The Science of Happiness · PRX and Greater Good Science Center

How to Feel More Hopeful

·20 min·1 clip

Dacher Keltner recalls his childhood terror over the ozone hole, then reveals humanity's surprising success in fixing it.

Tomas Morin describes the ozone layer as the first environmental threat that hijacked his nervous system, explaining that as a child the news that there was a hole in the sky that could physically harm people felt too enormous to process mentally, so his body carried the fear as anxiety instead. Years later, reading that international action to protect the ozone layer had worked gave him a profound sense of relief and possibility, a feeling he describes as the discovery that humans are capable of collaborative repair, not just collaborative destruction. That experience of recovered hope became the emotional foundation for what the Science of Happiness episode examines through Charlotte van Oyen Witvliet's past-fulfilled hope writing practice. The exercise asks participants to write about a situation where they once hoped for something and that hope was fulfilled, reconstructing in detail what the hope felt like, what actions contributed to its realization, and what it meant when it came true. Van Oyen Witvliet explains that the research shows people who do this exercise feel more hopeful and more motivated to take action, striking a balance between naive optimism that leads to passivity and overwhelming despair that leads to paralysis. Morin, an award-winning poet and professor of creative writing at Rice University, tried the exercise for the podcast and shares his experience, including what it surfaced about the relationship between eco-anxiety, hope, and agency. Keltner frames the episode around a growing body of evidence that pressing pause on worry about the future to appreciate documented progress is not avoidance but a genuine psychological intervention. The episode is part of an ongoing series examining specific evidence-based practices that have been shown to increase wellbeing.

As heard by us

A quiet, grounded episode about climate hope, eco-anxiety, and the memory of collective repair.

Hope, in this episode, is not treated as sunny feeling. It is treated as evidence you can return to when fear gets too large to hold. A childhood memory of the ozone hole gives the conversation its shape: dread first, then the later discovery that collective action, including…

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When doomscrolling has flattened your belief that change is possible.

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