 my beautiful internet friends and welcome back. Cakes and aloo are gonna be joining us for a little bit today. I was gonna do a video today, just kind of logging my trip up to Denver and back down. I'm going to see a new surgeon to check on what's going on with my leg, why it hurts, why I can't walk, why I can't use my prosthetic leg if there's any issues on and so forth. And as you guys know, I had been like talking to doctors or making appointments or really doing anything moving forward for like a couple of weeks. I was talking about how I was like living in denial and something hit me this morning. I don't think I've been living in denial about what's going on. I think I have been experiencing something called learned helplessness. I'm gonna put on some fake nails. Pretty nails make me feel more in control of my life and we're gonna learn about and talk about something called learned helplessness and how I think that that is what has been plaguing me. Have you ever felt helpless? This can be one of the most painful feelings ever. Yeah, it really is. Feeling like you don't have control of a situation I think is one of the worst experiences that human beings can go through. It's not like we're all control freaks but we also kind of are. Like we wanna feel like we have control of our own lives and when we feel helpless, that's paralyzing, that's exhausting, that's really, really scary. Helplessness is more than just sadness. It's a feeling that you can't change your negative situation and that you might be stuck feeling that way for a long period of time. I have mentioned on this channel more than once how I have felt like I was cursed or doomed or anything like that and that's exactly what this is talking about. Like an inability to change my circumstances and like it's gonna be stuck this way for a very long time. Shaking off helplessness feels like an uphill battle. Even if you have your friends and family who want to help you, you might express your feelings only to hear things like this. You can do it. Don't be so down on yourself. Just give it a try. This is no joke. People who love me, people who care about me, people like you guys are telling me like when I'm really down and I feel hopeless and helpless and just lost that like you can do this. Just keep moving forward. Like keep your head up and things like that and it just feels so crushing and like I can't express to people how I feel like they don't get it and how like no, you don't understand like there's nothing I can do to change the situation and it feels like it's never gonna get better. Like I'm always gonna be cursed or even pain forever. Like I am helpless to change the situation even though I'm not necessarily. Unfortunately, the feeling of helplessness is a belief that you can't do it. This belief may be so strong that trying to believe anything else would seem absolutely ridiculous. Even though your friends and family have good intentions with their encouraging words, the words don't stick. Yes, that's the thing. It does seem ridiculous. And the reason I say that is because like I always say I've had 14 years of experience of like failed surgeries and things never going right. And so trying to have a conversation with someone where they're telling me like it's gonna work out. Like this surgery will go fine or like let's just go see another doctor or whatever and like, well, we'll figure out what's going on seems ridiculous to me. Cause I'm like, no, you don't get it. Everything in my life, everything in my experience tells me that will not work out. There's actually science behind the way that we talk to ourselves and develop a feeling of helplessness. And I think that that has to be true because it's almost like this helpless victim mindset of like just throwing on my hands. Like, well, I can't do anything. Like I just, I just, I have no control here. I'm helpless. Like I'm just leaf on a stream and life is throwing me towards the waterfall. So what can I do about it? So I might as well just give up. And when I or when someone gets in that mindset it can be a pretty dangerous place to be in. Like you can get hopeless pretty quickly. And the thing is we can change our mindsets. Graduate student Martin Seligman when my favorite psychologist was conducting an experiment on dogs when he noticed that they seemed, well, helpless. They were given this very simple task but many had given up on even trying. What caused this helplessness in these dogs? Were certain dogs helpless or were all dogs at risk for learning this helplessness? Like that giving up on trying, I think is what I've been talking about with living in denial. Like I'm just gonna pretend like, no, this is really happening. So I'm not gonna do anything to progress forward. Like I've done the bare minimum when it comes to taking care of my like the bare minimum. But I'm like, it's not gonna make a difference anyways. So why would I do anything? Like it's not gonna help. So why am I gonna waste any energy or effort? His experiment consisted of three groups of dogs. The first set of dogs was the control group. The second set were given shocks but were given the ability to turn off the shocks with a simple action. And the third set were given shocks without any way to turn off the shocks. So the second set of dogs had control over their shocks. They could push a button and they could stop getting shocked. The third set had no control over their shocks. Imagine what this taught the dogs about their ability to control the environment and remove themselves from a bad situation. Not surprisingly, the third set of dogs learned a feeling of helplessness. I know, this is a really sad study. Like this has really messed up. I feel super bad for the puppy. I mean, yeah, we do learn stuff from experiments like this, but still. After the initial exposure to the shocks, the dogs were given a second set of shocks. In order to stop the shocks, all the dogs had to do was just walk to the other side of the room. Just a few steps could stop these new shocks. So after the poor puppies had been traumatized, they were free to just leave. They could take control of our own destiny. They could do what they needed to do to get out of that situation, but did they? The second set of dogs, the ones who could actually control the shocks the first time were significantly more likely to simply just walk across the room and stop the shocks. What's more important is that they were significantly more likely to actually try to stop the shocks. However, the third set of dogs, the ones who originally had no control over whether or not they got shocked were much more likely to literally sit down and just accept the shocks. So the dogs that have been taught that they didn't have any control in their lives just didn't do anything. Cause why would they? It's never going to get better. Like it's never going to change even though it could change for them, even though they had the ability to move forward in their lives and get away from that pain. At the root of learned helplessness are beliefs that you are out of control and that you do not have power to make changes. Just like the dogs in those experiments, we too as humans can develop the feeling of helplessness through our own beliefs. How do you create these beliefs? Let's say you're an aspiring singer, but you hold on to a limiting belief that says you might not be very talented. Deep down, you truly believe that maybe you won't make it big. Or let's say you've experienced a lot of physical pain and suffering and failed surgeries over the course of your life and you hold on to this limiting belief that nothing you ever do will fix it, that no medication, that no doctor's appointment, that no visit, that no specialist, that no alternative situation will ever fix anything. You fight this belief by entering a singing contest and during the singing contest, you start to compare yourself to all the other contestants. You tell yourself that they are more talented and that you don't even stand a chance against them. When it comes time for the judges to pick a winner, you don't even place. When you get home, you tell yourself that you're not a good singer. You use the failure of your loss to justify these beliefs. In my situation, you use every failed surgery or everything that didn't go right to just keep reinforcing this belief that like, see, I told you, I told you that it's never gonna work. You're never gonna be okay. You're never gonna be out of pain. So why even try? Before you know it, you are so set in your belief that you quit singing altogether, even though you love it. Let's take a step backwards and look at the facts. Does the result of one singing contest automatically mean that the people who didn't place were bad singers? Not necessarily. Does the result of one or two or three or four failed surgeries or procedures set back mean that it's never going to get better? No, it does not mean that. That is faulty logic. Do singers have more than one shot to enter a contest and prove their worth as a great singer? Of course. In this situation, the singing contest is similar to the first set of shocks in Seligman's experiment. You experience a failure, aka losing the contest or getting shocks and you felt like you couldn't control the outcome. When you face another opportunity in the future to overcome that failure, you assume that you have no control over the outcome and you just sit down. You just don't do it because why would it work? Why would anything ever work? Because it hasn't, because you're helpless. We see the way that our failure leads to helplessness which ultimately leads to more failure. But the subsequent failures aren't because the helpless person isn't good enough or can't control the outcome of the situation. The subsequent failures come from the belief that they can't even control the situation and the feeling of learned helplessness. Because sincerely, if you don't even try, you aren't going to move forward. Like if I don't seek help, if I don't seek treatment, if I don't seek other answers, the belief that it's never going to get better will continue because it's not gonna get better because I'm not helping myself. Optimists or people who are less likely to be affected by learned helplessness are likely to say, yes, yes, you can break the cycle and prevent failures caused by feelings of helplessness. Pessimists, on the other hand, or people who are more likely to fall into the trap of learned helplessness may say, no, it's out of my control. Here's a secret for you. There are ways to help yourself transform into an optimist. And side note, I think an important distinction here is that sometimes we think we are an optimist or a pessimist that doesn't exist. Like you can be optimistic, you can be pessimistic. Your identity is not in one of those things. There are many things I'm super optimistic with. Some people see me as a really optimistic person. There are other times I'm super pessimistic. I'm just a salt shaker of like pessimism, just shaking all over myself. So it works both ways. So if you see yourself one way or people have told you that you're an optimist or you're a pessimist or you're like a positive person or you're just always negative, don't listen to that. Everyone is many things, we're all a mixed bag. There are ways to break out of that cycle of learned helplessness and prevent future failures and roadblocks. You can actually use optimism as a tool to give yourself the best chance at success. That idea of controlling our destiny that we have some control over it is kind of vital. Cause here's the reality. We don't have control over what happens to us, but we do have control of how we respond to whatever occurs. That is important to hold on to because otherwise I think we kind of lose our minds thinking that everything is out of our hands, that we're helpless, that we can't, that we just can't do anything and we're just being washed along by the tide of the world and that's not true. We do have choices and our mindset does affect things. So that's just a little bit about learned helplessness and I think that that's kind of what I've been experiencing. I've been like the dog that kept getting shocked and didn't have any control and now that I have control, I'm still not walking across the room, right? So today I'm walking across the room. Today I'm going to take a leap and go up to Denver and talk to a doctor even though I really don't want to and see what the next step is. Just like swallow my emotions, not shove them down into a box and never experience them again, but like put them on a shelf temporarily to be dealt with at a different time and do what I need to do so I can keep moving forward because I'm not helpless. I do have some say in my life and I do have every say in my actions and my reactions to what happens to me and so do you. So I'm curious if you've ever felt this learned helplessness in your own life, comment down below. Hey everybody, it's Joe of the future here. So I know so many of you guys have been asking me how things went. I do have information for you guys about how my doctor's appointment went but it was a little bit too long for this video. So the next video is gonna cover everything that I learned and what the future is going to look like. I'm excited to share that with you guys. I'm a little bit, you know, nervous for it but I think it will be good long term. So make sure that you hit like and subscribe on the channel so you can see that upcoming video and I can't wait to see you guys then. I look forward to reading your comments, responding to them and learning from you guys. By the way, if you guys are interested in getting updates a little bit faster than I can actually produce videos about them, I do post things on Instagram a little bit earlier. So if you're interested in following along, hop over to my Instagram, I look forward to seeing you there. I love you guys, I'm thinking of you and I will see you soon. Bye guys.