5 ways to cultivate hope when you don’t have any
BY ANGELA HAUPT
THERE’S A SENSE, ONCE A WHIS-per, that’s growing louder every day. Glaciers are melting, children are being slaughtered, hatred runs rampant. Sometimes it feels like the world’s approaching a nadir. Or like you are.
The antidote to any despair might be hope, experts say. It’s one of the most powerful—and essential—human mindsets, and possible to achieve even when it feels out of reach.
“Hope is a way of thinking,” says Chan Hellman, founding director of the Hope Research Center at the University of Oklahoma. “We know it can be taught; we know it can be nurtured. It’s not something you either have or don’t have.”
Many people, he notes, don’t fully understand what hope is—and what it isn’t. Being hopeful doesn’t mean engaging in wishful thinking or blind optimism. Rather, it’s “the belief or the expectation that the future can be better, and that more importantly, we have the capacity to pursue that future,” Hellman says. The opposite of hope, therefore, is not pessimism, but rather apathy, with its loss of motivation. And while wishing is passive, hope is about taking action.
Being hopeful is associated with an array of benefits. “Our capacity for hope is one of the strongest predictors of well-being,” Hellman says. Research suggests, for example, that people with more hope throughout their lives have fewer chronic health problems; are less likely to be depressed or anxious; have stronger social support; and tend to live longer.
We asked Hellman and other experts for strategies that can help cultivate hope—even when it feels unattainable.
1. Give yourself permission to be hopeful.
Remember when you were a kid, and well-intentioned adults cautioned you not to get your hopes up? That mentality can linger, notes David Feldman, a professor of counseling psychology at Santa Clara University in California. “The truth is, whether or not we allow ourselves to hope, at some point we’re going to be disappointed,” he says. “I don’t think the solution is never allowing ourselves to feel hopeful or giving up on hope altogether.” So go ahead and grant yourself permission to look toward the future with excitement and ambition.
2. Set at least one meaningful goal.
In the mid-1980s, the psychologist Charles Snyder set out to determine what qualities hopeful people had in common. He landed on three key factors that form the basis for Hope Theory, a model
