Ep. 53: Dan Harris - Your Life, Ten Percent Happier - News Anchor & Meditation Evangelist

Our guest today is ABC News correspondent and best selling author Dan Harris at ABC. Dan has been co-anchor on Good Morning America and on Nightline. Although Dan has recently stepped down as the anchor of Nightline to focus more on the business that has grown out of his New York Times bestselling book on meditation, 10 Percent Happier How I Tamed the Voice in my Head, Reduced stress without losing my edge and Found Self-Help that actually works. Dan continues to co-anchor the weekend edition of Good Morning America as he hosts an ABC radio podcast inspired by his book called 10 Percent Happier with Dan Harris. We are so excited to have Dan with us today to talk about how meditation has impacted his life and how we can all get started meditating.

Dan’s life took a radical turn when he was on the air on Good Morning America in June 2004 and had a panic attack. He turned to meditation to turn around the inner narrator in his head.

His first meditation experience was terrible. He confesses it took him a year to move from 5 minutes up to 10 minutes. In this podcast, he will tell you why feeling anger or fear during meditation is just something to notice.

Today he is a meditation evangelist who caters to skeptics. Once you know what is happening in your mind, you don’t have to get yanked around by it. Harris explains, “The good news is that you are not stuck with your level of happiness, your level of calm, your level of distractibility, your level of compassion. These are all skills that are susceptible to training.”

Dive into the details on this incredible podcast on the calm, focus and mindfulness which can be yours through the practice of meditation.

More From Dan Harris

Twitter @10percent

Facebook @tenpercenthappier

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Website: 10 Percent Happier

Podcast: 10 Percent Happier Podcast

Books: 10% Happier: How I Tamed the Voice in My Head, Reduced Stress Without Losing My Edge, and Found Self-Help That Actually Works--A True Story - Dan Harris

Meditation for Fidgety Skeptics: A 10% Happier How-to Book - Dan Harris

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Show Notes

[12:01] I get a lot of meaning out of the practice itself. But in some ways, what's even more meaningful is knowing how many people I've been able to direct toward the practice.
[12:23] I see myself as kind of a gateway drug. I talk about meditation a little bit of a different way than others do. And that, I think, allows me to speak to skeptics and to get them interested in the practice. But then I step out of the way and I give them great teachers on our app or in my podcast or even in my books.
[01:37] I spent a lot of time in war zones, Iraq and Afghanistan and a lot of stuff in the Middle East as well.
[02:15] I started to self medicate with recreational drugs, including cocaine. Then one day I was on the air on Good Morning America in June of 2004, and I just basically lost the ability to speak. I couldn't breathe. My lungs seized up, my mouth dried up, my palms are sweating. I really just lost it.
[02:54] Mindlessness can cascade.
[05:45] We're always sort of wanting stuff or not wanting stuff, judging people, judging ourselves, comparing ourselves to other people, thinking about the past or thinking about the future to the detriment of whatever is happening right now.
[07:14] What was your initial experience of meditation like? It was awful. The worst. First of all, I had to get past the misconceptions.
[07:28] Meditation hadn't yet become cool and there were very few aspirational figures for me to look at and think, OK, maybe this is something for me.
[07:56] A little bit of meditation every day could lower your blood pressure, boost your immune system, lower the release of stress hormones and literally rewire key parts of your brain.
[09:12] Then, in fact, this scene of your own inner wildness and distractibility and self-centeredness is the antidote to this kind of malevolent puppeteer of our ego that is yanking us around all the time. The antidote is physically seeing it clearly so that it doesn't own you.
[09:42] I don't think I've gotten north of 10 minutes for a year. Over the course of my first year, I did five minutes and it gradually got to 10 minutes. And I don't think I was doing much more than that. And then I decided to go on a meditation retreat. But I don't want anybody to think that if you're interested in. You've got to go on a meditation retreat.
[10:17]One thing I often say is one minute counts. I also have a precept that I like called Daily-ish. I like to have a low bar and a sort of elasticity that gives you flexibility because I from my understanding of the science of habit formation, that those can be very useful approaches.
[10:56] 30 minutes and then maybe a little bit more than that. And then there for a period of time as I was getting really, really into it, I even was doing it for a couple of hours a day and then I scaled back.
[12:01] I get a lot of meaning out of the practice itself. But in some ways, what's even more meaningful is knowing how many people I've been able to direct toward the practice.
[12:23] I see myself as kind of a gateway drug. I talk about meditation a little bit of a different way than others do. And that, I think, allows me to speak to skeptics and to get them interested in the practice. But then I step out of the way and I give them great teachers on our app or in my podcast or even in my books.
[14:48] But in my experience, we don't like it when you talk to them in an unsolicited way about meditation. I think it often comes across as you telling them they're broken. And I really went down that rabbit hole with my wife.
[16:09] The best way to have a mindful kid is to be a mindful parent.
[17:18] One sign of a really advanced practitioner is that they don't take themselves too seriously.
[20:17] Like any good investment, the 10 percent compounds annually. So I don't know what figure I would give you, but I do think that I'm way more than 10 percent happier relative to where I was the first time I meditated.
[20:41] There's so many misconceptions about what happiness is, even in the linguistic roots of the word half that is “hap” the same root of the word haphazard or hapless. It literally means luck. The idea is like it's something embedded in our language. Is the idea that this is happiness is something that happens to you. You win the lottery, the cute boy in your class likes you, whatever.
[21:11] There are a couple of things that I find really radical and empowering about meditation. One is what the science around meditation is screaming out at us is that happiness is in fact a skill, something you can train just the way you can train your bicep in the gym.
[21:43] The good news in my case is that you are not stuck with your level of happiness, your level of calm, your level of distractibility, your level of compassion. These are all skills that are susceptible to training. And at the end of the day, we all want everything we want - narrows down to mental states.
[22:34] We live in a universe characterized by entropy and impermanence. So I think the kind of happiness that meditation engender is is a much more rugged happiness that is a sort of contentment in the face of a world where we have some control, but not as much as we think.
[27:14] Mindfulness was one of many qualities that were cultivated through meditation. Another huge one that doesn't get talked about as much is something called compassion, which is a big word, but really just means the desire to help people who are suffering. That's wired into us as a species. We're a cooperative species. We survived and dominated the planet because we could work together to take down the mastodon or whatever.
[29:43] Everything is changing all the time. This is an indisputable fact of nature. Meditation can help you on all these different levels.
[31:29] But anybody who's meditated may notice that on any given day, your meditation experience may not be calm. You may actually sit down and find yourself completely enraged or totally distracted. And that's actually not a problem in terms of your meditation practice. In fact, it can be a good thing because to sit for a couple of minutes and see your capacity for anger or sadness or fear or distractibility instead of trying to wish it away and call yourself a failure, because you should be in this bullet proof bubble of bliss to in fact get more curious and interested in an intimate with all of these emotions to which we're all susceptible is a training and not drowning in these emotions that are going to come up for you from time to time.
[32:27] So if you sit and you meditate and you're noticing a lot of anger is coming up and you investigate it mindfully, well, how does it feel in your body? What kind of thoughts are you thinking? Well, then when you're ambushed by anger in the middle of a conversation with your spouse, you're less likely to say the thing that's going to ruin the next 72 hours of your life. Calm is a tricky benefit, but a benefit nonetheless. The second one is focus. You know, the exercise of sitting, watching your breath and then noticing you've become distracted and starting again and again and again. That really has been shown on the brain scans to build up the parts of the brain that are associated with attention, regulation or focus. And then third, the most important benefit, in my opinion, of basic mindfulness meditation is mindfulness. And what is mindfulness? It's the ability to know what's happening in your mind at any given moment without being yanked around by it.

Thank you for joining us on HealthGig. We loved having you with us. We hope you'll tune in again next week. In the meantime, be sure to like and subscribe to this podcast, and follow us on healthgigpod.com.

““I get a lot of meaning out of the practice itself. But in some ways, what's even more meaningful is knowing how many people I've been able to direct toward the practice.” - Dan Harris
“Thinking about the past or thinking about the future to the detriment of whatever is happening right now.” - Dan Harris
“I get a lot of meaning out of the practice itself. But in some ways, what's even more meaningful is knowing how many people I've been able to direct toward the practice.” - Dan Harris
“The best way to have a mindful kid is to be a mindful parent.” - Dan Harris
“One is what the science around meditation is screaming out at us is that happiness is in fact a skill, something you can train just the way you can train your bicep in the gym.” - Dan Harris
“And at the end of the day, everything we want - narrows down to mental states” - Dan Harris
“We live in a universe characterized by entropy and impermanence. So I think the kind of happiness that meditation engender is is a much more rugged happiness that is a sort of contentment in the face of a world where we have some control, but not as much as we think.” - Dan Harris
“Mindfulness was one of many qualities that were cultivated through meditation. Another huge one that doesn't get talked about as much is something called compassion, which is a big word, but really just means the desire to help people who are suffering. That's wired into us as a species. We're a cooperative species. We survived and dominated the planet because we could work together to take down the mastodon or whatever.” - Dan Harris

Keywords

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Ep. 53: Dan Harris - Your Life, Ten Percent Happier - News Anchor & Meditation Evangelist

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