In 1967 a young Martin Seligman was working in the lab at UPenn, reluctantly studying dogs using shock treatment (Seligman, an avid dog lover, recently shared during a lecture I was attending that he always shocked himself before the dogs). It was well known at the time that dogs with an unescapable shock would give up ~ that nothing they did mattered. The theory at the time was they “learned” to be helpless.
Learned helplessness was then observed in many species - cats, rats, mice, monkeys - yes, and humans. Yet, some people (and animals) were resistant to helplessness.
No matter how long you shocked them, they didn’t give up.
Eventually, neuroscience showed us that it’s actually the other way around: passivity is the default, but we learn as children that we can control adverse events.
We learn that we have the ability to affect our environment.
We learn we have efficacy and agency ~ that we can make choices and create different outcomes.
But what is it about those that don’t give up?
And those that bounce back quickly?
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What Seligman and his colleagues went on to discover is something they coined the “hope circuit” ~ an interaction in the brain between a structure called the dorsal raphe nucleus (which drives passivity) and the medial prefrontal cortex (a source of agency and control.
Essentially, by learning what you’re capable of (medial prefrontal cortex) you overcome passivity (dorsal raphe nucleus).
Bad things are going to happen.
It’s a fact of human life that challenges are going to come. People get sick. Economies slide. Nature reacts to our abuse of her. According to the updated theory of learned helplessness, “passivity and heightened anxiety are the default mammalian reaction to prolonged bad events”1.
The stupid adage that you can’t control what happens to you but you can control how you respond is actually true. It’s how we explain these events to ourselves and what we do about it.
When we believe that the events are:
Short term
Limited in effect
Within our control to manage
We unlock helplessness and gain the ability to change.
That’s the recipe for hope!
That’s why I’m so fond of saying:
You have to believe that change is possible in order to take action!
You have to have HOPE that things can change.
Hope is what drives us to try.
Hope is what fuels efforts towards change.
I got a lot of feedback on the recent episode of Better Than Fine, which is why I put together a little guidebook that you can get for free here.
Explanatory Style, Mindset, & Hope
Explanatory style is just that - the way we explain our world and our place in it to oneself. Hope and optimism go hand in hand - they are a belief that things can get better and a recognition that just like there are problems, there are also upsides, lessons, and solutions.
Mindset is a collection of beliefs that influence our explanatory style. When we have a pessimistic explanatory style and a fixed mindset we tend towards helplessness.
There are a lot of overwhelming, scary, and unprecedented challenges in the world today. Along with them come increases in anxiety, depression, and declining mental and physical health.
Getting out of this challenged place will require tenacity, grit, creativity, problem solving, and teamwork. How do we get ourselves there?
IMHO it’s going to require incredible amounts of hope. For me personally that comes from a deep belief in humanities ingenuity, collaboration, and grit.
My evidence: the miracle that humans have already made it this far.
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https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4920136/#:~:text=Learned%20helplessness%2C%20the%20failure%20to,learning%20undermined%20trying%20to%20escape.