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Hopelessness means change the approach
A signal that spreads
Hopelessness is meant to say give up on this specific job, this plan, or this relationship, and move on to the next. In practice, it spreads to life as a whole: give up on the belief that things will get better, or give up on dreams. A signal that was supposed to be specific becomes far too broad.
A strategy that isn't working
Picture sending 300 resumes through an online platform and hearing nothing back. Of course that feels hopeless. The signal is that the strategy is not working and that it is time to get creative about a different one. A harmful relationship works the same way: it may never change, but there is hope of getting out.
Only one way to live
Stanford freshmen reach the same wall the first time they fail an exam or realize they cannot be pre-med. They feel there is only one way to have a good life, or to make other people proud. The opportunities to have a life worth living are vast, and the more a person fixates on the one version it had to be, the more overwhelming the hopelessness becomes.
Why does hopelessness spread to everything?
Psychiatrist Aaron Beck described overgeneralization as a thinking pattern in which one setback is treated as proof about a whole life. The hopelessness theory of depression, proposed by Lyn Abramson, Gerald Metalsky, and Lauren Alloy in 1989, holds that people who explain bad events as lasting and global rather than temporary and specific are more likely to become depressed. The difference lies in the explanation, not in the event itself. The theory has been tested in many studies of students and adults over the following decades.
How did researchers first study giving up?
In the 1960s, psychologist Martin Seligman and colleagues at the University of Pennsylvania found that dogs exposed to shocks they could not escape later failed to leave a situation where escape was easy. The result was named learned helplessness. In 2016, Seligman and Steven Maier revised the account: passivity turned out to be the default response to prolonged adversity, and what has to be learned is that control is possible. The brain region that detects control is the prefrontal cortex.
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