8 Ways To Reconnect With Hope When You're Struggling To Find It

Feeling hopeful can be good for your mental health, motivate you to be more proactive about going after goals, and even draw in manifestation possibilities.

But hope doesn’t always feel easy or natural to connect with, especially when you’re experiencing challenging emotions and circumstances—or when you’re feeling stagnant and uninspired. Yet it’s these times, when hope seems hard to muster up or even foolish to entertain, that you might need hope’s healing power most…simply as an act of self-love and self-care.

Some things to contemplate about hope

We might loosely define hope as allowing for the possibility that things can or will change for the better, such as circumstances improving, or our ability to navigate them improving. For some, mindfully connecting with hope is an act of faith.

Hope can be an inner experience that does not rely on outer circumstances. For example, choosing to be hopeful about the possibility of making something meaningful, positive, or nourishing out of a setback or loss.

Hope might help you feel more engaged with life and connected to others if you’ve been feeling distant or disengaged, or hope might be a way of inspiring yourself to go after a dream if you’re stuck in a rut. 

Hope is a positive emotion that can make you feel expansive, light, playful, energized, and joyous. Experiencing positive emotions regularly could make people feel more balanced and resilient. Hope may even be part of how some people heal and move forward when recovering from a painful occurrence.

The next time you’re having trouble connecting to hope regarding an area of your life, or you’re having trouble connecting to hope in general—but you’d like to feel more hopeful—try the following:

Emotions are incredibly complex and many times contradictory. You don’t have to be all in or all out on team hope. It’s not only healthy to acknowledge challenging emotions and circumstances, being real with yourself can be a relief and a crucial part of grieving. And there may still be moments when you feel hopeful, or want to.

Give that hopeful natural impulse, or desire to be hopeful, room to expand. Hope might be the cushioning life raft that supports you through stormy circumstances or waves of difficult emotions.

Hope doesn’t have to be over-the-top huge or wildly unrealistic—you can hope in a grounded, practical, proportionate way.

Try working with a hopeful thought, like, “I believe some good might come from this, or that at least a silver lining could be revealed to me in time.” Or, “I’ve faced setbacks before, and I often come through stronger and wiser.” Or, “Even if things don’t turn out exactly how I want, I’m trusting that putting myself out there will bring new energy, lessons, and opportunities into my life.”

Adjust mantras to reflect how you really feel and what’s really going on in your life. For loving, hopeful affirmations and action steps, check out my 2025 daily calendar, A Year of Self-Love. Doing something daily, like connecting to hope, helps form healthy new habits and neural pathways.

Piggyback onto hope by remembering when you hoped for something positive in the past…and it happened! It could be a miraculous healing, helpful person, or ideal opportunity that came into your life right on time.

If you’re feeling scared or dejected about the state of the world, recall a moment when something amazingly positive happened for the collective. Let yourself feel the energy of hope from those old memories in your body.

Look back at pictures of smiling faces from that time or recall how you celebrated. Life is cyclical, and when we look back at wonderful times from the past, we not only connect with those good vibes, we remember that wonderful times very likely will come again.

When you’re feeling a lack of hope, focus on what you can give. Put out a product or offering that’s encouraging. Show up to a shift at work with the intention to bring more uplifting energy to those around you.

When you find a way to share your light with others—whether it’s helping a coworker organize their desk, helping a child solve a difficult homework problem, donating time or money to a worthy cause, becoming an advocate for those suffering most, or reminding a friend that they’re loved—you’ll begin to feel more hopeful.

That’s because you’re creating things in the world to get hopeful about! If your family, community, or larger world is downtrodden, giving back and focusing on service can often immediately make you feel more positive, and when you feel positive it’s much easier to connect to hope. 

Part of connecting to hope is believing that there’s something inherently good and benevolent about life and human beings. Be an example of that compassionate force in your interactions with others, when you can, and watch compassion spread.

Keeping yourself safe, standing up for what you believe in, and maintaining healthy boundaries are non-negotiable aspects of a self-love practice. So as you honor those important values, also see how compassionate you can be in everyday interactions with folks at home, at work, and out in the world.

If you’re having trouble connecting to hope, odds are some people around you are too—either because of challenging circumstances or their own mental-health struggles.

One tiny interaction with another person that’s compassionate can create a loving energy inside you, and make you feel more hopeful about humanity as a whole.

Give yourself a wider net when fishing for a positive result. Getting too fixated on a certain scenario happening or getting too specific about how things might improve in the future can set you up for disappointment when details don’t go exactly to plan, which they rarely do.

Being attached to a single outcome happening can also make you miss a golden opportunity when it appears, because it comes at a time or in a manner you’re not expecting.

Staying open, flexible, and general when connecting to hope also makes hope easier to sustain over the long haul when you’re dealing with a situation that just won’t resolve easily or quickly. Hoping in a general way could be healthy self-protection if hope makes you feel very vulnerable.

You could have a friend who’s been through a long period of barely getting by financially or struggling to manage a chronic health issue.

If the moment feels right, you might grab their hand and share, “I just want you to know I’m always holding out hope this changes for you soon.” That could help your friend stay connected to hope, and who knows how that might help their mental state or even action steps.

If there’s a group of people in the world who are suffering, and there’s nothing more you can do for them in a practical sense, you might hold hope in your heart for their situation to improve. Hoping for others is also an act of self-love, as it increases your empathy, making you feel closer to those around you and the wider world.

If you’re feeling down or just blah and unenthused, be gentle with yourself. Pretending to feel something you don’t can be self-punishing, which is the opposite of self-love, and can even make challenging feelings bigger to get your attention.

There may be moments in your life when hope isn’t authentic or even appropriate. But if you want to connect to hope—because perhaps you used to feel more hopeful and miss that buoyant emotion, or maybe you sense that being more hopeful might actually improve a situation—know that you can connect to hope mindfully as an act of self-love. 

The takeaway

On some days it might be better or easier to connect with hope than on other days. Wait for an opening, like when you notice something positive happening to a loved one or when you wake up one morning feeling less worried or more motivated than usual.

If you’re having trouble connecting to hope for long periods, many people can relate. Reach out to folks who love you and health-care professionals to get extra support. Hope can be a powerful part of your self-love practice!