Why Hope Is More Powerful Than Positive Thinking
- 17 hours ago
- 8 min read
Drawing on her own healing journey through cancer, Sarah Hurst is a coach and creator of the Mind Medicine Movement™, helping people calm the nervous system, reconnect to themselves, and take back their power to heal body, mind, and soul.
When life becomes frightening or uncertain, we are often told to “stay positive”. It is usually said with love, but when you are facing cancer, grief, trauma or another life-changing experience, positivity can sometimes feel like another thing you have to get right. Hope is different. Hope does not ask you to deny what hurts, it simply leaves the door open to the possibility that something else may still be ahead.
What is hope?
Hope and positivity are often used as though they mean the same thing, but I believe there is an important difference between them. Positive thinking tends to focus on expecting a good outcome, whereas hope can exist even when we genuinely do not know what the outcome will be.
During my own cancer journey, I learnt that I did not need to convince myself that everything was going to be fine. Sometimes I was frightened, sometimes I was overwhelmed, and there were moments when I could not see very far ahead at all. What I needed was something quieter and more believable than certainty. I needed to know that there was still possibility.
Psychology gives us an interesting way of understanding this. Hope Theory, developed by psychologist Charles Snyder, describes hope as involving both agency, meaning our sense that we can move towards something meaningful, and pathways, meaning our ability to see or create possible routes towards it. Hope, in this sense, is not simply wishing for the best. It contains movement, possibility and a sense that we may still have some choices available to us. That distinction matters enormously when so much of life feels beyond our control.
Positivity can become pressure
There is nothing wrong with positivity. Optimism, gratitude and noticing what is good can all be valuable parts of emotional wellbeing. The problem comes when positivity becomes an expectation rather than something that arises naturally.
People facing cancer know this particularly well. Comments such as “You’ve got to stay positive”, “Everything happens for a reason” or “Don’t think negatively” are usually intended to reassure, but they can unintentionally silence the very emotions someone needs space to feel.
Fear does not disappear because we tell ourselves not to feel it. Neither do grief, anger, sadness or uncertainty. When positivity asks us to push these feelings away, it can create another layer of pressure because now, not only are we frightened, but we may also believe we are somehow failing at healing because we are frightened.
This is where I think hope offers something much kinder. Hope can say, “This is really hard, and I am frightened, but I am still here.” It allows reality and possibility to exist in the same sentence, which is very different from pretending everything is okay.
Hope makes room
One of the things I feel strongly about in my work is that emotional healing needs room for the whole human experience. We do not heal by dividing emotions into good ones that are allowed and bad ones that need to disappear.
Sometimes fear needs to be heard. Sometimes grief needs to be felt. Sometimes anger is telling us that a boundary has been crossed, and sometimes sadness simply needs somewhere safe to land.
Hope does not compete with these emotions. It can sit beside them.
You can be terrified before a scan and still hope for good news. You can grieve the life you had before illness and still wonder what your future might hold. You can feel exhausted by treatment and still have a tiny part of you imagining walking along a beach again, seeing your children grow, taking another holiday or simply waking one morning and feeling more like yourself.
Holding hope does not make the difficult feelings less real. It simply means they are not the only thing that is real.
Hope creates possibility
This is one reason hope sits so firmly within the Purpose pillar of my Slow Down, Identity, Purpose and Self-Love (SIPS™) framework. Purpose gives us something to move towards, and hope allows us to believe that movement is still possible.
Purpose does not have to mean discovering a huge mission for your life. In the middle of illness or emotional overwhelm, that idea can feel ridiculous. Purpose might simply be wanting enough energy to sit in the garden, having something in the diary you genuinely want to do, reconnecting with someone you love, or deciding that you want to feel a little more peaceful in your own body. Those small desires matter because they point towards a future.
In my article Why Healing Begins With Gentle SIPS™, I explored why slowing down comes first in my framework. When we create enough space to hear ourselves again, we begin to notice what matters. From there, identity and purpose can gently start to emerge.
Hope gives that purpose somewhere to breathe. It reminds us that the future has not been completely written yet.
Why hope matters
Hope is not just a lovely idea. It has been studied extensively within psychology and healthcare, including among people living with cancer.
A systematic review examining hope during cancer treatment found that hope was positively associated with factors including quality of life, social support and spiritual or existential wellbeing, and negatively associated with psychological distress and depression. A further meta-analysis examining positive psychological resources also found a positive association between hope and quality of life in people with cancer.
These findings need to be understood carefully. They do not mean that hope cures cancer or that someone who is struggling emotionally is somehow affecting their chances of recovery. That kind of message places an enormous and unfair responsibility on the person who is ill.
What the research does suggest is that hope can be an important psychological resource. When life becomes uncertain, having something meaningful to move towards can influence how we experience that uncertainty, how we cope and how connected we remain to life beyond what is happening today. For me, that is where hope becomes powerful.
Finding everyday glimmers
Hope does not always arrive as a great surge of confidence. Quite often, it begins much more quietly, through what I call glimmers.
A glimmer is a tiny moment that catches your attention because something about it feels good, safe or alive. It might be sunlight coming through the window, the warmth of a mug between your hands, birdsong, somebody making you laugh, a favourite piece of music or the feeling of fresh air on your face.
These moments can be easy to overlook, particularly when the nervous system has been living in survival mode. When we are frightened, the brain naturally becomes more alert to threat. As I explored in my article The Nervous System and Healing: Why Calm Is Not a Luxury, It’s Essential, slowing down helps us begin to notice cues of safety again.
A glimmer does not need to make you happy. That is important. You might still be having an awful day and notice the sky for ten seconds, and the power is in recognising that, alongside everything difficult, something else exists too.
When we begin collecting these tiny moments, we create evidence that our experience is not entirely made up of fear. There are still moments of connection, beauty, humour, comfort and meaning available to us. Those moments may seem very small, but sometimes hope begins exactly there.
Hope needs honesty
There is another side to hope that I think is particularly important when we are talking about cancer and serious illness. Hope needs to be allowed to evolve.
At the beginning of a diagnosis, hope may mean cure. During treatment, it may mean responding well or reaching the end of chemotherapy. Later, it might become hope for a clear scan, more time, less pain, a meaningful holiday, a conversation with someone you love, or simply a peaceful day.
Changing what we hope for is not necessarily giving up. Sometimes it is an extraordinarily courageous way of meeting reality while continuing to remain connected to what matters.
Research involving people with cancer increasingly recognises the importance of realistic hope, including conversations that honestly acknowledge prognosis while still allowing meaningful hope to exist. Hope does not require false reassurance. In fact, I think authentic hope is stronger when it is grounded in truth.
There is a world of difference between saying, “Everything will definitely be fine” and saying, “I don't know exactly what happens next, but we will keep looking for what is possible.” The second leaves room for reality, but it does not close the future.
When hope feels distant
There will be times when hope feels almost impossible to access. This is particularly true when somebody has just received frightening news, is waiting for results, or has been living with uncertainty for a long time.
At those times, asking someone to “find hope” may feel almost as unhelpful as asking them to think positively. We do not need to turn hope into another job.
Sometimes we borrow hope. It might come from the medical team, who can still see possibilities we cannot yet see. It might come from a partner, friend, therapist, or coach who can hold a steadier perspective while ours has temporarily disappeared. It might come from hearing somebody else's story, being reminded of something we still care about, or simply having someone beside us who does not try to fix what we are feeling.
Hope can be relational. We do not always have to manufacture it alone.
This is also why I believe support matters so much after a cancer diagnosis or major life event. There are moments when our own view becomes incredibly narrow because fear takes up all the available space. Having someone calmly walking alongside us can help widen that view again.
Hope is not certainty
Perhaps the thing I most want people to understand is that hope does not require certainty. If we wait until we know everything will be okay before allowing ourselves to hope, hope becomes impossible in many of the moments when we need it most.
Hope lives in uncertainty. It says there might be another path. There might be another option. There might be another beautiful moment tomorrow. There might be strength in me that I have not discovered yet. There might still be life here that is worth leaning towards.
This is why I believe hope is more powerful than positive thinking. Positivity can sometimes ask us to change the way we feel about what is happening. Hope allows us to feel exactly as we do while still remaining connected to possibility, and that feels much more human to me.
Choose one small hope
If life feels uncertain at the moment, you do not need to create a grand vision of the future. Start much closer to where you are.
Ask yourself what you hope for today. Not what you think you should hope for, but what would genuinely feel meaningful. Perhaps you hope to sleep well tonight, feel calm for ten minutes, have a conversation you have been avoiding, or notice one glimmer that reminds you there is still beauty around you.
Then ask yourself whether there is one tiny thing you can do that supports that hope. This is where hope begins to become more than wishful thinking because, even when we cannot control the outcome, we can sometimes participate in the next step.
And if hope feels too far away to hold by yourself right now, allow someone else to hold a little of it with you. You do not need to see the whole path ahead. Sometimes healing begins with believing there may still be a path and taking one gentle step towards it.
If you are navigating cancer, illness, or another major life change and would value support in finding your way through fear and back towards hope, you can explore my coaching and the Mind Medicine Movement™. Sometimes the first step is simply having someone in your corner while you begin to see what might still be possible.
Read more from Sarah Hurst
Sarah Hurst, Coach and Creator of the Mind Medicine Movement™
After walking her own path through cancer, Sarah Hurst discovered that true healing isn’t just physical, it’s emotional, spiritual, and deeply personal. She went on to create the Mind Medicine Movement™, helping others calm their nervous systems, rediscover purpose, and reconnect with themselves through her SIPS™ framework, Slow Down, Identity, Purpose, Self-Love. Today, Sarah supports people living with or beyond cancer and anyone seeking calm, clarity, and wellness through her coaching, meditation, and touch therapy practice in Hove, East Sussex. She also offers an online coaching service.
