negative thinking and giving up hope literally never helped once

The gambler's fallacy, also known as the Monte Carlo fallacy or the fallacy of the maturity of chances, is the belief that, if an event (whose occurrences are independent and identically distributed) has occurred less frequently than expected, it is more likely to happen again in the future (or vice versa).

Obviously going around in a state of denial doesn’t help

It's not obvious. That's the hitch. Figuring out when to persist and when to accept defeat is at the heart of the emotional struggle.