Hope keeps options mentally available.

When you believe nothing will improve, options stop appearing to you as options. They may still exist, but you do not consider them, do not investigate them, do not take them seriously. Hope functions partly as the mental condition under which choices remain visible.

If you feel out of options, try assuming for ten minutes that a solution exists and asking what it might be. The point is not to feel better but to restore access to thinking you have shut down.