The Hidden Power of Negative Emotions | George Loewenstein | The Art of Charm

An emotion is basically a program that um evolved in our evolutionary past um to deal with recurring situations of evolutionary significance like escaping predators. Emotions are all-encompassing programs. They change our memory. They change our perceptions. They change our mindset. They change our hormones. They change our muscles. When we are in a diff different emotional states, we are effectively different people. Emotions reprogram us and we have as little empathy for ourselves in a different emotional state because we're really a different [clears throat] person when we're in a different emotional state as we have for another person. [music] Welcome to the show. It's great to have you. >> Great to be on it. >> You've spent your whole career studying why people misjudge their own emotions. If you had to boil it down to one sentence, what is it? >> I guess it's something I would call an empathy gap, but it isn't about well, it isn't mainly about interpersonal empathy. It's about um empathy for yourself. And the basic idea is when you're in one emotional state, it's almost impossible to imagine how you would feel or behave if you were in a different emotional state. And that applies like if you're in a emotionally cold state, you're not emotional. It's very difficult to imagine how you would feel or behave if you were in an emotional state. And but the reverse is also true. When you're caught up in emotions, you lose perspective and it's hard to imagine not being in the state that you're currently in. >> What's working against us here? Because it feels like for many of us, especially in our audience, they feel like they have a good handle on their emotions and they can work through them at will. >> Um, very few people really do have a good handle on on your emotions. like um >> even when you can let's say that you're very down, you're depressed. Even when you can kind of at a cognitive level reason, okay, I'm depressed now, but I'm probably not going to be in the future, it still feels like you're going to be depressed forever. And this is the true this is like your true reality. Many of us would label that as a a negative emotion that we want to get rid of and we want to put a lot of effort to remove that feeling of depression or feeling of sadness. And because of that, we try to orient ourselves towards what we would label as more positive emotions, pursuing happiness, pursuing joy. >> It's amazing to me how difficult it is to get rid of negative emotions. Well, nobody can really extricate them from their life in general. And it's not it isn't really that surprising I guess if you're depressed that it's not that easy to get out of depression because you know people go to see psychotherapists, they take drugs, things like that. But there's some other there are some other types of emotions that are so counterproductive and yet people just can't move past them. As part of the book that I wrote um the opposite of happiness, I did a very big survey. I called it the misery survey with over 500 people and I asked them about kind of their pet misery, [clears throat] like the misery that they most suffer from. And I asked them to tell me a story about it and I asked them to tell me if they had any special insights into it. I asked them when did that story that you told me, when did it happen and how bad was it? And something that really struck me from looking at the responses was how many of these stories dated way way back in people's lives and let's say it was something like um anger or envy or jealousy. People were decades after the story happened people were still suffering from the same emotion like anger. It seems like um anger is such a miserable feeling, kind of corrosive anger, such a terrible feeling, and it would be so good for people to just walk away from it, to forgive and forget, but people just aren't able to do that. What goes along with that is the impact on our relationships. So carrying on to those emotions often will lead us to cutting that person out of our life, breaking a relationship that we've had for years, a partner, spouse, a best friend over this one distinct event and this emotion surrounding it, unable to look past that emotion and judge them more on the totality of their character or the relationship we've built up until that point. >> There's a category of people who are um rejection sensitive. I think I mean that um I think almost everyone f um is vulnerable to to that to some degree but some people are more vulnerable than others and people who are rejection sensitive very often they'll preemptively reject people because they're afraid of being rejected themselves or they'll act behave in ways that end up leading them to be rejected. There was a very cool study where they asked people to imagine that um they go into they have a partner and they go into the room and their partner's on the phone and they try and they start talking to the partner but the partner doesn't pay attention to them. And they ask like why do you think your partner would do that? And the people who are much less rejection sensitive say, "Oh, it was probably that there was something great on their phone that they could they couldn't separate themselves from and tear themselves away from." And the people who are rejection sensitive think that, "Oh, they're being hostile." And then the two groups are asked like, "Um, how would you respond?" And the first the group that's less rejection sensitive says, "Oh, I just wait for them to finish viewing what they're viewing." And the rejection sensitive people say, "Oh, I'm going to wait till they want my attention and then I'll show them. I'm not going to pay attention to them." So, like, I mean, that's true of so many of these negative emotions. They tend to be kind of self-fulfilling. I mean, jealousy is one of the worst. By jealousy. I mean not I have a separate chapters on envy and jealousy. Envy is kind of um when you kind of like to have what somebody else has. Jealousy is a fear of losing somebody. It could be losing a friend but usually it's losing a romantic partner. >> Romantic partner. And it's kind of striking how the degree to which um extreme jealousy leads people which is fear of losing someone leads people to do exactly what um lead which what ends up causing them to lose the person they're fearful of losing. >> What I think is so interesting about this especially going back to the the misery uh study is how often that misery is one direction. So, the person we cut off might have no idea why we cut them off and have no idea that we're feeling miserable about it and about what they did to us, but we have that self-directed view around this emotion and the way that we color the world and our judgments of others. And the other person's walking around completely oblivious to what just happened and the misery that we're carrying because of them. in the modern world where we often communicate by texts and emails. I guess the young generation it's all text, no emails. But in any case, I think there's um huge differences between people and how quickly they respond and also how quickly they expect other people to respond. I'm somebody who if I send an a text or an email, I really want a rapid response. And when I don't get a rapid response, like the person takes a few days, I don't think, oh, they must be busy. I think, oh, like maybe they hate me or something like that, I tend to kind of catastrophize. >> What's also interesting about that is our emotional state has nothing to really do with what the message is, but that is the way we'll view that message. So, if I'm angry about something else and I get a response that's neutral or maybe a little rushed, I can read it as curt and anger from the other person and it can doubly anger me now that I'm seeing this message in an angry state and reading their perspective in an angrier way than was intended. Emails and texts are so dangerous because unlike face-to-face communication where you have all sorts of context and facial cues and other types of information, it's so easy to misinterpret them. And so like there's a famous study where people um sent messages that were sarcastic and the people who picked them up didn't interpret them that way. And that's that that is a just a disaster. Like um [laughter] they say um oh you looked so terrible today. What they really mean is you looked amazing. But if you interpret it at face value then you feel deeply insulted and insecure. That's another great example where someone's intention can be humorous but our current emotional state doesn't allow that humor to come through or impact us in a positive way. and we can then read them and create our own personal misery around the way we read. That's something completely unintentional >> and that's a terrible a perverse feature of our kind of emotional composition. When we are in a negative state, there's a phenomenon called mood contingent judgment and mood contingent memory. Also when we are in a negative state we tend to interpret thing um things that happen to us things that people say to us negatively which kind of pins us down in our negative emotional state. In fact it exacerbates the emotional state and then also this phenomenon of mood contingent memory. When we are in a negative state, we just naturally remember bad things like social blunders, bad things that happened to us, you know, and so on. And again, it it pins us in a negative state. And there's a lot of a lot of perverse feedback mechanisms. Yeah. >> Yeah. But what what I found interesting around that is then its impact on self-esteem and the carryover effect of the way we view ourselves just from what you described. Some of those blunders, some of those mistakes, some of those just very human situations we find ourselves in can impact our self-esteem in really profound ways. I actually wrote an academic paper titled fragile self-esteem and it's exactly about that and it's about the idea that you can get get pinned down into a negative state or pinned down in the positive state but if you're in the positive state it's likely that you're always worrying about um falling into the negative state and getting tra and getting trapped there. There's some really nice research by um the psychologist Roy Bowmeister and others on um violence and aggression. So like it used to be believed that violent people had low self-esteem and but when they actually measured the self-esteem of violent people, it didn't turn out that way. It actually looked like they had high self-esteem. And then Bowmeister came along and ca came up with this brilliant idea that people who are violent have high but fragile self-esteem. It's like they're walking on top of a wall and somebody's negative comment or at least comment that could be interpreted negatively threatens to push them off the wall. And so they're always um responding aggressively to any perceived slight. I think it's like a it's a really brilliant theory for understanding aggression. >> Double tapping on that, I think many of us feel that this idea of self-esteem is more durable than it really is and we build it once and we just carry it through our our lives. But in actuality, um there's great science that shows that's not true at all. And one of the early chapters of my book is on self-esteem. And I talk about Mark Lir's sociometer theory. The sociometer theory is the idea that like when we were evolving in small groups, it was really essential not to get ejected from your group. Like if you got ejected, you'd be vulnerable to predators. You wouldn't be able to share food. It was basically being rejected by your group. It was a death sentence. >> And so it was incredibly important >> um for you to maintain the respect and esteem and liking of your group. And according to sociometer theory, self-esteem isn't really self-esteem. It's um your appraisal. Self-esteem is really your appraisal of how your social group is evaluating you. And and that and according to this theory, your self-esteem, it isn't a stable thing. It can vary from moment to moment. Somebody, some random stranger is rude to you and your self-esteem can plummet like um >> Yeah. And yes, just it's it's kind of um crazy. >> Well, well, even more fascinating to me, the rude makes sense. Someone rude to us, we feel like there's judgment placed. But but even there are situations where we could catch someone laughing and we can assume they're laughing about us and then we take that down into our self-esteem and say, "Okay, I'm doing something wrong." And and judge ourselves negatively. And the laugh could be about a joke they heard in their AirPods, so listen to something else. completely nothing to do with us. But so much of this is the personalization and then the building of our own self-image and the fragility around the influence emotions create for us. >> That's right. And what I mean one of the central themes of my book is that when it comes to positive and negative emotions, there's huge asymmetry. So there's when it comes to self-esteem, there's almost no depth, no bottom to the uh degree of bad self-esteem you can experience. And you can experience that for an awfully long time. When it comes to positive self-esteem, you can, you know, you can feel kind of good about yourself, but it there's no um kind of soaring to heights of high self-esteem, unless perhaps you're a narcissist, but even narcissists narcissists are famously insecure. And feelings of positive self-esteem also tend to be much more fleeting than feelings of negative negative self-esteem. And this is true kind of across the emotions. There's some emotions that don't even have a positive counterpart. Like for example, envy. You um envy is when you recognize that somebody else has something that seems desirable to you that you don't have, >> right? >> And you feel bad. But suppose that you recognize that somebody else doesn't have something desirable that you do have. Like, wouldn't it be nice >> if that made you feel really good? And you know, maybe it might feel make you feel a tiny bit good, like you were able to gloat a tiny bit about your superiority, but really it's much more likely, unless you're kind of a psychopath, un it's much more likely that the emotion you're going to be experiencing is sympathy, another negative emotion. And so, >> yeah. So, it's kind of like there's so many of these situations where the down like you're walking on this ridge and there's a downside in one direction and a downside in the other direction. >> Yeah. And the asymmetry of it is fascinating. So, I I know obviously you're you're writing a book and you could have all of your colleagues give rave reviews, but yet that one negative critique from someone who doesn't know you at all is probably going to stick with you more than all of the positive. It doesn't matter if the positives reach tens of thousands. Same with our podcasts and videos. You know, there's tons of people who are saying, "Oh, I I love this." But those negative commenters, those people who say something about us, it's piercing weigh far more on our psyche than any amount of positivity. >> Yeah, that's right. I I have that with teaching ratings. like I remember verbatim a few u negative comments that I got in my teaching ratings. There's a metaphor that um Paul Rosen uses to describe this. It's the roach in the wine. If you take a um a barrel of the finest French wine and you drop a single roach into it, you ru you ruin it. But you could take a vat of roaches and no amount of adding French wine is going to help uh make it attractive. And it's a it's a great metaphor like >> you go to dinner with your significant other. Let's say you go to a really nice fancy restaurant and the food is delicious and then um she makes a thoughtless comment or even much more common or at least in my case I make some kind of a thoughtless comment and I can tell she's bothered and all of a sudden um you know we might as well be in McDonald's you know like um the the I don't taste the food. >> Sunsets's ruined. Yeah. Dinner's awful. >> Yeah, exactly. >> So, what's going on with our brains there? Why why is there such an an asymmetry and imbalance here? >> I mean, it's because um our brains are produced by evolution. And evolution designed us to be what all that evolution cares about is that we survive and re reproduce. That's called, you know, evolutionary fitness. evolution. Um, as the kind of um the um a effective psychiatrist um Randy Nest said doesn't give a fig about whe whether we're happy. Happiness is just a mechanism that gets to us to do things and unhappiness is as well. But it turns out that kind of negative affective states are way more effective in getting us to do the things we need to do to improve our evolutionary fitness than positive affective states. There are all these I mean if you look at the shelves of bookstores they're filled with books about happiness like and a lot of them are self-help books about how to achieve happiness but if you actually read the academic literature on happiness the it turns out that psychologists are kind of flumxed about what the function of happiness is and it turns out that there's kind of a few different positive emotions but if you look at someone's face you can't distinguish what emotion they're feeling if they're in a positive state. But negative emotions are very distinct from one another. Like if we're afraid >> or if we're envious or angry, you know, like um humiliated, if we're ashamed, they the the face and the body posture is completely different for each of these. And they each have their own separate functions. And so evolution figured out very very early that the negative emotions are kind of much more effective. It's the stick is way more effective than the carrot for getting us to do what we need to do to survive and reproduce. What I also find fascinating is what we think in perceive in the future will make us happy as the destination. when we often reach it, it doesn't actually make us happy. And then if we think back to our our version of ourselves when we thought that would make us happy and we say, "Hey, we achieved it." We can recognize it, but that still doesn't make us feel happy. But so many of us get caught on this pursuit of happiness and then feeling unhappy even when we're achieving the things that we mentally thought would give us immense happiness. >> Right. I I think that's that that's absolutely true. And A big part of it is we when something good happens to us and um it just becomes part of who we are, it it kind of recedes into the background. We take it for granted and um and we so we kind of hideonically adapt to it very very rapidly. And so we when we're thinking about oh if I could let's say if you're an academic if I publish this book I'd be really h I'd be really happy. Well, the happiness lasts just amazingly um an amazingly short period of time. Unfortunately, I mean, we do tend to we we do adapt to negative things as well. We can be happy in pretty diverse or not too unhappy in pretty terrible negative circumstances, but our adaptation to negatives is much slower and less complete than our adaptation to positive things. And there are all sorts of different things that can prevent us from adapting to negative things. Like I the the last chapter in the first half of my book is about hope, the downside of hope. And one of the things that can prevent us from adapting to negative things is exactly hope. Why is that the case? Like it it doesn't rationally make sense. Logically, I'm sitting here saying, "Well, that doesn't make sense. Why is our brain wired in that way? And what what's happening there that that is so misguided?" When we think that there may be some prospect for relief in the future, our brain says, "Okay, I'm not going to do the mental work of adapting to this thing cuz maybe it will get better." But I mean basically adaptation to negative things happens when your brain programming decides that um okay he's not going to I'm trying to get him to change his behavior. I'm trying to get him to improve his situation. He's not doing it. Okay, it's not working. I'll I'll cut off the negative feeling because it's just not it's not succeeding. But when then when you introduce a little bit of hope then your brain is kind of not it's not consciously thinking this but at some level it's thinking oh well um maybe there is some prospect for improvement. I'm not going to adapt it. It it does make sense for me to keep like hitting him with a stick and maybe he'll do what he needs to do to make his situation better. Well, I I think so many of us have heard the importance of developing empathy for our interpersonal relationships for becoming high EQ and you talk about this empathy gap for ourselves like what is going on there? What do you mean by that? And how should we be looking at empathy when it comes to ourselves? >> I personally think that um empathy is impossible. It it doesn't exist. I think we can be let's start with other people. Yeah, >> I think I think we can be um sympathetic possibly very sympathetic to towards somebody else and that means that we feel bad because they feel bad and I think I mean sympa if if you yourself are in a bad situation other people's sympathy can be very rewarding right it's nice to think that somebody else is experiencing sympathy but to me empathy means feeling the same thing so If you are depressed, I can be sympathetic that you feel depressed, but I'm not going to be depressed myself. And that would be empathy. So I can feel sympathy, but not empathy. But even when it comes to sympathy, um I think there are huge limits on sympathy. If you have if you feel depressed or you have a migraine or a backachche, these are things that there's no external manifestation. For all I know, at this moment, you're in a deep depression, but you're not showing it to me. And so, it's very hard for me to sympathize. Now, on the other hand, if you had broken your arm and there was a bone sticking out of your shoulder, I would be horrified and I'd be very sympathetic to you. even if you even if you if the bone wasn't really bothering you at all. So another property of interpersonal sympathy is that there's very really very little connection between how bad the target of your sympathy is feeling and how bad you are you are feeling. But empathy >> if a bone is sticking out of your shoulder I'm going to feel bad but it's not going to feel like physical pain to me. And so I don't really believe in the existence of empathy. Um I think you can get a little bit of empathy with another person. Like I I had an experience that um a friend of mine had been complaining about back pains for quite for years really and I I would say, "Oh god, that sounds terrible." But I I never really empathized with it. And >> yeah, >> I'm not sure how much I even truly at some visceral deep level sympathized with it genuinely. And then I was doing some construction outdoors and I lifted up this big rock and then I felt something give in my back and my instantaneous response was not, "Oh, this feels terrible for me." My instantaneous was response was, "Oh, that's what he's been telling me all this time. I I felt this surge >> of sympathy, maybe even a little bit of empathy toward my friend that I hadn't truly experienced until then. And I think that's a reason why when we are in miserable circumstances, if we are depressed or we have a migraine, um we tend to feel kind of isolated because we think it it feels like other people just can't feel our pain. And right >> that's true. It's true that they can't feel our pain. >> So there's obviously the phrase, you know, misery loves company. So in these scenarios, we would seek out not our happiest friend when we're miserable. We would probably not want to spend too much time with them because it would just deepen our misery reflectively looking at how we don't have what they have, but instead we'd probably want to spend time with someone that we deem more miserable than us. Like, okay, comparatively speaking on on whatever my internal metric for misery is, well, at least I'm not that person. At least I'm not in that bad of shape. Mhm. But you started out by asking about empathy gaps and really the most interesting empathy gaps happen are what I call intra not interpersonal. They happen within people and so and the empathy gap is like we're basically creatures of our immediate emotional states. Like one of um the first chapter in the first chapter of my book, I talk about like what is an emotion? And I say that an emotion is um basically a program that um evolved in our evolutionary past um to deal with recurring situations of evolutionary significance like escaping predators, kind of um winning um partners, things like that. And and emotions are all-encompassing programs. They change our memory, they change our perceptions, they change our mindset, they change our hormones, they change our muscles. Like basically when we are in a diff different emotional states, we are effectively different people. Um, if if I'm angry and you're if I'm angry or I'm sad, I'm more different from myself, then like let's assume that the two of us are kind of in pretty fairly neutral emotional states. Yeah. >> Right now than we are than you are from me and I am from you. Um, so emotions reprogram us and we have as little empathy for ourselves in a different emotional state because we're really a different person when we're in a different emotional state as we have for another person. And that's the that's what I call an intrapersonal empathy gap. >> What is causing that tonal vision? Because I think many of our listeners are feeling, wait a second, I I can definitely imagine myself in these other emotional states. Like, I have high EQ. I I can have empathy for other people and imagine what it's like for the emotions that they're facing. >> I've done a whole lot of research which shows that people have almost no ability to bridge these empathy gaps. like we we put people into different affective states and we have them predict how they'll behave in a different state and they completely mispredict their own behavior. Like for example, I did a bunch of studies [clears throat] with my friend and colleague Leaf Van Boven where we asked people if they would do kind of scary things in the future. And when things are in the future, we tend to not be in touch with our fear. And people would say, "Oh, sure. I will dance or mime in front of the class for $5." Um, no problem. >> Next next week, no problem. And then next week would arrive and almost everybody would chicken out because now they're actually experiencing the pain. >> And I I also kind of did studies with um addicts And we looked at addicts. We the there were these addicts who were in treatment with buprenorphine which is an kind of a opioid substitute. And we caught people either right before they got their buprenor they they were they came to the clinic and we caught them either right before they got their buprenorphine so they were in a state of high craving or right after they got their buprenorphine so they were not craving the drug. They were feeling satiated and then we asked them five days from now when you come back to the clinic would you prefer what would you prefer to get an extra dose of buprenorphine or $10 extra dose of buprenorphine or $20 up to $100. And what we found was, and this is a real choice that we gave them, and what we found was when they were in a craving state, they um valued the extra dose a week uh 5 days later twice as highly as when they were in a satiated state because they were in touch that when they were craving, they knew what it was like to be craving. And when they weren't craving, they'd lost immediately, just moments later, moments after getting their dose of buprenorphine, they'd lost touch with what it feels like to crave drugs. And these are people who have probably been in and out of a craving state hundreds or thousands of times in their life, so they should know. But we're just um experience doesn't really help. like um we are just creatures of our immediate emotional state emotional state and no matter how high our EQ is people are unable to bridge the gap I've never noticed I've never observed that there are people are better at this than other people I think over time you can learn to bridge empathy gaps like you can learn strategies oh if I go to the bar and have a drink, then I'm going to smoke a cigarette. Or if I go into the bar and I have a drink, I'm going to get into a fight. I'm not going to go to the bar. But right, it but when you do that, you're just learning, okay, going to the bar is a bad idea because I know this from experience. You're not actually in touch with who you'll become if you go to the bar and have a drink. So you've, it's true, you can learn about p your own patterns of behavior, but you can never bridge empathy gaps in the sense of actually being able to imagine how you will feel if you're in a different emotional state. Well, one of the studies in the book, the ice bucket experiment and exposure, I think is a little astounding for many of our audience. I think the the pantomime in front of the room and that sense of embarrassment, we kind of all nod our heads, but I think we we misjudge our ability to like stick with the visceral pain and the memory there. I think that experiment really stood out to me. Could you walk our audience through it? >> I think maybe what you're referring to is the study of torture, >> right? And during the U Bush administration when we were um involved in the war in Iraq, the Bush administration started um engaging in um interrogation techniques that had been widely viewed as torture. And one of those was waterboarding. Like probably our most basic instinct instinct is breathing. Even if you like basically destroy somebody's brain, they still like the breathing instinct is in your brain stem. It's the most important um function for survival. And the people in the uh in the Bush administration like Donald Rumsfeld claimed that waterboarding was no big deal. It's they defi they said it's not torture because the the US had signed on to a treaty to a UN treaty barring us from doing torture but they said water boarding isn't torture but um and there was a famous um Chicago talk host named Menco and he kind of publicly kept on saying oh water boarding big deal water boarding isn't torture and he agreed to get waterboarded himself and within uh I mean people who get waterboarded it it go it unfolds over a period of minutes but Manco after a matter of a few seconds he like threw the um he he started flailing his hands and he kind of um threw the apparatus off and he said [clears throat] he said uh this is horrible. It is torture. It only took him like a few seconds to recognize that water boarding was torture. I think in the study of mine that you're talking about, we asked people whether putting people in a cold room for an extended period is that um enhanced interrogation or is that torture? And when we just asked people kind of um in a neutral state whether which it was, a lot of people said, "Oh, that's enhanced interrogation. That's not torture." But all it took was um this was um research with Lauren Nordrren at Northwestern University. All it took was for to for people to put their hand in a bowl of ice water, which is um psychologists use this as a method of inducing pain. It's it's really surprisingly painful. And just doing that changed people's perceptions of whether being in a cold room was enhanced interrogation or counted as torture. And sometimes it's like in the example that I gave of um um in the uh what was the example I gave um sorry um anyway sometimes all it oh the example I gave of um hurting my back and suddenly empathizing my friend who had who had been complaining of a hurt back. Sometimes it takes all it takes is a little taste of a misery to come closer towards empathizing with the a person's mi misery and certainly coming a lot closer to sympathizing with that misery. >> Well, I think many of us don't recognize how the empathy gaps can distort our moral judgment. I think we separate our moral judgment with our character and and what we know is right and wrong. And it's hard for us to then recognize that no, these empathy gaps can actually distort that in really meaningful ways and make us even as we view ourselves as moral characters do immoral things. >> Yeah, that's right. Um, absolutely. When we're under the thr of a strong emotion, we'll very often do things that violate our own emo our own emotion um moral standards. And these empathy gaps work in another way as well. I mentioned that um drug crap empathy gap for drug craving. If you're not craving a drug, even if you're an addict, if you're not craving a drug, it's impossible to imagine how powerful craving could be in terms of influencing our behavior. So, like I ask I used to teach a freshman seminar on um drug abuse and addiction and I'd ask my students, "If you got addicted to heroin, do you think you would ever is it possible that you would ever steal from your parents or abandon your children?" And every everyone said, "Oh, there's no way I would ever do that." And but of course people who are addicted to heroin kind of routinely do things like that. And um it's and we morally judge them especially severely because we think oh I wouldn't do that. If I if I were in a craving state I wouldn't do that. And but that's just false. That's just a perfect manifestation of an empathy gap. If we were in such a craving state, we would do exactly that and probably worse. >> And so yeah, it it works in also it these emotions lead us to violate our own emotional standards and they lead us when we're not emotional to judge other people much more severely. >> And then we also hold our memories to have more of a stark impact on us than they do. So the retrospective blind spot and this great story of Mike Straoud in Antarctica where many of us externally would be like what is this guy thinking? Why is he doing this to himself? But we all have this blind spot. >> That's right. We do. And in in some ways it's probably good for evolutionary fitness like in terms of um the poor memory for pain probably helps to explain why people have second um why women um give birth to second and third and third children. Yeah. Right. >> So what happened with Mike and in Antarctica? >> Oh well um I the the example of Oh well two things happened with Mike in Antarctica. One was that his um so this was the first unaded crossing of Antarctica by foot and he was with a guy named Reynold Fines who's like a true kind of stoic like a a unbelievable um explorer guy and he his um fine's foot was eroding like it was um getting eroded by frostbite. and he was in excruciating pain. And Stout reports that when like um and so he finds even though he's like an unbelievable um tough guy um every once in a while he just couldn't stand he couldn't stand not to kind of reveal how much pain he was in. And then Mike Stout would tell him, "Oh, that's terrible. I you know, I feel for you. I feel your pain." And um but then Strauss's Stout comments that he didn't really feel his pain because pain is something that can't be shared. >> But I think actually you're referring to another part of the book and that is that this Antarctic crossing like um was probably the most um not only because of eroded feet but because of being cold all the time and miserable and and food um food deprived and things like that. It was just like an unrelentingly miserable experience. And then and the whole time Stra is thinking about u going home and being with its children and how he's never going to do something like this again. And then so it's 97 days for the audience like 97 days of just punishment, grueling, freezing punishment, near starvation, suffering, >> and of course going through it. He's what everyone would be daydreaming about, like getting back to your family and heat and food and everything that you love. >> Yeah. And he's thinking, I'm never going to do something like this again. And then he gets back to his family and like I think he's like playing with one of his kids and he says that um part of his brain is longing to get back out and do the next feat. Um, and he talks about um the memory trick is is doing its work on me again. And the memory trick he's talking about is exactly the empathy gap that when we're not in a state of misery, it's just impossible for us to be in touch with the misery that uh a state of misery even if we experienced it ourselves not very long ago. Now many of our listeners self-identify as high performers and in that identity say oh I perform under pressure just raise the stakes and I will meet the challenge in front of me and they certainly don't believe that they're going to choke. So what actually happens when we raise the stakes? Do people really perform better? >> Well and I I um so I have a chapter in the book on choking under pressure. Um I tell I open up it with a personal story about myself and the um and certainly there are people who are better at dealing with pressure than other people but at some sufficiently high level of kind of motivation I think pretty much everyone is going to choke under pressure and choking I have recently I've been doing a lot of um research and writing about um attention about the attention being a resource like land, labor, capital, attention. Attention's become become the new economic factor of production. So I'm very interested in attention. Yeah. >> And if you look at cases of choking under pressure, a lot of them have to do with attention. Like for example, let's say that you play golf and you've um I don't play golf, so I'll probably um I'm probably about to um show off my ignorance, but you swing your club hundreds or thousands of times and you automate the club, your your swing, your golf swing. Um, and then you get into, you make a bet with a friend or you get into a tournament and your brain say your brain just automatically says to itself, "Oh, this is really important and I've got this scarce resource attention and I should use my scarce resource to deal with this really, really important situation." And so even though it's the last thing you should be doing, you pay attention to your swing. You think about the swing and then once you think about it, all the kind of programming fall falls out the window. Or another example would be you are in a let's say um you're a podcaster and let's say you have like a really really important guest on your show Barack Obama. It's like the best guest you ever had and you are and you've been interviewing and and you're an experienced interviewer, but this one's really important and you start thinking to yourself, "Oh, if I blow this, I'm blowing the opportunity of my life." And oh, it would be so great if this works out, it's going to be so great. It's going to project my podcast into the stratosphere. And so instead of thinking about the conversation with Barack, you are focusing on the upside and downside of the interview going well or badly. And so a whole lot of different forms of choking have to do with attention. But then yeah, I mean there's other there's other categories like for example I talk about um I used to do a lot of um rock climbing and mountaineering and if you get into a bad I don't I don't think this is true of like the really great mountaineers and probably that's one reason why they are great mountaineers but if you are more of an amateur and you're um and you get into a bad spot like where where you don't feel like you're very well protected by the rope or you're the protection you've put in is like if you fall it's likely to come out and you get scared. Well, what I f what happened to me is that I would get something I call sewing machine leg. And sewing machine leg is your foot starts just automatically going like this, which is like the worst possible thing that could happen to you if you are kind of trying to hang on to a rock. And then it starts doing that and you think, "Oh god, my um sewing this sewing machine leg thing is going to it's going to knock me off the rock." And you get even more scared. And then the sewing machine leg gets worse. And there's this um feedback cycle and which um contributes to which makes the choking even worse. I mean I think everyone choke will choke under some circumstances but for some people choking happens more easily than for other people. Actually, one of the most pervasive from for the the biggest fear of the largest number of people is public speaking. And what happens when you engage in public speaking? Well, when you engage in public speaking, your brain is saying, "This is really important, and I'm going to shut down my digestive system." And that's a good thing because like if you're up on the podium, you don't have to run off the podium to go take care of your bodily needs. >> But at in another way, it's not a good thing because part of digestion is like producing saliva. That's part of the digestive process. And so you're public speaking and you don't produce the saliva. And then you experience this phenomenon called dry mouth. So then you you start talking like like this and of course >> grabbing your water constantly. >> When you realize that you're talking like talking like this, it makes you realize, "Oh, I'm performing badly." You get more tense and your body and your brain says, "Oh, I really have to shut down that digestive system." And so you get another one of these feedback processes. And then you walk off stage in anger and you've been told all you got to do is go vent to your friends, go vent to your family about that anger you're carrying and you'll empty that anger from your system. When in actuality, >> you're just breathing new life into that anger. Why do so many of us think that if we can just vent our emotions away, we can release them, empty them, and and move forward. And they're so misguided. >> That's right. There's a quote in my book. There's a quote from a researcher who says that trying to deal with anger um by venting it is like trying to use gasoline to put out a f to put out a fire. Not a good idea. >> Yeah. >> But why do we think that we can vent it away? Like where is that coming from that we have this belief that oh if we just share this now we we dump this anger onto our friends we're releasing it. I mean, I think a lot of that comes from kind of perspect um psychoanalytic perspectives that that have kind of a hydraulic view of the of the human psyche that's like if we can verbalize stuff. It's like we will um drain the that will will relieve the pressure. And I mean I think there are some situations that where that's true. Like for example um I'm very interested in something I call the drive to disclose. Like you um you have some personal thing weighing on you or maybe you'd like to brag or you have some great piece of gossip and you're dying to share that with another person. That's the drive to disclose. And I do think that sharing that can relieve the drive to disclose is kind of an internal pressure. I've got this inside of me. I've got to release it. And when you do disclose it to somebody, >> it feels great. >> Very it it does feel good and it does relieve the pressure. So in some in some situations, I do think that the hydraulic metaphor is an apt one, but when it comes to anger, it doesn't work at all. um trying to um trying to mitigate your anger by venting it like um just like it's like the vent is like um throwing uh like blowing air on a fire. >> Well, you have an anecdote of a friend o over email who had something incredibly tragic happen and it just the anger continued to get worse and build. It was not something that was relieved. What happened? >> Uh yeah, that's right. It's a it's a a friend who a a long-term close friend. I in addition to doing the um misery survey, I also um I when I got together with friends since I was working on the book, I'd say do um are there any um emotions that you experience, negative emotions you experience, especially intensely? And this person said, "Oh, yeah, anger." And I asked her, "Well, can you explain?" And she said, "Well, let me write. I'm going to write to you about it. And she and she sent me several pages about it. And she was um she got um pregnant and she um had a and she had a child and it was like an unbelievably meaningful experience for her like um certainly the most meaningful experience of her whole life. And but then I think the baby was about 3 months old and she got an email and it was from a guy and the guy the email was I thought you might want to know that my girlfriend is cheating with your husband. And so she realized that her at this um she felt like she was sharing this incredibly meaningful thing with her husband. But then she discovered this that [clears throat] he had been in a very different u mind state and kind of behaving very differently from what she believed. And she said that the anger was just like eating her up. it was keeping her from sleeping. And she so um so many of the different descriptions of anger that I got from her and from other and from people in the from the misery survey referred to anger as toxic or as acid eating away at you. And as I said before, it is just it striking to me how people can't get past the cannot get past this anger. Yeah. And I think it it also drives us in physical ways. You know, classic advice might be to punch a punching bag or yell [clears throat] into a a pillow to again this concept of vent and and have the sense of cathar catharsis of letting the anger out of our body. But that actually just doubles down on the anger. >> That's right. Yeah. I think ultimately the only solution to anger is you have to find a way to kind of forgive the other person and sometimes that involves um perspective taking and which is something that we just don't naturally do. We're not naturally good at perspective taking, but sometimes um somebody can say, "Well, weren't you in this situation that was somewhat analogous and you be and couldn't you say that you kind of behaved this way in the past?" And that's um that is a whole lot more effective than try than um vent trying to vent the anger. I I actually opened the book with um an anecdote about getting this email um that was from a guy in my field and it was an email it wasn't meant for me. It was about me. And in in the email, this person accused me of not properly acknowledging their cont their research, their their work. And I um and my initial reaction was like intense anger and um like I mean it was very insulting toward me and but fortunately I wasn't able to respond immediately. I had almost a whole day to think about it before I responded and I was hanging out with a friend that day and and he helped me to kind of process it. But I started to think about, oh yeah, there were situations where I felt like other people didn't acknowledge my seinal research and it would and weren't there situations where it would have been so easy for me to send an email to the wrong person and so on. And by the end of the day, the anger had really kind of given way almost to sympathy and like um and to kind of an understanding of the of the of this other person. And I and I sent a very um kind of reconciliatory or consiliatory um message to them, which ended up being a very good thing. I mean, people, you should never ever respond immediately when you're in a a situation of anger. Like, never respond immediately to an email that makes you angry. And absolutely, you should never CC other people than the person who makes you angry. I've seen so many situations where somebody gets angry about something and sends the response to this huge they feel so self-righteously um indignant they send the response to a huge distribution list of people not realizing how badly that's going to come across. So, even though like um my book is absolutely not a self-help book, but let me introduce an element of self-help into this podcast. If you ever get an email or a text that makes you really angry, never ever respond to it. Don't even respond after 10 minutes because you might think, "Okay, after 10 minutes I've had a chance to cool down." That's not true. You might have just had a chance to incubate and um so big difference. >> It really takes at least a day to to truly cool down and and you need and just the passage of time isn't enough. You need to kind of think about it in an open-minded way and perspective take. So, knowing all all of your research and putting this book together and your view now of these emotions, what have you done personally to change what happens when you're feeling these strong emotions? Because I think so many of our listeners have sort of oriented themselves around the pursuit of happiness and the labeling of these emotions and done some things that are maladaptive for what the emotions are telling us. I mean, yeah, people often ask me this, like, how has studying um emotions changed changed your behavior? And I'm sure it has in various ways. Like I have a if I'm in a down state, I I it must be that I have a better understanding of what it's like to be in an upstate. But I think these things are so intrinsic to kind of human existence. When I do get in when I do get into a down state, like maybe depressed with a small D, I lose I I do lose perspective. And like um so maybe I'm a little bit better at saying, okay, I know that people get out of down states, but um I know I will get out of this down state. I might be a little bit better at not reacting angrily when I'm get a um email that makes me angry, but really I think these are just about being human. And my my book is um I can't my answer is I wish I could say that studying this has changed me but when I get depressed it still feels like I always have been depressed always will be depressed. I'm it it doesn't save me from the the things that I talk about in the book. I do and I do think that there are ways that kind of gaining the insights from the book can help you. I mean, as I said, it's not a self-help book. It's a book about insight. It can give you insights into your own emotions. It can give you insights into the negative emotions of people around you. And I think it can to some degree make you less critical of yourself. One of the things I talk about in the book is meta emotions. These are emotions about emotions. And very often, so very often we tor um emotions torture us and then we torture ourselves with these meta emotions. Like for example, >> we feel envy towards a friend and then we feel and we're not supposed to feel envy, you're not supposed to feel envy towards a friend if something good happens to them. Yeah, if something good that happens to them, we're supposed to respond with unmitigated joy. But we feel envy and then we feel guilty about feeling envious. And I think that um understanding of having a better understanding of negative emotions maybe can help to mitigate these meta emotions to some degree. I think that there's another way that reading the book can make you can help you maybe to feel better. Um I think it had this effect on me and various friends who I gave advanced copies to who read the book said okay I I get that this is a not a self-help book but actually reading this book did make me feel better in certain ways and there's an awful lot of different ways of being miserable like I talk about 12 specific miseries in my book And most of us hopefully only suffer from a subset of those. Like um I only I have two that I'm I'm not going to share them, but I have two that I'm particularly prone to. >> Okay. And but reading these descriptions from the misery survey and reading the academic literature on all of these other emotions, I often found that I had the experience like there but for the grace of God like um it wasn't that I was kind of kind of gloating because I was better than the people who had negative emotions. [clears throat] I just experienced this sense of [cough] [clears throat] this sense of relief. Oh, thank God I don't experience that. That sounds so terrible. And so I do think that reading the book um can mostly my goal in this book is to provide insights in in the same way that if you read a novel, a sad novel, you're going to gain psychological insights into the characters and in the novel and hopefully insights into yourself, >> right? And I'm I really hope that reading the book will provide people with insights into negative emotions, but I do think that there's some possible silver linings that that people can get. And I I would say the two big ones are the kind of um mitigation of these meta emotions and the other one is this there but for the grace of God go I effect. Yeah, I would add a third of self-compassion recognizing that even you who put the book together, did the research, the experiments, looked at the data still have these natural forces inside of us that knowing what we know, we don't have to feel so guilty about our behaviors or actions because of them in the wake of those emotions, recognizing that it's just part of being human. >> That's right. And when we think about compassion, this kind of relates back to the empathy cap. When we think about compassion, we usually think about compassion for other people. But you're absolutely right that um compassion for yourself might be a much more important determinant of our day-to-day well-being. >> Thank you again for [clears throat] joining us. I really enjoyed this conversation and the book. Where can an audience find out more about your work in the book? >> Thank you, AJ. I did. I really enjoyed the conversation as well. And the easiest way to find out about the book is to go to the website oppositeofhappiness.com and I have a bunch of stuff about um about the book and endorsements, things like that. So that's the best way to learn about it. >> Thank you again for joining us. >> Thank you. [music]