Is Having Hope Helpful?

About every other week I send a tip for how to have a better life when you have a chronic illness to the people in my list. In my last tip, I told my readers to imagine that their illness and symptoms were never going to get better – that they would be the same tomorrow, next week, next month, and next year as they are today. I then asked them what they would do, given that they weren’t going to get any better, to get the most they could out of life.

The reason I had my readers imagine that they were never going to get better is because – and I learned this both from my own life and from my clients – many people with chronic illnesses put off doing things they would like to do. They do that because they keep hoping they will get better, making doing those things will be a lot easier. So my tip was basically for people to stop hoping and start doing, and many people wrote to tell me they found it very helpful.

That tip not withstanding, I actually think that it’s a good thing for us to have hope. I think it’s good for us to read about people who have had miraculous recoveries from chronic illnesses (and there are many credible stories describing that). I think following the latest research about chronic illness treatments, whether stem cell technology, a new biologic, or a completely new breakthrough, can give us hope for a better future and help us get through bad flares and other difficult times.

I did both: when my symptoms were awful I read about people who had recovered from Crohn’s disease, and I followed the latest treatments for it. And both gave me badly needed hope when I was struggling to get through each day. So there’s no question in my mind that having hope can be very helpful.  But what I’ve also learned, which I pass on to my clients and will pass on to you, is that we will have better lives if we don’t let hope that our illness will get better in the future keep us from doing things that, even though they may be hard to do, will bring us enjoyment today.