Well•come, kin. Pause, and take a deep, calming breath with me. In... and out... As you breathe, remind yourself of your innate wisdom and wholeness. With each breath—be here. Fully present, as we embark on this journey together.

LaShaun Here to help you feel good & function well in the most meaningful areas of your life. Because being stressed, striving and stuck in survival mode was never the goal. ​ #whensciencefeelslikemagic

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I was sitting at the dinner table waiting for my queen bee, bestie. When she arrived she took one look at me and said you look exhausted. She was right.
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Not even 10 seconds later she took a deep sigh and laid her head on the back of the booth. We decided we were both holding on by a thread.

We shared a one-minute update that contained approximately nine months of accumulated fatigue. Life has been coming. Relentlessly. One thing after the next, before you've finished processing the last one.
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And somewhere in the accumulation, you stopped noticing that you'd adjusted your entire posture to brace. That exhaustion had become your baseline. That you hadn't taken a full breath since…well, you can't quite remember.

We were hanging on by a thread and I mean it cellularly. Bone weary. Tired.

You've heard the adage. Hope is not a strategy. It sounds smart in a boardroom. It sounds evolved. It sounds like something a person with a color-coded project plan and adequate sleep would say.

But sometimes?

Hope is the strategy. Sometimes it's the only thing keeping you functional long enough for something to change. Hope as a feeling is unreliable. And sometimes what we're calling hope isn't hope at all, it’s hopeium, the softer addiction, the waiting dressed up as patience. This missive isn't about that. This is about the other kind.It shows up, it disappears..
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Hope as a practice, though, that’s different. A practice is something you can do with your hands even when your hands are shaking.

Charles Snyder, a psychologist who spent his career studying this exact distinction would tell you that hope isn't what happens to you. It's what you do. And what you do can be learned. It can be practiced the way you practice anything worth getting better at: clumsily at first and then with something that starts to feel like rhythm.

Check out the science ↓

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Snyder formalized something in the early 1990s, he built a theory of hope around two components: agency (the belief that you can move toward what matters) and pathways (the cognitive ability to find more than one route toward it). Goals give hope its direction. Agency gives it motivation. Pathways give it flexibility, the willingness to try a different approach when the first one doesn't work.

What Snyder understood, and what three decades of research have confirmed, is that hope operates differently from optimism. Optimism says things will probably work out. Hope says I can figure out how to get there, and I believe I have the energy to try. Optimism is a prediction. Hope is a decision to keep problem-solving.

And the data continues to evolve.

A 2025 study led by Megan Edwards and Laura King at the University of Missouri examined more than 2,300 participants across six studies and found that feeling hopeful, the emotional experience of it, in the body, predicts a stronger sense of meaning in life, independent of other positive emotions. Amusement didn't do it. Contentment didn't do it. Excitement didn't do it. Hope was the only positive emotion that consistently predicted that a person experienced their life as meaningful (Edwards et al., 2025, Emotion; PMID: 40111802). Which is a very sophisticated way of saying: your nervous system can tell the difference between happy and headed somewhere.

Meanwhile, a 2026 meta-analysis by Richardson, Long, and Gallagher reviewed 129 studies with over 31,000 participants and found a reliable inverse relationship between hope and anxiety — both cross-sectionally and over time. Higher hope, lower anxiety. Consistently. Across populations, ages, and diagnostic categories (Richardson et al., 2026, Journal of Clinical Psychology; PMID: 41289211).

And a companion meta-analysis from the same research group examined 120 studies (n = 36,707) on hope and depression, finding a weighted effect size of r = −.443 — indicating that higher hope is associated with substantially fewer depressive symptoms, both in the present and prospectively over time (Gallagher, Murphy, Senger et al., 2025, Cognitive Therapy and Research; doi: 10.1007/s10608-025-10609-x).

What that means on a random morning when everything's sideways: hope doesn't make the hard things stop being hard. It reactivates the part of your brain that plans, problem-solves, and imagines forward: the same cognitive processes that chronic stress gradually shuts down.

PRACTICE

This is a Snyder-informed exercise you can do in your head, in your notes app, or on the back of whatever receipt is nearest. It takes five minutes. Maybe less.

1. Name one thing that matters to you right now. Keep it concrete and proximate. Not "happiness." Not "peace." Something specific: reconnecting with a friend I've been avoiding, or getting through this week without canceling everything.on my calendar

2. Write down three ways you could move toward it. They don't need to be good. They don't need to be efficient. The point is multiplicity. When the brain can see more than one option, it stops fixating on the loss of any single one. Write them fast. One sentence each.

3. Finish with one true sentence about your own capacity. Not affirmation-speak. Something you've actually done that proves you can move when things are hard. I drove to my therapy appointment when I didn't feel like it. I texted back after I filled my cup. That's agency as evidence. Your own evidence.

You're doing what Snyder described: naming a goal with enough specificity to aim at, generating multiple options to keep your thinking flexible, and reminding yourself. From your own lived experience that you have moved before. You can move again.

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If anything you’ve read here has been resonant, nourishing, or of service to you in a meaningful way, please do, share this email. I appreciate your reciprocity.

In sharing, you contribute to a bigger picture - a world pulsating with well-being and wholeness. I'm grateful for you!

Here are more ways I can support you.

• Feedback, love notes, and other inquiries? Just hit reply
• Want me to give a talk at your event or with your team? Workshops, consulting + speaking inquiries, apply here.​

P.S. If you got to the end of this, that was agency. Just so you know, Reader, (✿ ♥‿♥)