things to remember when you feel trapped, empty or stuck

Featured image: The U.S. Army; derivative work: Sargoth, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.