Hope…The Thing With Feathers

It is a little after seven in the morning on November 4th, and I am walking in the woods. The leaves are letting go one at a time, in no particular hurry, and the sun is coming up through the branches the way it has every morning since long before any of us were here to notice. In the distance I can hear the world going about its business: the hum of cars on the road, people driving to work, a plane somewhere overhead, a dog that has clearly spotted a squirrel and has opinions about it.

For about ten years now, this is where I have come to find hope. When the news became unbearable, when I could no longer read another headline without feeling my chest tighten, I would put on my hiking boots and walk into the forest. As you know, I often share those pictures from those walks, sometimes with a little caption that some of you might recognize:

“Nature don’t care”

The grammar was intentional, a small act of defiance. Whatever was happening out there in the human world, the trees kept doing tree things. The creek kept running, the deer kept wandering through, the seasons kept turning. I found enormous comfort in that indifference. It reminded me that the world is much bigger than whatever was keeping me up at night.

This morning, though, something is different. Yesterday was election day in the United States (the midterms), and I woke up to results that many of us had stopped daring to imagine. I am not going to tell you how to feel about them. Some of you reading this are celebrating, some are disappointed, and some of you live on the other side of the ocean and are wondering why the Americans are making such a fuss again. What I want to tell you about is not the election itself, but what happened in my body (bear with me).

For years I have been holding my breath. I don’t mean that figuratively, or not only figuratively: I mean that somewhere around my ribs, a muscle has been clenched for the better part of a decade. The things I care about most, and that I write to you about every month (contribution, dignity, mutual respect, what Adler called Gemeinschaftsgefühl, the feeling of belonging to a human community), seemed to be losing ground in public life, year after year. At one point I exhaled a little (2021), but only a little, because I didn’t trust that it would last. Then I held my breath again, harder this time. Somewhere along the way, without ever deciding to, I stopped allowing myself to hope. Hope had started to feel dangerous. What if I hoped and nothing changed? Wasn’t it safer not to hope at all?

Last night, on November 3rd, following the news in real time late into the night, I cried. Or to be more precise, I sobbed: I’m not sure which it was: joy, or relief, or ten years of something finally coming loose. What I do know is that I waited for the big exhale, the one I had been saving up for years.

It didn’t come.

This morning, walking among the falling leaves, I am still holding my breath. A voice in my head keeps saying I’ll believe it when I see it. I know that what happened yesterday matters (under-statement), and I know that it is a necessary first step (“a sine qua none” condition). Yet my body refuses to let go. I have been braced for so long that I seem to have forgotten how to unbrace.

I am wondering: is there something in your life you’ve been holding your breath about? A diagnosis, a marriage that has been fraying, a job search that won’t end, a child who has lost their way, the state of the world? Have you, like me, quietly forbidden yourself to hope, because hoping and being disappointed felt worse than not hoping at all?

It turns out there is a reason I can’t exhale, and science has a few things to say about it (spoiler: it’s not because I’m a congenital grump).

Why can’t we exhale even when the news is good?

In the full post, I share:

• The 2016 discovery that turned learned helplessness on its head and revealed the brain’s “hope circuit,”
• What a long-term Finnish study found hopelessness does to the heart,
• Jerome Groopman’s remarkable story of forbidding himself to hope,
• Frankl’s lessons from the camps, and
• Five Practices for learning to hope again, including the surprising origin of “acting as if.”

A little bird and a new dawn are waiting for you there as well.

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PART 2 - CONTINUED FROM NOVEMBER NEWSLETTER

What hopelessness is, and how we fall into it

In 1967, Martin Seligman (who would later become the father of Positive Psychology) and his colleague Steven Maier ran a series of experiments that made them famous. Animals exposed to discomfort they could not escape eventually stopped trying to escape at all, even when the way out was right in front of them. Seligman and Maier called this learned helplessness: the animals had learned that nothing they did mattered, and so they gave up. For fifty years, this was taught in every introductory psychology class, and it shaped how we understood depression in humans.

In 2016, after Maier had spent decades studying the brain itself, the two men published a paper with a remarkable admission: the original theory got it backwards. Passivity, it turns out, is not learned. Giving up is the brain’s default response to prolonged adversity, the automatic setting we fall back into when bad things keep happening and we can’t see a way out. What has to be learned is the opposite: the sense that we have some control, that what we do makes a difference. They found the pathway in the brain responsible for detecting that control, and Seligman, never one to shy away from a good name, called it the hope circuit.

A word of caution is in order here: this research was done on animals, and nobody has yet proven that a rat’s brain giving up works exactly like yours or mine. Still, this research can explain why my inability to exhale is not a character flaw, nor ingratitude. After years of bad news, my nervous system did exactly what nervous systems do: it went back to its factory setting. Hopelessness was the default. Hope is the thing we have to relearn.

How do we know when we’ve slipped into hopelessness? Researchers in Finland measured it with just two questions, which you can ask yourself right now.

1. Do you feel that it is impossible to reach the goals you would like to strive for?
2. Does the future seem hopeless to you, as if things can’t change for the better?

If you nodded along to either one, you are not alone, and you are not broken. You are a human being who has been through a lot.

What hopelessness does to us

Those two questions from the Finnish researchers come from one of the most striking studies which exist on the subject. In the 1990s, researchers followed more than 2,400 middle-aged men in eastern Finland for six years. The men who scored moderately or highly on hopelessness were significantly more likely to die during the study than men who felt hopeful, and the more hopeless they felt, the higher the risk. High hopelessness also predicted heart attacks, and moderate hopelessness was associated with cancer. What surprised the researchers most was that this held true even after accounting for depression and the usual risk factors like smoking, cholesterol and blood pressure. Hopelessness, on its own, was a danger to these men’s health.

A follow-up study on the same group looked at the arteries in their necks. Over four years, the men with high hopelessness showed 20 percent more hardening of the arteries than the others. The lead researcher, Susan Everson, put it in these rather striking terms: this was the same magnitude of increased risk one sees when comparing a pack-a-day smoker to a nonsmoker.

So when I tell you that I have been holding my breath for ten years, I don’t mean it only as a metaphor. All those years of bracing have probably had real consequences for my health, and if you have been holding your breath for your own reasons, the same is likely true for you.

Alfred Adler, who was a physician before he was a psychologist, would not have been surprised. He saw the human being as a unified whole: what happens in the mind happens in the body, and the other way around.

In Adlerian psychology, the great enemy of mental health is discouragement, which is literally the loss of heart (remember cœur, the French word for heart, hiding inside courage).

As far as I know, Adler didn’t write much about hope by that name, but he wrote endlessly about what happens when we lose it. Discouraged people retreat. They hide. They stop moving toward their goals and toward other people, and they build what Adler called safeguards: reasons and excuses that protect them from the risk of trying and failing. Forbidding myself to hope was a safeguard. If I never hoped, I could never be disappointed.

The problem is that safeguards don’t only keep out disappointment. They keep out life. Hiding leads to stillness, stillness leads to paralysis, and paralysis, when it lasts long enough, has a name: depression. Contemporary Adlerians Julia Yang, Alan Milliren and Mark Blagen describe Individual Psychology as a psychology of courage, and when they list the qualities of a courageous person, hope and movement sit side by side with empathy, meaning and endurance. Without hope, there is no movement, and without movement, as Adler would say, there is no life.

Emily Dickinson understood something about all of this a century and a half ago:

I love that her little bird never asks for anything. Hope doesn’t require us to be in a good mood, to have evidence that things will get better, or to deserve it. It perches there and keeps singing through the storm. When we fall into hopelessness, as I did and as so many of us do, the bird hasn’t stopped singing. We have stopped listening, because listening feels too risky.

What hope is, and what it does

If hopelessness is so dangerous, then what exactly is hope? The psychologist C.R. Snyder spent his career trying to answer that question, and his answer is refreshingly practical. Hope, for Snyder, is not a warm feeling that floats down from the sky. It is a way of thinking that has three ingredients:

1. a goal you care about,
2. pathways (the ability to imagine routes toward that goal, including detours when the road is blocked), and
3. agency (the belief that you can actually start moving down one of those routes and keep going).

He compared hope to a car that needs both a map and fuel. A map with an empty tank goes nowhere, and a full tank with no map just drives in circles. People high in hope, by his measure, do better in school, in sports, in their health and in their psychological lives.

The oncologist Jerome Groopman, a professor at Harvard Medical School, came at hope from a different direction: the bedside of patients facing terrible diagnoses. In his book The Anatomy of Hope, he tells the stories of people who found hope, or lost it, at the most critical moments of their lives, and he goes looking in research laboratories for the biology behind what he witnessed. He makes a distinction that I find essential: false hope pretends the obstacles aren’t there, while true hope looks right at them and still sees a path forward. False hope is a lie we tell ourselves. True hope is a decision to keep moving with our eyes open.

The most moving story in the book is Groopman’s own. After a failed back surgery, he lived with severe pain for nineteen years. When a doctor finally proposed a demanding new therapy, Groopman realized, to his dismay, that he, the man who believed hope was a healing force for his patients, had given up hope for himself. He had forbidden himself to hope, just as many of us have in the last few years. Slowly, a tiny bit of hope stirred, and he began to imagine doing the things he hadn’t done in years. Within a year, he was almost entirely free of pain. Groopman, who is the child of Holocaust survivors, came to see hope as the very heart of healing.

Some of you may also remember the surgeon Bernie Siegel, whose book Love, Medicine and Miracles was everywhere in the late 1980s. Siegel noticed that his “exceptional patients,” the ones who outlived their prognoses, tended to be the ones who refused to accept hopelessness and took an active role in their own healing. His work is more storytelling than science, and some of his claims have been debated ever since (but I LOVED his books and they were an invaluable resource as my husband Steve was going through his cancer), but he was one of the first doctors to say out loud what Groopman would later investigate in the lab: what we believe about our future is not separate from what happens in our bodies.

Why we cannot live without it

No one has written about hope in the face of the unbearable more powerfully than Viktor Frankl, the Viennese psychiatrist who, as a young medical student, was a member of Adler’s circle, until Adler expelled him in 1927, partly for asking too many questions about meaning (the irony!). Frankl survived Auschwitz and other Nazi camps. In his seminal book Man’s Search for Meaning, he observed that the prisoners who lost faith in the future were the ones least likely to survive. He describes how the death rate in his camp rose sharply in the week between Christmas 1944 and New Year’s, not because conditions had changed, but because so many prisoners had held onto the naive hope of being home by Christmas. When Christmas came and went, they lost heart, and their bodies followed.

Optimism didn’t save Frankl; meaning did: the image of his wife, the manuscript he was determined to rewrite, the conviction that his suffering could still serve a purpose. He often quoted Nietzsche:

“Those who have a pourquoi to live can bear almost any how.”

The guards could take everything from him (his possessions, his name, his family, his health), but they could not take away his freedom to choose his attitude and to hold onto his dignity. In that sense, they could not take away his hope either, because his hope never depended on how things turned out.

I would never in a million years compare our breath-holding over the last ten years to what Frankl lived through. What I take from him is this: the kind of hope that lasts is not “everything is going to turn out the way I want.” It is “my life still has a direction, and I still get to choose how I move toward it.”

How to learn to hope again

If giving up is the brain’s default, and hope is what must be learned, then hope is a skill. Skills can be practiced. Here is what I have found, both in my own life and with my clients, helps us find our way back.

Perspective, or why it helps to be small. Every morning in the woods, nature reminds me that it “doesn’t care.” The leaves fall whether I am hopeful or not. The sun rose this morning just as it did on the worst mornings of the past ten years. There is something deeply freeing in remembering how small we are in the grand scheme of things, and how much bigger and older the world is than whatever is crushing us today. Perspective doesn’t make our problems disappear, but it gives them a size we can bear. Go outside. Look at something that has been there longer than you have, a tree, a river, the stars, and let it put you back in your place, in the best possible sense.

Focus on what you can control. The hope circuit, remember, is activated by the experience of control. We can’t control the outcome of elections, wars, diagnoses or other people’s choices. We peut control how we spend the next hour, how we speak to the people around us, whether we go for that walk, whether we pick up the phone. Each time we act on something within our reach, we are teaching our brain that what we do matters, which is exactly what hope is made of.

Act as if. This is the one I am most excited about, because I recently learned something new about a tool I have been teaching for more than twenty years. In our PEP parenting classes, we teach parents to “act as if”: when it’s time to leave the playground, you say so calmly, then walk toward the car as if your child is going to follow you (in other words you act the part and hope that your movement will generate the movement you wish in your child). One of my PEP colleagues told me recently that she had always understood it as a kind of pretending, a performance of confidence for the child’s benefit. What she realized only recently is that “acting as if” is not about “fooling” the child. It is about changing ourselves: changing our own inner conviction so that we truly come to believe our child is capable of doing the right thing. The child feels that belief, and responds to it.

I went digging, and the history of this idea goes further back than either of us knew. Adler didn’t invent “as if.” He borrowed it from a German philosopher named Hans Vaihinger, whose 1911 book The Philosophy of ‘As If’ argued that human beings live by useful fictions: ideas we can never prove to be true, but which shape how we act and therefore what becomes possible. Adler built this into the heart of his psychology. We all live toward goals we have imagined, and those imagined goals, whether they are true or not, direct our every movement. Later Adlerians turned the idea into a practical technique: if you want to become a different person, start acting as if you already were that person, and watch what happens to your thoughts and feelings.

Applied to hope, this means I don’t have to wait to feel hopeful before I act hopeful. I can make plans for next year as if they will happen. I can speak about the future as if it holds good things. I can take a deep breath, even a partial one, as if it were safe to breathe. Vaihinger would say that whether the fiction is true matters less than what it allows me to do. Over time, the acting changes the believing and as a result, the being.

Contribute. Adler believed that we feel most significant, and therefore most encouraged, when we are contributing to something larger than ourselves. Hopelessness turns us inward; contribution turns us outward. Volunteer, help a neighbor, write the note you have been meaning to write, show up (metaphorically and literally) for someone who needs it. Each act of contribution is a small vote for the kind of world you want to live in, and it is very hard to feel hopeless while you are actively contributing to something.

Take one small step. Snyder’s “pathways” don’t have to be grand plans. When hope feels out of reach, it is usually because the distance between where we are and where we want to be seems impossible. Shrink the distance. What is one thing, the smallest possible thing, you could do today that moves you an inch in the right direction? As I always tell my clients: get off the hamster wheel of your thoughts, look down at your feet, and put one in front of the other.

Still learning to breathe

I wish I could tell you that writing all this has finally allowed me to exhale. It hasn’t, not completely, not yet. My body is still braced, still half-waiting for the other shoe to drop. I suspect that after ten years of holding our breath, it will take more than one night to remember how to let it go. What I do know is that something shifted yesterday. I know that hope, once it starts circulating again, changes how people act and how they treat each other, even if nothing changes quickly in the halls of power. I know that the bird with feathers has been perched in my soul this whole time, singing, even when I didn’t allow myself to hear it.

So I am practicing. I walk in the woods, I notice the leaves, I take the next small step, and I act as if it is safe to breathe. Some mornings it almost is and it’s getting easier every day.

What about you? What have you been holding your breath about, and what would it take to let a little air back in?

I’ll leave you with a woman who knew a thing or two about holding on through storms. In 1965, Nina Simone recorded a song about a new dawn, a new day and a new life, about birds and sun and breeze and the simple, defiant joy of feeling good. Turn it up, close your eyes, and breathe.