By Dan Tomasulo, Ph.D.
Focusing on what can be done in the future rather than on what happened in the past is key to understanding how hope can help. Toward this end, three findings emerge from the literature on hope that are helpful now:
Recalibrate goals. As longer-term goals become more uncertain, there is a considerable risk of depression. Micro-goals can recalibrate our focus, allowing us to reengage. This is the equivalent of putting a cooling pad on your laptop. Think about ways that you can accomplish goals within brief time limits. Something you can plan, expect you can do and accomplish in 20 to 30 minutes, or even a couple of hours, will awaken your hope circuit. What generates hope is the belief you can control some aspects of your future. Planning a meal, taking a walk, answering three emails, making the bed, cleaning the closet all have tremendous value in helping you reengage and feel better about your life in those moments. Hope is generated when we can detect and expect to have control in the future. Micro-goalsetting can help us get there.
Express gratitude, kindness and compassion. Hope isn’t something we either have or don’t have. Instead, it is cultivated and regulated by engaging in small doses of positivity. The scale between positive and negative thoughts is a balance between pebbles and feathers. Negative thoughts are more potent because of a negativity bias – they are like pebbles on a balance scale. Worrying has helped us survive, but these pebbles can tip the scale and keep us in a downward spiral if we worry too much. Positive thoughts are like feathers. They can outweigh the pebbles – but you need a lot of them. Being intentionally positive can restore a necessary balance. It is in these small but genuine ways that accumulated positivity can help hope gain momentum toward a tipping point. Regularly thanking people and making an intentional effort at being kind can add the needed feathers to you and others and help tip the scale in the other directions. They are not incidental.
Cherish relationships. A survey by the Royal Society of Arts with The Food Foundation earlier in April found that once the COVID-19 crisis is over, an overwhelming majority of Britons (85 percent) want some of the personal or social changes from their lockdown experience to continue. Only 9 percent of Britons want to go back to their “normal” life. Better relationships were a major part of this finding. A stronger sense of their local community was reported by 40 percent of the respondents in this survey, and a similar amount were more engaged with family and friends. This is how you add feathers by the bushel. By developing better relationships now, they are building a foundation for what Maier and Seligman said matters most: “… expectations of a better future…”
Our most precious human capacity is our most available and renewable resource – and is never further away than our next thought.
Dan Tomasulo is a core faculty member at the Spirituality Mind Body Institute (SMBI), Teachers College, Columbia University, and holds a Ph.D. in psychology, MFA in writing, and Master of Applied Positive Psychology from the University of Pennsylvania. Honored by Sharecare as one of the top ten online influencers on the issue of depression, his next book is “Learned Hopefulness, The Power of Positivity To Overcome Depression.” DanTomasulo.com.
The article originally appeared in the June 4 – 10, 2020 print edition of The Two River Times.
