Learned Helplessness

Learned Helplessness is a phenomenon easily found in both academics, and social scenes. This phenomenon is caused when someone fails at something once, he tends to apply that to every single thing that he does in the future, causing him to feel often frustrated, stupid, not useful, etc. 

When I start thinking about this I picture myself sometimes, I can remember moments for example during my mathematics classes. Watching my classmates saying that they couldn’t understand the tenth point, when I wasn’t even through the first one. Since then I labeled myself as a girl who will always fail at math, someone who will never be able to solve an equation. It is actually really hard when you feel that, not being useful, but after one of my teachers saw me giving up so much on every task, she told me to try once again but harder. It was quite incoherent to me since everyone was so fast at solving them and I had to spend a lot of time on them, but I did just as she told me to, and I solved it.

What is really amazing is that I would have never tried again, and I still have lots of trouble since I am very used to feeling as failure at my math class, if my teacher would have not pushed me through it. Maybe we all need someone to help us do some things, and we might as well need to stop labeling ourselves as failure, useless people, stupid, and others. These can really block our way to succeeding and achieving tons of things. We can’t just stand there without moving, watching how this goes by us…

“Life is not about waiting for the storm to pass, it is about learning how to dance under the rain”

By: Lucia Miri Echavarria