 Hey guys, today's video I'm going to talk about a thing called learned helplessness Learned helplessness. What is it and what it can tell you about? Maybe sometimes you feel Hopeless you feel like everything you've tried before hasn't worked. I'm going to tell you why you feel that way and how you can overcome it Learned helplessness, right? What is it? It's important to know this because it's a very very important discovery in psychology Okay, so it was discovered by Kai in the 60s Martin Seligman famous psychologist well-known psychologist He was involved in this movement of positive psychology. Okay. He later became more involved in that movement That was really that the idea that psychology tends to focus on people who have serious serious problems Okay, dysfunctional problems and he said well, yeah, it's great That psychology is helping those people but psychology in general should be helping everybody Should be helping people live complete happy lives live Optimally in the world. Okay, achieve happiness. So that's Martin Seligman, right? So he was interested way back in the 60s in how How learning occurs and how can people learn through negative experiences, okay? That's kind of what he was interested in. He was kind of following up on work from Pavlov You've probably heard of Pavlov's dogs and conditioning. Okay, so basically what Seligman wanted to find out is He used dogs in this experiment and by the way the experiment I'm going to tell you about here. It's quite cruel Okay, so back in the 60s the ethical guidelines around psychological experiments were much more laxadisical even nonexistent than they are today, right and So you could kind of get away with a lot of the things back in the 60s that you couldn't do now You couldn't do this type of an experiment nowadays Okay, certainly with dogs. So what he did was he wanted to find out well, okay Dogs can they learn through negative experiences? So what he did was? He had these dogs in his laboratory and he would put them into this sort of cage right this box and he would tie them down and While they were tied down he would administer these electrical shocks to the dog. Okay And at the same time there would be a sound made Okay, so after time what he learned was the dog learned to fear The sound even when it wasn't being shocked So for a while it would shut it would shock the dog they would shock the dog and make a noise Okay, and over time. Yes, the dog learned to fear the noise even when it wasn't shocked So basically the discovery there is and it might seem obvious to me and you because we know how clever dogs are sometimes The discovery was dogs can learn to associate okay associate two things But the interesting thing was In the experiment the dog was tied down Okay, and they figured that okay well untied dog now and We'll continue to give them the electrical shocks and the assumption was of course now that they're free They're going to just jump away from the electrical shock Every time it's administered. Okay That is not what happened though When they untied the dogs who had been in the experiment they found that the dog just stood there Okay, helplessly. It wasn't trying to escape even when they weren't tied down anymore And there was an easy way for the dog to escape right, so they were trying to figure out what is happening here and They figured out because they put new dogs in who hadn't been shocked in the past through the experiment And gave them shocks and straight away they would jump out when they're not tied down so The outcome of this experiment the takeaway from it is the dogs learned to be helpless Through the experiment because when they were tied down and they were given the electrical shocks Initially, they try to escape. Okay, try to escape try to escape try to escape, but they're tied down so they learned Trying doesn't work. That's what the outcome was for the dog the takeaway message for the dog If I try it's pointless doesn't work and then even when a solution was there for the dogs Okay, when they actually could escape they refused to see it. They refused they couldn't see it. Okay So that's what learned helplessness is when you try something. That's a bad strategy Okay, over a long period of time You you begin to accept that any strategy I now take on in the future even if it's a different strategy Or the same strategy at a different time It's pointless trying doesn't work now that was with dogs Okay, and you can induce this in all sorts of other animals another example is fish Okay, so if you have fish in a fish tank, and you have maybe one predatory fish and a bunch of smaller prey smaller fish if They're left to their own natural devices What will happen is the big fish the predatory fish will eat those but in an experiment what you can do is you can divide the fish tank with a Sheet of glass or perspex and you can have the predatory fish on one side and the prey fish the smaller fish on the other side What will happen is the big fish will start charging at the paint that the sheave glass trying to get to the smaller fish And because you know fish don't learn as quickly as we do it takes a long time for the fish learn This isn't working, but it takes a long time, right? So they keep trying over and over again hitting their their face against the glass, right? After a while the fish learns this is pointless this won't work Okay, and at that point if you take out the glass What you'll see is the smaller fish will swim right up to the predatory fish. They'll even start cleaning his teeth Okay, so again we can see the learned helplessness all the fish has to do is try again And it'll be successful Okay Now in the animal kingdom we can see that and if you think humans are not susceptible to learned helplessness think again We absolutely are one hundred percent, okay? Humans are very susceptible to learned helplessness and you can eat they've even done experiments on this You can induce learned helplessness in humans in a matter of minutes Okay, take away from this is and why it's important for you to understand what learned helplessness is all about Is that if you are thinking about your life and your future Okay, and the things that you would like to have happen in your life the nice experiences you would like to have and You have a sense that it's pointless. It's hopeless. It won't work for me. I've tried everything before okay Remember the dog remember the fish, okay? There is always a strategy It's just that you haven't come across the right strategy yet or You gave up using a strategy that wasn't useful at one point in your past, but now might actually be useful, okay? so there are always New strategy there is always a strategy that will work for you no matter what area of your life you are interested in improving, okay? So I want you to just Be aware that you are susceptible to that Trick of the mind, okay? And if you feel hopeless and you feel like there's no point in trying anything anymore Always remember now is the time to start reevaluating my strategy Okay, if I think about my strategy and I believe that it's it's possible for me to move forward in this area I know I can find a strategy Maybe that involves looking at your old strategy and say you know that wasn't work That wasn't working and I know why that wasn't working Okay, and it's hard to do that right because it would be great if just every strategy We stumbled upon was the right one But we need to continually reevaluate our strategies and maybe try strategies that we've given up on in the past Okay, so guys bear that in mind and that's Martin Seligman's learned helplessness and Hope you found it interesting and I will talk to you guys soon. Take care