When bad things happen, hope is sometimes all we’re left with, and sometimes it doesn’t feel like much. Hope, after all, is merely a feeling, there’s nothing guaranteed about hope. You can’t hang on to ‘hope’ like you can hold on to a positive diagnosis, a sunny forecast, or plain good news. For some, hope can feel rather pathetic, as though one should be bravely facing the worst not just ‘hoping’ for things to turn out alright.
But, according to American psychologist Charles Snyder, hope is an essential emotion we should be cultivating in our day-to-day lives. Snyder’s ‘Hope Theory’ posits that people with higher levels of hope create better outcomes across the board. An athlete training for a competition should be ‘hopeful’ of winning; a student working on an…
