Too often, when we face challenges, whether personal or political, we can feel hopeless. Yet research in positive psychology shows how we can find hope even in the most challenging times.

When things go wrong in our lives, we can experience stress, feeling a constant sense of threat that keeps us from solving our problems. In an emergency, this stress reaction can save our lives. The alarm center in our brains responds to a threat with the survival reaction of fight, flight, or freeze, causing us to take immediate action (LeDoux, 1996). For example, we can jump out of the way of a speeding car. However, when our stress reaction becomes chronic, it limits our awareness of available options.

The stress reaction can prevent us from solving our problems in these three ways:

To build our hope, we need to move from being reactive to thinking more creatively. Instead........

© Psychology Today