More Than Just Wishful Thinking: How Having Hope Helps You Live Better
As it turns out, hope is more of a process and less wishful thinking.
Hope:
noun: A feeling of expectation and desire for a particular thing to happen
verb: want something to happen or be the case
Hope is something that we have all experienced, we hope to get good grades in school, we hope that that the cute guy at work will notice us and we hope that our partner remembers our birthday and make an effort to plan a celebration. Most importantly, we hope that we will have a good life that we enjoy, that we achieve our dreams and that nothing bad befalls us.
In 2020, the world as we know imploded on us. When Covid-19 hit, many of our worlds were turned upside down and we have been hoping that the pandemic will be resolved soon. Now, most of us just hope to get back to a sense of normalcy.
Fear is the Antithesis of Hope
In times of crisis, be it global or personal, we often hope that it will soon pass. Some of us are more pessimistic than others and find it hard to find comfort in hope and instead reach for fear. However, choosing hope is vital for our well-being. The psychologist Barbara Fredrickson suggests that when we choose fear it closes us off and we become close-minded to possible actions. With fear, pessimism invades our daily life and we become that negative person no one wants to engage with.
For example, during the pandemic, we’ve witnessed the fear that has led many people towards panic buying and the attack on Asians across various western countries as a source of blame.
Hope, on the other hand, opens us up to possibilities. Hope brings out the positivity in us, the resourcefulness in us. Hope also lets us move forward. We see this time and time again in times of crisis. Years after the nuclear plant disaster in Fukushima, residents of the area are keen to dispel the negative impression of Fukushima and move forward by turning the area into a tourism spot. As spoken by a local tour guide “there is hope here”.
The Process of Hope
According to the psychologist CR Snyder, the process of hope requires us to not only know what we want (our goal), we need to have agency and pathways as well.
A sense of agency comes from a feeling of being in control of our lives. When we have a sense of agency, we take ownership of our actions because we believe that we are responsible for the outcomes in our lives. As a result, we are also more likely to believe in our capabilities.
This sense of being in charge doesn’t just occur during significant life moments, we experience this everyday when we stand at traffic lights and push the buttons frantically for the little green man to appear so we can be on our way. The act of pushing the buttons makes us feel like we are the ones controlling when the green man appears. In reality, most pedestrian traffics crossings are actually controlled by an automatic timer even though in some places, at certain times of the day, the button pushing can manually trigger the lights to get ready to change.
When we set our sights on a goal, there are often many ways to get to the destination we want. In terms of hope, the pathway we choose requires us to not only have different options we can choose to act on but to believe in the strategies we choose to tackle our goals with as well.
In a study conducted by CR Snyder, he found that people with high levels of hope were also able to come up with more ways with which they can reach their goals. This means that they were more resourceful, inventive and also more adaptive should an obstacle come along that could stop them from achieving their goals.
Sometime, hope can even bring us back from the brink of death as we will see with Mr Wright.
Hope for Mr Wright
There was a man named Mr Wright. Mr Wright was a patient of a psychologist named Bruno Klopfer and he was also diagnosed with an untreatable cancer that had metastasized throughout his body.
It seemed like his diagnosis was hopeless, until Mr Wright was told there was a new experimental drug called Krebiozen that could cure him. Miraculously, just days after the first injection, Mr Wright was up and about after being bedridden for some time. Tests also showed that his tumors had shrunk and he was discharged from the hospital.
Soon, however, the efficacy of the drug was reported in the media and Mr Wright grew concerned and doubtful and his cancer returned. The doctors then gave him a new treatment and said that they were injecting him with a new and improved and therefore effective version of the drug.
In reality, they had given him an injection that did not contain any drug at all. This is what we know as a placebo treatment. Once again, Mr Wright got much better and left the hospital. A few months later, however, reports of the inefficacy of the drug made the rounds on the media yet again and within days, Mr Wright dies from his cancer.
This was a classic case of the placebo effect however, Klopfer suggested that it was hope that enhanced his recovery and the removal of hope that led to his deterioration in the end. When he was told of the new drug, Mr Wright’s will to live and his self-agency was restored, and the new treatment also provided a new pathway for him to treat his cancer.
When there were doubts about the efficacy of the new drug, he lost hope and his cancer returned. When the doctors treated him with the placebo drug however, his hope was restored and he got better once again. Sadly, his last hopes were once again dashed when doubts about the drug resurfaced and he died just days after the damning reports.
More than Just a Miracle Drug
Of course, hope is not just limited to recovery from an illness or placebo effect. Having hope helps us view life from a different viewpoint and manage life’s stressors differently. For example, the psychologists Richard Lazarus and Raymond Launier have found that that hopeful people see stressful situations as challenging rather than threatening.
They surmised that this is because hopeful people tend to view a stressful situation in positive terms. This doesn’t mean they view it as easy, but that they deal with a situation from a position of rational thought, perseverance and positive thinking. This suggests that when we are hopeful, we are better equipped to deal with stress, bad situations than those with less hope.
A study on the relationship between hope and goals found that people who measure high on hopefulness tend to focus on a successful outcome and have more confidence in whether they will succeed as compared to the those with less hope. By focusing on the positives, we are then also more likely to persevere with our efforts to achieve our goals.
Look on the Bright Side of Life
When we feel hopeless, we feel like the future holds little promise. These days, as we experience the uncertainties of the pandemic or our personal situations for extended periods of time, hopelessness feels almost normal.
Yet, with the way many nations and individuals have dealt with crisis after crisis, we know that hope exists. Hope does not exist in a vacuum and it is more than wishful thinking. It exists in a relationship between goals, agency and pathways.
Think back to a time when you felt like things were hopeless, how did you get yourself out of it? You might have thought about what you want to achieve or your goals and of course, you would have thought of how you can get what you want or the pathways. To have these thoughts in the first place, you will naturally have had a sense of agency because you were planning for your outcome instead of letting life drag you around.
I think it is clear, hope lives in us. Next time you need a dash of hope, believe in what you are capable of, take action and of course, hope for the best.
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