What is learned helplessness and what does it teach us about emotional management?

Ever since psychologist Martin Seligman developed the concept of learned helplessness in the 1960s, Research in Psychology has not stopped throwing interesting results that show new facets about this freak.

Today we know that knowing well how it influences us is important to adopt a philosophy of life that allows us to face complicated situations. Therefore, in this article we will talk about what learned helplessness is and what it shows us about managing our emotions.

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What is learned helplessness?

Learned helplessness is known as a pattern of behavior that usually occurs when a subject is exposed in a repeated to a situation that generates discomfort and that he perceives as something that he cannot control or modify through his Actions. Specifically, it is characterized by **the adoption of an attitude of passivity and apparent resignation with what is happening **(which does not mean that it suffers less for it).

Learned helplessness has been observed in both people and non-human animals, and is reflected in behaviors such as giving up trying to avoid a painful stimulus, refusing to flee from a source of danger etc

Its importance is such that it has been extensively investigated in contexts as important as hospitals, given that it has been seen that many patients fail to communicate how they feel. find or show symptoms that show the progression or persistence of the disease because they assume that they can do nothing to improve their health, or even can make it easier for them to suffer unnecessary harm during treatments for not expressing how they feel.

On the other hand, learned helplessness is closely related to the concept of Control locus. This is the type of belief through which people assume that what happens to them, be it good or bad, is caused by their own actions or, on the contrary, is generated by external circumstances, such as luck or the behavior of other people.

For example, there are those who present a problematic locus of control because they assume that the good things that happen to them are due to the help of others and that the bad things that happen to them are their fault; or, on the contrary, other people believe that what makes them suffer is always the fault of the world around them, and that the good things that happen to them are always a reflection of their own merits.

In learned helplessness, the fact of repeatedly suffering an unpleasant or physically or emotionally painful experience makes the person internalize the idea that you can no longer do anything to get out of that situation by your own means, and that in any case the best thing that can happen to him is that something or someone intervenes so that this source of aversive stimuli stops affecting him.

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The implications of learned helplessness in the management of emotions

As we have seen, learned helplessness means that, through the objective actions that occur to us in our environment, let us draw conclusions about the degree of control we have over what occurs. Therefore, through this psychological mechanism, it is very easy for us to fall into a pessimistic mentality that paralyzes us and that leads us to give up a series of options that are really within our reach, even if we are not aware of them.

For example, in a very famous experiment, people were asked to perform a series of tasks that required concentration, while being exposed to distracting sounds. A part of the participants was told that they could get up to turn off that emission of sounds by pressing a button, while the others were not given that option.

As well; although in most cases the group of people with the ability to press the button could eliminate those distractions, they usually did not and preferred not to waste time to devote to the task; however, on average they showed significantly better performance than those who couldn't turn those sounds off. That is to say, that the simple fact of knowing that they had more control over the situation allowed them to have a more proactive attitude towards the challenge before them.

Thus, we must not forget that learned helplessness, which can occur in any person if the circumstances are right, can make us believe that we have less control than we really do, making us fall into a vicious circle of passivity and suffering. It is important to maintain a framework of interpretation of reality that allows us to bear in mind that we always we have a certain decision-making capacity, either about our environment or about our own processes mental.

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