The New Science of Hope

There is an epidemic of depression and anxiety among all age groups in all settings around the globe, with sadness, stress, and worry reaching all-time highs. According to Gallup’s 2022 Global Emotions Report, the trend for this situation is getting worse.[i] The Gallup report highlights three important, alarming tendencies.

1. People are having more negative experiences and fewer positive ones.
2. Stress, sadness, and worry are at their highest recorded levels.
3. People do not feel rested and experience less joy than at any other time in history.

This means the tools psychology has used since its inception are tools that have failed to prepare us. Roughly 80% of people with depression relapse[ii]. Despite everything we’ve thrown at it, 80% of people who get depressed get depressed again. The key to understanding this is how treatment effects are reported, and relapse rates get noticed. Relapse rates (the measure of those who appear to have been cured, healed, or relieved) are more important than treatment success rates. Just because a treatment for depression or anxiety worked doesn’t mean it continues to help once the treatment is complete. You can get a good treatment effect—and yet a high relapse rate.

As the Gallop report indicates—nothing preventative has been put in place to stop the worsening conditions. New research and ways of thinking about what is needed indicate there is hope—literally. A new science of hope and hopefulness has the capacity to change the trend. The key is understanding exactly what hope is, what makes it unique and making that realization work for you.

Hope is the only positive emotion that requires negativity or uncertainty to be activated. Without bleakness, the spark for hope isn’t ignited. We have no need for hope without sorrow. Low hope people fail to realize that the negativity or uncertainty is a call to action—one that can serve to change their perception about a situation. Their perception of the circumstance is fixed, causing them to repeatedly focus on the negative and not challenge themselves. In contrast, high hope people know that hope is the regulation of perception toward believing in control of the future. They believe a positive future outcome is possible,[iii] combined with a desire for that outcome. They search out ways to cultivate positive feelings while entertaining possibilities. They cherish relationships and will seek support in achieving their goals. High hope people stand ready for life's challenges, and the payoff comes from research that shows they will live a longer, happier, and healthier life.[iv]

For the most part, the field of psychology has been first and foremost focused on reducing symptoms—not healing the causes—and preventing relapse once symptoms have been treated. The major meta-analysis studies agree that to do this, we need better treatment interventions that lessen relapse[v]. We require different ways of thinking about the problem to create more effective treatment interventions. Yet we’ve been studying the flashlights that don’t light up rather than those that keep on shining.

This new approach helps empower people to make changes by assisting them to experience more positive emotions. They do this while they learn to reduce the negativity. Studies repeatedly show that these positive interventions may be the most effective method worldwide[vi].

Negative and positive thoughts are typically unbalanced when under stress and worry. Imagine those negative thoughts are like pebbles, and positive thoughts are like feathers. We have survived as a species because we've learned how to worry—so there is something scientists call a negativity bias. We are drawn to fear about what might hurt us in some way. Over time, we have emphasized worry, and positive emotions have become little more than mere frivolities. We don't linger on them. Typically, we go back to worrying about the next thing on our list. The question is: Can the feathers ever balance out the scale? Can they tip it in the direction of positivity? The short answer is yes—but initially, you'll need a lot of feathers.

Medicine and traditional therapy approaches knocked the negative thoughts off the seesaw and kept the pebbles from piling on, but they do nothing to add to the feathers. We relapse because there isn't anything positive being added to the feather's side.

This is to say that positive psychology and hope can offer the other half of the equation. Designed to work with medical, traditional, and alternative therapeutic approaches, adding positivity to our life is an opportunity to combine the findings of positive psychology to the toolbox—not to try and replace what is there.

Once you know how to balance the scale by removing negative thoughts, you keep them at bay by adding more positivity. In other words, this approach teaches you how to hope. That was the secret behind those who didn’t relapse: they continually added positive emotions and experiences to their lives to counterbalance the negativity. By learning to regularly remove the thoughts, feelings, behaviors, and beliefs that were getting them depressed and adding those that would increase positivity, they had learned how to remain hopeful.

If you want to add a little more hope to your life, here are three things you can do to begin.

Hope is adding feathers to your life

Source: Commentary/Fair use

1. Use micro-goals. Set goals that let you achieve results within 20 or 30 minutes—or even up to 2 hours. The micro goals (e.g., replying to 3 emails in the next 20 minutes; writing 500 words in the next 2 hours; washing the dishes and cleaning the kitchen in the next 30 minutes) are ways to help you stay focused. Micro-goals provide satisfaction and joy from accomplishing a goal.

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2. Express gratitude toward others every opportunity you have, and review each day by identifying the three specific events you are grateful for and write them in your journal. Gratitude has often been referred to as the queen of virtues, and the benefits of expressing it are known to cause an increase in happiness, health, and life satisfaction, as well as decreases in negative emotions and problematic functioning.[vii] Because it can simultaneously do these increases and decreases, it is one of the perfect interventions to promote hope.

3. Finally, find ways to be kind. Being kind is part of a feedback loop that is triggered by positive emotions and facilitates well-being.[viii] Kindness is a prosocial act that does as much for us as it does for others. As Scott Adams suggests: Remember, there’s no such thing as a small act of kindness. Every act creates a ripple with no logical end.

A version of this article also appears on the Infijoy site here.