Hope

I was reading about this experiment done by Curt Richter. Trigger warning that this involves an experiment with rats and them dying by drowning. If you don't want to read about that I won't be upset. Read my other stuff and I will talk to you later.

So in Curt Richter's first set of experiments he took 12 domesticated rats and put them into a bucket to see how long they would swim before they would drown. He found out that 3 of them lasted about 2 minutes and then the other 9 would last days before drowning.

In the second set of experiments Curt Richter got 34 wild rats recently caught. Now, wild rats are really good swimmers and the thought was that they would fight very hard for their survival. But surprisingly all of the 34 rats died after Swimming and trying to escape the bucket for only a few minutes. Their excellent swimming ability and fierceness didn't seem to keep them fighting to survive.

Curt Richter thought about what was causing some of the rats to give up and decided that hope was a key factor in what made some rats struggle on. Where the domesticated rats have been around humans and perhaps have been helped in the past have hope of being rescued by their handlers. These rats will keep fighting in the belief that all is not lost. However, when they don’t have this prior experience, they will give up quickly.

In Curt Richter's own words: “The situation of these rats scarcely seems one demanding fight or flight — it is rather one of hopelessness… the rats are in a situation against which they have no defense… they seem literally to ‘give up.’”

With this in hypothesis, Curt Richter decided to experiment more. To test this Curt Richter selected a new bunch of rats who were all similar to the second group. Again, he put them into buckets and observed them as they swam around. This time though, just before they died, he rescued them. He saved them, held them for a while and helped them recover.

Curt Richter then placed them back into the buckets and started the experiments all over again. He discovered that his hypothesis was right. When the rats were placed back into the water they swam for much longer than they had the first time they were placed in the buckets. The only thing that had changed was that they had been saved before, so they had hope this time.

Curt Richter wrote that “the rats quickly learn that the situation is not actually hopeless” and that “after elimination of hopelessness the rats do not die.”

There was a time that I felt like a drowning rat. My brother and I tried to fill up a yoga ball with water in a hot tub when we were younger. Why? We thought it would be fun but we were mostly just young a stupid. When we got it filled up we could not get it out of the hot tub because it was obviously too heavy. So I decided to get underneath it to push it out while my brother pulled. Well it slipped out of his hands and pinned me into the bottom and trapped me. My dad happens onto the scene to see my brother standing there staring. Then looks at the hot tub and sees legs kicking and water splashing. Like the hero he is, he runs over and cuts the yoga ball open with his knife, pulls it out of the water, then pulls me out of the hot tub gasping for air. I can imagine that the rats felt similarly thankful for the hands that rescued them.

Similarly I felt like I was drowning in my depression and anxiety ridden life while I was going through my divorce. It even got to a point when I thought there was no reason to go on. I had no kids, my wife did not want me anymore, I was even laid off from my job because of covid. What was the point. Well it sounds stupid but what pulled me out of it was two things. One, my cat rocko. Everyone in my family is allergic to cats but me. If I was gone, who would take care of him? Two, a tik tok video. A guy that I watched at the time just lost his best friend to suicide. He talked about this in a video and said “taking yourself out is not an option. So you better look for your plan b. There are people out there that love you and would be worse off if you were gone. So buck up and get help.” So I manned up, told my family I was struggling and got help. 

During that time my Aunt told me that when she was going through a similarly bad time what got her through was doing one thing. Pick one thing every day that you can do to keep yourself moving forward. If that means you make sure your laundry gets done that day or you study for your test coming up or you get to the gym that day. As long as you are doing one small thing to move the ball up the hill instead of letting it slide down. You are doing great. Then after a while it can do two things a day. Eventually you stop counting the small things and you are just living life. So I used that as my plan b, to better myself and better my life. I got help to get out of my bucket.

Hope is such a powerful thing. We all should reach out a helping hand because you never know when someone is about to give up. You could be the reason for them to think back to a time they were rescued and keep on swimming. I know I have been saved before I bet you can remember a time as well. Like dory said “just keep swimming…”  so just keep swimming your savior might just be a second away or you might be on the verge of saving yourself. I hope this might be a helping hand to help get you out of your bucket…