Learned Helplessness | A Tied-up Mind That Keeps You From Succeeding
Have you ever been discouraged? I think so. But have you ever been discouraged after getting success?
Have you ever find yourself thinking: “I’ll never play this stupid game ever again” after beating all your friends at darts game the night before?
No, you’re right, why should you stop being successful? Let me rephrase it a little differently.
Have you ever find yourself thinking: “I’ll never play this stupid game ever again” after losing against all your friends at darts game the night before?
Of course, you do. Are you conscious, beyond dart games, how destructive this mindset could be?
Let me reassure you, you are not entirely responsible. It is a deeply ingrained behavior in humans and animals called “Learned Helplessness”.
As early as the Bronze Age, we’ve understood how to turn the minds away. At this time, the best way to attach an elephant wasn’t with a chain composed of expensive materials at the time, but in his head.
This practice consisted first of all in attach a baby elephant with placing a rope on one of his legs attached to a sturdy wooden post. This is the first and most important step to keep the elephant within a certain proximity for the rest of its life.
After maybe several attempts, the baby elephant will understand that he is incapable of breaking it. He will grow with the idea that every time he will get tied up, trying to escape will be vain.
Once he reaches adulthood, even if he is perfectly capable of breaking the rope, the elephant will always be convinced that he is not. Result: The elephant learned helplessness.
What is Learned Helplessness?
Seeing yourself inferior to your friends at playing darts game will introduce in your mind an idea. It could be :
“I’m not good at dart games”.
“My friends are too good at this game. I can’t beat them”.
The movie Inception rightly shows how far-reaching an idea could impact a person’s life. In this case, the cognitive dissonance between your action “playing darts” and your thoughts often drive to a discontinuation of the activity.
Learned helplessness happens when you repeatedly fail, and you conclude that you are incapable of improving your performance.
Ultimately, this attribution keeps you from trying to succeed, which results in increased helplessness, continued failure, loss of self-esteem, and other social consequences.
Martin Sellingman (an American psychologist) theorized learned helplessness during the Cold War. We also believe that some of these findings may have been used in torture programs conducted by the CIA.
The goal in times of war was to include an idea, an unconscious message in prisoners minds: “resistance is futile”. It is a well-known psychological warfare technique still used from time to time in terrorist groups.
Without any doubt, learned helplessness goes much further than some darts games and psychological warfare techniques.
It touches all areas that are closely or remotely related to learning. And one of them that we all know is school.
Charisse Nixon has shown that it takes about ten minutes to induce learned helplessness in a classroom.
She asked a class of 30 students to find three anagrams. For each of them, pupils had to raise their hands once they figured the solution out.
Three pupils, however, were trapped and had their first two anagrams different from the rest of the class. These were much harder, whereas the third one remained equivalent to other children.
Seeing their comrades succeeding quickly when they still stuck give them a painful inferiority feeling. These 3 pupils were convinced that they did not have the level to do this exercise. As a result, they did not succeed either in the last, albeit way easier.
This 10-minute exercise is terrifying and reflects what years in this system could have done to your mind.
So much so that we can’t say today whether students fail because they don’t have the ability or because they are convinced that they don’t have the ability.
Our brains weigh our past failures against our future attempts, and while a series of small, easy victories gives impetus to our success, a series of failures breaks our morale.
People like Steve Jobs have understood the drawbacks of learned helplessness. Here is an excerpt from his speech at Stanford in 2005 in which he directly spoke about it :
“When you grow up you tend to get told that the world is the way it is and your life is just to live your life inside the world. Try not to bash into the walls too much. Try to have a nice family life, have fun, save a little money. That’s a very limited life. Life can be much broader once you discover one simple fact: Everything around you that you call life was made up by people that were no smarter than you. And you can change it, you can influence it… Once you learn that, you’ll never be the same again.”
Like the elephant, you have probably grown with multiple ropes, attached through your social environment (education, school, attendance). The difference with him is that you can escape this situation.
How to fight Learned Helplessness?
First off, the more you know about this effect, the more resistant you are to it. Congratulation, just by reading the first part, you’re less exposed!
Then, we know it’s much easier to succeed at something if you have a victory streak. In my opinion, this is a criterion that separates bad learning books from good ones.
Good books start with the basics and leads you success after success to victory. Bad books start hard and sometimes include traps that try saying: “I’m smarter than you”.
Unlike school, Video games easily capture attention. It is estimated that between 2004 and 2014, humanity has outgrown 7 million years of cumulative playing at World of Warcraft. Why?
In Mario games, you rarely start at the last world against Bowser. In fact, a good video game is a clever mix between difficulty and ease, letting the player in a momentum between boredom and discouragement.
Look for content like this! Applications like Duolingo are very useful for learning languages because they are gamified.
However, on a more personnel level, Learned helplessness is often the consequence of what Dr. Carol Dweck calls a fixed mindset.
“In a fixed mindset, people believe their basic qualities, like their intelligence or talent, are simply fixed traits.” — Mindset by Dr. Carol Dweck
A fixed mindset is the result of years of rope tied up one after the other to keep your mind in captivity.
On the other hand, in a growth mindset, people believe that their most basic abilities can be developed through dedication, and hard work, brain, and talent are just the starting point.
In a presentation, Dr. Britt Andreatta stressed the importance of comparing and valuing oneself to one’s improvement rather than peers or any exterior factors.
This simple advice is the key to transform your life into a great video game. It turns awful grades into a question.
“Can I do better next time?”
At this question, of course, the answer is yes! Viewing your progress assures you to pass from success to success, from level to level until your final boss.
But generally speaking, to become better. Better at mathematics, writing, running, or whatever. Favor steady little improvements rather than rarely big ones.
Mathematically, If you get 1% better at darts game each day, after 365 days, you will be 37 times better. I close this article by letting you meditate on this quote from Albert Allen Bartlett:
“The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function.”
