What Is Learned Helplessness?

Martin Seligman’s Experiments On Depression and Motivation

Over the past year, I’ve come to realize I have a tendency to want to fall asleep when my stress levels increase. It’s as if my mind looks at the potential stressor and decides I’m better off taking a nap and temporarily forgetting the woe of the day.

Whilst I do enjoy a good nap, this isn’t so great when I have important tasks to do but can’t complete them because my body and mind shut down. I once received a complaint at work from a candidate I was meant to call but didn’t because I fell asleep whilst working from home (he didn’t know that). I did have intentions to call him, but I was faced with another task that felt overwhelming to handle, which prompted a wave of tiredness to come over me.

This complaint prompted me to look into why I had this relationship to stress. Why was it that in the face of adversity, I seemed to shut down rather than find a solution or fight my way through it? It’s as if my body and mind’s automatic reaction was to see stress as something I couldn’t handle or rather cope with through unproductive means. In a sense, I am helpless and unable to appropriately tackle that stressor.

This led to me reading about learned helplessness theory for the first time — a model of depression tested and put forward by Martin Steinberg in the late 1960s to help explain why some individuals fail to take control of their situations in the face of adversities.

This theory can help explain why someone like myself feels a sudden urge to sleep when faced with daunting tasks, why we can stay in unhealthy or even abusive relationships, and why we fail to take the appropriate action in our lives to create a better future for ourselves.

Important stuff, so let’s look at the experiments more closely.

Learned Helplessness: Martin Seligman’s Dog Experiments: The Hypothesis

Martin went into his experiments wanting to test why some of us fail to take appropriate action during times of distress. He hoped his results would help form a model of depression, as a lack of motivation, apathetic feelings and hopelessness are hallmarks of the mental disease. Note: Whilst a model of depression was the aim of this work, I think this work can translate to any of us who have experienced adversities and struggle to change — depression or no depression.

He also aimed to discount hopelessness as an individual’s choice but rather a learned response acquired during childhood. This would help explain why individuals who are depressed or facing conflict feel as if they lack choice in their options despite the abundance of choices someone from the outside may see. It’s all well and good telling someone to change their attitude, but what if their bodies reaction is to automatically shut down? What if this is how they’ve learned to cope?

This is what Martin was trying to show.

The Experiement: Part 1

To test his hypotheses, Martin took 3 groups of dogs and placed them in a box. The first group of dogs were controls. They didn’t receive any treatment and were later released to prove that the other two group’s reactions were unique to their treatments, and not a result of any outside factor that the control dogs would have been subjected to.

The 2nd and 3rd group of dogs were paired in what scientists call “yolked pairs” meaning that a group 2 and group 3 dog would both be subject to the same treatment — in this case, an electric shock at the same time.

The only difference between the two groups was that group 2 dogs were able to stop being shocked by pressing a lever, and it was only when they pressed this lever that their group 3 pair would also stop being shocked. Group 3 dogs had no idea that they had been paired, or that an outside source was controlling the outcome of their pain.

In repeating this pattern, Martin hoped group 2 dogs would begin to understand that they DID have control over their experience of pain, whilst group 3 dogs felt the pain was inescapable. After all, group 2 dogs COULD end their pain by pressing a lever, if they chose to, while group 3 dogs had no control over their pain. To these group 3 dogs the pain was inescapable, only stopping at random and beyond their control.

After a series of repeats the group 2 dogs quickly learned that they could press a lever to stop their pain, and did so with quicker succession with each shock. Each time they would get shocked, they would end their pain through choosing to press the lever, meaning they understood they had control over their experience.

However, it’s what group 3 dogs began to show in part 2 of the experiment that interested Seligman and underpinned his theory of depression and learned helplessness…

The Experiment: Part 2

In part 2 of the experiment, Martin set up a test-box, divided down the middle by a fence with one side of the floor electrified, and the other side not. He then tested group 2 and group 3 dogs to see their reactions when placed in the box and shocked. He wondered, will these dogs jump the fence to safety or will they remain in pain on the electrified side? Would their prior learning of control or no control impact their decision to move?

What he found was monumental. Group 2 dogs, previously trained to understand that they COULD control the outcome of their painful experience through pressing a lever, jumped the fence to safety. Group 3 dogs, on the other hand, displayed signs of hopelessness in the form of lying down, whimpering and seemingly “succumbing” to their painful experience until the pain stopped. In Martin’s words;

“…a typical dog which has experienced uncontrollable shocks before avoidance training soon stops running and howling and sits or lies, quietly whining, until shock terminates. The dog does not cross the barrier and escape from shock. Rather, it seems to give up and passively accepts the shock” Martin Seligman, Learned Helplessness, 1972.

Why was this happening? The group 3 dogs DID have a route out of pain, and yet they failed to take appropriate action to seek that way out.

Let’s examine.

Takeaways From Seligman’s Experiments

Martin’s experiment proved that helplessness, defined here as inability to source one’s way out of a painful situation, could be a learned response, subjective to an individual’s early-childhood experiences. Even when the dogs in group 3 could have found a way out of their pain, their previous experience with an inescappable stressor in part 1 instilled a belief in them that they should “give-in” to the pain, rather than find a way out.

It’s also important to recognise the physiology of helplessnes. Here the dogs appeared to be depressed, choosing to succumb to the pain rather than fight it. Whilst this reaction can be seen to be unproductive, adaptive responses such as the dogs lying down and choosing NOT to fight CAN be beneficial if they can’t escape pain. Dissociation and other symtpoms of helplessnes and/or depression can shield us from pain by shutting us off from our emotional reactions.

For example, when I was younger I couldn’t escape the stressors that bothered me. Financially dependant and too young, I turned to helplessness as a way of coping. Sleeping for me was a way out because I didn’t have an option to fight or escape my environment. This is the reality for most children. We adapt to cope with the stressor, rather than fight it.

The problem with learned helplessness is that whilst it may assist in times where there is a pure lack of control, like a child who is experiencing pain they can’t escape, or the group 3 dogs in part 1 of the experiment, it teaches the body to always react this way towards stress.

Even when there are solutions to be found.

Final Remarks

The point of all this being, if we have previously lived in painful environments where we lacked control, we may have adopted a hopeless mindset in order to cope.

It’s important we’re aware of this in adulthood as we may be experiencing psychological and/or physiological responses to stress that, without awareness, we don’t fight, and succumb to life’s challenges. These responses may be automatic, and occur beyond our conscious awareness, like a bout of tiredness, anxiety, and invasive thoughts that tells us we lack the ability to change. In being aware of these automatic, learned responses, we can work with them to change.

Interestingly, the group 3 dogs who were demotivated to find a solution to their pain only learned to jump the fence when they were physically picked up and shown what they needed to do to escape. This highlights the importance of outside help in assisting us through our internal struggles.

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