I have to be honest with you, I used to think that hope was kind of dumb.
I am and always have been a pretty sunshiney person. But the joke of being nicknamed Dr. Sunshine is that I’m more existential dread + sunshine than I am a pollyanna-let’s-pretend-everything-is-sweetness-and-light kind of sunshiney. I think it’s one of the miraculous and subversive powers of humankind that we can sit in the darkest of darks, facing the bleakest of bleaks, and laugh.
So I’ve had a somewhat complicated relationship with positive psychology, which sometimes gets deployed in a pollyanna style, but has real and vivid neuroscience behind it. When I first found out that Martin Seligman had nicknamed the set of brain structures and circuits responsible for imagination, future planning and dreaming “the hope circuit,” I cringed a bit. Hope? Really? You’re going to tell folks sitting in the darkest of darks, facing the bleakest of bleaks to have hope? Come on.
But then I leaned into the science. And just like that, Dr. Sunshine is all in. The hope circuit radically changed how I work with clients, as well as how I think about the world and our beautiful, miraculous, adaptive brains.
Download the PDF below for an explanation of the hope circuit, how it works, and three tools that will turn it on.
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