In 1967, an interesting study was published that established the concept of learned helplessness. The basic idea is that if you are subjected to a negative experience of some kind, in this case, I believe it was dogs receiving a mild shock that was uncomfortable, but nothing you do can stop it from happening, that you eventually give up, that you learn that you are helpless. And this was the prevailing theory all the way up. Until about 10 years ago, when the same authors of that original paper, they published a new paper with a lot of data, particularly brain scan data, showing that there was an association, but that it was kind of the opposite of what they thought, that you don't learn helplessness, but instead you learn control. The data basically shows that in the same situation. Where these animals are subjected to a negative experience. I think in the examples that they provide in the paper, it's rats in this case. That the rats who recognize that a control, you know, an input of some kind, that some action they take relieves them of the negative experience. Their brains are the ones that are changing. This is a kind of a fundamental shift. The original paper would have been supported by the idea that your brain changes as a result of a lack of control. In other words, your default mode would be control. And you would try to control something only to be met with, you know, that control not working. But actually, our kind of default mode tends to be passivity. Until we are. Confronted with the experience of control. And the input that we provide that gives us the feedback that our control has worked actually changes our brain in an interesting way. It turns off some signal in our brain. This is incredibly interesting to me because it comes down to a very important, what I believe is one of the most important factors in our lives. And in our lives. In our careers. And I was just talking to my son about this earlier today. He came to me with a problem. Something to do, I believe, with his iPad. It wasn't charging correctly. And he was distraught about this. And I had the opportunity to talk to him about, now what? What do we do? Do we allow this situation? To reside? Or do we instead say it is within our ability? It's within our reach. It's within our influence to change our situation. Of course, my son doesn't really necessarily appreciate the philosophical nature of these discussions all the time. But what he does recognize, because it is fundamentally a part of our neuroscience. Is that when he does take action, suddenly that feeling of helplessness and the negative experience he's having shifts. And as it turns out, this is a common prescription for people who are dealing with anxiety. In particular, with dread type anxiety. I've dealt with this myself. I've shared on this show before that over the years I've dealt with health anxiety. And the advice that I received from a therapist at one point followed right in line with this. I don't know whether this was... This specific theory applied from this paper... But the advice I received... The direction I received... Was... Control something in your environment... Take an action... Take an action... That gives you a sense of control... Now... I think it's very important if you're listening to this show right now and if you're struggling in your career, if you're facing difficult things, you've probably read on a job description that that job requires action orientation, that it requires you to be proactive, right? These are all kind of action words. And I think this is more important than it seems on its face. In fact, I think this is one of the most critical behavioral things that we can learn as human beings because it shifts the way we interpret our world. We move from being passive to being active by noticing that our control has an impact. This is super, super important because it doesn't necessarily have to match your situation. So what does this mean? If I wanted to get a new job, let's say my goal is I'm out of a job, maybe I've gone through a really difficult layoff, I'm in definitely a negative experience, I'm one of the dogs that is in the group that is getting the uncomfortable shock. And if I want to sit and wallow, or live in that difficulty for a long time, I can do that. I can do that. In fact, that is the default state. We have to take some kind of action to break out of that. But the important thing is that the action that I take doesn't have to necessarily result in me getting a new job in order for my brain to change modes. All it really requires is that I take some control action to make my mind and body change. And that's what I'm talking about. So this is the inside I want you to take away. How we deal with hard things, how we deal with challenges in our lives, is we exert even a small modicum of control. We exert some influence over our environment. This is often repeated in different kinds of philosophies. You've probably heard the importance of making your bed in the morning, right? And it really stands out in the book. From this underlying neuroscience, that if you take action over your environment, the neurological changes that happen encourage you to be action-oriented more generally. So you build confidence by taking some controlling action that has an impact on your environment. And when you see that your action results in a consequence, right? You see that you are controlling something in your environment. That is when that neurological change happens. Your brain can't really differentiate whether that control is equal magnitude to the thing that you were feeling helpless because of. So in other words, once again, if I'm, you know, out of a job, I don't necessarily have to take an action that gets me a job, right? The equal, you know, reaction, right? To my situation. I don't have to rectify my situation in order to get the neurological realignment to action orientation. All it takes is a much smaller control input. Okay. And this, the effect lasts. This is another thing that the study showed is that even a week after the behavioral response to a new stressor that was, you know, not pattern matched to the old stressor in some of these animals, their behavioral response existed. It changed the way they think about the world. It changed their paradigm of how they operate in the world. So it's important to recognize because, because the, the concept of learned helplessness might, uh, uh, you know, lead us to believe that we have a lot to reverse if we're stuck in this situation of passivity. But in fact, because there's not learning happening because our brains are not actually changing in those moments, the control mechanisms can work pretty quickly and pretty effectively without a lot of time passing. We can actually exert the control and begin to change relatively rapidly, right? So, um, what does this mean to you? It means that when you experience a hard thing, when you experience a challenge in your life and your career, you don't have to overcome the whole challenge. Let me say that a different way. When you have a big problem to solve, when you have, you know, a hard situation to face, challenging emotionally, physically, uh, uh, you know, financially, um, all of these challenges that you're going to, we're all going to face these. We have a million in front of us. It is part of what life is. And I'm facing these right now. I'm facing, I'm facing them in my job. I'm facing them, uh, you know, uh, uh, outside of my job and my life. It's something that happens to all of us. And we don't have the answers right away. This is just a reality of life. And so through these experiences, we learn and we eventually get wiser, but when we don't have the answers and no one else is around to give those answers to us, we have to navigate our way through it. We don't have a map of this. We don't have a guide to tell us what to do. Maybe we can Google some answers. Maybe we have friends or colleagues or coaches, or maybe you listening to me on this podcast helps you. I don't know. What I do know is that you don't have to solve the whole thing in order to feel ready to face it. You don't have to be able to match the magnitude of your problem with each action that you take. You can eat a little chunk of that problem away. And that simple step, of moving in the right direction, even one step in the right direction, that exertion of control is what will align your brain for the next thing, to be able to take on that big challenge and to take the next step. So one step in the right direction might be enough. My simple recommendation for you is to find the things that you can exert control over. Now, I want to be careful in, you know, framing this as purely a control thing. It's more like agency, right? You're, the environment that you control is very important. For example, if you, this might be something as simple as setting the temperature to a temperature that you like in your office. It may be something like cleaning the desk in your office before you start work so that you are exerting control over your, literally your physical environment, and you're getting that feedback. There are simple ways to do this. Those are obviously the most important things. But if you're not, if you're not, if you're not, if you're not, the things right in front of you, but there could also be other simple ways like taking care of your own calendar. Exerting some control is what gives you the neurological benefit that I'm talking about. So find, find what those things are, especially if you have felt like there's a lot of chaos in a particular area. Find one, you know, let's say 5% improvement in that area. Find a simple thing, one, one step in the right direction in that area of chaos. My bet, my, I won't guarantee this because everybody's different and everybody's going to respond to this differently. My bet is that when you exert this control, you're going to feel the neurological benefit and realignment to action orientation. And this skill is so important because we've talked about this a million times over on the show. Our jobs are changing, what's required of us, what we need to do to be successful. There's a lot of new demand. There's a lot of dynamic problems that we're having to solve. We're having to let go of some things. We're having to adopt new things. This has always been true, but the pace at which this is happening now is greater than it ever has been. And so this may feel like constant shocks to us. It may feel like a big mountain to climb. But if we can exert some action of control over this and take a step in the correct direction. Now, for example, if we can learn about something that we didn't know yesterday, this is probably the easiest way. If you're learning, you are. And so this is probably as an action in the right direction, as a control over your mental environment, right? If you can take these action-oriented steps, then you're going to be more ready for whatever comes next. Thank you so much for listening to today's episode of Developer Tea. This is a little bit of a different style of episode because we talk about these skills and kind of the underpinnings of what's going on in our brains and the research surrounding that, I think. Sometimes it can be a little bit of a challenge, but it can be a little bit of a challenge. to frame how we think about it. And taking this stuff that is written in a white paper in 2016 and making it applicable, to me, sometimes I come across these insights and they really change the way I think about the world. And I try to practice those things as I come across them. So that's why we did this episode today. And hopefully it was helpful to you. Hopefully, for those of you who have been feeling a little bit stuck, maybe this is a way forward for you. Thank you so much for listening. If you enjoyed this episode, please leave a review, subscribe in whatever podcasting app you're using. Of course, iTunes has the biggest impact on the reach of this show. But now we are also on YouTube. If you're not subscribed on YouTube, go and check that out. You know, it's mostly just my face. If you're watching YouTube right now, you know that you can see my very cool office and my guitar is hanging up on the wall behind me. But mostly, you know, this is just another way for you to have developer tea available to you. Thank you so much for listening. Until next time, enjoy your tea.