If you feel helpless, read this

Powerful questions for difficult times

You may have noticed that I don’t do politics here. There are a lot of reasons for that, and I don’t foresee them changing.

But today I do want to offer something relevant to those of us who are struggling on this front, in response to what I’m seeing in some of my clients, family and friends. (Much of what follows will also be true for other situations that feel both intolerable and outside your control, however—so apply wherever makes most sense to you!)

What I’ve noticed most in these conversations is a profound sense of helplessness. Something horrible is happening, and we can’t stop it. We don’t know what to do or we tried to do the things we knew and they didn't work and it’s all falling down around us. We cannot break into the newsfeed and wrench events into the shape we want them to take. We can’t make certain people grow spines. We can’t make other people shut the hell up.

It’s hard to know what’s worse sometimes: the sense of limitless doom or the intolerable frustration at the sheer fucking stupidity. In a sense, I think this combination is something like the emotional signature of helplessness. It's not just the feeling of being unable to affect events; it's being unable to affect them while knowing how they could or should or must go instead. It’s like watching the heroine do the idiotic thing that will get her killed while screaming at the screen—except the stakes aren’t fictional and involve the entire planet.

All of which makes sense. Helplessness is logical fucking reaction.

And/but there is also this: a brain focused on helplessness will find more helplessness.

Confirmation bias is one of the most documented features of the human brain. We see what we expect to see. Which means we only register the evidence that supports the hypotheses we already have. If confronted with counter evidence, we are more likely to look for reasons to reject it than we are to update our hypothesis to reflect the evidence.

And at this point, many of us have unintentionally set our brains on the implicit mission Find all the terrible things and tell me why I’m helpless in the face of them. And, because of cognitive bias, our brains will fulfil this mission, in spades.

Note: I’m not saying that our brains is making up the terrible things. But they are pre-selecting our reaction to them. And that means that these terrible things will arrive to our consciousness already suffused with the sense combined doom and frustration and impotence. Our sense of helplessness is inevitably confirmed, because we registered the evidence from inside that view in the first place.

This is an issue, because a) helplessness is agonising and b) this agony contributes nothing to our lives or the world we want to protect or create. All helplessness really tends to do is make it harder to put down our phones. If we can’t stop the train wreck, at least we can watch it unfold in slow motion six hours day!

Despite the sheer number of terrible things, I don’t think we need to keep our brains tuned to the helplessness setting. I think we can deliberately shift into a feeling-state that contains less overwhelming doom and frustration. Not only will this feel better, but it is also a lot more likely to create positive action. To see what I mean, you can start by trying out these three questions.

1. Who do I want to be in relation to this challenge?

I love this question for anything difficult imposed upon us, because it puts the focus on an area where we have control without trying to pretend the external issues away. Thinking about who we want to be as we grapple with the unacceptable invites us to see this moment as an epic one where we can contribute something to the world, rather than a defeated moment where nothing we do can make a difference. It offers us the opportunity to hear in the alarm bells a kind of call—and it insists that how we respond to that call matters. All of which is pretty much the opposite of feeling helpless.

One important point about this question: the word ‘should’ does not appear in it. There is no right way to answer this call, and that’s part of the point. Who we want to be in this moment may look nothing like what we or others might have predicted. You might decide it’s most important to show up as an amazing neighbour, an empathetic parishioner, the one person not to lose their freaking mind at the school board meeting, whatever.

If you are already prone to judging your actions in the present as not enough, you can also use the following modification: What is one single do-able action I want to take in relation to this challenge, and why is this choice meaningful to me? This should provide some guard-rails for your brain, so you don’t wind up turning the call into more proof that your performance is subpar.

2. Who is with me in this challenge—past, present, and future?

This question challenges helplessness from a different direction, by changing our sense of scale. Helplessness feels small, solitary, trapped and disconnected. When we think of everyone else who is with us in the challenge, we zoom out to a very different vantage point, where we are part of something big, collective, connected and potentially powerful. That zoomed out perspective creates hope simply by giving us a longer scope and bigger canvass. We can think of our badass precursors who fought similar battles 50 or 500 years ago. In the American example, we can remember that literally millions of people voted against our current president. We can think of the future we want to bring into being, and who it is for.

The caveat here is about how we define ‘with’. Although online sharing and posting and commenting can feel like a chance to experience this togetherness, it also fosters groupthink, and right now the group is thinking a lot of thoughts leading to helplessness. Reflecting one another’s sense of outrage and disaster doesn’t create the zoomed out perspective I’m talking about. It’s not a larger view; it’s just a hall of mirrors.

For that reason, if you find yourself defaulting to an internet-outrage-and-disaster form of connection in your brain, you can add the following questions:

• What positive emotions do I want to feel in connection to people who are with me?

• Why is it important that we are together? What does our togetherness do?

• What inspires me in others?

• What IRL connections might I want to explore?

3. How am I motivated by [*clears throat, steels self to continue*] love?

This one sounds so cheesy that I almost can bear to add it—but, cheesy or not, it works. When I was doing a lot of union activism at my unversity, our most powerful moves always started not from rage at the administration’s latest idiocy but from love for our students, our profession, and the dream of quality education for all. I think that’s because love can drive action without exhausting you. It also can’t be taken away. At the end of the day, even if you don’t win that specific fight, you still have your love for the thing itself. You still get to feel that connection, and that can enable you to show up again the next day.

The caveat here is that feeling love doesn’t mean you aren’t allowed to feel other things. It’s not about having to turn the other cheek or not be angry or anything else. It’s about the fact that fighting for something out of passionate advocacy can be considerably more sustainable than fighting against something from rage and disgust. If you have a tendency to judge your own negative emotions, though, you might decide you want to skip this one!

Just asking these questions once won’t eradicate all the helplessness. But redirecting your brain to them frequently will definitely diminish it. And I think whatever relief we can create on this front is important—because helplessness won’t change anything external, but it will wear us down inside.

The next time you’re tempted to check the latest dystopia update, give this a try instead: set a timer for five minutes and free write in answer to one of these questions. See if what you feel by doing that seems more sustainable, more action-able, more connected, than what you might have felt otherwise. And let me know how it goes.