Special event: Hope made simple (Day 2)

Hey community

Welcome to day 2 of our special event on hope. Feel free to check out day 1 here. You can share any thoughts that popped up while reading through this, answer one or two of the questions posted, or just sit with it for a moment ❤️

It’s easy to tell a person to choose hope when they’re already feeling pretty good. What do we do if we’re having a bad day? To answer that question, let’s find out more about what exactly causes you to have all of these negative feelings

Different parts of your brain are responsible for different things. There’s a part of your brain that deals with logical reasoning, decision-making, learning, and other more complex tasks; let’s call this part the upstairs brain. Another part of your brain handles your emotions; let’s call this the downstairs brain

Because your emotions are hardwired to protect you from danger, your upstairs brain shuts down when your downstairs brain senses too much danger and takes over. This means that when you’re feeling really sad, angry, anxious, or afraid, it becomes more difficult to think rationally and make good decisions. The first helpful thing you can do here is to help your downstairs brain calm down

Here’s a list of things you can try:

1. Deep breathing - you can google for a breathing GIF, count to 5, or clench and unclench your fist to help you focus on breathing

2. Journaling - writing down your thoughts and emotions can help you to get them out and

3. Visualisation - there are many ways to do this, I’ll tell you about two common ones you can try:

a. imagine yourself in a place where you feel safe or happy, and hold try to recreate the space as vividly as possible

b. visualise how you’re feeling right now as vividly as you can. Think about the colour and shape, or give it a name if you’d like. When you’re done, change one thing about it, such as by changing the colour or the shape or its size

5. Grounding exercises - the 54321 method is particularly popular: identify 5 things you can see, 4 things you can touch, 3 things you can hear, 2 things you can smell, and 1 thing you can taste

6. Gratitude - focus on one good thing that happened in the past week, and try to recreate it in your mind

Today, if you feel your downstairs brain starting to become distressed, try a few of these techniques and see if it helps ❤️ If it does, you can try practicing hope and see if it’s a little easier

Questions:

1. If you practiced hope yesterday, how did it go?

2. What are some things that usually help your downstairs brain to calm down

The content in this post is adapted from the hope self-help guide

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