Hopelessness: Definition, Examples, & Theory

By Angela Saulsbery, M.A.
​Reviewed by Tchiki Davis, M.A., Ph.D.
Discover what hopelessness means, its causes, and how it’s related to depression. Also, how to get help for hopelessness.
*This page may include affiliate links; that means we earn from qualifying purchases of products.
Have you ever felt profoundly dissatisfied with your life, but couldn’t imagine how it could improve? Maybe these feelings and thoughts led to apathy–lots of snack-fueled Netflix binges, long naps, and little progress on goals that you value. Maybe you were even diagnosed with clinical depression and told that your hopelessness was a symptom of a psychological disorder. 
If so, you’re not alone–as Sidney Poitier said, “There is not racial or ethnic domination of hopelessness. It’s everywhere.” Anyone can experience hopelessness. Hopelessness, along with its siblings helplessness and worthlessness, can prevent us from engaging with the most meaningful parts of our lives. These mental states can reinforce themselves, leaving us trapped in a vicious cycle: If you can’t imagine how your life could change for the better, you’re less likely to try to change it and it’s more likely to stay the same. You might then take this sameness as further evidence that there’s no hope. I’m proof that it is possible to break out of this cycle, however, and I hope that this article leaves you with an understanding of hopelessness that helps you to loosen its hold over your life (or gives you tools to defend against it in the future).
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What Is Hopelessness? (A Definition)

​Hopelessness is negative expectations combined with the judgment that problems can’t be solved–in other words, people in the grip of hopelessness believe that their future will be miserable and that there’s nothing they can do to change it (Beck et al., 1975).

Opposite of Hopelessness

The opposite of hopelessness is, of course, hope. The essayist Rebecca Solnit defines hope as a force that drives us to fight for change; hope is also a choice to stay open to uncertainty and possibility instead of retreating to the glum certainties of pessimism (Solnit, 2016). Solnit writes of hope as something we create and do–it’s a willful mindset more than a feeling.

In the video below, Peta Murchinson discusses her experience of finding hope in a seemingly hopeless circumstance: the terminal disease diagnosis of her young daughter, Mia. Although the diagnosis is hopeless in the sense that Mia will die, Murchinson and her husband refocused their hope on providing the best life possible for their daughter in whatever time she has. Along the way, they have received abundant love and support from other people–love that Murchinson says they wouldn’t have experienced if Mia weren’t ill. This story supports Solnit’s contention that hope “is not the belief that everything was, is or will be fine” (Solnit, 15 July 2016). Instead, hope is the ability to imagine a worthwhile future coupled with the conviction that our choices and actions matter.

Video: Finding Hope in Hopelessness

Hopelessness Theory

The hopelessness theory of depression states that people are more likely to become depressed if they blame unpleasant events on internal, stable, and global causes (see Liu et al., 2015 for a review). For example, imagine another driver aggressively honks at you at a stoplight. If you think that the driver is honking at you because you’re a terrible driver, always will be, and are generally bad at every skill you attempt, you’re more likely to end up depressed. In contrast, if you think that the other driver is honking at you because they’re having a bad day, you’ll probably never run into them again, and most other drivers are polite, you’re less likely to end up depressed. With the latter kind of explanation, you preserve your self-concept and see the annoying interaction as an isolated event instead of a pattern. Many people who experience emotional abuse as children tend to reach for internal, stable, and global explanations for painful events in their lives–this pattern can cause hopelessness when people endure more hard times later in life (Liu et al., 2015, Fig. 1).

Is Hopelessness an Emotion?

Hopelessness is not solely an emotion–the construct also encompasses cognitive and motivational elements (Beck et al., 1974). In addition to “negative” emotions like sorrow, despair, and fear, hopelessness includes pessimistic beliefs about the future. Beliefs are thoughts, not emotions.

Examples of Hopelessness

Hopeless thoughts are often demotivating and include words like “never” and “always.” Here are several common examples. If any of these examples sound familiar, please bear in mind that they all contain logical fallacies that you can question and revise.
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  • “I got a C on this test, even though I studied. I’ll never get an A, no matter how hard I work. The teacher hates me.”
  • “I’ll always be single. No one could possibly be attracted to me. There’s just something wrong with me that I can’t hide.”
  • “Of course I didn’t get the job. There’s so much competition that someone else will always get picked over me. I just don’t have the natural talent to get into this field.”

Hopelessness in Depression

Hopelessness is a hallmark symptom of clinical depression. Depressed people tend to predict unrealistically negative futures for themselves (Beck et al., 1974). This symptom may be the reason depression is linked to suicidal behavior–in other words, hopelessness specifically, rather than depression more generally, might drive suicidal behavior (Beck et al., 1975). Alternatively, hopelessness may drive suicidal thoughts without necessarily causing suicide attempts–hopelessness isn’t strongly associated with the choice to act on suicidal thoughts (Qiu et al., 2017). It’s unclear whether the sad and apathetic moods of depression lead to hopelessness, a hopeless mindset leads to depression, or the cause-and-effect relationship goes both ways.

The Beck Hopelessness Scale

Aaron Beck and colleagues devised a hopelessness scale to measure pessimism and negative expectations (Beck et al., 1974). They found that hopelessness, more so than depression, is associated with suicidal intent severity (Beck et al., 1974). The researchers also identified cognitive, motivational, and affective (emotional) components of hopelessness (Beck et al., 1974).

Hopelessness vs Helplessness

Helplessness is a set of negative beliefs about your own abilities and power–if you feel helpless, you believe that you can’t take any action to change or influence your circumstances. Although I believe that everyone (except in the most extreme circumstances) can take some action to improve their lives at least a small amount, feelings of helplessness are often a rational response to being overpowered by others. 

Helplessness often naturally flows into hopelessness–if you (believe that you) can’t take meaningful action, it makes sense to conclude that your life won’t get better. If you believe that someone else might save the day, however, you might still have hope even if you see yourself as helpless. 

People feel hopeless if they don’t think they can make positive changes to their lives AND if they believe that no one else is motivated and able to make changes for them. For example, an abused child may know that they are helpless to escape a violent home; this helplessness may become hopelessness if the child also believes that they are worthless and therefore not likely to be rescued by other adults. Alternatively, the child might believe that other people are all callous and untrustworthy and therefore won’t help; they might also believe that other people are as helpless as they are. In any case, hopelessness requires an extra step beyond helplessness: It encompasses a lack of faith in other beings (people, God, etc.) as well as a lack of faith in yourself. 

Hopelessness vs Despair

In The Sickness Unto Death, absurdist philosopher Søren Kierkegaard variously defines despair as distance from God, alienation from one’s own nature, and wishing not to be oneself (2004). For those of us who aren’t 19th-century Danish philosophers, despair is the emotional component of hopelessness. Despair is also the typical response to the pointlessness (real or perceived) of fighting on toward a goal (Nesse, 1999). Despair prompts us to give up on a goal; this emotion may be helpful if we’re actually wasting our time (Nesse, 1999). Although hopelessness often includes feelings of despair, it also describes a set of beliefs about the world, the future, and our own abilities. Hopelessness includes an explicitly cognitive component that despair lacks.

Hopelessness Help

Because hopelessness is so difficult to overcome and is often a symptom of clinical depression, your best bet for overcoming hopelessness may be to reach out to a qualified mental health professional. A crisis text line or suicide hotline may also help (although if your hopelessness persists, consider finding regular therapy as well–hotline workers may be able to connect you to resources for long-term therapy). Options include texting HOME to 741741 to reach the Crisis Text Line or dialing 988 to reach the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline (formerly the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline). You don’t need to feel suicidal to call or text these lines.

When I feel hopeless, connecting with loved ones also helps. A good long FaceTime chat with my best friend may not solve all my problems, but the connection we share at least reminds me that someone is in my corner. Reminiscing about good times my friend and I have shared also helps me imagine how life could be better in the future. Below, I describe several additional strategies that I’ve used to break out of the cycle of hopelessness.

  • Experiment. In my science education, I learned about null hypotheses. A null hypothesis predicts that your intervention won’t change the outcomes you care about. For example, “The tomato plants that I give the new fertilizer to will produce the same number of tomatoes as the plants that get the usual fertilizer.” Usually, we scientists hope to discredit the null hypothesis. After learning this concept in an introductory psychology course, I began thinking of my pessimistic thoughts as null hypotheses that I could test. So, whenever I thought something like, “I won’t get a good grade on this exam no matter what I do,” I’d test the thought by doing everything I could think of to perform well on the exam. Unsurprisingly, I tended to score well–over time, repeated success shifted my thoughts toward optimism and confidence.
  • Don’t buy into it. Alternatively, you can treat pessimistic or hopeless thoughts like annoying acquaintances. Instead of engaging with, internally debating, and analyzing every negative thought, I often just brush them off. For example, I might think, “I shouldn’t go on this trip. Something is definitely going to go wrong,” to which I can respond, “Thanks for your input, pessimism, but I’ve already decided to go.” Or, after thinking, “Why am I bothering to go on this date? This relationship isn’t going to go anywhere,” I can think, “Yeah, probably not, but that means I have nothing to lose–I can relax, be myself, and enjoy a nice omelet.” (That guy is now my partner–and I did enjoy the omelet.)
  • Write a new story. Narrative therapists believe that we can empower ourselves and live more satisfying lives by challenging and rewriting the stories we tell ourselves (White & Epston, 1990). Externalizing problems is a critical part of this process–in separating our identities from the problem, it’s easier to see past it to what we want for ourselves. In the case of hopelessness, you can try asking what the hopelessness “wants” you to do–e.g., “The hopelessness wants me to give up and never apply to grad school. It doesn’t want me to have a career I find interesting and more financial stability.” This framing might inspire you to take steps toward your goal in spite of the hopelessness. This strategy might work particularly well if you tend to react to criticism by trying to prove the naysayer wrong.

Quotes on Hopelessness

Hopelessness can strike anyone. The quotes below (from a self-help author, an actress, an activist, and a politician) may help you better understand the concept: 

  • “Since our society equates happiness with youth, we often assume that sorrow, quiet desperation, and hopelessness go hand in hand with getting older. They don't. Emotional pain or numbness are symptoms of living the wrong life, not a long life.” – Martha Beck
  • “Nothing prompts creativity like poverty, a feeling of hopelessness, and a bit of panic.” – Catherine Tate
  • “The terrorists thought they would change my aims and stop my ambitions, but nothing changed in my life except this: weakness, fear and hopelessness died. Strength, power and courage were born.” – Malala Yousafzai
  • “Hopelessness is a really toxic and dangerous state.” – Cory Booker

These quotes illustrate our power over hopelessness, the creative risk-taking that emotional low points may enable, the danger of hopelessness, and the growth and resilience that people can experience after traumas which might ordinarily cause hopelessness.

Articles Related to Hopelessness

​Want to learn more? Check out these articles:​​​​

Books Related to Hopelessness​

If you’d like to keep learning more, here are a few books that you might be interested in.

Final Thoughts on Hopelessness

Hopeless people believe that the future will inevitably be painful or meaningless. The tendency to explain current painful events in internal, stable, and global terms promotes hopelessness and may lead to depression. Hopelessness is, indeed, a symptom of depression that is strongly linked to suicidal thoughts. If you feel hopeless, mental health professionals may be able to help you; engaging in the relationships and activities you find most rewarding and meaningful might also rekindle hope. I believe that, no matter how hopeless our circumstances appear, there’s almost always something (even if small) we can do to improve them. With the many problems and stressors that most of us regularly face, it’s easy and understandable to become hopeless. And it’s difficult but crucial that we keep moving, keep testing our hopeless thoughts, and don’t give up.

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