Helplessness can be explained

Many of us tend to overuse words like "never" and "always." It's as if we have it worse than others every time, regardless of the circumstances. We say that "we always have it uphill" or that "we will never succeed at anything." Martin Seligman, an American psychology professor, gave a name to such remarks - according to him, it's simply pessimism. But where does it come from?

In 1967, at the University of Pennsylvania, this American psychologist conducted a rather cruel study with dogs. To begin with, the dogs were placed in cages in which they received electric shocks, and to turn them off all they had to do was jump to the other side of the cage. They learned to do this fairly quickly. They were then divided into two groups, Each dog in the first group had a matched dog from the second group on whom they depended. In the first, the dogs were in control of whether or not they would be shocked. In contrast, in the second group, the dogs were fully dependent on whether the dogs in the first group succeeded in turning off the shocks, Their own efforts made no difference, no matter what they did, the shocks would randomly turn on and off on their own. In the third stage of the experiment, all dogs were given the opportunity to turn off the shocks. The dogs in the first group quickly resisted the way of avoiding the new ones, while most of the dogs in the second group meekly endured the electric shocks. They learnt that no matter what they do they still won't change their circumstances, so why bother?

,Although the study was made on dogs, people tend to react in the same way. When a student gets bad grades from a particular subject a few times in a row, he starts to believe he doesn't have the necessary skills for the subject and stops trying to improve, feeling helpless.

"How you think about your problems can exacerbate them, including depression, can either weaken or worsen them. Failure or defeat can teach you a lesson in helplessness." When we have a pessimistic explanatory style, the feeling of helplessness whenever we fail, can plunge us into depression. This happens when our thoughts and beliefs are universal in scope, not just about a particular situation, but about all such situations in the future (we see it in black colors). Over time, we stop taking any action, feeling that we are helpless no matter what we do. Martin Seligman refers to this as learned helplessness.

What doesn't kill us makes us stronger.

- Friedrich Nietzsche

There is a lot of truth in this statement, but much depends on our explanatory style and attribution model. Attribution is nothing more than ascribing certain characteristics to someone or something. When attribution is extrinsic, the behavior in question depends on the situation the person is in, such as I am in a good mood because I heard something funny. When it is internal, we assume that the cause of a behavior is our trait, e.g. I am in a good mood because I am a cheerful person. Unfortunately, things are not always so simple. It is not uncommon for us to blame ourselves by attributing to ourselves fixed traits of universal scope, such as a lack of ability or intelligence, and this can lead us to learned helplessness. Children who don't do well in school are not necessarily incapable, they just stop believing they can do well after a few failures and stop trying to learn.