I'm not sure why there's a few negative comments here. The dialectic the article sets up is clear:
Prior: People acquire helplessness through reinforced external negative stimuli (dysphoric)
Author: No, it isnt the presence of negative stimuli, but the absence of internal positive (control-promoting)
This makes all the difference for understanding how to treat the issue; as well as how to communicate it.
Let me give an example from my own life this morning. For quite awhile I've been leaving things in random places where they aren't tidy (prone to breaking, etc.). This morning, for the first time in awhile, I made the extra effort to move something to a better place.
On the first model, and an intuitive one, it was the effort to pick up the items that was the negative stimuli. So the treatment is: learn to enjoy tidying, etc.
Rather, I actually experienced the opposite, and I sort of realised it at the time.
This week I began resetting all my schedules, alarms; started reorganising my day. And it's no coincidence that this tidying-act followed; as have many since i've done this. The heart of the change was actually just putting 4 alarms on my phone.
So what has happened?
I havent learnt to enjoy anything more. Rather, I've started rehabituating my self of control -- by even trivial changes, I am strengthening that sense. The items of my apartment more clearly appear as objects that I can control, rather than a chaotic environment that's beyond control.
This I think is incredibly important in how we frame advice in these cases.
If you have some "learned helplessness", don't focus on the tasks over which you're helpless. Do something quite radically different: practice taking small steps of control, which require minimal effort -- and so on.
I've called this the snowball of success where you make small, disciplined actions that you call "success" (_setting an alarm_) than then "snowballs" into larger "successes" (_cleaning your room_). The opposite is true as well, in my experience: if you fail to make the _small_ actions, it will "snowball" into you not making the larger actions throughout the day.
I've been calling these the "virtue cycle" and the "viscous cycle" - both being behaviors that reinforce "similar behaviors". Most people are familiar with the term "viscous cycle" and the idea of a downward spiral of reinforcing behaviors, but that same interlocking mechanism works in reverse too. One can generate an expanding series of positive behaviors to eliminate bad habits, promote positive behaviors and instill a more positive general attitude simply by proving to yourself that you are indeed in control of yourself.
Really good way to say it! In my experience, there's something to do with starting a "flow" that I as a human get stuck into. If the "flow" is doing things that I don't want to do but I _need_ to do for whatever reason (_because I told myself I would, because it will help my future self, etc_), I will be in a "flow" state of doing those things, causing the "snowball" effect or the "virtue/viscous cycle" as you describe it.
As someone posted above, there are limits to this but I wonder if there are systems or ways that we could _stretch_ those limits, possibly by making the _hard_ things not a choice and to be in this _flow_ state without needing to actively expend energy to be in it. Something like a muscle where the more you stretch it past its ability, the stronger it gets (_within reason_). As an example, when I started running, I could hardly do 1 minute without heavy breathing and now am able to run half marathons that, while tired at the end, are completely within my wheelhouse without feeling almost dead.
When I started running, I couldn't make it three city blocks without an asthma attack and cramps. Now I do 3-5 miles of hill running per day in the country summer sun. (Tennessee)
Over the past few years I have been developing a system based on incremental flow, as you mentioned. You can absolutely use small habits, and also leverage the Flow State proper in order to train. Eventually you are able to graduate to multiple spinning plates. (to reference your other comment). As you say the greatest danger is dropping all the plates in the presence of a minor stressor since you are operating at your current capacity.
What you end up needing to train is getting back on the horse. It's similar to the notion of "Returning to Breath" in a meditation practice. I have a leveling system and an economy built in, so that I gamify the practice of picking up the pieces. I'm currently working on smoothing out the difficulty curve, comparing several game mechanics like leveling down, adaptive difficulty, and triggering special modes. The idea is to have some sort of a pressure relief valve built into your life.
Fellow Volunteer here so totally empathize with the summer sun making the runs even harder!
I used to be far more systematic with my life many moons ago, in my late teens and early 20s. That helped immensely and I credit a lot of my personal growth towards that.
I don't think this is the best forum to get into the weeds about it, especially since everyone is different and YMMV. The root of the systems were to 1) create a singular, specific goal that was _the most important thing to me_. More important than pride, than sleep, than food. That's not healthy and only works so far so I then added 2) retrospectives every week on how I'm doing in relation to that goal. Are the steps I'm taking actually helping me reach that goal? Is that goal actually more important than anything else? Is that goal the actual goal I'm after or was it just a flag bearer for what I think the goal might look like? Being solely focused on one thing that influences everything and iterating on that goal are the two "systems" I now use in a general sense.
As an example, I wanted to get into software but dropped out of school and worked manual labor jobs. I decided that my only goal in life was to become a software engineer so I spent all my free time, all of my energy, all of _me_ in order to reach that goal. That came at the cost of the manual labor jobs which meant I had to couch surf for a few months/a year and get food from my friends so I could literally focus my whole life around that goal. I was blessed to have that support network, privileged one might say these days. I'm not saying that's a good choice and I doubt most people have the support network of friends with couches that they'll offer you. But I do think the _severity_ of my desire for that goal was the root cause of success.
Having a singular, focused, concrete goal is the biggest takeaway from all the other "systems" I used. Happy to chat more if that's your jam!
US Marines are trained to make their bed with military speed and precision as the first thing they do each morning. If one can't do that little thing how can one accomplish everything else with military speed and precision for the rest of the day?
It makes more sense if you think of it in terms of identifying risk.
Rather than, "a marine who doesn't make their bed with precision is incapable of precision," think of it as "a marine who doesn't make their bed with precision is experiencing problems that could prevent them from acting with precision in more important situations."
That does sound plausible but I do know. When I come across suchlike justifications for petty rules, I rather tend to feel there's some kind of petty control frreakery behind it. Then again I have no military experience.
Requiring them to make their beds doesn't strike me as unreasonably petty, and to the extent that they do make soldier follow petty rules it's often done with a purpose, usually to install obedience. Not that there aren't lots of dicks in the military, but you shouldn't be so quick to dismiss the way organisations do things because often there's a good reason.
Eg. tidiness slips in small actions, accumulating, then at some point I just clean it all up as one act and I may-or-may-not break that act into smaller bites (that probably just make sense from an order of operations/batching standpoint.)
Also, generally for things like tidiness, I keep a couple rules. Pick up daily before bed. This covers 80%. But sometimes I'll let that go or only clean halfway, then I must catchup on Sunday. But, cleaning is definitely a full mode I put myself into. If I started doing small unrelated tasks hoping it prodded me to get up and clean, I never would.
That's true, to a degree. At some point you will hit both a time delay barrier inhibiting the training...
Having to learn delayed gratification is hard for an AI and hard for humans.
And then you'll hit the resource barrier. There's only so much and so hard any one person can control and influence with any given means.
100% agree here. In my younger days, I used to think that "willpower" was an unlimited resource but totally agree that there _are active limits_ to it and even more so you _cannot change things outside your control_. Someone once said that humans can only handle so many things at once and the moment you give them even one more thing than they can handle, all of the spinning plates come crashing down. I think that when we focus on learning to spin just one plate, that can snowball into learning to spin many plates, even though we still can only spin 10 plates at a time before all hell breaks loose.
Neither did it for me. What has worked somewhat, is shifting the mindset. I could make my bed everyday and I never felt more productive for achieving something small first. However, when I set my mind to become a more tidy person overall, putting things in the right place, stops being as cumbersome.
> On the first model, and an intuitive one, it was the effort to pick up the items that was the negative stimuli. So the treatment is: learn to enjoy tidying, etc.
Hmm. The negative stimuli here should be when something breaks. You'll always have to make some efforts to tidy things up, so it can't be a negative stimuli in itself because it's not one of the outcomes. Here it's a positive punishment (broken things should lead you to change the original behavior) (actually, not tidying up has its own positive reinforcement stimuli: you don't have to make efforts).
> I havent learnt to enjoy anything more. Rather, I've started rehabituating my self of control -- by even trivial changes, I am strengthening that sense. The items of my apartment more clearly appear as objects that I can control, rather than a chaotic environment that's beyond control.
Yes, there it is: positive stimuli reinforcing behavior. Which works better than positive punishment (or so I learned decades ago in psy101 ?).
All good, but the natural response to discomfort was to do something about it (perhaps this was previously learned?) but after repeated failure to do anything about it, the shocks become accepted). The helplessness was learned. Maybe that's reversion to a default though?
Well I wrote one of the negative comments and I think you give the article an apologetic interpretation (which is great). I can agree that if this is the point then it is a good advice, but how is it different from setting yourself SMART goals and the general wisdom from personal management in psychology or theory of action in philosophy? You seem to argue that learned helplessness is alike weakness of will and while they might be on continuum there is something different between those cases since under normal circumstances you don't fail to run away from pain. And while the way "out" might be similar if we we fail to understand the difference then we will fail to understand the mental state of people who are in genuine cases of learned helplessness such as many-year homeless people.
So, like, maybe a careful criticism is not that the article is wrong but it simplifies things to the point where on the one hand we are blinded to the most important things about learned helplessness and on the other hand besides the point that you bring up the article includes many rhetorical devices which obscure the main point.
That is not the first rule in the book. Although yes Jordan Peterson might say something like that.
Just to get the facts clear: the first rule in his book states “Stand straight with your shoulders back.” which he discusses both in its literal (biological) meaning and the metaphorical meaning.
Now that you mention it, yes, that seems to fit what I heard - as I stated I have not read the book, just heard him mention it several times in his netcasts. I thought it was the first rule because I distinctly remember the phrase 'first, clean up your damn room'.
This article seems to relay on the idea that by default we can take no action and therefore we don't acquire helplessness as it is the default. But it doesn't seem to make sense? The norm is that we make actions all the time and agency is expected. When one loses their agency then we are talking about learned helplessness. If we want to say "Oh, in fact those people did not learn helplessness since there is nothing like this to learn, it is more accurate to say that they find their circumstances so dire that all actions seem to them unreasonable effort as it won't allow them to change those circumstances." then I guess that true but it seems trivial. It is like saying that if you are so depressed that you don't eat then it is not depression but a default state since you need a reason to eat and you just fail to have that reason. Which is like, the point? We expect healthy people to take care of themselves and if they feel like there is no reason for them to do so then they are not back to some natural state which is fine. So I feel like there is no big discovery here. It is just terminological adjustment so that we can avoid possible misinterpretations plus some new fact from the neuroscience which doesn't change anything about our psychological understanding.
So yea, the big fanfare about "debunking" and how the science progresses are out of place. This is a one paragraph news without citation.
> So yea, the big fanfare about "debunking" and how the science progresses are out of place. This is a one paragraph news without citation.
Wait, what?!
This post is summarizing and then (past the sponsor blurb) literally citing the paper on this. Not just any paper, but one by the same authors who first created the theory of "learned helplessness" - and one in which they conclude they initially got the mechanism backwards. See:
In your defense, the site layout is partly to blame. I almost didn't notice the citation at the bottom - the sponsor blurb made it seem the content ends there, and that citation, for a split second, looked to me like some templating/database bug. Also the major point - that this insight is not random, but an update by the original researchers - is buried in the last paragraph.
Yea, the point about the same people changing their opinions was quite interesting so I mostly pointed out the lack of citation since I though that the article might misrepresent the paper and I wanted to verify it. And now that I am reading it, I find it is nicely nuanced and really well written. I was wondering why exactly I was suspicious about the original article and now I see that my problem is the tone. The article starts with "Helplessness Is Not Learned" and claims that it has been "debunked" where the paper keeps the phrase "learned helplessness" as a well documented fact and adjusts the mechanism behind the phenomena, which is much more reasonable.
> The norm is that we make actions all the time and agency is expected.
Agency about things we percieve we can control. There are vastly many more things which are out of our control, or require gargantuan effort to change, or would be extremely risky.
Consider a human child. We are born objectively helpless. Over time, we develop bodily strength and (ideally) learn correct ways of relating to reality. This is effectively rooted in humility, which is not false modesty as we commonly seem to think, but a habit or disposition of assimilating the truth and conforming ourselves to it. (The opposing vice is pride which is a rebellion against truths that we don't like; the result is alienation from reality and delusion and, therefore, objective helplessness.) Conformity with the truth is a prerequisite of prudence (the ability to be able to discern our true good in any given situation), which is a prerequisite of justice (constancy of will in giving everyone their due), which is a prerequisite of fortitude (the ability to remain steadfast in the pursuit of the good in the face of fear), which is a prerequisite of temperance (the moderation of desire in light of our nature and thus objective good).
The point? That we need to learn and acquire virtue to attain self-mastery which is true freedom. (Note the "self". It is not about controlling or dominating others.) There is no one so helpless as someone who is a slave to his passions.
When you can't escape suffering, you learn to cope with it in your mind instead of by escaping the stimulus. This allows you to adapt to a new normal and take what actions you can, optimizing for what you can control.
I see an interesting parallel with mindfulness here.
Isn't the right solution to {chronic pain, trauma and broken self-worth, inability to afford safe housing} to escape the internal/external situations incompatible with a fulfilling life, rather than to optimize for a "new normal" devoid of safety and a healthy environment? The problem arises when finding a better state is unattainable with the mental and financial resources available.
The Buddha might tell us that all life is suffering, and we all need some level of mindfulness just to get through the day. Some pain is escapable and some is not, and what is healthy is more situational than most people realize.
Stoicism is the practice of vigilance in order to partition the world into things over which you have control vs no control. The goal is to shift your engagement with the world to only account for, but not fret over, the latter, while you spend your attention and time on the former.
I guess I've misinterpreted the meaning of "learned helplessness." I've always thought it meant that the person had learned that it was easier to get someone else to do it instead of doing it themselves by feigning helplessness. I guess feigned helplessness is a better term for what I was thinking of?
Yeah, that’s unwillingness to do something they know they can do/learn if they wanted to. They aren’t helpless.
Actual helplessness has an element of fear or lack of control. The person thinks they aren’t able to do something. Essentially, they’ve given up because they don’t feel any of their actions have control over the outcome.
I very much appreciate this article as it explains how science advances.
I read the book by Seligman and highly recommend it also to people outside the field.
On the other hand it seems like the author needs to justify that science can be wrong and needs refinements.
It’s very tedious. I remember during my PhD that I had to put these disclaimers on top too. I would expect that this is implicitly clear especially in an academic context.
I can't agree with this. Maybe they disproved a particular version of learned helplessness, regarding this dorsal raphe nucleus, but it seems clear that that is not the end of the story.
People and animals clearly learn to stop doing actions that have harmful consequences.
> People and animals clearly learn to stop doing actions that have harmful consequences.
But that's not at all what learned helplessness is. On the contrary, learned helplessness is defined by the absence of proactive action that could remove a painful stimulus.
My understanding is that "learned helplessness" is not "unlearned control" but "not-learned control". Someone who can't read isn't someone who forgot how to, but someone who never learned how to.
I think it's helpful because that means that everyone has to learn control. As opposed to just a few people who would need to learn it to fight their helplessness. So, maybe something that should be taught at school?
Imagine every book you picked up were nonsense, but you were forced to "read" them, over and over every day. Over time, your brain might stop parsing the letters and words because it has learned that there is no semantic reason in them anymore, to the point that you might read a meaningful work and no longer be able to understand it.
The article says that there is no such thing as "learned helplessness". To match what the article says, I can turn your example into: when you don't know how to read, reading means nothing. One has to learn to read in order to make sense of the words.
You do not learn to ignore words by reading without knowing how to ("learned helplessness"), you learn to read words.
It's not about having to learn to read. The example the parent poster was making was you already know how to read, but one day find that every book you pick up is filled with nonsense rather than real words. Eventually to stop bothering to try to read anything. That's what they were describing as 'learned helplessness'.
The new paper seems to just re-word it as 'learned loss of control'. I don't see the huge difference. Just because the default state on most things is helplessness doesn't mean you cannot learn to fall back into helplessness again. But if the new wording helps with constructing treatment plans for mental health issues, sounds fine enough to me.
Yes, this is well stated. I understand why people write articles thqt lead with a provocative statement, but I think it's important for us all to read between those lines.
"unlearning" or even "never learned"
I think the distinction is important when trying to fix that. Learning new skill is something different then trying to unlearn something. You probably need to use other methods.
Thats kind of interesting when you think of it in the context of big government or monopoly or union monopsony vs individual agency of free markets. Just believing that the market is free gives you the sense of control to act on your ideas vs the alternative of perceiving you have no control because union, or government, or marxism, etc. Causes the failure we have seen in those systems.
No, that's the gist of the whole article. Some people do not learn how to control their life and I would say that's the important diference. You have to try to learn this new skill not to unlearn "helplessness".
"And it’s only in situations where we think that investment of resources is worthwhile that part of our prefrontal cortex tells the dorsal raphe nucleus to chill and let us do something about it. In this context, it’s not helplessness that is learned, but control."
The worthwhileness can be both positively and negatively reinforced externally.
I have seen this numerous times when working in various teams. Not sure it is what applies here.
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There is one place where Learned Helplessness is super prevalent due to loss of control: The behavioral treatment of autism in children.
Applied Behavioral Analysis uses operant conditioning theory and techniques used to coerce behavior and compliance in autistic children. It turns out though, that this “therapy” results in Learned Helplessness and PTSD/cPTSD in 46% of autistic people who later seek further therapy for trauma resulting from the practice.
Autistic people see ABA as torture and abuse. Help me end it.
A the imho proper and useful concept of "learned helplessness" refers to a situation where someone learns that appearing helpless and asking others for help is the success strategy for achieving any goal. In an environment where this is true, most people will quickly learn this. The situation where this is bad is when a person learns this unconsciously and really believe themselves to be helpless, their learning immediately ruling out even the thought of solving any problems themselves.
There is no reason why both negative and positive stimuli couldn't contribute to such learning. If you reward children every time they ask for help, or punish them every time they try something themselves, or both, there is a big chance they learn helplessness to some degree.
But this is not what it's meant by "learned helplessness". You are describing an unrelated phenomenon. Learned helplessness has nothing to do with feigning helplessness to get what you want; it's instead about giving up and accepting a harmful situation that is perceived as unavoidable.
Let me give an example from my own life this morning. For quite awhile I've been leaving things in random places where they aren't tidy (prone to breaking, etc.). This morning, for the first time in awhile, I made the extra effort to move something to a better place.
On the first model, and an intuitive one, it was the effort to pick up the items that was the negative stimuli. So the treatment is: learn to enjoy tidying, etc.
Rather, I actually experienced the opposite, and I sort of realised it at the time.
This week I began resetting all my schedules, alarms; started reorganising my day. And it's no coincidence that this tidying-act followed; as have many since i've done this. The heart of the change was actually just putting 4 alarms on my phone.
So what has happened?
I havent learnt to enjoy anything more. Rather, I've started rehabituating my self of control -- by even trivial changes, I am strengthening that sense. The items of my apartment more clearly appear as objects that I can control, rather than a chaotic environment that's beyond control.
This I think is incredibly important in how we frame advice in these cases.
If you have some "learned helplessness", don't focus on the tasks over which you're helpless. Do something quite radically different: practice taking small steps of control, which require minimal effort -- and so on.
As someone posted above, there are limits to this but I wonder if there are systems or ways that we could _stretch_ those limits, possibly by making the _hard_ things not a choice and to be in this _flow_ state without needing to actively expend energy to be in it. Something like a muscle where the more you stretch it past its ability, the stronger it gets (_within reason_). As an example, when I started running, I could hardly do 1 minute without heavy breathing and now am able to run half marathons that, while tired at the end, are completely within my wheelhouse without feeling almost dead.
When I started running, I couldn't make it three city blocks without an asthma attack and cramps. Now I do 3-5 miles of hill running per day in the country summer sun. (Tennessee)
Over the past few years I have been developing a system based on incremental flow, as you mentioned. You can absolutely use small habits, and also leverage the Flow State proper in order to train. Eventually you are able to graduate to multiple spinning plates. (to reference your other comment). As you say the greatest danger is dropping all the plates in the presence of a minor stressor since you are operating at your current capacity.
What you end up needing to train is getting back on the horse. It's similar to the notion of "Returning to Breath" in a meditation practice. I have a leveling system and an economy built in, so that I gamify the practice of picking up the pieces. I'm currently working on smoothing out the difficulty curve, comparing several game mechanics like leveling down, adaptive difficulty, and triggering special modes. The idea is to have some sort of a pressure relief valve built into your life.
Do you use any systems in your own life?
I used to be far more systematic with my life many moons ago, in my late teens and early 20s. That helped immensely and I credit a lot of my personal growth towards that.
I don't think this is the best forum to get into the weeds about it, especially since everyone is different and YMMV. The root of the systems were to 1) create a singular, specific goal that was _the most important thing to me_. More important than pride, than sleep, than food. That's not healthy and only works so far so I then added 2) retrospectives every week on how I'm doing in relation to that goal. Are the steps I'm taking actually helping me reach that goal? Is that goal actually more important than anything else? Is that goal the actual goal I'm after or was it just a flag bearer for what I think the goal might look like? Being solely focused on one thing that influences everything and iterating on that goal are the two "systems" I now use in a general sense.
As an example, I wanted to get into software but dropped out of school and worked manual labor jobs. I decided that my only goal in life was to become a software engineer so I spent all my free time, all of my energy, all of _me_ in order to reach that goal. That came at the cost of the manual labor jobs which meant I had to couch surf for a few months/a year and get food from my friends so I could literally focus my whole life around that goal. I was blessed to have that support network, privileged one might say these days. I'm not saying that's a good choice and I doubt most people have the support network of friends with couches that they'll offer you. But I do think the _severity_ of my desire for that goal was the root cause of success.
Having a singular, focused, concrete goal is the biggest takeaway from all the other "systems" I used. Happy to chat more if that's your jam!
Viscous relates to viscosity.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viscous_vortex_domains_method
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vorticity
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/virtuous%20circle
Rather than, "a marine who doesn't make their bed with precision is incapable of precision," think of it as "a marine who doesn't make their bed with precision is experiencing problems that could prevent them from acting with precision in more important situations."
A "no brown M&Ms" situation. https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/brown-out/
(Also, it's a matter of establishing a habit of discipline.)
Eg. tidiness slips in small actions, accumulating, then at some point I just clean it all up as one act and I may-or-may-not break that act into smaller bites (that probably just make sense from an order of operations/batching standpoint.)
Also, generally for things like tidiness, I keep a couple rules. Pick up daily before bed. This covers 80%. But sometimes I'll let that go or only clean halfway, then I must catchup on Sunday. But, cleaning is definitely a full mode I put myself into. If I started doing small unrelated tasks hoping it prodded me to get up and clean, I never would.
And then you'll hit the resource barrier. There's only so much and so hard any one person can control and influence with any given means.
Hmm. The negative stimuli here should be when something breaks. You'll always have to make some efforts to tidy things up, so it can't be a negative stimuli in itself because it's not one of the outcomes. Here it's a positive punishment (broken things should lead you to change the original behavior) (actually, not tidying up has its own positive reinforcement stimuli: you don't have to make efforts).
> I havent learnt to enjoy anything more. Rather, I've started rehabituating my self of control -- by even trivial changes, I am strengthening that sense. The items of my apartment more clearly appear as objects that I can control, rather than a chaotic environment that's beyond control.
Yes, there it is: positive stimuli reinforcing behavior. Which works better than positive punishment (or so I learned decades ago in psy101 ?).
Just to get the facts clear: the first rule in his book states “Stand straight with your shoulders back.” which he discusses both in its literal (biological) meaning and the metaphorical meaning.
So yea, the big fanfare about "debunking" and how the science progresses are out of place. This is a one paragraph news without citation.
Wait, what?!
This post is summarizing and then (past the sponsor blurb) literally citing the paper on this. Not just any paper, but one by the same authors who first created the theory of "learned helplessness" - and one in which they conclude they initially got the mechanism backwards. See:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4920136/
Agency about things we percieve we can control. There are vastly many more things which are out of our control, or require gargantuan effort to change, or would be extremely risky.
Why do you think that? By default, we know nothing and are lazy.
The point? That we need to learn and acquire virtue to attain self-mastery which is true freedom. (Note the "self". It is not about controlling or dominating others.) There is no one so helpless as someone who is a slave to his passions.
Once I learned my mental issues had a name and could be coped with, it shook me out of that “helplessness”.
Knowing what you have power over lets you focus on the things you can control.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=uic_3vlI5BE
I see an interesting parallel with mindfulness here.
Actual helplessness has an element of fear or lack of control. The person thinks they aren’t able to do something. Essentially, they’ve given up because they don’t feel any of their actions have control over the outcome.
What you're describing is usually referred to as "weaponized incompetence."
I read the book by Seligman and highly recommend it also to people outside the field.
On the other hand it seems like the author needs to justify that science can be wrong and needs refinements.
It’s very tedious. I remember during my PhD that I had to put these disclaimers on top too. I would expect that this is implicitly clear especially in an academic context.
People and animals clearly learn to stop doing actions that have harmful consequences.
But that's not at all what learned helplessness is. On the contrary, learned helplessness is defined by the absence of proactive action that could remove a painful stimulus.
Honestly doesn't seem like a very meaningful distinction to me.
I think it's helpful because that means that everyone has to learn control. As opposed to just a few people who would need to learn it to fight their helplessness. So, maybe something that should be taught at school?
That is learned helplessness.
The article says that there is no such thing as "learned helplessness". To match what the article says, I can turn your example into: when you don't know how to read, reading means nothing. One has to learn to read in order to make sense of the words.
You do not learn to ignore words by reading without knowing how to ("learned helplessness"), you learn to read words.
The new paper seems to just re-word it as 'learned loss of control'. I don't see the huge difference. Just because the default state on most things is helplessness doesn't mean you cannot learn to fall back into helplessness again. But if the new wording helps with constructing treatment plans for mental health issues, sounds fine enough to me.
Teaching someone to have control, as opposed to “unlearning” their helplessness (which presumably if default, can’t be done).
If you think it isn't then you're not observing the right timescale.
This makes every difference in how to treat people who have this problem. All you have to do is teach people how to feel they have control again.
"And it’s only in situations where we think that investment of resources is worthwhile that part of our prefrontal cortex tells the dorsal raphe nucleus to chill and let us do something about it. In this context, it’s not helplessness that is learned, but control."
The worthwhileness can be both positively and negatively reinforced externally.
I have seen this numerous times when working in various teams. Not sure it is what applies here.
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Omegl
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Applied Behavioral Analysis uses operant conditioning theory and techniques used to coerce behavior and compliance in autistic children. It turns out though, that this “therapy” results in Learned Helplessness and PTSD/cPTSD in 46% of autistic people who later seek further therapy for trauma resulting from the practice.
Autistic people see ABA as torture and abuse. Help me end it.
https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1__cTL6OryHG5Hr6vwl_s...
There is no reason why both negative and positive stimuli couldn't contribute to such learning. If you reward children every time they ask for help, or punish them every time they try something themselves, or both, there is a big chance they learn helplessness to some degree.
So we could clear up the confusion about what "learned helplessness" means by instead calling it, "hopelessness", or "despair"?
Interestingly enough, the definitions of hopelessness and despair are circular references to each other:
hopelessness | ˈhōpləsnəs |
noun
a feeling or state of despair; lack of hope
despair | dəˈsper |
noun
the complete loss or absence of hope
Huh, weird