Episode Summary
In this short episode I share how learned helplessness made its presence firmly felt again and reminded me that I’ve yet to overcome it.
Episode Transcript (Edited)
Hi and welcome to today’s episode of Hope, Help and Happiness.
Today has been a day of ups and downs I suppose. Yesterday I had set out the goal of me working on my health and focusing on that. Today I was going to do just that.
But what’s happened is I’ve had a lot of sorting out to do in terms of catching up with things that I’ve let slip. I’ve spent a long time today just looking for paperwork and finding things that needed to be done. I need to get things sorted out with accounts for my bookkeeper.
Whilst doing so the echoes of learned helplessness came back to haunt me.
My current challenge or the current task I need to complete is to gather all my receipts, my expenses for the business and put them all together, send them over to my bookkeeper. So I’ve had to collate the receipts and scan them in and work out what’s been paid and what’s not. It’s not a job that’s necessarily difficult, but it’s one I hate doing.
But it does trigger a behaviour from the past which I’ll talk about in a second.
What’s been happening today in trying to deal this challenge is I suddenly got a measure of the impact learned helplessness has had on me. I found something like 15 to 20 unopened letters – I hope some of them aren’t bills – I don’t know yet as I’ve not opened them.
I’m worried about opening them in case I find something I should have dealt with.
The point is, I’ve allowed my learned helplessness to let things slip which means that two things happen.
First of all, I feel bad about myself letting things slip, which compounds the feelings I have about myself.
Secondly, I start to build up this backlog of stuff that I know needs to be done. As time goes on, that becomes harder and harder to deal with anyway. That compounds my feelings of helplessness. But also practically I’ve got this potentially massive problem looming that I might have to deal with as well.
So today as I was going through and sorting out the accounts and the receipts, it started to become difficult for me. The actual task in itself, is something quite straight forward, though a little tedious, and is something a healthy person could do quite easily.
But for me the perception of the task’s difficulty and complexity has been magnified in my mind by my learned helplessness.
As I start to try and address the challenge, echoes of my low self esteem and not feeling good enough come back and haunt me.
I start to think, “I’m not sure what to do here”.
And because I’m not sure what to do and I feel bad about myself because I SHOULD know. I end up doing nothing. And because of do nothing, I feel bad. And so there’s this downward spiral. In the end I start to feel fatigued, which I think is my subconscious’s way of dealing with this.
So this afternoon I took to my bed and had a nap. I was there for about two and a half hours.
This is a reminder the patterns of learned helplessness are still there.
Whilst I have arrested the mental decline I was in, and whilst I’m getting back on my feet again, there’s still echoes of the past that keep coming back and challenging me. Now maybe this afternoon I was too tired.
I’ve discovered I do work best in the morning, so I’ve started to put the tougher tasks first thing in the morning when I’m at my freshest and I am able to make more progress with them. I did that for the early part of today.
But then as the day wore on, I got more tired. It started become harder and this pattern got more ingrained.
So I am frustrated that this is here. I feel embarrassed that I’m admitting that, but I’m using this as a vehicle to draw my attention to things like this and to hold myself accountable for dealing with it.
But on a positive note, there are things shifting.
I have made some progress today. I have moved things a little bit further forward than I have done for some time now.
I think I have this expectation that I should change things now. That is probably the reason why I feel a bit bad about the experience I’m sharing here.
So that’s Today’s episode. I can go and start looking at doing the research I said I’d do yesterday.
Until tomorrow…
