_______________________________
Today's Daily Dose of Hope is sponsored by Morning Brew, the free daily newsletter that covers business news, from Wall Street to Silicon Valley, with a little wit...and in about five minutes. Hope and good humor go together, and Morning Brew gives you a smart, lighter start to your day. Sign up below.
_______________________________
Some of you have expressed to me how hard it is to find hope in your everyday. For all of you, here are three places that I think you should consider and what research says about each of them.
The light coming through your window
Ever think of just opening your blinds or curtains to let the light into the room? A 2025 study of more than 13,000 adults with depression found that time spent in outdoor daylight tracked with better mental health and better sleep1. Step outside for ten minutes and see how your day goes.
A bird you didn’t plan on
Researchers at King’s College London used a smartphone app to ping 1,292 people at random moments to ask how they felt. Whenever someone had just seen or heard a bird, their wellbeing score was higher, by 1.72 points on the study’s scale. The lift was still partly there at the next check-in2.
The nice thing you almost didn’t say
Frequently we hold back compliments more than we should. In nine experiments, Xuan Zhao and Nicholas Epley found that people who give a compliment consistently underestimate how good it makes the other person feel. And, overestimate how awkward it will be. People in their surveys said they held back a compliment about 36% of the time3. The people who got the compliment cared about the warmth behind it, not whether the wording was polished.
Good news is frequently in the room; we just need to look for it.
Hope doesn’t always arrive as a big event. Sometimes it’s a window, a sparrow, and a sentence you finally said out loud. Collect three small ones today and see what happens to the big ones.
Question
What’s one ordinary thing that reliably lifts your mood, and when did you last notice it on purpose?
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.
Attributions
1 Mental health and sleep correlates of self-reported outdoor daylight exposure in over 13,000 adults with depression (European Psychiatry)
2 Smartphone-based ecological momentary assessment reveals mental health benefits of birdlife (Scientific Reports, 2022)
3 Insufficiently Complimentary? Underestimating the Positive Impact of Compliments (Zhao & Epley, JPSP, 2021)
