If there are circumstances we can’t influence, what should we do?
In the fifty-seventh year, American researcher Richter puts rats in glass jars with water. There’s nowhere to climb out, nothing to grab onto. And he watches how long the animal will swim. The rats died in the first fifteen minutes. Not from exhaustion. They just stopped swimming. Gave up and that was it.
Then he started taking the rat out of the water after a few minutes, holding it in his hands, and then returning it. And the rat swam much longer after that. What changed was whether it believed it could actually get out, which allowed it to hold on longer.
This story is worn out. There are many inaccuracies, and I wanted to dig deeper into this topic, so here we go.
In seventy-two. People are put in a room, and loud noise is turned on. The noise bursts in short flashes at random moments. You don’t know when the next one will be. And during this time, you have to work. Then, in the silence, you’re given a text to proofread for errors and a puzzle with no solution, though they don’t tell you that. The result is obvious: after such noise, people are duller and give up faster.
One group was shown a button at the beginning. They were told: if it becomes unbearable — press it, the noise will stop. But we’d like you not to do it. Almost no one pressed the button.
The noise was the same, but people made significantly fewer mistakes and worked on the unsolvable puzzle much longer. It wasn’t the button that worked, but the fact that it was there.
Let’s get a bit closer to the body. Slightly earlier, another researcher shocked rats in pairs — all the same. Only one could somehow influence it, and the other couldn’t. The second one had a stomach ulcer. It’s important not how much is piled on you, but whether you have any control over it.
The British have been monitoring ten thousand civil servants since eighty-five. It turned out that heart issues affect subordinates, not bosses. The lower the position, the worse the health. It’s about how much control a person has over how they work. The whole story about “heart attacks from responsibility” is nonsense. Healthier is the one who decides. The one who just follows orders gets sick.
And now about mountains. This is not research; it’s just what I’ve seen on the trail, having hiked a lot.
Do you know who falls behind first? Not the weakest. It’s the one who doesn’t go at their own pace. Any instructor will tell you: the group moves at the speed of the slowest. If you rush, you won’t just get one tired person, but the whole group exhausted.
And those who are convinced that the peak is just over the next hill are the slowest.
You get over one — and there’s another slope. And another. It’s a small defeat-disappointment each time. Three or four of these — and the person sits down. Not because they’ve run out of energy, but because the version of the route they believed in is exhausted.
But those who were honestly told at the start that “it will be eight hours and four false summits” reach the end calmly. Although they walk the same path and suffer from the strain. However, if you lay it all out for them, it’s not certain they would even attempt it.
Let’s recall Frankl. Everyone knows the quote: “He who has a why to live can bear almost any how.” Although, by the way, that’s Nietzsche, Frankl just quoted him.
But almost no one mentions what he wrote next. He recounted that in the camp, the death rate sharply increased between Christmas of forty-four and New Year’s. Because many people lived with the hope that by Christmas they would be home. Christmas came. They had to endure further—this is the same false summit. Only instead of a hill—it’s a date.
And that’s the main thing for me in Frankl—meaning cannot be tied to a deadline. “I will endure because it will end by March” is not a support. You can’t control that!
Support sounds different: I will endure because there is reason to. Without a date.
I see this constantly in my office.
A person comes in who has been carrying a burden of a job that’s consuming them for years. I ask: listen, what has changed now? It was the same before. And it turns out, earlier they knew they could quit. And now they don’t. The same goes for relationships—they’ve settled, no longer fight, have given up, and live like this.
The burden is the same. The button is gone.
And here, by the way, is an interesting point in Milgram’s experiment. It’s the one where people were asked to administer electric shocks to another for wrong answers, and they did so 65% of the time. (They didn’t actually administer shocks, but the actor pretended to be in pain, and the lab assistant stressed that they must continue.)
Everyone remembers one number—sixty-five percent. But this is the result of just one variant out of two dozen. Milgram tweaked this experiment in various ways, and compliance varied from zero to ninety percent.
And the most interesting variant is where two supposed participants, actually actors, sat in the room. At some point, they got up and said: that’s it, I’m not participating in this. And they left.
After this, about ten percent continued to the end. Nothing changed, just the person saw with their own eyes that refusing was indeed an option.
This is the button. Sometimes it’s just someone who stood up and left first.
Or a couple that has been together for twelve years. Trouble begins not when someone threatens to leave. Trouble begins when both feel that leaving is impossible, and they stay not out of love, but need or fear.
That’s why advice like “just endure” makes me uncomfortable. Endurance without a sense of exit is not strength but weakness. That’s what leads to ulcers.
There are things where there simply is no button, such as war. For what has already happened, there isn’t one, either. It would be easy to write now: just find a sense of control within yourself and relax, get yourself together, here’s some great exercises for control and a better life! (Greetings to info-mongers).
It won’t work. The illusion of control works only until you realize it’s an illusion. You can go on a retreat, but you have to return home, you know, as they say, don’t confuse tourism with emigration! Elevator buttons that aren’t connected to anything only reassure those who aren’t aware, believe me, it won’t last long.
But between “I control everything” and “nothing depends on me” there is a huge space. And a person who has been under tension for a long time stops seeing it altogether.
You can’t influence when it will end, but you can influence what time you get up. You can’t choose the circumstances, but you can choose whom to call today. And don’t set dates for yourself that you can’t control (good evening, procrastination).
It may be funny when we are going through such cataclysms, I understand. It doesn’t solve the problem. It does something else — it prevents the body from switching to the mode of “nothing depends on me.” We break down in this mode, not from the load.
So go at your own pace. And don’t believe those who say that the peak is just over the hill.
The button doesn’t have to be big. It has to be genuine. And it doesn’t have to be pressed.
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1. Rats in a jar of water.
Richter, C. P. (1957). On the Phenomenon of Sudden Death in Animals and Man. Psychosomatic Medicine, 19(3), 191–198.
2. Noise-cutoff button.
Glass, D. C., & Singer, J. E. (1972). Urban Stress: Experiments on Noise and Social Stressors. Academic Press.
3. Rats, electric shock, and ulcers.
Weiss, J. M. (1971). Effects of coping behavior in different warning signal conditions on stress pathology in rats. Journal of Comparative and Physiological Psychology, 77(1), 1–13.
4. British civil servants.
Marmot, M. G., et al. (1991). Health inequalities among British civil servants: the Whitehall II study. The Lancet, 337, 1387–93.
Specifically about work control — two works from 1997:
Bosma, H., Marmot, M. G., et al. (1997). Low job control and risk of coronary heart disease in Whitehall II. BMJ.
Marmot, M. G., Bosma, H., et al. (1997). Contribution of job control and other risk factors to social variations in coronary heart disease incidence. The Lancet, 350, 235–239.
5. Milgram
Haslam, Loughnan & Perry (2014). Meta-Milgram: An Empirical Synthesis of the Obedience Experiments.
6. Frankl
“Man’s Search for Meaning.”
