“Help do” vs. “help to do” vs. “help doing” in English

Both “help someone do something” and “help someone to do something” are acceptable. The form without “to” seems to be more common in everyday speech than the form with “to” (especially in American English), but both forms are common in formal writing:

Some learners try to combine the -ing form we can find in other phrases with “help”, but this is unfortunately not correct:

Finally, there is one informal phrase in which we do use “help doing”, namely “cannot help doing”. If someone “cannot help doing something”, they cannot suppress the need to do it. For example:

This idiom means the same as “cannot help but do”—we could also say, “I cannot help but think about her constantly.”

A few more examples of correct usage: