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How do your hands give you hope?
I looked at mine this morning before the coffee kicked in. A little older looking than they used to be. A scar I can still trace back to a story when I was a kid whittling wood and the knife slipped. They’ve held my wife’s hand, a shovel, a grandchild, and more keyboards than I’d like to count. Here are three ways they give me hope, ranked by how much I think they matter.
They hold on to other people
Researchers at the University of Virginia and the University of Wisconsin put 16 married women under the threat of a mild electric shock and had them hold their husband’s hand, a stranger’s hand, or no hand at all. The brain scans showed a large drop in the brain’s threat response with the husband’s hand and a smaller drop with the stranger’s. The happier the marriage, the bigger the calm. The effect was strongest in the women with the highest marital quality.
So a hand on your hand tells your brain it doesn’t have to carry the load alone. Even a stranger’s hand helped a little. Hope, at its most basic, is the sense that help is nearby and our hands are how we say so without a word.
They get into the dirt
Thirty gardeners did a stressful task, then half gardened for 30 minutes and half read indoors. Both groups calmed down. But cortisol dropped significantly more in the gardeners. And their positive mood came all the way back, while the readers’ mood slipped further. That’s the van den Berg and Custers study, published in the Journal of Health Psychology in 2011.
Thirty people isn’t a huge sample, and the researchers themselves couldn’t say whether it was the movement, the outdoors, or both. I’ve and my Trees for Wildlife (now Garden for Wildlife) have put a lot of trees in the ground over the years. I can tell you the feeling afterward is the closest thing I know to a down payment on the future. You press soil around a root and you’ve made a bet that something will be standing here long after you’re gone. In fact, the trees I and my fellow Scouts planted at the border of an interstate highway still stand there over 50 years later.
They make things
A UK national survey study led by Keyes found that people who did arts and crafts reported more happiness, life satisfaction and a stronger sense that their lives were worthwhile. Keyes pointed to mastery as part of the reason. You can see your progress, and you can be proud of it.
Anyone who’s finished a crooked birdhouse knows the feeling. Something exists now that didn’t before, and your hands did it.
Where I land
If I had to pick one, there is a very quick answer: hand-holding. Soil and craft heal the person doing the work. A held hand heals two people at once. Though honestly, the three overlap.
Hope lives at your fingertips.
Your hands are the part of you that’s always ready to help. Let them.
The title says it all. It’s a plain invitation to make the first move toward someone, which is exactly what the brain scans suggest we’re built for.
Question
When did someone’s hand last make a hard moment easier for you? And whose hand could yours be today?
Attributions
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