Do you know what self-efficacy means and what influence it has on a healing process?

If you take a lab rat in your hand and place your second hand on it in such a way that you form a kind of cage with all five fingers, the rat will spend the first few minutes looking for ways to escape from the prison.

The longer you hold the rat like this, the more its ambition to find a way out dwindles. If you throw the poor animal into a pool of water, it will swim for 30 minutes before it gives up and has to be rescued from drowning. 

A genetically identical lab rat that is allowed to swim without first being restrained will last how long?

What do you think? Twice as long? Ten times as long? The same amount of time? 

Well, a rat that has not been "trained" to be helpless beforehand swims 60 hours. That is 120 times longer. Again, as a reminder, the two animals are the same age and strength, and genetically practically identical. 

The only difference is that one had been trained to be helpless. In other words, the second rat's perseverance and stamina came solely from the confidence that he could do it.

So this trust can be influenced. 

By the way, the concept of trained helplessness can be transferred one-to-one to humans. This was shown in the following experiment: a school class was given the following task: each student was given a sheet of paper with three words on it. 

A new word was to be combined from the letters of each word. One half of the students received two words from which a new word could be easily combined, for example, the English 3-letter word BAT can be easily converted into TAB, which this half of the students managed in a fraction of a second. 

The other half of the students were given two words whose letters could not be combined to form another word. They were thus presented with an unsolvable task. 

The third word on the list was the same for all students. The group with the first two, easily solvable tasks was then also able to form a new word from the third, clearly more difficult word. 

The control group, which was presented with two unsolvable tasks, would now have a real solution possibility at the third word, but they were already disillusioned (learned helplessness) and simply gave up at the third word. The effect of learned helplessness was reinforced by the teacher repeatedly asking "Who has already found a solution?" and thus additionally triggering a feeling of inferiority and frustration in the second group, because most of the classmates from the first half naturally gave up.

Prof. Martin Seligman, American psychologist, in the 60s 70s and 80s coined the terms "Learned helplessness"and subsequently "positive psychology". Today - especially on the subject of self-healing competence - the term self-efficacy is used. What problem-solving capacities do I know I have? How much do I trust myself? Do I quickly capitulate in the face of a difficult task or do I work on it until the solution is found? How a person answers these questions depends solely on his or her self-efficacy.

Vera Birkenbihl one of the smartest thinkers in the German-speaking world, unfortunately deceased in 2012, sees people's self-efficacy in the context of the ever-increasing conveniences of everyday life. In other words, more and more is being taken away from us and so we have to solve fewer and fewer (small) problems. For example, the fully automatic oven bakes the ideal bread, the vacuum cleaner now drives around on its own just like the lawn mower and does its job. 

In the past, a sailor needed a comprehensive knowledge of navigation that extended into the field of astronomy. Today, every amateur sailor gets his position on the world's oceans, accurate to 3 meters, displayed by electronic helpers for 24 hours, in color and in real time, with speed, course and water depth. 

Consequently, hardly anyone today can navigate by map and direction finding instruments, let alone by the constellation.

It is no different in the area of self-healing competence: for every little ailment there is a little pill that simply makes it disappear. If we have a tweak in our back, we can have a micro-invasive operation in no time at all, and then we can carry on as before - and that is often unhealthy. This not only prevents me from looking for the cause of the discomfort, but also prevents me from forgetting that I have the ability to investigate the causes and make the resulting course corrections in the first place.

As the previously described experiments show, self-efficacy (=.Self-healing competence), however, can be specifically trained and thus dramatically increased. 

For some people, it is as if they suddenly discover the autopilot on their ship of life, switch off and take over the helm themselves from now on and consistently and consciously steer in the desired direction. 

I see increasing self-efficacy as the first and most important step in a healing process. 

Here is another article on the subject Self-efficacy & self-healing.