In my first two years in undergrad, as I was headed towards a medical degree, I took a whole lot of psychology classes. I assumed most problems with getting people well would revolve around mindsets and emotions. (It turned out that I was right.)
In many of my classes, we had to review some horrible animal studies - studies that would surely be shut down if PETA found out about them. Several of these studies involved putting food and/or freedom in front of an animal. When the animal would move toward the food or toward freedom, it would receive a nasty jolt of electricity. With enough shocks and time, that animal no longer attempted to either meet its needs or pursue freedom. It gave up; overwhelmed, over-stressed, and permanently deterred by pain of the shock.
If you have any goals at all, especially big ones, you're going to run into challenges, conflict, opposition, resistance, failure, rejection, and struggle... Stress. In other words, you'll likely get "shocked" any time you go for anything worth having. Suffer enough shocks, enough "stress", and unfortunately, eventually you'll believe you can't or that it's not worth it. Over time, you learnhopelessness.
Stress creates a measurable effect on your ability to remember, learn, function, and hope. The more intense the stress, the greater the damage. In war time, battlefront situations can create enough stress in short period of time to brainwash someone into hopelessness. That is an obvious example where anyone would expect that result. It's more insidious than that for the typical person in that it happens more gradually and almost unconsciously. Daily stresses, over time, can brainwash anyone into hopelessness and despair; brainwash them into being a limited person.
The saddest story ever told is what "Might've been;" the life we could have lived if we hadn't let the "shocks" or the stress deter us. When we are brainwashed, we believe the lie of hopelessness that our problems, our "shocks," are quitting points that can't be overcome. In reality, the problems we face are not stop signs, but guide posts on the path of life, learning, and success.
How this looks today, from a health care perspective, is that people succumb to hopelessness and give up when it comes to their mental and physical wellness. This quitting looks like only 13% of Americans exercising, 60% of Americans overweight, 30% morbidly obese, and medicating our hopelessness with anti-depressants. Outside of health care, learned hopelessness is at the core and very much responsible for the job and economic crisis.
Learned hopelessness makes it so most people don't believe in their dreams, and worse, don't know that they don't believe in their dreams anymore. They wouldn't recognize their dreams, by this point, if they came and kissed them in the face. Which is, in fact, what their dreams are doing.
Let us help you turn what "might've been" into what will be!
