Blueprint #2: Program your mind to get through hard times

Your 3 actionables

• Increase your level of Hope factor: Hope can be measured (State Hope Scale) and improved on with gratitude, belief in a higher power, and creative pursuits. Hope is so powerful that it even prevents suicidal patients from going through with their intentions of committing suicide

  • Write down your weekly, monthly, and yearly successes—do this often and include professional and personal successes, including relationships and social interactions (no matter how small)

  • Write down the things you are grateful for in your life

  • Find something greater than yourself to believe in—it can be God, Karma, Mother Earth, or your Grandpa; it doesn't matter. Just believe in something greater

  • Exercise your creativity through writing, art, or music

• Practice logotherapy: Attach meaning to your suffering

  • Think about the person (or pet) that you love more than anything else in the world and tell yourself that you are doing this for them and that you will get through this for them. This is so powerful that it helped Jewish people get through their brutal experiences in Nazi concentration camps

• Create success loops: Set extremely small and simple goals, meet them, and then strike a victory pose and celebrate by screaming. Do it regularly

  • For example, give yourself a goal of doing 2 push-ups. Then do it. Then get up and throw your arms into the air and yell "YES! FUCK YEA!" Envision yourself doing the same thing for a bigger goal like reaching 20 push-ups

  • You can strike a pose with your smile too by forcing your face to smile. Hold a pencil with your teeth, while ensuring that no part of your lips are touching it and also raise your cheeks. This is associated with improved positive feelings

Keep reading if you want a bit more detail on these 3 actionables. A full reference list is available at the bottom of the blueprint.

What is the Hope factor?¹⁻³

Hope is defined as a cognitive system that is based on a sense of successful agency (goal-directed determination) and pathways (planning of ways to meet goals).

Basically, your level of hope is formed by the goals you create and the ways you try to achieve those goals. Both agency and pathways are necessary to form hope. The other thing to note is that hope isn't formed by just creating and achieving one goal or coming up with ways to achieve a goal at any one point in your life. Hope is the cumulative effect of every single goal-directed behaviour you choose and the consequent pathways that you take. Hope is so powerful that it even prevents suicidal patients from going through with their intentions of committing suicide. This isn't mumbo jumbo. Research (over the last 3 decades) confirms that hope confers survival advantages and that hopelessness confers risk. Hopelessness correlates more strongly with suicide and predicts it better than depression. 

Hope factor can be measured

Hope can be measured using the (State Hope Scale) . The Hope Scale contains eight hope items, plus four fillers. You can either examine results at the subscale level or combine the two subscales to create a total hope score. Higher scores equals better.

Total Hope Score of 40-48 are hopeful48-56 are moderately hopeful56 or higher are high hope

You can increase your Hope factor²

There are 3 things you can work on to increase your level Hope: goals, agency, and waypower (pathways). Goal-directed thinking can be fostered by setting small, meaningful goals that are achievable. Agency, your belief in being able to achieve goals, can be strengthened by self-talking and revisiting successful experiences. You can instill waypower by breaking down goals into smaller pieces so it's easier to set a plan into motion to accomplish those goals. 

Actionables:

• Write down your weekly, monthly, and yearly successes—do this often and include professional and personal successes, including relationships and social interactions (no matter how small)

• Write down the things you are grateful for in your life

• Find something greater than yourself to believe in—it can be God, Karma, Mother Earth, or your Grandpa; it doesn't matter. Just believe in something greater

• Exercise your creativity through writing, art, or music

Hope is significantly correlated with all of the following benefits:²⁻⁷

Practice logotherapy: Attach meaning to your suffering

"Man’s Search for Meaning" is a book written by Viktor Frankl, chronicling his experiences in Nazi concentration camps. He attributed his survival to the fact that he attached meaning to his suffering and termed it, "logotherapy." He noted that this was true for most Holocaust survivors. This became a key concept in modern psychology.

Logotherapy has can be applied to all three human dimensions: psychological, physiological, and spiritual.

• Psychologically, logotherapy techniques can help with anxiety, phobias, and obsessive-compulsive disorders.

• Physiologically, logotherapy can help you cope with suffering and physical pain or loss.

• Spiritually, logotherapy can demonstrate that life has meaning or purpose when we suffer from the “existential vacuum” that we experience as boredom, apathy, emptiness, and depression.

Create success loops⁹⁻¹³

From our above discussion of Hope, we know that goals play a major role in shaping the way we see ourselves and others. People who are focused and goal-oriented are likely to have a more positive approach towards life and perceive failures as just minor setbacks, rather than personal shortcomings.

Our brains are wired for goal-setting

Goal-setting gives a boost to our systolic blood pressure (SBP) which is the measurement of our body being geared up and ready to act. If the goal is easy to achieve, we get a nice spike. If it's a little hard but still doable, we get a larger spike and thus more excitement in the body and sympathetic nervous system. But if the goal is seen as impossible our system writes it off, indicated by a SBP decrease.

A lot of studies have also shown how neural connections and the brain activities pump up our motivation to set and achieve goals.

For example, the Medial Prefrontal Cortex (MPFC) deals with the present orientation of the goal-setting process. The MPFC activation allows us to think about what we need to do right now to achieve our goals, and we set the targets accordingly. If the goal seems too far away, the MPFC activation lowers significantly, which is why we may lose interest in sticking to our goals.

There is also something called the Reticular Activating System (RAS), which is a part of the brain that plays a key role in regulating our goal-setting actions. It processes all the information and sensory channels related to the things that need our attention right now.

An exciting fact about RAS activation is that we can observe its effects. For example, a person whose goal is to start a family, is likely to notice more couples and families around him. This happens because of RAS activation. The RAS is aware that this is what the person is paying attention to at this very moment, and hence it chooses to register only the information related to that.

All of this suggests that thinking about, writing down our goals, and even visualizing our goals can activate parts of our brain that will help us achieve those goals. It's almost like a self-fulfilling prophecy—let's call it a Success Loop.

How you can create success loops:

To use this concept to our benefit, it's actually very simple—we need to set easy, achievable goals, and combine visualization. And we need to do it regularly.

• For example, give yourself a goal of doing 2 push-ups. Then do it. Then get up and throw your arms into the air and yell "YES! FUCK YEA!" Envision yourself doing the same thing for a bigger goal like reaching 20 push-ups

Over time, these success loops strengthen the neural connections involved with goal-setting, motivation, and hope. This will allow you to set and achieve bigger and bigger goals. It explains why you hear successful people say things like "success snowballs". Because it does.

And guess what? We can also apply this same concept to increase our positive feelings and make ourselves smile more.

The human face is a powerful signaling system to your higher brain. Facial behavior constitutes not only the expressive output of inner emotional states or social motives but also an input to the subjective experience of emotion.

In one study, participants were asked to do a fake smile, known as the Duchenne smile. These participants reported a more positive experience when pleasant scenes and funny cartoons were shown to them. Furthermore, they tended to exhibit different patterns of autonomic arousal when viewing positive scenes. These results support the facial feedback hypothesis and suggest that facial feedback has more powerful effects when our face contorts to mimic the way it naturally looks when expressing an emotion.

Try it yourself:Strike a pose with your smile by forcing your face to smile. Hold a pencil with your teeth, while ensuring that no part of your lips are touching it and also raise your cheeks. 

And that brings us to the end of this blueprint. I hope you found the actionable items in this one, as useful as I found them. In my research, I was really blown away by the Hope construct and how much the Hope factor influences all aspects of our life. Equally cool is that it's something we can work on and improve over time. Even if we are born with mental health issues like anxiety, we're not stuck with "the bad hand that we got dealt," rather, we should say that "I got dealt a bad hand, but I can change it."

See you next week.

References:

1. Snyder CR. Psychological Inquiry. 2002;13:249–275. 2. Morrow R. In L. Murray Gillin (Ed). 2006;606–618. 3. Weingarten K. Fam Proc. 2010;49:5–2. 4. Rand KL and Cheavens, JS. In S. J. Lopez & C. R. Snyder (Eds). The Oxford Handbook of Positive Psychology. 2012. 5. Lazarus, RS and Launier R. In L. A. Pervin & M. Lewis (Eds). Perspectives in interactional psychology. 1978. 6. Michael ST. In C. Richard Snyder (Ed). Handbook of hope: Theory, measures, and applications. 2000. 7. Conti R. Soc Psych Edu. 2000;4(2):189–211. 8. Frankl VE. Man’s search for meaning. 1959. 9. Granot Y, et al. Transl Iss Psych Sci. 2017;3(2):176–186. 10. Balcetis E and Dunning D. Psych Sci. 2010;21(1):147–152. 11. Alvarez JA and Emory E. Neuropsych Rev. 2006;16(1):17–42. 12. Berkman ET. Consult Psychol J. 2018;70(1):28–44. 13. Soussignan R. Emotion. 2002;2(1):52–74.

DISCLAIMER (Last updated September 25, 2022)

Remember guys, even though I'm an MD, I do not practice medicine. I am simply providing education in these "blueprints" (newsletters). Please use common sense and do not mistake information provided here for professional advice of any kind.