Learned Helplessness

Why I spent a week sleeping on dirty sheets, and what it taught me about agency

Photo by Priscilla Du Preez 🇨🇦 on Unsplash

I had spent about a week sleeping on dirty sheets with no pillowcases. My husband has been sleeping on the couch because he’d been sick, and I hadn’t changed the bedding yet so he could come back to bed. Every time I thought about doing it, something in me recoiled. Not just “ugh, I don’t feel like it.” More like my body physically wouldn’t cooperate. The idea of wrestling a fitted sheet onto the mattress made me want to scream and pull my hair out.

I knew it wasn’t okay. He was stuck on the couch because of me. I was sleeping on increasingly gross sheets because of me. But I couldn’t make myself do it. Or wouldn’t. Or something.

This is what learned helplessness looks like up close: not always dramatic, not always about big life decisions. Sometimes it’s just you and some dirty sheets, locked in a standoff with yourself.

My therapist taught me years ago to ask myself a specific question when I’m stuck like this: Is this “I can’t” or “I don’t want to”? And once I figure that out, to ask a second question: If I’m telling myself I can’t, is that actually true, or am I just convinced it’s true?

These questions matter because learned helplessness thrives in fog. When you can’t tell the difference between genuine limitation and resistance, between actual inability and learned helplessness, you lose your agency. You become a victim of your circumstances instead of someone making choices within them.

Let me tell you about the time I had to make one of the hardest choices of my life, and how it taught me that you don’t have to stay helpless even when you genuinely can’t do something.

When I was finishing up high school, I had to pass my finals in math. I couldn’t do it. Not “it was hard” couldn’t. Genuinely couldn’t. I’d sit down to study and hit a wall I didn’t understand. It would drive me crazy. I would cry and think about it all the time; why can’t I just learn this?

That’s when my therapist taught me to distinguish between “I can’t” and “I don’t want to,” so I could advocate for myself. I had to really examine: which one is this?

It was “I genuinely can’t.”

That was a really hard thing to decide. Because my therapist also told me: “Look, you’re gonna have a great life. An interesting life. A life full of growth. But you’re gonna always take the more treacherous road. It’s gonna be harder than it is for others. Not doing math, one of the basic things, is going to come back and bite you in the ass later. You need to know that you are making the choice of being able to handle that later.”

I made that choice. And it did come back to bite me.

When I moved to the US to attend San Francisco State University, they almost kicked me out (which would mean deportation) because I didn’t have any math abilities and refused to do math. They told me to go get diagnosed with something if I wanted to stay. That’s when I found out I have both math anxiety and generalized anxiety disorder, and that my math anxiety was so bad growing up that I basically missed the years when I should’ve been learning the foundational concepts that would help me learn anything using math these days. I got to stay.

I’d always wanted to study psychology. I can’t ever do that if I don’t get over my math thing, because you NEED statistics for that. People told me “oh, statistics is fine, it’s nothing like math,” but let’s be real here. I’ve tried it, and let’s just say that it’s not for me.

I’ve had to change my actual dreams and plans because I made that choice. But that was part of what I decided to take on myself.

Here’s what I learned: it’s not about whether you’re a victim or not. There isn’t anyone out there looking to see if you’re sad and poor and miserable enough to give you a million bucks and make all your dreams come true. You’re going to have to fight for things no matter what. That’s how people live.

The question is: What CAN you fight for? What CAN’T you? And even when there’s a “can’t,” notice that the story doesn’t end there. It doesn’t end with “can’t.” It doesn’t end with the victimhood. It ends with what you do with your life now.

I gave up psychology fully. But that sent me on a trajectory of doing things that led me to now working with ADHDers directly. I might have done well as a psychologist, but it doesn’t matter, because I knew it was too much to ask of myself. I’ve fought extremely hard to get to where I am today.

That’s agency. Not overcoming every limitation, but making conscious choices about which battles to fight based on honest assessment of what you can and can’t do, and then fighting like hell for the things that matter within those constraints.

But learned helplessness doesn’t just show up in major life decisions. It shows up in the small stuff too. Sometimes especially in the small stuff.

My mom has this thing where she needs to do something with her hands all the time. She’d come to me out of the blue with beautifully cut fruit on a plate and ask if I wanted it. Of course I did. But now, when I buy kiwi because I want some kiwi, I look at it in my house and think: I don’t want to peel it. I don’t want to cut it. And the kiwi goes to the trash eventually.

It’s ridiculous. Is it really going to be that hard for me to get up and peel a kiwi?

My husband cooks for me, makes food for me, cleans for me. It’s incredible. He’ll be fasting for the day and still make me food. He doesn’t even eat the same food I eat; he makes MY food, all on his own time. And I’m so grateful.

But here’s what I’ve realized: because of my executive dysfunction, I feel like I NEED that. But the truth is I don’t need it. I would LIKE it. I love it. He’s amazing. But I don’t NEED it. The need part is from the learned helplessness.

Whenever he’s out of town, do you know how hard it is to get myself to just stand up and make myself dinner? I don’t even have kids to cook for, to take care of. I just need to cook for myself. And it feels absolutely horrible. At the end of the day, it feels so bad to realize that if people weren’t doing things for you, you can’t do anything.

So we need to prove to ourselves, even if we are spoiled (like I am), that outside of the support, outside of the fact that someone’s doing stuff for us, we could take care of ourselves. We’re good. We just like to be taken care of. That’s a different thing.

When I’m alone and need to make dinner, I catch myself thinking: “But I want to sit here and watch TV.” So I’ve had to tell myself some things.

First: you have your iPad for this. You have your phone for this. You don’t actually need the television.

Second: How much television time do you want in a day? When you think back on your day, at the end of it, what do you want to remember yourself having done? Do you want to remember what you watched, or do you want to remember a variety of different activities and feel kind of proud of yourself?

Third: There’s a finite amount of things that are watchable right now. This isn’t a need. You know what IS a need? For me to make myself some food and see that I can make myself some food. For me to get up and clean and show myself that I can keep this house clean. That if I lived alone, I wouldn’t become a hoarder. I wouldn’t live in squalor. That’s a way bigger need than my need to watch TV.

And it’s not like I’m even watching it live anymore. It’s all streaming. I can pause it for 30 minutes.

We all want to be perfect at things. When we need to do housework, we want to be the person for whom it’s effortless, whose natural tendency is to tackle those tasks. And when it’s NOT our natural tendency, we think: well, I guess I can’t.

But it’s not a natural tendency for anyone, is it? We all need to do things for ourselves. We don’t need to do them as often or as perfectly as we imagine. But we definitely need to do things for ourselves.

Back to the sheets.

After a week of being stuck, I had a conversation with someone about it. We talked through the resistance: Was it that I couldn’t do it? That I didn’t want to? That I was punishing my husband for not doing it for me? That my ADHD was punishing both of us?

I never figured out the perfect answer. But at some point, I realized: the avoidance was making me suffer much more than just doing the thing.

So I put on some music, whined as I walked up the stairs, and changed the sheets. The whole thing took less than ten minutes.

Ten minutes. After days of it feeling completely impossible.

I didn’t skip up those stairs feeling empowered. I whined. I did it while complaining. And that’s okay. I still did it.

Here’s what I want you to understand: You don’t have to do everything all the time. Sometimes you truly can’t do things. But you don’t have to stay helpless about it.

Sometimes the way out of learned helplessness isn’t perfect clarity about whether you can or can’t or don’t want to. Sometimes it’s just recognizing that staying stuck hurts more than moving forward, even if you have to whine your way through it.

You get to choose which suffering you’re willing to accept: the suffering of doing the hard thing, or the suffering of staying stuck.

That’s agency. Not feeling good about everything. Not overcoming every limitation. Just choosing, consciously, what you’re willing to fight for and what you’re willing to let go.

Even when there’s a genuine “can’t,” that’s not where your story ends.