How to Push Through Existential Despair

Hi, so this week’s video is all about recovering from despair. Despair is a loaded word, but let’s face it, if there was ever a time when we could use that word, the conclusion of 2020 has got to count. There’s been racial injustices across the country, there’s been political strife, and that continues to a certain degree. There’s been the pandemic and all the economic consequences, and the fear for our health, and the lack of travel and opportunity, and social isolation. This is a year where we can talk legitimately about despair. But of course, there’s another element of despair, there’s the opposite of despair, and that’s the emotion of hope. And not in a pop psychology, fufu fluffy kind of way. Today’s topic is distinctly about the science of hope and how to overcome despair. So stay tuned, I’ve got that coming right up.

As a coach, public speaker, and best-selling author, I teach topics just like this one all around the world. So stay tuned, and I’ll give you practical tools that you can use to make both yourself and those around you both happier and more successful.

Okay, so this video is all about hope. And before I get into the topic, I want you to go ahead and click that subscribe button if you’re new to the channel. It’ll mean you get a new video about positive psychology every single week in your inbox. Now look, despair is for real. Despair is that angsty feeling, it’s filled with uncertainty, fear, and if there’s ever been a time when a little bit of despair is appropriate, 2020 is it. But we are just beginning the new year. We are beginning 2021, and wouldn’t it be wonderful if we could genuinely have a different emotion, have a much richer, better emotion, if we could genuinely feel hope.

And hope, of course, is just this belief that something positive is emerging. It’s an emotion that is in some ways actually manufactured. It requires cognition, and it’s unique, it’s maybe the most unique human emotion. When you think of other very intelligent mammals, they have the full range of reactionary emotions that humans have too: fear, joy, horniness, all these kinds of basic emotions. We react to the situation that’s around us. But hope is uniquely human because it’s manufactured through cognition. When we hope, we actually have to conceive of something that makes us feel like our future has an opportunity for us.

And most often, hope has this element of overcoming a negative component. So we can hope for things that just are going to be happy and positive in what are already happy and positive circumstances. But most of the time when we talk about hope, we see that there’s an element, a tinge of something negative or frightening or difficult before us, and through our imagination, through our planning, through our unlimited spirit, we can feel this sense that there’s a better opportunity underway. We are predicting future happiness. Get that, it’s beautiful, that’s what hope is, this uniquely human characteristic.

And of course, when we manufacture hope through our mental cognitive processes, we are actually tying into something that positive psychologists refer to as unconscious thought theory. And this is, I’ve done videos related to this in the past, especially one about visioning. But unconscious thought theory says essentially this, that when we manufacture some plan or idea or goal in our minds, our subconscious, the unconscious part of our brains which do the vast majority of our mental processing, begins to work on this plan that we executed or that we conceived of in our conscious mind. So that, as we come up with a goal consciously, write it down, speak it out loud, imagine it, we set to work something in our unconscious mind where the brain starts problem-solving. Through the night when we’re busy thinking about something else, in the background, our brain is working on this unconscious thought that should become the execution of the plan, becomes the problem-solving.

It’s why people can go for the walk when they left the house with some problem on their mind, and as they’re going for a walk, they suddenly come up with the idea. Well, it wasn’t because their conscious mind, minute by minute or detail by detail, processed the plan. It was that the unconscious brain in the background did all the work, and then that hopeful realization that you actually have a plan comes about. So, hope has this beautiful, good, rich feeling, emotion. It’s one we can manufacture, and it actually, once we’ve manufactured, there’s good theory to suggest that the brain continues to work to bring about that thing that we’re hopeful for.

So, there’s lots of good theorists who work on this area of research about hope. But there’s one specific I want to speak to about today, and that’s a guy named Dr. Anthony Sholey. He does a lot of work on the subject of hope, and I like some of what he says. He basically says there are four basic foundations to hope, ways that we go about creating this sense of hope. And when it becomes realer, it’s the strength of these four foundations, and each of them you can individually work on to improve in yourself. And I’m going to cover them quickly right now, these four foundations of hope.

The first one is attachment. It’s the sense that, as tribal animals, we are deeply rooted in social connection. And the degree to which we’re isolated is the degree to which we have hopelessness. So, the more we can feel our sense of attachment, the more likely we are to be able to have hopeful feelings. It’s a foundation that gives us a solid starting place for hopeful thoughts. And so, the way to go about getting more attachment is to reach out. Reach out to the people that you love, that you’re connected to, and even all the casual relationships you have, people who you don’t consider particularly close, maybe neighbors or people you work with, they’re very important. Reach out, be connected, and even reach out to your other intelligent mammals that share the same hormone of happiness which is oxytocin. So, your dog or your cat that loves you, give them a cuddle, because that attachment is worth something.

Secondly, the foundation of hope is something we call mastery, and I write a lot about that in my book. Mastery is simply this idea that we’re getting better, we’re achieving certain goals, we’re becoming more skillful. And often, when we’re working in areas of strengths, our mastery is a source of great fun. So, one of the ways to get more mastery is to have fun challenging our skill sets and growing stronger in different categories of our life. Whether it’s health, nutrition, certain areas of subject matter interests, tinkering around with your car, whatever it is, work in areas of strength and grow those strengths even further. And you get this sense of mastery, which is this idea that we have feelings about our own strengths and our own capability. And of course, that sense of mastery gives us a degree of confidence that whatever we’re facing in the future, we can face more successfully.

We can achieve mastery in one area, and the emotional reward from that comes over in other areas. Does that make sense? So, as we build mastery, it generally is a foundation for more hope in our lives.

The third foundation for hope is this ideal of survival confidence, or survival awareness, which is maybe a vague concept for most of us. But it’s basically where we’re seeing options, where we don’t see the obstacles as the thing that we believe in, but we see the obstacle as this thing that we have to devise a plan to overcome. And it’s just belief that I can devise options that, if I put my mind to something or seek help from other people, we can find a plan that gets around the obstacle. And often, survival awareness is investing in yourself, look at your own coping skills, examine what you’re presently doing that’s helping you get by from day to day. Whether it’s self-care, the connections to your friends and family, the things that you’re good at at work, look at those things that help you cope and increase that survival awareness.

The fourth foundation of hopefulness is spirituality. Now, in previous videos, I’ve defined spirituality as the opposite of materialism. When we’re no longer with things that we think are concrete in the world and we become more ethereal, that’s an avenue to spirituality. But another way of looking at spirituality is simply the belief in something bigger than one’s own self. And when we enhance our degree of spirituality, we enhance our hopefulness. And this does not necessarily mean belief in a God, although it might be. Any deity that is part of your religious or spiritual practice, that’s fantastic. That’s a great basis for spirituality. But bigger than one’s own self could be other things as well.

Right now, looking at a pandemic, we could look at the government as a source of a belief in something bigger than oneself. Vaccination programs, public health programs, economic stimulus to overcome the hardships that have been a result of the pandemic. All those reasons or all those facets of government can give us reason to believe in government coming to our aid. Science is another belief that’s bigger than one’s own self. And for those people who rightly look at the science and say, “Hey, vaccinations are genuinely coming to a store near you, literally any time right?” It might be a period of months, maybe you’re feeling a little ways down the road, but for the first time since February of 2020, we now can have this confidence that the pandemic will run its course. It’s coming to an end.

Even if some people don’t believe in the science and don’t take the vaccine, we can believe the science is enough to protect one’s own self. And if enough of us get vaccinated, obviously we reach herd immunity and we’ve overcome the pandemic. So, science is a source of belief.

And maybe interestingly, we can believe in nature. That’s why I’m filming out here today. Look at this gorgeous spot I’m at. I don’t know what the belief is, but there’s a healing quality, there’s a loveliness, there’s a beauty here. And at some very guttural, real level, I can believe in this too. And of course, we can believe in other people, and that’s a foundation for spirituality too.

So, there you have it, four foundational strengths or roots by which we can have more hope. And we can work on each of those foundations and literally start 2021 with a rational, well-researched basis for growing hope. And goodness knows, we do need some hope right now. And it’s through the investment in our hope that we will have resiliency and come out of what’s been a tough year and make 2021 a great year.

And that’s my wish for all of you. Wishing you a happy new year and a year filled with hope, peace, safety, and love. Thanks for watching, we’ll see you next time.