What Helps You *Want* to Stay Alive in Times of Despair?

These days, anyone of any political persuasion can find reasons to despair. Dramatic social upheaval. Climate change. Wars. Artificial intelligence. Mondays.

If you wish you could die, or if you outright think of killing yourself, what keeps you going?

In another post, I asked, “What stops you from killing yourself?” to help you identify your reasons for living. Now, I’m asking because I want all the ideas I can get.

I’m giving a keynote talk at the American Association of Suicidology conference in April, on how to want to stay alive in dark times. Want to, because for many people it’s not enough to just survive.

True confession: I don’t really know how. The title is aspirational. I chose it in the spirit of Dale Carnegie’s famous self-help book “How to Win Friends and Influence People.” His book offers good ideas, but it doesn’t have fool-proof answers.

Similarly, I have many ideas about ways to want to live. Ideas based on my own suicidal crises. Ideas based on my clinical work as a psychotherapist. Ideas based on my research and scholarship as a suicidologist.

I have a lot of ideas, but I don’t want to miss something important. Which is why I’m inviting you to share in the comments below what helps you want to stay alive.

Yes, it’s kinda weird, isn’t it? I’m crowd-sourcing the ultimate life-or-death advice.

Reasons for Living when You Want to Die

To get your ideas flowing, I’ll share the results of a novel study. Researchers looked at more than 7,000 Reddit posts by people with suicidal urges and analyzed the reasons why they didn’t try to end their life.

The study authors identified 12 major reasons for staying alive, listed here in order of how frequently they appeared:

Friends and Family

By far, concern about loved ones was the most common deterrent to suicide. This showed up in 43% of the Reddit posts. In comparison, the next most common reason was cited only 10% of the time.

Specifically, people said they didn’t want to hurt their friends and family. They also mentioned wanting to spare loved ones from finding the body, organizing a funeral, cleaning out the person’s belongings, and other consequences.

Those same things weighed heavily on me in my own suicidal episodes. Once, during an especially bleak mood in Paris many years ago, I ruled out suicide because getting my body back to the U.S. would have been a huge hassle for my parents.

Purpose

Fulfilling responsibilities, working toward goals, and finishing projects gave many people’s lives purpose. This is reminiscent, to me, of that Robert Frost poem:

The woods are lovely, dark and deep,

But I have promises to keep,

And miles to go before I sleep,

And miles to go before I sleep.

Curiosity and Optimism about the Future

Hope for the future. A belief that things would get better. Curiosity about what will happen in their life. Each of these kept people going.

It’s like that famous quote from Project Semi-Colon: “Your story isn’t over.”

(Sadly, the founder of Project Semi-Colon, Amy Bleuel, killed herself in 2017. But her message is still true.)

In my 20s, a therapist asked me, “Don’t you want to see what happens?” And: “Can’t you have the humility to acknowledge you don’t know what will happen?” Powerful questions, because at the time I felt certain my life would never get better. Thankfully, I was wrong.

Hobbies and Activities

What do music, masturbation, and Minecraft have in common? All were listed as reasons to not die by suicide. So were football, exercise, and books.

For myself, I’d add eating chocolate, petting cats, writing, traveling with my husband Pete, and swimming in the ocean as compelling reasons to stick around.

What hobbies and activities make life worth living for you?

Animals/Pets

A questionnaire called the Reasons for Living Inventory lists 72 reasons across six domains: responsibility to family, child-related concerns, fear of suicide, fear of social disapproval, beliefs about survival and coping, and moral objections. (You can see the questionnaire and learn more about it in my post, “What Are Your Reasons for Living?”)

Researchers use the Reasons for Living Inventory a lot, but to me it has a striking failing: it doesn’t include pets. Pets help people cope. Pets also need to be taken care of.

People have told me they don’t kill themselves because they don’t want to subject their pets to abandonment, an animal shelter, or euthanasia. As one person in the Reddit study posted, “My dog needs me.”

Pets factor so big in people’s lives that an animal shelter in Oregon started asking everyone who came to surrender a pet if they had suicidal thoughts. In the first three months, seven people were identified – and helped – as a result.

Intervention by Others

Intervention doesn’t have to mean calling the police or taking someone to the hospital. A shout from someone to “get down from there,” an unexpected visit, and other actions by others stopped some people in the Reddit study from following through with their suicide attempt.

There’s an oft-told story of someone who left a suicide note saying, “I’m going to walk to the bridge. If one person smiles at me on the way, I will not jump.” The medical examiner and a psychologist found the note after the person’s suicide.

It goes to show that you never know what impact a few words, a smile, or a little act of kindness can have on others.

Fear of Pain, Death, and/or the Afterlife

Everyone knows Shakespeare’s famous question in Hamlet, “To be or not to be?” In that speech, Hamlet’s main reason for being is the uncertainty of what comes after death:

To sleep, perchance to dream—ay, there’s the rub:

For in that sleep of death what dreams may come,

When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,

Must give us pause…

Hamlet goes on to say that the uncertainty “makes us rather bear those ills we have than fly to others that we know not of.”

These same fears of a harsh afterlife stopped people in the Reddit study. So did fears of regretting one’s suicide at the last, irrevocable moment, fear of physical pain, and overall fear of dying.

I have to say, similar fears troubled me when I was suicidal. I worried in particular that I might be reincarnated into a life of even more suffering, to teach me whatever lessons I didn’t learn this time around.

Transience

“This, too, shall pass” is a phrase thought to bring joy to the suffering and suffering to the joyous. Everything changes. Maybe not the situation – a dead loved one doesn’t come back to life, for example – but the intensity of despair and pain can change.

Apathy, Laziness

Suicide requires effort; the proverbial path of least resistance is to keep going. Who knew apathy and laziness could be life-saving?

Procrastination is life-saving, too, for that matter. Putting off suicide, thinking without acting, taking a long nap – all of these have helped some people survive.

Fear of Surviving a Suicide Attempt

People have survived suicide attempts with horrific injuries – paralysis, brain damage, blindness, to name a few. How tragic that the act they undertook to end their suffering only created more. That prospect was enough to keep some people in the Reddit study from acting on their suicidal thoughts.

Spite

I love this one! “I don’t want my haters to win,” one person posted on Reddit. You know what they say: “Living well is the best revenge.”

A recent memoir, The Chair and the Valley, gives a poignant example of surviving out of spite. The author, Banning Lyon, had been abused by doctors at a psychiatric hospital. When he was in an especially dark place, he remembered a friend’s words: “You can’t let the doctors win.”

Pharmaceutical Drugs

Some people credited antidepressants with saving their life. I believe they saved my life, too. This is a controversial topic, because other studies have reported that taking antidepressants caused harm. Stopping antidepressants also can be treacherous.

Other Reasons for Staying Alive When You Want to Die

The study authors also listed reasons that didn’t fit neatly into one of the above categories. Not having a gun available was one reason. Getting into therapy was another.

What Helps You Want to Survive?

What reasons in the Reddit study most resonate with you? What reasons do you have for living that the study didn’t capture?

And, most importantly, what helps you to want to live?

© 2025 Stacey Freedenthal. All Rights Reserved. Written for Speaking of Suicide.