Hulking Out! Why You Change When You're Angry

David ben scientist. That show was The Incredible Hulk, starring Bill Bixby and eighties bodybuilder Loofer Igno. In the show, scientist David Banner is accidentally exposed to a bunch of gamma rays, which mess with his body's chemistry. Now, whenever Banner gets angry or emotional, he experiences a terrible reaction that transforms him from a normal, mild mannered researcher into

an enormous, muscular rage monster the Incredible Hulk. Oh and somehow the whole intense emotions thing also makes him green. Banner worries a lot about the emotional demon that lurks inside him. He also spends a lot of time warning people about the consequences of pissing him off. Don't make me angry, you wouldn't like me when I'm angry. My mom was fond of using the very same quote whenever my little brother and I were on the verge of annoying her. Don't make me angry, you would not like

me when I'm angry. I'm just surprised you remembered that. I feel like you said a lot you guys calmed down where I said it. Mary, You really did, You really slowed down. I never actually had to get angry. For a budding psychologist, the concept of an incredible hulk was absolutely fascinating. It wasn't us that our powerful emotions could unleash some inner lurking beast. It was that strong feelings like anger could effectively turn anyone, even my own mom,

into an entirely different person. But is the idea of an incredible help just a comic book metaphor, or is there a real psychological sense in which we do become different people when we're in the grip of anger or other intense feelings like pain, hunger, anxiety, and embarrassment, and if we do become strangers to ourselves when we're in the grip of tough emotions, Are there strategies we can

use to develop more empathy for those anguished strangers? Are there ways we can harness the rational side of our inner David Banners to take better care of ourselves when we emotionally help out. Our minds are constantly telling us what to do to be happy. But what if our minds are wrong? What if our minds are lying to us, leading us away from what will really make us happy. The good news is that understanding the science of the mind can point us all back in the right direction.

You're listening to the Happiness Lab with doctor Laurie Santos. When I was pregnant with my first child, I really wanted to have the natural birth experience. This is author Jemma Hartley. There was this tremendous pressure I had put on myself to be a certain kind of mom, even in the birthing room. Like many pregnant women, Gemma had lots of ideas about what the painful process of childbirth

would be like. A lot of it had to do with that romanticized view of what natural birth is, and I like that idea of myself as someone who was like this tough natural birthing mother. Gemma wanted to be as prepared as possible for the birth experience she dreamed of. She read books about unmedicated childbirth and followed lots of bloggers who'd been through process naturally. This was like the

height of the mom blog. Then I followed a lot of women who had these beautiful birth stories and pictures of their home births and tubs, and I felt like that was the type of womanhood I was aspiring too in that first pregnancy, and things didn't go according to plan with my first child at all. Jemma wound up being induced soon after she arrived at the hospital without getting much of a choice from her doctors, which led to a whole host of additional medical interventions, including an

epidural and an episiotomy. I had a lot of anger at myself. I had a lot of anger in general around the experience, But I think the first person I blamed was myself. Jemma was angry that she chose to listen to her doctor in the heat of the moment. I should have told that doctor, like absolutely not I should have stayed the course. It didn't matter that most people probably would have done the same thing Jemma did and listened to the medical professionals if they were in

a scary, painful and uncertain situation. But that wasn't how Jema viewed it. After the fact, I was really unkind to myself in that way. I just blamed myself for not being stronger in the moment while I was in a lot of pain. So when Jemma found out she was pregnant with her second child, she immediately began fantasizing about how she could rectify that disappointing first birth experience. Maybe there's a chance that I'm going to get the kind of birth eye envisioned the first time around, And

then that also didn't happen. Jemma's experience with childbirth number two was much better than the first time around, but during the delivery, her medical team worried that she wasn't progressing as fast as she should be. The doctors again suggested inducing labor and an epidural, even though Jemma had really hoped for an unmedicated birth before she went into labor. She again decided to take the intervention, and so that was still a difficult thing for me to process after

everything was done. When Jemma got pregnant with baby number three, she held out hope that the third time would be the charm. She found a midwife she trusted who'd be there to advocate for her at the hospital, and even joined a group of other pregnant women who'd made the

commitment to a natural labor. We were talking with a group of three midwives every week about what our plans were and kind of coming to this like group consensus of what we wanted, and I felt really confident in my ability to go through and have the birth experience that I wanted with my third this time, when Jemma went into labor, everything went as well as could possibly be planned. She made it to the hospital with no complications.

My midwife was there, you know, within twenty minutes, and she like lit candles and drew a bath for me and was like, we're going to get through this. Jemma progressed as expected. Her doctors didn't see a need for an epidural or any medical interventions. Her dream of a natural childbirth was mere moments away. You're at the finish line. And I decided the pain was too much and I requested an epidural, and my midwife was really like, are you sure you just have to get through this last part.

We've talked about this for your whole pregnancy. But I felt really clear in my decision. What mattered to Jemma when she was in the worst pain of her life wasn't the fantasy she'd had during her pregnancy. The only thing she cared about then was reducing the pain so that she could feel present for her final baby's birth. That ended up being more important to me than having

the natural birth. Research shows that the switch and preferences that Jemma experienced in the delivery room is strikingly common. One study surveyed a group of pregnant women before, during, and after they gave birth. Before and after labor, many of the women shared Jemma's strong preference for an unmedicated birth. They too, predicted that they'd stick to that choice even in a moment of extreme pain, But during labor, nearly

all of their preferences switched. Like Gemma, many women wound up requesting the very pain relief they'd sworn off minutes earlier, and so I ended up getting the epidural at the very last moment that they would let me. I was not ready to go through that pain. Gema chronicled her repeated changes of heart in an essay for the website Romper entitled I wanted a natural childbirth, Then I changed

my mind. Writing the article was Jema's attempt to process the sense of anger and blame she'd felt about her decision with the first two pregnancies. I wanted that identity, and I had already sort of claimed it for myself, even though I hadn't done it yet, and so I had to sort of shift my perspective on who I was as a birthing person. What I find so fascinating about Jema's story is that it shows just how bad we are at understanding what we'll need when we're in

the grip of an intense emotion. We assume that we'll be courageous when we're hit with extreme pain or column in the midst of a terrifying situation, or stoic in the face of a rage inducing event, and we often beat ourselves up badly when we tap out, feel terrified, or go full hulk in anger. It's so much easier to find our inner critic than our inner cheerleader. You truly feel like you're a different self moment to the next, as driven by these really intense emotional or visceral states.

It's very challenging. This is psychologist Rachel written a second later. It almost feels like you're dealing with a stranger, but the stranger is yourself. It's just your emotional state. Two minutes ago. Rachel knows just how hard it can be to have empathy for yourself after you've been in the grip of a tough emotional situation. When I was a kid, I was just so into figure skating. It became such a part of my life. It's basically all I did.

That was the career that I wanted, and as a part of that, I had just had massive performance anxiety. At skating practice, Rachel was the picture of poise and confidence, but as soon as it was time for a big meet or competition, everything changed. I would faint before competitions, I would fully go down. As soon as the music stopped and the performance was over, Rachel's anxiety completely disappeared. We're talking like five to ten seconds after this is over.

Then I just had the sense of regret of why did that go so poorly? And it just went so quickly to just self critique, sort of like really intense

self loathing. Post competition, Rachel experienced the same frustration about her behavior as author Deema Hartley experienced after taking those epidurals to Rachel, that skater who was having a panic attack seconds earlier was as much of a stranger as the raging, incredible hulk was to mild Manner David Banner, and then once the competition was coming again, I would

get it. Eventually, the constant choking under pressure forced the budding skater to drop her dreams of turning pro but the curiosity Rachel felt about her own affect of transformation stuck with her and I think certainly has shaped my interests to this day, this power of affect. Rachel is now an assistant professor at the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto. Since leaving competitive figure skating, she's become an expert on the psychological bias known as

the hot cold empathy gap. So the empathy gap is this broad tendency for people who are in emotional states what are known as hot states, to fail to appreciate what it will be like in an unemotional or cold state. Study after study has shown that we have trouble comprehending other people's hot states, their anxiety or anger, or sadness or exhaustion, when we ourselves are in a not so

emotional cold state. For example, fit and healthy nurses routinely undermedicate cancer patients experiencing the hot state of chronic pain. Parents who aren't stressed about an upcoming test often underestimate the academic anxieties their children feeld, And as one Irish proverb eloquently put it, a full person has a hard time understanding the needs of the hungry. It's kind of hard to jump into the mind of someone else who's

experiencing something very different from what you are. Rachel wanted to figure out why people have this hot cold empathy gap. Her work started from the hypothesis that we find it easiest to empathize with another person if we've had some experience of the thing they're going through, and there are findings to support that. If you put undergraduate students in a wheelchair for a day, they're more likely to indicate that they feel empathy toward someone else who is disabled. So,

of course shared experiences can help with empathy. And so I think our intuition does come from a good place. There's just real limits to it, and Rachel found that the extent of these limits is rather surprising. In one study, she tested whether being forced to endure a boring task in the past would make subjects more empathic towards strangers

who are currently doing that task. She brought college students into the lab and told them about a fictional subject, let's call him Pat, who was asked to do an onerous memory test that involved remembering long strings of numbers, exactly the type of lab studies that undergrads don't want to come in and do. Pat was really motivated to finish this test, but he got too tired and flaked out. The subjects were then asked to evaluate Pat. Did they

think he was competent and capable and so on. The first group of participants had no personal experience doing the tests that Pat had fluncked, but the second group of subjects got to evaluate Pat immediately after doing twenty minutes of the same boring test themselves. So these were people who were really in the heat of it that they

understood the fatigue. A third group of subjects was also asked to evaluate pat but they did so a full week after they'd completed the boring task, when they'd had plenty of time to recover from the hot state of exhaustion. The most compassionate people were the ones who were fatigued themselves, followed by those who had no experience. But the least compassionate people of all were the ones who had done

the task themselves. But they had done it a week ago, So it was something specifically about only not being in the fatigue state anymore, but also having the knowledge that, well, I did that task just a week ago, and I managed to get through it myself. That seemed to be particularly problematic for compassion. Our emotional empathy gaps, it seems,

are even more cavernous than researchers had expected. Rachel worries that our inability to show compassion for the people who need it most, even in cases where we've been there and done that, could be hindering our happiness. Tons of studies show that we get a well being boost from helping others in need and taking care of the people we love, but Rachel's were hints that we may be significantly less motivated to provide that help when we're in

a cold state. But there's a second, and possible even bigger worry for our happiness. If we're bad at understanding other people's hot states and showing them compassion, are we any better at being kind to ourselves when we cross that hot coal boundary? I think an essential insight of a lot of this research is that when you're not in an emotional state, you just can't really grasp what

it's life. The Happiness lab will be right back. We were on this bike trip and there was one day that was just particularly gruling, and we kind of knew it at the beginning of the day. Social psychologist Leaf van Boven and George Lowenstein recently went on a hard cycling trip together. Leif says that they're used to intense rides, but even they knew that this particular day of biking, which included an eleven hour trek entirely up hill, would

test their limits. About halfway through the day, we suddenly just got desperate to get out of the situation, and we were trying to get to the top of this hill where we could make a call to someone to come and pick us up. Even though Leaf and George had fully committed to that tough route earlier that morning, the pain and exhaustion they experienced in the moment were just too much. Unfortunately, their desperate attempt to escape was

defeated by poor cell phone service. We were unable to reach the person to come rescue us, and so we had to do another twenty five miles and four thousand foot assent, which almost seemed like it was going to be impossible to do. But at the end of the day, when we got into camp, we were all so relieved that we hadn't been able to reach the person, because we forgot the misery of those twenty five miles. It's

an interesting counterfact. Well, actually, if we had been successful in getting a ride at that point, would we have looked back and just felt just a little bit embarrassed that we weren't able to actually pull it off and ride the full distance? You know that we would have. I'm so glad that we had no phone service at

that point. Even now, I am, like psychologist Rachel Rattan, George and Leaf are interested in the mechanism underlying our hot cold empathy gaps why we can't fully understand strong emotional states like fear, or anger or exhaustion when we're

not experiencing that state ourselves. Their first hypothesis about the processes underlying these gaps when something like this, when we are trying to predict how other people are going to respond to a particular situation, we first try to imagine how would we respond in that situation, and then we tried to make adjustments for the fact that the other

person is different from us. You might assume, as many psychologists initially did, the empathy gaps occur because we don't fully understand how other people are different from us, and so we screw up that second part of the process. We don't correctly adjust for how different other people really are. But what we find is their big reason that you get it wrong is because you get yourself from You don't know how you would act if you got into that situation. It turns out that we also show an

empathy gap for ourselves. Take for example, my favorite of Leaf and Georgie's studies. Leaf and George would have loved to have forced their subjects into super extreme hot states. It's like reage or pain or starvation. But powerful states like those are pretty hard to induce, at least ethically in laboratory settings, so they focused instead on a feeling that's both relatively common and reasonably achievable in a classroom.

Social embarrassment. If you just kind of imagine standing in front of an audience and having to deliver an impromptu speech, everyone understands that that's embarrassing that they might want to get out of that situation. But Leaf and George didn't

just ask their subjects to give an impromptu speech. They put students in a big group and told them that they might soon be chosen to step up to the front of the class and perform the best dance moves they could to Rick James's nineteen eighty one song super Freak. We chose super Freak because everybody knows super Freak Like. It's probably an easily danceable song if someone were to actually enjoy dancing in front of an audience, like, it's very easy to put people in this state where they

can imagine exactly what's happening. We've removed all the mystery of just a pure fact of the situation they're confronted with. The remaining mystery is, how are you actually going to respond if that's reality. Half of the students were told to imagine, just hypothetically, what would it be like to dance in front of the group. What's the smallest amount of money we'd need to pay you to do that. Most of people in the hypothetical condition, they were like,

I don't know, eight bucks or so. But the other students were told that the dance off was not hypothetical, it was actually happening very soon. Unlike subjects in the hypothetical condition, these students were terrified that they might actually be wiggling their butts on stage within the next thirty seconds. They were feeling the heat of embarrassment, and their hot state seals wanted to chicken out as quickly as possible.

Leaf than George found that students in this hot state demanded over fifty bucks to get on stage, and some students wanted way more. The surprisingly large number of people said like a million dollars, Like they just wanted to really drive that point home that there's no possible way I'll ever do this when we're in a cold state. We have the illusion that our hot state sells act in ways that are confident and courageous that we'd be

totally willing to embarrass ourselves to earn eight bucks. But when we're actually in that hot state, we suddenly want to avoid discomfort as much as possible. The problem is that our lion cold state minds don't realize that, so they constantly put us in emotional situations that kind of suck. As George knows all too well, there is a girl I always had a crush on in high school. She had your first name, Laurie. All of high school I was tongue tied, like I never asked her out or

anything like that. Several years after graduation, George's mom, a professor, called to share some news. Her son's high school crush had enrolled in her new class, and I said, really, George, figure he must have grown emotionally since high school. In this cold state, he fully believed he wouldn't fall prey to that dorky teenage anxiety. So George hatched a plan. He'd head to his mom's classroom and wait for class to end, and when Laurie walked out the door this time,

he'd finally be able to chat with her. And sure enough, how it walks Laury just five minutes before. George had predicted that he'd be completely smooth, that he'd finally talked to his crush and overcome his adolescent shyness. But it didn't pan out like that. I was instantly transported back to those days. Tongue tied again, and she just walked

past and left the building. So I think a lot of us have fantasies off we only we could go back to high school, we'd be self brave, but we wouldn't be We'd be exactly the same way that we were. Experiences like these have convinced George and Leaf that comic books like The Incredible Help are onto something important about

human nature. The idea that we are different people and we're in different emotional states helps to understand why we have so little perspective into our own feelings and behavior when we are in a different state. This inability to predict how we'll think or act in a hot state

often leaked to a huge hit on our happiness. There are tons of situations in which we just set ourselves up for failure, whether it's the pain of a tough bike ride or the stress of a tough week at work, or the sugary temptations that come when we try to eat healthier often put ourselves into situations where, in the grip of a hot state, we do things we hadn't expected. We call a cat, or shout out our coworkers, or

grab a candy bar. Try as we might, we simply can't predict the happiness needs we'll have in a hot state. From the vantage point of a cold state, we also get very very judgy, and the cold state you have very little empathy for your hot state. We tend to blame ourselves and hold ourselves much more accountable exactly because of this empathy gap, because we don't really understand the

power of the emotions that we were operating under. And as you can probably guess, the pain caused by all this blame, guilt and judginess isn't great for our happiness. The problem is we can't in retrospect then understand why we fail to act, and so those moments end up kind of haunting us as we look back on them. So how can we deal with the anguish this haunting can cause? Well, the science shows there are ways we can be kinder to our helped out selves. If we're

willing to put in some introspective work. We'll learn more about what those strategies are. When the Happiness Lab returns from the break, my nerves would just get so bad. I would start to just feel I would get covered in cold streat. I would just feel a loss of control of my body, and I would go down. Psychologist and former competitive skater Rachel Return knows just how badly hot emotional states like anxiety can affect us. All I

wanted to do is run away. Like if I could have just shed my identity, gotten a new passport, it left the country before some big competitions, I absolutely would have done that. Rachel also knows the shame and judginess that begins as soon as our hot states start to cool off. I would just be like, why did I do that? That doesn't make any sense. This is the thing that I care about so deeply. These are three to four minute performances. Why can't I put that aside

and just do this? And decades after performance anxiety ended her skating career, Rachel still struggles with the way intense states impact her performance. I've fainted during an academic talk. So this is just something that's plagued me for a long time, and it really drives this fascination with the power of these states, and that's one of the reasons Rachel's current research is focused on how we can reignite the compassion that our cool, rational selves should be feeling

for our hot, emotional selves. The first step to minding such empathy gaps, according to Rachel, is making sure that our cold state selves remember that we have such gaps in the first place. When you're not in an emotional state at a given time, it's nearly impossible to understand its effect on your behavior. We usually plan our lives when we're in a calm, rational state, but we often forget that more intense, emotionally charged situations could be lurking

right around the corner. There's just been so much research on how whatever state we're in, just it feels like the truth, Like it just feels like an accurate assessment of reality, and I'll never not feel this right. This prediction that will always feel as rational as we do

in a cold state gets us into trouble. We constantly underestimate how emotionally vulnerable will be in certain situations, and this leads to what Rachel's thesis, advisor Laura Nordgren called the restraint byas when we're in a cold state, we assume we'll have more willpower and emotional control and tough

situations than we actually do. This is one of the really strong nuggets of wisdom in this idea that you really truly don't have control and you just have to internalize that message because you may feel great right now, but if a craving takes hold of craving takes hold it, you truly don't have as much control over that as you think. Rachel thinks we should practice reminding ourselves that we're going to be pretty powerless when a truly intense

emotion strikes. She likes to quote one AA mantra in particular, the one is away from one's last shrink, the closer one is to the next one, which is just the farther you get from something that you actually get worse at understanding it. But Rachel also has practical tips for how to at least nudge ourselves closer to that kind of understanding. One recommendation involves doing author and mother of

three Gemma Hartley did after her final childbirth experience. We can write to ourselves about how we really felt when we made a hot state decision. It's a trick that Rachel has used a lot. I started to just write down what's going on when I'm in a hot state, just as a way to consult with the future cold self.

If you get terrified every time your friends drag you on stage for karaoke, or enraged every time you hop in your car to run errands during rush hour, grab a pen when you're still in the grip of that hot feeling and give your future cold state self a little happiness advice. Just write down, like, don't do this again. Your past self is going to communicate to a future self from the stage, because you can't rely on the

idea that you're going to remember what that was. It's just giving you a kind of a little sneak peek, some slight access to how you actually might feel on that state. Rachel also recommends what she calls anticipated re experience.

When you're in a cold state, take a few minutes to carefully and vividly imagine what it would feel like to re experience a past strong emotion, and go slowly play out the emotional experience, almost like a movie in your head in which you follow the steps of going from a cold state into a hot state and then acknowledge that the intense emotion of craving or anger or anxiety you just simulated is probably lurking somewhere around the corner.

So if you tell people like, yeah, you've made it out of this state or this difficult life experience, but there's a chance that that might not always be true, that's a surefire way to get people to at least somewhat tap into that experience again. Rachel says that such knowledge is power. She worries that we're prone to just ignoring or shying away from the things we did when we hulked out. I think people are so quick to say that whatever was done in these emotional states is

not them. That's paradoxically not helpful because you're not learning from it. It can be tough to take a cold, no pun intended, hard look at how we behave when we're angry or anxious or pissed or exhausted, But doing so gives us critical information about the ups and downs of our emotional life. If you're collecting data and you're seeing the ebbs and flows, it's hard to completely distort

that information. Rachel's final tip is the hardest one. It involves recognizing that will never truly be able to overcome our empathy gap, and that basic feature of human nature means unfortunately, our hot state selves will pretty much always feel like a stranger. As a real challenge for us to understand ourselves in this sense. Again, like I keep coming back to the AA model, is it because I think there's a real beauty to it, which is like, at some point you have to just acknowledge the loss

of control and live your life that way. This final piece of advice reminded me of something that psychologist George Lowenstein shared when we spoke earlier. It isn't possible to bridge the empathy gap itself, but George and his colleague Leaf Fan Boven share Rachel's hope that if we can just get our rational selves to remember that fact, it'll

help us better take care of our emotional selves. The solution isn't just to sort of say you need to be different, you need to kind of develop willpower, self control and be a better person. It's how we think about restructuring the situations on the context that you find yourself in so that you are less often tempted, that you're less often sort of pushed into this hot situation.

Like Rachel, Leaf and Georgie are optimistic that a better understanding of the empathy gap could help our cold state selves to become a little less judgy and perhaps even more forgiving when we do holk out. There's a famous saying, to explain is to forgive, and I think that to some degree that is true when it comes to empathy gapps. The more we can truly understand people's behavior, the more

sympathetic we would be. The hot cold empathy gap means that we all have a misunderstood inner monster who's ready to burst out whenever we experience intense emotions. It's not just as David Banner says, that we don't like ourselves when we're angry. It's more that we simply can't know ourselves when we're in a hot state, even though our lying cold state minds tell us otherwise. The science shows that we can't fully grasp what it's like to be

in a hot state unless we're actually in it. There's no way to cure or the incredible hulks lurking inside us, but there are strategies to at least acknowledge those Hulks and better plan for their arrival. And all the suggestions you've heard today in this episode kind of fit with what my mom and I learned watching my favorite TV show back in the day, because what I loved most about The Incredible Hulk is that researcher David Banner was

pretty good at following all this scientific advice. When the series ended, Banner still hadn't found a cure for his tragic metamorphosis, but he successfully lived his life in full awareness of the rage monster inside him. He spent pretty much every episode trying to make sure he didn't get into situations that would cause him to hulk out. He controlled his circumstances by admitting to those around him that

they needed to be careful about upsetting him. Banner didn't go to AA, but he fully acknowledged the loss of control that comes from being a human with an empathy gap, and he really did try to be the best caretaker he could for the fragile, yet rather muscular, emotional green

dude within. I hope your cold State selves will commit to being nicer and more compassionate to your inner emotional hulks, and I hope you'll return next week to check out the next episode of The Happiness Lab with me Doctor Laurie Santos. The Happiness Lab is co written and produced by Ryan Dilley, Emily Ann Vollon and Courtney Guerino. Joseph Friedman checked our facts. Our original music was composed by Zachary Silver, with additional scoring, mixing and mastering by Evan Viola.

Special thanks to Milabelle heather Thing, John Schnars, Carlie Migliori, Christina Sullivan, Maggie Taylor, Eric Sandler, Nicole Morano, Royston Preserve, Jacob Weisberg, and my agent, Ben Davis. The Happiness Lab is brought to you by Pushkin Industries and me Doctor Laurie Santos. To find more Pushkin podcasts, listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your podcasts.