The Happiness Lab with Dr. Laurie Santos - Hulking Out! Why You Change When You're Angry

Episode Date: October 24, 2022

When mild-mannered David Banner gets mad he transforms into the raging Incredible Hulk. Dr Laurie Santos loves this comic book tale - because it reflects real life. Intense things like anger, pain, even hunger, can cause us to act in extreme ways that we might not predict beforehand or forgive afterwards. When we're in so-called "hot states" we might become a total stranger to ourselves. This can have a serious impact on our happiness, by stopping us properly planning for how we'll react to strong emotions and causing us to be unfairly harsh on our inner Hulks.  See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Pushkin. Hello. Good to see you. I'm hanging out with my mom over Zoom today to take a trip down television memory lane. Okay, I'm ready. Mom and I are still huge fans of the TV shows I grew up with when I was a kid. You watch a lot of cartoons, you know, He-Man and Thundercats. We're also really into live-action superhero TV. Buck Rogers, the greatest American hero,

and Linda Carter's Wonder Woman. But today we're watching the one superhero show that caught my imagination the most. Dr. David Banner, physician, scientist. That show was The Incredible Hulk, starring Bill Bixby and 80s bodybuilder Lou Ferrigno. 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. I'm angry. I'm just surprised you remembered that. I feel like you said a lot. You guys calmed down when I said it, Laurie. 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 just 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 hulk 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 hulk 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 Dr. Laurie Santos. When I was pregnant with my first child, I really wanted to have the natural birth experience.

This is author Gemma 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 is 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 the process naturally. This was like the height of the mom blog. Then I followed a lot of women who had these, you know, beautiful birth stories and pictures of their home births and tubs. And I felt like that was the type of womanhood I was aspiring to in that first pregnancy. And things didn't go according to plan with my first child at all. Gemma 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. Gemma 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 Gemma did and listened to the medical professionals if they were in a scary, painful, and uncertain situation. But that wasn't how Gemma 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 Gemma 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 I envisioned the first time around. And then that also didn't happen. Gemma'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 Gemma 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 Gemma 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 Gemma 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 20 minutes. And she, like, lit candles and drew a bath for me and was like, we're going to get through this. Gemma 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. Like, I know we've talked about this for your whole pregnancy, but I felt really clear in my decision. What mattered to Gemma when she was in the worst pain of her life

wasn't the fantasies 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 in preferences that Gemma 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 Gemma's strong preference for an unmitigated 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. Gemma 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 Gemma'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, you know, as a birthing person. What I find so fascinating about Gemma'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 calm 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 one moment to the next as driven by these really intense emotional or visceral states. It's very

challenging. This is psychologist Rachel Rattan. 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. That'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 this 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 Gemma 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-mannered 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 affective transformation stuck with her. And I think certainly has shaped my interest 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 under-medicate 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 feel. 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 test that Pat had flunked.

But the second group of subjects got to evaluate Pat immediately after doing 20 minutes of the same boring test themselves. So these were people who were really in the heat of it. 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 not 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 seems 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 work 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 possibly 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-cold 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 like. The Happiness Lab will be right back.

Ugh, we're so done with new year, new you. This year, it's more you on Bumble. More of you shamelessly sending playlists, especially that one filled with show tunes. More of you finding Gemini's because you know you always like them. More of you dating with intention because you know what you want. And you know what?

We love that for you. Someone else will, too. Be more you this year and find them on Bumble. We were on this bike trip and there was one day that was just particularly grueling. And we kind of knew it at the beginning of the day. Social psychologist Leif 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 11-hour trek entirely uphill, would test their limits. About halfway through the day, we suddenly just got desperate to get out of the situation. 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 Leif 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 25 miles and 4,000 foot ascent, 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 25 miles. It's an interesting counterfactual, 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 Leif are interested in the mechanisms

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 went something like this. When we're 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 try to make adjustments for the fact that the other person is different from us. You might assume, as many psychologists initially did, that 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 the big reason that you get it wrong is because you get yourself wrong. 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 Leif and George's studies.

Leif and George would have loved to have forced their subjects into super extreme hot states like rage 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 1981 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 the pure facts of the situation they're confronted with. The remaining mystery is how you're 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 the 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 30 seconds. They were feeling the heat of embarrassment and their hot state selves wanted to chicken out as quickly as possible. wiggling their butts on stage within the next 30 seconds. They were feeling the heat of embarrassment,

and their hot state selves wanted to chicken out as quickly as possible. Leif and George found that students in this hot state demanded over 50 bucks to get on stage, and some students wanted way more. This 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 will ever do this. When we're in a cold state, we have the illusion that our hot state selves will 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 lying 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 was a girl I always had a crush on in high school. She had your first name, Lori. 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 figured 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 Lori walked out the door, this time he'd finally be able to chat with her. And sure enough, out walks Lori. Just five minutes before, George had predicted that he'd be completely smooth, that he'd finally talk 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, oh, if only we could go back to high school, we'd be so brave, but we wouldn't be. We'd be exactly the same way that we were. Experiences like these have convinced George and Leif that comic books like The Incredible Hulk

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 leads 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, or the sugary temptations that come when we try to eat healthier, we often put ourselves into situations where, in the grip of a hot state, we do things we hadn't expected. We call a cab, or shout at our co-workers, 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.

In 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 hulked-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. Ugh, we're so done with New Year, New You. This year, it's more you on Bumble.

More of you shamelessly sending playlists, especially that one filled with show tunes. More of you finding Gemini's because you know you always like them. More of you dating with intention because you know what you want. And you know what? We love that for you. Someone else will too. Be more you this year and find them on Bumble. here and find them on Bumble. My nerves would just get so bad. I would start to just feel,

I would get covered in cold sweat. I would just feel a loss of control of my body and I would go down. Psychologist and former competitive skater Rachel Rattan knows just how badly hot emotional states like anxiety can affect us. All I wanted to do was run away. If I could have just shed my identity, gotten a new passport, and 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 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 hot states impact her performance. I have fainted during an academic talk. So this is 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. 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 we'll always feel as rational as we do in a cold state gets us into trouble. We constantly underestimate how emotionally vulnerable we'll be in certain situations. And this leads to what Rachel's thesis advisor, Lauren Nordgren, called the restraint bias. When we're in a cold state, we assume we'll be in certain situations. And this leads to what Rachel's thesis advisor, Lauren Nordgren, called the restraint bias. When we're in a cold state, we assume we'll

have more willpower and emotional control in tough situations than we actually do. This is one of the really strong nuggets of wisdom in AA, 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, a craving takes hold, and 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 farther one is away from one's last drink, 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 what 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 state 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 in 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 hangry 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 we'll 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. It's a real challenge for us to understand ourselves in this sense. Again, I keep coming back to the AA model 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 Leif Van 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 can we think about restructuring the situations and 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. so that you are less often tempted, that you're less often sort of pushed into this hot situation. Like Rachel, Leif and George 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 hulk 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 gaps. 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 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, Dr. Laurie Santos.

The Happiness Lab is co-written and produced by Ryan Dilley, Emily Ann Vaughn, and Courtney Guarino. Joseph Rydman checked our facts. Our original music was composed by Zachary Silver, with additional scoring, mixing, and mastering by Evan Viola. Special thanks to Mia LaBelle, Heather Fane, John Schnarz, Carly Migliore, Christina Sullivan, Maggie Taylor, Eric Sandler, Nicole Marano, Royston Preserve, Jacob Weisberg, and my agent, Ben Davis.

The Happiness Lab is brought to you by Pushkin Industries and me, Dr. Laurie Santos. To find more Pushkin podcasts, listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your podcasts.