Learned Helplessness

There’s nothing more frustrating than feeling powerless.  But what’s more tragic is when people actually have the tools at hand to change their situation, but feel trapped or unable to act.   Psychologists call this learned helplessness.  One of the best books I’ve read lately, Brain Rules by Dr. John J. Medina, has a great chapter about this subject, and how learned helplessness contributes significantly to depression.

Dr. Medina talks specifically about Learned Helplessness in his chapter on stress.  From the brain and body’s perspective, stress can be defined as having three critical components- 1) the cause of the stress  produces a physiological change in the body; 2) you’d avoid this stressor or experience if you could, and 3) You don’t feel in control of the stressor.   For example,  one person might find a rollercoaster stressful because they can’t get off when they’ve had enough, but another person enjoys the ride, because it’s exactly what they bargained for in the first place, even though the bodily and mental changes during the ride for each person may be nearly identical.

Learned helplessness comes about when people feel victimized or particularly pessimistic.  This negative mindset prevents people from seeing potential solutions to their problems.  Instead, they find all the reasons in the world why they can’t do something, or why they feel trapped.  We’ve all had moments like these, where we may not like our job or a teacher, but feel powerless to change the status quo.  We tell ourselves we need to stay in this job and won’t be able to find another one as good, even though we hate it.  However, as long as we feel trapped and discouraged, we’ll never get out of this negative situation into anything better- we merely accept that this is all we deserve.  It’s what we call around our house the “might as well go eat worms” attitude.

My husband got to this point with his job a number of years ago.  He felt frustrated, and contemplated leaving.  He submitted his resume and and went on some interviews.  He almost took a new job at another hospital, but instead, stayed where he was, after negotiating new and different responsibilities with his boss.  He didn’t go look for a new job to blackmail his boss into compromise, though.  The process of looking for and finding another possible job served to change his mindset about the benefits of his current position to what else was available.  It made him feel wanted and appreciated where he was, and that someone else at a new place appreciated his talents and skills as well.   The experience changed his whole feeling of being trapped into one where he felt he had the power to make decisions about his destiny.

With kids who struggle in school or with learning disabilities, parents, teachers and administrators often throw a lot of accomodations, ideas and solutions at a kid, hoping that something will stick.  We hope they will begin to understand why organization and study skills are important.  We hope they’ll believe what we tell them.  We want to scaffold their skills and help them succeed.  But in the end, the kid has to do the work on their own.  They have to use the skills you try to help them develop.  And at some point, they have to fly on their own, without you waiting there to catch their every mistake or failure.Yet, some kids developa learned helplessness attitude, because someone is always stepping in to save the day, and they don’t feel like they have any responsibility for their success or their failures- it was all external to them.

In that catch-22 way of the world, one of the biggest ways to get over learned helplessness is success.  The more a child has small successes on their own, the more they are encouraged to try new things, stretch a bit, and see what they can do.  While it can be challenging to help a kid who has developed this failure attitude to turn it around, it’s absolutely vital.

There’s another great book out there for parents of kids  who struggle with this, called The Shut Down Learner, Helping Your Academically Discouraged Child by Dr. Richard Selznick, PhD.  I have an interview with Rich coming up on the LD Podcast, and we talk about ways to help kids who simply have turned off and feel at a loss to where to begin to find success in school.  The Shut Down Learner is also about kids who feel stress about school, who feel out of control, and don’t know how to change this mindset that makes them feel trapped and frustrated every day.  These are kids who are experiencing learned helpessness and may be prone to depression as a result, because they don’t feel any power to control their lives or situation.

While helping a child see the light at the end of the tunnel and find the bright spots where they can shine can be difficult, it’s absolutely critical to their development.  It’s equally as critical for us to help our friends to see their way out of the darkness in their own lives, if we can.  But in each case, what needs to happen is just find a place to begin, to start, to try, and give it a shot.

After all, what do you have to lose?

Tags: brain rules, John medina, learned helplessness

Understanding Attention

As someone with two kids with ADHD, attention is a big deal to us.  I’ve made it my job to understand how attention works, how to get it, how to focus it, and how sustain it, because this information is vital to helping my kids learn how to learn most effectively.

Turns out, this has a shiny, interesting byproduct- the shift in the advertising and the PR markets is becoming all about how to get and sustain attention.    Whether you are talking about parenting, education, presentations, marketing- aspects of all of these endeavors involves, at its heart, attention.

Every human is equipped with a brain that has been customized by biology and experience over time.  We now know that brains are always changing, forming new connections, pruning out old ones, even after you are an adult.  People’s faces can be encoded on one neuron in your brain.* For everything you read, everything you see, everything you learn, your brain is changed by this process and customized for your needs.

Attention is the system that gets you to focus and possibly encode new information.  Our brains are constantly looking for new information and running complex algorithms to determine whether that thing moving in your peripheral vision is harmless, or a danger.  That’s part of our simplest flight or fight mechanism, and we can’t turn that off.

However, for people with ADHD, that system runs on high alert most times.  Every new and novel stimulus, from the kid dropping a pencil next to you to the teacher writing on the board, to thinking about what’s for lunch are competing for brain space and attention concurrently.  With ADHD, people have more trouble than most in directing their attention to a particular stimuls and tuning out all the others.  I often describe it as trying to watch TV with someone who loves to channel surf.  Just when you are getting into a show, someone comes along and changes the channel, and you don’t have the remote. Very annoying.

You get lots of little pieces of information this way, but integrating it into a coherent whole can be difficult.  When you attention keeps switching to pay attention up to each novel piece of information, you can lose a grip on the story line, and having to refocus can take time.  Medication for ADHD essentially gives people back the remote control, and their brains become a bit better at prioritizing what needs immediate attention and what can wait in line.

Attention essentially lets us decide what piece of information we can work on in our “working memory”- basically your mind’s lab bench.  You can work on problems, write, solve  math problems- but sooner or later, that project is going to need to be put away or stored, so you can move on to the next thing.  Some things get trashed, others get put away for short term or long term storage- and the more interesting things are, the more other pieces of information or relevant connections you can make to the new information, the more “copies” are put away in different folders in your brain.  Each time you think about your mom’s cookies for example, you not only can get to this memory from thinking about your mom, seeing a picture, but even seeing a silimar cookie or smelling cookies in the oven can bring this full memory back in all of its sensory glory.    This memory has many connections, so you can retrive it from many different storage places, so to speak.

Attention is something we all want.  Emotionally, it validates us as people.  It allows us to make deeper and more meaningful connections.  But if you overload the attention service, things become chaotic- the lab bench has too much stuff going on, and your brain can go so far as to boil over – many temper tantrums in adults and kids are caused by attention buffers beging overloaded and going into meltdown, or in entreme cases, people simply go to sleep to knock out the background noise, explaining why babies often simply go to sleep even in noisy shopping malls- their attention system gets overloaded, they get cranky, and respond by shutting off and sleeping.

If you really want to get ahead in the world of marketing, in the world of PR, presentation, education- whatever, really- it wouldn’t hurt to start by understanding how you can get and then focus the inborn attention mechanism we all have.  Then you can start to figure out how to sustain it, encode information into memory, and make it useful and relevant for your audience.

John Medina has a great book out about the Brain that I really think everyone should read- it’s called Brain Rules, and I have links to it below.  You could do worse than to learn how to use and manipulate the one tool every human has with them every day.

*See Brain Rules, by John Medina, for more in depth discussion about the brain and science- I’m really enjoying the Audible version.  His website is incredibly helpful as well.

Tags: ADHD, analogies, attention, brain rules, education, focus, John medina, marketing, PR