Why Hope May Be One of Our Most Important Survival Mechanisms
By Dr Chris Pickard
What if hope isn’t simply a nice feeling?
What if it is actually one of the mechanisms that helped life survive?
I’ve been interested in hope for years.
Long ago, I came across a fascinating experiment involving rats, survival and what appeared to happen when an animal lost hope. The story stayed with me.
More recently, while reading Chapter 18, “Hope,” in Rays of the Dawn by Dr Thurman Fleet, I found myself thinking about that experiment again.
Fleet proposes a fascinating idea about where hope actually came from.
That sent me back to the rat experiment, and then into the modern research on hope, self-efficacy, helplessness, control and resilience.
And a fascinating possibility emerged:
Perhaps hope developed because life repeatedly discovered that today’s apparently impossible situation doesn’t necessarily determine tomorrow.
If that’s true, hope isn’t just positive thinking.
It may be an extraordinarily ancient survival mechanism.
The Rats That Appeared to Lose Hope
The experiment I remembered was conducted by Curt Richter at Johns Hopkins and published in 1957 in a paper called On the Phenomenon of Sudden Death in Animals and Man.
Richter had been studying how rats responded when placed in water from which they couldn’t escape.
Something strange happened.
Some animals—particularly wild rats that had previously been restrained—stopped struggling and died remarkably quickly.
Yet under different conditions rats could swim for extraordinarily long periods.
Their physical capacity alone didn’t seem to explain what was happening.
Richter became interested in the possibility of hopelessness.
He then found that if animals were removed from the water, given a brief reprieve and subsequently returned, their behaviour could change dramatically.
They persisted for much longer.
Over the years this has morphed into a wonderful internet story claiming that rats swam for 15 minutes, were rescued, and then swam for 60 hours because they had been “given hope.”
The actual experiment was considerably more complicated, so I wouldn’t quote those neat numbers as scientific fact.
But I think the real finding is actually more interesting.
The rat hadn’t suddenly developed stronger muscles.
Something had changed in its experience.
An apparently inescapable situation had turned out not to be permanent.
It had survived.
And now it behaved differently.
The Idea That Made Me Revisit Hope
That brings me back to Rays of the Dawn, a book written by Dr Thurman Fleet, a very successful chiropractor and healer.
In the chapter on hope he proposes an intriguing idea.
He starts from the very real fact that early life repeatedly encountered catastrophes that appeared unsurvivable—yet life survived.
(And if you want to see just how extraordinary that survival story has been, watch the BBC’s excellent Evolution series with Chris Packham. I had literally just watched it as the seed of this essay was forming — and, rather serendipitously, the series itself ends with a nod to hope.)
Fleet then gives this fact a spiritual interpretation.
He proposes that through repeated experiences of apparently fatal calamities followed by survival, hope gradually arose as an inherent capacity of the evolving soul.
He writes:
“Being exposed… to repeated calamities which apparently were fatal, the soul surprisingly survived these crises. Thus hope originated…”
Now, Fleet’s explanation involves a spiritual model of the soul and accumulated experience that science cannot currently verify.
But put the metaphysics to one side for a moment.
There is a fascinating underlying proposition:
Could repeated survival of adversity actually have contributed to the evolution of something we now experience as hope?
I think that’s a question worth exploring.
From Survival to Hope
Go back far enough in evolution and there was obviously no creature sitting around thinking:
“Don’t worry. Things will be better tomorrow.”
But even very primitive organisms needed mechanisms that helped them respond to their environment.
Move towards resources.
Move away from threats.
Defend.
Escape.
Conserve energy when necessary.
Survive long enough to reproduce.
As nervous systems became increasingly sophisticated, something incredibly important became possible:
Experience could change future behaviour.
An organism encounters danger.
It responds.
It survives.
Its nervous system retains information about what happened.
The next time adversity arrives, that previous experience can affect what it does.
So we begin with something very simple:
Past survival alters future behaviour.
I’m not suggesting an ancient animal was consciously experiencing human “hope.”
But perhaps we’re looking at some of its evolutionary building blocks.
An Extraordinary Twist in the Science of Helplessness
This gets even more interesting when we look at the famous research on learned helplessness.
Martin Seligman and Steven Maier originally proposed that when animals repeatedly experienced events they couldn’t control, they learned that nothing they did mattered.
Eventually they stopped trying.
That idea became enormously influential.
But here’s the fascinating part.
Fifty years of subsequent neuroscience caused Seligman and Maier to revise their own interpretation.
Their conclusion is now essentially that they originally had part of the story backwards.
The passive response to prolonged adversity appears to be more fundamental.
What animals particularly learn is control.
When an animal discovers:
“Something I do changes what happens”
brain systems involving the medial prefrontal cortex detect that control and modify the stress response.
Even more remarkably, previous experience of control can influence how the animal responds to future adversity.
Think about that.
Experience has taught the organism:
“My actions can matter.”
And that previous learning changes its response when the next challenge arrives.
Does that sound familiar?
Because we’re getting remarkably close to one of the fundamental ingredients of hope.
Perhaps Hope Has an Evolutionary History
Maier and Seligman themselves offer an evolutionary explanation for some of this.
For very primitive organisms, prolonged defensive activity is expensive.
If a threat cannot be escaped, endlessly burning energy may be disastrous.
So withdrawal and energy conservation can sometimes be adaptive.
But as organisms became more sophisticated, something changed.
They developed increasingly complex ways of influencing their environments.
Run.
Hide.
Fight.
Climb.
Dig.
Cooperate.
Problem-solve.
Control became possible.
And if action can change the outcome, giving up too soon is no longer necessarily adaptive.
Now there is biological value in maintaining effort.
That gives us a possible evolutionary progression:
Threat → Action → Survival → Learning → Expectation of Control → Persistence
And eventually, in a sufficiently sophisticated brain:
Hope.
Humans Take Hope to Another Level
Then humans do something extraordinary.
We don’t merely remember the past.
We can imagine the future.
We can mentally travel somewhere that doesn’t exist yet.
We can look at:
Where I am now
and imagine:
Where I could be.
And then ask:
How do I get from here to there?
Psychologist C. R. Snyder developed one of the most useful scientific models of hope.
I like to summarise it as:
Goal + Agency + Pathways
Goal: I have somewhere meaningful I want to go.
Agency: I believe I can do something to get there.
Pathways: I can find routes that might take me there.
That’s very different from wishful thinking.
Wishful thinking says:
“I hope something good happens.”
Real, operationalised hope asks:
“What future do I want—and what can I do to help create it?”
When One Path Disappears
The pathways part is particularly important.
Imagine desperately wanting something and believing there is only one possible route to achieving it.
Then that route disappears.
What happens to hope?
Potentially it disappears with it.
But suppose instead we can say:
“OK. That didn’t work. What else could I try?”
Hope survives.
One of the lines in my coaching notes is:
Defeat only means you had the wrong plan—so make a new one.
That’s pathways thinking.
And I think it tells us something important:
Hope doesn’t mean believing Plan A will work.
Hope means Plan A can fail without concluding that the future has failed.
There may be a Plan B.
Or C.
Or Z.
Sometimes we simply haven’t found it yet.
“I’ve Survived Before”
Another piece of the puzzle comes from psychologist Albert Bandura and his work on self-efficacy.
Self-efficacy is our belief in our ability to perform the actions necessary to deal with a situation.
And one of the most powerful ways we develop it is through mastery experiences.
In simple English:
I’ve done difficult things before.
Think how closely that connects to Fleet’s idea.
We face something that feels overwhelming.
But somewhere in our own experience is evidence:
“I’ve been frightened before.”
“I’ve been lost before.”
“I’ve faced things I didn’t know how to solve before.”
“And somehow I’m still here.”
That creates another possible chain:
Adversity → Action → Survival → Memory → Self-efficacy → Future persistence
Yesterday’s difficulty can actually become part of tomorrow’s strength.
Our scars aren’t necessarily evidence that life defeated us.
Sometimes they’re evidence that:
It didn’t.
We Can Borrow Hope
But humans possess another wonderful ability.
We don’t have to personally experience everything.
Bandura described vicarious experience as another way we develop self-efficacy.
We watch someone else overcome something and think:
“If they can do it, perhaps I can too.”
That’s why stories matter.
It’s why mentors matter.
It’s why communities matter.
It’s why seeing someone recover from illness, rebuild a relationship, start exercising at 70, recover from financial disaster or rebuild their life after tragedy can be so powerful.
We can borrow evidence from somebody else’s life.
And sometimes we can even borrow somebody else’s belief in us.
A parent.
A teacher.
A friend.
A doctor.
A coach.
Someone who effectively says:
“You can’t see the pathway right now. That’s OK. I can see possibilities you can’t yet see. Let’s find one together.”
Perhaps one of the most important things we can ever do for another person is hold some hope for them when theirs is running low.
But Hope Needs Energy
There’s another part of this that I believe we overlook.
Physiology drives psychology.
We talk about hope as though it floats around independently of the body.
It doesn’t.
Thinking requires a brain.
Problem-solving requires cognitive resources.
Taking action requires energy.
Emotional control requires biological capacity.
Try solving your biggest life problems after several nights of terrible sleep.
Then try looking at exactly the same problems after sleeping properly, eating well, exercising and spending time with someone you love.
The problem may not have changed.
But the person looking at it has.
One of my favourite lines from my Heroic coaching notes is:
Sleep is a bridge from despair to hope.
That doesn’t mean sleep cures depression or solves life’s problems.
It means the physiological state from which we perceive a problem influences our capacity to respond to it.
This is one reason I believe so strongly in getting our Biological Foundations right.
Sleep.
Movement.
Nutrition.
Breathing.
Light.
Human connection.
Recovery.
We aren’t removing life’s challenges.
We’re building a human being with greater capacity to meet them.
Movement and “Hope Molecules”
Exercise provides a wonderful example.
Most people still think of exercise primarily in terms of muscles, weight, cardiovascular fitness and perhaps blood sugar.
But movement also changes our brain and our biochemistry.
Contracting muscles release signalling molecules known as myokines, some of which communicate with other organs including the brain.
Psychologist Kelly McGonigal has popularised the lovely term “hope molecules” for some of these exercise-related signals.
Obviously, there’s no little chemical molecule containing “hope.”
But I love the metaphor.
Because it reminds us:
Changing the state of the body can change the state of the mind.
Sometimes when the world looks hopeless, the next intervention doesn’t need to be another hour sitting there thinking about the problem.
Get up.
Go outside.
Walk.
Breathe.
Sleep.
Eat some decent food.
Talk to someone.
Then look at the problem again.
Hope Creates Action — But Action Also Creates Hope
And here’s where the whole thing becomes circular.
We normally assume:
Hope → Action
I feel hopeful, therefore I do something.
But perhaps it works the other way too:
Action → Hope
Take one small step.
Something happens.
You achieve one tiny win.
Now your nervous system has another piece of evidence:
“I did something.”
Do it again.
Another piece of evidence.
This is why I love micro-wins.
Don’t wait until you’ve lost three stone to celebrate.
Celebrate today’s walk.
Don’t wait until you’ve written the book.
Celebrate today’s 500 words.
Don’t wait until you’ve completely transformed your health.
Celebrate today’s better breakfast.
Small victories accumulate into evidence.
Evidence builds self-efficacy.
Self-efficacy increases action.
Action creates more evidence.
So instead of spiralling down into helplessness we can deliberately create a:
Virtuous Spiral of Hope
Hope → Action → Micro-win → Evidence → Agency → Greater Hope → More Action
Hope can therefore become something we practise.
Hope Isn’t Blind Optimism
None of this means pretending everything is wonderful.
Sometimes things aren’t wonderful.
People become ill.
Relationships fail.
Businesses collapse.
People we love die.
Bad things happen to good people.
Hope isn’t denying reality.
And it isn’t saying:
“Everything will work out exactly as I want.”
To me, hope says something much stronger:
“This is where I am. I don’t know exactly how this ends. But there is still something I can do.”
Sometimes that means changing the situation.
Sometimes it means finding another pathway.
And sometimes, when circumstances genuinely cannot be changed, it means deciding who we will be within them.
Which brings us beautifully to the Serenity Prayer:
God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change; courage to change the things I can; and wisdom to know the difference.
That’s not passive optimism.
That’s intelligent hope.
Hope and Adaptive Vitality
This is why I increasingly see hope as an important component of what I call Adaptive Vitality.
Health isn’t simply the absence of disease.
Resilience isn’t simply being tough.
Adaptive Vitality is our capacity to meet life’s challenges, respond appropriately, recover, learn and continue moving towards greater health, meaning and purpose.
Hope sits beautifully within that process:
Stress → Struggle → Action → Survival → Learning → Hope → Adaptation
And as that process repeats:
“I’ve survived before.”
becomes:
“Perhaps I can survive this.”
Then:
“What can I do?”
Then:
“What other pathways are available?”
And finally:
Action.
Which creates new experience.
Which potentially creates more hope.
Biology → Psychology → Meaning
I think we can simplify the whole thing into three levels.
Biology — Do I have the capacity to act?
Energy. Sleep. Movement. Nutrition. Nervous-system function. Physical health.
Psychology — Do I believe I can influence what happens?
Agency. Self-efficacy. Flexibility. Pathways. Previous mastery.
Meaning — Is there something worth moving towards?
Purpose. Love. Service. Values. Faith. Family. Your future self.
All three matter.
Which is why telling someone who’s struggling simply to “think positively” isn’t terribly helpful.
Instead, perhaps we should ask:
What future would be worth moving towards?
What can you control?
What have you survived before?
Who else has successfully travelled this road?
What other pathways haven’t you considered yet?
What’s the smallest useful thing you could do today?
And:
Does your body currently have the resources to help you do it?
Four Billion Years of Not Giving Up
And that brings me back once more to Dr Fleet.
I can’t tell you scientifically that hope represents accumulated memories within an immortal soul.
That’s a spiritual proposition.
But the underlying idea fascinates me.
Life has existed on Earth for somewhere around four billion years.
Our ancestors survived extraordinary changes in climate, predators, starvation, disease, geological upheaval and mass extinction events.
Every one of us is here because there is an unbroken chain of life behind us that survived long enough to create the next generation.
And perhaps something of that history really does live within us.
Not necessarily as Fleet’s conscious or spiritual memory, but through genes, nervous systems and behavioural mechanisms sculpted by billions of years of natural selection.
Mechanisms that allow organisms to learn.
To adapt.
To detect control.
To remember success.
To keep acting when acting might still matter.
And eventually, in humans, to do something perhaps unique:
Imagine a future that doesn’t exist yet—and deliberately work towards creating it.
Perhaps that’s the extraordinary evolutionary journey of hope.
Make Hope Happen
So the next time life becomes difficult, don’t simply tell yourself to “have hope.”
Make hope happen.
Look after your biology.
Remember what you’ve already survived.
Borrow evidence from people who’ve travelled the road before you.
Spend time with people who believe in you.
Decide what future you’re moving towards.
Work out what you can control.
Find one pathway.
If necessary, find another.
Take the smallest useful action today.
Then celebrate the win.
And repeat.
Because perhaps hope isn’t something you’re either lucky enough to possess or unfortunate enough to lack.
Perhaps hope is something we can build.
Something we can practise.
Something we can give to others.
And something that life itself has been practising for billions of years.
Fleet wrote:
“Hope is the motive power of all effort.”
I’d modify that just slightly:
Hope gives us a reason to keep acting when the outcome is still uncertain.
And sometimes staying in the game long enough to discover another pathway is precisely what changes the outcome.
References
- Fleet T. Rays of the Dawn. Chapter 18: Hope.
- Richter CP. On the phenomenon of sudden death in animals and man. Psychosom Med. 1957;19(3):191–198. doi:10.1097/00006842-195705000-00004.
- Snyder CR. Hope theory: Rainbows in the mind. Psychol Inq. 2002;13(4):249–275. doi:10.1207/S15327965PLI1304_01.
- Snyder CR, Irving LM, Anderson JR. Hope and health. In: Snyder CR, Forsyth DR, editors. Handbook of Social and Clinical Psychology: The Health Perspective. Elmsford, NY: Pergamon Press; 1991. p. 285–305.
- Bandura A. Self-Efficacy: The Exercise of Control. New York: W.H. Freeman; 1997.
- Seligman MEP, Maier SF. Failure to escape traumatic shock. J Exp Psychol. 1967;74(1):1–9.
- Maier SF, Seligman MEP. Learned helplessness at fifty: Insights from neuroscience. Psychol Rev. 2016;123(4):349–367. doi:10.1037/rev0000033.
- Maier SF, Watkins LR. Stressor controllability and learned helplessness: The roles of the dorsal raphe nucleus, serotonin, and corticotropin-releasing factor. Neurosci Biobehav Rev. 2005;29(4–5):829–841. doi:10.1016/j.neubiorev.2005.03.021.
- Amat J, Paul E, Zarza C, Watkins LR, Maier SF. Previous experience with behavioral control over stress blocks the behavioral and dorsal raphe nucleus activating effects of later uncontrollable stress: role of the ventral medial prefrontal cortex. J Neurosci. 2006;26(51):13264–13272. doi:10.1523/JNEUROSCI.3630-06.2006.
- Alarcon GM, Bowling NA, Khazon S. Great expectations: A meta-analytic examination of optimism and hope. Pers Individ Dif. 2013;54(7):821–827.
- Peterson C, Seligman MEP. Character Strengths and Virtues: A Handbook and Classification. New York: Oxford University Press; 2004.
- Luthans F, Youssef CM, Avolio BJ. Psychological Capital: Developing the Human Competitive Edge. Oxford: Oxford University Press; 2007.
- Gollwitzer PM. Implementation intentions: Strong effects of simple plans. Am Psychol. 1999;54(7):493–503.
- Fredrickson BL. The role of positive emotions in positive psychology: The broaden-and-build theory of positive emotions. Am Psychol. 2001;56(3):218–226.
- McGonigal K. The Joy of Movement: How Exercise Helps Us Find Happiness, Hope, Connection, and Courage. New York: Avery; 2019.
