Calm Can Be Contagious

and that's where I'm hoping this podcast can help. If your brain works anything like mine does, you may have spent a lot of this challenging COVID nineteen crisis in a near constant state of mental rumination. My inner monologue has been constantly racing from students and family members I need to check in on to what's left in my pantry for dinner, to the latest scary statistics, to oh no, did I just touch my face? My entire brain is

like zip zipzipsipsip from one stressful thing to another. The continued uncertainty of this awful situation has made it nearly impossible for me to switch my thoughts off, and I know I'm not alone. One friend recently mentioned that even when she has gotten a chance to relax, to sit down with a good novel, she feels like she ends up reading the same sentence over and over again because her brain keeps jumping from one scary scenario to the next.

If we're going to make it through this collective crisis with our mental health intact, we need to find ways to keep all our ruminative thoughts under control. The good news is that modern science and ancient traditions have converged on an effective and completely free way to quiet our racing minds. That's the practice of meditation. If you've listened to past episodes of The Happiness Lab, you've probably already

heard about the benefits of meditation. But today I want to talk with someone who's seen these benefits firsthand, someone who started out as a huge skeptic but has converted to the power of mindfulness. And so I was super excited to welcome to the Happiness Lab. ABC News correspondent Dan Harris. He's the author of ten Percent Happier. How I teamed the voice in my head, reduced stress without losing my edge, and found self help that really works

a true story. We'll start the episode with how Dan first came to this practice of meditation. So this was back in two thousand and four. I was anchoring the news updates on Good Morning America. The main hosts of the show were Diane Sawyer and Charlie Gibson. Diane and Charlie said, okay, over to Dan for the headlines of the morning. And as soon as that happened, as soon as the red light went on, my body went into mutiny.

I could feel my chest titan, I could feel my lung seize up, my palms were sweaty, my mouth went dry. But my mind, in reaction to what was happening physiologically, started to freak out. And so the more I freaked out psychologically, the more my body reacted, and the more my body reacted, the more my mind reacted. And it was just a death spiral. And I just couldn't breathe,

which is a prerequisite for being a news anchor. And I had to do something and I'd never done before, which is quit right in the middle of my stick. So yeah, that sucked. What was the fall up after that? I mean, you've never had one of these episodes before you go to your doctor and talk to him about it. So the first panic attack happened, everybody asked me what was wrong, and I lied and said nothing. I went backstage and my mom called me and she said, you

just had a panic attack. I didn't really do him much about it. She hooked me up with a one doctor who I talked on the phone, and we didn't really do much about it. So I just carried out with my life and I was able to go on the show at the top of the next hour and I was fine, So I kind of got away with it. Then many months later, I had another one, but that

was like a real wake up. So I then went to go see a doctor and he asked me a bunch of questions to try to figure out what was going on, and one of the questions was do do drugs? I said, yeah, I do do drugs, and he leaned back in his chair and gave me a very shrinky look, which communicated the following sentiment, okay, asshole, mystery solved to actually, I should back up. At this point the drugs. I had spent a lot of time after nine to eleven

in places like Afghanistan, West Bank, Gaza, Israel. During the second at Fada, I was in Iraq many, many times. And when I came home from Iraq, I at one, after one six month stint, I got depressed and I didn't know I was depressed, and I didn't know what to do about it. So I a friend of mine offered me some cocaine. I had never done drugs before, and I said yes, And I really liked the cocaine and it made me feel better, but it wasn't I was never high on the air. I wasn't high the

mornings I had panic attack. So I didn't connect the two. But as soon as the doctor asked me about drugs, I made the connection. And he argued that it was enough to change my brain chemistry and make it more likely for me to have a panic attack. And so that is what really made me change my life. And it was partly the drugs. But in some ways the cocaine you were doing was a symptom of something else. Right, In some ways it was the workaholism plus the drugs.

Probably right, I think it was ambition. Yes, I think you put your finger on it. You know, I had volunteered to go cover these wars after nine to eleven without really thinking much about the psychological consequences. And yeah, it was. It was an intense time. And I think it's fair to draw a straight line back to my desire to make a mark in the world, right, which was unique to you, I think, being an anchor in

the midst of the post nine to eleven world. But I mean lots of us go through this where we feel like, you know, our work is everything and we have to be on all the time and do whatever is necessary, whether that's drugs or work one hundred hours a week or I mean, this is in some ways unique. So and so I want to fall up on this story from there. So you know, your doctor tells you get off the drugs, but it sounded like after that you still started searching for ways to kind of find

a better path. So it actually a bunch of things happened after that faithful morning. When I sat with the doctor in his kind of shabby little office. He didn't think I needed to go to rehab, but he definitely said I needed to quit doing drugs and that I needed to come see him once or twice a week indefinitely. So I did do that. What happened next was that my boss, a very famous news anchor named Peter Jennings.

I mean, this guy at his peak was reaching thirty million people in night and he was a very smart and interesting guy. And he asked me to start covering faith in spirituality, which I did not want to do. I was raised in the People's Republic of Massachusetts and my parents are both left of Trotsky academic physicians, atheists. As I often joke, I did have a bar mitzvah, but only for money, so I'm not I was not spiritually inclined. And I told some of that to Peter

and he said he didn't care. He wanted me to do it anyway, and it became great transformative assignment for me. I realized how ignorant I was about issues related to faith and spirituality. I made a bunch of friends. I spent a lot of time in mosques and megachurches and Mormon temples, and it was fascinating that said, none of what I encountered spoke to me personally. I didn't, you know, join a church or go kosher or anything like that.

But eventually one of my producers, Felicia Baberica. She had been turned onto a self help author by the name of Eckhart totally, and Eckhart totally was not somebody I'd ahead ever heard of, but Felicia said he might make a good story for me. So I did a little googling, and turns out he's beloved by celebrities. Oprah has put copies of his book in every bedroom and every house

she owned. So it struck me as weird enough for a good TV story, So I ordered one of his books at the first The book just struck me as ridiculous. You know, he's using pseudoscientific like vibrational fields, and he's making these grandiose claims about how he had a spiritual awakening and lived on a park bench in the city of London for two years in a state of bliss. And then he started to unferral thesis about the human

situation that I thought was so spot on. His argument is that we all have a voice in our head that chases you out of bed, and he's yammering at you all day long and has you constantly wanting stuff, not wanting stuff, judging people, comparing yourself to other people, judging yourself, thinking about the past, or thinking about the future to the detriment of you know, whatever's happening right now.

That just struck me as spot on true. And this thesis explained the most embarrassing moment of my life, that the panic attack was the result of me just being yanked around by this voice in my head. And that

just struck me as a massive and important realization. And so that was sort of like point number one, where you sort of realized that there was this interesting take on the human condition that if we could just get control over this crazy voice in our head, we might live a better life and sort of will flourish a

little bit more. But the real step forward was when I think you get a book from your wife, if I remember the story correctly, that really pointed you more towards meditation as a specific path to controlling that voice in your head. Yeah. So I was super confused when I read Toli's book because I couldn't see any actionable practical advice. Was just really frustrating, and I didn't know

what to do about this. I ended up spending a bunch of time looking into the self help world, met a lot of people who promised that you can solve all of your problems through the power of positive thinking, which is not a possibility actively bad actually the research subject actively yes, yes, it's reckless hope. I think that they're peddling. And then I came in the middle of all of this, I came home and my then fiance and now baby mama Bianca, gave me a book by

a guy named doctor Mark Epstein. Bianca said, you know, she'd been hearing me yammer on about totally and whatever, and this might be useful for me. So I read the book that night and I had a big aha moment, which was that all the stuff that was most compelling from ek Caartoli was lifted from somebody called the Buddha, and the Buddha actually had practical advice, which was meditate. I was a little hung up on that because I didn't want to meditate. I had a bad attitude about it.

But it was interesting to finally have something real to do. And so what didn't that feel like when you first started meditating, right, because now you have to sit there for five minutes kind of being like adopting this practice that you probably before with your scientist, had thought of as like hippie dippy or like people in robes do that sort of thing, or I mean, what was the first what was the first few steps? Like, yeah, it was humbling. You're absolutely right. I did not want to

do it. I was super intrigued by the notion of this voice in our head, and I had this powerful intuition that managing that voice would change my life. And as you indicated, I had a really bad at tute about meditation. I thought it was for people who are, you know, really into aromatherapy and Cat Stevens and you use the word now must day with no irony, and that's not entirely untrue, by the way. But what really changed my mind was the science. There's just all this,

you know this, there's a ton of science. I suggest that meditation can you know, literally rewire your brain and the parts of the brain associated with stress or attention regulation. It's been shown to lower blood pressure, boost your immune system. And so that was super intriguing. Given that my parents are scientists, my wife is a scientist. I was not good enough at math to go into that direction. So now I wear makeup and talk to TV cameras, but

I respect science. So that's really what changed my mind. And so I was reading a book by John cabot Zin, who's a former MIT scientist who pioneered something called mindfulness based stress reduction, which is a secularized version of Buddhist meditation. And I was reading his book and I said, all right, I'm gonna do this, and I set an alarm on my BlackBerry. This is how long ago. This was like

two thousand nine. Set an alarm for five minutes. And I sat on the floor, not cross legged because I don't like that, and I was I'm not so limber, and I was kind of my back was leaning up against a bed and my legs were splayed out in front of me. And you know, the basic instruction is to sit, try to feel your breath coming in and going out, and then when you get distracted, start again. It was humbling. It was like holding a live fish in your hand. It's just your The mind's always squirming

away from you. Once you see where it's going, it's really embarrassing. You know, you're just you know, composing tweets, plotting revenge, thinking about lunch, random thoughts, you know where to gerbils run wild and and then you just have to catch it and begin again and again and again, and after the first five minutes was up, I realized, Okay, this is not some nonsense hippie pastime, this isn't hacky sack.

This is really a powerful exercise. And I just decided I'm gonna try to do this every day for the foreseeable future. And here I am, and so now a decade on doing it every day, Like, what's the difference in terms of your inner monologue? Well, look, I entitled my book and then everything I've done subsequently ten percent Happier. So I'm kind of stuck with math jokes the rest of my life. But you know it's true enough, right, It's not going to solve all of your problems. Nothing's

going to solve all of your problems. That's why that's why I called the book ten percent Happier. My publisher didn't get the joke, and she was trying to bargain me up to twenty. You know, it sounds so you can think about it like an investment. So I think the ten percent compounds annually. This is a skill. The ability to work with and have a different relationship with the voice in your head is a skill, and you get better over time. I find that my inner weather

has become significantly balmier. But does that mean that I'm perpetually blissed out? Absolutely not am. I I'm super anxious right now in the middle of this pandemic. I am worried about my business. I'm worried about the state of the world. I'm worried about Your wife works in healthcare too, right, Yeah, well there you go. My wife is incredibly stressful. She is an intensive care specialist and so she works in the ICU. She knows how to work a ventilator, her

skills are very much in demand. She's highly, highly skilled and trained, and I think it's the right think for her to do to go back to work. But I'm worried about you know, these people are dying and so I'm worried about that. You know, if I'm being honest, I'm worried about her infecting me when she comes home. And we have a kid, and I would be super frantic if kids were getting sick regularly, which doesn't appear

to be the case. But still, there are a lot of things stressing me out, and I don't think meditation is going to solve all of that. I just think it makes you more balanced, more resilient, more thoughtful in the face of life's ups and downs. So let's dig into some of the specific things that meditation might be helping in this domain, again with the caveat that it's not going to make this pandemic perfect, but even if it's making each of these things ten percent better, that's

pretty big in the current crisis. So let's talk about meditation and anxiety. So what's some of the evidence jesting that just this simple act of following your breath for five to ten minutes a day will allow you to reduce this or fear that we're all feeling right now. I want to be clear. You know, the people in

my position tend to hype the science. I worry that some of their reporting around meditation and science has been a little bit irresponsible or overblown, and so I try to be careful, largely because my wife police is what I say about this to point out that, you know, the research around meditation is very much in its early stages. It's been going on for ten, fifteen to twenty years. It's really ramped up in huge ways now, but it's still early days. So I usually use the term like

the research strongly suggests the following. But where the research is the strongest is around anxiety and depression. That's really where it's the strongest. And anxiety and depression or two things that I've been dealing with my whole life. I was a little kid and my parents had to send me to shrink because I was worried about nuclear war. So these are not new am for me, and it's really heartening to see that meditation is good for those

two conditions. How does it work? Because I think if you're an individual human being, you may not care so much about what the data show. You probably just care about like, what's this going to do for me? And how is it going to do it? The act of sitting and trying to watch your breath inevitably getting distracted over and over and over, and then noticing what's distracted you and starting again and again and again. That over time boosts your self awareness. You have more visibility into

your inner life. And once you see clearly these anxiety loops, these thought patterns, these ancient habits, these storylines embedded into us by our parents or by the culture, once you can see those clearly, they have less of a chance of owning you, and that is a game changing skill that you can You know, after a few weeks of meditation as a beginner, you start to really see it show up in your life. But over time it you

just get better at it and better at it. And for me, that has been one of, if not the most powerful results of meditation. And so the second domain I wanted to dig into is the domain of sleep. Right. You know, we know that one of the things that anxiety does and stress does in general, is it kind of jacks up our sympathetic nervous system in a way that's hard for us to rest in any form, but

particularly in sleep. Have you found personally that this active meditating every day has helped your sleep and know of any other evidence for it. Yeah, so there is evidence that meditation is good for sleep. But there's no shortage of irony here because the word Buddha means awake. So

meditation was not designed to help you sleep. It was designed to wake you up to your inner cacophony so that you have a different relationship to it, and so that you can see other fundamental truths about the universe, like impermanence, the fact that everything's changing all the time, and there's not much we can do about it, which is actually scary and liberating at the same time. That

was the original purpose of meditation. But in our modern life, where our ancient sort of racing mind for which we evolved, you know, we evolved to be a you know, for threat detection and finding food and mates, we evolved to have a raising mind, it's not serving us in a modern context in many ways. So you get into bed at night and the mind is racing, and we don't

know what to do about it. And so meditation is really useful for calming you down, focusing you on something other than your thoughts, even if just for a nanosecond, kind of a circuit breaker on our repetitive inner loops. And for many people that really helps the process of going to sleep. And so I have I'm very much in the habit of the last thing I do every day is meditate. Yeah, me too. That's that's the main

time that I do it. And I can tell when I'm not doing it, when I'm like really busy and get to bed late, and I'm like, again, fall prey to all the biases that make us not do this stuff. I'm like, oh, I'm just going to fall asleep right now. My sleep is just so much worse than if I'd taken in three minutes to just follow my breath. But that gets to the problem, which is and I think one of the reasons that you wrote your second book.

I think I heard you interviewed at one point and you said, you know, you thought when you wrote the first book and gave all the evidence that everybody who read it would just instantly meditate and the world would be a better place, hurl themselves into the lotus position. That's what I thought they would do. But alas, we are creatures of like horrid neuroses that prevent us from doing really good things that would be awesome for us.

So when we get back from the break, I actually want to talk more about the things that prevent us from doing it, especially right now during the COVID crisis, and what we can do to overcome those voices in our head that are telling us not right now won't work, try it later. Meditation could be a huge help for all of us right now, but that doesn't necessarily make it easy to sit down and get our own on during this tough time. And so I asked Dan Harris

for some help. I wanted him to walk me through the reasons why we don't necessarily make it onto our

meditation cushion, especially when we most need it. It's probably super frustrating and deeply annoying to hear people extol the virtues of meditation, and then many people listen to this are thinking, well, I haven't done it, so now this thing that's supposed to distress me is just making me more stressed because I you know, I'm engaged in self laceration around not doing this thing that everybody says I should do, and blah blah blah. So I get it. So I'm here to make this easier for you and

lower the bar. I don't think twenty minutes is a reasonable ask for many people at the beginning, which is why one of my little slogans is one minute counts. I get that people are time starved. Even when we're locked in our homes, we feel time starved. I've been been meditating at night with my elderly neighbor. She's got some anxiety, but for lots of legitimate reasons, and so we go out into the hallway and stay physically distanced and meditate together, and sometimes my son comes out to see.

He's five, he doesn't like meditation, but he comes out to say hello. And I've noticed that she talks about how she has nothing to do all day and she's beating herself up for not meditating during the day. And I get it. We feel time starved no matter what's going on in our lives, and I'm not here to talk you out of that. What I do think is useful, though, is to lower the bar enough so that people can

actually can and will actually do this thing. And so one minute Counts is I think it sets people's minds at ease. It seems so eminently doable that I like that. You know, I'd rather see people do five to ten minutes, but I think one minute definitely does count, and you are getting real benefit from that, and I think it

can lead to a deeper practice over time. The other thing I love about the one minute Counts is that the one minute doesn't necessarily have to be you in the lotus position, you know in some fake meditations, shrine in your tiny apartment with your family around you. It can be when you're washing the dishes, it can be when you're unloading the dishwasher, it can be when you're

washing your hands. I've heard as another great one like if you just take time to follow your breath and be present during those moments, in some sense, that can count too. Okay, so you've actually said something very important. Two things are true. One, it is true that we can co opt our daily activities to turn them into meditation, so I have a bunch of things to say about that.

But it is also true that there is a difference between sort of free range meditation as I call it, you know, on the go daily life meditation where you're mindful while you're washing the dishes or washing your hands or whatever, and formal practice. And I believe that if you're doing on the go practice mindfulness practices, that's great. You should feel good about that, and if that's all

you ever do, great, bravo done. But I also believe that there is immense value to formal practice, even if it's just for a minute or five minutes, and that that can turbo charge the free range practices. So I just want to make that plug. But on your point about these sort of on the go mindfulness practices, absolutely you can turn anything you're doing into meditation just by paying attention to it. Let's take washing your hands, because we all have to do this for twenty seconds a

million times a day. And now my hands are just you know, as dry as the sahara and cracked and painful, which is a good sign. We should all we should all have painful hands, right seeing that, Yeah, let's let's take washing your hands. You can sing Happy Birthday twice, fine, or you can use those twenty seconds to just feel the road data of your senses. What does it feel like when the hot or cold or warm water hits your hands? Was it feel like as your fingers intertwined?

Was it feel like as you put the soap on and the soap washes off? What noises are you're hearing? What are you seeing in front of you? And then every time you get distracted, which you will, You'll get distracted a million times. You get carried away by your to do list, by your phantasmagoric projections into the future about this pandemic and this Gently catch yourself and return to the physical sensations. I think that's a better way to spend twenty seconds than just singing Happy Birthday or

neurotically worrying about any number of things. Yeah, I think that's fantastic. So that's kind of one thing, this idea that people don't have enough time. I think another thing that's coming up for a lot of people right now, especially given that everybody's squished with their family into small apartments and things and can't get out to leave, is it feels like I don't have any privacy to do this right now that like, you know, my kid could kind of could walk in while I'm sitting there trying

to follow my breath. You know, there's stuff going on everywhere. It's hard to find silence. What advice do you have for people who just feel like they're too kind of trapped in their homes with so many folks around to do this. Well, first of all, I feel you. I'm in my home with my wife and our five year old, and it's a lot. So I think you've got to give yourself a break and recognize that some days, many days, perhaps most days, you won't get to it. However, there

are little tricks. So for bedtime, for example, if you've got younger children you're putting them to bed, there's always that space between when they stopped talking and when you can actually extricate yourself. So if you're lying there spooned with your kid or sitting in a chair next to the bed, steal that minute or two right before you go to bed. Great time. You know, we have a comfy chair in the corner of our bedroom and I use that my policies. I just meditate until I feel

super tired. I don't know how long that is. I'm a timing it, but I think it's a while that you will definitely have time for that. Lock yourself in the bathroom, use noise canceling headphones first thing in the morning before anybody else is up. Lots of little tricks you can use and give yourself a break if you don't get to it. The final thing, and this one comes up a lot for me when I'm sitting to like literally sit down and meditate, is I'm kind of

more scared now than I normally am. I feel like when I first started meditating, I was really worried about the Pandora's box. You know, what crap from my childhood is going to come up, what insecurities are going to

fly by. It can and sometimes be really scary when you're really listening to this voice closely, and I feel like that's even more scary now when in some ways our anxieties are justified in certain senses, right, like our mortality is coming closer than it's ever been for some of us, especially those with pre existing conditions, And so how do you fight this one where it's like, it just seems like if I sit down to just follow my breath and pay attention to what I'm feeling, it's

going to feel really awful, particularly in the current time. Well, let me just validate the point. I think it's true. It's true if you meditate, it's possible that difficult things from your past will surface. I think it's also true that if you meditate right now and you don't have a lot of trauma in your past, the trauma of being alive right now it may surface for you. And so I don't want to sugarcoat that, but I think the choice is do you want to have this stuff

because it's there, the traumas there. Would you like to have it lurking in the background of your psyche, driving you blindly in many ways, or would you like to drag it into the sunlight and investigate it journalistically, non judgmentally, in a friendly, kind way, so that you have a choice. I mean, this is what meditation offers to us is instead of reacting blindly to everything because we have no

visibility into our inner life, you can respond wisely. And so, yeah, we're in a we are in an extremely uncomfortable and difficult situation right now. Do you want to face that fourth rightly so that you can be calmer, insaner, and that you can be more effective and more helpful to other people. I think meditations are going to be very useful in that sense. I don't think I'm not a meditation fundamentalist. I think there are other ways that can

also be useful. Calling your shrink if you need medication, taking that medication, getting enough sleep, exercising, eating well, making sure you have social connection, tuning into your capacity to help, which can elevate you out of you the black hole of self obsession. There are many ways to cope with this moment. I would just submit that meditation should be

one of them that you should consider. And in some sense, if you're doing it right, if you're doing it right, meaning that you're doing it non judgmentally, in some ways, you're supposed to not embrace those yucky emotions, but at least be there with them and be compassionate about the fact that you have them, which in our daily lives we tend not to do with the yucky stuff going on gold Star, I mean, that's exactly right. That's the radical move of meditation, which is our habitual response to

difficult emotions is fight it or feed it. This is something completely different. This is just being with it, investigating it. So the great meditation teacher Tara Brock has a little acronym that I like called rain our aim. You're hit by a big, powerful emotion, are is just recognized what's

happening right now? A is allow it instead of fighting it or feeding it, giving into the anger and you know, making the phone call that you wish you hadn't made, or giving it to the fear, and you know, buying all the surgical masks that the doctors actually need. Just allow it to be here and then I investigate it. Feelings they call them feelings for a reason. They show up in your body. And you can take a look at your chest, tightening your head, thrumming, maybe some nervous

energy down your arms. Take a look at that kind of non judgmentally, and then n can mean nurture. It's a little little syrupy for my taste, but have a friendly attitude toward it. Instead of judging yourself for having this emotion or wishing it away or giving into it, you can actually have a warmer relationship to see that the anxiety is just your mind's way of protecting you.

Maybe not super skillfully, but it is this little neurotic voice in your head is trying to help you, and you can generate some warmth toward that, and then you can you know, blow it a kiss and go in another direction. Yeah, I've heard, I've heard the phrase you use. This is what I like to use from my end is like you're cool. Hey, you're cool. Yeah, chest tight, you know you're cool. That's all right, you know, yes, just like nurture and love it and you know, try

to you know, encourage it. But just like it's cool, you're there. I'm not going to freak out, just hang out. You know. When we talk about meditation, we often talk specifically about like breath based meditation, where we're just kind of following our breath. But lots of folks have argued there right now. What we need is a different kind of meditation, one that focuses on other people right now. Yes, I'm going to make a pitch for this is I can't believe I'm saying this, but I'm gonna make a

pitch for love. And I want me to say something about love here, because I think that love has been pounded pulverized into meaninglessness through wrote repetition and Hollywood cliche and bad Bon Jovi songs. I think we kind of need to knock love off of its pedestal and just define it down just something super simple that doesn't require string music or anything like that. It's just the capacity to give a shit. We all have that. It's deeply

wired into us or we are a social species. The human who was only human on the savannah back in the day was probably a dead human because you need it to be part of a tribe, a pack, so we can all tap into this innate ability we have to care about other people and about ourselves. There's a pretty good argument to be made that if you can't have a friendly relationship to it yourself, you're going to

have a hard time doing it for others. So there's a kind of meditation that, as you might imagine, I had a negative reaction to when I first heard about it. It's called loving kindness meditation. It is like like using all the cheese from like meditation, like technology to like make us feel really hippie dippy about it. Yes, but

I was interviewing somebody recently. They were doing this loving kindness meditation and she went to the teacher to complain about it, and the teacher said, if you can't do cheesy, you can't be free. I think that is an incredibly powerful thing to say. So let me tell you what the meditation is. Because some of you, who if you're like me, an anti sentimentalist, you're going to have a reaction,

which is you basically picture a series of beings. Often we start with ourselves and then you move on to like a close friend, a mentor, a neutral person, a difficult person, and then everybody. And as you're envisioning these people, you repeat silently for phrases may be happy, maybe be safe, may be healthy, may you live with ease. To me, at least, it sounded like Valentine's Day with a knife

to my throat. But but there's been an enormous amount of study of this kind of meditation, and it's been shown to have really powerful effects not only on our physiology, but also on our psychology and behavior. And I can't believe I'm saying this, but I think what is going to save us, both individually and collectively right now is love. As I defined it before. It doesn't have to be super gooey. It doesn't have to be something out of a movie. But it can be as simple as having compassion.

Has been described as empathy, which is feeling other people's feelings plus action, just having the desire to help. So what are you doing with your elderly neighbors, What are you doing with the people with whom you share an apartment? What are you doing if you live alone? Are you supporting local businesses? Just that move of tapping into your your innate capacity to give a shit about other people and yourself can elevate you out of the morass of

kind of self centered neuroses. And as I said a moment ago, I think it's what will help us survive this thing individually but also as a culture. Given all the science of the stuff and what you've seen in your own life, are you hopeful that If people use some of these techniques, it's one of many things they

can do to feel better during this crazy time. I one, now, I'm violating my ten percent a little stick, but I am one hundred percent confident that if you add just small doses of daily ish meditation, it's going to make a difference in your life. I don't I'm not laboring under the delusion that immediately all three hundred and fifty million Americans or seven billion humans are going to just start meditating. But I think calm is contagious, just like

panic is contagious. As talking to a great meditation teacher the other day who quoted something that the very famous zendmaster Tick not Han said, which is that you can think about our current situation, or any stressful situation, like a bunch of people in a boat in a storm. Of course that's a stressful situation. Some people are going to be freaking out, but one calm person on that

boat can change the atmosphere dramatically. And so yeah, I don't think we have to expect that everybody's going to meditate. Don't try to like browbeat your spouse into doing it or your parents into doing it. If you do it. The way you show up will be different some percentage of the time, and that can make any calculable difference. I hope you've gotten some helpful tips for how you can reap the benefits of a little mindfulness in this

stressful time. And I hope you'll also check out Dan's podcast ten Percent Happier, where he'll give you even more tips for becoming present in the stressful time. But I also wanted to take Dan's charge seriously that one minute is all you need to get started. So let's end this episode with a quick one minute ish meditation together. If you're walking around listening to this, why don't you hit pause on this recording for a second and go

find a comfortable seat. So, now that you're sitting down, I want you to quickly close your eyes and become present. Just pay attention to how your body is feeling right now. Then I want all of you to take a long, deep breath in and then breathe out really smoothly. Now, let's take another long deep breath in, really filling your belly,

and then breathe it out. And one more time, just a really deep breath in, really filling that belly and breathe it out, and now I just want you to have your breath returned to normal, and I want you to just follow where your breath feels like it's moving in your body. Sometimes this will be at the edge of your nose or at the edge of your lips, but it could also just be in your chest or in your belly where you see your belly rising and falling. And for the next few seconds, just pay attention to

where your breath is. Don't try to change it, just follow it. And if your mind wanders from your breath, which it will inevitably do, just really non judgmentally bring it back and just go back to focusing on your breath. Now that you've had a few seconds to take time to focus on your breath, will end with one big, deep breath in and then give it a big sigh out. And so that's it. Y'all just did a quick one minute meditation. I'll invite you to take a second to

see how you feel. Take a second to notice how that one minute of taking time to be mindful feels in your body right now. If you're like me, it feels pretty good. And so it's worth remembering that you can do that at any time, the mindfulness benefits are there for you. You just need to take a moment to breathe. We'll see you for the next episode of The Happiness Lab with me Doctor Laurie Santos. The Happiness Lab is a Pushkin podcast. It's co written and produced

by Ryan Dilley and mastered by Evan Viola. Our original music is written by Zachary Silver. Special thanks to Ben Davis, Heather Faine, Carly Mgliori, Julia Barton, neil A Belle, Jacob Weisberg, and the rest of the Pushkin crew.