WHY DID I Do That?!

By Leslie Garrett • Illustrations by Edmon de Haro

in these moments, and how we can aim for a bit more self-compassion.

My friend shared the story in hushed tones during a late-night run. Her friend had discovered that her husband was cheating and that he’d taken the other woman to a hotel room in another town. My friend’s friend got into her vehicle, drove three hours to this town, then staked out the hotel. This woman had only a hazy notion of what she would do if she saw her husband and his paramour. Luckily she never saw them. She probably would have worried anyway. After some cold cramped hours in her car, she began

ABOUT THE AUTHOR to calm down and drove back home. “What was I thinking?” she’d asked my friend. “What was she thinking?” my friend asked me. Sometimes our behavior surprises even ourselves. It has happened to me. It has likely also happened to you. Maybe, despite your lawn sign that reads “Love Wins,” you flipped the bird to a driver who cut you off. Perhaps, like another friend of mine widely known for her kindness, you told an antsy child to “sit the [bleep] down” during a sleepless transatlantic flight. These experiences are jarring. That’s not who I am, we later think to ourselves. So, what happened?

Leslie Garrett is the author of more than 15 books for children, as well as a journalist whose work has appeared in The Atlantic, Washington Post, Good Housekeeping, and Cottage Life. She currently works as coeditor of Bluedot Living, Martha’s Vineyard, which focuses on local grassroots solutions for climate issues, and aims to expand to locations around North America.

The “Hot-Cold”

Empathy Gap

Dr. George Loewenstein, a professor of psychology and economics at

Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, PA, is curious about that too. In the early ’90s, he noticed something intriguing on his runs, which included a steep hill—so steep that stairs are built into it. On the ascent, his body screamed at him in pain. But within 10 to 20 seconds of cresting and beginning the descent, he could barely remember how horrible it felt. A few days later, Loewenstein would repeat the whole thing. While his initial curiosity focused on physical pain and our inability to recall it, he wondered too about emotions, eventually broadening his theory to include them. He wanted to answer the question: When humans are in a particular emotional state, why, he wondered, are we so bad at imagining ourselves in a different state?

Loewenstein called this effect the “hot-cold empathy gap” and theorized that when we are in a “cold” →

(unemotional) state, we struggle to imagine how we will feel and to predict how we will behave when we are in a “hot” state (for instance, fearful, angry, hungry, or in pain). Part of what creates the gap between hot and cold states is that we struggle to empathize with others whose behavior seems ridiculous or unwarranted—an interpersonal empathy gap. We’re similarly unempathetic to ourselves when we’re in a different emotional state—an intrapersonal empathy gap. When we’re calm, we can’t imagine being angry enough to punch a wall. When we’re well-rested, we can’t imagine being exhausted enough to snap at a child.

This gap includes physiological states too, which explains why our plan to eat healthier goes right out the window when, stomach grumbling, we open our cupboard and pop open a bag of Doritos. One of Loewenstein’s studies focused on the disconnect between healthy people taking unhealthy risks, such as smoking. He also considered the gap medical personnel could exhibit toward people experiencing pain, essentially underestimating their experience.

“We’re never going to be able to imagine how we’re going to feel and act in a different emotional state,” Loewenstein says, whether that different emotional state is our own or someone else’s. “Our brains are not capable of doing that.”

What our brains are capable of, he says, is noting patterns of behavior. We might notice, for instance, that when we’re in a hot state of excitement, we become overly generous. When we’re in a cold state, perhaps examining our bank balance, we promise ourselves we won’t offer to pick up the tab for everyone’s meal the next time we get dinner with friends. Then the next time rolls around and, well, out comes our joie de vivre and our wallet.

But Loewenstein thinks that the key to managing behaviors we don’t want begins with noticing our patterns. Our overspender might decide to carry only enough cash to cover their own meal. Then, even in a state of excitement or enthusiasm, when the impulse arises to cover the whole tab, they can’t.

Zindel Segal, Distinguished Professor of Psychology in Mood Disorders at the University of Toronto, points out that, when we’re in a hot state, the regions of our brain being activated tend to be lower down and farther back—the brain stem, cerebellum, and limbic system—which generate our fight/ flight/freeze responses. At the same time, there isn’t a lot of activity in the regions of our brain that help us understand our own or another person’s behavior. “You’re very much locked in a state of high arousal,” he explains, “and usually the solutions we search for are the ones that we’ve been habitually drawing upon.” Not surprisingly, Segal, who’s also a founder of Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy, urges us to consider a mindfulness-based approach. If we apply mindfulness to the hot-cold empathy gap, he says, it allows us to pause and connect with our own or another person’s experience. It grants us the space to label our emotions and create “greater moments →