Hope Isn’t a Feeling – It’s a Choice

While we often talk about “feeling” hopeful, that phrasing is a little misleading – because unlike sadness or joy or fear, hope isn’t actually a feeling. It’s a mental process that we can choose to engage in. It’s not an internal signal that naturally occurs. 

In other words, hope is something we do rather than a feeling that simply emerges on its own. Our bodies and nervous systems and brains will just send us signals for things like sorrow and elation – that’s what makes them feelings: they generally happen without our direct supervision. Hope doesn’t work like that. We have to reach for it and wrangle it into our brains.

Now, why does that matter? Am I just arguing semantics here? Well, recognizing that hope is a choice rather than a feeling gives us agency. When we’re feeling hopeless (which IS a feeling, but I’ll get into that below), hope is something we can reach for on our own. It’s a mental process we can walk ourselves through to improve our general state of being. We get to decide to be hopeful, to intentionally think hopefully instead of, well, hoping that hope will just happen on its own. 

If y’all haven’t read Brene Brown’s Atlas of the Heart, I can’t recommend it highly enough, and it’s where I picked up this idea. The book is essentially an encyclopedia of emotions – arguing that the more we’re able to identify and define our feelings, the more we increase our capacity to move through them. 

Rather than moving alphabetically through the vast landscape of emotions, the book breaks feelings into categories – “Places We Go When We Compare” (admiration, envy, jealousy, etc.) or “Places We Go When It’s Beyond Us” (awe, wonder, confusion, etc.). This helps a lot in distinguishing between similar but different feelings – awe vs. wonder, jealousy vs. envy, and, perhaps most significantly for me, the difference between hopelessness and despair. 

Hopelessness IS a Feeling

To back up a bit: I read this book a few months after it came out at the end of 2021. I was on a solo camping/road trip down the California coast and using that time to process the first of two heartbreaks in 2022 (it was a beautiful and very difficult year). And the first heartbreak of 2022 fucking wrecked me. 

Although the relationship was quite short, its brevity was a huge part of my confusion and despair. It didn’t make sense to me or my general sense of the universe that I could meet this marvelous person only to have him retreat so quickly. It felt like I’d fallen into the pit of the same pattern of getting involved with avoidantly attached people – in spite of the tremendous amount of work I’d done around my own attachment wounds and trauma. 

And I just couldn’t move on. I was incredibly stuck and wounded and grieving something so much more than just that person. Then I read the section in Atlas of the Heart on “Places We Go When We’re Hurting,” and it was so god damn helpful I can’t even properly explain. 

See, for a lot of mostly trauma-related reasons, I’d been feeling a lot of anguish and despair around that break up. Things felt incredibly bleak, and I was struggling to keep myself above water emotionally.  But the book helped me to understand that what I was feeling was actually just hopelessness – an important distinction from despair. 

I’m going to paraphrase rather than quote the book directly, but here’s my take away:

• Hopelessness is the feeling that you can’t see a path forward in one particular area of your life. Hopelessness is focused.
• Despair is the feeling that nothing in your life is going well or ever will. Despair is pervasive.

I was feeling incredibly hopeless about my love life, but I wasn’t actually sinking into despair. Work was going well enough. I had a lot of supportive and thriving friendships. My house was still in the midst of a seemingly never-ending renovation project, but that was going okay, too. My physical health was good, even if my mental health was in the shitter. And I was back in therapy and on a waitlist to talk to a psychiatrist and get some answers about my mental illness (a few months later I finally got my ADHD diagnosis – and so much of my life began to make more sense).

That distinction – between hopelessness and despair – did for me exactly what the book is advocating: it helped me move through. It helped me take stock of the areas of my life that were going well instead of letting my hopelessness in one area become the all-encompassing sense of despair I’d been drowning in. And it helped me start taking some small actions toward hope.

What Is Hope, Then?

Here’s where I will quote the book: “Hope is a way of thinking–a cognitive process” (Brown, 97). Again, hope is a thing we do for ourselves. It’s a type of mental problem-solving, kind of like when we think through the steps in a recipe or task. 

To find our way to hope, we need three components: a goal, a means to achieve it, and the capacity to get there. Or, we need to at least believe that those three things are possible. If one of those three things is missing, hope is tremendously difficult to access.

Let’s look at this in some practical terms, what finding hope looks like in the context of something tangible like a career shift. Changing careers is a big deal. It’s scary and daunting and totally overwhelming at times. But it’s also something that we have a lot of agency around and pathways to achieve, especially if we’re willing to be patient and make concessions in the short-term. So, hope is accessible. 

Goals. The first element of hope is knowing what you want. For me, I want to move away from digital marketing (my current day job) and into life coaching. It’s a clear goal!

Pathways. In order to feel hopeful about achieving my goal, I have to have an idea of how to get there. This can get overwhelming when the goal seems big or far away, but so long as I have some sense of a pathway, I can access hope. Here, I’m enrolled in a training program that’s going to give me the tools and resources to build a coaching practice – eventually. (Patience is also an important aspect of this element of hope). 

Agency. We have to believe we can actually achieve our goal, that we can do it! Again, if our goal seems too big or the path too long and hard, it can be easy to doubt ourselves. And if we let the “I’m-not-good-enough” demons get the better of us, hope evaporates. 

Hope Takes Effort

Again, hope doesn’t happen on its own, unless we’ve trained our brains to naturally reach for it. We’re not really wired to be hopeful. We’re wired to look for problems, to be vigilant for what could go wrong, to be on the lookout for saber-tooth tigers. Hope requires us to go against those engrained mental pathways and choose a different path.

To find hope, we have to be the Little Engine That Could and just keep telling ourselves “I think I can, I think I can!” Or, if we can’t always do that for ourselves, hiring a career coach or a life coach or a relationship coach can be incredibly helpful. I’ve worked with several coaches at this point, and I can’t emphasize enough how helpful it is to have someone who believes in you to remind you to believe in yourself. 

Hope is an important aspect of mental health, and the bitch of this all is that mental health generally takes effort to maintain. Hope is a workout for your brain, but there are at least clear instructions. 

If and when you’re feeling hopeless, take out a journal and identify the three components: 

1. what is your goal? 
2. are there ways for you to get there (even if they feel distant and big and seemingly insurmountable)? 
3. do you believe you can get there? If you don’t believe it yet, who can you ask for support, encouragement, or advice?

That’s your recipe for hope. Pretty simple. Definitely accessible. Can be hard to put into practice. I hope you choose it, though.

And I want you to know I believe in you, kid! We’ve all got so much more in us than we tend to recognize on our own. But you can do this, whatever it is.