On the other hand, the most pessimistic person you ever met can still be hopeful about something. Hope is very specific and focused, usually on just one issue. Most people associate hope with a dire situation. People hope to get out of difficult circumstances. That is often when people do find themselves hoping fervently! But hope also can provide the key to making everyday life better. It can make present difficulties much easier to bear. An example of that is reported by the American Psychology Association.
Children who grew up in poverty but had success later in life all had one thing in common — hope. What is a Respite House? In a way, having hope links your past and present to the future.
You have a vision for what you hope will happen. Whether it does not, just envisioning it can make you feel better. The big things: An end to the pandemic. A better future for their children. They hope for tangible things: a bigger paycheck, a safe home, good health. And the more amorphous ones: love, respect, to feel seen.
Recent polls show that while most Americans remain at least somewhat hopeful about the future, hope is being tested. Suffering and division are ever-present, and there doesn't seem a clear path forward. But psychologists say hope is not a luxury. For mental health, it's a necessity. Saturday is World Mental Health Day , and decades of research show hope is a robust predictor of mental health. Not only does it make life more enjoyable, experts say, but hope also provides resilience against things like post-traumatic stress disorder, anxiety, depression and suicidal ideation.
Hope offers chemical benefits too, in the form of endorphins and lowered stress levels, things, experts say, make people more productive. Contrary to how some people talk about hope, researchers don't view it as a passive emotional state. While colloquially people may say things like, "sit back and hope for the best," researchers who study hope say it's an active coping approach. In a paper Gallagher published in , he and other researchers looked at whether people expected their lives five years in the future to be good or better than their current ones.
The study included more than , people from over countries and found that worldwide, people tend to have positive expectations for the future — they often believe it can be as good or equal to the present. A poll by The New York Times and Siena College in June found that while many Americans are frustrated in the short term, they remain hopeful in the long-run.
Sixty-eight percent of voters said they were hopeful about the state of the country. It is the trust you have that when you go to bed at night, you will wake up to a new day that is filled with possibility. The problem with desire, anticipation, and expectation is that when a particular thing is not forthcoming, they can disappear, leaving a void into which negative thoughts and feelings enter.
Just think of a child opening his birthday presents. He desires, anticipates, and expects a particular thing — a toy or bike, for instance. When this thing is not forthcoming, what does he do? He gets upset. He has a tantrum. He is not grateful for the presents he did get. Hope does not depend on certainty. Hope is merely the belief that there is the potential for something good to happen.
The light is not a particular thing. The light is just something good — the potential for something good. When we are at our lowest point, it is hope that lifts our head and shows us a path back toward something good. Remember, hope is akin to trust, and when your general feelings are negative, you must trust that they will pass. Hope is a bit like an unseen compass that points us in the direction of something beneficial to our future.
Hope is a source of energy. It helps us to see something better up ahead and to put one foot in front of the other to move forward. We are more prepared to work hard, to strive, to be willing to tackle and overcome the obstacles that we face.
0コメント