Enhancing Motivation And Overcoming "Learned Helplessness"

narouz

Member
Joined
Jul 22, 2012
Messages
4,429
Re: Enhancing Motivation and Overcoming "Learned Helplessnes

j. said:
I wouldn't want to push myself to do intellectually creative things. I've been productive in that aspect I'd say most on my life and the desire most often just came naturally.

Well, that's good then j.
And all the better if the creativity does not have to be in the form of an "exercise,"
which does make it seem less...well...creative. :?

I like music.
But over that last few years...
...I've experienced Minimal Music Mojo.
You familiar with that affliction?

So I would be all for exploring some of the Peatian, creative, movement oriented stuff,
like QiJong (if I've got that spelling right).
I miss doing something physical and movement-oriented with my Peating,
like running/exercising before--to replace that thang.

But I also think I need to challenge myself, be more aggressive with my particular creative thing, music.
Rather than sit back and assume that once I am Peatianly Perfected biologically
the music will spring Minerva-like from my head.
 
J

j.

Guest
Re: Enhancing Motivation and Overcoming "Learned Helplessnes

Music sounds like a nice exercise, if you like it, it probably won't feel forced, or like an exercise. One thing that crossed my mind is practicing sight-singing, if that sounds interesting to you, and you haven't completely mastered it yet. There are books which start gradually, with songs that just use 2 notes. Then you get songs with more and more notes. You can of course check your singing with an instrument to see if you sang correctly.
 

WilltoBelieve

Member
Joined
Nov 25, 2012
Messages
34
Re: Enhancing Motivation and Overcoming "Learned Helplessnes

Another contribution from Albert Hofmann. ..
See Hofmann's book also: LSD - My Problem Child


These quotes from RP are remedies for learned helplessness in and of themselves.

Just re-reading them here is already giving me a boost of energy.

Ready to practice self-helpfullness.
 
OP
R

Ray-Z

Member
Joined
Oct 16, 2012
Messages
321
Re: Enhancing Motivation and Overcoming "Learned Helplessnes

WilltoBelieve said:
Another contribution from Albert Hofmann. ..
See Hofmann's book also: LSD - My Problem Child


These quotes from RP are remedies for learned helplessness in and of themselves.

Just re-reading them here is already giving me a boost of energy.

Ready to practice self-helpfullness.

Thanks for mentioning Hofmann. I wasn't familiar with him, and he seems to have had an interesting life. Note that like Ray Peat, Hofmann had a background in the arts.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Hofmann
 
OP
R

Ray-Z

Member
Joined
Oct 16, 2012
Messages
321
Re: Enhancing Motivation and Overcoming "Learned Helplessnes

Before my caffeine wears off, I want to say a little bit more about learned helplessness from a psychological perspective. (As always, jump in and correct me if my information is wrong or out of date.) While I haven't thought through precisely how these ideas relate to Peat's work, I think I see some connections.

Martin Seligman and his co-authors noted that in their experiments, not all of the animals or humans subject to inescapable stress developed learned helplessness. In later research, they argued that how people interpret stressful events strongly affects their likelihood of developing learned helplessness.

Seligman argues that people are more likely to develop learned helplessness when they interpret the causes of stressful events as permanent, pervasive, and personal, and less likely when they interpret the causes as temporary, specific, and external.

Example: A friend fails to return your phone call. :eek:

Pessimistic interpretation: "I never understand other people, and I'm always getting on their nerves. She probably got tired of my rudeness." :cry:

Optimistic interpretation: "She was probably super busy and forgot, or maybe she lost her mobile phone. Stuff happens. And anyway, everyone else loooooves me." :D

The pessimistic interpretation indicates that the cause of the event is personal (the event is your fault), permanent (the event is a consequence of what you consider to be a permanent character flaw), and pervasive (the character flaw affects your relations with lots of people).

The optimistic interpretation indicates that the cause of the event is external (you had nothing to do with your friend's failure to return your call), temporary (the event is unlikely to recur often), and specific (the event has no bearing on your relations with other people or other areas of your life).

[Aside: In some cases, an optimistic interpretation of an adverse event might be personal rather than external, but let's keep this simple. :mrgreen: ]

Seligman argues that the pessimistic style of interpretation leads you to expect failure in parts of your life in the future, lowering the anticipated rewards of expending effort to improve those parts. In this way, the pessimistic style encourages learned helplessness.

Seligman suggests that changing your habits of interpretation can help you unlearn "learned helplessness." He recommends writing down your explanations for adverse events, and then disputing these explanations and developing alternative explanations if you find that your initial explanations are unduly pessimistic (i.e. permanent, pervasive, and personal).

The idea isn't to deceive yourself, but rather to recognize that in a highly uncertain and complex world, pessimistic explanations that at first seem plausible aren't necessarily correct, or even likely.

While, IMO, adequate sleep, nutrition, and thyroid are more important than Seligman's exercises for avoiding unnecessary pessimism, I've found the exercises insightful. :2cents

The discussion above draws on pp. 40-50 and 76-77 of Seligman's book, Learned Optimism.

[Aside: The U.S. intelligence services reportedly used Seligman's ideas about learned helplessness to devise protocols for torturing detainees after 9/11/01.]
 

kiran

Member
Joined
Aug 9, 2012
Messages
1,054
Re: Enhancing Motivation and Overcoming "Learned Helplessnes

Ray-Z said:
Example: A friend fails to return your phone call. :eek:

Pessimistic interpretation: "I never understand other people, and I'm always getting on their nerves. She probably got tired of my rudeness." :cry:

Optimistic interpretation: "She was probably super busy and forgot, or maybe she lost her mobile phone. Stuff happens. And anyway, everyone else loooooves me." :D

I find sugar to make a big difference. Adequate sugar will keep me optimistic. The less sugar I have in me the more pessimistic/paranoid I become.
 
OP
R

Ray-Z

Member
Joined
Oct 16, 2012
Messages
321
Re: Enhancing Motivation and Overcoming "Learned Helplessnes

kiran said:
I find sugar to make a big difference. Adequate sugar will keep me optimistic. The less sugar I have in me the more pessimistic/paranoid I become.

That's been my experience, too. As energy and resources (rest, minerals, anti-stress hormones, and so forth) increase, optimism increases.
 

kettlebell

Member
Joined
Oct 14, 2012
Messages
417
Location
UK
Re: Enhancing Motivation and Overcoming "Learned Helplessnes

In later research, they argued that how people interpret stressful events strongly affects their likelihood of developing learned helplessness.

Seligman argues that people are more likely to develop learned helplessness when they interpret the causes of stressful events as permanent, pervasive, and personal

I am a firm believer in not only good nutrition but good conscious deliberate practice of positive thoughts. Neurobiology research has clearly shown that thought patterns when practiced make physical changes in the brain and the way it "Fires". It is well worth the effort of stopping negative thought patterns before you finish them and replacing them with conscious positive thoughts regardless of whether you "Believe" them or not. It literally physically changes your brain over time to a more optimistic outlook and positive expectations of situations.
You are also unwittingly living in the "Now" at the same time so killing two birds with one stone.

In my opinion discipline of thought is as important as nutrition. I realise it is difficult to to do that when you are sick or have a lack of good nutrition but it makes it all the more important. People who consciously practice positive expectations get better faster, feel more control over their lives and are more resilient to stress as they don't respond to most situations negatively.

Great topic.
 

gretchen

Member
Joined
Nov 30, 2012
Messages
816
Re: Enhancing Motivation and Overcoming "Learned Helplessnes

Yeah, it seems incomprehensible to me that I didn't drink coffee all those years. I was never the 90s "cafe" type; might have been better off if I had been.

I employ a lot of anti-serotonin stuff in to my daily regimen, but I'm still sooo tired lately. Next step for me is thyroid & odansetron.
 

narouz

Member
Joined
Jul 22, 2012
Messages
4,429
Re: Enhancing Motivation and Overcoming "Learned Helplessnes

gretchen said:
Yeah, it seems incomprehensible to me that I didn't drink coffee all those years. I was never the 90s "cafe" type; might have been better off if I had been.

I employ a lot of anti-serotonin stuff in to my daily regimen, but I'm still sooo tired lately. Next step for me is thyroid & odansetron.

Sorry if I've missed it, but have you ever posted your temps and pulses?
 
OP
R

Ray-Z

Member
Joined
Oct 16, 2012
Messages
321
Re: Enhancing Motivation and Overcoming "Learned Helplessnes

kettlebell said:
I am a firm believer in not only good nutrition but good conscious deliberate practice of positive thoughts. Neurobiology research has clearly shown that thought patterns when practiced make physical changes in the brain and the way it "Fires". It is well worth the effort of stopping negative thought patterns before you finish them and replacing them with conscious positive thoughts regardless of whether you "Believe" them or not. It literally physically changes your brain over time to a more optimistic outlook and positive expectations of situations.
You are also unwittingly living in the "Now" at the same time so killing two birds with one stone.

In my opinion discipline of thought is as important as nutrition. I realise it is difficult to to do that when you are sick or have a lack of good nutrition but it makes it all the more important. People who consciously practice positive expectations get better faster, feel more control over their lives and are more resilient to stress as they don't respond to most situations negatively.

Great topic.

Well said, Kettlebell. Especially like the observation that monitoring unduly negative thoughts keeps you in the present. While I value a great deal the kinds of cognitive exercises you and Seligman recommend, I'll add that for some people, it may be easier to start to rein in distorted thoughts with diet than with cognitive training. (I had this experience.) :2cents But everyone's different, and o/w, couldn't agree more.
 

Swandattur

Member
Joined
Mar 17, 2013
Messages
1,137
Location
Florida
Re: Enhancing Motivation and Overcoming "Learned Helplessnes

Just thought I'd add a comment to this older thread. Cognitive therapy is supposed to be fairly successful at alleviating depression. A psychologist got me to read the book, "Feeling Good" which is about how to practice cognitive therapy, when I was experiencing my first severe depression. I think it helped somewhat. I gave the book to my sister, though, and she said it helped her a great deal, that it was like a breakthrough for her. For me, diet is helping a lot, now.
I had a very strange dream that was about learned helplessness and depression. That same sister got me more actively interpreting my dreams. It was weird and very to the point. Sometimes your dreams hit you over the head with their meaning.
I couldn't help commenting here, because the learned helplessness thing is very interesting to me. Someone mentioned that, although they had never been depressed that they had felt unable to act. Anyway, that is part of depression. I've had depressions where I felt very empty, not sad really, just an awful frightening emptiness.
 

repeat

Member
Joined
May 2, 2013
Messages
44
Re: Enhancing Motivation and Overcoming "Learned Helplessnes

There's a lot to be said on this important subject.....

Just some thoughts. For me it's very important to get away from moralistic views on mental health, and from the very first time I read a Ray Peat article I felt just that, and what a relief, his understanding is very much like mine, I think.

By moralistic I mean both a "get yourself together, think positive" attitude, OR the one you get along with the ssri-treatment, "your illness is really just a genetic thing, your upbringing, diet or whatever has nothing to do with it" Both these views are missing the point as I see it.

If you are in a situation of inescapable stress, positive thinking won't change a thing, thats the fact, and it could be a problem if you think it will. On the other hand, I really do believe that we have that within us, to always try, fight and struggle, and that's also why I don't feel it's right to imply that people aren't "positive" enough.

And here's the thing, depending on the situation and your own abilities, a coping stategy could be to just stay passive or cooperative, another situation will maybe reward you if you fight. The problem is that when you get out of the difficult situation, you have changed and maybe you get trapped into these patterns of reacting.
What I understand from reading Ray Peat is that if we nourish metabolism, we don't have to stay trapped in any of those pattern we may have learned, and that's such a humanistic view of it.


Last in the article Autonomic systems

"Although I don’t think the autonomic nervous system, with its sympathetic and parasympathetic divisions, exists in the way it has traditionally been conceived, the idea can be useful if we think of using drugs and other factors in ways that tend to “quiet an overactive autonomic nervous system.”"


I think, that instead of seeing the parasympathetic system as the "good guy" in a system with two branches, we should look at both branches of the autonomic system as one, and the basal metabolism as the the other part.
 

Swandattur

Member
Joined
Mar 17, 2013
Messages
1,137
Location
Florida
Re: Enhancing Motivation and Overcoming "Learned Helplessnes

Some stresses in life are really impossible to escape. You can try to do things to mitigate the stress, but you can't escape it. At least making your diet as optimal as you can get is a way to mitigate the stress factor. Since I've been following Ray Peat diet etc. recommendations the best I can, I notice that these things do make a big difference in how I feel. I never realized before that sometimes just eating some fruit or protein and fruit could make a dramatic difference in my mood. Now I wonder if that would have helped back when I had severe major depression. I have also found certain foods cause me to have depression. I have been under a lot of stress in the last several years. Probably that and getting older makes me more vulnerable to problematic foods in my diet.

I think I know what you mean by coping strategies that have outlived their usefulness. I think each of my sisters and I had different coping strategies for family stressors when we were growing up. My youngest sister and I are both beginning to recognize some ways we behave as coping strategies that have outlived their usefulness.

Maybe my sister was trapped in a negative thinking loop, so using cognitive therapy on herself helped. When I had major depression the cognitive therapy thing helped somewhat, maybe, by getting me to recognize any sign of improvement. She feels like her depression was dysthymia rather than major depression. So, it might have been milder, but it never went away.

I like Ray Peat's way of seeing human mental and physical health.
 

Rolan

Member
Joined
Jul 3, 2013
Messages
126
Age
38
Location
London/Shropshire, England
Re: Enhancing Motivation and Overcoming "Learned Helplessnes

Ray seems to be the only one actually linking these things together. The rest appear to just go 'Well, these are the foods we've been eating the last however many thousand years, so eat those and let's hope we can activate our caveman DNA!'.

So simplistic. Now, back to Ray - I wonder now when thinking about my own issues over the years. I've always had problems with inner drive and motivation, instead choosing to stay beholden to apathy, lethargy, isolation and depression and the list goes on. For the last few years I've become aware of energy. I would put my malaise down to some abstract condition- 'existential misery' - or some other bollocks. But now I'm thinking, well, isn't it more likely that there is some metabolic deficiency going on here? There must be some lack of inner energy, or a lack of flow rather. All sorts of things can cause this - childhood trauma, conditioning and so on - but what If food actually plays a bigger part in all this? Wouldn't that just be the biggest joke ever? That our mood swings, depression and apathy can be put down to broken metabolism, and that all the things that we're told to stay away from, like sugar and salt, are essential nutrients for us to actually feel the desire to evolve?

I actually believe that nutrition is one of many aspects, and that it's really part of the puzzle but not whole puzzle. Other pieces of the puzzle are things like, say, letting go of the past so that your energy can flow. Or re-learning how to play, and especially re-learning how to use one's intuition. And that is what's great about Peat; his work actually makes us intuitively work for ourselves. No ridiculous Primal Blueprint, or Perfect Health Diet - both of which are such arrogant concepts by the way - but rather a laboratory for us to experiment on ourselves. That's why I hope 'The Peat Diet' never becomes such a thing. I'm glad he doesn't want to write 'The Ray Peat Diet'. Thank God there's actually a real biologist out there who wants to help, rather than an endless array of Bro-ologists and googlers and bloggers.

EDIT: I notice that when I have a creative project which I am excited about, I am absolutely unstoppable. Things stream through me effortlessly. It's the actual pre-cursor to creative projects that I find a struggle. It's the drive to get up and do it that is the problem. Obviously, I am the problem. nutrition is a tool really.
 
J

j.

Guest
Re: Enhancing Motivation and Overcoming "Learned Helplessnes

Rolan said:
All sorts of things can cause this - childhood trauma, conditioning and so on - but what If food actually plays a bigger part in all this? Wouldn't that just be the biggest joke ever?

I'm pretty sure it's even more than that. I think the level of PUFAs in the diet greatly influences which political systems societies have, and the even bigger joke might be that the concept 'polyunsaturated fats' couldn't even exist before biochemistry was well developed.
 

Rolan

Member
Joined
Jul 3, 2013
Messages
126
Age
38
Location
London/Shropshire, England
Re: Enhancing Motivation and Overcoming "Learned Helplessnes

What I meant to write there, J, was 'What if food has a bigger part to play in all this than most of us believed'? As opposed to 'What if food has a bigger part to play than childhood trauma, or, for instance, social conditioning.

Because I'm sure you're being more than a little sarcastic there. Or maybe not :D
 
J

j.

Guest
Re: Enhancing Motivation and Overcoming "Learned Helplessnes

I wasn't being sarcastic.
 
J

j.

Guest
Re: Enhancing Motivation and Overcoming "Learned Helplessnes

I meant to say that I got the impression you might actually be underestimating the influence of food, even when you attribute to food a greater influence than is typical.
 

charlie

Admin
The Law & Order Admin
Joined
Jan 4, 2012
Messages
14,363
Location
USA
Re: Enhancing Motivation and Overcoming "Learned Helplessnes

Rolan said:
But now I'm thinking, well, isn't it more likely that there is some metabolic deficiency going on here?

Yes, maybe even a caffeine deficiency. ;)

There must be some lack of inner energy, or a lack of flow rather. All sorts of things can cause this - childhood trauma, conditioning and so on - but what If food actually plays a bigger part in all this? Wouldn't that just be the biggest joke ever? That our mood swings, depression and apathy can be put down to broken metabolism, and that all the things that we're told to stay away from, like sugar and salt, are essential nutrients for us to actually feel the desire to evolve?

The awakening is a beautiful thing to watch. :)
 

Similar threads

Back
Top Bottom