Entrepreneur, Senior Leader & Ecosystem Builder with a degrees in Music, Psychology, Digital Mgmt & Transformation. Co-founder of the Music Factory and Earkick. Life-long learner with a deep passion for people, mental health and outdoor sports.
Learned helplessness? If that sounds like a character flaw others have, read on. It happens closer to home than most of us assume.
Maybe you rewrote your resume to look perfect, and your cover letter might as well be a new template. You hit submit to apply for a job, and then… Nothing. Then you apply for a job elsewhere. Yet again, nothing. You try a third, fourth, or fifth time, and each attempt drains you a little bit more than the previous one.
Until you reach a point where you give up, you see a new posting that would work great for you, but why waste time on it? You COULD apply, but you don’t because it probably won’t matter anyway.
So you call it being pessimistic? This can in fact be a sign of learned helplessness. Notice that the key word here is LEARNED. Not something you’re born with, and not who you are. The concept describes what can happen when you experience enough situations where your actions seem to have little or no effect on the outcome. Over time, you may start expecting the same thing to happen again, even when new opportunities for control appear.
And if your brain can learn that pattern, it can also learn a different one.
How Learned Helplessness Develops
Learned helplessness is a well-established concept that psychologists have studied for decades.
That expectation can affect motivation, persistence, and the way you respond to new opportunities.
The concept was first developed through research by psychologist Martin Seligman and colleagues. Later work refined the theory for humans, emphasizing the role of how people explain negative events to themselves. If you come to see bad outcomes as permanent, pervasive, and beyond your control, you may be more vulnerable to helplessness-related thinking.
When Your Efforts Keep Going Nowhere
The result can look like this: You didn’t exactly become incapable of making stuff happen; you just stopped believing you could, and that belief is a big issue. It affects your life in SO MANY ways. Imagine if you were in a relationship where the other person keeps dismissing your tries to talk about what’s bothering you.
After a while, you’ll stop bringing it up because you’ll see that there’s no point. It’s not that you don’t care anymore because you do, but why bother when nothing changes?
Learned Helplessness At Work
Or, if it does, it changes for the worse. It can also happen at work.
You volunteer for projects, stay longer, you do everything right, and someone else gets promoted over you every time. Sooner or later, you’ll stop going the extra mile because your brain noticed that hard work doesn’t pay off here.
This is one reason learned helplessness can be so difficult to recognize. The response may have made perfect sense when it developed. It was your brain trying to make sense of repeated experiences and protect you from wasting more energy.
Stress Changes How You Respond
The effects can go deeper than motivation.
Research on stress and the brain suggests that uncontrollable stress can impair the functioning of the prefrontal cortex, a brain region involved in attention, working memory, decision-making, and flexible responses to challenges. Under intense or prolonged stress, more reactive brain systems involved in emotional and threat responses can have greater influence over behavior.
This doesn’t mean that your brain is permanently broken or that you have no control over your response.
It means that chronic stress and repeated experiences of uncontrollability can make it harder to think flexibly and respond actively when you need to.
Learned Helplessness: Your Body Feels Out of Your Control
Chronic pain or illness can cause learned helplessness, too.
Let’s say you suffer from chronic back pain and you’ve already tried all kinds of treatments over the last few years.
Nothing has helped, and the only thing that happened was that your bank account is a lot emptier now.
It starts to feel like your body is doing its own thing, whatever you do. You may become less willing to try physical therapy again, investigate a new treatment, or make another lifestyle change because your previous efforts haven’t paid off.
That response can become self-reinforcing. The less you try, the fewer opportunities you have to discover that something new might actually help.
When Learned Helplessness Starts Early
Learned helplessness can develop in adulthood, but patterns of feeling powerless can also begin early in life.
For some people, growing up in an environment where outcomes felt unpredictable or outside their control may shape how they respond to challenges later on.
If you grew up in a house where you were frequently criticized or punished in ways that felt unpredictable, you may have learned that your behavior had little effect on what happened next.
From a child’s perspective, the lesson can become:
“There’s no point in trying.”
That’s a simplified version of a much more complex developmental process, but the underlying pattern can carry into adulthood. This has nothing to do with your character.
Your brain is drawing conclusions from the experiences you’ve had. Those conclusions can feel completely logical, especially when you’ve collected enough evidence to support them.
The problem is that old conclusions can continue influencing you long after the circumstances that created them have changed.
The Cycle That Keeps You Stuck
You start avoiding situations because you expect them to go badly. So, you don’t apply for the job. You don’t ask the question, or postpone making the appointment. The new treatment your friend told you about? You don’t try it. The immediate result may be relief.
You don’t have to risk another disappointment.
This pattern can be seen in all kinds of everyday situations.
What Learned Helplessness Can Look Like
Learned helplessness can sound surprisingly reasonable. It tells you to stop wasting your energy, accept the situation, and move on, all while quietly convincing you that your actions won’t change the outcome.
Here are a few ways that pattern can show up in everyday life.
1. Making Friends Feels Pointless
Maybe you’ve moved to a new city and tried to make friends. You joined a class, went to a few meetups, reached out to people, and kept getting polite replies that never turned into actual plans. After a while, you stop asking. You tell yourself you’re just “not a social person” or that people already have their own circles.
The next time someone invites you somewhere, you might even find a reason not to go. The next time someone invites you somewhere, you might even find a reason not to go.
2. Money And Finances Stop Feeling Manageable
It can happen with money, too. Maybe you’ve tried budgeting, cutting expenses, applying for better jobs, and even starting a side hustle, but you still feel like you’re barely getting ahead. After enough failed attempts, you might stop checking your finances altogether. You don’t negotiate your salary, you don’t apply for that better-paying job, and you don’t look into ways to save because what’s the point? Your financial situation starts to feel like something that happens to you rather than something you can influence.
3. Health Efforts Stop Feeling Worth It
The same thing can happen when you’re trying to get healthier. You exercise for months, change your diet, and follow every recommendation, but the results don’t come as quickly as you hoped. Eventually, you stop going to the gym or abandon the changes you made because you’ve started to believe that your effort won’t make a difference anyway. The next time someone suggests a new approach, your first thought might be, “I’ve tried everything.”
4. Life Throws You a Problem You Can’t Solve Alone
It can also happen in situations where you have very little control over the outcome.
Consider someone recovering from an accident. They’re already emotional and in pain, but now, on top of that, they have to deal with medical bills, insurance, and legal documents. It all feels like too much.
Even finding the right person to help can become another source of stress. If you’re in a city like Nashville, for example, you may have plenty of options when looking for a personal injury lawyer in Nashville. But having options doesn’t always make the decision easier when you’re already exhausted and overwhelmed.
And if you’re in a much smaller place like Lotsee or Lost Springs, your choices may be more limited. You might worry that the first lawyer you find is your only realistic option, especially if other lawyers don’t have the time or capacity to take on your case.
When every path feels complicated and every decision feels like it could go wrong, it’s easy to stop making decisions altogether.
A situation like this can reinforce the feeling that you’re at the mercy of circumstances you can’t control. The more powerless you feel, the harder it can become to take the next step, even when help is available.
Break the Learned Helplessness Cycle
Thinking happy thoughts is never a bad idea, but it won’t help in this case. What you should do is give your brain new evidence that what you do has an effect on what happens to you.
You simply have to stick to a few steps.
Start With Small Wins
Some goals are too intimidating, and that intimidation will stop you in your tracks. So, instead of that, choose a goal that seems small, like deciding to make your bed every single morning before you go to work or taking a short walk after lunch.
Notice Automatic Thoughts and Challenge Them
Many thoughts show up on their own, and a lot of them aren’t pleasant. When you notice that unwanted thoughts like ‘there’s no point’ keep bouncing back, ask yourself what might happen if you try anyway.
Be curious when you hear that annoying little voice; don’t treat what it says as a fact.
Look for something that contradicts it, and you’ll open the door to the possibility that what you think is true might just be imaginary.
Create More Experiences That Make You Feel Like You’re In Control
Learning to steer your mind on purpose is another way to reclaim control. Try to actively see your influence on your life.
If you learn a new skill, that’s proof that trying new things can pay off. If you decide you’ll wake up at a certain time, you’re the one shaping your day, not the other way around. If you finish a project, that’s evidence that you’re the kind of person who can follow through and be successful.
You Can Learn a Different Pattern
Learned helplessness does not have to stick with you forever. It’s just this annoying thing your brain has picked up because your life hasn’t exactly been cupcakes and rainbows. So, get to work. Make one tiny choice today that you KNOW you can follow through on.
Then do it again tomorrow. Every time you do what you said you would, your brain sees that your actions count. It’ll feel like it’s not working at first, but remember that this isn’t something you learned in a day or 2.
Learning a pattern takes time. So does unlearning.
No stop scrolling and take that first small action you know you can own!
