Achieving happiness by ‘unlearning’ helplessness

An optimist may see a light where there is none, but why must the pessimist always run to blow it out?

Renee Descartes

In psychology, there’s something that’s studied and referred to as ‘learned helplessness’. You are probably familiar with it even if you don’t know it by that term.

For instance, have you ever said or thought or felt something like this:

“That’s how it’s always been. It will never change” or

“It’s because of me” or

“I’ll never be able to do it”

Now, most of us may have such thoughts or feelings from time to time but they are fleeting. We don’t hold on to such thoughts and often, we make attempts to prove our thinking wrong. Most of the time, we do tend to have a more optimistic way of handling situations even if at first, we may feel pessimistic.

But for someone who has ‘learned to be helpless’, these kinds of thoughts and feelings tend to persist as ongoing pessimism. Consequently, they feel less and less in control of their lives.

They tend to perceive situations as being permanent and unlikely to change:

“That’s how it’s always been. It will never change”

They also tend to perceive them as ‘personal’ – a direct reflection on themselves:

“It’s because of me”

And this way of looking at things can be pervasive

“I’m never be able to do it”.

Such people have truly learned to feel helpless so that, even when situations change and opportunities do arise, they feel unable to make the most of them, to really give themselves a chance!

I’m sure you can see how pessimism and learned helplessness can prevent you from achieving happiness.

Optimists, on the other hand, are believers in change, in opportunity, in self-efficacy (being effective) and self-determination. They are not prepared to let others or other things prevent them from achieving happiness. Instead, they are convinced that they, and only they, are responsible for their happiness. They know that the situations they encounter in life are ones that their own thinking, beliefs and attitudes have attracted.

The man who introduced the concept of ‘learned helplessness’, Martin Seligman, was also the man who developed the idea of ‘learned optimism’.

We are capable of learning anything and optimism is one of the things that we can learn. I should know!

For a long time, I was an incurable pessimist, or so I thought (well, would you expect different from a pessimist?)! But there came a point in my life when sheer logic led me to consider the fact that there were other ways of being. That was the time it actually struck me that I could choose to be happy.

Now, I often here people admitting that ‘happiness is a choice’. But they often say it with such a grim face, sometimes adding “but it’s so hard”. And there you have a bit of ‘learned helplessness’ sneaking in!

So, I think it’s worth asking: Do I really believe that happiness is a choice? And if so, what does that mean for me in a very real and practical sense? How do you live that belief everyday?

I’ll leave you to reflect on that one and share my thoughts on it in my next post!

In the meantime, I hope you ‘unlearn some helplessness‘ in time for Thanksgiving!