
Unlearning Helplessness - braythwayt
http://braythwayt.com/2015/01/20/learned-helplessness.html
======
karmakaze
Here are the points that came up in my read:

1\. See this as a concrete example of attachment/detachment: don't identify
yourself with a situation. The event is not you. (Except if your pessimism is
so great as to direct events, then it is you, but you can change.)

2\. Circles of influence and concern are rarely nested. It's just we don't
even consider areas of influence where we have no concern.

3\. I'm saving the link to reference the HN graphic in future.

~~~
themodelplumber
Just wanted to add onto this with some information I've gleaned lately. My
business consultant takes me through a lot of different ways of looking at
personalities and right now we're on Jung.

A lot of INTJs hang out here; here are some common INTJ mental tricks:

* Holding yourself to a higher standard than those around you

* Expecting yourself to make extremely bold, large career moves

* Holding yourself to a tighter timeline than you hold others

* Expecting yourself to achieve things on an unrealistic timeline

As INTJs mature (i.e. through and past midlife), it is common for them:

* To learn to make the small, bite-size steps that can help them put their big-picture plans into action

* To learn to be easier on themselves

An INTJ in the grip of their inferior function (stress, illness, tiredness /
exhaustion) will commonly:

* Binge on things that indulge their senses (from TV to loud music to porn to food to exercise)

* Get zero enjoyment out of the binging

* Take an adversarial attitude toward the outer world (so-and-so is plotting against me, etc.)

An INTJ can escape this by:

* Using their gift for thinking to plan, learn, write, chart, and strategize about ways to escape their unrealistic expectations, currently sub-optimal situation, etc.

* Remembering that what others think about you is often a result of that person's personality dynamics, rather than whatever you, (the INTJ) think the other person must be thinking about you. For example, if you think an ENFP may be plotting against you because of something he said, that probably says more about your stress levels than it does about the ENFP's disposition.

A good reference (and not just for INTJs): "Beside Ourselves," by Quenk.

I hope this can be helpful to someone. It helps me just about every day.

~~~
nickysielicki
MBTI is largely bullshit.[0]

[0]:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myers%E2%80%93Briggs_Type_Indic...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myers%E2%80%93Briggs_Type_Indicator#Criticism)

~~~
amyjess
The test is largely bullshit, but the function stack that underpins the MBTI
concept is a good model of the way people think.

It just turns out that discovering somebody's function stack is way harder
than it looks. Rather than take a test, it's best to study the functions, pay
attention to how you think, and suss out how your function stack works.

Of course, the MBTI letters that are used to describe the types are
misleading. You look at INTJ and think "somebody who favors introversion,
intuition, thinking, and judging", and that's such a horrible
oversimplification it's easy to dismiss. But if you're familiar with the
function stack, then you know INTJ is code for "introverted intuition >
extraverted thinking > introverted feeling > extraverted sensing" (for short:
"Ni > Te > Fi > Se"), and if you know how those functions are defined, then
you can actually get a decent grasp on how an INTJ thinks.

I can say that from doing a lot of introspection that my four functions are
Si, Fe, Ti, and Ne. I have still yet to suss out the exact _order_ of my
functions, and that appears to change with my mood. The two most plausible
orders for me are Si>Fe>Ti>Ne and Ti>Ne>Si>Fe, which would make me either ISFJ
or INTP, respectively. The usual descriptions of _both_ types resonate very
strongly with me in different situations (but never at the same time), and I
can't say the same about any other type. One thing to note is that people can
develop their weaker functions to the point where it becomes possible to
emulate a type with the same functions but in a different order (there are
four such clusters consisting of four types each), so maybe I'm just good at
wielding my lower functions.

~~~
themodelplumber
Fascinating that you think you may be ISFJ or INTP. I am married to an ISFJ
and have a few ISFJ friends and they are quite a bit different from my INTP
friends and family members.

------
cryoshon
I'd appreciate a bit more content from this article, maybe discussing some
specific strategies to reduce helplessness and increase resourcefulness.

As it stands now, it's a bit too fluffy to take much away from.

Additionally, I think that the core concept here is philosophically stoical,
along the lines of "some things are up to us, some things are not up to us,
and pain occurs when we aspire for the things that are not up to us to be up
to us."

~~~
braythwayt
Author here.

This is a funny area. I feel quite confident giving prescriptive advice about
strategies for software development, but not so much about strategies for
dealing with psychological issues like depression and helplessness.

What I can do is share my own experience, and tell you where to find the
resources that helped me. Thus... I would say that if anything in the post
feels like something that is bothering you or has bothered you in the past, go
and read about Learned Optimism, the rough opposite of Learned Helplessness:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learned_optimism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learned_optimism)

And especially Seligman’s self-help book on the subject:
[http://amzn.to/1zFQXcr](http://amzn.to/1zFQXcr)

The book claims that “optimism” can be measured, and that there are strategies
for improving it, and discusses those strategies. I personally found that they
did help me, and further that Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) under the
supervision of a professional helped me even more.

I also wrote a post directly about Optimism a while back, it outlines
Seligman’s strategies:

[http://braythwayt.com/homoiconic/2009/05/01/optimism.html](http://braythwayt.com/homoiconic/2009/05/01/optimism.html)

There was lively HN discussion at the time, you may find it informative:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=589200](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=589200)

~~~
e12e
As framed/contrasted in the article, the term "learned helplessness" seems a
bit off. If we look at the venn-diagram, it would appear that we have: things
we care about, things we can change, and things _we don 't realize we can
change_. It's those things, that are "learned helplessness" \-- and a way to
avoid it is to form "informed helplessness": to have an accurate idea of our
world: what we really care about, what we can really change _and_ what we
really _cannot change_.

First find out what we _actually_ care about. Then figure out which of those
things we are unhappy with. Then which of those we cannot change. This is our
area of "informed helplessness". Periodically re-examine this area, to check
if some things have become more malleable by ourself (this is to avoid
"learned helplessness", or "artificial helplessness".

The point being: if you sit down and figure out "what you cannot change" \--
you're effectively teaching yourself to be "helpless" about those things. The
key difference is presumably that it is a rational, active, decision.

Perhaps the literature/research have some better terms for this -- but I felt
it looked a bit inconsistent in the article.

~~~
braythwayt
> if you sit down and figure out "what you cannot change" \-- you're
> effectively teaching yourself to be "helpless" about those things.

The research doesn’t back this up. This is one of the reasons why I’m
reluctant to be prescriptive about these things, our intuition about what we
ought to believe and how we ought to think sometimes does not produce the
results we want.

For example, people walk around saying it’s important to “take responsibility”
for the things that happen to us. And many successful people say, anecdotally,
that this is what they do. And yet, many people try this and fail.

Seligman’s book explains why successful people say they take responsibility
for what happens to them, but also explains why that doesn’t work for
everyone. His research was that successful people have this “optimism” trait
where they are asymmetric: They personalize the good things that happen to
them, and depersonalize the bad things.

Meaning, they think they are responsible for their success.

But if you ask them, they perceive they were taking responsibility for
everything that happened to them. But statistically, this is not the case.

So what I will say to you is, don’t argue with whatever I am writing or
saying, go to the original sources and understand what Covey and Seligman are
actually saying, and what research they did to arrive that their conclusions
and prescriptions for changing your life.

~~~
e12e
Isn't the only difference between your venn-diagram example and "learned
helplessness" that in the former case the subject is aware of the decision-
making, rather than passively giving up?

------
wodenokoto
What was the YouTube video about? Honestly ~50 minutes video is too long to
embed without any kind of introduction to why I shouldd stop reading and start
watching.

Even 10 minutes is stretching it, if the video itself doesn't start of with an
introduction.

~~~
braythwayt
Inside joke. It’s the first episode of “The Prisoner,” a legendary dystopic
television show featuring a prisoner whose jailers go to great lengths to
induce a feeling of helplessness, but he resists.

That’s literally the plot of every episode: The jailers thinking up new ways
to teach him that he cannot control what happens, and him coming up with new
ways to make the jailers feel that it’s them who cannot control what happens.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Prisoner](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Prisoner)

