Give Them Hope
What I read: Hope is the antidote to helplessness. Here’s how to cultivate it by Emily Esfahani Smith. Published September 13, 2021.
Many of us recall the now iconic poster of Barack Obama by artist Shepard Fairey that served as a constant reminder of Obama’s message of hope.
Hope is indeed something worthy of creating, fostering, and nurturing. Everywhere we turn there are reasons to not be hopeful. Climate change. Political turmoil. Capitalism’s uneven opportunities. The pandemic. And more. Despite these challenges, it’s important to hold on to hope.
I recall during the 2016 campaign many people would throw up their hands in resignation because they felt the former President would win or that the Democrats weren’t doing what was needed to win back the Presidency and key Congressional seats. But they did. Enough people had hope it could be done and they got it done. Now that a new President is in office, you can feel hope return to the national stage.
Sure, there are some who decry everything the Democrats and Independent progressives and moderates do as ruining the country or as corrupt. Those right-wing elements, who are luckily the vast minority in our country, will remain loud and angry. They don’t live in hope. They live in negativity. But I don’t think their message of no hope will resonate with the majority of Americans and I don’t think such negativity resonates with most people throughout the world.
Michelle Obama echoed her husband’s message of hope.
You may not always have a comfortable life and you will not always be able to solve all the world’s problems at once but don’t ever underestimate the importance you can have because history has shown us that courage can be contagious and hope can take on a life of its own.
Emily Dickinson wrote one of my favorite descriptions of hope.
Hope is the thing with feathers that perches in the soul – and sings the tunes without the words – and never stops at all.
I’ve long contended that the impetus behind hope is essentially love. Perhaps not always love of the romantic variety but rather love in the more universal sense. How could one have hope for humanity were one to not simultaneously have love for other human beings? That’s how I see it anyway. These words from Maya Angelou resonate with me in that regard.
Love recognizes no barriers. It jumps hurdles, leaps fences, penetrates walls to arrive at its destination full of hope.
Hope is the stuff of progress. Hope is the stuff of self-improvement. Hope is the stuff of life because without hope it’s opposite, despair, can rear its ugly head and take over our lives, individually and collectively.
In the article that inspired this post, Emily Esfahani Smith suggests hope as an antidote to helplessness. Talk to people these days and you’ll probably hear tales of feeling helpless. Helpless to change a life situation. Helpless to change our country’s direction and outcomes. Helplessness seems built into the ethos of humanity, but it’s hope that ultimately changes things for the better. So, figuring out how to counter helplessness and replace it with hope is a practice to which we should all aspire.
Smith writes about a phenomenon you might have heard of before, learned helplessness. In psychotherapeutic circles learned helplessness is a sense of powerlessness, often the result of a traumatic event or persistent failure to succeed. Therapists often consider it an underlying cause of depression and the article points out that linkage.
Helplessness, learned or otherwise, is the opposite of hope. Dealing with it is an important component of creating hope in one’s life and hope within a culture or community.
Smith references the 1960s research of Martin Seligman and Steven Maier. Seligman and Maier discovered the concept of learned helplessness when they were studying fear responses. (The researched referenced used dogs as the fear subjects and I have concerns about using animals in this manner, but that’s a separate topic.)
Martin Seligman and Steven Maier discovered learned helplessness in the 1960s, as graduate students at the University of Pennsylvania, under the supervision of the experimental psychologist Richard Solomon. Solomon was studying how dogs learned and responded to fear. His team restrained each dog in a cage with two compartments, and gave it multiple mild but unpleasant electric shocks, each time paired with an audible tone. Later, the dogs were untied and the tone was played – having learned to associate the sound with pain, Solomon predicted the dogs would jump across to the safe compartment to avoid the pain. But when the dogs heard the noise, they remained passive, and did not do anything to try to escape the pain.
What the dogs had learned during the experiments was to be called learned helplessness. The dogs who had been restrained and made to feel helpless did not try to escape the shocks being doled out by the researchers. They had learned they were helpless and that escape was futile.
Seligman and Maier eventually replicated the experiments with humans and during those experiments Seligman noticed something he considered important. When people were exposed to non-controllable unpleasant events, they began to exhibit some classic symptoms of depression. This led Seligman to conclude that learned helplessness is a subtype of depression.
However, during the same experiments, researchers noticed that a subset of the people exposed to the uncontrollable events did not give up their attempts to escape the situation. They did not stop exerting control. They had hope.
Even though they learned that nothing they did mattered to stopping an aversive event, they kept trying to make their situation better. Also, some of the subjects who did give up, becoming helpless for a time, bounced back immediately and began to act with agency in later parts of the experiments. The question was – why? Why did uncontrollable adversities render some people helpless while others remained resilient?
Researchers Lyn Abramson and John Teasdale contended that being made to feel helpless was not in itself enough to produce depression. What really mattered was how people made sense of ther helplessness. What attributions did they assign to their helplessness?
All these researchers teamed up and eventually decided that there are three ways people can interpret what happens to them.
As Seligman would later put it, different people have different ‘explanatory styles’. Some people have a ‘pessimistic explanatory style’, and make negative attributions about aversive events (ie, internal, universal, permanent), and they are more vulnerable to depression. Other people have ‘optimistic explanatory styles’ – when bad things happen, they don’t blame themselves but the world, and they see the adversity as temporary, local and specific. Their story about the world and their place in it is much more hopeful, and they are more resilient.
This all led to Abramson and her colleagues ultimately reformulating the learned helplessness theory as the hopelessness theory of depression. When life throws us a curveball, a significantly negative event, some people come to pessimistic conclusions about their situation. Thoughts of worthlessness or an unchangeable situation end up depressing and demoralizing them.
Such hopelessness can have some seriously bad outcomes. Suicide is one extreme example. But the flip side is that people who can muster a sense of hope end up having better mental and physical health.
All of this points to a powerful insight – that instilling or restoring a sense of hope in people might help them build resilience and alleviate their emotional suffering. The next question is how? How can people build a sense of hope, especially during hard times?
So, how can we build a sense of hope when confronted with all the challenges we face?
One way is to reframe or alter the stories we tell ourselves about life’s adversity. We might blame ourselves for something but it’s often outside circumstances that are truly to blame. Instead of focusing on those things we can’t control we can focus on those we can. We can position adversity as temporary rather permanent in our lives.
At times I’ve been chastised for clinging to hope and singing its praises. Some have countered that hope is simply blind optimism that neglects to accept reality. But hope is not blind optimism, at least not the type of hope I try to embody. Hope’s foundation is about being able to look positively to the future. By setting realistic goals and plotting out a plan to achieve them we give hope substance. Hopeful people aren’t simply Pollyanna but rather they feel that they can control their lives which is the opposite of helplessness.
I consider setting goals of some sort an important aspect of keeping hope alive in my own life. But I’m leery of the mountains of goal and life planning systems that pop up from various personal development gurus even though much of what they’re codifying is useful. I just think each of us functions in life a bit differently and that wholeheartedly adopting someone else’s goal attainment system is folly.
My own systems for staying on course in life toward better outcomes and achievements have varied over the years. It’s been an ongoing iterative process during which I’ve sometimes mapped out goals in deep detail, often with a five- or 10-year timeline. I don’t do that anymore. I found that process stressed me out and didn’t result in superior outcomes.
As I wrote in Reevaluate Your Life Every Day, rigid goal and planning systems just don’t work for me.
I no longer keep detailed lists of goals and associated tasks. That way of living feels like living by checklist and that’s not appealing to me. It feels excessively regimented and confining. I know it might work for some. Throughout my life I have made attempts at such detailed life planning. However now it feels extremely rooted in a productivity mindset culture and that’s not how I want to experience the world any longer. Been there. Done that. Done that a lot. No thanks.
I find what often happens for me and others is that goals are created, and detailed plans are laid out, usually with a best case scenario mindset (a best case scenario almost never happens), and the plan is launched and working fine until life throws a wrench into the plans and you need to pivot or alter course entirely. That’s how life works. I’ve yet to see a long-term life plan that has worked out as originally envisioned.
But I do have goals or at least directions in which I want my life to move. They just happen to be reset each morning and evening when I do my self-reflection.
One process I use regularly works well for me to achieve goals and avoid a sense of helplessness – setting minimum daily requirements. I would find myself stressed out over not achieving everything in my detailed plans and would repeat the planning and failure cycle repeatedly. I did that for years. Sure, I made some progress because I was at least working toward something, and this engendered hope. But the accompanying stress was something I had to figure out how to avoid.
I came up with the concept of minimum daily requirements (MDR). MDR in this case isn’t nutrients for which the phrase is often used. Rather, MDR for me is the minimum milestones or goals I must hit each day in order to not feel stress that I haven’t done enough.
However you decide to create worthwhile objectives in your life and the process to achieve them it will ultimately increase your sense of hope. Hope lives amid action. Hopelessness lives amid inaction.
From that initial research on helplessness in the 1960s have sprung decades of findings with a more uplifting message. Circumstances, no matter how bad, do not have to defeat us. You have the capacity to adopt more hopeful patterns of thinking in the face of adversity, and to adjust and pursue your goals, even amid hardship. If you can maintain hope in these ways, it will help you find the courage, strength and resilience to ride out the inevitable storms that life brings.
If you are in the grips of despair and hopelessness, I believe the key is to take action. All actions will be imperfect. You’ll set a goal. Make some progress, Experience setbacks. Make new goals. Take a fork in the road on the way to your goal that ends up being better than the initial plan. Life’s messy and the path to goals is never linear. It’s always a winding road with many forks that may take you to better places than you ever imagined if you had stuck to your original route.
Now is a time we all need hope. We need hopeful humans so they can take the action we need to not only make our individual lives better and happier, but also to collectively figure out and improve life on the planet as we’re challenged with some tough circumstances such as climate change.
As Jonas Salk once said, “Hope lies in dreams, in imagination, and in the courage of those who dare to make dreams into reality.”
May hope be present in everything you do, and may it be the fuel that improves your life and the lives of those everywhere.
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