Self-help and lifestyle podcasters may have already led you to believe that maintaining hope is a key component of living a more fulfilled life.
“Hope is a muscle,” Krista Tippett, host of “On Being,” has said, “a practice, a choice that actually propels new realities into being.”
As it turns out, she isn’t far off.
A new study by Brookings Institution economists Carol Graham and Redzo Mujcic analyzes 25,000 randomly selected individuals over a period of 14 years. It’s the first large-scale, longitudinal study of its kind to look at hope’s role in human well-being.
“Emotions are central to the study of human well-being, yet mainstream economists have only begun to think about the importance of these factors in economic, social, and health behaviors,” the researchers wrote in a statement about the new study.
“Hope is likely the most important positive emotion and socio-emotional trait directly relevant to long-term outcomes but is the least studied dimension of well-being.”
Their new research, recently published in “Health Economics,” aims to bridge that gap.
Using a large and nationally representative data set from Australia called the HILDA panel, they explored the links between hope and long-term outcomes in life arenas, including economics, health, and social life.
And what they found is major.
“Those with high levels of hope had higher levels of well-being, education, earning and employment outcomes, perceived and objective health indicators, and are much less likely to be lonely than those with low levels of hope,” the researchers shared.
“We also find a persistence of hope within persons, which in turn likely helps drive outcome driven behavior over many years.”
Essentially, hope is not just a belief that things will get better, which the researchers call optimism. But rather, hope is the determination to make them better, indicating that hope requires agency and determination.
“Hope is associated with higher resilience, ability to adapt, and internal locus of control,” the researchers continued.
“Hope also serves as a psychological buffer during bad times: Respondents with high levels of hope were less likely to be affected by negative life events and shocks and adapted more quickly and completely after those events. People with hope also had a higher internal locus of control.”
Hope does have a genetic component and is shaped by environmental factors out of someone’s control, like familial and community support, education, and opportunity. This means it is likely easier for people with access to more opportunities and resources to develop agency and hope earlier in life.
But the good news? Socio-emotional traits and skills can be developed throughout life, the researchers said. The ability to be hopeful is malleable and shifts and changes throughout one’s life.
This research can be used, Graham and Mujcic pose, to confront concerns around cultural despair and populations that lack hope.
“The absence of hope in some population cohorts is also worthy of concern, as those without hope are likely to live lives that are shorter, sicker, and less prosperous,” the researchers shared.
“In the most extreme outcomes — such as the crisis of deaths of despair in the United States (premature mortality due to suicide, drug overdoses, and alcohol-related diseases) — the loss of hope pre-dated the mortality trends and could have served as a warning sign.”
Knowing that hope has positive impacts on things like economic prosperity, professional opportunities, health outcomes, and more — all critical to quality of life and longevity — the researchers believe this research will be foundational in improving lives everywhere.
They conclude: “We believe that better understanding the drivers of hope and its consequences can ultimately inform the ability of both individuals and of public policy to improve people’s lives.”
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