Years pass, and the child grows into someone who no longer talks about their ambitions, avoids challenges they once found exciting, and responds to every suggestion with a shrug. Their family calls them unmotivated, their teachers say they are wasting their potential, and nobody seems to remember the child who once tried so desperately to make everyone proud.

Now imagine a parent who has spent years trying to keep a family together despite financial hardship, an employee whose every attempt to speak up has been dismissed, or a student who has repeatedly asked for help only to be told that they are not trying hard enough. Eventually, they begin to withdraw, not necessarily because their circumstances have improved or their ambitions have disappeared, but because they can no longer imagine their efforts making a meaningful difference.

From the outside, it looks like surrender; from the inside, it may feel like the only response that experience has taught them to expect.

Psychologists call one process that can help explain this pattern learned helplessness, a concept developed through research by Martin Seligman and Steven Maier in the 1960s. Their experiments explored how repeated exposure to situations that could not be controlled affected later behaviour, finding that some animals subsequently failed to escape unpleasant circumstances even when escape became possible. The central idea was unsettling: when experiences repeatedly teach an individual that their actions do not influence what happens to them, they may eventually stop trying, even when the possibility of change returns.

A 2023 research review by Michael V. Baratta, Martin E. P. Seligman, and Steven F. Maier, titled From Helplessness to Controllability: Toward a Neuroscience of Resilience, examines how the perception of control shapes responses to stress and how experiences of control can help protect against its harmful effects. The researchers describe learned helplessness as involving “passivity and increased fear” following uncontrollable adverse events. Their work highlights an important distinction between facing a difficult situation and believing that nothing one does can change it.

This distinction matters because we often judge people by their present behaviour without considering the experiences that may have shaped it. A student who stops studying may be labelled lazy, even if they have spent years trying to meet expectations that keep moving beyond their reach. A child who no longer shares their problems with their parents may appear secretive or indifferent, even if earlier attempts to communicate were met with ridicule, anger, or dismissal. An adult who refuses to pursue a better job may seem content with mediocrity, even if repeated rejection has gradually convinced them that their qualifications will never be enough.

Of course, not everyone who struggles to act is experiencing learned helplessness, and a difficult childhood does not automatically produce it. Human behaviour is shaped by many factors, including mental health, social circumstances, available resources, and individual differences. Nevertheless, the concept offers a valuable way to understand why someone may stop taking opportunities that appear perfectly reasonable to everyone watching them.

A 2025 review by Gustavo E. Tafet and Tomas Ortiz Alonso, published in Frontiers in Psychiatry, revisits the relationship between uncontrollable stress, learned helplessness, and resilience. The authors discuss how repeatedly perceiving a lack of control may contribute to helplessness associated with depression, while experiences of control can support more adaptive responses to stress. Their work reinforces the importance of understanding not only what happens to people, but also what they learn to expect from their circumstances.

Consider what this might mean inside a family. A child who is constantly criticised may eventually stop making decisions independently because every mistake becomes evidence of incompetence, while every success is dismissed as something they should have achieved anyway. A teenager who is never trusted may stop explaining themselves, not because they have nothing to say, but because they have learned that explanations rarely change the verdict. Even parents can experience a similar pattern when years of financial insecurity, caregiving responsibilities, or repeated attempts to improve their family’s circumstances leave them feeling trapped in an endless cycle of effort without relief.

In each case, the visible behaviour can conceal a history that outsiders do not see. Someone may appear careless because they no longer invest emotionally in an outcome; another may seem stubborn because they avoid situations in which failure feels inevitable. What looks like indifference can sometimes be an attempt to protect oneself from the disappointment of hoping again, particularly when hope has repeatedly made an already painful situation harder to bear.

This is why telling someone to “just try harder” can be remarkably ineffective. For a person who believes that their actions make no difference, another demand to make an effort may sound less like encouragement and more like another opportunity to fail. They do not necessarily need someone to explain the importance of hard work, because they may already have worked harder than anyone realised; what they have lost is the confidence that their effort will lead somewhere.

This is especially relevant when considering depression, although learned helplessness is not itself a formal diagnosis and cannot explain every aspect of the condition. Depression can affect energy, concentration, motivation, sleep, and the ability to experience pleasure, making ordinary responsibilities feel disproportionately difficult. A person who cannot answer messages, complete assignments, maintain their room, or get out of bed may be struggling with more than a lack of discipline. Assuming that they could simply function normally if they cared enough can turn their existing difficulties into another source of shame.

The encouraging part is that helplessness is not necessarily permanent. Rebuilding a sense of control does not require pretending that painful experiences never happened, nor does it mean that someone can recover through positive thinking alone. It may begin with small, achievable decisions, an environment where effort produces a visible difference, access to appropriate mental-health support, or simply a person who listens without immediately turning every confession into a lecture.

For a struggling student, that might mean helping them identify one manageable task instead of demanding that they repair an entire academic record overnight. For a child, it might mean allowing them to make decisions without treating every mistake as a moral failure. For a parent overwhelmed by responsibility, it might mean offering practical help rather than praising their sacrifice while leaving them to carry the same burden alone. The point is not to remove all responsibility from someone, but to make it possible for them to experience responsibility without feeling that failure is inevitable.

We cannot know someone’s history simply by looking at them, and learned helplessness should never become another label used to dismiss people. But we can remember that behaviour rarely tells the whole story, that repeated disappointment can influence what people believe is possible, and that a person’s apparent lack of effort does not necessarily reveal how much effort they have already spent.

Perhaps the next time someone seems to have given up, we should resist the immediate urge to ask why they are not trying, and instead wonder what happened when they tried before. 

Perhaps the child who no longer dreams, the parent who has stopped asking for help, or the student who has abandoned their ambitions does not need another reminder of their wasted potential. 

Perhaps they need a reason to believe that their actions can still make a difference. So, before you tell someone to try harder, consider how many times they may have tried before you ever noticed they were struggling.