4 ms·

Unlearning Helplessness

71 points by braythwayt 12y ago

cryoshon 12y ago
I'd appreciate a bit more content from this article, maybe discussing some specific strategies to reduce helplessness and increase resourcefulness. As it stands now, it's a bit too fluffy to take much away from. Additionally, I think that the core concept here is philosophically stoical, along the lines of "some things are up to us, some things are not up to us, and pain occurs when we aspire for the things that are not up to us to be up to us."
- ctdavies 12y ago
  I think pain probably still occurs when injured, too.
- 0359B02149AB 12y ago
  I think it's always going to be fluffy. Hard things are hard.
- braythwayt 12y ago
  Author here. This is a funny area. I feel quite confident giving prescriptive advice about strategies for software development, but not so much about strategies for dealing with psychological issues like depression and helplessness. What I can do is share my own experience, and tell you where to find the resources that helped me. Thus... I would say that if anything in the post feels like something that is bothering you or has bothered you in the past, go and read about Learned Optimism, the rough opposite of Learned Helplessness: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learned_optimism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learned_optimism And especially Seligman’s self-help book on the subject: http://amzn.to/1zFQXcr http://amzn.to/1zFQXcr The book claims that “optimism” can be measured, and that there are strategies for improving it, and discusses those strategies. I personally found that they did help me, and further that Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) under the supervision of a professional helped me even more. I also wrote a post directly about Optimism a while back, it outlines Seligman’s strategies: http://braythwayt.com/homoiconic/2009/05/01/optimism.html http://braythwayt.com/homoiconic/2009/05/01/optimism.html There was lively HN discussion at the time, you may find it informative: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=589200 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=589200
  - brerlapn 12y ago
    I also found Seligman's What You Can Change and What You Can't to be informative.
  - e12e 12y ago
    As framed/contrasted in the article, the term "learned helplessness" seems a bit off. If we look at the venn-diagram, it would appear that we have: things we care about, things we can change, and things we don't realize we can change. It's those things, that are "learned helplessness" -- and a way to avoid it is to form "informed helplessness": to have an accurate idea of our world: what we really care about, what we can really change and what we really cannot change. First find out what we actually care about. Then figure out which of those things we are unhappy with. Then which of those we cannot change. This is our area of "informed helplessness". Periodically re-examine this area, to check if some things have become more malleable by ourself (this is to avoid "learned helplessness", or "artificial helplessness". The point being: if you sit down and figure out "what you cannot change" -- you're effectively teaching yourself to be "helpless" about those things. The key difference is presumably that it is a rational, active, decision. Perhaps the literature/research have some better terms for this -- but I felt it looked a bit inconsistent in the article.
    - brerlapn 12y ago
      "Informed helplessness" probably isn't the best frame for the concept, but maybe more like a cost-benefit analysis for giving a shit (CBAGAS), or the Gaullic shrug ( ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ ). My brother and I both lived in DC once upon a time. We both got parking tickets, some of which were legitimate and some of which were made up by the meter maids because the DC government is banking that you'd rather just pay $20 than go through the hassle of an appeal (which they usually just ignore). I would get enraged; my brother would just shrug and say "cost of living in the city--you want to walk home from your favorite bar or to your favorite restaurant, this is what you put up with." It wasn't that he thought it was okay, he just decided it wasn't worth the mental energy to get mad about it. I still get mad about them, but I can see that his perspective is far preferable.
    - braythwayt 12y ago
- estefan 12y ago
  Learned Optimism by Dr. Martin Seligman is well worth a read. It contains more details. There's a interesting experiment where he shows how dogs learn to be helpless. Fascinating.
- wodenokoto 12y ago
  I saw this as an introduction to what helplessness is, what it means and where it comes from and more importantly, that it can be dealt with. The reader is supposed to come away with the knowledge that this thing exist and it seems to make sense. The author tells of an expert and links to his work for more in depth.
- brerlapn 12y ago
  For the author-- the mockup graphic of the HN front page was a nice tough and made me laugh out loud. I'd be interested in a citation to the quote referencing gambling and bullying, too. Cryoshon, a reference to at least some books like Burns' Feeling Good, or a synopsis of the techniques (like how you would apply Seligman's personal-general-permanent framework to Burns' triple column cognitive distortions tool), would be helpful, I agree. And while I personally think stoicism is an underrated and misunderstood philosophy, I don't think the article is really getting at what you ascribe in your last sentence, because the article isn't saying that your circle of influence is immutably fixed. Unlearning helplessness may mean having the wisdom to accept things you can't change, but it could also mean thinking of ways to increase your circle of influence to be more in line with your circle of concern. Most people would say slavery is within their circle of concern, but would also feel as though it was well outside their circle of influence. And to some degree, it is, but you can still increase your sense of influence by donating money to effective anti-slavery organizations, for instance, or paying attention to where your consumer goods are produced. But you can also reasonably reduce your circle of concern without it being a surrender by acknowledging that there are bad things happening in the distance that you aren't reasonably obligated to spend energy worrying about. Deciding that your circle of influence is small, and that trying to change that is aspiring beyond your place sounds itself like learned helplessness, though.
wodenokoto 12y ago
What was the YouTube video about? Honestly ~50 minutes video is too long to embed without any kind of introduction to why I shouldd stop reading and start watching. Even 10 minutes is stretching it, if the video itself doesn't start of with an introduction.
- braythwayt 12y ago
  Inside joke. It’s the first episode of “The Prisoner,” a legendary dystopic television show featuring a prisoner whose jailers go to great lengths to induce a feeling of helplessness, but he resists. That’s literally the plot of every episode: The jailers thinking up new ways to teach him that he cannot control what happens, and him coming up with new ways to make the jailers feel that it’s them who cannot control what happens. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Prisoner https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Prisoner
karmakaze 12y ago
Here are the points that came up in my read: 1. See this as a concrete example of attachment/detachment: don't identify yourself with a situation. The event is not you. (Except if your pessimism is so great as to direct events, then it is you, but you can change.) 2. Circles of influence and concern are rarely nested. It's just we don't even consider areas of influence where we have no concern. 3. I'm saving the link to reference the HN graphic in future.
- e12e 12y ago
  > It's just we don't even consider areas of influence where we have no concern. This is one of the things that is at the heart of many arguments about "deep culture", bigotry, sexism etc -- and why people so often talk past each other. If an actor is blind to the effect of their actions, they are difficult to convince that they probably should change their actions. To them, their actions don't have any effect (or given the audience, their functions aren't as side-effect free as they think they are... ;-).
- themodelplumber 12y ago
  Just wanted to add onto this with some information I've gleaned lately. My business consultant takes me through a lot of different ways of looking at personalities and right now we're on Jung. A lot of INTJs hang out here; here are some common INTJ mental tricks: * Holding yourself to a higher standard than those around you * Expecting yourself to make extremely bold, large career moves * Holding yourself to a tighter timeline than you hold others * Expecting yourself to achieve things on an unrealistic timeline As INTJs mature (i.e. through and past midlife), it is common for them: * To learn to make the small, bite-size steps that can help them put their big-picture plans into action * To learn to be easier on themselves An INTJ in the grip of their inferior function (stress, illness, tiredness / exhaustion) will commonly: * Binge on things that indulge their senses (from TV to loud music to porn to food to exercise) * Get zero enjoyment out of the binging * Take an adversarial attitude toward the outer world (so-and-so is plotting against me, etc.) An INTJ can escape this by: * Using their gift for thinking to plan, learn, write, chart, and strategize about ways to escape their unrealistic expectations, currently sub-optimal situation, etc. * Remembering that what others think about you is often a result of that person's personality dynamics, rather than whatever you, (the INTJ) think the other person must be thinking about you. For example, if you think an ENFP may be plotting against you because of something he said, that probably says more about your stress levels than it does about the ENFP's disposition. A good reference (and not just for INTJs): "Beside Ourselves," by Quenk. I hope this can be helpful to someone. It helps me just about every day.

71 points by braythwayt 12y ago

I'd appreciate a bit more content from this article, maybe discussing some specific strategies to reduce helplessness and increase resourcefulness. As it stands now, it's a bit too fluffy to take much away from. Additionally, I think that the core concept here is philosophically stoical, along the lines of "some things are up to us, some things are not up to us, and pain occurs when we aspire for the things that are not up to us to be up to us."

ctdavies 12y ago
I think pain probably still occurs when injured, too.
0359B02149AB 12y ago
I think it's always going to be fluffy. Hard things are hard.
braythwayt 12y ago
Author here. This is a funny area. I feel quite confident giving prescriptive advice about strategies for software development, but not so much about strategies for dealing with psychological issues like depression and helplessness. What I can do is share my own experience, and tell you where to find the resources that helped me. Thus... I would say that if anything in the post feels like something that is bothering you or has bothered you in the past, go and read about Learned Optimism, the rough opposite of Learned Helplessness: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learned_optimism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learned_optimism And especially Seligman’s self-help book on the subject: http://amzn.to/1zFQXcr http://amzn.to/1zFQXcr The book claims that “optimism” can be measured, and that there are strategies for improving it, and discusses those strategies. I personally found that they did help me, and further that Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) under the supervision of a professional helped me even more. I also wrote a post directly about Optimism a while back, it outlines Seligman’s strategies: http://braythwayt.com/homoiconic/2009/05/01/optimism.html http://braythwayt.com/homoiconic/2009/05/01/optimism.html There was lively HN discussion at the time, you may find it informative: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=589200 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=589200
- brerlapn 12y ago
  I also found Seligman's What You Can Change and What You Can't to be informative.
- e12e 12y ago
  As framed/contrasted in the article, the term "learned helplessness" seems a bit off. If we look at the venn-diagram, it would appear that we have: things we care about, things we can change, and things we don't realize we can change. It's those things, that are "learned helplessness" -- and a way to avoid it is to form "informed helplessness": to have an accurate idea of our world: what we really care about, what we can really change and what we really cannot change. First find out what we actually care about. Then figure out which of those things we are unhappy with. Then which of those we cannot change. This is our area of "informed helplessness". Periodically re-examine this area, to check if some things have become more malleable by ourself (this is to avoid "learned helplessness", or "artificial helplessness". The point being: if you sit down and figure out "what you cannot change" -- you're effectively teaching yourself to be "helpless" about those things. The key difference is presumably that it is a rational, active, decision. Perhaps the literature/research have some better terms for this -- but I felt it looked a bit inconsistent in the article.
  - brerlapn 12y ago
    "Informed helplessness" probably isn't the best frame for the concept, but maybe more like a cost-benefit analysis for giving a shit (CBAGAS), or the Gaullic shrug ( ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ ). My brother and I both lived in DC once upon a time. We both got parking tickets, some of which were legitimate and some of which were made up by the meter maids because the DC government is banking that you'd rather just pay $20 than go through the hassle of an appeal (which they usually just ignore). I would get enraged; my brother would just shrug and say "cost of living in the city--you want to walk home from your favorite bar or to your favorite restaurant, this is what you put up with." It wasn't that he thought it was okay, he just decided it wasn't worth the mental energy to get mad about it. I still get mad about them, but I can see that his perspective is far preferable.
  - braythwayt 12y ago
estefan 12y ago
Learned Optimism by Dr. Martin Seligman is well worth a read. It contains more details. There's a interesting experiment where he shows how dogs learn to be helpless. Fascinating.
wodenokoto 12y ago
I saw this as an introduction to what helplessness is, what it means and where it comes from and more importantly, that it can be dealt with. The reader is supposed to come away with the knowledge that this thing exist and it seems to make sense. The author tells of an expert and links to his work for more in depth.
brerlapn 12y ago
For the author-- the mockup graphic of the HN front page was a nice tough and made me laugh out loud. I'd be interested in a citation to the quote referencing gambling and bullying, too. Cryoshon, a reference to at least some books like Burns' Feeling Good, or a synopsis of the techniques (like how you would apply Seligman's personal-general-permanent framework to Burns' triple column cognitive distortions tool), would be helpful, I agree. And while I personally think stoicism is an underrated and misunderstood philosophy, I don't think the article is really getting at what you ascribe in your last sentence, because the article isn't saying that your circle of influence is immutably fixed. Unlearning helplessness may mean having the wisdom to accept things you can't change, but it could also mean thinking of ways to increase your circle of influence to be more in line with your circle of concern. Most people would say slavery is within their circle of concern, but would also feel as though it was well outside their circle of influence. And to some degree, it is, but you can still increase your sense of influence by donating money to effective anti-slavery organizations, for instance, or paying attention to where your consumer goods are produced. But you can also reasonably reduce your circle of concern without it being a surrender by acknowledging that there are bad things happening in the distance that you aren't reasonably obligated to spend energy worrying about. Deciding that your circle of influence is small, and that trying to change that is aspiring beyond your place sounds itself like learned helplessness, though.

wodenokoto 12y ago

What was the YouTube video about? Honestly ~50 minutes video is too long to embed without any kind of introduction to why I shouldd stop reading and start watching. Even 10 minutes is stretching it, if the video itself doesn't start of with an introduction.

braythwayt 12y ago
Inside joke. It’s the first episode of “The Prisoner,” a legendary dystopic television show featuring a prisoner whose jailers go to great lengths to induce a feeling of helplessness, but he resists. That’s literally the plot of every episode: The jailers thinking up new ways to teach him that he cannot control what happens, and him coming up with new ways to make the jailers feel that it’s them who cannot control what happens. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Prisoner https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Prisoner

karmakaze 12y ago

Here are the points that came up in my read: 1. See this as a concrete example of attachment/detachment: don't identify yourself with a situation. The event is not you. (Except if your pessimism is so great as to direct events, then it is you, but you can change.) 2. Circles of influence and concern are rarely nested. It's just we don't even consider areas of influence where we have no concern. 3. I'm saving the link to reference the HN graphic in future.

e12e 12y ago
> It's just we don't even consider areas of influence where we have no concern. This is one of the things that is at the heart of many arguments about "deep culture", bigotry, sexism etc -- and why people so often talk past each other. If an actor is blind to the effect of their actions, they are difficult to convince that they probably should change their actions. To them, their actions don't have any effect (or given the audience, their functions aren't as side-effect free as they think they are... ;-).
themodelplumber 12y ago
Just wanted to add onto this with some information I've gleaned lately. My business consultant takes me through a lot of different ways of looking at personalities and right now we're on Jung. A lot of INTJs hang out here; here are some common INTJ mental tricks: * Holding yourself to a higher standard than those around you * Expecting yourself to make extremely bold, large career moves * Holding yourself to a tighter timeline than you hold others * Expecting yourself to achieve things on an unrealistic timeline As INTJs mature (i.e. through and past midlife), it is common for them: * To learn to make the small, bite-size steps that can help them put their big-picture plans into action * To learn to be easier on themselves An INTJ in the grip of their inferior function (stress, illness, tiredness / exhaustion) will commonly: * Binge on things that indulge their senses (from TV to loud music to porn to food to exercise) * Get zero enjoyment out of the binging * Take an adversarial attitude toward the outer world (so-and-so is plotting against me, etc.) An INTJ can escape this by: * Using their gift for thinking to plan, learn, write, chart, and strategize about ways to escape their unrealistic expectations, currently sub-optimal situation, etc. * Remembering that what others think about you is often a result of that person's personality dynamics, rather than whatever you, (the INTJ) think the other person must be thinking about you. For example, if you think an ENFP may be plotting against you because of something he said, that probably says more about your stress levels than it does about the ENFP's disposition. A good reference (and not just for INTJs): "Beside Ourselves," by Quenk. I hope this can be helpful to someone. It helps me just about every day.