Hope Isn’t a Feeling. It’s a Condition.

My son and I are on the floor and there is LEGO everywhere. We’re building a city and deciding where the roads go, which building gets to be the tallest, and whether there’s room for a park. He’s five and has very strong opinions.

I am completely, entirely there. I mention this because six months earlier, I wasn’t. Not even close.

The perfect storm

I’m a 40-year-old single mom. I moved from the US to Australia and built a life here without any family nearby. I have ADHD. And at the time, I was on dating apps.

If you know anything about ADHD, you might already see where this is going. ADHD brains are wired for dopamine-seeking. We hyperfocus. We also experience something called rejection sensitivity dysphoria, which means rejection doesn’t just sting, it lands like a freight train. Dating apps, with their infinite scroll and their unpredictable hits of attention and their regular serving of rejection, were a perfect neurological disaster for my particular brain.

Everything else in my life was suffering. My work. My sleep. My presence. And most painfully – my relationship with my son.

He was hitting me. He told me he hated me. And as gutting as that was to experience, I understood it. He’s a mirror. When I’m dysregulated, he’s dysregulated. When I’m not really there, he feels it. I took him to a play therapist. I got some tools. But I was getting to a place that felt like more than overwhelm.

I wanted to escape my whole life. Leave my son with his dad. Move back to America and live with my sister. Everything just felt too hard, and I didn’t know what to do. I was hopeless.

Helpless and hopeless are not the same thing

I’ve thought a lot about where I was in that period. And I think it matters to be precise about it, because the two states that look most similar from the outside are actually quite different.

Helplessness is: I don’t know how to get from here to there.

Hopelessness is: even if I could, I’m not sure it would matter.

I was tipping from one into the other. And what I’ve come to understand – through my own research, and through interviewing brilliant humans like hope scientist Kathryn Goetzke and mental health prize-winning artist, Honor Eastly, while writing my book – is that what looks like hopelessness is very often something else entirely. It’s a nervous system that has run out of capacity. It’s a brain that’s been running on fumes for too long.

Hope, as Kathryn Goetzke’s research shows, is our capacity to navigate obstacles and believe in our own agency even when things feel impossible. It’s not optimism as a personality trait. It’s not toxic positivity. It’s the quiet, stubborn belief that there are paths forward, and that you’re capable of finding one. It sounds like, “Okay. I’m here and it’s shit. But I can get over there somehow. What do I have to do?”

It was never a people problem

The work I do is built on a simple, stubborn premise: most of what we write off as people problems are actually conditions problems. The environment isn’t set up to support the human inside it. And when the conditions are wrong, capacity shrinks – our bandwidth, our energy, our ability to think and feel and connect – and we can’t access the capability that’s already in us.

This is true in organisations. And it turns out it’s also deeply true in our personal lives.

Honor talked to me about bandwidth – the idea that our time and energy are finite resources, and that what we put them into either fills us or depletes us. It’s not about resilience, it’s about bandwidth.

As I continued down a slippery slope of misdirected hyperfocus and intense dopamine-seeking behaviour — I wasn’t broken. My bandwidth was. And I was pouring it into something that was actively working against my brain chemistry.

I deleted the apps. Not forever – but for five months. And I started paying attention to my conditions instead. Honor’s words echoed in my head. Honor shared in our interview that we need to acknowledge that we’re dealing with a real load on our system, and each of our systems have unique bandwidths. If we’re struggling, feeling hopeless, we’re not weak; we’re likely operating at capacity.

Your brain on the wrong fuel

Here’s something worth understanding about dopamine, because I think it explains a lot about why hope feels so hard right now – not just for me, but for most of us.

Dopamine is a short, sharp spike of pleasure. And the thing about spikes is that they always tip back. The brain returns to homeostasis – and on the way back down, it tips briefly into pain. That’s the continuum. Every hit is followed by a dip.

Doomscrolling, outrage news cycles, the unpredictable rewards of social media – these are dopamine machines. And if you’re running on them all day, you’re not just tired. You’re operating below your emotional baseline most of the time. Your set point for what feels okay has shifted downward. Small pleasures stop registering. Curiosity feels out of reach. And what looks like apathy or disengagement is actually a nervous system that’s been stuck deep in the dip.

That’s not a character flaw, it’s chemistry and chemistry is workable.

Play is not what you think it is

I didn’t know at the time that while I was getting my conditions back on track – sleeping better, being more present, taking myself off the dopamine rollercoaster – I was also doing something else. So was my son, in his sessions with the play therapist.

We were both using play to get our nervous systems back online.

I think most people hear “play” and think: nice idea, not really practical, maybe for kids. But the research on what play actually does to the human body is hard to dismiss. When we laugh, when we engage in something that genuinely delights us – play releases dopamine, serotonin, oxytocin, and endorphins simultaneously. That’s a more potent neurochemical combination than running, meditation or sex.

It doesn’t spike and crash the way dopamine hits do. It steadies. It recalibrates. It brings you back to a baseline where curiosity is possible again. And curiosity is the neurological precursor to hope – you cannot imagine a better future when your brain is locked in threat-detection mode.

Play isn’t the reward for getting your life together. It’s part of how you get there.

And it doesn’t have to be big. Dancing in your room to a song you love. Drawing something badly. Writing something no one will read. Building a LEGO city with a five year old who has very strong opinions about where the park should go. Hanging out with a friend that makes you laugh.

The permission problem

Here’s the thing I’ve noticed though: most people who’ve stopped doing joyful things haven’t lost the ability. They’ve lost the permission.

They’ve decided it’s indulgent. That they’ll do it once things settle down. That play is for people who have their life sorted, not for people who are in the middle of a mess.

If that’s you, here’s the good news: permission is contagious. You don’t have to find it alone. Play is one of the most infectious human states there is. You can borrow it from someone who already has access to it. A friend who makes you laugh until your face hurts, a kid or a dog. Someone who hasn’t yet learned to take everything quite so seriously.

I talked to friends. A lot. I told them how I was actually feeling – not the edited version, the real one. And being received by people who love you is its own kind of recalibration.

Hope needs people

Kathryn Goetzke’s SHINE framework – a research-backed model for building hope – puts social connection at its centre. Not as a nice-to-have, as a core mechanism. Hope is not a solo project. It is built in relationship, maintained in community, and recovered through genuine connection.

Which means if hope feels inaccessible right now, the answer probably isn’t to think harder about it. It’s to look at who you’re spending time with, how you’re spending your energy, and whether the conditions you’re living in are feeding your capacity or quietly eating it.

If you’re in a darker place than overwhelm – if hopelessness feels more accurate than helplessness – please find a professional to talk to. That’s not weakness, that’s wisdom. My son’s play therapist helped him come back online. There’s no version of this where asking for help is the wrong move.

The litmus test

About six months after I changed my conditions and my capacity expanded, my son told me I was the perfect mama.

I know that sounds like a neat ending. But it wasn’t a sudden transformation. It was a slow accumulation of better conditions – sleep, presence, real connection, the removal of things that were eating my bandwidth, and the return of small, genuine joy. It was the LEGO city. It was the conversations with friends where I said the true thing. It was getting off the dopamine rollercoaster long enough for my brain to remember what it felt like to be okay. It was focusing on the things that mattered to me.

Hope didn’t arrive as a feeling. It arrived as capacity. The capacity to be on the floor, present, building something with my kid, and believe – without having to think about it – that things were going to be alright.

One question worth sitting with:

Where are you putting your energy right now – and is it filling you or draining you?

You don’t need to overhaul your life. You just need to look at your conditions.