August 23, 2023 – The woman got here to her first therapy session desperate and depressed. Her husband, to whom she had been married for 20 years, had just announced that he was in love with another person. At the age of 47, she was so distraught that she suffered a heart attack and was subsequently unable to work.
“Her self-esteem was profoundly shattered,” said Dr. Dan Tomasulo, a consulting psychologist and academic director of the Spirituality Mind Body Institute at Teachers College, Columbia University, who treated her. “Within about 10 days, her whole life collapsed.”
By working together with her repeatedly, Tomasulo not only helped her overcome her depression and sense of hopelessness, but in addition helped her to succeed.
The key? Teaching her to have hope.
Hope may Tomasulo and lots of other mental health experts argue that one must learn to be more hopeful. Once we learn to be more hopeful, this habit will help us overcome depression, suicidal thoughts, lethargy, unhealthy habits, and other obstacles and ultimately move forward.
Recent surveys suggest that our hopefulness is lagging significantly, and in some population groups greater than in others. In February CDC reported that 57% of U.S. teenage girls felt consistently sad or hopeless in 2021, twice as many as boys and the best since 2011. Overall, 32.3% of U.S. adults reported anxiety or depressive symptoms in 2023, in accordance with an evaluation of Census Bureau data by the Kaiser Family Foundation. Among adults between 18 and 24, it was almost half. Experts don't agree on how much hopelessness drives suicidal thoughts, but a minimum of amongst depressed people, it's believed get connected.
Learning to hope shouldn't be only an excellent skill, it could possibly be life-saving. Therapists like Tomasulo, who advocate an approach called positive psychology, in addition to educators who've created hope programs for youth and employees, say anyone can develop or regain their sense of hope — in the event that they're willing to work at it.
What is hope and hopefulness?
To strengthen hope, it's important to grasp what hope is. Hope is a word we use often. “I Hope I win the lottery.” Or “I Hope I'll get a better job soon.”
That hope is just a wish, experts said. It's a “faint” hope, said Rick Miller, founder of a program at Arizona State University called Kids at Hope. that teaches the value and strategy of hope. “We're talking about cognitive hope,” Miller said.
This hope requires a goal, the ability to stay motivated to achieve the goal, and ways to get there, even when obstacles arise, according to the Kansas psychologist who developed the concept 30 years ago. happen. This is “learned hope,” say Miller and others.
The path from hopelessness to hope
“Hope is unique among all positive emotions,” said Tomasulo, “because it requires negativity to be activated. All other positive emotions do not need that. Hope is unique because it requires something, [going] incorrect.”
While helping people find the path to hope, Tomasulo talks about pebbles and feathers – pebbles being the negative thoughts, feathers being the positive ones. To cultivate hope, of course, the goal is to increase the number of feathers relative to pebbles. When you do that, the ratio between positive and negative emotions changes and the positive ones start to carry more weight.
At one of the first meetings, Tomasulo asked the woman with the heart attack and unfaithful husband to focus on gratitude – the things she was thankful for in her life. Friends would bring her food after her hospital stay, she recalled, and then other friends would take her. She had a horse that she loved, and although she couldn't ride it yet, she could go to the stables and spend time with it and her nieces, who also loved the horse.
Instead of staying stuck in her pain, the woman's perception changed when she realized there was more going on in her life than just depression and adultery. Experiencing all this kindness enabled her to be kind. When she was better but not yet able to return to work, she began volunteering at a food bank, which boosted her self-esteem.
Then, quite naturally, she began to lean into the future. The feathers became more and more numerous.
“Hope is the belief that you can positively influence the future and the desire to make that happen,” Tomasulo said.
Within six months, she was competing in equestrian competitions again, had a significantly better job, and survived the divorce.
“It wasn't that she forgot the pain or the negativity, but that she realized she had a selection about what to concentrate on,” said Tomasulo, who wrote Learned hope And The positivity effectAfter much deliberation, the woman decided to give hope.
What research says
“Hope is a lot of work,” says Dr. Crystal Bryce, associate dean for student affairs and associate professor of medical education at the University of Texas at Tyler, who studies hope in adolescents and adults. (Researchers measure hope by adding up scores on Adult And child Scale of hope.)
Their findings include:
- The level of hope in children changes over time. “We have a reduce when children moved from seventh to eighth grade, and an improvement in hope scores when they moved from eighth to ninth grade.” In her study of more than 1,000 adolescents in sixth through 10th grade, she found that performance stress in school may contribute to this decline and that promoting hope skills (such as goal setting) before the transition to high school can buffer stress and increase performance. “Those who have more hope tend to have less stress.”
- In another study of 726 students in grades 6 to 12, those who had higher Hope Before the pandemic, students felt more connected to school during the pandemic, even when they were doing distance learning. “Even in this hopeless time, they were able to find ways to feel connected,” Bryce said. Feeling connected, Bryce said, reduces the risk of depression.
- In a small study on 41 teachers, Bryce found that those who were emotionally exhausted before the pandemic had less hope during the pandemic. Those who received support from peers had more hope.
Giving hope to young people and workers
Others have launched programs to provide hope to children and adults in the workplace.
One of these is Hopeful Minds, a project developed by iFred (the International Foundation for Research and Education on Hope). The aim is to give students, teachers and parents the tools they need to develop a hopeful mindset. Its 16 Instruction45 minutes each, have been downloaded more than 5,000 times for free in 47 countries, according to Kathryn Goetzke, founder of iFred.
Goetzke also founded the Shine Hope Company, which offers courses and campaigns in workplaces to create more hope and thus improve the well-being of workers.
Goetzke knows the path from hopelessness to hopefulness well. Her father committed suicide shortly after she started college. In her grief, she said, she soon realized that her coping mechanisms were based on hopelessness, not hopefulness. When she was told she was at high risk for suicide, she began to explore hope. Goetzke's book was published on the 30th anniversary of her father's death. The biggest little book about hopewas published.
She insisted that learning to be hopeful is not hopeless for anyone.
“I can teach anyone to be hopeful, but everyone has to do the work themselves,” she said.
Miller, of Arizona State University, founded the Kids at Hope program in 2000. The name, he said, is meant to eliminate the “at-risk youth” stereotype for many who are considered disadvantaged. When children with fewer benefits are labeled “at-risk,” he said, the possibilities that they'll succeed decrease.
The program currently operates in 24 states, in 475 schools and juvenile detention centers, and inspires schools and organizations to create a culture and environment where all children succeed.
“We have presented the science of hope in a series of training modules,” Miller said. “We translate the research into simple but powerful principles and practices that demonstrate how to create and activate hope for everyone and by everyone.”
The basics, Miller said, are that children must know that adults consider in them and are willing to construct a relationship with them. Another secret's introducing an idea called mental time travel, which inspires hope. It is “the brain's ability to imagine a future.”
To date, Kids at Hope has trained over 125,000 adults and reached greater than 1.1 million children ages 3 to 18. With an “it takes a village” attitude, the organization has trained not only teachers, but in addition social employees, bus drivers, janitors, school inspectors, juvenile prosecutors and others, Miller said.
“Hopeful people seem to be more successful in life than people without hope,” Miller said. “They are more successful socially, emotionally and economically, and they live longer. While vague hope comes and goes, cognitive hope is a choice we can make every day because it comes with a strategy.”
There are different definitions of hope, but Miller likes this one: “If resilience is the ability to bounce back, then hope is the ability to move forward.”