Learned Helplessness: Why We Give Up Trying

Forced to replace our car during Covid, we ended up buying an overpriced Tesla. Yes, this was back in the early days, before the world’s first trillion-dollar payout man went full Bond villain. And yes, I bought the stickers earlier this year to avoid the public shaming of being seen in a Tesla.

When I finally decided to drive the car, a whole week after it had been sitting in the garage, it took me a few minutes to adjust to the unsettling lack of hardware. My husband rode nervously in the passenger seat. It reminded me of my early driving days. I was twenty-two then, practically geriatric by first-license standards, and it was Jerry, an Aussie driving instructor, who taught me how to drive.

Jerry spoke fluent Aussie’isms; gems like “Don’t hit the pedestrians. They dent (sounds like “dint”) the car.” But some of the things he said were completely lost on me. Once, while on the motorway (Aussie freeway), I heard Jerry say “I switch lanes.” I nodded, assuming he was just narrating his driving preferences. It took me a minute to realize he was giving me actual instructions to move to another lane. It’s a miracle I passed my driving test, but over the years, I've grown into a solid and reliable driver.

That is right up until I met the Tesla. I barely made it out to the first stop sign on our street before things started to unravel. Approaching the stop sign, I gently lifted my foot off the pedal, expecting the car to lazily roll forward so I could perform a proper California stop and continue rolling past the sign. To my utter horror, the car stopped. Like fully, abruptly, right there.

My husband, panicking in the passenger seat, started barking instructions at me like I was sixteen again. Annoyed, I got out, swapped seats with him, and we drove right back home. A few weeks later, I mustered the courage to try again. Same result. The third time, I didn’t even make it out of the garage.

I couldn’t understand the car’s “Hold stop” or figure out single-pedal driving. When others insisted Teslas were the easiest cars to drive, I rolled my eyes. “Brainwashed converts,” I thought. And so, for two whole years, I refused to drive the Tesla in our garage, convinced I’d never “get it.”

That, my friends, is an embarrassing but true story about learned helplessness.

In the late 1960s, psychologist Martin Seligman and his colleagues conducted an experiment that would no doubt be unethical by today’s standards, but passed muster back then. They studied how dogs react to electric shocks.

For the study, dogs were divided into three groups.

Dogs in Group 1 had agency. They could press a panel with their noses to stop electric shocks.

The Group 2 dogs, in contrast, had no power. Their shocks only stopped when a Group 1 dog pressed the panel. Group 2 dogs’ own actions had no effect.

Group 3 dogs hit the lottery. They were the control group and weren’t administered any electric shocks.

But here’s the thing: dogs in all groups were placed in a box with a low barrier, one they could easily jump over at any time, to escape the whole situation.

The study's results were eye-opening.

Group 1 dogs learned to press the panel to stop the shock, but soon also realized they could circumvent the whole process altogether by jumping over the fence. The dogs from group 2 quickly learned that their actions (when they tried to press their nose to the panel) made no difference and eventually gave up trying, instead choosing to whine and endure the shocks. This, despite the escape route being right in front of them.

Seligman termed this behavior “learned helplessness”. Ethical considerations notwithstanding, Seligman’s studies explain how we humans behave when we start to internalize the belief “nothing I do matters”.

Learned helplessness explains why people who struggle with weight loss or diets give up too soon using a version of “I’m just built this way” as their excuse. Or why some of my family and friends still living in India freak out when their household helpers don’t show up.

Although I’ve used fairly trivial examples of learned helplessness, it can and is often a debilitating condition requiring serious mental and psychological interventions from qualified specialists. At its root, learned helplessness is a coping mechanism we resort to when we find ourselves in situations we can’t control, or we feel powerless in.

Seligman didn’t just identify learned helplessness. He has spent the majority of his career developing the field of positive psychology to counteract helplessness and to answer the question, “If helplessness can be learned, can hope be learned too?” And the answer is a resounding YES! His book Learned Optimism is proof that like training a muscle, it’s possible to practice optimism.

We may not all face extreme circumstances but we’ve all had our Tesla moments when we tell ourselves, “I’m never going to get this.” The irony is the more we avoid uncomfortable situations, the more proof our brain collects of our lack of aptitude. Learned helplessness can easily become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Our job is to become aware of the stories we tell ourselves and interrupt the loop by appreciating small wins, reframing setbacks and believing that we have agency.

Which is how, one day, when my crusty old Chevy finally decided it had had enough of me, I forced myself to give the Tesla another go. I figured if thousands of people, many of them far less experienced, could drive one just fine, it couldn’t possibly be that hard.

And that’s how, people, I am now a decent (dare I say, expert?) Tesla driver. And no, I don’t mean I just turn on Full Self-Driving and call it a day. And although it pains me to admit this: it is one of the easiest cars to drive. I’m not helpless anymore, I’ve simply become hopeless. A hopeless fangirl. (Of the car, not the man – just to be clear).