Comment by braythwayt | Hacker News Reader

Comment by braythwayt | Hacker News Reader

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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

And especially Seligman’s self-help book on the subject: 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

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

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=589200

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.

"Informed helplessness" probably isn't the best frame for the concept, but maybe more like a cost-benefit analysis for giving a shit (CBAGAS), or the Gaullic shrug ( ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ ). My brother and I both lived in DC once upon a time. We both got parking tickets, some of which were legitimate and some of which were made up by the meter maids because the DC government is banking that you'd rather just pay $20 than go through the hassle of an appeal (which they usually just ignore). I would get enraged; my brother would just shrug and say "cost of living in the city--you want to walk home from your favorite bar or to your favorite restaurant, this is what you put up with." It wasn't that he thought it was okay, he just decided it wasn't worth the mental energy to get mad about it.

I still get mad about them, but I can see that his perspective is far preferable.

> 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.

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?

Thanks for writing this. Circles of concern vs. influence, and optimism (as insightfully described in the article) are concepts that I have been practicing for years, attempting to teach to others, and have profoundly changed my life.

People reference 7 Habits so often but the things that are typically mentioned (the actual "Habits," per se) are not the parts that I found most life-altering. For me, it was the philosophy:

  -Character vs. personality
  -Abundance mentality
  -Responsibility = Response + Ability
  -Principles vs. values (and natural law)

Actually this is the only summary I've found which hits on what I believe were the most important parts of the book: http://www.slideshare.net/shaludhamaniya/seven-habits-of-hig...

I also found Seligman's What You Can Change and What You Can't to be informative.

I actually immediately went and purchased the Learned Optimism book on Amazon after reading your article because it seemed like it would be quite interesting and useful.

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