What is Learned Helplessness?
What is learned helplessness?
Many people live their lives full of depression and hopelessness. Pharmaceutical companies are making a fortune from people who believe drugs are the only answer. Watch television and you’ll be offered a free sample of popular antidepressants. The idea that a person could benefit instead by taking nutritional supplements has been studied since at least 1986.
In important ways, humans are no different than the lab rats in the learned helplessness study. The factors of learned helplessness, as you will see, could be affecting many people. In this experiment, rats in a closed cage were made helpless by a series of hundreds of harmless yet scary shocks. When the wall separating them from an escape was eventually removed, the rats remained. They quivered inside their cage bound by their learned helplessness. Even though they were physically capable of jumping out, they no longer recognized the opportunity.
The outcome was altered in a positive way when the biochemistry of the rats was altered. Scientists found after examining the brains of these animals that they were depleted of noradrenaline. This is the factor that enabled the rats to try to get out and, when depleted, it eliminated their ability to continue to try to get out. They had developed learned helplessness.
Then it was found that if you supplemented the rats' diet with precursors to noradrenaline, such as phenylalanine or tyrosine, they would quickly unlearn the helplessness and start jumping out. Even more interesting, if the rats were given these supplements at the beginning of the experiment they were much more resistant to becoming helpless, no matter how long the shocks went on.
Too often, we are bound by our belief that the "walls" around us prevent us from achieving our goals. Even when our "learned helplessness" walls come down, we can remain in our mental paralysis. We may know what to do intellectually but, as the rat study indicates, we can be predisposed by our biochemical mental state to accept our fate, just as if a wall surrounded us.
This study provides a very important lesson for humans. That success in life depends less on your IQ, education or connections than on your persistence.
Click Here to Learn why are neurotransmitters so important?
BrainFix at Night
If you are going to study at night but don’t feel like you need a physical energy boost, then BrainFix™ taken alone works wonderfully. Your body can make noradrenaline and dopamine during the day and night. The difference is that at night you don’t use them as fast as during the day. Your brain isn't running as fast and you're not making as many decisions. You do not have to remember as much information. You make noradrenaline at night considerably faster than you use it and you store it in the synaptic vesicles. When you wake up in the morning you'll literally have a big discharge of it, in your brain and in the rest of your body.
There are a few people whose discharge system for noradrenaline doesn't work correctly, and they may take literally half an hour to get themselves out of bed. If they were to just suddenly stand up, they will literally pass out and fall flat on the floor. There’s not enough noradrenaline to support the necessary level of blood pressure. This condition is a particular type of hypotension that occurs on arising in the morning. It’s called orthostatic hypotension. It's relatively rare, but it indicates an extreme case of what can happen when noradrenaline isn't released in your body. We're dealing primarily with the brain. Anybody who has to work hard - particularly if they are self-employed - will find that sitting in front of a computer all day can be just as wearying as digging a ditch. Yet at the end of the day when you feel totally wiped out, it has nothing to do with having exercised your muscles to exhaustion. It's the result of the work your brain has done. If a person gets too depleted of brain chemicals, they will lack the initiative to do things that are necessary. They may not even recognize opportunities right in front of them. One of the biggest problems in America is that many people don't recognize and take advantage of opportunities that become available to them.
This is especially important for entrepreneurs or for people who work in the stock market. For that matter, anybody who would like to have a better job than they have now. No one gets promoted for just sitting there, doing exactly what they're told and no more, all because of their lack of initiative.
There are people who would like to run their own business who just let the opportunities go by one after another. Eventually, they discover that they're locked into a job in which they will never get what they really want.
Why is EnergyFix better than a cup of coffee?
EnergyFix™ has 80 milligrams of caffeine per serving (BrainFix™ has no caffeine so can be taken anytime.) That is less than the caffeine contained in a typical cup of coffee. A cup of freshly brewed coffee contains about 110-120 milligrams per cup. Starbucks coffee can run much higher. Instant coffee contains about 60 milligrams per cup. The first cup of coffee in the morning gives you energy and improves your ability to work quickly and accurately.
Caffeine isn’t as bad as most people think. It’s the excessive use of caffeine that runs us down. Tests have shown that moderate doses of caffeine improve performance on certain types of activities like typing; typing fast and accurately improves with the use of caffeine.
Caffeine is the world's most popular work ethic drug. The first cup usually gets most people going but doesn’t keep you going – so you reach for another and then another and find that it doesn’t seem to work as well as the first cup. You can drink coffee all day and fall asleep at 10:00 at night with a cup of coffee in your hand. Many coffee drinkers get irritable and jittery. This gives caffeine a bad name. One of the mechanisms by which caffeine provides stimulation is by making you more sensitive to the effects of noradrenaline. It also sensitizes you to the release of noradrenaline. So during the day as you make all these fast, hard decisions, you deplete your supplies of noradrenaline; the caffeine has less and less to work with. So it's not too surprising that the caffeine by itself doesn't work as well toward the end of the day.
With EnergyFix™, however, you'll find that it keeps working for up to 4 hours, depending on how hard you are working. The harder you work the faster you burn it off. We recommend that the average person take EnergyFix™ & BrainFix™ at 10:00 AM and 3:00 PM. If you are going out for the evening take another serving before you go. If are not going out but want to get some work done before bed just take another serving of the BrainFix™ by itself.
For best results do not take Protein 1 hour before or after taking EnergyFix®
Take EnergyFix® at least 1 hour from consuming any protein. When your stomach disassembles protein, certain amino acids can interfere with the transport of phenylalanine across your stomach into your bloodstream and particularly across your blood-brain barrier and into your brain.
There are protease enzymes in your saliva that start the digestive process as soon as you start chewing. When protein reaches your stomach, it starts to be taken apart by protease enzymes.
Our bodies are very efficient at breaking down food into usable nutrients.
EnergyFix™ capsules are designed to do the same thing as the EnergyFix™ drink but without the low glycemic fructose. You'll get better results if you take carbohydrates with EnergyFix™ and EnergyFix™ capsules. We recommend a piece of fruit with your drink (or capsules) both at 10:00 AM & 3:00 PM. This is a good way to get your two pieces of fruit for the day along with the necessary fiber.
This information was taken from an interview with Durk Pearson and Sandy Shaw® in May of 1998. All rights reserved.
EnergyFix and BrainFix were formulated by award-winning Life Extension Scientists Durk Pearson and Sandy Shaw© for their own personal use. The Food and Drug Administration has not evaluated these statements. None of the products listed are intended to diagnose, treat, cure or prevent any disease. Please read all labels carefully before consuming them. Satisfaction guaranteed or your money back.