Become 10% Happier Through Meditation with Dan Harris

with Dan Harris. I wanted to call the book The Voice in My Head as an asshole, because I just think that that's a profane statement of a fundamental truth. Welcome to the one you feed Throughout time, great tinkers have recognized the importance of the thoughts we have, quotes like garbage in, garbage out, or you are what you think, ring true. And yet for many of us, our thoughts don't strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self pity, jealousy,

or fear. We see what we don't have instead of what we do. We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it's not just about thinking our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent and creative effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction, how they feed their good wolf. Thanks for joining us. Our guest this week is Dan Harris, correspondent for ABC News and co anchor for both Nightline and the weekend

edition of Good Morning America. In two thousand fourteen, Harris released his first book, Happier. How I Tamed the Voice in my head, reduced stress without losing my edge, and found self help that really works. A true story. In the book, he describes how after a panic attack on national television, he stopped using drugs and discovered the bet of fits of meditation. Let's hear the interview. Hi, Dan, welcome to the show. Hi glad that you could join us.

I really enjoyed your book ten percent Happier. There's a lot of things that will get into as we go through the interview, but I related within with an awful lot of it, and I think are our approach to a lot of the things that are in this area are are very similar, and I was I was laughing a lot during the book at different points. Thank you. Yeah,

You're welcome. So our podcast is called The One You Feed, and it's based on the parable of two wolves, where there's a grandfather who's talking with his grandson and he says, in life, there are two wolves inside of us. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love, and the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like hatred and greed and fear. And the grandson stops and he thinks, and he says, well, grandfather,

which one wins? And the grandfather says, the one you feed. So I'd like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life and in the work you you you know. I think it speaks to the fact that that the mind can be trained. Um, the brain and the mind can be trained. Uh. And

you can practice for things like happiness and compassion. And that's the radical note notion undergirding meditation, that just as you go to the gym and build your bicep, you can sit close your eyes and practice things practice to be happier, or to be kinder, or lots of other things and um. And that there's science that backs this up. And you we see it in the brain scans that we see that the areas of the brain associated with stress the gray matter literally shrinks. The area associated with

empathy and compassion, the gray matter literally grows. So this isn't some touchy feely new ag thing. This is hardcore scientific uh stuff and and at the same time life changing. And and this is why we're seeing everyone from scientists to pro football players to entertainers to c e O s uh engaging with what has always been considered a kind of fringe e weirdo activity. Uh. And that's why I wrote my book to try to get people who might be skeptical about this stuff to to open their

minds a little bit exactly. And I'm going to give just a brief overview of your book for the listeners, and then I'll kind of go into some more in depth questions and you can jump in if I say, you know, if I don't get the summary quite right.

But in general, it's a story of you, um, your journalism career, you going overseas UH in a lot of war zones, coming home, starting to self medicate some some different feelings through drugs, which led to you having a panic attack on air, which then led you to start searching for some answers as to what was happening, which ultimately led to you getting into meditation and then writing this book. So that's the very you know, forty five

second version, pretty close, fair enough? All right, So you originally said that you wanted the title of your book to be the Voice in my head is an Asshole, which I thought was a wonderful title. You also just referred to the voice in your head as a malevolent puppeteer, which I also absolutely loved. What do you mean by that? I think that the fundamental the truth of the human condition is that we have this voice in our head and in your narrator. I mean, I'm not talking about

hearing voices or schizophrenia. I'm just talking about this voice that is what chases you out of bed in the morning and is heckling you all day long, and as you constantly wanting things or not wanting or judging other people, are very harshly judging yourself, uh, and thinking about the past and thinking about the future instead of focusing on what's happening right now, and when you're unaware of this NonStop conversation you're having with yourself. It is a malevolent puppeteer.

You asked you around, and it's why you have your hand in the fridge when you're not hungry, or you're losing your temper when it's strategically unwise, or you are a checking your email when your kids are trying to talk to you. So to me, that's why I wanted to call the book The Voice in My Head as an asshole, because I think I just think that that's a a profane statement of a fundamental truth. I agree.

I think the first time that I ever got that really understood that and heard and you sort of described a similar experience when you when you read somebody describing that voice in their head, it was it was a complete revelation that we, most of us, have never really thought of that that that voice isn't necessarily us. It's

a it's it's a manifestation of our mind. The central feature of our lives is this sense of me or I. It's the force that has you, you know, making dents to deployments, are getting up and leaving the room when you have to go the bathroom. It's this kind of it's this propulsion that's with us all the time. And there's you know, color commentating, commentating on everything, but we take it for granted. Uh, we don't. We don't see it, and unless it's pointed out to you, and this point

out to you, it's like this thunderous truism. Obviously it's totally obvious. Um, obviously it's totally obvious. That's a little bit of a ridiculous statement. But it is obvious and yet overlooked. So um, it's uh. One. When when I first encountered this, this um, this observation, it was a

big deal for me. And also it was not only powerful because it was intuitively true, but also because it explained some of the dumb behavior that you described that that I write about in the book, That the fact that I went to war zones without really thinking about the psychological consequences, that came home and got depressed and

really wasn't fully aware that I was even depressed. I wasn't self aware enough to to to perceive what was really going on, and then I blindly self medicated with cocaine and ecstasy and it all blew up in my face in the form of a panic attack on Good Morning America in June of two thousand four. So for me, this seeing yeah, seeing Ekar totally who happened to be the first first person who I heard described the voice in the head. Seeing it on a page in a

book was was a very powerful experience. The problem was with e car Totally that a lot of the other

stuff he was writing but I found irretrievably ridiculous. Yeah, I have to say reading about your your your experience of reading Eckart totally was one of my favorite parts of the book because You've got a line where you say, uh, you know, just when about when I started to think that totally was a sage and perhaps he held the key to all my problems, he started saying some ludicrous ship, which just cracks me up because that's exactly my You know, when I've read that stuff, it's I have the exact

same experience. It's this, there's so much truth here, and yet everything else that's coming on here is just sounds insane to me. And that's one of the things I loved about your book because on this program, we've tried to really be focused on what I would say are pretty practical, down to earth application of you know, how

do we make our lives better? How do we live better in the world, And and you come to all this stuff very very skeptical, you start reading neck Art totally and you're intrigued and totally turned off at the same time. UM, tell us a little bit about where things went from there, and how did you go from being so skeptical to being a believer at least in meditation, like as you said earlier, which a lot of people tend to uh you know has a bad has a

bad PR program. Right, people don't have good thoughts about meditation. How how did that journey go for you? Yeah? I think meditation is a massive PR problem. UM. I think what what what clinched it for me was the science. Um, I'm a skeptical guy. But the scientific research into meditation, which I was previously unaware of, is you know, while

it's still in its embryonic stages, um, it is pretty compelling. Um. It shows that or it's suggests that meditation can do everything from lowering your blood pressure to boosting your immune system to literally rewiring key parts of your brain. And uh, you know, as I mentioned before, you see it on the brain scans, and um, you see it on the m R s. And I find that very very very compelling. And also the other thing that I think really convinced me to to give meditation a shot is that it

doesn't involve all of the things that I thought it involved. You. You don't have to where special outfits, you don't have to sit in any finding positions, you don't have to chance, you don't have to light in sense. Uh, you know, you don't have to join any group. It's a it's a secular, simple brain exercise that you can do, uh, you know, a couple of minutes a day, and it can have a pretty transformative effect. Again, it's not gonna there's a reason why I called the book ten percent Happier.

It's not gonna, you know, transform your life into NonStop rainbows and unicorns. But I think it does. Uh. What it does is it allows you to feed the right wolf um repeatedly. And that's what you're practicing to do um in meditation. And you know, just to expand on the on the wolf thing um. You know, we we we tend to you know, the human condition is that we tend to make our suffering worse than it needs to be, and we tend to gloss over or ignore all a lot of the good things in our life.

And what meditation allows you to do is to be present for the for the things that are good, and to not go down the rat hole of useless rumination over things that you can't change. I think that suffering and stress and striving is all, you know, a part of life and part of trying to achieve anything and be ambitious. But you know what, I found meditation has helped me figure out how not to cross the line

between what I call constructive anguish and useless rumination. And so to me, that that's kind of a played into the to the wolf analogy, because there's a wolf that is um so you know, self referential and self absorbed that he gets uh depressed and anxious, and then there's a wolf that is actually you know, wise and uh discriminating and uh paying attention to what the actually going on,

and meditation allows you to see the latter wolf. I like to make the distinction between pain, which is the normal things that happened to us in life that are unpleasant, and then suffering, which is sort of that as you just described, it's that extra layer of stuff that we put over top of it, all the thinking we do about about what's happening, the feeling bad about feeling bad,

or the stories that we tell ourselves around that. And one of the things you quoted in the book Stephen Bachelor, who's a writer I really admire, and and you said the craving to be otherwise, to be elsewhere, permeated my whole life. Can you tell us more about what why you chose that quote and what it means to you. I just thought, I mean, I really like kicking a Bachelor.

He's he wrote a book called Buddhism Without Beliefs. Uh. He's a self described Buddhist atheist, which is kind of a um redundant phrase because there is really no God. There is no God in Buddhism, so um. But nonetheless, he's a he's a in a faith that is a very skeptical faith, Buddhism, and is barely a faith at all. He's a super skeptical guy. So he's he's I like

him for a lot of reasons. Um. And he's really good at describing this tendancy we we have to be projecting into the future or reminiscing or ruminating on the past instead of focusing on where we are right now. It totally actually has a nice phrase here. He talked talks about the background static of perpetual discontent. Um, that we just never were like colloquy abies, were never quite

happy or okay with what's happening right now. We're always trying to get onto the next thing, or we're idealizing the past in some way, uh, instead of fully inhabiting what's happening right now. Um. And I just found the way Bachelor wrote about it to be quite powerful and

to be accurate in terms of my life. I mean, I I am in a in a deadline dominated world and of journalism, and you know, so by by dint of being in this kind of job, it kind of puts the the the human tendency to lurch forward to the next thing on steroids and um, So I found that phrase very very powerful. And I'm not saying I've cured myself of that tendency, but the first step is

admitting it. And meditation is good for sort of you know, rubbing your nose in the tendency so that you can see it when you're doing it and you can back off. I have a question for you related to that. So you recently you recently, I guess within the last year, so became uh, the anchor on Nightline, which is something you had wanted for a long time, and in your epilogue you talk a little bit about how that's been satisfying.

I'm curious if you think had you had you achieved that place without some of the work you've done on meditation, whether you would have had the same sort of experience of being dissatisfied with where things were what they were

and be kind of look into the next thing. Uh. You know, I have a conflicted view on on the tendency we have to never be satisfied because I think to a certain extent it's useful, right, because the those who achieve in society often are, you know, like oysters with that little bit of sand that irritates them and that turns into a pearl eventually. You know that you just never quite you know happy. I like that to

a certain extent. But the thing is, we take it too far, or I realized that I was taking it too far, and um so I don't want to totally demean or degrade the the the insatiability of the human of the human mind. But I do think that there's you've got to You've got to figure out how to draw the draw the line. You know, when is it useful to be pushing and pushing and pushing and when is it not so useful? And for me, I've just gotten better at figuring that out and it pertains the Nightline. Um,

you know, I it was. I think about this a lot now, especially with the book too. When you when you have something, you've probably heard this theory before, that the set point theory that we humans have a we have a set happiness, set point that good things can happen or bad things can happen. We tend to sort of gravitate over time back to our set point. And

that that happened to me both with Nightline. I got the job and I was so excited, and then I just kind of gravitated back to my stet point over time. And then with my book, you know, I worried. I worked on this book for four years and I worried that it was gonna suck, and and maybe it does suck, but it ended up selling well, which was enormously thrilling. And then over time, you just kind of gravitated back

to your stet point. Um. What I will say, the difference between the old me and the new me is that I think the set point has gone up over time, and that uh, I'm more aware of the gravitation back to it, and so I don't get too dared away with the ego trip of doing doing well at something, uh, and I don't get too disappointed to myself when it wears off and I started thinking looking around and thinking

about what am I going to do next? One of the things in the book that you wrestled with and you just you just talked about it, and it has been it has been the fundamental question that eats at me for for years as I've as I've looked at this sort of stuff, and it's exactly what you just said. Where's that Where's that line between uh, always wanting something different and striving, which is undeniably in some ways positive for for humans in general, versus sort of accepting where

we're at and being happy with that. And I think you did a lot of wrestling with that in the book, where you came to some answers that were a little bit comfortable. Have you had any more insights or anything else you want to want to share about that, because that one still sort of, you know, pokes me in the side. Yeah, I mean, I think it is for

any ambitious person. It is the question in my view, um and Uh, I think it's all about finding the line between, as I said before, constructive anguish and useless rumination, and that's a blurry and wavy line. And it's kind of like in spin class. I don't know if you were taking a spin class where you're on the bikes and um extract you've taken wonder you haven't I have? Unfortunately Okay, yeah sucks. Um I do it, but it's a good workout, but it's horrible. Um anyway, the instructor

will say, you know, turn the resistance up to six. Well, there's no number on the dial, so you're you're setting your own six. And that's kind of the same thing here that you're you You've got to kind of have this internal self awareness to to know. Okay, Um, I've now spent twenty minutes worrying about all the awful ramifications of missing a flight. Uh can is it okay now to start thinking about something else? Yes, I think it is, um And, and it's just a it's just an ongoing process.

But for me, I just find it interesting to watch my mind in that way. You know that made that that last stavement is kind of a larger issue. Um, the the the fact that when you become a meditator you sort of objectify your mind in some ways you you you, um, you start to view it with some amusement and some in a more just passionate way. Um. But back to the ambition question, I just think that it's about figuring out how when is it okay to be pushing and pushing and pushing and when did it

no longer useful? Yeah. The other thing I've thought about with that is I've come from a position that always thinks that it's dissatisfaction or unhappiness or pain that that drives me forward to do things. And and I've thought more about could that motivation come from a different place or does it sometimes come from a different place, not one of unhappiness, but one of I guess, for lack of a better word, a joy or and enjoyment of making and creating things. I think it can, you know,

and I think can come from both places. Um. You know, I've I found that when I've gone on meditation retreats, you know, when the mind when I'm when I'm when the amount of a discursive random thinking comes down because you're you're you know, focusing on your breath for hours the time, I have many more good ideas. I'm often like running back to my room to scribble things down. Um. And and where is that coming from. It's not coming from a striving place, right, It's just coming from getting

out of your own way. Uh. But you know, but again at the same by the same time, and I'm not I'm not against you know, creating a big ambition for myself or anybody else doing it and then going forward with extreme prejudice. I think I think there's something to be said for that. And that's how we that's how we got the iPhone and skyscrapers and um. But but I also think that enormous amount of creativity can come from more positive places too. It's the it's just

not a simple answer, right, It's not. And I think for for a long time I wanted a simple answer with it. You did get sort of an answer, um, And I think it might have been uh Joseph Goldstein who gave it to you where you talked about, um not being attached to the results. Yeah, you know, in terms of just to get back here, you know there's

not being a simple answer. I think a lot. I think there is a romanticizing it's and it's in history, you know you there's you see it from Plato or Aristotle or whatever, all the way way back in time. We've heard about Uh, Shakespeare did it too. I haven't dona have all the quotes of my fingertips where this romanticizing of melancholy, that everybody who has achieved anything has to be sad and miserable, and that scans to me

as as like excuses. Now, to some extent, I think it's true there is a high level of correlation between anxiety and achievement, and which is why I firmly believe that a certain amount of stress and struggle is part of achieving. But again, I'm not quite sure, based on my own experience and having spent a lot of years kind of attacking this question internally and externally, not quite sure that if van Go had been slightly less crazy, that he didn't cut his ear off, that they wouldn't

have made the beautiful paintings. He might have made even more beautiful paintings. Um And I can just tell you from my own perspective, I feel like I'm doing better work now that I'm less crazy. I'm still pretty crazy again the book of Happier. I'm not claiming some sort of perfected state. Um uh. And again, if my wife was on the phone right now, she would give you still a moron speech. Um. So. I but I think, and maybe I'm deluding myself, but I think that my

ability to focus is better now. The quality of my work is better, the quality of my interaction to other people is better. Um. And So I don't think that somehow being happier it works at cross purposes with being successful. I just don't. Um. But back to your question, non attachment results. Yeah, that simple, little, kind of bland sounding phrase turned out to be transformative to me. Uh. The phrase non attachment, for his else is all throughout Buddhism.

But the person who first said it to me was Dr Mark Epstein, who's a very good friend of mine in a shrink in New York City, who writes great books about the overlap between Buddhism and psychology. And he was telling me that, you know, you can try really hard to achieve things. You have to recognize we live in a universe that is characterized by entropy. Chaos and impermanence,

and you're not in control. And so the route to maximal resilience is to do as bet you know, to work as hard as you can, set audacious goals, etcetera, etcetera, but to recognize that in the end, uh, you can't be in control of the results. So it's so a certain amount of this passion um visa vi the results is the right way to go. And that will allow you to dust yourself off and get back in the fray after you lose, which you will sometimes Yep. And

Steve Jobs lost. I mean he had a whole bunch of you know he had by the way, he was the meditator. Um, you know, he had all sorts of setbacks, all of my uh you know Ted Coppel, who's a personal hero of mine. You know, he he had struggles. Peter Jennings, an even bigger hero in my world. Uh, you know, was the main anchor of ABC News at age twenty six or something like that, and they got fired and uh or demoted publicly and sent off to

be a foreign correspondent. He rehabilitated his reputation and then came back to become a legendary anchorman. So this is this the way of the world. We're all going to have these setbacks, and you can choose to feed the wolf of negativity and rumination, uh and resentment, or you can feed the wolf of resilience. The catchphrase that you start to apply to your thinking is is this any longer useful? It's because to the point, there is some

amount of planning, worrying, thinking all that that's critical. And I think that that line is is it useful? And how how do you tell that for yourself when it's no longer useful? As I was saying before, it's this this blurry, wavy line I did. I don't know. There's no magic formula for figuring out when you're thinking it's useful.

It's kind of intuitive. But what meditation does is it gives you boost yourself awareness because you're sitting with your eyes closed and watching your mind, and you become, in fact, the part of the brain associated with self awareness that the gray matter has been shown to grow. You become you've become better at this kind of self monitoring so that you can see when am I kind of going down a rat hole here? And when am I actually

engaged in some constructive analysis. Excellent. I do think you're book was was really excellent. I it's I've read more of these books than I am even cared to admit um, and I loved your book and I actually got something out of it beyond just resonating with the story as a whole, because your skepticism and and your path I think Mark Epstein was the first person I read that I really went, oh, wow, this really makes a ton

of sense to me. But you described when you were on your meditation retreat how you hit a point where you had um. I don't know if you'd refer to it as a spiritual experience, but you had an experience of some sort where your mind sort of locked in and was you were you were ecstatically overjoyed, and you described what that was like. You described how your mind

was noting things really really quickly. And despite all the things that I've read and all that I had never thought of that as being the experience, and once I did, it was. I won't say I had an experience to the level of yours, but something clicked in me when I started thinking of it that way. Really about the whole point is to sit back and just watch the mind. It's about watching, It's about nothing else, and that was enormously helpful for me, So I wanted to say thanks

for that. I appreciate it. I mean, I think it's actually about you know, it's annoying to say this because it's such a stupid cliche with this whole be here now, being in the present moment thing. But another way to say it is the way they say it in sports, being in the zone. What's happening. When you're in the zone, you're totally focused on what's happening right now. You're making a free throw, for example, or you're hitting a put um. And that's what happened to me on that meditation retreat.

I was just kind of dragged, kicking and screaming into the present moment for you know, many many hours. And that was associated with a big blast of serotonin. And I think that most of our happiness is derived from focusing on what's happening right now. And uh, you know there's another It was a great study Harvard that showed that it picked people on their iPhones. All the researchers sent out these iPhone alerts at random times two hundreds of people and ask them, what are you doing right

now and how happy are you? And what they found was that that when people's minds were wandering, they were less happy. Um. And so it goes to follow that when you're in the zone, when you're focusing on what's happening right now, you can be really really happy. And what meditation does is just shove you into the moment. I mean you're you are uh basically, you're shoving yourself into the moment by repeatedly refocusing on the feeling of your breath coming in and going out every time your

mind wanders. And that can have if you do it. You know, if you're sequestered on a meditation retreat for ten days with a bunch of weirdos, um, you know, and all you're doing all day long is meditating, that that can be one of the effects. And that's certainly what happened to me. And when you know, when I drop all of my obsessive thinking, when I'm standing at a stoplight in New York City or uh, standing in my office looking at the window, I can get just

a little taste of that one now and again. And I think what's really important about that is meditation is a big is a big part of it. But that's available to us really any time that we choose to do it. And I've I've found for me that that's a great practice when I'm starting to get swept away with whatever negative feelings, is to just come back and try and notice exactly what's happening around me right then.

And it tends to interrupt this. I heard an interview the other day and I can't remember the woman's name, but it was on a podcast called on Being and she's studied mindfulness since the seventies, and she doesn't really advocate meditation so much. She's much more an advocate of, Hey, you can at any minute just start paying attention to what's going on around you. And I think that's ah I found for myself that meditation is a real way to strengthen that muscle. But it's not the only place

that it happens. Yeah, but I guess you know, I know who you're talking about. I don't remember her name, but I know you're talking about my I have never read her material, nor I ever discussed this, So I'm gonna say something that maybe i'll later right, But I kind of disagree. I mean, I agree that, yes, she's right. You can. You can drop into the present moment. Anybody can. But it's really hard to do if you don't have

this practice. It's kind of like going out and throwing a fifty yard past in an NFL game if you've never done any practice before. And meant, what meditation does is just it just teaches you how to do it. You have a mechanism. It's a really simple mechanism. Um, you know what, I could teach you how to do it and fewer as the New York Times reporter had me do In the New York Times tech reporter had me teach them how to meditating. Fewer characters and it

takes to send a tweet. It's super, super simple. It's just you learn how you learn how to focus. And Um, I think practicing mindfulness is tricky without it. That's just my view. Most likely this woman who's been setting mindfulness since the ninety seventies is right, and I'm wrong, but that's just my view. I tend to agree. I've not read her stuff either. What it made me think of a little bit was, um, and you said it when you were reading Eckar Totally stuff like the ideas were great,

but there was no there's no practical implementation plan. There was no way for you to see how to get from where you were to what was being described. And that's for me, that's what meditation does, is it does strengthen that muscle. The other big one that I come back to all the time is so much of it. It's a skill and knowing how to do it, but so much of it for me is just even remembering to do it, even remembering, And that's I've said this.

You know, listeners are probably tired of hearing it, but that's why I started the podcast, was to remind myself to feed the good wolf, for example. Because I've got a lot of the tools, it's remembering to use them on a regular basis. Well. The one of the many meanings of mindfulness and the the Buddha's ancient language of Polly, one of the meanings of the word is remembering um. And that's what the practice of meditation is is getting

lost and then remembering to refocus and uh. And what what you're doing in meditation is just training yourself to get to remember more frequently. And you can do that with compassion. There's compassion meditation, which which again just boost your ability to remember not to be an asshole more frequently. And um, so remembering is great, and I that's why I think listening to podcasts, reading good books it you know, you're just infusing your life with this stuff so that

when you get swept away, you recover more quickly. Yeah, exactly. Maybe the not being an asshole compassion stuff, Chris, do you want to maybe work on that a little bit? It's all right, Um, well, Dan, thank you very much. It's been a it's been a great talk. I Uh, like I said, I really enjoyed the book. I've read a lot of them. It was it was one of my favorites. I think it mirrored my my journey a lot.

And I think what you're doing for meditation is really important, which is putting it kind of right in the mainstream, demystifying it. So thanks for all you're doing with that. Thanks for having me on. I appreciate. Okay, take care, take care all right. Bye. If what you just heard was helpful to you, please consider making a monthly donation to support the One You Feed podcast. When you join our membership community with this monthly pledge, you get lots

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