podcast

When you look out at the future and it seems that everything is just giving you anxiety, everything looks bleak. From everything that you have experienced, everything that other people are saying, everything that you've heard. We're all just drawing on our past experience. But the future is not the past. The future has a lot more possibilities than the ones that we have already seen and we've already been through. And we think that the future only has certain possibilities because that's the way that our brains work. When we can imagine that there are more possibilities than what we know from our own experience, then we can have hope, and this can help us to do things that have been impossible for us before.

Hi, everybody. Welcome to the podcast today. Thanks for joining me. I wanna talk today about something specific you can do to cultivate the opposite of anxiety. So anxiety is really good at imagining bad or dangerous or threatening future situations. Anxiety happens when we have the threat response, when our brains decide that the demands that we're facing are too much for our resources. With anxiety, you're afraid that you don't have avenues to reach your goals because the demands in your situation look way bigger than your resources
So what's the opposite of this? Well, the opposite is hope. Hope is about imagining or acknowledging that something good might or could happen in the future. Hope is also related to believing that you'll be able to find avenues to reach your goals or n- or in other words, that you can find the resources to meet the demands that you're facing. That somewhere out there they're available.
Researchers have found that hope is really important for wellbeing. It's been researched over several decades, and there are a lot of studies on this. And one of the big benefits of hope is increased wellbeing. Well, what do we mean by wellbeing? Wellbeing has psychological aspects. It has social aspects. It has subjective aspects, and hope helps with all of these. Hope helps you to feel like you have more autonomy, like you have more mastery over your environment, like you have more personal growth going on, like you have better relations with others, like you have more purpose in life. It helps you to have better self-acceptance. It helps you to feel more integrated socially and like you're contributing socially. It helps you to feel more accepted socially. Hope also helps you to feel greater life satisfaction overall, and it helps you to have more pleasant emotional experiences than negative ones. And in addition, like we mentioned a moment before, hope helps you to have increased capacity to reach your goals.
Here's an example. There's a study that looked at people's attitudes and actions toward climate change. And this study was looking at groups of people and collective action and what it is that helps collective action to happen. what they found is that when groups have hope in relation to climate change, which is a topic where a lot of people might feel hopeless, that they're more likely to do something about it. They're more likely to engage in efforts to com-to combat climate change. So just to clarify, this is not hope that denies that climate change exists. This is hope that acknowledges that we've got a problem, but also believes that humanity can and will devise solutions. So when a group has collective hope about climate change, they're more likely to act on it. So it shows that hope is really an important prerequisite for collective action and that it helps us to reach our collective goals as well.
So these are different reasons why it would be really important for us to learn how to cultivate hope. But for those of us who have a tendency toward anxiety, myself included, it might not be very natural just because our brains are really good at imagining the future as a threatening bad scenario and not so good at imagining good things that could possibly happen. So how do we go about cultivating hope? Well, there are a lot of studies that have examined this as well, different interventions and strategies that people can use, and they measure whether or not it helps people to reduce hopelessness and cultivate a sense of hope. One of the things that seems to really work for people is to use reappraisal strategies. And we have talked about all kinds of different reappraisal strategies on this podcast. Reappraisal strategies are the strategies that work on your appraisal of the world, or in other words, the glasses that you're seeing your situation through or the story that your brain is telling about your current situation. So I wanna tell you about one particular strategy that I have used that has helped me to cultivate hope. It's a way of changing the glasses that I'm using to look at my future that helps me to feel more hopeful.
So we had an episode a while back where we talked about how your memory is involved in predicting your future. And we talked then about how we think that our memory is a storage system, but it's really a prediction system. Our brains use our memories to predict the future. The same parts of our brains are used in recalling and in predicting. So our brains are basically always asking, given what happened before, what is likely to happen next? And when we go through a situation, our brain doesn't store memories like video clips. Our brain stores memories kind of more like Lego blocks. It breaks our situation, our memory down into different components, and it stores these different components in different parts of our brains. And then what happens when we want to predict the future? Our brain will take different pieces, different components from all these different memories and assemble something new to make a prediction. So for example, let's say you have a favorite lunch place that you go into often. As you go into that place today, your brain doesn't wait to see what's gonna happen before it starts to predict the future and starts to make decisions about how you're gonna act in there. It already starts to stitch together a, a prediction of what it thinks is gonna happen today when you go in that lunch place. So it takes all of your past experience in that lunch place. And your brain will use all of these different parts of your past experience to predict what might happen today. And this helps you to decide how you're gonna behave and how you're gonna f-, the mood that you're gonna have as you're walking in to the lunch place. So the fact that our brain uses our past experience to predict the future is useful because it helps us to learn from past experience, but it's also imperfect because we all know that reality is not limited by our own experience, and the future is greater than our past experience, and things can happen that are not consistent with what have happened to us before. So this is one reframe that has really helped me, is recognizing that the future is not the past. That even though my brain thinks the future is the past, and my brain can only use the past to predict the future, I like to remind myself that there are more options than what I have seen, what I have heard of, what I have experienced that could happen right now.
So let me tell you a little personal story about how this has helped me in a specific experience. So I live in Brazil, as most of you know, and I often travel to the United States for performances with my quartet or to visit family. And there was one time when I was traveling to the U- to the US, and there were gonna be three different legs on my flight. And I was able to check in ahead of time online, but I wasn't able to get my second, the boarding pass for my second leg. I was able to get my first and third leg online, and the information that I saw online said that I would have to get that second boarding pass at the airport. So I thought, "Okay, sure. I'll take that first leg of my flight. I'll get to the São Paulo airport, and then I will go up to the desk of the gate that I need to leave from, and they will print me out a new boarding pass, and everything will be fine. The problem was that when I got to the São Paulo airport and I went to go and try and get to my new gate, that was when I realized I had made a mistake. Because in order to get to my new gate, I was gonna have to pass through sort of a turnstile in which I would have to use my new boarding pass to get through it in order for it to open for me. So I wouldn't able, be able to access the whole area of the airport for international flights if I didn't already have my boarding pass for the next leg. And I looked at my watch, and I saw that I had less than an hour to make this connection, and I started to panic because I knew from all of my experience traveling between Brazil and US on this particular airline and at this particular airport, that this was gonna involve a lot of steps. I was gonna have to leave the security area, and I was gonna have to go out back into the main airport to the check-in desks, and I was going to have to stand in line to get a new boarding pass because this particular air- airline was not super great, and I wasn't going to be able to get a new boarding pass on one of their computers there. I was gonna have to talk to a person, and then I was gonna have to go through security again, and I was gonna have to go through passport control, and then I was gonna have to get to the new terminal, the international terminal, which is far, and there's no train to get there. You just gotta walk or run. And so, and so I started to panic. I knew from all of my past experience with making this connection and in this airport and how long the sec- it takes to go through security and how long it takes to stand in line to get your boarding pass, that there was no way that I was going to make this connection. But a little light bulb went on in my head, and I thought, "Ding." all of my past experience says, "You'll never make it," but the future is not the past, and there are other options besides what you have already experienced that can happen. And so I thought, "Hey, let's see, let's see what happens. I'm gonna try and make my next connection." So I started running. I went out into the main area, went into the check-in area. There was a huge line to get up to the desk to be able to get my new boarding pass, and I immediately started to ask people if I could go in front of them because I was about to miss my flight. And I kept asking my way to the front of the line, and then I was able to get to an agent, get to my boarding pass. I started running to the security line, and that was also super long and very, very slow as it al- almost always is in São Paulo. But again, I, I had this idea in mind that I might be able to make it because the future is not the past. And so I started asking again, "Can I go in front of you? Can you let me go in front of you 'cause I'm about to miss my flight? Sorry, I need to get in front of you." And I worked my way to the front of the security line, got through the security, and then went through to the, through the passport control. And then I started running to get to the other terminal where the international flights were gonna be, and it was a long ways. And I ran, and I ran, and I ran, and I reached my gate right as the agents were closing the flight. I was able to get on just as they were closing the doors. I was the very last person on the plane, and I sat down in my chair having made my connection.
So in this case, hope made me able to catch my plane because otherwise, if I had simply relied on my past experience, I would have not run. I would have not talked to, to a million people to try and get to the front of the boarding pass line and then the security line. I hate talking to people. I hate asking to get to the front of the line, but I had hope. I hoped that it was really going to work, and so I was willing to spend that uncomfortable energy to ask people to get to the front of the line. I kept looking for ways to make it work instead of imagining all the ways that it would not work, which I had seen many of these ways in the past. I chose to imagine that there was something that I had never seen before. And I really could not have made it unless I had hoped, unless I had imagined that it might be possible for something good to happen here. Hope made it possible for me to meet my goal, to make my connection, where it would have been impossible otherwise.
So I just wanted to bring up this idea for you to help you to remember that even though when you look out at the future and it seems that everything is just giving you anxiety, everything looks bleak from everything that you have experienced, everything that other people are saying, everything that you've heard, we're all just drawing on our past experience. But the future is not the past. The future has a lot more possibilities than the ones that we have already seen and we've already been through. And we think that the future only has certain possibilities because that's the way that our brains work. We, we draw on the Lego blocks of our past experiences to, to stitch together a future scenario. But there are a lot more possibilities than what we have drawn on. And when we can imagine that there are more possibilities than what we know from our own experience, then we can have hope, and this can help us to do things that have been impossible for us before. This can help us to reach our goals and to work toward things that have never been done before, that we have never seen before.
So I just wanted to suggest this idea for you today. Thanks so much for tuning in, and we'll see you next week