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How can we build a sense of hope when the future feels uncertain? Poet Tomás Morín tries a writing practice to make him feel more hopeful and motivated to work toward his goals.
Summary: Can writing about your hopes make you feel more optimistic? In this episode, poet Tomás Morin tries a hope-focused writing practice developed by psychologist Charlotte Van-Oyen Witvliet. Backed by research, the practice helps people feel more hopeful, motivated, and grounded in gratitude, even in the face of uncertainty.
How To Do This Practice:
- Write about something you deeply hope will happen, but can’t fully control.
- Reflect on how important this hope is to you and how motivated you are to pursue it.
- Recall a past hope that once felt uncertain but eventually came true.
- Write about what you’re grateful for from that experience, including who helped and what you learned.
- Connect what you learned then to what you’re hoping for now.
- End by naming one small action you can take today toward your current hope.
Today’s Guests:
TOMÁS MORIN is a poet who won an American Poetry Review Honickman First Book Prize for his collection of poems A Larger Country. He’s currently a professor at Rice University.
Check out Tomás’ work: https://www.tomasqmorin.com/
Read some of Tomás’ poems: https://tinyurl.com/3v8u6m5h
Read Tomás’ latest book: https://tinyurl.com/aej9cw3a
CHARLOTTE VAN OYEN-WITVLIET is a clinical psychologist who teaches at Hope College in Holland, Michigan.
Learn more about Charlotte’s work: https://tinyurl.com/yc65w4nu
Related The Science of Happiness episodes:
Climate, Hope, & Science Series: https://tinyurl.com/pb27rep
Why Going Offline Might Save Us: https://tinyurl.com/e7rhsakj
How To Show Up For Yourself: https://tinyurl.com/56ktb9xc
How To Feel Better About Yourself: https://tinyurl.com/42fn62a2
Related Happiness Breaks:
A Self-Compassion Meditation For Burnout: https://tinyurl.com/485y3b4y
5 Minutes of Gratitude: https://tinyurl.com/r6pkw2xx
A Humming Technique to Calm Your Nerves: https://tinyurl.com/mr42rzad
Tell us about your experience with this practice. Email us at happinesspod@berkeley.edu or follow on Instagram @HappinessPod.
Help us share The Science of Happiness! Leave us a 5-star review on Apple Podcasts and share this link with someone who might like the show: https://tinyurl.com/2p9h5aap
Transcription:
TOMÁS MORIN: It’s so easy to just, you know, you watch the news or you doom scroll, you know, on social media and the algorithm keeps feeding you all the, all the worst things. And it’s so easy to feel alone and hopeless. As a kid when I learned about the hole in the ozone layer. I mean, what a moment. It felt like, oh, suddenly we’re in some disaster film. And like, what’s going to happen? Is this the end?
CBS In The News: Ozone - 1986 Recently scientists discovered a weak stop in the ozone layer over Antarctica, the icy continent…
TOMÁS MORIN: It felt like there’s this awful thing that’s happened in the sky that I can’t see, and if it doesn’t get fixed, then this is going to physically hurt us. It’s going to force us to change how we, how we live. We won’t be able to go outside anymore. So it’ll be too dangerous. That event hijacked my nervous system. It just felt too big. It felt too big for me to, I think, like, understand mentally. So instead my body carried that fear. Now when I look back, I realized that it was anxiety. And fast forward years later, I remember seeing somewhere, ‘Oh, hey, you know, we did it.’ And, and just feeling like, oh, wow. Like we as a species we’re actually capable of this.
BBC NEWS: Human action to save the ozone layer appears to have worked. The study says it should recover within decades…
TOMÁS MORIN: To have our nations come together, have our government pull together, our politicians come together across the aisle and, and actually come up with a plan and then implement it.. That was really, that was really huge for me.
I knew we were capable of collaborative destruction. But I didn’t know that we were capable of collaborative repair.
DACHER KELTNER: I’m Dacher Keltner, Welcome to The Science of Happiness. This week we’re going to look at how we can draw hope, even when hope feels far away. Today we’re going to look at what happens when we press pause on our worries about the future, to appreciate the progress we have made. Our guest, poet Tomás Morín, tried a writing exercise shown to make us feel more hopeful about our future. The psychologist who created this practice, Charlotte vanOyen-Witvliet, also explains how she tested it, and why it works.
CHARLOTTE VAN OYEN-WITVLIET: We can avoid this overwhelming kind of helpless despair on the one hand, but also not this sort of naive optimism that leads to presumption and passivity on the other. I think that it can kind of keep us going, like, “what I do matters.”
DACHER KELTNER: More after this break. Welcome back to The Science of Happiness. This week we’re going to explore a writing exercise shown to make us feel more hopeful, and in turn more motivated to take action. Our guest Tomás Morín, tried this writing practice for our show. Tomás is an award-winning poet, author, and professor of creative writing at Rice University in Texas. Tomás has felt eco-anxiety since he was kid—when he learned that there was a hole in the ozone layer, and had the realization that the future of the environment isn’t certain—and it could hold real dangers. He joins us today to share how this writing practice went, and how it has affected his eco-anxiety. Tomás, welcome.
TOMÁS MORIN: Thank you for having me.
DACHER KELTNER:. So for our show, you did a writing practice, Tomás, and you know, Charlotte Van Oyen-Witvliet who has done research on this past fulfilled hope writing exercise finds people get more hopeful and more happy, uh, when they do it. The first step is where you write about something you’re currently hopeful for and you focused on the climate. What’d you write about?
TOMÁS MORIN: I wrote about the polar ice caps. For me, when I started seeing the images of how they were melting and ever increasing melting and the polar bears and what it’s doing to the ecosystems over there, for me it felt, like a similar moment to, the hole and the ozone. Like this terror, like, oh, polar bears could become extinct as a species within my lifetime. And what does it mean to live on a planet that doesn’t have ice, you know, at either pole? And, and then everything that’s going to happen, from there in terms of rising sea levels. One of the big hopes that I have is that not just that the ice can return,but also that these places which are homes to diverse ecosystems. I want the flora and fauna that are from there and that are native from there to, you know, be able to thrive again, but also, for those places to be protected. And yeah, I just hope that we can as nations, as people, make the changes that we need in order to, you know, save our planet before it’s too late.
DACHER KELTNER: In this exercise, the next steps are to write about a past hope that you had that’s been fulfilled with just a sense of gratitude. And what did you write about in terms of something you’d hoped for in the past that came true in your life?
TOMÁS MORIN: One of the things that I wrote about, when I was a kid when recycling first started, I remembered, just thinking about how cool it would be to be able to recycle everything, or most everything, and not just aluminum cans. Which I remember as kids, we would collect in order to go and sell them, you know, for a few bucks and then go buy some soda. I spent some time around landfills when I was, when I was a kid. Cause I had an uncle who worked at one and just seeing just the piles of just like refuse and furniture and clothes and being in the near and around it in those mountains of trash was just like it’s just so soul-killing.
DACHER KELTNER: We gave you some questions and prompts that were a little bit more specific in this writing about this past fulfilled hope. And one was to describe steps you took or actions that you may have engaged in, and also the relationships that arose. When you were thinking about this past hope that was fulfilled, how did writing about it kind of evoke ideas about action or, or actions themselves?
TOMÁS MORIN: For me, moving away from my small rural town that I grew up in and then moving to a college town where the ideals were more progressive and there was more of an interest in recycling and conservation I went undergraduate and at Texas State University in San Marcos. And I can’t tell you how much joy it gives me when I walk up to like either a single stream recycling receptacle or where it’s like you have five choices and one of them is compost. It just fills me with so much joy that, “Okay, like all of this just isn’t going to a landfill.” And there’s a river that runs through the town in San Marcos, Texas. And the river has it’s like an ecologically sensitive area, so while people can swim in it, uh, there’s also like Texas wild rice that grows there and it grows nowhere else in the world. There’s a blind salamander. And seeing the university’s collaborations with the city on preserving that and protecting it and seeing people like actually doing research, you know, out there while people were sunbathing and whatnot. It really opened up my mind to like, there are other people, who take seriously, the charge of, you know, that we are stewards for this, this planet that we live on. It just felt like it was in the air and there was organization around it and people were promoting it and supportive and I didn’t feel strange like I did growing up in my small town where it’d be like recycling, you know?
DACHER KELTNER: The flights of the imagination you’re taking us on of the ozone and the recycling and how it’s changed through your own reflection. Brings me to a question when you reflect on this hope writing process, does it kind of reveal to you certain principles or strengths, or concerns that are central to you in thinking about climate issues?
TOMÁS MORIN: One of the things that doing the exercise at the writing practice did kind of bring home for me is how important it is to slow down. I feel like we just move through the world so fast and we’ve forgotten that we’re actually speeding through it. And I think we’re so disconnected from just what exactly is a normal, reasonable way to move through this space that we occupy. And I think that speed oftentimes does equate that haste does turn into waste, you know, a waste of not just like physical resources, but a waste of, energy waste of waste of thought. A waste of feeling. So for me, the writing practice, one of the great things about it was and I think especially because I did it with on pen and paper, was just slowing down. So I was, I was really grateful, really grateful for that.
DACHER KELTNER: Yeah. What an effect. I’m really curious, just pushing it a little bit, how did this exercise shift your sense of eco anxiety and climate hope? Were there any reflections or insights it brought to you?
TOMÁS MORIN: Having the part of the exercise be to reflect on a past hope that did come to fruition was one I was surprised that was a part of the exercise. But then secondly, my second reaction was like, oh, this is fantastic because it’s not just a problem focused, practice. List five things that you wish were different and, and, and then it leads to nothing. But having that component be, you know, what’s the one thing you hoped for that did come to pass? It’s, so I feel like in my mind it reminded me that, oh yeah, sometimes things do work out. Not just because they just happen. Because, you know, we took collective action and that felt so, uplifting isn’t the word, but it, it just felt like, you know, if my sort of like mental mindscape was, was a sky, it felt like there was, half as many clouds, dark clouds,as there were before I started. We have a lot of work to do. I think for me, a huge part of how I navigate all of that is reminding myself that one, I can’t solve everything alone. Two, no one is expecting me to do that. And that three, a lot of these problems won’t find solutions within my lifetime, and that’s okay. But just doing my part while I’m here is important and not just, you know, succumbing to despair and doing nothing.
TOMÁS MORIN: I know that anxiety and stress and depression and melancholy- all of these things are, they’re generational and what I want is I, I don’t one of my legacies to be that. Oh I taught my kids how you know, how to despair. I don’t, I don’t want to pass that along. I want to pass along to them hope, you know a practice of hope and that it’s not just something, you know that sure. Sometimes you wake up and you feel hopeful and sometimes you don’t. And just because you don’t on a certain day doesn’t mean you can’t get there. But I think those are things that have to be taught. You know, we’re just not, we’re not just born knowing how.
DACHER KELTNER: Tomás Morín, thank you so much for your poetry and for writing about hope for our show. It’s, it’s been so, so wonderful to hear where it’s taken you and, and, uh, it gives me hope and a little bit less anxiety about these uncertain things we’re facing with climate crises.
TOMÁS MORIN: Thank you. so much. It’s been an absolute pleasure talking with you.
CHARLOTTE VAN OYEN-WITVLIET: So one of the things we did was to ask things like how likely is it that this hoped-for outcome will actually happen? What’s your level of motivation to do what you can to bring about this hoped for outcome?
DACHER KELTNER: Welcome back to The Science of Happiness. Our environment faces an uncertain future. And it can feel really scary to hold onto hope for a good outcome. But what if we were able to identify times in our lives where we didn’t know what would happen, and we held a hope anyway … and then that hope was fulfilled? Poet Tomás Morín, who we just heard from before the break, tried a writing practice where he did just that. It was created by psychologist Charlotte Van Oyen-Witvliet at Hope College in Michigan.
CHARLOTTE VAN OYEN-WITVLIET: Hope involves anticipating a good future that we think is possible and we really want to be true, and that isn’t 100% within our control alone. We can’t be completely assured but we believe it’s possible and so we’re motivated to pursue it. To invest in making more possible the likelihood that we will be able to experience this future good.
DACHER KELTNER: Our podcast’s executive producer, Shuka Kalantari, spoke with Charlotte about the experiment she conducted and more details about how to do it. Here’s Shuka.
SHUKA KALANTARI: The idea to actively try and make people more hopeful, started in a therapist’s office.
CHARLOTTE VAN OYEN-WITVLIET: My name is Charlotte Van Oyen Witvliet, and my training is in clinical psychology and hope is utterly essential to therapy processes.
SHUKA KALANTARI: Her studies show the more hopeful you are, the more likely you are to be patient, forgiving, have self-control, and feel grateful—with gratitude being the leading indicator that you’re a hopeful person. So with that in mind, she the hopeful writing practice that author Tomas Morin tried for the show. And then she tested it out on 153 undergrad students.
CHARLOTTE VAN OYEN-WITVLIET: First we had asked people, identify something that you really hope is going to happen, uh, in your life and that you can’t guarantee is going to turn out.
Like you really want it, you really care about it. and you can’t a hundred percent guarantee its outcome.
SHUKA KALANTARI: They could write about anything — as long as it was really meaningful to them, and something where they couldn’t completely control.
CHARLOTTE VAN OYEN-WITVLIET: So one of the things we did was to ask things like: ‘How important is this hoped-for outcome to you?’ How likely is it that this hoped for outcome will actually happen? What’s your level of motivation to do what you can to bring about this hoped for outcome?
SHUKA KALANTARI: Afterwards, the students were divided into two groups. One group was given the mundane task of writing about all the different travel routes they took that day.
CHARLOTTE VAN OYEN-WITVLIET: And then the people assigned to the gratefully grateful remembering condition went through a practice of identifying a past hope that they similarly longed for that they couldn’t a hundred percent guarantee it was gonna turn out the way that they really wanted, but that did turn out. We asked them to get really specific about what it was that they were grateful for and also to get really specific about who they were grateful to. We asked them questions like, what did you learn in the process of pursuing and experiencing this past hope that was, How did you use your own motivation and action to pursue this outcome.
SHUKA KALANTARI: Throughout the experiment, Dr. Witvliet’s team surveyed each student to see how happy and hopeful they were feeling. The people who wrote gratefully about past fulfilled hopes reported feeling more hopeful about the future happier, and motivated to make their hopes come true.
CHARLOTTE VAN OYEN-WITVLIET: I often think about gratitude as a deep well that hydrates hope.
SHUKA KALANTARI: Gratitude gives us something to draw on because we’ve seen evidence, time and again, of good things.
CHARLOTTE VAN OYEN-WITVLIET: And so we have a sense that it can happen. I can’t passively presume, but I’ve seen evidence before that the story can turn out okay.
SHUKA KALANTARI: It all comes back to the idea of ‘uncertainty’.
CHARLOTTE VAN OYEN-WITVLIET: It’s not a hope unless we have some degree of uncertainty because we haven’t seen it yet, right?
SHUKA KALANTARI: But that uncertainty can feel uncomfortable and anxiety-provoking. It can be really scary to not know what’s going to happen next.
CHARLOTTE VAN OYEN-WITVLIET: I think we have to hold some space for lament. For the things that are really scary, and our own role in this. At the same time as we lament, we need to actively engage hope and name the good in that grateful kind of way, and partner together with people that are also pursuing these same, arduous and meaningful goods. And it’s when we have space for both lament and hope that we can avoid this overwhelming kind of helpless despair on the one hand, but also not this sort of naive optimism that leads to presumption and passivity, on the other. So look for signs of life in places that should be desolate. Notice what’s happening there. I think that it can kind of keep us going, like, “what I do matters and what I decide not to do also matters.”
DACHER KELTNER: We have instructions on how to do the hope-writing practice we talked about today in our show notes. Give it a try and also, please share the show with someone who you think could use a bit more hope in their life. Our next episode of The Science of Happiness comes out on July 3rd — just before Independence Day, when we celebrate freedom and our shared rights. One of those rights, often overlooked, is access to public parks and green spaces. These are places where everyone—regardless of background —can move, breathe, connect, and restore.
STACY BARE: I came home from Iraq in 2007. I reintroduced and committed myself to time outdoors. I had a somatic experience on the top of a rock climb. And that's when I was like, okay, this is it. This is where I need to be spending my time and my energy.
DACHER KELTNER: We explore how parks support our health and our communities.
Thanks to our associate producers Emily Brower and Dasha Zerboni. Our producer, Truc Nguyen. Our sound designer, Jennie Cataldo of Accompany Studios. And our executive producer, Shuka Kalantari. I'm Dacher Keltner. Until next time, thanks for being part of the Science of Happiness community.
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