Hope, Optimism and Resilience

“It’s a jungle out there!” is the common expression when one defines the life in today’s highly competitive world. Cut-throat competition, Dog eats Dog world, it’s a rat race. Has the life become so difficult and challenging only now? Was life serene comfortable and without any challenges for our ancestors?  In fact primitive humans had difficult lives. Our distant ancestors felt vulnerable to many mysterious forces. In some years food was plentiful; in other years it was hard to find. In some years severe storms, floods, and forest fires killed many people. Sometimes wounds caused people to die, but wounds sometimes healed. Some people recovered from sicknesses that killed others.  

Ancient Greeks believed that gods living in the heavens on Mount Olympus controlled the events affecting their lives. In Greek mythology, Pandora was blamed for opening a box that unleashed a multitude of harmful spirits that inflicted plagues, diseases, and illnesses on mankind. Spirits of greed, envy, hatred, mistrust, sorrow, anger, revenge, lust, and despair scattered far and wide looking for humans to torment. Inside the box, however, Pandora also discovered and released a healing spirit named Hope. Hope had the power to heal afflictions and illnesses caused by the malevolent spirits.

From ancient times, people have recognized that a spirit of hope helps them bear times of great suffering, illnesses, disasters, loss and pain. They learned that the spirit of hope could lead to being healed.  I have mentioned the power of hope in my earlier post on Optimism as an attribute of success. The chemistry of hope has been extensively studied by the scientists and in one of the tests it was found that it had remarkable effect in the healing process of PTSD (Post Traumatic Stress Disorder) patients.

A person full of hope (i.e., is hopeful) feels less despair. Hopeful people endure longer, which can lead to healing, rescue, or the end of bad circumstances. Hope allows people to imagine that their present difficult life will be better in the future. People who lack hope cannot imagine a better future for themselves. To be “hope-less” is discouraging. Hopelessness augments bad future experiences. Hopeless people are likely to give up and not try to hold on.

Hope is meaningful when people are struggling to survive bad conditions. Without bad conditions, there is no need for hope other than hoping that good things will continue to happen and bad things will not occur again in the future. As long as humans experience disease, tragedies, and disasters, they will also feel hope.

Optimism and pessimism both tend to be self-fulfilling prophesises. If you expect a good outcome, your brain spots little events and momentary opportunities that can lead to that outcome. If you expect a bad outcome, your brain spots that outcome; you may not try the falling opportunities because you believe that they are not going to work for you. Your brain will have you thinking, feeling, and acting in ways that lead to that predicted outcome.

Dr. Jerome Groopman, MD, writes in his book “The Anatomy of Hope” writes - “Hope can only flourish when you believe that what you do can bring a future different than the present. To have hope is to acquire the belief that you have some control over your circumstances that you are no longer entirely at the mercy of forces outside yourself.” He cautions that “having hope won’t necessarily beat the odds, but without hope you are lost. Without hope you have no direction to go in. You have no courage and no resilience, Hope gives you a chance.”

Groopman says that, as a surgeon, he has found that “an optimist believes everything is going to work out for the best. In fact, in life, that is often not the case. True hope is clear-eyed. It does not make that assumption. It sees all of the problems, all of the difficulties that lie ahead, and through those obstacles, it finds a possible realistic path to a better future.”

People with positive attitude act in ways to get the good results they expect. They give positive explanations for set-backs and persevere in their efforts. People with negative attitude accept setbacks as proof of what they expected and as an excuse for not working to make things turn out well.

Both hope and optimism can contribute to resiliency because they are future oriented. People who feel hopeful and optimistic increase their chances of bouncing back and may make things even better than before. India has excellent example of millions of Sikhs and Sindhis who were displaced in partition and had lost everything they had, but they have resurrected themselves from ashes and everyone is doing real well and many of them are leading businessmen and industrialist. The community never lost hope even after losing everything that they had leaving their property and riches back in Pakistan. They are the biggest and best example of resilience of a community.

Hope helps a person endure through difficult times, and optimism provides thoughts and images of things turning out well. Hope is what people have. Optimism is what people believe. Positive attitudes are usually linked to actions people take, step by step, to get them from where they are to where they want to be. Highly resilient people are imbued with a mixture of hope, optimism, positive attitude, and an ability to imagine a desired condition in a way that motivates and guides their purposeful coping actions. Such people expect and need good outcomes, and often get them.

Rhonda Byrne’s Secret talks about “Law of attraction”, thoughts are things, it is nothing but positive thinking. Resilient people don’t deny the existence of negative thoughts and failure centric situations, but they chose to ignore them and focus more on positive thoughts and success centric situations. They are not wishful thinkers, but meticulous thought strategists. Resilient people know that unfolding events are not totally predetermined. The world is more malleable and shapable than most people think. That is why; people with hope, optimism, positivity, and coping skills have an amazing ability to get good outcomes in situations that have other people thinking that there’s no way they can survive and prevail.

An amazing thing about our brain is that when we instruct it to look for something, if often finds it. Resiliency is about putting Mr. Triumph at work and asking Mr. Defeat to leave the thought factory permanently (The analogy is from David J. Shwartz’s book “Magic of Thinking Big” also referred to in my earlier posts). The starting point for resiliency often begins with asking questions such as, “How can I cope with this? What is still good in my life?”  We can have two different sets of feelings about our circumstances. It’s not a matter of feeling one way or the other, as in feeling happy or unhappy. If you define the situation too narrowly and think of it only as devastating your life, then other aspects of your life that seem contrary to your mind set won’t reach you. Both aspects are there in nature, it’s for you to allow them to reach you.  Whenever negativity or pessimism engulfs you, stop, wait make effort to think is there a way out, yes there is a way out, I just need to look hard and find it. Trust me you will most certainly find it.