So we've been talking about these cases where we need to pay attention to our feelings to feel a little bit happier, and we've been looking at our cognitive triad sort of focused on feelings. But the thing about feelings is that encompass a couple different things, right? And usually we think about feelings as emotions. But of course, the feelings include the way our body feels too and this is important, right? I think we often forget that our brain is connected to our heart and our digestive system and like our sleepiness and our hormones, right? We often don't like to think that our bodies and our mind are connected but they really are. And I think that leads to an interesting consequence which is that, our bodily sensations are affecting us a lot more than we often realize. And paying attention to how our body sensations affect us can be really relevant for our happiness. So let's take a couple classic cases where our bodily sensations affect us. Let's look at hunger. I don't know if you all follow Ariana Grande's twitter feed but she shocked a bunch of her fans recently when she tweeted, actually I don't want to have no next true love, it doesn't really exist, I hope you're having a great day. And everyone's like, my God Ariana like true love doesn't really exist, what's going on? But then later she clarified she twitted, yeah, true love might exist. I was just hungry, right? But this is the kind of thing that we all go through, right? When we're really famished, we made kind of stupid decisions. We might say things that we don't agree with, we might do things that later our rational selves will think are stupid, and it's not just when we're angry this is also when we might be in pain. If you have period cramps, if you have a headache, you're not going to be making the best decisions. And it's not just pain it's also when we feel incredibly tired or we feel incredibly stressed. One of the most disturbing studies looked at the kind of consequences that we experience when we're stressed, and the ways that it can make us make not so good, even not so moral decisions. In fact, Tindall and Curtis look directly at the effect that stress has on our sense that maybe it would be okay to cheat a little bit. They surveyed high school students about plagiarism. So they look for correlations between students level of somatic stress, and negative emotions they were experiencing and so on. And then their attitudes towards cheating, specifically their attitudes towards plagiarism. And what do they find? They found it as your stress goes up, your preference for plagiarizing goes up too. So you're more likely to cheat when you're stressed. All this goes to say that when our bodies feel bad, we wind up doing stuff that our rational selves might not agree with that much, that our rational selves might be like, hang on, That's not a great idea. In some sense, when our bodies don't feel good, we wind up being kind of strangers to ourselves. And researchers have a term for this, they call this kind of disconnect between our rational and our emotional selves. The hot cold empathy gap. This is just a bias in which we underestimate the influence that our internal state might be having on us at any moment. The influence is having on our attitudes, our preferences, and our behaviors. And so this name hot cold empathy gap comes from the fact that psychologists refer to different kinds of states as either being hot states, really emotional, really stressed, really kind of bodily alarm states versus cold states. You're kind of cold, you're chill, you're you're rational self. And so we'll kind of define these as hot cognition. These thought processes that occur when we're under really high stress, or high emotions, or high bodily states versus cold cognition. Those chiller, more rational thought processes that happen where we're really under low stress, and the is that there's an empathy gap there. In other words, there's a gap between what our hot selves might want and what are cold cells might want. And that means this disconnect means we're mispredicting all the time we mispredict how we're going to feel when we're cold if we're currently hot, right? If you're stressed in the moment, if you're super hungry and you have to make a decision about whether or not to cheat on a test, you're not thinking that your rational self a week later might not like the consequences of that. You're just like whatever. Let me just cheat, right? This is this idea, right? Like we're not paying attention to what our cold rational selves might want in these states when we're hot, but that's not the only empathy gap. We also have an empathy gap the other way, if we're currently feeling cold, we're not thinking about what's going to happen to our hot selves, means when we're in our cold chill varies in rational selves. We're not making predictions about what's going to happen when we might be under really heavy emotions. And this means that we're constantly kind of screwing over our hot selves because we're not planning ahead to what we might feel like when we're really emotional. My Yale students made a meme like this this is like, you at the beginning of this semester versus you at the end of the semester, you might at the beginning of the semester be taking all these extracurriculars, taking on more hours at work and so on. But then when the semester picks up and you start having more and more tests, you're going to feel like you're in your hot state, you're going to fall apart. You're cold self at the beginning of the semester, screwed over your hot self. And we kind of do this all the time. And so the key is that we need to recognize there's this gap, I'm not going to be able to predict what my hot self is going to want later on, when I'm cold and vice versa. And that raises this question of how do we deal with this? And of course we deal with it with our psyprotips. And the most important psyprotip I think is the first one, which is that, our hot selves aren't the best decision makers. And so one of the ways we can deal with that is we just try to let our hot selves not be making the decisions in the first place by not getting into those hot states in the first place, right? Don't let yourself get angry, like try to avoid times when you're overly stressed or overly sleepy, do what you need to do to take care of your body so you don't wind up in those states in the first place, that's kind of psyprotip number one. The psyprotip number two is to use your rational cold self to make good decisions to protect your hot self later on, like your hot self is going to make bad decisions so set up situations so they don't get to, right? For example, maybe you can move your alarm clock when you're cold self going to sleep far away so that when it goes off your hot sleepy self won't shut it off, right? You might be able to put your exercise gear in a really obvious place, so that when your hot self might not be like too tired to do it, it's much easier for them to kind of jump in and do the exercise. You kind of cleared the path for your hot self to make it as easy as possible. And this is definitely true in terms of your academics, remember things are going to get more stressed throughout the semester, what can you do to protect yourself? These are all the things that we can do to make sure we're not falling prey to this empathy gap, that we can let our hot selves and our cold selves live in a bit more alignment. [MUSIC]
