What Does Hope Do With Fear?
A field guide to functioning while quietly terrified.
Honestly, this week I’ve been more scared than usual.
The escalation of aggression in the Middle East, Trump’s increasingly erratic behaviour, and my own nation’s obvious fossil fuel dependency with no political narrative in sight for how we transition out. It has all accumulated into something that crossed my personal threshold for tolerating uncertainty.
When fear tips into overwhelm, the human brain does something very predictable. It detours. The fight or flight response is essentially a neurological bypass, routing us away from our sense of hope and possibility toward the very ancient business of staying alive. And in late-stage capitalism, with its daily diet of extractivism and extremism, many of us are experiencing the chemical equivalent of being chased by a lion. Not once in a while. Regularly. On a Wednesday morning.
The rational mind wants to offer reassurance here. “But you are not actually in danger right now.” And that’s true, probably. But go tell your nervous system that.
This is where “what if” questions do their most interesting damage. We are strategic creatures. We play out scenarios so we can find our vulnerabilities and prepare. But those of us with vivid imaginations can conjure a full-body fear response from something that has not happened and may never happen. The threat is real enough in the body. The chemistry doesn’t know the difference.
Which means we can’t think our way out. We have to move through it physically.
Emily and Amelia Nagoski, in their book Burnout, make the point that experiences leave a chemical residue in the body, and that residue needs to be processed, not just understood. Crying. Moving. Sleeping. Being held. Sitting in a sauna. A long sigh. These aren’t indulgences or distractions. They are how the nervous system completes the stress cycle and finds its way back to a wider emotional range.
I start with sighing. Big, elaborate, full-body sighing. It sounds slightly ridiculous and it works reliably. Sometimes I reach for a film or a piece of writing that can give me an adjacent emotional experience, something that cracks me open just enough to let some of the feeling move through, without pointing directly at the thing I’m afraid of. My grief finds a lane. The body does its job.
Once you’re out of the hole, more becomes available to you. Not just hope, but creativity, connection, perspective.
Here’s where the practice I lean on most lives, though, and it isn’t a somatic one. It’s a question I ask myself. Not “what if this terrible thing happens?” but “who will I be if it does?”
It’s a small shift that changes everything. The first question positions me as someone things happen to. The second makes me the one who responds. I rehearse it. I think about what qualities I want to bring: courage, love, compassion. I sit with what it would feel like to be that version of myself. And something always shifts, not because the fear disappears, but because I’ve located myself inside it differently.
This is hope as practice, not feeling. It is most useful when built in fair weather, when the stakes are lower and the conditions are good for learning. But if you find yourself in a storm of your own mind’s making, you don’t have to begin there. You can start with a sigh. You can start with a cry. You can work your way back from the body, one completed cycle at a time, until you find yourself standing again in the fullness of who you are.
That, I think, is where hope lives. Not in the absence of fear, but in the capacity to move through it and still recognise yourself on the other side.
Wherever you are reading this, I am sending you so much love. For heroically getting on with it, buying the groceries, finishing the PowerPoint, feeding the cat, while carrying something heavy in your chest. There is a thread between us, and I am tugging on it gently this week, to remind you that we are not alone in this. We will move through this big, strange, frightening moment together, and we will come out the other side changed in ways that matter, for people who aren’t born yet. Hold on.
x Arohanui (big love)
Megan
P.S. If this week’s dispatch resonated, you might want to know that this kind of thinking is at the heart of what I do with leaders one on one.
The Executive Support Package is a 20-week working partnership for CEOs and senior leaders in the for-purpose sector. Not coaching that stays in the room. Not consulting that produces reports you don’t have time to read. Something more useful than both: a trusted thinking partner who shows up every week to help you think clearly, plan strategically, and actually get the important things done.
If you’re carrying a lot right now and you’d like some tailored support, I’d love to talk. Or you might know someone else who could benefit from extra capacity right now.