Learned Helplessness vs Simple Rules
Historically, when circus elephants are young, the trainer will sometimes adhere a chain to their leg to control where they can go to. If they meander too far, the chain will tighten and they will pull on it until they are exhausted. As they grow, their size and weight increase dramatically. A byproduct of said increases is that their strength is enormous. When the adult elephant wanders a little too far in his surroundings, the chain tightens and they stop and return to the proper proximity.
The odd thing here is that the adult elephants could easily snap the chain if they applied a bit of force. Their mind has become so accepting of the chain constraint that they don’t feel the need to challenge it. Elephants are useful animals to relay analogies of how the brain works and we will revisit this section of the Analogy Zoo (AZ) soon. Now let’s move to the dog section of the AZ and if you are sympathetic to dogs, I apologize in advance, but the good news is that we are not giving them a one way ticket to space like the russians did in 1957 with Sputnik 2, R.I.P. Laika.
In 1897 Pavlov popularized a term now known as ‘classical conditioning’ via the now famous ‘ring the bell and cause the dogs to salivate’ experiment. This is a well known and established theory and is often referred to as ‘Pavlov’s Dog’. As a footnote this has been replicated in humans with various twists. One I recall from my college Psych professor (many….many…years ago 😉 was having volunteers kiss after eating onion rings. Later the very smell of onion rings caused arousal in the participants. Of course, this association can also be negative. The next time you are attending a party where some form of wine or spirit is being served, offer to replace their beverage with a large shot of peppermint or cinnamon schnapps. Study the first reaction on their face. Unless your friends are new or uninitiated to alcohol, there is most likely a negative experience that serves as a backdrop for their reaction. This is an example of Classical Conditioning. Classical Conditioning is the process by which an animal or human associates one thing with another*. This later became the foundation for behaviorism, which is “a school of psychology which was dominant in the mid-20th century and is still an important influence on the practice of psychological therapy and the study of animal behavior”.*
In 1965, Martin Seligman attempted to further the findings of Classical Conditioning by performing an experiment where he would ring a bell and administer a shock to a dog via a collar. Soon,even when no shock was administered after the bell rang, the dog still reacted as though it was being shocked. The amount of stress being experienced in their reaction is quantified via serotonin levels*. He then tried moving the dogs to a small room that had a very small hurdle in the middle. One side of the room had an electric floor, the other did not. When the bell rang, the side with the electric floor would administer electric shocks to the dogs that remained on that side. The findings; the dogs that had worn the shock collar remained on the side that administered shocks and generally never bothered to move to the other side of the room. Dr. Seligman called this condition “Learned helplessness”. Learned Helplessness is a behaviour exhibited by a subject after enduring repeated aversive stimuli beyond their control..[1]
In humans, learned helplessness is related to the concept of self-efficacy, the individual’s belief in their innate ability to achieve goals.
The key takeaway here is that one should question what ideas, goals or virtues are not being pursued due to physical and emotional constraints that are no longer present or relevant.
One simple way of doing this to force yourself to ask ‘why not?’ when you hear your mind produce an auto response to a question or idea. When I have the idea for a book, invention or career shift, I immediately blow it off. My immediate instinct is that someone far more talented and disciplined has already written that book, created that device or gotten my dream job. I focus on the steady progress that my eyes can see vs the infinite opportunities that my mind has conjured. I fail because I do not even start, but my failure is private. I prefer to save face and rationalize my decision to do so with any number of readied ‘contorted candor’ mantras such as; I’m too old, what if it affects my children, I will disappoint my partner, I will never find a job this comfortable again, the market is poised for a downturn….best to wait, my children will be disappointed in me.
I notice that my children are very convenient subjects in my rationalizations. Yet, at no point in my life have my children ever advised me to just keep my head down or avoid change.
Granted, their dream job for me is some combination of candyman / movie theater clerk. Presumably so that all spoils and advantages of such professions would be part of their fathers early and incremental inheritance.
I once spent a weekend camping and running with a legendary ultrarunner. He was entering his golden years (Over 60) and regaled me with stories of how his over the top work ethic both fueled and burned his business and family. A proverbial Sudoku where passion, providence, pride and pity intersected personally and professionally. Now twice divorced and retired, his company having been successfully sold, he is much more communicative with his children. He is now more present and fulfilled in their time spent together. His point? In the end, children want the same thing for us as we want for them, A joyful life.
I think about my own life and how my children view me. There is none so critical, so cold and so lacking of empathy than that of the voice that I judge myself with.
If shame based feedback were a fruitful tactic my NY Times bestseller list would be well into double digits.
Instead, I’m reluctantly surrendering to the idea of regularly sharing very flawed and unedited thoughts and insights with an audience that has yet to find multiple readers within a 24 hour timespan. Such verbal fodder is the result of simple rules. In this particular case, I type for a few minutes in the morning before I run or have coffee.
Simple Rules are my effective antidote to learned helplessness.
They bypass the logic that leads to analysis paralysis. Give me any reasonable amount of time and I shall form a wall of doubt that will retain all but the most persistent of ideas and opportunities. Such walls are the result of my learned helplessness. The feedback and negative outcomes I have experienced have formed scar tissue around the joints of optimism and dissipated its natural inertia. Simple rules allow me to sometimes sidestep the all star Left Tackle star from team Reality. It provides me with a few moments of potential clarity and even possibly creativity.
The Self Dev guru Mel Robbins has a trick called the 5 second rule. “If you have an impulse to act on a goal, you must physically move within 5 seconds or your brain will kill the idea”. I think the key word there is ‘physically’. This may be her way of incorporating a simple rule to cup her hands around the flickering flame of hope being bullied by the winds of doubt.
What is your chain?
How has it resulted in Learned Helplessness?
What is your simple rule to address it?
LINKS
- Learned helplessness at fifty: Insights from neuroscience.
