Tomorrow, I’ll do better. I’ve just got to keep my head up high. I can do it. Tomorrow everything will work out.

That’s what he told himself night after night. But the next day wasn’t better. Over and over. Optimistic nights, discouraging days—it got ever harder to stay optimistic.

His failures got worse and worse, as failures tend to do. Now, if you’re not keeping up in school, teachers might slow down for you. If you’re not keeping up in life, problems escalate and accelerate until you’re dealing with problems a genius couldn’t solve.

His reality checks kept coming hard, fast, and disappointing. Something had to give. The intuitive choice was to ignore, dismiss, and deflect the reality checks. It’s too painful to give up on oneself, and it’s easy to give up on reality.

Positive psychology pioneer Martin Seligman coined the term “learned helplessness” to describe the depressed, defeated attitude that, for bad luck or incompetence, besets those who just can’t catch a break. He argued that we can overcome it by interpreting our failures as local. You’re not a failure; you just failed one test—that sort of thing. But what if it’s one failed test after another, day after day? When failure becomes that generalized, one has to face it.

Or does one? To stay positive, we can more readily get in the habit of dismissing the reality checks and believing our own lies about how good we’re doing. Circle the wagons, it’s us against the world trying to bring us down. Blame others........

© Psychology Today