“Try Not to Think of It” — Hope as a Cognitive Process
Often, I have found myself scoffing at starry-eyed people. Too hopeful, too naive, just waiting until life comes at them and they grow out their beard, so to speak. Until they go bald. We are serious people, and as serious people we know that hope belongs to the naive. Us, on the other hand, we are realistic. Hope, we think, is a passing temperament. It comes from not knowing, not from serious work. The last thing we serious, realistic individuals would want to admit is that our scoffing is a defensive habit. We too were once starry-eyed dreamers.
Considering hope as serious cognitive work is a hard pill to swallow, first and foremost because it demands that we face a learned fear: try not to think of it, you will get attached and suffer all the more. Not to mention the humiliation of wanting something that may never arrive. We rehearse and prepare for said suffering, we preemptively grieve, dwindle our life satisfaction and "suffer" in our imagination. We have all seen the quote from Seneca, written in Moral Letters to Lucilius: "we suffer more often in imagination than in reality." During World War II, in an attempt to understand this mass anxiety, psychiatrist Erich Lindemann observed how wives of soldiers emotionally detached from their husbands while the men were still at war, grieving them before they had died. Later accounts coined the crass term "waiting vultures" to describe them. Theirs was an attempt at emotional self-preservation through anticipatory loss. Sounds familiar? Preemptive grieving is the precursor of our defensive habit. It leads to a foreclosed identity that we fool ourselves into thinking is the identity of a wise individual. Longitudinal data (Cantor & Norem, 1989) show that as a general life stance, defensive pessimism corrodes life satisfaction and social integration, and it does not even take the sting away once we do have to welcome home the body of our dead husbands. Lindemann found something worse: the wives who had pre-grieved most thoroughly could not reattach to their husbands when the men came back alive. The rehearsal had worked too well. They had practiced the loss so completely that the return of the living person could not undo it.
Our strategy, then, is an ironic process that reliably backfires. The forbidden thought that buds into hope has to be suppressed in order for our detached persona to hold. However, dislodging said forbidden thought means that we must build an antihope radar, an unconscious monitor that scans our stream of thought, catches any flicker of wanting, and consciously suppresses it. Daniel Wegner's ironic process theory describes exactly this mechanism: one part of the mind works to avoid the thought while another part checks, repeatedly, whether the thought is coming up, and in doing so keeps bringing it to mind. The expressive suppression and cognitive load required to accomplish this is how we end up dampening positive emotion while amplifying the negative. James Gross's research confirms the cost: suppression does not reduce negative feelings. It only flattens the positive. We quietly resign in our mock acceptance of fate, carrying the affective signature of a flattened mood, reduced motivation, and worst of all, cognitive rigidity. We serious people become uninspired.
But the cost is not only emotional. It is structural. A person operating under chronic suppression is not simply unhappy. They are cognitively constrained in ways that compound over time. Gross's work shows that habitual suppressors experience impaired memory for the events of their own lives, elevated cardiovascular stress even at rest, and damaged social relationships, because the people around a suppressor can sense the inauthenticity even when they cannot name it. The flattened mood is not a neutral state. It is an active drain on the resources that a person would need in order to set goals, identify pathways, and believe in their own capacity to act. In other words, suppression does not merely prevent hope. It dismantles the cognitive infrastructure that hope requires. The serious person who has trained themselves not to want things has not achieved equanimity. They have systematically degraded the very apparatus, flexible thinking, emotional range, tolerance of uncertainty, that would allow them to function as a goal-directed, agentic human being. The defense has become the disease.
If fear is a learned defensive habit, then the alternative, hope, is a learned cognitive process. In fact, hope is, as Martin Seligman put it, a learned override, suggesting that the default, the mammalian baseline, is not despair but effort. C.R. Snyder's hope theory breaks the process into three trainable components: goals, the capacity to identify what you are moving toward; pathways, the ability to generate multiple routes and stay flexible when one is blocked; and agency, the belief that you are capable of initiating and sustaining movement. Hope in this framework is not optimism. It is not the expectation that things will work out. It is the trained tolerance of disappointment alongside the continued willingness to act. The recovery from suppression must start with reappraisal, changing how we interpret a situation before the emotional response fully activates. From there, behavior moves toward what one values rather than away from what one fears. Emotional range stays intact. The body can rest. Cognition stays flexible. Hope is maintained alongside disappointment-tolerance rather than in place of it. And the suppressed feeling does not leak out as projection or symptom, because it is no longer suppressed. It is acknowledged, structured, and directed.
- Zheen Salih Abdullah