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.
The space between your father and I make me want to stay alive.
Millie,
Your words really struck me. I’m not sure exactly what “The space between your father and I make me want to stay alive” means to you, especially because my father is no longer alive. Maybe you’re referring to *your* father? In any case, it sounds like something powerful to you lives in that space. Thank you for sharing it here.
We don’t need reasons to live we need better access to euthanasia. The current world system exists purely to provide wage slaves for the elite. We need a humane way out, not words
Euthanasia is suicide. Suicide is wrong period. I’m tempted to but God will get me through this!
Wrong according to who? Your particular flavor of imaginary friend? Nice that He talks to you and tells you what’s right and wrong for other people, but maybe He should spend some time actually acting like He loves his supposed children instead of letting them live a life that makes the threat of either Oblivion or Hell seem like small potatoes.
I’m in a dark place right now and came across your writings. I’ve never heard a therapist speak so realistically about suicidality. It a made me cry and want to lie on your doorstep and beg you to talk with me. But…..that’s not going to happen.
I live in FL, a mental health treatment desert. Also I’m old and have tried almost every treatment there is, or at least researched them.
Been on Lexapro for many years but it’s not enough now.
I’ll call my Dr. tomorrow to look for someone here for a medication adjustment. I’ve tried this a few times down here with disastrous results but I’m out of other options.
trouble is, it never just “passes.” Every single day I think ending my life would be best for me. My struggles are enormous and I only really think of how I can support others in their struggles.
That I don’t want to hurt my family is largely a given when considering whether to be or not to be. The problem is the mind tricks I use to justify my decision to suicide: they would be better off without me. They hate me anyway, or perhaps they wouldn’t care one way or the other. But the one I can’t seem to get past is this: I don’t want to teach my kid that suicide is how to solve her problems. I don’t want her to learn [from me] that suicide is an acceptable option when she feels depressed, overwhelmed, even hopeless. She deserves better than that. And she deserves to know that I do, in fact, love her more than I hate myself.
I wonder why you hate yourself. If you did something bad, making amends might help. If you didn’t do anything to deserve it, perhaps your the victim of toxic parents who made you feel that way when you didn’t deserve to. That was my story and therapy has helped a lot. While it’s good that you love your daughter more than you hate yourself, you might be able to do something about that latter feeling. I know it’s hard, because first you have to feel worthy enough to even try to help yourself feel better about yourself. For me, knowledge of my childhood gave me the optimism to believe I might just be worth it. I’m not saying it’s easy because it’s not and I still struggle with self-esteem issues but the suicidal thoughts have no power over me now. I hope for the best for you.
Dear Erin, I get where you are coming from. Those monsters who whisper in our heads that our family will be better off without us or that we are a burden, these are real. But believe me PLEASE, these are just thoughts and even though we can then Feel them, they are whispers and not Truths.
I can often lie in bed for hours thinking about wanting to die, what I would do in terms of getting rid of things that I own (so that people do not have to deal with my possessions) and about how I would go about putting my thoughts into action. I end up not being able to get out of bed as I just feel so exhausted – on all levels.
As I look around me, I then begin to feel a disconnect from the things that I own. This isn’t a good thing as I have always had a deep connection to my things and the memories that they invoke; the stories that they tell me. With that connection going, it can often feel like I have nothing to hold on to.
I have no children nor any pets which I can focus on.
Often I cannot help but think about my life when I first met my partner (who died by suicide in 2021) and the life that we shared for so long (30 years in all). They were the only person I ever truly felt loved by. Knowing that they died due to no longer being able to manage their mental illness is what hurts a lot. People tell me that I have a lot to live for. However, they are not in my head or my heart. The loneliness without my partner or our little dog is very intense. As time moves forward, I too can begin to lose any real worthwhile Hope for the future. How I hate these feelings.
Life seems to just be a series of uphill battles these days.
But I do find that if I can support others who have lost someone to Suicide, that I start to grow more positive. With others who have a lived experience with suicide loss, thinking about suicide, or attempting suicide, we can share our thoughts, our feelings in whatever capacity we are able to. And as we share, people connect with us by empathizing with our plight (as too we with them). WE GROW MORE POSITIVE and WE GROW MORE STRONGER.
So I would simply like to encourage you to try and find others who are going through a similar experience to your own.
Another thing that I found helpful was to write out the things that have given me a sense of purpose or things that I find pleasurable. These are what make you and me who we are – they do not have to be validated by others, as they are the things that speak to the core of who we are. Unfortunately, we often want the validation of others but sometimes we just need to find a connection to our own self.
When a person dies, and more so to suicide, the impacts of their death are already difficult enough and can be very devastating. Until recently, I know that I have not given a lot of thought to how many people are most likely to be affected by my death. In the case of my partner, for some of his friends, I can appreciate just how much. As an example, one friend reaches out every anniversary to talk about my partner on their birthday, the day of their death, when Christmas and Easter come around, as too Halloween. She is always extremely depressed on these days and you can hear it in her voice; see it in her tears. Others who were affected have seemingly gone back into their own lives. However, I cannot know what is in their minds and hearts. Some people have pulled away, and I think maybe it is because I am a reminder of the friend they lost – they did not blame me for the death (though some did) but they are reminded nonetheless of the friend they have lost. Now having read a recent post, I have been thinking more about this aspect to loss. People are affected irrespective of what is going on in our minds and hearts.
So you see – even though the Monsters whisper their dark thoughts to us, we all have an impact somewhere on another person’s life. That can mean we will be grieved by people (this could even be a store owner, a neighbor, someone who may see you walking down the street, though they never speak with you). Of course, your thoughts and feelings may be deeper than this and that is where your GP may help you, even if only by connecting you to a support group. If you feel able to, you can speak about a referral to a therapist.
From a personal perspective, I spent 4 years living with fairly intense suicidal thoughts (even down to developing a detailed and well thought-out plan) but here I am, still living and reaching out to people like your good self. Please just keep sharing with us what is going on in your life and hopefully you will begin to gain strength to silence those Monsters that I speak of. TAKE CARE