Hope Holds Our Heartstrings and Increases Our Well-Being

Hope from my heart to yours

How cold our hearts would be without hope. Hope is what gives us our glow. It allows us to grow. K.Barrett

What is Hope?

Hope is an emotion and more. Hope is an element of spirituality. Hope is an antidote for trauma and mental illness. Hope holds the heartstrings to human well-being. Hope could heal humanity.

In every published study of hope, every single one, hope is the single best predictor of well-being compared to any other measures of trauma recovery. This finding is consistently corroborated with other published studies from top universities showing that hope is the best predictor for a life well-lived, According to Chan Hellman, Phd. and Casey Gwinn, J.D.

How Does Hope Help?

When a person feels hope they are open to possibilities, expecting better things to come. They are working toward those outcomes. When a person has lost hope they no longer plan goals for the future. They are stuck. They don’t have a reason to push forward for their own wellbeing or to be a part of anything beyond themselves. Even those that have lost hope can learn to have it again.

The evidence is convincing that hope buffers stress and adversity, predicts important outcomes, and can be learned and sustained. Chan Hellman, Phd. and Casey Gwinn, J.D.,

Much of Hellman and Gwinn’s work is with trauma survivors, both children, and adults. They have found great success teaching the science of hope.

How Do We See Hope in Society?

Recent headlines make it abundantly clear that many in our society have suffered a loss of hope. We have seen increased rates of suicide, gun violence, police brutality, rioting, and looting. We have also seen the widening of divides: political, social, economic, educational. Unfortunately, the list goes on.

When we look at the people in the headlines above, one thing they have in common is they have lost hope. They are not making plans, they are not hopeful for the future. They don’t see what they can do to positively impact what comes next for them. During the rioting in my city, I found an article by Terry Nguyen that stood out to me:

People with a lot to lose don’t do things like that. “The question you have to ask yourself is: Why are there so many people in our society who don’t have a lot to lose?” says sociologist Darnell Hunt. That’s the fundamental underlying question.

I felt that hope must be gone from those that will resort to destroying. Another perspective that I had never considered came in the same article. It was in reference to an interaction in the 1992 LA uprisings at a South LA shopping center:

There was this older black man standing. He was watching everything unfold and told me, “See that over there; that’s my record store.” He said he would give it all up to see something positive come out of this.

In other words, he meant that things have to burn to get attention, to get people to realize that there’s something fundamentally wrong with the system. Yes, he might be a victim of the looting because his shop was burning, but he was willing to make that sacrifice to hope that the movement would advance in a positive direction. Not everyone might feel that way, but there are some people who do.

This man’s hope pulled him through a terrible situation. It became clear to me that lack of hope can get us into situations or stuck in them. The only way to get out maybe hope!

How Can We Grow Hope?

The great news is that there are ways that we can assess, monitor, and increase our levels of hope. We can use what science has proven to boost our well-being.

Hope theory can be subdivided into four categories:

Goals that are valuable and uncertain are described by Snyder (1994, as cited in Snyder, 2000, p.9) as the anchors of hope theory as they provide direction and an endpoint for hopeful thinking.

Pathway thoughts refer to the routes we take to achieve our desired goals and the individual’s perceived ability to produce these routes (Snyder, 2000).

Agency thoughts refer to the motivation we have to undertake the routes towards our goals.

Barriers block the attainment of our goals and in the event of a barrier we can either give up or we can use our pathway thoughts to create new routes.

We can further assess our own levels of hope with The Adult State Hope Scale. With this assessment and the above categories, we can work toward growing our hope.

What Inspires Hope?

My own hope often piques when I see other people working to support hope growth. There are two very interesting such projects below:

The National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI) and their Hope Starts With You PSA. These PSAs are very touching. They provide a visual experience. This can help us all remember how important and easy it is to provide hope for those that have lost it.

Reading Allowed is a program that gives students hope. The program provides high-quality instructional tutors to struggling readers with low financial means. Statistics show many of these students would end up in the criminal justice center if not for this hope. The mission and the work Reading Allowed is doing give me hope that we can make a difference!

Concluding Thoughts on Hope

Hope is essential to our well-being. We must build and hold on to hope. There are so many things that we can do to help restore hope in ourselves and others. Even a glimmer of hope is the first step over a divide. A bridge between stuck and strong, between them and us…heartstrings pulling toward more hope. Once we have a bit of hope, it spreads. Collective hope can improve outcomes for all.

I score high on the hope scale. Going forward, I will demonstrate my hope to others more often. I will include my hopes for them in our text messages, emails, and conversations. In this case, if their hope ever waivers, this can remind them to focus on hope as a means of moving toward happiness and success — improving their well-being. It will help remind them that hope is always an option.

Thanks for reading! You might also enjoy this poem. I wrote it hoping to inspire thoughts around embracing each other for our greater good.

Thanks to R. Rangan Ph.D. at Science & Soul for the Prompt: Hope