23: Between Helplessness and Optimism
And Why It Matters Where We Stand
Is a positive experience a needed given to cultivate a positive mindset?
Yesterday, we were invited out to a farewell dinner by my uncle who’s been visiting from Australia and stayed at my parents’ house for a couple days. The conversation came onto another family member he’s about to visit soon after and my uncle mentioned the striking positivity she’s known for. That raised a thought in me:
Are we thinking positive because good things happen to us, or are we experiencing good things because we’re thinking positive?
Does always expecting the worst narrow our view so that we simply deprive ourselves of any other potentially positive option? Or do we need to experience something good so that we can start believing in the good? Like when we ask what was there first, the chicken or the egg, what comes first here?
In Psychology, there is a term called learned helplessness – when we’re convinced that we’re powerlessly caught up in negative circumstances. This clouds our sense of self-efficacy. We feel like our actions and behaviour won’t have any effect on the outcome, which makes it even harder to find the motivation to get up and go.
Just as there is learned helplessness, there is also learned optimism. Other than people operating from learned helplessness, learned optimists navigate challenges with a positive but realistic outlook and associate their determined efforts with the chance of a changed outcome. They feel like it’s worth trying because they’re able to see the connection between effort and result.
Our upbringing plays a big role in the way we’re shaped regarding optimism or learned helplessness. However, and against what many of us tend to believe, it doesn’t set it in stone. Whether we grew up in a harmonious family or not will most likely determine how we start off in that matter, but it doesn’t have to be the sole prediction for the whole rest of our lives. As the term suggests, learned optimism is something we can acquire at any point.
Self-efficacy is crucial for self-realisation. As long as we stay convinced that we won’t be able to achieve our aim anyway no matter what we do, it’s easy to miss possible solutions in sight. Why bother when it’s hopeless, right? That’s the trap.
Of course there are always aspects remaining out of our control, but that’s not the point here. Staying focused on the immovable things doesn’t get us anywhere. What will allow momentum to build, though, is drawing our awareness back onto what’s realistically adaptable. And in many cases, we’ll be able to find enough potential starting points.
So do we need the positive experience now, or not? I feel like this question is one we can each answer for ourselves, only. Building up this expectation though, needing to feel proof first, seems to come with a notion of passivity on our side and might reinforce this sense of helplessness we already talked about earlier – like a resignation to the external circumstances.
Choosing to form a view carried by learned optimism, on the other hand, may help us to see chances where we would have overlooked them otherwise. It’s a way out of the numbness and a path towards realistic possibility.
Catching ourselves in moments when we’re back to believing that it doesn’t matter anyway, and pointing out the decisions where it does, instead, can make all the difference in the long run – and it will.
Carry-On:
Where do you stand between learned helplessness and learned optimism?
This week, if you feel like it, spend some time observing your own thoughts on that matter and see if there’s something coming up you might want to re-evaluate.
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Today’s sources:
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.03.14.25323965v1.full
https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/child-and-adolescent-psychiatry/articles/10.3389/frcha.2023.1249529/full