Anyone who suffers from persistent pain without hope of breathing may be familiar with the phenomenon of learning helplessness. Learning helpless terminology refers to the situation in which a person or animal suffers an unpleasant situation [usually a punishment] and tries to escape it multiple times, but only the failure and the will to resist weaken to a degree of indifference. The final evidence of learning helplessness is to allow the subject to resist punishment when the situation changes, but they cannot do it because they are completely desperate.

Learning helplessness on humans

The effects of learning helplessness are similar to the effects of clinical depression. Both states are characterized by indifference and despair. Some people think that clinical depression is a sense of helplessness that cannot overcome a person's fear of death. The most common examples of human learning helplessness are children who perform poorly in academic tests. If they study hard but still fail, this may make the situation worse. The pattern of failure will begin to become ingrained, and students will soon feel that they cannot succeed. Even if they provide students with easier materials, they may fail because they believe it is inevitable.

Learning helplessness on smoking cessation

Most people who try to quit smoking have not made their first efforts. People usually start smoking because of traumatic events or long periods of boredom, and soon find themselves trying to give up what is now a habit. It should be remembered that even a smoker is a fundamentally rational existence, and a failed attempt to give up cigarettes fifty or one hundred times will lead people to draw a reasonable conclusion that their efforts are futile. This leads to a sense of despair that leads to depression and leads to more smoking.

Of course, the tragedy is that, under adverse circumstances, these repeated efforts to quit smoking will hinder efforts to quit smoking when quitting smoking. Start smoking, try to quit when the cause of the beginning still exists, and fail: This is the secret of long-term addiction.

How to overcome the sense of helplessness

It should be argued that learning helplessness is a response to a set of stimuli that usually take the form of the environment. If you try to exit multiple attempts, you will need to look at the factor patterns that exist in the environment in which they failed. A straightforward example is someone trying to quit someone who lives with other smokers. Since tobacco will always exist in such an environment, the temptation will not be stronger than these factors.

So what you need to do is change the environment around you, both physically and mentally. If you are hiking in the mountains, tell yourself that this is a new beginning for you, don't bring cigarettes. If you go on vacation, see it as a great opportunity to encourage new behavior patterns. If you can't change your physical environment, you can always try to change your mental environment. Always look for the difference in your situation now compared to all other times of failure. Tell yourself that you are smarter now, you are getting stronger now, and now you are more desperate, so you will overcome despair, which makes quitting smoking more difficult.

How to learn helplessness can make smoking cessation more difficult was originally published on Spring