Principles of Hope and Meaning

Certain neurological, biological, and psychological principles underlie experience. Misunderstanding them can inhibit hope and diminish meaning.

Principle 1. Mental focus amplifies and magnifies

Whatever we focus on, good or bad, becomes more important than what we don't focus on.

Principle 2. Repeated emotional associations are prone to automatic activation

Emotional habits lead to behavioral habits. The difference between habitual and intentional behavior is hundreds of millions of multi-firing neurons.

The human brain stores numerous assumptions about its environment based on experience, which it uses to make behavioral choices. If there is no apparent environmental exception to the string of assumptions underlying a given behavioral impulse, it’s enacted automatically without conscious thought, emotion, or perception. We can walk across the living room and sit down without thinking or feeling anything about it. We don’t have to look for the chair because the brain assumes its location. (We can’t do that in a hotel room, which is why travel is exhausting. In an unfamiliar environment, the brain must formulate new strings of assumptions, judgments, and decisions for automatic behaviors.) In familiar environments, most of what we do is on autopilot, consuming far fewer energy resources than consciously decided behavior choices.

Anything we do repeatedly, we’ll begin to do on autopilot.

Principle 3. The biology of emotions is the biology of meaning

The trend of evidence about the causes of emotional activation suggests that they are primarily biological, influenced more by the body than the mind. Routine variations in feelings are influenced profoundly by how we sleep, eat, drink, and exercise, by fluctuations in room and outdoor temperature, general immune system functioning, tissue inflammation, hormonal activity, loud noises, bright lights, and abrupt environmental changes.

Emotions give intensity to hope and meaning, while lack of emotion drains intensity from them. To paraphrase the pioneering emotion theorist Silvin Tomkins:

"With emotion anything is important; without emotion, nothing is."

Hope and positive meaning are both products and causes of feeling good. Hopelessness and a sense of meaninglessness are both products and causes of feeling bad.

Principle 4. Hope, meaning, and value are created within us, not in the environment

The psychological aspect of emotions is the meaning we give to our experience. For example, consider the meaningful statement:

“I’m damaged because I was abused as a child.”

That meaning is likely to produce shame, anxiety, sorrow, disgust, resentment, or anger.

A sense of hope follows the creation of a more benign meaning. For example:

“The abuse I suffered as a child has made me resourceful, compassionate, able to appreciate life, and love more deeply."