Hope Builds Meaning Through Action
In this newsletter, I frequently write about how central meaning is to a fulfilling life. People who perceive their lives as meaningful experience better psychological and physical health, stronger relationships, and greater success in pursuing their ambitions. When meaning is absent, people are at greater risk for depression, anxiety, and self-destructive behaviors ranging from substance abuse to suicide. I’ve also written about how meaning is found more in action than in contemplation. New research provides important insights into the role that hope plays in this process.
There is already a lot of research showing that hope supports meaning in life. A new series of studies published in Motivation and Emotion goes further by testing a specific mechanism. The researchers examined whether goal-directed action is one of the ways that hope builds meaning. They tested this idea in the context of health, looking at whether hope for one’s health promotes meaning in life by increasing health-related behaviors.
In the first study, the researchers explored this idea during the COVID-19 pandemic. They found that people who felt more hopeful about their health during the pandemic engaged in more health-protective behaviors such as hand washing and social distancing. And those behaviors, in turn, were associated with greater meaning in life. In a subsequent study, the researchers turned to the everyday health domains of exercise and nutrition. They found the same pattern. People who felt more hopeful about their health were more likely to engage in healthy behaviors, and those behaviors predicted greater meaning.
These findings provide evidence of a link between hope, goal-directed behavior, and meaning. But because these studies are correlational, they don’t tell us the direction of causality. It could be that hope increases goal-directed action, which then builds meaning. But it could also go the other way. In fact, previous research, including studies my colleagues and I have conducted, provides experimental evidence that meaning in life increases goal-directed action, which could increase hope. So does hope also increase goal-directed action and meaning?
To test this, the final study used an experimental design. Participants were randomly assigned to one of three conditions. In the hope condition, they were asked to write three reasons they were hopeful about achieving their health goals over the next two months. In the hopelessness condition, they wrote three reasons they felt hopeless about achieving their health goals. We all experience moments of greater and lesser hope about our goals, and this writing exercise was designed to temporarily shift participants toward a more or less hopeful outlook on their health. In the neutral condition, they wrote about their daily routine.
The researchers found that those in the hope condition reported greater intentions to engage in healthy behaviors and higher meaning in life compared to those in the other conditions. Because participants were randomly assigned, this provides stronger evidence that hope is actually driving these effects.
In a previous newsletter, I discussed the momentum of meaning. You can spend a lot of time thinking about what would make your life feel meaningful, but meaning is found more in action than in contemplation. The hard part is getting started. But once you begin taking purposeful action, meaning starts to build, and that meaning motivates further action, creating a self-reinforcing cycle.
This new research adds an important piece to that picture by identifying hope as one of the things that can help get the cycle going. Though the studies focused specifically on health behaviors, the underlying principle extends to other domains. When you feel hopeful about a goal, whether it involves your career, your relationships, or your community, that hope motivates you to take concrete steps. And those steps contribute to a sense that your life has purpose and direction.
These findings also reinforce a theme that runs through much of my work on human flourishing, the importance of an outward and action-oriented approach to life. Meaning is not primarily found through inward contemplation. It is found through engaged, purposeful activity directed toward goals that matter to us and to the people we care about. While hope is something we experience internally, it doesn’t turn us inward. It pushes us outward, toward the aspirations and actions that generate meaning.
Hope is often dismissed as wishful thinking, a passive emotion that makes people feel good but doesn’t actually do anything. But research on hope, including these studies, tells a very different story. Hope is an energizing force. It moves people to act, and that action is what builds meaning. Our outlook on life matters not because of how it makes us feel in the moment but because of what it motivates us to do.
Have a great weekend!
Clay