The Science of Hope: A Conversation with Kathryn Goetzke Ahead of the International Day of Hope

Hope, we often assume, is something you either have or you don't—a feeling that comes and goes with circumstance. Kathryn Goetzke has spent more than a decade proving otherwise. Hope, she argues, is a measurable, teachable skill, one that can be learned, strengthened, and rewired into the brain, no matter where you're starting from.

Kathryn is a global mental health advocate, the founder and creator of The Shine Hope Company, and the founder of iFred, the International Foundation for Research and Education on Hope. For years, she advocated for an official International Day of Hope through iFred—a vision that became reality when the Permanent Mission of Kiribati to the United Nations championed the resolution designating July 12 as the International Day of Hope, adopted by the UN General Assembly and first observed on July 12, 2025.

Ahead of this year's observance on July 12, 2026, we sat down with Kathryn to explore the science of Hope, her SHINE Hope framework, and how her work connects to Dr. Amen's message that you are not stuck with the brain you have. Her story—and her science—is a powerful reminder that a better future is something we can build. (You can learn more about Kathryn's work at kathryngoetzke.com.)

From Hopelessness to Hope Scientist

Let's start with your story. What led you from your own experience with hopelessness to becoming a "Hope Scientist," and how did that journey shape your belief that hope is a skill anyone can learn?

My journey started in the darkest possible place. When I was eighteen, my dad, who was my best friend, died by suicide. In my early twenties, I had my own attempt.

Thankfully, I got support, and part of that journey included seeing Dr. Amen and getting my brain scanned. That experience taught me how deeply the biology of the brain relates to our mental health.

I initially set out to rebrand depression, to shine a positive light on it and take on the stigma. That's why I founded my nonprofit as the International Foundation for Research and Education on Depression.

Doctors had told me I was at high risk for suicide. And I knew that if you want to prevent something, you have to get to the root cause.

So I poured through the research personally, because I wanted to save my own life. And what I found, again and again, was hopelessness: the single consistent predictor of suicide. Not depression, not anxiety, not previous attempts: hopelessness.

Nobody taught me that; I figured it out, and that's why I call myself a Hope Scientist. I know some people don't love that, because I don't have a PhD. But a scientist develops a hypothesis, tests it over time, refines it, and keeps improving it, and that's exactly what I've done with Hope for more than a decade, including in the peer-reviewed research I publish.

So I did what a scientist does: I went deeper and deeper into root cause. I studied hopelessness and found Abramson's definition: it's both emotional despair and motivational helplessness, combined in a moment in time. I kept going deeper and simplifying, and created the Hope Matrix; we're always somewhere on it, and we teach it in our International Day of Hope lesson.

And guess what? We can always manage our emotional despair, and we can always get out of helplessness and into action. We just need to learn the skills for how.

I also discovered Hope was measurable, but no one was teaching people how to Hope. That's why I rebranded iFred from Depression to Hope, because if you learn how to cultivate Hope skills, you protect yourself from depression.

And I wasn't just diagnosed with depression; I was diagnosed with everything under the sun. Major depressive disorder, anxiety, PTSD, ADHD, an eating disorder, and I went from one addiction to the next to the next, never getting to the root cause. The labels were never the real problem; underneath every one of them was unmanaged hopelessness.

My anxiety was unmanaged fear. My depression was unmanaged sadness. Violence toward ourselves or others is unmanaged anger, and alcohol was simply my way of not feeling any of it.

Once I learned to sit in those emotions and express them in healthy ways instead of reacting, everything changed. That same emotional energy became my power: channeled into my passion and purpose, I can hyperfocus and get done in an hour what takes most people a week. I now have the skills that keep me moving even when I don't want to, and the more challenges I have in life, the more I have to shine.

I would do anything to have my father back, and I can't. If you've ever watched someone you love struggle and not been able to support them, you know that pain. So the next best thing is to teach everyone I can what I know, so that nobody loses someone they love to suicide.

And here's a hard truth I had to learn: we can't change other people. In fact, staying stuck trying to control someone else keeps us stuck in our own cycles of hopelessness, in our despair and our helplessness. What we can do is teach the skills; that's all any of us has the power to do.

In 2013, I developed my first Hope programming and proved my theory that Hope is a measurable and teachable skill, and that as we increase Hope, symptoms of anxiety and depression decrease. I've been teaching Hope ever since, through iFred, The Shine Hope Company, and programs like Hopeful Minds, Hopeful Mindsets, and Hopeful Cities. And what Dr. Amen taught me about brain health shaped how I understand and teach Hope, which is why I'm so grateful to be partnering around this International Day of Hope.

I'm now on a mission to teach the world. My most important credential isn't just the research I've studied. It's that I figured out how to make the journey from hopelessness to Hope myself, and I know the path can be taught.

"You Are Not Stuck With the Brain You Have"

Dr. Amen often says, "You are not stuck with the brain you have — you can make it better, and we can prove it." How does that idea show up in your work? In what ways is hope itself something we can train and strengthen, much like brain health?

Let me start with how I define Hope, because everything flows from it: Hope is the belief that the future can be better than today, and that I/we have the power to make it so.

Hope is not a wish. And Hope is not the same as faith, though many people think of Hope in the faith sense.

Faith is an important part of Hope, and faith practices are an important part of the SHINE framework; prayer, for example, is a great Stress Skill, and trust and community are powerful ones too. But faith alone can't teach us the biology of the brain: what happens in the stress response, and what happens when we drop into our downstairs brain. My dad died with a Bible on his lap; it wasn't that he wasn't faithful, it's that he was never taught how his biology was driving his behaviors.

That's what Hope science does: it brings together brain science, brain health, and faith practices, and shows how they work together. It's a big part of why this partnership with Dr. Amen's community means so much to me.

And here's what will stop everyone in their tracks: Hope predicts our academic achievement above intelligence, our workplace productivity above optimism and self-efficacy, and even our athletic performance above our natural abilities. Hope predicts what we achieve in nearly every domain of life. It is the most important skill we can learn, and it's taught almost nowhere, not in our schools, not in our homes.

Dr. Amen taught me personally that I'm not stuck with the brain I have. From the first time I met him, he was clear he didn't have all the answers: here's what he knows, here's what he saw in my brain, here's what he can do. He talked to me about neuroplasticity and told me I have power over my future, but that I had to make it so.

Dr. Amen couldn't get me sleeping or eating the right foods; I had to take care of myself. But what he could do, and did, was inspire within me the knowledge that I could do it. What he was really doing was building Hope within me.

I often say you can't give someone Hope, but you can teach them how to Hope, and that's exactly what he did for me. He's been my doctor for a long time, and it's why he's on the cover of my book, The Biggest Little Book About Hope.

One of the first things I learned from him is that you are not your thoughts. Those automatic negative thoughts, the ANTs, are not who you are. That was revolutionary for me, because I had learned so many unhealthy patterns, and thanks to neuroplasticity, patterns can be rewired.

That's exactly how Hope works. Hopelessness is not a diagnosis or a disease; it's a moment in time, and those moments happen unconsciously throughout the day. We get triggered, the stress response takes over, we drop into what I call our "downstairs brain," and that blocks our ability to Hope.

So the work is making hopelessness conscious, then learning the skills to activate Hope. And just like brain health, Hope is measurable, which means it's trainable; I built tools so anyone can measure their own Hope at myhopescore.com. What gets measured gets improved, and what gets practiced gets rewired.

Inside the SHINE Hope Framework

Tell us about the SHINE Hope framework. Can you walk us through the Five Keys — Stress Skills, Happy Habits, Inspired Actions, Nourishing Networks, and Eliminating Challenges — and how someone could start applying them today?

The SHINE Hope framework answers a simple question: how do we actually manage hopelessness? Emotional despair, in the basic sense, is sadness, anger, and fear.

When we're triggered, we have a 90-second physiological response as stress hormones flood our system, and it blocks our ability to access our frontal lobe, which is where we make healthy decisions, good decisions, and connect with others. Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor's work on this really prompted my thinking. If we never learn how to de-escalate that stress response and get back to a rational place, that's when we go to the drinking, the self-harm, and everything else that keeps us stuck.

Traditional Hope science looks at goals, agency, and pathways to goals, based on Snyder's Hope theory. I built on that, but I come at it from hopelessness, because hopelessness is what I set out to solve, and my work in mental health and brain health drives everything I know about Hope. That's what makes this framework different, and it's why it starts with the stress response.

Here are the Five Keys:

• S: Stress Skills. Managing our stress hormones—our cortisol, adrenaline, and norepinephrine—in healthy ways, because those chemicals directly affect our brain and our ability to think. When we're triggered we drop into our downstairs brain, and until we get back into our upstairs brain, where we think critically and problem-solve, we can't access solutions, and that's where Hope lives. This is where practices like meditation, prayer, visualization, and affirming beliefs come in: they de-escalate the stress response so we can act instead of react.
• H: Happiness Habits. How we stay in our upstairs brain by cultivating our happiness hormones (serotonin, dopamine, oxytocin, endorphins) in healthy ways. This is pure brain health, and it's exactly what Dr. Amen teaches: our nutrition, our sleep, our exercise, the nutrients we feed our brain, and even what we say to ourselves. We can get those same chemicals in very unhealthy ways too, yet no one teaches us the healthy ways; that's what this key does.
• I: Inspired Actions. How we get out of helplessness and toward the future we want: setting goals, overcoming obstacles, and sometimes re-goaling. We teach SMART goals: specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-bound. If we unconsciously chase unattainable goals we can develop clinical anxiety and depression, so it's about using our Stress Skills and Happiness Habits on the way to whatever we want.
• N: Nourishing Networks. Cultivating bidirectional, healthy networks with ourselves and with other people. We're up to 95% more likely to achieve something if we write it down and check in with someone regularly. The people we're around significantly impact our ability to build Hope.
• E: Eliminating Challenges. Becoming conscious of the negative thinking patterns, behaviors, and beliefs that get in the way of our ability to Hope: the ANTs Dr. Amen talks about, internalizing failure, rumination, and worry. Once we can see them, we interject with our Stress Skills, Happiness Habits, Inspired Actions, and Nourishing Networks.

All of it is grounded in brain health and brain science; everything Dr. Amen teaches for the brain is also building our Hope. These are skills we can practice every single day, and the more challenges we face, the more we get to practice. To start today, join our International Day of Hope activation at internationaldayofhope.org and learn the Five Keys.

The First — and Second — International Day of Hope

July 12, 2026 marks the very first International Day of Hope. What does it mean to see this become an officially recognized global observance, and what do you hope people and organizations do to mark the day?

July 12, 2026 is actually the second International Day of Hope; we observed the first last year at the United Nations, which was an incredible moment. But my vision is so much bigger than a day. I want the International Day of Hope to become like Earth Day, and honestly, it should be even bigger, because what could be more important than the belief that the future can be better than today, and that I/we have the power to make it so?

We are driving ourselves to hopelessness. We need to be driving ourselves to create a better future. That's why I'm building a full ecosystem for Hope, all reinforcing one thing: how we move from hopelessness to Hope.

And it's going everywhere. We have evidence-based programming for youth, teens, college students, and adults, from a single lesson to full courses, delivered in schools, workplaces, prisons, and to veterans through the VA. We have in-person programs, Hopeful Cities activations with public health campaigns any city can run, an app and consumer brand for Hope in development, and programming recognized as an innovation by the World Bank.

I want our kids learning these skills in school and seeing Hope everywhere they look. What we surround ourselves with is what we learn, and right now our kids are surrounded by hopelessness. In the U.S., the CDC found over half of teen girls report persistent sadness or hopelessness; in Canada, a study of nearly 50,000 post-secondary students found 65% reported hopelessness.

They are learning that from us. Until we teach them that hopelessness is learned, and that there are skills to get to Hope, we will stay stuck. I believe nothing is more important in the world than learning how to Hope, and ensuring our kids know how to Hope.

The science backs this up. I just published a peer-reviewed paper with Dr. Veronica O'Brien, "Harnessing Hope: A Psychological Strategy for Achieving the Sustainable Development Goals," in the International Journal of Mental Health Systems. Drawing from nearly 100 sources, it shows Hope is critical for all 17 of the Sustainable Development Goals, not just mental health.

Consider what the research shows: Gallup found employees who feel hopeful about their future are 69 times more likely to be engaged at work. Hope predicts whether people take climate action and adopt green technology. And the UN's own reporting shows more than half of SDG targets are seeing weak progress, because every goal on Earth depends on people who believe the future can be better and that they have the power to make it so.

This has been the through line of my advocacy. I spoke at the United Nations to help get mental health into the Sustainable Development Goals and co-authored the 2015 paper calling for mental health targets; we got mental health in two places, but Hope belongs everywhere.

As a UN representative for the World Federation for Mental Health, I've seen what a global observance can do; we mark World Mental Health Day every October 10th. Now we have a day for Hope, and here's how I'm asking everyone to join the movement:

• Be the Sunflower. This July 12 we're launching the Be the Sunflower campaign. As Jay Shetty shared in a beautiful video, sunflowers follow the light, and in darkness they turn toward each other. Be the sunflower for someone.
• Become a Certified Champion. Learn the science of Hope through our International Day of Hope Certified Champion program, and activate it in your community.
• Measure your Hope. Take the assessment at myhopescore.org, individually or across your organization. You can't strengthen what you don't measure.
• Activate your city. License Hopeful Cities and give your whole community a blueprint for teaching the skills of Hope.
• Make Hope a strategy. Companies, campuses, teams: commit to one concrete Hope initiative for the year ahead, not just the day.

And if you're a leader, athlete, or celebrity reading this: this movement needs your voice. Hope is the belief that the future can be better than today, and that I/we have the power to make it so; imagine making that real for every child on Earth. Make a statement this July 12, and come build it with us at internationaldayofhope.org.

How Cultivating Hope Changes the Brain

Hope and brain health are deeply connected. Based on the research you've studied, how does cultivating hope actually change the brain — and why should hope be considered a protective factor for mental health, alongside the lifestyle and brain-health strategies Amen University teaches?

Cultivating Hope actually changes the brain because, thanks to neuroplasticity, you can rewire it. You are not everything you think. As you learn these skills, you create new neural pathways, new habits, new ways of being.

I know this personally. I'll be celebrating 22 years in recovery this year, and so much of that has been learning to take the pause: the 90-second stress response break. If there's one thing I could get the whole world to do, it would be to take 90 seconds from when you're triggered to when you act, because we do so much damage within those 90 seconds.

The research on Hope as a protective factor is mind-blowing. In our "Harnessing Hope" paper, we cite Harvard's Human Flourishing Program research linking Hope to reduced risk of all-cause mortality, fewer chronic conditions like diabetes, hypertension, stroke, cancer, and heart disease, and improved sleep. People higher in Hope adopt healthier behaviors, stick to their treatment plans, and recover faster from injury and illness.

That's what I mean when I say Hope relates to everything we want in life: our health, our education, our work, our relationships, our performance, even our longevity. Hope isn't a nice-to-have. It's the psychological foundation underneath all of it.

And here's the most hopeful finding of all: while high Hope predicts lower anxiety and depression, the opposite is not true. Having anxiety or depression right now does not predict your future Hope Score. You can build Hope starting from wherever you are.

The Happiness Habits, like nutrition, sleep, and kindness, build our happy hormones in healthy ways, and that's what brain health really is. The same practices Amen University teaches for the brain are practices that build Hope, and Hope makes us far more likely to keep doing them. You can rewire your brain; I've done it, and it's really incredible.

If You Feel Stuck or Hopeless Right Now

For someone who feels stuck or hopeless right now, what's one practical, science-backed strategy from your work they could try today to start shifting toward hope?

First, I want you to know: hopelessness is not a permanent state. It's what happens when your emotional despair collides with your sense of helplessness: "I feel bad, and I can't do anything about it." And both of those pieces are workable.

Start by identifying your despair. What am I in sadness about, what am I in fear about, what am I angry about? Get curious: what are those emotions telling you?

Learn to manage those emotions in healthier ways rather than running from them. I ran from my emotions for a long time, into my addictions, and it only made them worse. Sometimes the healthiest action is no action at all: learn to meditate, and learn to sit in those feelings without running.

Then work on the helplessness side by asking: where is my power in this situation? We can't control other people. But there is always something within your power.

If you feel hopeless about many things—your work, your relationship, your home—don't tackle everything. Choose one thing for today, then ask: how can I work on my emotional despair around this, and what one step can I take forward? That's really it: make it conscious, and start moving toward Hope.

And please, if you're in crisis or having thoughts of suicide, reach out for support. In the U.S. you can call or text 988 anytime, and you can find our global resources at ifred.org or join our online anxiety and depression support group there. Asking for help is itself a powerful act of Hope.

A Message for Coaches and Practitioners

As Amen University's community works toward hope-informed brain health education, what would you say to coaches and practitioners about weaving hope-building skills into the support they offer their own clients?

The most important thing for practitioners to learn is this: hopelessness is learned, and we can learn how to Hope. If coaches and practitioners take away nothing else, I want them to take away that.

The second thing surprises people: your Hope as a coach or therapist, your Hope for your client, is sometimes more predictive of their outcomes than their own Hope. If you don't believe their future can be better and that they have the power to change it, they will feel that, and they will internalize it.

So no matter what, instill, encourage, and inspire the people you work with with the confidence that they can create a better future, and that they have the power to make it so when equipped with the skills.

And on the hard days: no matter how many times someone has relapsed or hasn't shown up, you never give up Hope on the people you're working with. Giving up Hope on them is a disservice to them. You believe in them, and you teach them to believe in themselves, because belief is right there in the definition of Hope.

I know this works, because it's exactly what Dr. Amen did for me. He didn't hand me Hope; you can't give someone Hope. He taught me how to Hope.

He believed my future could be better, showed me I had the power to make it so, and equipped me with the tools. Twenty-two years into recovery, I am living proof of what a Hope-informed practitioner can set in motion. Every coach and practitioner in the Amen University community has that same opportunity with every single person they serve.

We are in a global hopelessness crisis, and we need a global Hope movement. Be part of it. Be that for someone; be the sunflower.

To learn more about Kathryn Goetzke's work and join the movement, visit internationaldayofhope.org, ifred.org, and theshinehopecompany.com. Her peer-reviewed paper, Goetzke, K., & O'Brien, V. (2026), "Harnessing hope: A psychological strategy for achieving the sustainable development goals," appears open-access in the International Journal of Mental Health Systems*.*

If you or someone you know is struggling or in crisis, support is available. In the U.S., call or text 988 (the Suicide & Crisis Lifeline) anytime, or find global resources at ifred.org. Reaching out is an act of hope.