How to Feel More Empathy (With the Host of Bad Women: The Ripper Retold)

totally addicted to just such a podcast. It's a new show called Bad Women, hosted by the amazing historian Hallie Rubinholt. Bad Woman is a show devoted to understanding more about the lives of the women who were murdered by Jack the Ripper. Now from that description, you might be thinking, Oh, this is some new true crime thing that Laurie's gotten obsessed with, but that's not actually what the show is about.

What Bad Women really tackles is the mystery behind why the Ripper's victims wound up in his path in the first place. What are the sociological factors that put them in harm's way, and what is it about our minds that prevents us from empathizing with these women and countless others who face poverty and injustice in the modern world today. I want to talk to Hallie about these mysteries and what they mean for our own psychology and even for

our own happiness. I also wanted Hallie to tell me the strategies she uses to face these awful injustices head on. I wanted to understand how someone could study these dark topics and stay optimistic, because that, in particular seems like a strategy that we all need, especially nowadays. But before we jump in, I also wanted you to get a sense of the show and why it is so captivating in catchy and so here's a quick listen to the

Bad Women trailer. It's a bad habit we have. We tell the tale of the murderer and not the murdered. The clock on Whitechapel Church was striking half past two when Ellen Holland watched her friend Polly Nichols sway off into the darkness. Polly was drunk, penniless and broken. She was inconsequential in the minds of most people she met, but she was about to cross paths was someone who

would give her a grisly, unenviable place in history. In the autumn of eighteen eighty eight, Polly and four other women were brutally killed in a slum neighborhood of London. Their unsolved murders were so violent, so cruel, that their killer earned a nickname that is still known the world over. Armed down on halls, shann't quick ripping them Jack the Ripper. But in the greatest cold case in history, few of

us have stopped to question the basic facts. One fact that you know about Jack the Ripper that he never got caught and who did he kill? Prostitutes? I'm Hallie Ribbinhold as a historian interested in the stories of women. I'd assume the lives of the five victims had been thoroughly researched long ago. I was wrong. When I dug into the records. I began to reveal rich and interesting lives. Most of the time mellmen leave if they're being beaten to a pulp or he put out an eye. Lives

blighted by problems and prejudices. Most women today would recognize. There wasn't a great deal of sympathy for alcoholics, so one had to sign a temperance pledge saying I will not drink if only a tourist so simple. I identified with the women, sympathized with the tough life choices they made, and admired their determination. She gets on the boat and comes to England. She seeks wider horizons. I came to know them and like them. She wants more than she's

been born into. But I also discovered something else, something new, something troubling. It was just so obvious to me the very first time I looked at this file. How could we have gotten this this wrong for this many years? And something that chips away at the foundations of the Ripper myth? Nam Sure, all of you here today, do you know that Jack's sectims were ladies of the night, weren't they? They were forced to choose the myth still served up by tour guides to visitors who flocked the

murder scenes each evening. And now, ladies, you might be thinking, well, I'd never think that work ever, but didn't Okay, Well, sadly, the answer is yes. Polly, Annie, Elizabeth, Katherine, and Mary Jane were not killed while selling sex. It was other, no less troubling factors that put them in the path of their murderer. In this podcast, I'll tell you how I know that and why it still matters very much even today, Halle has upset the world of rippology by

her general attitude towards RiPP rologists. I'll also explain why my research has enraged so many people who claim to be experts in the Ripper case. The attacks have just been relentless and malicious. But actually I think they just don't really want other people talking about the murdered women

and challenging their views in any way. If you want to know how we got the Ripper story so wrong, what those mistakes tell us about ourselves, and why putting the record straight make some people so very angry, join me, Hallie Rubbin Holt for Bad Women The Ripper Retold starting October fifth, wherever you get your podcasts. So, Hallie, thank you so much for being on the show. Thank you

for having me. I mean, when I first heard that Pushkin was doing a podcast about the women who were murdered by Jack the Ripper, I kind of had this assumption it was like the standard true crime podcast, and then when I listened to it, I realize that that's not really what the show is actually about. And so, you know, talk about this misconception. Well, yes, I mean

it is about a lot more than that. It's largely about the lives of the five victims of Jack the Ripper, which have been completely overlooked, and we look at a lot of issues that come out of their lives. So issue about addiction, for example, issues about homelessness, issues about violence against women, all of these things, because they're so integrated into the story and the way we tell the

traditional story of Jack the Ripper. And one of the things that I found so striking about this is that all of these injustices you've just mentioned, you know, violence against women, you know, poverty, addiction, these are things that we're facing today and they're the kinds of things that we just haven't really dealt with. And so, without giving away too many spoilers, give me a sense of how some of these things played out in Victorian times and

with some of the women who were the Ripper's victims. Well, I mean, people very much in the past were trapped in a poverty cycle similar to poverty cycles that people in the present are trapped in. So that if you were born into a family that doesn't have a lot of money, doesn't have a lot of resources, your opportunities in life are going to be very limited. And this was even more so the case for working class women

in the nineteenth century. Poor women didn't have access to education in the way that people of wealth had it or men. Women couldn't actually make careers for themselves in the professions because the professions weren't open to women, because it was believed that a woman's only role in society was to be a mother, a wife, a care She wasn't a breadwinner, she couldn't have a life of her own.

And because of that, if something went terribly wrong in a woman's life and she didn't have a man to support her, she had no way of earning an income. She fell into this poverty trap and had to rely on going to the workhouse, begging, taking very menial jobs that weren't designed to pay her very much. And so things were much more difficult if you were a woman. And so, I mean these injustices you talk about, I mean,

the workhouse has just sounds so scary and awful. You do such a good job of making sounds so terrifying in their podcast. But all of these injustice is the thing that I found most striking was the fact that all of these women faced this kind of final injustice, which is they died at the hand of some horrible serial killer, and everyone thinks it was like their fault, you know, Oh they were just prostitutes, or oh they were addicts and so on. So talk about this kind

of final injustice, right. Yeah. In the Victorian era, the belief that somehow these women deserved what they got was part of a narrative which was designed to keep people in their place. So it was believed that bad women got what they deserved. So here were women who contravened the norm for what a woman was supposed to do in her life. These were women who had no families,

or they'd left their families behind. They didn't have a proper roof over their heads, they didn't have a husband to look after them or a father, and often they were reliant upon drink. They were failures as women. And because they were failures as women, it was believed, well, this is what happens when you're not a good woman. You get killed in a terrible, terrible way. And so basically this narrative propped up a lot of belief systems

in the Victorian era. At that time. The problem is that we have never really questioned this, and I think in a lot of mythologizing about the past, we just don't question these sets of ideas that we are really bequeathed. You know, we just repeat them, we parrot them, and imparroting them. We kind of acquiesce in a lot of the morality and the belief systems that pre existed, which

are of no use to us anymore. And you know, I would be lying if I said that we live in a society where it's not believed that bad women are the ones who get punished. Every time a woman goes out at night and is murdered, the first question that is asked is, well, why was she out, what was wearing? What did she do to incur this? And that shouldn't be the question we're asking. The funny thing, or the interesting thing for me is a psychologist, is that the fact that we ask this question might be

and part because of some of these biases of the mind. Right, Like, it's true that this kind of fit with the Victorian narrative at the time of kind of keeping women in line, but this might also just be a deep and pretty awful part of our human nature like it tends to fit with a couple of the psychological biases that we talk about in cognitive science. One of them which is so interesting is this bias known as the fundamental attribution error.

And the fundamental attribution error is that even though when I think about my behavior, I usually try to explain it using specific situations like oh, I drank too much because I was having a bad day, or you know, I for about my keys in the car because you know, I was like really stressed or something. When we look at other people's behavior, we assume that their behavior is the result of their personality traits or their moral traits,

not situations. Right, So if you had a friend, you know, a co worker who comes into work and says, oh, my gosh, you know, my car just got broken into. I'd left my person you might say like, oh, she's so absent minded, why would she leave her purse in the car, Or like, oh, that's just kind of fits with her, like she just doesn't treat her stuff well or something like that. You wouldn't think, Oh, maybe her kid was sick, or maybe she was really stressed, or

maybe she had a bad day. Right, when you attribute other people's behaviors to things. We don't tend to think in terms of the circumstances. We tend to think in terms of their personality traits. And I see this written

large in the stories you talk about, right. I just listened to your episode with Polly, and it was kind of like, oh, well, Polly, you know, she's such a glutton and she liked to drink, And it wasn't like, no, Polly had these awful family issues, like Polly had this horrible marriage, and so talk about what it's been like

to bring those circumstances to light. Knowing that people's natural tendency might not be even to think about them, it's really important to try to understand what the circumstances were that these people were coming from. This is where I think empathy comes in. And using empathy as a historian or any type of I think scientist is sometimes frowned upon and people recoil at this because they think that you're putting too much of yourself into it. But that

isn't the case. I think we can be empathetic and still be very impartial. But when we are telling human stories, when we are looking at human struggles, we must try and understand what the sets of circumstances were that allowed

for something to happen. And this is so important because I think one of the things we know from cognitive science is that if you actually look at the reasons behind people's behavior, often it's not as much their personality traits or their kind of moral failings as we think. Often it's the situation. The whole history of the last few decades of psychology has shown us that, hey, if you're in a situation where everybody is doing something, you're

probably going to do it too. If you're in a situation where you just feel really horrible time pressure, right, you're going to act more immorally. We talk about this on my podcast in terms of feeling time famine causes you to do all this awful stuff. And if you're in situations of poverty, if you're in situations where you're in danger, like, you're going to do things that you yourself right now not in those situations, might not do.

And so I think that there's this idea that we kind of morally condemn people for taking actions that we ourselves would have taken in those situations. And then the striking thing about bad women. Is it just articulates how awful some of these situations really were. I mean, give me a sense of some of the things that these women were facing, like just on a day to day basis. Gosh, well, I think we really take for granted how easy our

lives are. Physically, the Victorian era was absolutely terrible. If you were poor. The living environment was terrible, often completely infested with vermin. People were physically uncomfortable all the time. You know, today, we take a painkiller if we've got a headache, if something's wrong. You know, they didn't have access to that, and it didn't exist, so there's a certain level of ambient pain all the time. A lot of these women we know had diseases. Annie Chapman had tuberculosis,

Katherine Edos had kidney disease. Elizabeth Stride, for example, was suffering from treachery, syphilis, and the circumstances. Their lives were so awful, so bleak, so without hope that of course they're going to be drinking to forget as well, and hunger. I mean, these people did not know where their next meal was coming from. They didn't know what was going to happen. Really from hour to hour where they were

going to be laying their head. One of the most evocative things about your podcast is like the smells is like a poop everywhere, and it's like stinky. It's such a I mean, honestly, it's actually such an evocative part of your podcast. It's actually like takes you there in this wonderful way. So it's so funny because I'm so immersed in it, I don't it's so normalized for me that wait a minute, everybody has chamber pots. They're just

like poop at people's best. Yeah. Absolutely, I mean honestly, even if I was just facing like the stench of feces all the time, I feel like I definitely would start drinking washed in the bodies as well. A lot of times people did not have access to laundry facilities, to bathing facilities, you know, and sometimes when they had access to bathing facilities, it was cold water, so people

smelled terrible. And the fact that these women were going through so much pain, I think leads to the next bias that I see so much in your telling of these women's stories, right, the next psychological bias, which is what researcher is called the just world bias, and so

the idea behind the just world biases. We would like to assume that the world is a just place, that you know, good things, like truly awful bad things don't happen to good people, right, and that if we ourselves are good, if we work hard and do the right thing, we can live a life filled with joy and pleasure. In these kinds of things. These are deep beliefs that like keep us getting up in the morning and not

kind of terrified about what the world is. And what that means is that it makes us do good things right, like it makes us fight injustice, It makes us be good people because we don't want to get our come up, and so we kind of want to believe that if we do the right thing, you know, good things will

happen to us. But it also leads to this insidious rationalization, which is like when you see a bad thing happened to a person, your first instinct is to assume, well, you know, maybe there was some reason there, right, maybe it just didn't happen by chance. A friend tells you like, oh my gosh, my sister just found out she has liver cancer. Your brain instantly goes to there must be some reason that this is a just dessert, right that you know, the world doesn't work by making terrible things

happen to people. There should be some reason there. It's like, well, I wonder if she like drank too much or didn't take care of herself. Right, And this I saw just written large, not just in your women's stories, but just in how people reacted to the fact that you were humanizing them and telling their stories. And so does this kind of resonate, this kind of just world bias, the kind of thing you saw and the retelling of these stories. I mean, it's very current with the murder of women.

So in the United States, Gabrielle Petito, what was going on? What was she doing? What was people were asking those questions, you know, what did they do to deserve this? You know, the belief being, of course, that they brought it on themselves. We are so far from actually taking that step back, not asking those questions, but just reserving judgment and listening and examining the other factors that were at play here.

But what's triggered, it seems, is this kind of knee jerk response about women being at fault for their own murders. So for example, you know, here I am coming in and saying that, actually the story that you know about Check the Ripper, it wasn't these women's faults that this happened. By changing it, people get very upset about that because they're clinging to this belief system that's still with us today.

And it really seems to be a belief system that well, first of all, there's evidence that it might be really ingrained in the sense of emerging really early. In fact, there's evidence that even little kids show this, you know,

belief in a just world bias. In fact, if you tell little kids kid versions of the stories we wouldn't talk about, you know, Jack the rippburn my serial killer murders to little kids, but simple things like Joe was walking to school and he got hooped on by a bird, the kids will start justifying, well, you know, maybe Joe did something wrong or he's a bad person. Right, he

can't just be unlucky. There has to be some reason for this, right, And this emerges in four year old kids, so it makes sense that it's still with us as an adult. But another thing we know about this bias is kind of exactly what you said. This is a

knee jerk response. Right, this is some unconscious thing our brains do really fast, and one of the powers of this is that our brains start unconsciously looking for evidence that there might be some reason in there that it's a justice or you know, like with the cancer example, you're like, I wonder if she drank, Like you don't know anything about this sister, Like you're just like making stuff up about her, because you assume there has to be something there, And that means we go through just

a ton of mental gymnastics to keep these distortions up. And I think you know you've seen like these mental gymnastics at work, you know, So talk about some of the challenges you've faced from people who are like, no, no, no, you're just getting these women's stories wrong. Some people, it's some people, not all of the people are incredibly nasty and incredibly vicious with what they say. I mean, there

is this investment in this story. You know, this is very personal to some people who feel they've invested their lives in researching Jack the Ripper, And here comes this person from the outside saying, well, actually, this evidence that you've always assumed was true isn't actually true, and it's not true because of this, this and this, and so the only way instead of actually taking that on board, the only way they can process what it is that I've written is to say that I've lied, that I've

hid evidence, that I'm dishonest, that I'm a pathological liar. And that's the only way that they make it actually carry on with their biases. That really surprised me. Yeah, human minds kind of suck, as we say a lot, yes, and this is you know, when things challenge our core beliefs, it's amazing how much effort will go through to kind

of rationalize that. But I mean I get this too occasionally, right, Like I'm doing a podcast on happiness, and I occasionally get critics who say, you know, my voice sucks or I'm dumb, or how dare I mentioned this particular thing right? Or how dare I not mention someone in like X circumstance when I know we have an episode coming up about X circumstance in like three weeks. If they just waited, What doesn't that kind of critique feel like to you? I know what it does to me. It just feels awful.

How have you kind of processed it? I've tried to process it with empathy actually and actually reasoning myself through it, which is, look, people want to be angry. By being in public life at all, you're going to be a lightning rod for everybody's issues, and a lot of people who attack you it's their issues. It actually almost has nothing to do with you. And I see that as a kind of way to navigate through some of this

real lastiness. But at the same time, it's like being a little boat on a rocky sea, you know, and you're just trying to find that even keel. That takes a lot of energy. Yeah, it can be really exhausting. And I think a particular feature of the kind of trolling that you've been getting is that my understanding is that most of it happens online. Right. It's not like these people see you, you know, in a shop and say, hey, halle face to face, you know, here my critiques about

your podcast. It's kind of this short, character length, anonymous tweet on the internet. Right. And this is something we also know scientifically, is that the internet takes away our face to face interactions, like our natural empathic urges come up when we're talking to people face to face, right, And That's one of the reasons that people can be so mean online is that the normal empathic urges that would creep up, like I shouldn't say something so harmful

to someone. It doesn't feel like you're saying it to a person because you're doing it on the Internet. On the Happiness Lab podcast, Scared of my colleague Jamie Zaki, who studies empathy directly, and he talks about how he worries that the Internet in general is undermining our natural empathy. And I think that this is especially true in this

space of kind of trolling and things. But one of the reasons I love your podcast so much, and one of the reasons it has been fun talking to you today is I can see your natural empathy kind of shining through, right. You know, these are people who are saying really hateful things about you, and you're like, well,

I'm trying to have empathy for them. This is the kind of thing that I think can be so powerful about a podcast like yours, right, is it's kind of like naturally allowing us to sort of flex our empathy muscles. If we can empathize with some women who died many many years ago, who've been in circumstances who are very unlike ours. It's kind of a way to kind of

boost our empathy for other people today. I mean, have you found that, you know, really understanding what it was like to be these women in awful circumstances has helped

you empathize more with people today. Absolutely. I mean writing so much and researching so much about female homelessness, and one day I was just walking down the strand in London and walked by a woman i'd say like maybe early thirties, and she had a child with her who was about seven years old, and she was begging for money, and I just stopped and I was so overwhelmed by looking at her and thinking, my god, you could be any one of these women I have just spent so

much time with. And I stopped and I talked to her, and I gave her some money, and she told me a story about how she fell into arrears on her rent and her landlord threw her out with her child. And I was staggered because this was literally a story right out of the nineteenth century and right there, right in that same place. And so I think writing about these women well, writing about poverty, writing about individual's experiences really makes you see more of the universal human experience.

And I think this is one of the powerful things about listening to these historical stories, right, you know you had that experience with you know, the homeless woman. But I'll be honest, like, actually, the same thing happened. I binge listened to a lot of your show when I was on a long drive and when I finished my drive, I parked my car and I was walking back to my house. I ran into someone who was homeless, this

homeless guy who was asking for some money. And you know, he's a guy who's often on that same street corner. And after listening to your show, I kind of not only gave him money, but did the same thing you did, which was like spoke to him for a couple of like how's your day, Like how are things going? And I was compelled to do it because you know, now he wasn't just someone I was walking by. You know,

this was a human who could have been me. Right, there's this idea that like, you know, you tend to see this not as just oh, this is another but really, this is someone that I've connected with in this interesting way, And so have you had other people who've had this reaction to kind of listening to your podcast where you know they're getting a sense of experiencing more empathy afterwards. Yeah, people are telling me that you know, they're crying as

they're listening to it. I mean, my my feeling is good. Good. We need to connect, we need it's so important, you know, human experience. Understanding human experience is so fundamental to understanding ourselves. And I worry sometimes with a lot of true crime, we tend to focus on the story of the perpetrator. We don't focus on the stories of the victims, and victimology is not as seen as sexy as suspectology. And ironically, you know you mentioned listeners crying, but that those tears

are actually a path towards well being. This is something we know from the research, right that connecting with other people, empathizing with other people, even if they have stories of pain, can sometimes make us feel more socially connected. They can ultimately lead to us helping other people, you know, giving you know, the dollar to the homeless person, and then that can allow you to feel better. Right, So, ironically, kind of connecting to other people's pain is actually a

path to happiness. The problem though, is that it doesn't like feel great in the moment. And I think that's what we're going to tackle when the Happiness Lab returns. In a moment, which is when you compassionately embrace the suffering of other people, it kind of sucks. And so what are some strategies we can use to deal with the injustice of the world, to face it head on, but to protect our well being when we do it. That's what we'll talk about when the Happiness Lab returns

in a second. I'm embarrassed to admit that even as I started listening to your podcast, I just assumed that the five women were, you know, prostitutes, drunkards, you know, people that we could have written off, right, And it took me some work to really listen to their stories and kind of come to terms with the fact that,

you know, they were just like me. You know, it wasn't this kind of thing that I can just kind of write them off, like I have to have empathy for them too, And I think that that sort of fits with a lot of people's experience, right when you finally start empathizing with a person who's going through pain, when you start finally empathizing with a person who's going through tough times. You feel better, it feels good, feels like you're enacting justice. You feel more connected to this person.

And so one of the strategies I like to suggest to my students who want to promote their empathy is to really take time to like work to see things from other people's perspectives, to like work to see things from other people's circumstances, and so, you know, talk about how history does that for us, and how you've been

able to do that with these women's stories. I am a social historian, and so the type of history that I examine is really the nitty gritty of human experience in the past, and I think that automatically brings you into a place of empathy, because when you understand the granular details of what it meant to be alive and a particular time and place, you suddenly see things very differently. And I think that's one of the important things about history.

You know, Psychologically, we often think that empathy involves sort of perspective taking right where I just kind of, you know, sit from my modern environment with no you know, chamber pots or feces around, and I think Oh, what must it have been like, you know, to be you know, a woman then, And often that perspective taking is kind of wrong, right, because I haven't thought really through the circumstances.

And that's why a lot of the science suggests that a better way to empathize is through perspective getting right. You literally ask people what are their stories? Right, which I can do in the modern day. I can interview someone who has a different circumstance than me and ask what that circumstances like and hear it directly from them.

And I think that's the power of the historical approach is ultimately, you know, what social historians have to do is to like find those narratives, you know, even if it wasn't a journal, right, Like find those circumstances and really pull out what would their perspective have been, you know, given these circumstances. And I think it can be really powerful because you're like, oh, when I perspective take, I was like, well, I wouldn't be out on the street

at night, you know, to get murdered. But then I'm like, oh, actually, when I get their perspective and see what it's really like, I think really quite differently. Yeah, exactly, and that is really important. Also when you understand other human experience, both in the past and the present, of people you know, of people you don't know, it helps you become a more empathetic person. It helps you see things you wouldn't

normally see. And I'm a really evangelical when it comes to promoting social history as the way forward in historical study, because it tells us so much about the present, and it helps us unpick so many of our habits, so many of our bad habits, and so many of our belief systems, and it helps us lead through you know, what can we use today and what belongs in the past. Still, it also allows us to kind of build up our

compassion muscles. I mean, there's tons of evidence showing that, you know, compassion is kind of a skill that we can build up over time, right, but it takes some practice, and that practice really does involve thinking through the bad things that are going on with other people. You know. There's evidence, for example, that it involves actively trying to wish well and give compassion to people who might not be so nice to you. Our critics are internet rolls,

people who say me and stuff. The research shows that these are muscles that we can build up. And it sounds like this is something that you've been working on too, especially when it comes to some of the online critics and some of the haters too. As much as I find it annoying and irritating, and actually some of the things they say, it's just so ridiculous that it's laughable, you know, And I do laugh at these things, but I think I have tried to understand, you know, where

are these people coming from. I've tried to understand why there's so much hatred. You know, whether or not they would ever be as kind to me, I think as kind of irrelevant. I think when we want to understand somebody and we want to understand a problem, it's always good to put yourself on somebody else's shoes try to figure out where they're coming from. And I think in many ways that sort of sometimes takes a lot of the poison out of what you see being aimed at

you or the way you see any particular situation. Yeah, and my podcast, we talk with the meditation teacher Tara Brock, and she told this story or metaphor where when you're walking by, you know a dog that's kind of barking at you, and you go to pettit and it sort of snaps at you and snarls. You could be like, oh, what a you know, what a jerk, this horrible dog.

But then you look down and you might notice that the dog's foot is in a trap or that it's hurt, right, and that gives you a completely different emotional perspective on this creature. Right now, you're not dealing with another agent who's mean and awful and trying to be a jerk to you. You're dealing with this person who's hurt, and it so instantly turns on compassion. And it sounds like by taking the perspective of some of these folks who are kind of haters of some of your work, you've

been able to do a little bit of that. You know, they're they're barking dogs, but they're barking dogs who might be hurt to some extent. Yeah, exactly, I mean I think I would. I would also point out that constantly taking that position can get really emotionally exhausting also, where you are always what ends up happening I saw times feel is that you end up doubting your own position because you're giving so much of yourself and so much

of your empathy out to other people. And I think for me and certainly maybe this is even a question for you, is how do you draw the line? Where are the boundaries? Yeah, well, one of the things you know, we learn in compassion research is that there can be these compassion fatigue and so using strategies like literally almost like you go to the gym and do squats to like build up your life muscles, like using strategies to literally build up your compassion muscles can be quite powerful.

And one of the ones you see in the research is a technique called loving kindness meditation, which sounds really cheesy, but it's a meditation practice where you like literally sit and extend compassion to other people. The prompts are usually think about someone who's really close to you and say, may you be happy, may you be well, may you be safe, may you find joy right, which, if you do it right, can kind of give you a sense

of compassion. Sometimes people report feeling something warm in their heart or in their heart space. But then what the practice is is that over time you kind of extend that compassion and that loving kindness to more and more difficult people, you know, maybe like a stranger, and then ultimately, you know, for me, like that guy who made the supermean comment on Twitter about the podcast. Right, you know, may you be happy, may you be safe, May you

find joy? Right. And what the process does is, first of all, it allows you that feeling of that emotion to extend to that person. But then it kind of gets you naturally to do the thing that I think we were just talking about, which is like, Okay, what's their perspective. They're just a human who's trying to find joy, who's like getting through it the same way we all are, where they're kind of figuring it out as they go,

and so it can be a powerful practice. But what the evidence suggests is that practices like that can reduce the thing you're talking about, which is sort of compassion fatigue or sort of burnout fatigue, especially in careers where you have to really be empathic. And so the studies have been done in people like palliative care, war workers and first responders, but I think social historians who are dealing with the deep injustice of the world could probably

benefit from some loving kindness meditation too. Yeah, I think I think you're onto something there. And another strategy I think we talk about on the podcast a lot is just, you know, finding ways to regulate your negative emotion, right. I mean, I think this is true for the online trolls, but I imagine it's a social historian. It's more true for like, you know, facing the injustice of the world

head on. You know, there's a reason we have this just world bias because it sucks to realize that terrible, terrible, awful things can happen to people who don't deserve them right. And that comes with a deep sadness, It comes with anchor, it comes with frustration, and so we need ways to regulate those emotions, and you know, the science shows that the way we do it is to actually sit with them.

You know. Tara Brock, who I mentioned, has this lovely practice that she calls rain, which is a meditation practice. Are ai n You recognize the emotions that your experience, you allow them to investigate what they feel like in your body, and then you kind of do something to nurture yourself. And there's lots of evidence that those kinds of practice where you kind of recognize, oh, I'm feeling really frustrated by you know, the fact that the world

is so unfair. I'm feeling really sad about what happened to these women back then and what happens to women today. You kind of allow those feelings, you said, I'm just going to sit with them and then let them play out in your body. And that's because the research shows that emotions are kind of like like a wave. You know, it's going to go up and you feel more and

more frustrated, but then you sit with it. Over time, it's just going to dissipey, it's going to do something, But then you do the end, which is something to nurture yourself, which is like it's exhausting to deal with the just as the world is exhausting to deal with online haters. You know, what can you do that's really nurturing to kind of take care of yourself. So sounds like practices like rain might also be you know, a good thing for social his historians to invest in to

kind of get through some of the yucky stuff out there. Yeah, I think that sounds really useful for anybody who is surrounded by really unpleasant stuff all the time. And that I was even going to say, you know, this day and age we're living in right now with COVID, and how the New sideical can be extremely overwhelming, and you know, every day when the numbers of people dying are published, that's really quite overwhelming. And I think that sounds like

a really good strategy really for all of us. And so I think this is a nice way to end, you know, And one of the reasons I was so happy to talk to you. You know, our natural instinct, our brains instinct, is to pretend that bad things don't happen to good people. Right. There just must be bad women, right, There's not bad things happening to good women. There's just

bad women. It just simplifies things. And it's one of the reasons I've loved how much your podcast is kind of brought to light, like, hey, these are biases, you know, we need to kind of deal with them and empathize with people who are going through some tough times, you know, but also that the science of happiness maybe can give us some good strategies to deal with our emotions as we do that. Hallie, thank you so much for chatting

with me today. This was awesome. Thank you, Laurie. It's been really enlightening.