I read a study a few years ago that said we're exposed to more tragedy today in 24 hours

than we were in our whole lifetime 25 years ago. Just think about that for a moment.

Hey everyone, welcome back to On Purpose, the number one health podcast in the world

thanks to each and every one of you that come back every week to listen, learn and grow.

Now today I want to address a theme that I believe is on all our minds and all our hearts.

When I've been speaking to people, whether it's on Zoom calls, meetings, bumping into you all on the streets,

the word that I've heard repeatedly is helplessness. What I am understanding from listening to you all,

on social media comments in stories is a feeling of a lack of control, a lack of influence,

and feeling like a sense of the world experiencing a downward spiral. Now raise your hands if you're with me,

if you've been feeling that way not along, if you feel that way, I know a lot of people right now will be saying,

thank you so much for talking about this, thank you for raising it. It could be what's happening in the political landscape,

it could be what's happening in the economic landscape, it could be what's happening right around the corner from you

potentially, and I wanted to address this theme of helplessness because I think often we understand,

or hopefully we understand that it's expected, that it's normal, but we don't understand it deeply enough

and we don't know what to do with it. But the first thing I definitely want you to understand

is that it is not surprising that we feel this way. When we see the events, the decisions that are being made,

they can be highly discouraging, they can be highly disheartening. So if you're feeling this way,

I want you to know you're not alone and there's nothing wrong with you. It's not like you're broken or you need to be fixed

or some part of you needs to be mended or you'll mad at yourself for feeling that way, a lot of people are feeling that way.

So the idea of learned helplessness actually comes from tests on animals, but we find that human conditioning is similar.

So in 1965 Martin Selegman and his colleagues were doing research on classical conditioning,

and this is the process by which an animal or human associates one thing with another.

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