A mental cycle forms when you become trapped in distress: You become convinced that your stressful situation is interminable. It makes you feel helpless, and eventually, you start believing you are powerless, and it manifests.

When people believe they are helpless, they often turn down opportunities to improve their situations or even resist learning to help themselves because their feelings of helplessness are ingrained. They've become resigned to living in perpetual stress and anxiety that has led them to this place. Believe it or not, this condition is called " Learned helplessness," a developed trait identified in 1967 by psychologists Martin E. P. Seligman and Steven F. Maier.

For the first 25 years, I believed I had no control over my emotions. I felt held hostage by my panic disorder and believed everything I did would result in suffering tremendous emotional consequences.

Because the usual routines of childhood made me panic, they were removed from my life: My mother got me out of sleepovers; she picked me up halfway through a weekend at my father's when I called begging to return and canceled events for invitations I'd accepted far in advance when I was feeling brave.

The "solution" was to have someone remove the conditions that made me feel helpless. Because—I was convinced—it was only when the path was free of challenges that I'd be free to truly live.

Despite knowing that the path would never be entirely clear, I still hoped that I might one day arrive at that fantastical stretch of existence in which I had no challenges and could live with a freedom no one in the world has ever lived.

When, at 25, I was finally diagnosed with panic disorder, I realized that the only way to liberate myself from confinement was to face the fact that I was imprisoning myself. I needed to find a way out.

That's when I finally understood that the obstacles WERE the path and that having them removed for me had confined me to a prison of co-dependence. But I had to face my fears, learn to tolerate the obstacles, and not run from adversity to break free.

I grew up learning to surrender before trying, and while I easily could have grown into an adult who continued on that path, I didn't want that. So, I chose to live by my true nature, reclaiming the part of myself that is resourceful and risk-taking, which has been my life's work.

Because I've spent decades facing my fears and working to become self-reliant, I can get incredibly frustrated when I see an adult lose all ability to do something as simple and mundane as turning off a lamp in someone else's house. They give up before looking for the switch and rely on others to do what they believe they can't.

But I know it's even worse for the person who feels powerless. It's a type of depressed state that convinces you there is no way out.

There is a way out. There is always a way out.

According to Martin Seligman in his book Learned Optimism, learned helplessness often originates in childhood, usually under the guidance of neglectful or unresponsive caregivers.

Either the child needs help, and no one comes to their aid, so they are left unable to control their situation and accept it, or they are not taught how to confront difficult situations and feel they must always rely on someone else.

This very quickly fosters a co-dependent style of relating.

In children, it can manifest as a lack of effort, low self-esteem, failure to ask for help, poor motivation, passivity, and procrastination.

In school, children who suffer from learned helplessness are afraid to try because they believe they are doomed to fail. They won't challenge themselves to read more complex material and instead read what they read when they were younger because they know they will understand the material. (This is what I was like as a kid.)

Conversely, they may try incredibly hard but still do poorly and become resigned to the idea that they will never succeed, so they give up.

It makes sense then that learned helplessness can, and often does, result in anxiety, depression, or both. When you believe that nothing you do will ever change the outcome of an event, people usually think there's no use in trying.

According to Dr. Seligman, when we believe that we have no control over what happens to us, we are convinced that we're helpless, and when we see ourselves in a certain light, we behave and act accordingly.

Some people learn to be helpless because that's what's been modeled to them by their caregivers; others know it through intentional conditioning, like in a cult, or based on their perception that they have no choice and that lack of control becomes their dominant narrative.

Feeling you have no control over the events around you makes it easy to lose motivation. This lack of motivation can set in so deeply that people will not take action even with opportunities to change their circumstances.

No one is born to believe they lack control over what happens to them or that failure is inevitable, so what's the point of trying? Even a 6-month-old will bat away food that they don't want.

The helplessness I'm writing about is learned behavior. Ironically, when we buy into our learned helplessness as a condition, cognitive blocks prevent us from learning.

When conditioned young, you grow into the beliefs you're raised upon. Take the story of elephants and the rope that binds them. When they are very young, elephants are secured to a pole with a thin rope so they won't escape.

The rope is too strong for their tiny leg, and no matter how hard they try to wrest themselves off the pole, they can't. Sooner or later, they give up.

As they grow, they become larger and more robust than the thin rope that secures them, and with just a bit of effort, they quickly free themselves, but they've already learned that they can't escape, so they no longer try.

This is how minds are set and how people are brainwashed. People are taught to believe that what holds us in place is stronger than the thing it's having (in this case, us).

We must learn how to break this mindset to prove that we can free ourselves from the thin rope securing us to our maladaptive beliefs that we're incapable.

As he tells the story in his book Learned Optimism, when Martin Seligman was 21 years old and just starting graduate school for experimental psychology at the University of Pennsylvania, he walked into the lab of Richard Solomon, the man with whom he was eager to study.

When he arrived, the other graduate students were distressed. There was something wrong with the dogs they were using for experiments. After pre-conditioning them with minor jolts and high-pitched tones, trying to get them to associate the noise with pain, they transferred the dogs into a different environment: a box with two chambers.

The dogs continued to receive shocks in the chamber, but they could easily escape over a very low barrier to a second chamber. They didn't; the dogs lay on the jolt side, whimpering. They had given up before even trying.

The graduate students were up in arms. Instead of seeing what young Marty saw, they could only see that something was wrong with the dogs, and the experiment they meant to conduct could not continue.

But what Marty saw was that the experiment had just begun.