Unlearning Helplessness

You don't have to live like this.

Author’s note: I was inspired to write this essay after I read

Cate Hall

’s excellent post on a similar concept, Maybe you’re not Actually Trying. This essay stands on its own, but may be slightly enhanced by reading Cate’s first. I hope you enjoy!

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In my third year of college, I was lucky enough to visit Universal Studios with my late friend Sam. As rollercoaster lovers, we were excited to try out Universal’s newest and fastest experiences—and on the top of that list was Hagrid's Magical Creatures Motorbike Adventure! Unfortunately, the estimated line time was 120 minutes. Still, we were hanging out together, so we decided the wait would be worth it.

When we got there, we found that there were two sections cordoned off from each other. The left section was full of riders, and the right section was completely empty. Normally, sections are empty because they’re not in use, so we joined the line of people on the left. For 30 minutes, we inched forward. And then we saw a park employee standing in the right section. Curious, we decided to talk to him.

Sam: Hi! What’s up with the section you’re standing in?

Employee: Oh, it’s just the solo line.

Sam and I share a look of bewilderment.

Me: Solo line?

Employee: Yes! The line you’re standing in right now is the duo line, for people who want to sit next to each other on the roller coaster. If you stand in the solo line, you’ll be paired up with a stranger.

Sam: …So what’s the wait for the solo line?

Employee: Well, the solo line looked really short, so probably around 15 minutes. If you wait in the duo line, you’ll be waiting another hour and 30 minutes.

Me and Sam: …

So, we hopped the cordon and switched to the other line. But we didn’t see anyone join us, even though they were within earshot.

The new wait was 15 minutes long. This was astounding: no other ride had a wait that short, unless you count the spinning teacup ride for 5-year-olds¹. So, we went back for seconds. When we tried it again the second time, the lines had rebalanced: we ended up waiting 45 minutes, which was maybe not super worth it.

I’ve been thinking about this story for the last year and a half. Sure, we’d skipped a huge line, but we weren’t the first to do so: there were 15 minutes’ worth of people who had discovered this first. For half an hour, we hadn’t actually been trying.

What the hell was that?

Laziness is just risk aversion applied to expending energy

In our evolutionary past, we probably had even less energy than we do now—food and water scarcity put a very high premium on action. Thus, it was very important for us to conserve our energy where possible. Taking an excessive number of actions that had no potential reward would be a waste of energy, a precious resource. Today, more humans die of obesity than starvation. We have a nigh-unlimited amount of energy in the form of food, but our evolutionary tendency towards laziness—the preference for lower-energy actions—still persists. Our energy limitations are now mental, not physical, but the basic calculus remains the same: because making the wrong decision is a missed opportunity, we should avoid taking actions that provide no expected reward.

This takes the form of a particular kind of emotional circuitry: laziness. In the absence of an obvious reward, we tend towards the lowest energy action. Rotting on couches, binging TV in our beds, ordering food and forgetting to leave the house until the sun has already gone down. Sam and I saw the empty right section in the beginning. But just like everyone else, we’d assumed that if that line was open, other people would have been standing in it already. We didn’t even bother to ask a park employee about it.

This is the sort of thing that Cate Hall calls finding an edge. Cate describes edges as

things you are willing to do that others aren’t, often because they’re annoying or unpleasant.

I prefer to take the competition out of it, and instead think of them as untapped resources or unseen choices that fly under the radar due to ignorance, emotional aversion, or poor calculation.

In this story, finding a park employee and asking about the right lane was an edge—an edge discovered by 15 minutes worth of people (and eventually me and Sam too). That edge was gated by ignorance and laziness. Fascinatingly, we accepted a greater amount of physical toil—standing in an unpleasant line for a really long time—just to avoid expending the mental energy of thinking a little harder. Instead of finding a park employee or checking out the other line ourselves, we chose to accept the status quo.

Being in that line was not a very comfortable experience. It was bright, hot, loud, crowded, and there was nowhere to sit. If you asked the riders whether they’d prefer to stay in their current long line or switch to a shorter and faster line, you’d expect them to switch. So, given the chance, why didn’t they?

Advanced laziness: learned helplessness

50 years ago, researchers at the University of Pennsylvania were performing experiments on dogs. One such experiment involved Pavlovian fear conditioning, restraining dogs in hammocks and shocking them 64 times.

I’m using a relatively dispassionate tone here, but this really sucks.

The researchers tried to assess how quickly the dogs would learn to escape the electric shocks the next day—but to their annoyance, the dogs often failed to even attempt escape, and instead just waited the shock out.

These researchers had just discovered learned helplessness entirely by accident.

The Encyclopedia Britannica defines learned helplessness as

a mental state in which an organism forced to bear aversive stimuli, or stimuli that are painful or otherwise unpleasant, becomes unable or unwilling to avoid subsequent encounters with those stimuli, even if they are “escapable,” presumably because it has learned that it cannot control the situation.

You’re probably familiar with situations like these. Maybe you’ve been in a toxic relationship that you just don’t feel like you can leave, or maybe you know someone who has. Maybe you’ve been depressed and feel like you’ll never get better again, so you stop going to therapy and go off your SSRIs. Maybe you’ve applied to 100 jobs and heard nothing back, so you give up on the job search because it feels futile. Maybe you had a really persistent stalker and felt like stopping him was impossible.

The common thread between all of these experiences is learned helplessness. Even though in theory, it’s not over yet—you can still leave that toxic relationship, you can still keep trying to get the help you need, you can still apply to jobs and maybe even get one—you’ve “learned” that it would just be easier to give up.

However, as Maier and Seligman discuss in a research paper studying 50 years of experiments on learned helplessness, it turns out that helplessness is not learned at all. Mammalian creatures don’t learn passivity in response to negative stimuli: instead, helplessness is the default when faced with prolonged unpleasant experiences.

the passivity and increased anxiety that follows uncontrollable stressors for several days is not produced by any expectancy at all, but rather is an unlearned reaction to prolonged aversive stimulation that sensitizes a specific set of neurons.

This jives with our previous description of laziness. But learned helplessness comes with an extra facet: the feeling that nothing can be better than the status quo. And though the term is generally used in the context of losing the perception of control after facing prolonged negative stimuli, the phenomenon of learned helplessness is really a catch-all for any situation in which a subject assumes control is not present—including situations in which the absence of control is an assumption from the start.

To quote Cate from her example with the persistent stalker,

When the stalker entered my life, I was at a low point in personal capacity — broke, alone, addled, etc. My approach towards him at that point (ignore, hoping he’d stop) was the only one that seemed available given my spiritual and psychological resources at the time. But my orientation to the problem became fixed in time at that point of low agency, and it never occurred to me to revisit it as my capacity for action increased.

Learned helplessness can be overcome

This fact of neuroscience is intuitively embedded in our conscious experiences of emotion. Trying to change our fate and avoid suffering usually comes with a sense of hope and anticipation, which can convert to despair if our desired outcome does not occur. After enough failures, a sense of bitterness and resignation sets in, shielding us from feeling that despair again—and, in line with what we said earlier, saves us from performing more actions that we know will be futile.

Regarding learned helplessness studies on humans, Maier and Seligman noted that

subjective unsystematic reports occasionally revealed that people from the inescapable group said that “nothing worked so why try?”

But succumbing to learned helplessness is not inevitable. Despite being strongly motivated by emotion, our brains allow us to process and sometimes even inhibit our emotional responses to events, granting us an unprecedented degree of behavioral control.

Unlike other mammals, we don’t have to succumb to helplessness.

From Maier and Seligman:

For complex organisms behavioral control can be possible over threats that are repeated, intermittent, and so persist across time. Thus, conservation/withdrawal and other energy adjustments set in motion by the continuation of threat should be inhibited.

The people in the line never assumed that we’d have control over the length of our wait; we saw the line and accepted our fates. Sam and I eventually exercised our agency, asking the employee and switching lines while others chose not to. But we also got lucky: we were near the front of the line and so had less time to resign ourselves to our fate, and we also were jostled out of our complacency at the sight of the employee. Had that employee not shown up, perhaps we would’ve waited the whole time without ever bothering to see what was on the other side.

However, by the end of the story, the lines had more or less evened out.

When people see other people making choices, they’re reminded of their own capacity to choose: once the crowd realized that switching lines was an option, they slowly started to take it, eventually removing the “edge” and bringing balance back to the world—or at least that one line.

So, what do we do?

We now know that we can overcome learned helplessness with our rationality and higher-order function—at least, once we recognize that we’re in a state of learned helplessness.

Thus, we are left with two vital questions. What does learned helplessness feel like from the inside? And how do we learn to recognize it?

Learned helplessness can feel very different in different contexts. Sometimes, it feels more overtly despairing, a dark cloud that tells you it’s impossible to succeed. This feels more like a protective mechanism, an escape from a hope that would inspire you to try again, only to lose hope again. Remember, the inescapable participants said:

“nothing worked so why try?”

Other forms of learned helplessness are lower energy. Instead of feeling like the despair that prevents further loss and futile struggle, they feel like simple resignation, a tendency to shy away from truths that feel uncomfortable to think about, or the desire to give up prematurely.

It’s not like Sam and I were super torn up about waiting in line. We also weren’t trying to avoid a strong sense of despair. We just didn’t think to look for any better options.

Learned helplessness can be incredibly difficult to recognize. For me, it often feels like an angry stubbornness at people who try to tell me that things could be different, a dull resignation that I avoid with distraction, or a dismissal of something that I “know” I should do that hasn’t really sunk in yet. And when I try to confront it, I am usually confounded by a high level of rationalized emotion that feels very logical in nature, and eventually get thrown off track. I believe a similar thing happens to most people stuck in their own situations. We get lost in our own heads, and can’t seem to shake that terrible thought:

this time, things really will never get better. It’s over.

Accordingly, the best way to identify learned helplessness is to have someone else do it for you.

Parties who know your situation but aren’t yourself, like a partner, therapist, or friend, will likely be able to see things that are hidden from your own perspective. They’re close enough to you to understand your tendencies and your problems, but aren’t subject to emotions that might cloud your mind, and can thus have an outside view. Your job is to identify who these people are, seek out their feedback, and then subordinate your ego long enough to listen to them. As Cate put it: seek real feedback.

For example, in Cate’s stalker example, she eventually got help from her husband—who undertook a simple course of action that she herself couldn’t see due to learned helplessness.

For another example, Sam and I asked the park employee if there was another line. Instead of having to explore ourselves, we talked to another person—who gave us the knowledge we sought. And once we switched to the other line, eventually people started following—since they now knew what was possible.

Another important factor in recognizing learned helplessness is emotional awareness.

Greater emotional awareness can give you greater freedom: if you’re unaware that you’re feeling anything, you won’t be able to distinguish between when your decisions are reasonable and rational versus when they’re irrational and unreasonable. The more introspection you do, the more you’ll understand your own particular cognitive distortions and loops—and once you understand your habits, you can start trying to change them. I like journaling for this, because I find it easier to be objective about my thoughts when I can externalize them, but everyone is different².

Live.

Either way, the change is going to have to come from you. All the feedback in the world means nothing if you won’t listen to it.

You’ll need the courage to solicit feedback from other people, the maturity to withstand them calling you out directly and honestly, and the humility to swallow your pride and figure out if they’re actually right.

There are no shortcuts.

Overcoming learned helplessness is less about exercising the cold hard skill of agency and more about learning to live with a strong sense of internal and external harmony. The more you understand your own habits, and the more you run your decisions by your people and trusted community, the better quality your decisions will be.

This isn’t easy. Even in the best of circumstances, unlearning helplessness is a project that can take a lifetime. But, in my opinion, it’s worth doing. I want to be free, and I want to live. I think you do too.

It’s time to stop standing in line.

1. Which unfortunately wasn’t much fun.

2. One of my favorite tools for this is The Hamming Question; What are the important problems in your life, and what is stopping you from working on them? You’ll probably find your gut reaction to be very informative.