The dogs that do not leave the open cage / happier than ever (3.26.23)

I used to take AP Psychology in high school. I didn't retain an incredible amount of info from that class due to my constant sleep deprivation and perpetual stress at the age of 17, although I was fascinated by the subject more than any other class I took. One of the things I do remember was this one study on the subject of learned helplessness: a term more clinically described as “the behavior exhibited by a subject after enduring repeated aversive stimuli beyond their control”. The experiment goes like this. A group of dogs are locked in cages in which they experience a temporary, mild electric shock – it is more annoying or startling than actually harmful, but it does cause an unpleasant reaction. The idea is to give the dogs a negative association to their being locked in cages. A control group of dogs experiences the shocks once and doesn't continue to experience it in the cage, so that if they were shocked again, it would startle them as much as it did the first time.

The variable group of dogs was shocked more than once until they stopped flinching from the shocks, which is to say they were conditioned to them and got used to it. After a while, scientists would open the cage door and shocked both sets of dogs again. The control group that only got shocked once responded once the cage was open, yelping in surprise and running out of the cage to escape getting shocked. The variable group got shocked with the door open and none of the dogs left the cage, even though the dogs could leave the cage and never get shocked again. They chose to stay where the shocks were – after all, they were used to it, and they had come to the conclusion that they were stuck being shocked even when there was an opportunity right in front of them to not be shocked anymore by leaving the cage.

The outcome indicates that one can get so conditioned to pain or suffering that you may not even process it anymore, or you don't fight for a way out anymore even when there is a way to get better. In humans, it manifests as the following: “learned helplessness is a state that occurs after a person has experienced a stressful situation repeatedly. They come to believe that they are unable to control or change the situation, so they do not try – even when opportunities for change become available.”

I believe this is truly why I'm scared of change (no, not because I'm a Taurus Moon, or whatever). I associate change in my life with harmful or terrifying experiences, even if they eventually become good again. I'm stuck with that initial reaction, and I don't want to go through it anymore. I would often rather not try to change things than try even for the opportunity to improve my life. Any time I've found myself in a situation where I realize a change will benefit me in the long run, I've had to force myself to do it. Kind of like when you see people walking their old dogs and all of a sudden the dogs don't want to move even with a tug of the leash – they hold their ground, collar smushing up in to their necks, and may even lie down on the cement in the cold in protest.

I actually did something like this as a toddler. Growing up in San Francisco, there are a ton of huge hills – especially in my neighborhood of Potrero Hill. Often we would have to walk home up the hills after school, after going for lunch, going to the bookstore, that kind of thing. I would get tired and refuse to walk anymore, so I would sit on the ground and not move. Eventually, my parents would pretend they were “leaving me there” (they always came back to get me after a certain distance – I never left their eyesight) so that I would have an incentive to get up and start walking. I guess I've always been stubborn when it comes to undesireable stimuli.

Of course, when I talk about “averse stimuli” in my life that have made me afraid of change, I'm not really talking about that. It's more like, things that I openly failed at doing in public and thus didn't get approval that I wanted. (i.e. the jam sessions in high school in which you get lost on the form and start playing some weird notes and embarrass yourself in front of your teacher and your highly competitive peers). Things that triggered anxiety attacks or my occasional bouts of vasovagal syncope, which seemed to happen when I was alone in public enclosed spaces. Things that spiraled me in to deep depression because it seemed to indicate that I was not good enough. I wanted to avoid those physical or mental lulls as much as humanly possible.

I remember being in college and not wanting to apply for Young Arts, the competitive nation wide jazz program intensive, because I did not feel like I could hear “no” one more time. I used to have dreams about getting rejected and humiliated at live auditions to the point where it felt like it had really happened to me in real life, or performing for a large crowd that booed me and subsequently emptied the venue because I was so bad. That's how much learned helplessness affected me – it made reality seem worse than it was.

I knew I could get better and better at music at any moment, and the recipe was quite simple. Practice more, discover what music you do like and want to play, write what is true to you, let your inner child create in abundance without judgement, and most importantly, what happens to you does not mean you are a bad person or do not deserve love. Try, audition, fail, and try again until you get a different result. That is a solution that undoubtedly works, and it's the only one. Nobody becomes a good musician by the way of some mysterious gift or God given talent. But I could not believe that that could be true for me, and because of that, I would do all of these things only halfway while carrying an immense amount of internalized pain. I did not believe things could get better. And for a while, they didn't - everyone knows that learning information accompanied with feeling unsafe, anxious, or depressed is not retained very well in the memory. Our body will eventually reject it, rid ourselves of it. It’s like erasing your own work. One of my music teachers who I looked up to in high school had told me “just because you're talented and can play doesn't mean that you're necessarily going to make it in the industry or be recognized for your work.” That resonated through my head non stop. I thought I was destined to be shocked in to standing in place – I may never be the musician I want to be, and it is too painful to go and find out.

“In humans, learned helplessness is related to the concept of self-efficacy; the individual's belief in their innate ability to achieve goals.”

It's an illusion when you have real ways to better your situation that are proven to work and you don't take them because you don't see the point in even trying. It feels like a real reason, but it is logically not a real reason. It might sound cruel, but, dismantling learned helplessness in my life means that I am trying to make the choices that seem to hurt me the most. And then you wait for the sting to wear off, whether it takes days, months, or years. But it does wear off – it always does – and the results subsequently come. It's a lot like those people who dip in freezing cold pools as a mental exercise, which is also a proven solution to folks dealing with anxiety and bipolar disorder. The goal is to regulate your stress reactions by not reacting emotionally when in the face of stress, since the cold will be highly uncomfortable and unpleasant when touched, thus raising the stress tolerance on the nervous system. I think it's not a coincidence that I am one of those people who slowly inches in to freezing pools, who's sensory system becomes overloaded at the thought of jumping in to the shock.

I don't say I'm happier than ever because my struggle with learned helplessness, anxiety, depression, or stress tolerance has necessarily been cured – although it has gotten better. I am happier than ever in the sense that I now possess the bravery of the cold plunger. I am aware of when I do not want to leave the open cage and why. I'm not completely used to the sting, but it's okay. I understand that it has to happen in order to get the life I want to achieve.

I have never looked in to the door of an open cage since.