How We Can Help Students Who Feel Hopeless About Their Future

In conducting research for this article, I scrolled to the end of many Google result pages, eventually stumbling across a post on The Student Room where an anonymous student expressed feeling hopeless about their future and career options. A member of the website’s volunteer team, DataVenia, responded with a beautiful opening paragraph:

“Have you ever wondered what would happen if you could travel back in time and change one seemingly insignificant event or decision in your past, and then watch as it unfolds into a completely different present-day? Then why can't some action you take today have just as significant an impact on your future. Of course your destiny is not fixed. We have free will and use that free will to control our own destinies. There will be challenges along the way, and those challenges may seem insurmountable. They are not. They are only obstacles in our path if we allow negative thinking to control our actions.”

This stirring statement promotes the use of an important but often underestimated asset of becoming an individual: agency.

What is agency? In an opinion piece for Education Week, Angela Duckworth describes agency as “the conviction that you shape your own future”. And she goes even further by describing the opposite of agency: “Believing that you’re helpless to make your dreams come true. Seeing yourself in life’s passenger seat, likely on a trajectory you don’t like and didn’t choose”. Unfortunately, the latter is a sentiment many students today can relate to.

A 2024 survey by the children’s charity Barnardo’s revealed that of the 1001 children aged 14-17 across Great Britain they surveyed, 55% of children responding believe that their generation will not be as well off as their parents. One participant stated that “The cost of living is going up and I know that my parents’ generation is less well off than my grandparents. It seems to follow that we would be worse off as well”. However, hope is a learnable, measurable skill, and one that has a sizable impact on students' success and persistence in school. Duckworth believes that the answer to hopeless students is to empower them with their own agency.

She disagrees with DataVenia on the point of controlling your own destiny, advising not to tell anyone that they have complete control over their destiny. Instead emphasising that what we do have control over are our thoughts and, importantly, our actions. But students need help to develop their personal agency, after all “young people need both challenge and support to develop confidence. We can neither solve all their problems for them nor expect them to grow without scaffolding”.

Firstly, you will need to teach your students about hopelessness itself and why they should choose hope.

Hopelessness, by definition, is the belief that things aren’t going to get better or that you can’t succeed. So how can young people overcome this? 

Well, you need to acknowledge that a sense of dread about the future might be coming from an unreliable thought process. Your brain, for reasons we will get into, can tell you awful things and predict dreadful outcomes. But just because you think it, doesn’t mean it’s true. Provide your students with engaging examples of this (for example, discuss how strongly people did, and do, believe that the Earth is flat) so they can trust that their darker opinions might be wrong. Hopeless feelings fuel hopeless thoughts. And it’s easy to get caught up in a negative cycle that makes it hard to see that things can get better. Help them be open to more optimistic thoughts. 

You can teach this by encouraging them to always argue the opposite to the negative thoughts. Routinely ask what evidence is there that things might turn out better than expected. Push them to consider how it could turn out better than they fear. But this might not completely eradicate their hopelessness so make sure to validate their feelings and even lean in to what hopelessness does for them. You might think there’s nothing you can gain from hopelessness, but hopelessness offers protection from disappointment. If you don’t expect anything good to happen, you don’t have to worry about being disappointed if things go poorly. It might also make you feel ok about not taking action. After all, if nothing is going to get better, then there’s no point in trying. So it also protects you from trying and failing. Discuss this with your students and show them that while hopelessness is a natural feeling, it gets in the way of their progression.

On the flipside, have them consider what they could gain from hope. How would life be different? What would they do differently if they had hope for their future? Then encourage them to apply this mindset to their decisions and actions. Sometimes, you have to change your behaviour first and the feelings will follow. Discuss how positive consequences of hopeful actions can motivate them to better their life.

Keeping this in mind, and after swimming through the advice columns of the Internet on your behalf, I have collated the commonly recommended actions to take to support the young student(s) in your life.

Don’t Ignore The Hopelessness

With access to the Internet and social media, the average young person is very aware of the state of the world, both as a whole and narrowed down to the world of work. Sweeping this and students’ feelings about it under the rug only serves to create frustration and distance between schooling and preparing for the future, two things that should go together. Set aside time to address the elephant in the room so that students can vent and release tension to allow them to focus on the positives and learning.

Remind Students About Progress Both Past and Present

The constant rollout of bad news can often overwhelm and hide the light of encouraging and hopeful news. But the positive news does exist. So remind students that there are good outcomes and stories. You can do this by showing the progress made in different parts of the world in various eras of history, relating any similarities in the situation to current events so that students can believe that their challenges are not insurmountable. Additionally you can share individual success stories. Discuss people who have overcome tremendous hardships or failed repeatedly and then succeeded, making sure to represent your students’ identities and backgrounds in these stories.

Teach and Engage With Problem-Solving

A big part of feeling hopeless is sensing a loss of control. Help your students overcome this by teaching what they can control: their response. Emphasise a mindset that tackles problems they can fix and accepts and accommodates outcomes they cannot. Propose a problem and discuss potential solutions. Educate your students on systemic structures that perpetuate certain problems and facilitate their exploration of how to dismantle the root of the problem. With issues they cannot change, explain different courses of action they can take to change how they feel about it. Delve into managing their anxieties and prioritising their mental health.

In order to teach your students to control what they can, train them to organise their intentions and goals. Once they have identified a problem and brainstormed a potential solution, show them how to break down their proposal into steps they can take to fix the problem or resolve negative feelings surrounding it. After, the only thing left to do is to take action. So make sure to do what you can to instill confidence in their capabilities so they can take action without dread or hesitation.

Promote the Development of Emotional Resilience 

Another lesson that will serve your students well is learning to persevere through emotional adversity. Many of today’s issues can cause harm to young people’s emotional health so teaching them healthy coping techniques and emotional resilience is of the utmost importance. Start with creating a safe space for them to share concerns and feelings. Validate their emotions and promote compassion both for others and themselves. Research and teach them healthy coping skills such as self care and listening to their feelings. Have them learn to embrace their and the world’s imperfections as well as appreciate and be grateful for the opposite. Be sure to lead by example and showcase emotional intelligence and regulation while teaching them the same. And don’t forget to remind them that with hope and hard work, “this too shall pass”.

Hopefully this article will help with combating your student’s hopelessness. If not, look into affordable mental health resources for students, such as Kooth or Young Minds.