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Today's Daily Dose of Hope is sponsored by Superhuman AI, the daily newsletter that helps you learn AI in about three minutes a day. Like the DDH, it's a small daily habit, and it keeps you curious and a little more ready for what's coming. If you want to see how these tools can make your work easier, look below.Put on a pair of glasses after a long stretch without them and watch what your face does. The squint lets go. Your head tilts back a little. Something that was a smear a second ago turns into a leaf, a street sign, or someone’s eyes.
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A friend posted the following recently:
“How do you keep joy alive during difficult times? If there’s anything I’ve learnt this year, it’s that joy and grief can exist all at once, and side by side.
Throughout my life, I’ve learned that when things feel heavy, it’s doing the small things that make you feel alive. You’ve got to keep up a routine that makes you feel like yourself. Not a relentless grind, but a routine that brings you joy. During some of the toughest periods I’ve faced in business (and in life), I've kept my routine going as best as I could: hiking, tennis, cycling, eating well, spending time with the family, catching sunsets, and early nights. Movement clears my head.
It keeps me focused on the horizon and reminds me that however difficult today feels, tomorrow can look different. When you’re going through hell or high water, you’ve just got to keep moving.
Joy, for me, is not pretending everything is fine. It is being relentlessly dedicated to optimism, and to a routine that keeps you there. What about you?”
I’ve been using the words Joy and Hope as if they were interchangeable for years.
They aren’t. They are closely related, though. And the way they relate is worth knowing.
Joy Is Hope You Can Touch
Joy lives in the present. Hope lives in the future. Joy says this moment is good. Hope says a good moment is coming. One is a gift you’re holding, and the other is a promise you’re leaning toward.
The research on this surprised me. In the late 1990s, the psychologist Barbara Fredrickson ran experiments on what positive emotions do to the body. At first, people were made anxious and then shown short films. The ones who watched a film that evoked contentment or amusement saw their heart rates and blood pressure settle back to baseline faster than people who watched something neutral or sad. Frederickson named this “the undoing effect.” A small dose of joy physically unwinds stress.
Subsequently, Fredrickson built a broader theory based on this experimentation and named it, called “broaden-and-build.” Negative emotions narrow your thinking. Why? A threat needs a fast, focused response. Joy does the opposite. It widens what you notice and what you’ll try. People in a good mood see more options. Over time those options turn into skills, friendships, and resilience.
Now frame this thinking with hope in mind. Hope needs options. You can’t hope for a way through something if your mind has shrunk down to the problem. Joy is what opens the door wide enough for hope to walk in.
Hope feels very scarce when you’re exhausted. Yet, it feels very sturdy after a good laugh. I’ve certainly notice that. A walk in nature doesn’t fix a single problem on my list. Yet, my list looks different afterwards.
Hope also makes joy possible when circumstances don’t hold that to be the case. Václav Havel, writing from a place where optimism would have been foolish, described hope as “not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out.” People who live that way still laugh. They find joy in the middle of the mess because they’ve decided the mess isn’t the whole story.
Many civilizations saw this pairing long before any psychologist measured it. Romans had a phrase, “rejoice in hope,” which treats joy and hope as partners. Joy is how hope shows itself while it’s still waiting for the evidence.
Joy is hope you can touch. Hope is joy you haven’t received yet.
Question
When was the last time a small moment of joy changed how a big worry looked to you? I’d love to hear what it was.
He sings about the present, the trees and the skies and the faces of people passing by, and then about the babies he watches grow and all they’ll learn. Joy in one verse, hope in the next, and he doesn’t seem to notice the seam.
A Daily Dose of Hope — one short reflection each day about where hope lives in our world. Read in 50 states in the US and 155 countries of the 195 countries throughout the World.
