The Importance of Hope

The end of the year brings a wide range of feelings, as one cycle of events comes to an end and another begins. Many of our ordinary routines are disrupted at this time of year, which can be both positive and unsettling. It can be frightening to contemplate the future: A recent editorial in the New York Times was titled "2024, We Await You with Dread." Lists of predictions for 2024 include topics like geopolitical instability, economic instability, environmental instability, and AI-fueled business instability. It seems there's a lot to worry about! On the other hand, this is a uniquely positive time of year for many people, bringing opportunities to get together with families, exchange gifts, participate in traditions, make contributions, and be part of something larger than ourselves. These relationship-cultivating practices have real health benefits in terms of reduced loneliness and greater social support, and over time they have been key to our survival as a species. Therefore it's worth taking time to cultivate gratitude and connect with others as we prepare for 2024. There's at least one more potential benefit of taking time to focus on the positives at this time of year: The benefit of hope.

Suicide is a behavior that's notoriously hard to predict in advance, but the best tool we have available for the task is something called the Beck Hopelessness Scale. The questionnaire consists of 20 yes/no questions, asking about things like whether you can envision a better future, or whether you expect your current situation to get worse. The items capture ideas like a person's faith in the future (reverse-scored), expectations for future success or failure, sense of current darkness, and perceived lack of opportunity. One study suggests that if you have limited time, you can learn most of what the scale tells you by asking a single yes/no item, "my future seems dark to me." Hope is fundamentally about the future, and if we don't have hope it can be very hard to go on. It's interesting that these specific beliefs are so strongly predictive of suicide, because the same can't be said for the other two parts of Beck's "negative cognitive triad" -- self, world, and future. We can believe that we ourselves are terrible people, or that the world is against us, but those beliefs don't harm our mental health to the same extent as a belief that the future contains few good things to look forward to.

I usually write in this space about the importance of the Intuitive Mind, because as a society we focus a great deal on rational thinking and overlook the crucial role and potential benefits of non-conscious thought. But hope is one area where the Narrative Mind has a starring role. It's not about what we are currently experiencing, but about what we expect or believe will happen in the future. These are fundamentally narratives, our mind's way of projecting ourselves into alternate scenarios that aren't currently true. That type of future-focused imagination has been essential to humans' success as a species. And it matters what stories about the future we are telling ourselves. 

So hope is important. But if we aren't currently feeling very hopeful, what can we do about it? Emily Dickinson's famous phrase "hope is the thing with feathers / that perches in the soul" captures the idea that hope comes from outside us, bringing support without asking anything of us in return. And here's a story from a great storyteller, Kerry Patterson, that describes the gift of hope provided by a friend. Even if these perspectives are true, we can develop a practice of actively looking for hope when it makes its appearance. But other writers suggest that hope is something you can claim through your own efforts: I particularly like Teddy Roosevelt's advice "when you're at the end of your rope, tie a knot and hold on." Nietzsche similarly suggests that "he who has a why to live for can bear almost any how," encouraging us to focus on a sense of purpose to keep going forward. And some writers even suggest that hope comes inexorably at the time when it is required: You have probably heard Martin Luther King, Jr.'s saying that "only when it is dark enough can you see the stars." Leonard Cohen says something similar: "There is a crack in everything. That's how the light gets in." These perspectives suggest that dark times themselves create hope (along with grief), by reminding us of what’s not currently present.

The scientific literature confirms that it's possible to actively cultivate hope. Some "hope attainment practices" include seeking out positive interactions with other people, helping others, focusing on good efforts rather than on perfect results, and taking care of ourselves through healthy sleep, diet, and physical activity. In my own recent work with nursing students, an intervention with these components did indeed increase participants’ sense of hope, as well as reducing their feelings of stress and burnout. As a final thought, it's important not to make "lack of hope" one more thing to beat yourself up about. If you aren't feeling it right now, remember that dread and hope can sometimes co-exist. Try some of the hope attainment practices, and see whether things start to shift a bit. Those future problems will still be there, of course. But the research says that a little bit of hope can go a long way in improving our ability to handle them.