Dan Harris on The Power of Meditation For Fidgety Skeptics

[Music] all right rich will hear from the neighborhood podcast host today on the show I have the great Dan Harris when we talk about when we talk about so much we went on for a long time talk about meditation we talked about relationships we talked about balancing ambition with mindfulness we talked about generosity so if you're not familiar with Dan he is a host on Nightline is also one of the weekend anchors on Good Morning America he is the man behind the book ten percent a terrible spot house ten percent a half-year he's got a new book out called meditation for fidgety skeptics and should all check out and hear more conversation please enjoy it if you like it ready to do it yeah alright thanks Dan thanks for making the time today thank you it was either evolved a little chat worried where did you travel from well here's here's the thing I had a little experience confronting my the limitations of my mindfulness today cuz I love this I live in the hills above Malibu Cove in Devon so I was pretty far away from here and started driving here like I don't know twelve thirty or something like that my plan was to get here meet Michael here at about 1:30 help him set up get everything organized and I pulled into the parking lot here at about 115 looked in the back seat of my truck and realized that I left all of my podcast gear at home it's like okay how do I solve this problem so I called my wife I'm like I can't believe I did this I'm such a knucklehead like I look like an hour away right there's no way I'm gonna be able to get home get this stuff and be back here in time to meet you immediately reflecting on our email exchange yesterday about where to do this and making sure that like I'm all set up when you arrive it's like all Julia's like you gotta meet you got to get my stuff and meet me like on halfway or whatever so I got my that she did it stepson to do it yeah she did she did it and it was interesting because this is the exactly the kind of thing that would have just put me into an absolute manic tailspin a couple years ago and I'm not saying that I handled it with complete grace today but I actually kept my [ __ ] together pretty well is like okay this is what it is Dan's probably gonna be there when I get here I'm not gonna be ready to go at 2:30 I'll get there when I get there and then you know traffic started stacking up as I got closer and closer to here with that you know that anxiety notches up incrementally with each red light it's like okay it is what it is so I wouldn't say my blood pressure was at complete baseline but I give myself like a b-plus and when normally I would probably get I probably daddy yes I think that the Delta between the D and the B+ actually adds up to an a in terms of the quality and quantity of your improvement I mean this is a case study for why you meditate it's not that perfection will arise because perfection is not on offer it's just being marginally but meaningfully less of an idiot right and this story crystallizes the benefits crystal I mean it's perfect yeah this thing happens it's your fault right completely my fault right which is all my buttons are like you're an idiot you don't know what you're doing yes yes yes Guerra plays into okay yeah I see it I see it I get it and yet so you didn't handle it like you know you didn't dance through it like Fred Astaire but you handled it much better than you would have before that's an a yeah and by the way it will continue to get better not every day and it won't be a like straight it's not a linear it's not a hotness tick but it'll gradually just kind of go in that direction yeah I think it will and we'll always like regress to the mean which is probably at that 10 percent happier kind of kind of like trajectory that little spike was was definitely above the 10% and and it'll go back down it'll rubberband a little bit and it's not a direct reflection of what I did this morning either it's just a compounded effect of what I've been doing over the last couple years that's right you mean it's not a it's not a direct we just to clarify what you said it's not a direct result of the meditation you did this correct it's just having meditated for a while there's actually a bunch of important things about that you just said first of all the 10% itself compounds now I don't know I mean I don't have any math and medical evidence to back this up but in my experience the 10% happier goes up over time because it just compounds like any good investment the other thing I'd say is that it is so important that you point out that it's not a result of the meditation you did this morning and a lot of people say you know they end up meditation and they think well that was a good or a bad one doesn't matter right doesn't matter the only question to ask yourself at the end of a meditation you could have been squirming and miserable the whole time was were you aware of it were you mindful of it because you are not training yourself to be better at putting yourself into a mental bubble bath you're training yourself to learn how to see clearly your own inner chaos so that it doesn't own you I think that's a really important observation and distinction and I kind of analogize it to you know what it's like to train for a race why don't you know like one of the races that I do or to write a book like you just you have to show up for it every day and sometimes you show up and you feel amazing and you hit it out of the park or the words are just flowing and other days it's a [ __ ] show yeah you know it's not working at all but you show up and you show up the next day and the cumulative impact of that consistent application of intention is really the the most important factor that's why they call it a practice these are all practices and in order to practice anything the first step as you said is to show up right nothing else can happen it's funny because you know when you walked in here today I thought you seemed slightly less boolean than the road I was agitated and then when I went to the bathroom I was like he knows I'm agitated like I'm running I'm looping this thing right in my mind he's like he can tell I'm off-kilter no no I took it to maybe like I pissed him off by asking him to come all the way out here I'm personalized it you know that I know but it just tell this is also useful to unpack because this is the way the mind works we can personalize it and say it's the way our minds work but it's really just the way the mind works every you know we're all in our own movie and we're all the stars of our own movie and whatever is happening in other people's movies or is only interesting to us pay for maybe some mild fleeting titillation or be as interesting or important because it says something about our own movie so you walk in here you're in a bad mood of course I need by the way it was totally minor vibrations was it it wasn't a bad mood I was just a jeté takus of what I just under undergone I wouldn't have known you were agitated I just thought slightly less bubbly than normal but I immediately just went to oh yeah it's probably a little annoyed that I Adam no come all the way out here oh yeah I was just hoping I would get here before you so I could get this thing set up before you walk I got to talk to Michael you're awesome all right well let's it's like you know canvas your current situation here I mean from my perspective you have like the world's greatest side hustle going on here I mean this is unbelievable like you so you were on the podcast before we shared your story perhaps we can kind of revisit that in a nutshell too so we can contextualize what we're going to talk about but while you're you know managing this incredibly I don't know what the word would be high-pressure career that you're in of hosting Good Morning America on the weekends and doing Nightline at the same time you have this thing going on that for anybody else would would be an entire career you've written multiple books on meditation you've got the 10 percent happier app you've went on this crazy bus tour and you've become this like the public face of mainstream meditation for America or the world in this kind of public health advocacy context like that's a lot you have going on right now well thank you for saying that it is a lot I think I would say the biggest problem right in my life right now is time management you know I just don't have enough time because I also have a family three-year-old son and wife who actually came with me to LA so we could have we live in New York City so she came with me just so hey we could escape the three-year-old and right we can have some time yeah she's had to get like a spa right now or so that's good I enjoyed your podcast with her oh yes I put her on my podcast you had like some weird trepidation about doing that but I thought it was amazing yeah I had weird trepidation about it because she knows me I think she really knows me there's no she actually knows the the the when the mask is off I don't we're actually I don't wear too much of a mask but she knows what I'm like at home yeah for real you're very self-effacing yeah and you're in your writing and in your presentation on the podcast so you know and that's part of you know that's part of your accessibility and relatability and charm so it was interesting to me that that seemed to you know sort of alarm you on some level yeah I mean I couldn't I can't control my wife right so it's like I'm not and I would nor what I want to but but you know when I make self effacing facing jokes on a podcast or in a book it's I'm controlling it my wife's there she can say whatever the hell she wants and she knows everything so that was just a little exotic right away with anything no but it was hilarious and she definitely gave me all the [ __ ] that I deserve to to have been given right and she's a very important and interesting case study in the context of this new book you know meditation for fidgety skeptics because she herself despite being your partner was not sold or at least not on board on a practice level with this whole thing that you're all about these days now she asked in the book lab whether maybe maybe I heard myself by frequently asking her whether what it's like to be married to your spiritual leader the irony is she's the one who actually got me started on meditation she gave me a book by dr. mark Epstein called going to pieces without falling apart and I read that book and realized that I had up until that time I'd been reading a lot of sort of Eckhart Tolle self-help stuff and I thought was very interesting because it talked a lot about totally I think quite brilliantly describes our ego the voice in our head the sort of background static of Perpetual discontent as he describes it but I've also heard Eckhart Tolle and my view accurately described as correct but not useful so he describes our situation well but doesn't actually give you much to do about it and when I read Epstein's book given to me by my wife I realized oh yeah there is something too bad it's called meditation and so I started meditating as a consequence of that and then wrote I've written a couple books about it and God has lived with me through this period of time she likes the meditation in that it's made me less of an [ __ ] than I used to be and I definitely had I retained the capacity to be a schmuck and have no question about it but I was much worse way back when and at a time when she knew me but she never adopted herself for a whole complex bully Abbes of reasons including you know her schedule and her sort of somewhat some she had a resistance to self-care which she viewed as a bit of self indulgent and then living with me I'm like a wagging finger personified even though I never I I don't lecture her about it I did a little bit at the beginning but I learned not to she just had a real resistance to it and over the course just to like differentiate herself like she's just not gonna get on board just didn't want to do something that she knew I wanted her to do marriage yeah absolutely I do the same type of thing I get it I know judgment I don't actually have any the only reason I wanted her to meditate was she has an incredibly stressful job she's a physician but she right now she's taking some time off but she's a highly trained highly specialized physician and we have a young child and before that we had a fertility crisis and she had breast cancer last year so it's been she's had a tough run and I thought this would be very useful for her but I knew that if I said anything she wasn't gonna do it so Jeff Warren my co-author on the book who's this brilliant meditation teacher he sat down with her and he was really able to unlock it for her and in a way that she now does meditate and what was it specifically that he did that unlocked it for her a couple of things first was he identified something that she identified and something that I had not seen in myself which is that my practice my meditation practice I'm as it turns out I learned in writing of this book that I'm a huge hypocrite I'm always telling people you have take it easy don't worry about it when you get distracted when you're meditating it doesn't mean you've failed it's actually the opposite you succeeded but in my own practice I was actually very mean to myself when I would get distracted and I have a real sort of grit and determination to sit a certain amount every day and Bianca saw this she saw that there was a sort of eat your vegetables vibe to my practice and it was not attractive to her and so Jeff was like I see what you see about dance practice get rid of that what I think you ought to do is have a gloriously self-indulgent practice that at the end of the day when you put your son to sleep and you come out I want you to put on some reality TV turn the volume down low sprawl out on the ground and just notice how good it feels to lie down tune into the physical sensations and when you get distracted start again and again and again he called the meditation he created for her taking back lazy which is a brilliant brilliant reframing the other thing he pointed out is that she had she often is the one she pretty much always the one wants to put the kid to bed because I work nights and early morning so Bulls never awake or available and he's really hard to get down so she can often spend 90 minutes 200 20 minutes in there feeling rage he was like just in and when you're lying next to the kidneys and you're just waiting for him to fall asleep did you meditate right there it's already doing you're there so she probably meditates more than anybody I know because she's marooned in this little monsters bed with him and she too has co-opted that time and turned it into meditation it's interesting that the people that go out of their way to make their life about caretaking are the ones that struggle the most with taking care of themselves is like being a doctor and a mother that idea that that you know you got to put the oxygen mask on yourself before she before you put it on the kid is so non-intuitive and challenging for for people like that to literally because it feels indulgent I suppose yeah we have a whole chapter in the book about this bianca being primary case study blue also spent some times some social workers who help kids with developmental delays in new mexico and their problem as well was I this is self-indulgent you know if the five minutes I spend on meditation I'm thinking well I could be with my husband I could be with my son I should be cleaning I should be doing any number of things and it's just what you said if you if you care truly about taking care of other people you can't do so effectively if you don't take care of yourself right but that there's that guilt yeah even shame absolutely some people that crops up that prevents people from from doing that you know I think that the key for somebody like me who's in the position of trying to help these folks is to acknowledge and validate those feelings I get it I see the logic behind your rationale but it's useful in a sort of non-judgmental way to help help folks see that actually under close examination the logic doesn't hold up right I see you as like this perfect cipher for the average human being who kind of knows what meditation is sort of you know tiptoeing around the outer edges of it but is intimidated or you know not so keen on all of the lingo you know language we can talk about the importance of language if you want and here you are this person who is like I said earlier like you know very relatable who speaks the same language as the human being speaks and is able to translate these principles through storytelling and through science to make these kind of very esoteric ideas meaningful in a very practical way for people and that's like kind of like where you're like this wedge in between east and west where you could take what you know the Buddha said or Joseph Goldstein says and translate it so the bond trader on Wall Street or the soccer mom in Topeka gets it I uh I really appreciate you saying that I mean I I kind of think of myself as a gateway drug you know I don't know I'm not a meditation teacher and there are great meditation books that already existed well my only innovation was to add the word [ __ ] a lot you know and and and to and to tell very embarrassing stories and and and to tell stories at all to really turn this to use the skills that I had been that I had acquired in the course of being a TV journalist to to turn it on this on on this practice and this tradition of Buddhism I sometimes feel like I had this image I was on a meditation retreat with Joseph Goldstein my teacher couple weeks ago and this image like I'm standing in his vast treasury of unbelievable material you know unbelievable journalistic and authorial material content and I'm like just taking it taking stuff from Buddhism taking stuff from meditation teachers and I'm like is somebody gonna arrest me I get to just take all this stuff but I did I'm just the right person at the right time I think maybe that I I had all this training as a storyteller I ended up stumbling upon meditation and now I I can just write about it as much as I want there's an endless supply of things to talk about I have in my head five more books that I want to write I just don't have the time to do them all right now but I would I would love to write well I want to dig into this a little bit more deeply but but maybe you can give us like the twenty second recap of how you got to this place so I had a panic attack on the national television viewable by anybody who wants on YouTube how many how many views does that the sub video millions and millions of views yes I actually don't think it's that bad I mean I can see like now that I know this story when I watch it I can feel your pain but if I just stumbled if I just happen to have been watching it at the time I don't know that I would have keyed in on what exactly was how that's right that's why my career didn't end that morning so I get one of two responses to the video most people see it and they say just what you just said you know not awesome but it's not that bad anybody however who's had even a taste of panic it looks that video their posture it's like a trigger absolutely so I happen to have handled it quite well I think either because I'm a sociopath or cuz I had the luxury of being able to toss it back to my co-anchors if I was I was on the air it was at seven o'clock in the morning in 2004 and I was supposed to read six stories off of the teleprompter six quick stories my job was that damn Good Morning America my job was to be the newsreader which they actually don't really do anymore on morning television but these do have people who came on at the top of the hour and just quickly read the headlines and as soon as I started speaking I was overtaken by this big bolt of fear I couldn't my heart was racing my mind was racing my palms were sweating my mouth dried up and most importantly my lungs seized up I just couldn't talk so I had to quit in the middle and I could toss it back to the main anchors which if I couldn't have done that panic attack would have looked much more from I would have ripped the mic off and run away more embarrassing than the panic attack was the back story so I had spent a lot of time as a young ambitious idealistic reporter in war zones Iraq Afghanistan Israel West Bank etc etc and I came home from a lot of these experience after having had a lot of these experiences and I got depressed and I very unwisely self medicated with cocaine and ecstasy and even though I wasn't doing drugs all the time and definitely not when I was working it was enough according to the doctor I consulted after the panic attack was enough to artificially raise the level of adrenaline in my brain and make me more likely to have a panic attack and so that kind of sent me off on a long windy weird journey that ultimately sever the years later landed me on meditation and the rest is and the rest is history and now you know you're traveling around the country in buses but importantly not in a proselytizing way but in a way of just trying to I mean evangelizing the wrong word but but it's like the wrong word being a living example of the benefits of you know this ancient you know way of approaching life the gospel I think the gospel literally means the good news and that is basically when I'm good news the good news if whittled down to it is that the mind is trainable that all the things we care the most about that we want the most inner peace to use a cliche term but let's just say happiness calm compassion focus gratitude these are skilled these are not factory settings that you can't change these are skills that you can practice that you can generate you can take responsibility for just the way you can work on your body and the gym as you do and that is good news and so my my whole mission on life in life aside from I guess I have three main missions want us to be a journalist the second is to be a daddy and and husband and the third is to tell people this right and I'm just trying to come up with creative ways to help you play you can if there are things about yourself that you don't like you can't magically make them go away like I'm still shorter than I want to be etcetera etcetera but you can train equanimity you can train kindness generosity these are these are in Crescent incredible thing to know and so to me yeah that's a kind of evangelism but importantly to amplify the point you were trying to make before that I probably cut you off in the middle of is that I don't wag my finger for real look if you're not interested in meditation I'm not gonna talk to you about it I only talk to people about meditation who like you gave me a microphone so I'll talk but like for years I didn't talk to my wife about it because I knew she didn't to hear it right what's interesting about what you just said is this idea of news good or otherwise that it's news in the Western world this idea that we can train the mind that we can there are things that we can do that we can practice that can amplify our equanimity that can make us more focus that can you know reduce the stress in our lives and and and set us on a trajectory towards achieving all those things that that we spend so much time and effort on in other areas of our life to achieve which is happiness fulfillment 10-man you know living purposefully all of these things right and we do spend an unbelievable amount of time in the gym or you know at our job or doing whatever we're doing without any regard whatsoever for how this thing you know that's sitting on top of our shoulders actually functions we spent so much time our stock portfolios our cars our bodies our interior design our resumes all of which are important I'm not I'm I spend time on those things but it's important to spend time as well on the one filter through which you experience everything and that's your mind and I think this is news people don't know this I didn't know this I mean I I did not know that any of this was possible I didn't even know the I was not even truly aware of the thunderously obvious fact that we have minds and our thinking and you know I mean yes if you had asked me on the street you have a mind and you are you thinking yeah I would have said yes but I I wasn't aware of the intensity of the non-stop conversation we are having with ourselves all the time this just chaotic stew of urges and impulses and desires that is your inner life and when you don't see it clearly it owns you and that's all that meditation is it's a systematic waking waking up to this reality so that you can surf it rather than be drawer you know drowned by it mhm and as much as it is news here I mean this goes back you know hundreds thousands of years in the East like millennia news you know you know a large part of the world were were that we're late to the party yes and what's interesting is that science has now sort of caught up to this trend to verify it in a way that legitimizes it to the rational you know logical way that we as Westerners kind of perceive the world I mean that's what allowed me to get over the hump because I was coming to the extent that I had ever even thought about meditation I thought it was ridiculous I mean you know I often joke that I thought it was you know for people who live in a yard and are really into Enya and Cat Stevens and you know live in a spend time on a Himalayan mountain top in the loincloth I mean just you know the all the cliches but it was the science that changed my mind my wife's in scientists both my parents are scientists I was not good enough at math too do science but I carries a lot of weight with me when I saw the science that suggests that it can lower your blood pressure boost your immune system literally rewire key parts of your brain then I thought okay this makes sense and importantly for me as somebody who struggle with anxiety and depression as well as panic and substance abuse the this the science around anxiety and depression is actually the strongest and I just you know in testing it in the laboratory of my own mind it became very obvious that when you can have some distance from your repetitive grim thought patterns your neurotic programs your inter neurotic programs then then they don't control you as much and that's what depression anxiety consists of maybe we can go in a little bit more deeply on on what the science actually does say and doesn't say so one thing to say about the science first is that it has been it continues to be regrettably hyped so I think people overstate what meditation can do and they latch onto every hot new study and and then there's some breathless headline about our meditation can you know make you dunk on a regulation hoop or whatever it's just not that that is not the case I think it's important to point out that the that the studies that the research is in it's early stages and that well we can't say much definitively what we can say is it strongly suggests the research strongly suggests that meditation can confer a number of really attractive benefits from as I said before lower your blood pressure boosting your immune system it's been shown to help with grades in school behavior in school it's been shown to help with anxiety depression age-related cognitive decline ADHD and the neuroscience is really the most exciting stuff that I'll just give you one study that was done at Harvard in 2010 or 11 they took people who had never meditated before just civilians and they scanned their brains to get a baseline reading of what their brains look like and then for eight weeks they had them do a little bit of meditation every day at the end they scanned their brains again and what they found is in the area of the brain associated with stress the gray matter literally shrink and in the area of the brain associated with self-awareness and also compassion the gray matter group that is just really compelling and it's also shown to have a salutary effect on the areas of the brain associated with attention regulation and another one last thing I'll say about this is there's a connected there a series of regions of the brain known as the default mode Network these are the areas of the brain that fire when we're in our default mode which is thinking about ourselves thinking about the past thinking about the future just kind of ruminating that's just the that's our resting state as humans meditators while meditating that area of the brain the activity goes way down and importantly for long-term meditators it goes way down even when you're not meditating mm-hmm that's that's pretty compelling and amazing yeah yes I feel like we're in a very tenuous interesting time I mean there's a lot going on right now you know we're in unchartered waters politically and particularly with respect to emerging technology there is a war for our time and attention afoot and and maybe there always has been but with the advent of all of these devices that are vying for you know vying for our eyeballs I feel like you know we we have to be we almost have to be practicing some form of meditation to avoid the compulsion that we all are faced with with just pulling the phone out of our pocket every day and looking at it like I don't know about you but I can go down the rabbit like I'll be scrolling through Instagram and I'll be like I can't stop scrolling what is roughly what is wrong with me and that and I realize like well you know a lot of time and attention and millions of dollars were put into this app to achieve precisely this result so that they're achieving with me and I have to go above and beyond and exercise like you know a lot of mindfulness and restraint to like create rules around these things and avoid them so that I can actually move forward in my life yeah in other words we're in a period where boredom need not exist ever again yeah we are so over stimulated and there's a lot of amazing things about that but you know we're in many respects we're prisoners right and so if you start to think of it in that context what are the tools to unlock us from this prison that we've that we've all volunteered for I had interviewed recently a very interesting person named Anu she's M roadie who she hosts a podcast called note to self and it's all about sort of our relationship to technology and she said and I'm probably gonna mangle the quote but that were in an essence conducting a huge science experiment global science experiment about our attention within our relationship to these to these devices because we're just we don't know what it does to us we know some things but we just don't really know what the long-term effects are of having this a supercomputer in your pocket and just being glued to it all the time my view and I'm open to change my my view right now is that you know these are incredible tools and they're so useful and so delightful on so many different levels but it's very important to try to create a healthy relationship to them so I'm not I mean I before we started rolling here I was talking about how I went out and splurged on the iPhone 10 i mean i-i I don't I'm not anti tech but I am anti unhappiness and I find that having a mindfulness practice which essentially just boosts your self-awareness right through having increased self-awareness because of meditation I noticed more quickly when like I'm just I'm doing this because I'm bored I'm doing this because I'm lonely I'm doing this I'm drowning in Twitter and I'm my stomach is roiling and my head is pounding because I'm upset about some political development step away man and that has really helped me so it's not to say that I never use technology it's just that my relationship to it has become more healthy and then the other thing I'd say is that I love that there's this proliferation of meditation apps out there because it it's like co-opting the engine of our distraction and turning your phone into something that teaches you how to be mindful I think there's a reason why these companies are doing so well yeah it is it's super interesting and and I can kind of contextualize it or analogize it to - you know recovery from substance abuse because I see my own denial mechanism creep up like oh well yeah I'm I'm on Twitter while I'm waiting in this line because you know my career is tied to social media and I need to know what's going on and I it's like it's [ __ ] you know I don't need to be doing that like but to be able to catch myself in that argument and have enough self-awareness to say that's just a lie that I'm telling myself to to validate this behavior that I know you know deep down it's not in my best interest it's just seeing it is a huge victory but I can always go on the ten percent happy happier app instead right I mean it's really cool like I think it's you did a really great job thank you and you know I I was on headspace for quite some time and I know Andy and I think they've done an amazing job they're pioneers yeah incredible right incredible and what you've done I was always you know curious before you launched your app like well what's he gonna do that that they're not doing or how do you differentiate and I think you've done an amazing job of creating something unique and different that also you know serves the same ultimate goal with the video and the various different teachers and and you know it's really and it's it's fun you know it's not it goes to that thing that you said earlier like this transition that you went through from that period of time when you wrote 10% happier when you were looking at meditation like your vegetables or just something that you have to like you got to do it you got to like get through it or whatever just something that you look forward to that's enjoyable it's funny because well first of all thank you for saying all that because the app has become really just you made your focus for me is just my baby and and I had no prior experience in business but luckily was able to through a long series of events that you probably don't care about find it's amazing team and we just are having so much fun doing this thing but you know in terms of making it fun I come from morning television and I often think you know weekend Good Morning America which is one of the shows I do it at ABC our success in the ratings is because if we yes we give you the news we do all the things that you check on all the boxes but the five of us who are on the show we love each other we're having a great time and it feels like a party that you want to be at and I want the app to feel that way that that it's not just dry meditation instructions when you watch the short little video clips that we serve up all the time right before you sit to meditate although you can just meditate if you want but if you watch the video clips it's fun it's super practical it's me sitting with some brilliant teacher or scientist and you learn something that can actually change the way you live but also have fun doing it to me that is just such a no it's an amazing experience yeah it's cool how Jeff ends the sessions by saying you know welcome to our meditation call yes so we you know our little slogan is nope nope nope and floats you know we we just the way meditations been delivered is either dry or twee or super like addressing you as if you're grasshopper you know that we're trying to avoid all of those tropes and just stick with what this is which is secular simple exercise for your brain but also as soon as you start just like you were talking about when you're online at the supermarket and you see you're checking Twitter and then you're engaging in all of these sort of crazy rationalize rationalizations that's hilarious when you look at your mind it's [ __ ] hilarious because it's crazy it's totally crazy if you can't have a sense of humor about this you are in deep trouble and I think that's what we're trying to bring to this thing is it's not that you're gonna career neuroses it's it's that as one great meditation teacher has said you'll become a connoisseur of your neuroses so that said that there don't have so much power over you yeah and just to break it down and make it super accessible and simple so that anybody can follow it yeah and to use language that people understand I mean we kind of danced around this earlier but you know the importance of the importance of language with ideas like this and you've sort of famously said like you know meditation is you know is in the greatest need of like rebranding or like a new marketing strategy because the idea that like like I'm just envisioning two guys watching Monday Night Football sitting next to each other and one leaning over to the other one and saying you know how's your loving-kindness prophesied it's like it's not gonna happen right and yet these are profound practices that we can all benefit from if we and I think guys you know have a harder time with the language then than women do for sure but you know two guys watching Monday Night Football might say you know how was your CrossFit class sure so but this is exercise for the mind and the brain and there's a reason why the Chicago Cubs meditate this reason why i novak djokovic meditates the US Army and the US Marines are spending tens of millions of dollars on meditation for the troops for a reason this is us up these are bicep curls for your brain and and there are lots of different practices that can work on lots of different mental qualities that you care about we just need to start talking about it this way so that it's not embarrassing to talk about it at Monday Night Football because those guys deserve this practice just as much as the traditional Yogi's who've been doing it forever deserve it everybody deserves it this is our birthright mindfulness is our birthright having a mind is our birthright and so this should be done by foster care children this should be done by inmates and prisons this should be done by patients and hospitals nobody is outside the scope you've been doing this for a while now and and your initiation into this was you know very much about like trying to reframe it and redefine it for yourself but as somebody who's now been around the block and has gotten to know all these amazing teachers and is very steeped in the Traverse traditions etc do you find yourself at times like nothing static so I would imagine your relationship with this is it's certainly more profound and different than it was when you begin but do you find yourself kind of gravitating a little bit towards the patchouli crowd in a way that you weren't initially because I'm just thinking like I analogize this to when I adopted a vegan diet like I was like I'm never gonna be vegan because those guys kick hacky sacks and have the dreadlocks and talk about things that I'm not interested in you know like it and now ten years later like I kind of have become one of those guys a little bit you know in a way that I never would have thought not by conscious design but by evolution I think it's such a great question the short answer is not really like I'm not as offended by it as I used to be and so I can be in the room when people are you know talking the talk but I still pretty offended by it I don't like you know like with Jeff and I were writing this book and we we did some so we did straight-up mindfulness practices in the book boy we also did some as you said before loving-kindness practice which I have a whole rap about we can get into it but we so we did some practices that are designed to boost your compassion and I told them don't use the word heart because that's just what does that even mean it's just kind of sappy so I still have some linguistic peccadilloes and little rules that I like to stick to because I think there's a way to talk about this that makes it less annoying but I am now way in the tank for meditation and I regularly go on meditation retreats and have a deep relationship with a this amazing meditation teacher Joseph Goldstein who's my view perhaps the greatest living meditation teacher and so it it's it's in a funny place catering to skeptics while I meditate two hours a day leigh-anne go on these long meditation retreats and it is that is you put your finger on a tricky balance for me but I haven't really given an inch on my firm convictions about the right and wrong way to talk about the practices yeah as a translator yes yes and and that that's certainly you know that's your that's your place that's your talent that's your that's your role at least as you as you see it clearly like everything you do is is a way of translating these ideas to so the average person that that's my goal that is definitely my goal is it really to out you're doing two hours a day yeah so a couple of years ago maybe two and a half years ago I got it in my head so not long after 10% happier came out I just got it in my head that I really wanted to go deeper the logic being not that I you know thought that I guess that the way to describe the logic is it's demonstrably true in my experience and based on the science that you can train yourself to be kinder and more mindful and more focused at all this thing so if you can be 10% happier what's the ceiling and I've become very interested in what's available at the sort of deeper end of the pool not only sort of as a journalist because I plan to write about this at some point but also as a human you know I saw so many benefits so for example one way to think about this is like with exercise so I okay you know I like being fit I got to look at my stupid face in television so I try not to be overweight and I my wife and I went to SoulCycle this morning and and at work six or seven days a week I work out you run these crazy like Ironman things and so I would never do that but I don't think of crazy because you do it's just that you personally got so interested in it that you wanted to take it further that's kind of what I'm going for in the meditation side although any serious meditations like really serious meditation person knows that I personally am not yet a meditative triathlete but I am making the bet my my best attempts to move in that direction so about two and a half years ago I had it in my head that two hours a day was the right number I don't know that it's kind of it's kind of out there that to ours is a number that a lot of dedicated practitioners do and I heard from my friend Sharon Salzberg an amazing thing she had a friend who Sharon is a great meditation teacher and she's been on the podcast ok so your listeners who know her that's which is amazing she is amazing she had a friend who wanted to do two hours but was very busy and he came up with this rule of I can do whenever I want wherever I want and whatever increments I want throughout the day and so now that's my rule I just I wake up in the morning I don't know when or where I'm gonna meditate or for how long and I just fit it in where I can and and that by the end of the day I get to two hours on a great day I'll Bank a little bit for the next day not a shitty day I'll like come up short and have to make that up the next day so today for example I've taken a lot of cars around LA and you know lyft in the backseat of lift cars and I've got a lot of time to meditate and so I'll probably io4 to five minutes from a couple of weeks ago I'll make it up today yeah interesting and how long have you been doing the two-hour experiment almost three years Oh three years almost three years about two and a half three years and what is the qualitative difference in your life between that and the more typical you know twenty minutes a day or twenty minutes in the morning in twenty minutes at night I just think it's it's taking the the benefits you get as a beginner and ramping them up it's not that I'm you know in some bubble of bliss you know with like bulletproof imperturbability or anything like that it's just that so what are the three benefits you get as a beginning meditator increase calm increase focus and less emotional reactivity I just turned up the volume on all three of those well the other thing I've noticed is that my actual practice is better this is a skill you know people sit down to meditate and they find immediately that they're super distractible which often people assume that's a failure but it's not I've just found that actually my ability to focus has gone up over time it's sort of more and more interesting and pleasurable things happen to meditation and when unpleasant things happen I'm actually able to be a quantum 'since a sin the minute not all the time but it at a much higher level than I used to be well certainly you know the the the proof is in the pudding in terms of like your productive output I mean the fact that you're you're a host on two different television shows you're writing books presumably you're traveling all the time to speak and you're doing things like podcasts you you have your own podcast at the same time you've got this app like you're doing you're a dad and you're I mean that would just blow the mind of the average human being or create so much anxiety that it would become an unsustainable situation yeah I I have a suspicion that that has to do with meditation it's funny I've only recently started to think that because there's a long time where I was doing the two hours and it was a bit of a stunt I was thinking because I said I want to write a book about enlightenment at some point so I was kind of at my initial instinct was a little crass it was like okay let's see let's see what happens what kind of it in AJ Jacobs kind of absolutely yeah I actually thought of that I maybe there's a book called a year of living dharmically you know like because he wrote a book called a year living biblically right but I realized that first of all I don't want to do it just for a year I want it this is the way I want to live and so my interest isn't this isn't actually just stunt journalism after a while I started to realize that this is I I actually want to be doing this level of practice if not more and and I actually have come to believe and I don't have any evidence to support this but I have to come I've come to believe what you just described that mmm this kind of crazy workload has become I've is enabled by the fact that I do have this practice that gives me the ability to stay focused when I need to stay focused and also to not suffer as much you know like suffering in the Buddhist sense you know the Buddha's describe suffering as just clinging to things you want and pushing things away that you don't want lacking any equanimity in the face of life's in next you know inevitable vicissitudes and I think I've gotten a little bit better it just kind of being more supple in my dealings with reality that isn't to say I'm perfect because I am definitely not but I I had this suspicion that this practice which started as a bit of a lark is really helping me do all the things I want to do it's multifactorial though because I think another part of it is just flat-out greed not necessarily greed for money because you know like I don't make any money off of the I don't get paid by the app you know we're a startup but greed for like lust for I am I have doing all the things I love you know I mean I love being a journalist at ABC News I'm so I've been there for nearly 18 years I love ABC News and such deep relationships there so much gratitude for the amount of experience the experiences they've given me and just I love the people at Nightline I work with and we can GMA I'm just absolutely love it all and then the writing these books and having this company in a podcast I can't get to hang out with people like you this is incredible opportunity and then having a family you know we had a huge as I mentioned before infertility struggle and so I just do not take for granted my three-year-old even when he's pooping on me so all of this is just so there's a lizard greed just trying to wring out of life everything I can and also navigating your wife's breast cancer that was brutal man she's okay now alright she's cured ah she's great and but look I mean I have to state the blazingly obvious she was a thousand times worse for her than it was for me with a lot of very painful surgeries and a lot of fear and but I will say that that practice particularly the before-mentioned loving-kindness practices that we haven't yet fully excavated but maybe we will really made a difference you know I'm squeamish I'm selfish I am NOT by nature nurturing and having a baby around the house and a wife who is as sick as she was big challenge for me and you know I found it actually in the end it really was I heard Bianca say recently that it was the best thing that ever happened to her getting sick that way and I would say was also the best thing that happened to our relationship that we just I really had to she's always been the caretaker she's a doctor she's actually naturally very very compassionate and we were but yin and yang in that way I'm a little more sort of aloof and I had to you know really step up and I found that I I don't want to say enjoyed it but I found a lot of meaning in engaging in that way and her gratitude stems from being able to reprioritize yeah her life yes as she says she was just kind of hurdling along in this high-powered medical career and parenting and a husband who was just non-stop and the breast cancer really made her stop and take stock and she's in the middle of this process of taking stock but she is for the first time really taking care of herself she's gotten really into SoulCycle that I mentioned we went to souls like oh there's more happy interested you hear your thoughts on your candid thoughts on Souls like oh but now it's look anything that gets anybody excited about being active yeah so I was actually very down and so it's likely because I used to do other forms of spin and I thought were much harder then I realised actually I was doing so slightly wrong I was that I wasn't actually rhythm writing that other forms of soul cycle arts and others forms of spin or like go this fast at this time for this many second souls like I was actually just about writing to the rhythm with enough resistance so that you kill yourself that way and so I took me awhile to figure it out and so we do that together we have a great to watch her take care of herself after years of not really taking care of herself as you're meditating and exercising in these ways so I think it's been really good for her and good for us that's amazing I want to get back to you know this this sort of contentment that you were expressing you know that you get to do all these things and you have this very big life you know it's it's almost intimidating to like talk about all these different things because it is it is like for the average person that would be anxiety producing how are you gonna and like but just so you do okay like yeah you're okay you're a human being yeah glad to hear that but I think it begs a question of happiness itself like you know the first book memoir sort of you know an argument in favor of meditation dressed up as a memoir through storytelling you know you make this compelling argument about the benefits of meditation the title is 10% happier like what is happiness and and how do you think about happiness in terms of you know a way of living or how does that kind of line up against other ideas comparable ideas like contentment fulfilment living purposefully living mindfully I have a whole rap on this this or the the the the those other words are more specific and truly more meaningful happiness is the reason why I chose happiness or happier is because that's the word we use more frequently but it actually doesn't mean much and in fact if you look I think I might have said this in my first book that the very roots of the word linguistically adamah etymologically reflect our cultural ambivalence about the subject hap h8p is the same it's like haphazard hapless it means luck so happiness is like something you luck into when in fact as discussed before in Tesla for it's it's really interesting so when in fact happiness is a skill I spent a lot of time asking happiness experts like meditation gurus you know how do you define happiness and nobody ever gave me a satisfying answer until dr. mark Epstein who I talked about before who wrote the book that really got me interested in this entry point yeah da mark and I were having dinner and I asked him how do you define happiness and he said something to me that was not meaningful at the time but I've come to believe that it is the smartest thing I have heard about happiness he said more of the good stuff and less of the bad okay what does that mean I've come to think about it in kind of geometric terms I'm terrible at math but if you think about psychologists have this theory called the set point theory so if you think about a graph it has an x-axis and a y-axis the x-axis runs horizontally so the set point theory is the x-axis is so kind of like you we all have a happiness set point so good things can happen and we you know our happiness level goes up and then we tend to revert back to our set point the x-axis the sort of straight line and then bad things happen to us and then our happiness goes below the set point eventually we were kind of revert to it that this is there's a theory about the way we are as humans that we have this kind of happiness set point in my experience that that sounds right but that what happens with meditation is that the top end of that graph the way you are when good things happen gets taller and more sustained because you are more you're enjoying in a more fulsome manner the for lack of less cheesy word blessings in your life and you're not so busy running rushing off to see what the next hit of dopamine might write might be so that's the top of the graph and then the bottom of the graph is when bad things happen to you and I think through the meditation it's like I become the bottom half becomes shallower that you're spending less time in useless rumination and you're kind of recovering more quickly and then meanwhile I think the setpoint itself moves up and to me that's how I think about happiness is how are you navigating life's ups and downs and are you getting the most out of the ups and are you maximally resilient in the face of the doubt yeah I've heard Sam Harris your friend talk about the the kind of half-life of negative emotions yes brilliant used right yeah so you know whether you have this yeah of course that's I got that for you well you're you're angry or you're resentful or you're you're looping in your mind some you know insanity that the half-life is much shorter it will dissipate and go away it's among Sam is a valued friend of mine and he has said many brilliant things that I steal that is one of them he talks about that one of the benefits of men having to do with the half-life of anger that you know you we still are going to experience difficult emotions unless your enlightenment if you even believe in that I don't know if I believe in it you got it right this other book I I'm gonna write this a pursuit of unless we are still going to experience negative emotions the mystery of consciousness is we don't know where our thoughts and feelings come from that come out of a void you can't which is liberating to know because there's no point holding yourself responsible you did this today you you got angry at being angry for forgetting your pod your audio equipment at home and started telling yourself a whole story which you caught yourself doing but you did do it anyway and we all do this we have a feeling you know impatience with our child impatience with our spouse whatever and we tend to get into these knots of self laceration around I'm this kind of person as a consequence of having just had this feeling we didn't invite the feeling it just came out of a void we don't know where it came from you can't hold yourself responsible for what you feel but you can hold yourself responsible for how you deal with it and so when anger ambushes you for me I deal with a lot of anger if I can see it if I have an inner meteorologist that can tell me when the storm is brewing is about to hit landfall make landfall then it I may either let it pass and not be taken over by it or I may get a few miles down the road with it you know a couple minutes of doing something stupid but then I catch myself the the amount of damage as sam says that you can do in two minutes of anger as opposed to an hour of anger is incalculable and that is the fruit of meditation which is why I was so jazzed about the story you told at the top of this podcast because because it epitomizes what the value of his practice is the beginning part of that for me is understanding that there is a distinction between the thinking mind and you know your I don't know what you would want to call it your higher consciousness your awareness having awareness of the thinking mind being the observer of the thinking mind and that kind of like duality right that these are actually different things yes which is kind of a mind blood I mean even go down the rabbit hole on that forever it's kind of a mind-blowing thing and it begs the question of you know what is consciousness what is our minds and you know what is actually going on here like how do you think about that kind of stuff I mean you just put your finger on perhaps the most interesting question facing mankind you know this is the fundamental mystery what is consciousness we know that we know stuff those you know what it feels like if you're driving right now you know that you're the feeling of your hands on the wheel you know that you're thinking but what knows it right try to find the little rich roll in your head you rich or whoever's listening try to close your eyes but don't close your eyes if you're driving and try to find you that you won't we don't know what knows it does that mean it doesn't exist I think the argument that gets made in this where it gets into the deep end and I'm in some ways sort of insufficiently qualified to talk about it so anybody who is qualified and here to be talking about it I apologize in advance but I think what the Buddhists would say is that this gets into the illusion of the self that we which is the primordial lie we are telling ourselves we think there is some core rich you know some core Dan and us on all of our negative emotions that is the wellspring of all of our negative emotions because we have greed to gratify the inner rich we have hatred to defend our whatever we have we have you know and then confusion about reality as a consequence of embracing this lie but the simplest way to think about this is there is a difference between your thoughts and your awareness of your thoughts so the thoughts or emotions or anything you're aware of or like actors walking onto the stage right they pass through our clouds going through the sky your awareness your consciousness you just is the stage or it is the sky if you want to whatever analogy wanted to use so we don't know what's sky is in this analogy here we don't know exactly what the stage is and you can get into lots of discussions about what it is but for just your rank-and-file meditator if that doesn't really matter the only interesting thing to the most practical thing to be aware of is that there is a difference between your raw bear awareness of things like when you're just feeling the sensations of your butt on the chair that is just playing old awareness then there's thinking about the feelings of your butt in the chair of me I got to do more exercising my butt is too big those are just thoughts that's a different thing and well none of these are things actually that's just an interesting idea but the more that you self identify your awareness with the actors on that stage the more that you will suffer absolutely and the more that you can to the extent that you can transcend that self-identification and and and kind of step into a more expansive understanding of oneness the more you can free yourself from the chains of of that cycle of suffering yeah I think it's just like to me it's like interrogating the mystery a little bit if you can do this little exercise which is a Buddhist exercise that Tibetan exercise you know close your eyes and hear whatever sounds were there you know there's all sorts of sounds my voice may be the little tape hiss whatever and then ask yourself what is hearing this and you won't find it but in the not finding as the Buddhists say there is a kind of liberation because you're not you're seeing how you're seeing the mystery the fundamental mystery of your own identity and of our existence and that can dis identify disentangle you from all of the suffering that we're creating of being so entangled with our thoughts and and our stories and all that stuff it's not magic and it's not permanent and unless again you're enlightened but it can in just moment after moment does is cut theory in meditation circles of short moments many times that if you just kind of are touching this mystery over and over and over again it has the net effect of making you lighter and and pushing you closer toward enlightenment whether you believe that something or not as beautiful as that sentiment is the prospect of really confronting that in yourself is terrifying because how's it we're sort of raised and taught to to you know identify with these stories that we tell ourselves about who we are I am this for I am dan I am a journalist I am rich I am whatever right and we we craft these narratives around identity that we delude ourselves are real and so to kind of engage with what you were just talking about is to kind of dismantle that yeah but in a certain way yeah that's right but there are two way there to the Buddhists talk about this in a way that actually is comforting which is to there are kind of two levels to life two levels to reality there's the relative truth you know you still are rich you you know on the day to day basis you know even if rich doesn't exist on some deep level you still use left put your pants on in the morning and you still need your podcast equipment if you want to do a podcast and that that is just the truth on a sort of relative on one on the on the level in which most of us operate on which most of us operate most of the time but there is a deeper truth which they often call ultimate truth which is kind of it can be roughly analogized to quantum physics so like this table that you and I are in doing an interview on he is a table but at the deepest level it's a bunch of spinning atoms and it space and so the same is true with the self and so you don't need to get deep you don't need to get too wrapped up in this it's just it's a sec it's a it's a useful thing to think of in so much as it can help you not get so wrapped up in your own stories well I think this is a good kind of place to launch into talking a little bit about the obstacles that people have to embracing to embracing meditation to begin with which is really the heart and soul of this new book meditation for fidgety skeptics because as I understand it like you know it's gonna ask you like you know why I write this book but you know I already know the answer to that which is that you were under the impression that writing the first book would state this case for meditation then I overall would read it and then adopt these practices and live happier lives and you were sort of surprised that that was not the immediate despite this being this book was a huge success right like that was not the reaction that you it was not the reaction I got I mean I first of all I didn't think any was gonna read it I was like my view was I'm like a b-level Network newsman writing about something at the time it was pretty niche you know meditation was no it was had some cultural capital but it wasn't was a super hot as hot as it is now so I just didn't think anybody's gonna read it yes in and up becoming pretty successful which was delightful and amazing probably the most one of the most consequential professional developments of my life and so gratifying but it was humbling to see that it didn't have the effect because you know I actually own 10% happier I didn't set out to write a memoir I initially was gonna write a how-to book but then the memoir parts of it were the only parts that anybody that was reading it liked I mean it's the it's the story that allows people to emotionally connect yet with you so that they can hear the other part right but I didn't I didn't I mean I only put some like a few pages of how-to stuff away at the back of the book uh-huh and I got a very interesting phone call from a friend of mine Daniel Goldman who he wrote a seminal book called emotional intelligence and he's a big meditator and he called me up it was like this is great it's so cool that you're getting so people excited about meditation but you you do have some responsibility to actually teach them how to do the thing and that was a big kind of a that set me on my heels and and I had to really think about what could work what should I do so the first thing I did was I ended up co-founding this company called 10% happier we have this meditation app that we've discussed and it's been incredible incredibly fun to do this and I've also learned a lot and one of the things I learned as being part of this company is while being part of this company is is that there's this rich pageant of neuroses that stop people from meditating and or embracing any healthy habit and so that is why I wanted to write this book and but I didn't want to write a dry meditation manual because I didn't think anybody would read that so I decided to do it as a story so I rented this big orange tour bus previously occupied by Parliament Funkadelic and we went 18 states in 11 days me and Jeff Warren who's this meditation teacher from Toronto and and we met all of these different people at you know all these different stops cops politicians celebrities social workers and you know you use them as a case studies for each of the eight main obstacles we identified so the book is trying to do three things at once it's like a fun story of this gonzo road trip it also is a systematic classification of all the obstacles to medicate and meditation and then answers about how to surmount them and it's a how-to book halfway through the writing the book when I was tearing my hair out I was like oh yeah so there's a reason why nobody's written a book like this before this is fun but what's great about it is that it is a fun story because it's a it's a it's like a bromance road trip like you and Jeff hit it off you guys develop this amazing relationship and and you embark on this adventure together and you know hilarity ensues yeah along the way we learn lessons you learn how to meditate and you kind of are able to quantify all of these reasons or these barriers that people throw up that's preventing them from accessing this tool that has been so transformational in your own life and it begins before you even go on the road with your own co-workers and and staff which I thought was really like instructive and hilarious to see like these people that you work with and you've had this you know epiphany in your life and yet they're like they're on a totally different page with this stuff like co-anchors at Good Morning America my weekend so we have this little you know tight-knit group that we can GMA because we're the sort of weekenders you know not not the a-team and but we really love each other and we have you know we're up early together on the weekend so we just got very lucky that we they the bosses put together a bunch of people will really have close relationships and they make fun of me for being the meditation guy all the time but they all have interest in it but aren't doing it so I brought in Jeff what I call the meditation MacGyver to see if he could help them get over the hump and we had this hilarious session where these people who just never shut up their jobs require them to never shut up like dead air is the is the the thing we all fear you know trying to get them to sit quietly and meditate was a real challenge and one of them Paula Faris who is my my work wife she's my co-anchor on the show the coho were the two main hosts of the show she literally she did something I've never seen anybody do before she turned the meditation the actual guided meditation into a call in response she was interrupting Jeff and asking him questions like a lot of questions they were good questions and Paula's are very very smart so it was they were useful questions but I'd never seen anybody sort of break protocol in this way and it was interesting because you know after Ezra partly as a consequence of this session you know Paula is now a pretty regular meditator that's really cool and she had a different idea for the title of this book yes she wanted to call it ten percent less of a douchebag or 10 percent happier but still a douchebag she refers to herself as the little sister dad never wanted uh-huh but God anyway yeah she likes to torture me but how brilliant is it that like you have you know you have this whole other life in this meditation world but you have this you have this platform where you go on national TV and like talk about it it's kind of amazing it's such is such a friend of mine wrote me a note the other day saying you know congrat the book seems to be doing well congratulations I was like dude I have a minor advantage which is that the one of the largest media companies on earth he's like this full throated back erm you know my bosses at ABC have been just like irrationally supportive they're just like you want to start a company great you want to do a podcast great you want to write more books awesome I'll help you promote them they're just incredible I mean they're absolutely because I could have just shut it down and say oh so we need your full attention on what we hired you to do I mean part of the deal is they know that I work seven days a week and I'm so super committed to ABC and so I mean I have to pull up I have to do my side of the bargain but you know they have been amazing and I think oh I think there are a lot of reasons for it you know just the depths of the relationships that we that I have at the company the fact that my boss has happened to be just very cool and also that this is a healthy message to be putting out there and I think it's just good for everyone to be promoting it I mean it'd be different if I don't know if I was writing like how to pick up ladies or something you know you know something right it's a blessing service yeah it behooves ABC to recognize that and embrace it I think so I think so and you know like there are a lot of people at ABC or into meditation of George Stephanopoulos Robin Roberts Diane Sawyer there are a lot of people there who are on board and I think that has helped do you have like secret behind the velvet rope like top-level ABC like executive washroom meditation especial no but I did do a private thing with the staff of Nightline the other day because and it was so interesting because we have a very tight-knit staff very heavily heavily female and they're all like Robocop's in in the sense that that you know like a Robocop was like a cop invented a lab who could do everything perfectly well these people these women mostly women although some men - they can shoot the stories they can produce the stories that can write the stories they can do it all and they're there's an enormous amount of stress in what they do and to sit and talk to them about the stress and how they feel the stress actually this is another thing we tackle in the book they feel like the stress is necessary to do the job that right that if they don't have the stress they'll lose their edge and it was really interesting to talk to them about how actually you know there are ways to manage the stress so that you don't wear down your resiliency and energy so that was a really useful private session with my team it was nice yeah I think I think that is a really is a big one with a lot of people certainly a big one with me and the way you kind of break the book down it's it's divided into sections that address each one of these objections and we don't have time to go through all of them but I think that's one of the ones that that is is one worthy of exploring a little bit because as somebody who's ambitious who's you know in certain respects you know has alpha tendencies I have developed this idea that myself will and my workaholism and my ability to kind of focus and go the extra mile is in certain respects a secret weapon and I've had to learn the hard way that is a very unsustainable source of energy that leads to burnout that you know unduly fatigues me and that ultimately makes me a difficult person to be around and generally unhappy and so although there's a dopamine charge that comes with that that's very addictive having to learn a new way of approaching my work that's more balanced that that involves more equanimity to use your word has been a challenge but ultimately is leading me in the direction of of creating a more sustainable productive way of approaching what I do so a number of things to say about that I mean you just articulated a psychology that I run into a lot and one that I dealt with personally as I was adopting this practice you're not wrong the the will that you describe the great that you describe the motivation creativity has been a secret weapon for you I mean you look at what you've achieved that that doesn't happen just by being you know perfectly economist in the face of everything that arises you know like you you've got it you've got to have some get up and go and you have it and that has worked to your advantage at some point there is diminishing returns and the self-awareness you generate through meditation can help you see okay so mmm the 97th time I launch into a perseveration loop around the audio quality on that last podcast does that does it make anything might help is this use them this is useful probably not if you notice you know to spend a little time worrying about whatever issue you're worrying about makes sense take action do what you can to fix it let it go move on to the next thing that kind of rabbit hole of useless rumination just wears down your energy wears down your resiliency makes you unpleasant to be around none of which gets you further towards your goal but meditation again the self awareness the mindfulness that we generate in meditation which can help you pull yourself out of the nosedive is what allows you to have a more balanced effective approach but that is not to say that stress has no you know has no role I think if you want to do anything great plotting and planning wringing of hands is part of the deal and you mentioned before the the scope of my personal responsibilities my professional responsibilities it does create anxiety for me and there are time in the writing of this book I talk about in the reading the but my wife had to do a little intervention because I was just totally burnt out I was trying to write a book on top of everything else I was doing in it I just took it too hard too fast too far and and she had to take me aside and be like dude you can't like fall asleep with the pages of the book you know in your hand and then have McCobb stressed dreams as a consequence and that made a big difference but so just goes to the final point I wanted to make as it pertains to to you which is that you you talked about how you're you know you're sort of moving in the direction of having a more balanced approach I would just give yourself credit because you can't snap your fingers and just have the idyllic balanced approach that you have in your mind it's gonna be about kind of vectoring toward it and having failures along the way and then learning from those failures so you're doing the thing it's just it's always going to be a messy process yeah it's definitely messy yeah yeah and I'm sure if your wife was here we would get a whole story about how messy it is but that's cool that is absolutely cool because there is no other way to do it hmm the other objection that I really connected with is this idea it's one of the ones ladder in the book later in the book you know Blanc is my meditation like you know everybody it's like as an athlete like I've I've been that guys like Trail runnings my meditation or when I'm out on my bike that's my meditation and I would imagine there's other people who you know Oh Netflix you know when I get home at night that's my meditation and it took me a long time to understand and I think we talked about this when I was on your podcast the difference between there is a meditative aspect to some of the training that I do but that's not meditation proper that there is a qualitative distinction between an active meditation or an activity that is meditative and formal meditation practice can I just say that when you were on my podcast that was one of the most popular podcast we've ever done oh cool thanks man you're the man so yes we men - what you just said I hear all the time for people you know knitting is my meditation or running running is the big one I hear running as my meditation yoga is my meditation my answer to that is always maybe you know I mean I can't rule it out but mindfulness meditation is a specific thing mindfulness meditation is paying attention to whatever you're doing so would you step back for a second running yoga knitting any of these things can be mindfulness meditation but you have to do it in a specific way which is to pay full attention to what's happening so if you're knitting you're feeling that the weight of the whatever I don't know how to knit but the little chopsticks that you hold while you knit you're feeling the weight of them you're feeling the movement you're making conscious movements and then when you get distracted which you will a million times start again and again and again mindful running would be and I've done this it's actually hurts much more than running the normal way where you're you know rehearsing some argument what you want to hurl at your boss or you're listening to a podcast or music but mindful running is headphones out you're feeling the physical sensations of the movement the pounding of your feet the wind on your face then when you get distracted you start again same thing with yoga most people don't do the aforementioned activities in the way I just described them they do it they're letting their minds run hither and yon by the way that's not a bad thing I think running and knitting and yoga all have really important health and psychological benefits just the way you've always done them but I wouldn't call them mindfulness meditation unless you you add on the tweak that I just yeah if you if you bring that level of intentionality to any action activity that you're participating in then I suppose yeah it could be but if you're just going like I'm running and my mind's is doing whatever it's doing without giving it any thought or putting any of that intention into it and that's not meditation doesn't mean it's not a good thing to do right it's just not meditating right right right so we haven't divided times as somebody who is in the news and is your career is about kind of navigating the daily cycle of insanity that we're all immersed in I I'm interested in your thoughts of how to help how to how to kind of navigate and deal with the day in day out you know cycle of news that I think is making people crazy yeah so I I think there are a number of ways in which meditation can be useful now one is use of social media so the self awareness that's generated through meditation can help you see when you're just like oh I've been on Twitter for four hours and my stomach is upset and I you know my chest is buzzing and you know I'm just vibrating with rage that that is a signal like if you're tuned into those signals that it's time to step away the other I had that not to interrupt no but I was I just have that experience yesterday I got all caught up in the Jake Tapper Stephen Miller interview saga I went down the rabbit hole and like watched the video and read the articles and then read the articles about what happened off camera stuff and I got really agitated by the whole thing and I had to finally say like what why am I even doing this to myself like what am i what value am I getting out of engaging and learning about this I think you got some value because it's important to be an engaged citizen and then the mindfulness your training kicked in and you saw that you had reach the point of diminished returns and you pulled yourself up textbook application of mindfulness so that's one example of how mindfulness can help in the current atmosphere the other is when we're experiencing the kind of rage frustration helplessness hopelessness many of us feel in the face of current events we can those emotions can drive us to do a lot of them you know unhealthy things stress eating snapping at people so the kind of again back to the self-awareness to know when you're super angry because there's something you saw on the news this morning and you're carrying it out through the rest of your day and you know in your case maybe eating too many cacao nibs or whatever it is you vegans eat I was by the way is planning on bringing you a green smoothie but I got all caught up in my crisis and couldn't make that have you changed my life because you probably have your cookbook and if not infrequently we'll dive in and plant power way right but also you told me one day I mean you after you came to my office the first time we met you I was hungry and you you a kind of my office to interview me for the podcast and I didn't even know who you were now I was no you are and you said go get a smoothie with kale spinach banana blueberry in almond milk and I went and it was like this is delicious it sounds disgusting but it's actually totally delicious you see a ton of energy sometimes I'll add an avocado so yeah so instead of binging on food or snapping at your you know venting your spleen at your opinionated uncle meditation can help you sort of not let not be so buffeted by the the sort of noxious nature of our political age and then the third thing is let me just ask you this though have you noticed a change in Europe as somebody who's like did you're in the you're in this as much as anybody in the world right have you noticed a difference in how you process that information or the kind of news diet that you put yourself on or how you react to the the vicissitudes of the cycle so the truth is that I'm more tuned into the news than I've ever been and I find myself I'm really following this story and I'm very concerned very concerned about the polarization and I'm very concerned with lots of things but mostly the biggest problem the root of it for me is how we're at each other's throats and we can't even agree on a basic set of facts that's a frame the discussion and that is so unhealthy there's a total breakdown and our ability to communicate in a healthy way yes so I would say that leads me to the third benefit and actually there's one more so for the third benefit is that I think mindfulness again the self-awareness that you get through meditation can help you see your own biases and it's actually something satisfying about noticing oh yeah are you happy every time mother appears to be making a moving closer to the white house or conversely do you have a coffee mug emblazoned with the words liberal tears on the side of it you know are you how talking are you like yeah are you a tribal and are you part of the problem I think we are all part of the problem and if you can start to see that then you can do what I would recommend and what I have come to do which is to have a really varied media diet and so I consume the mainstream media the so-called mainstream media including ABC New York Times but also I listen the liberal podcasts and I was in a conservative podcast and I find that seeing the world you know you can go from listening to Morning Joe to listen to ben shapiro and it's like you you're in a different universe and but it's i think that's very healthy and seeing and seeing where your own biases are can be just as interesting as catching yourself on as that you described earlier catching yourself online at the supermarket justifying how you need to be using tweeter twitter the this can be a rich field for exploration and then the fourth area that i think meditation can help is the loving-kindness meditation which we've just kind of discussed which is basically there's this other form of meditation that's often taught in conjunction with mindfulness where you systematically cultivate good vibes you sit close your eyes and envision people you know somebody you're close with somebody you don't like so a neutral person etc etc and you send them silently these phrases like may you be happy may you be live with ease etc etc it sounds like Valentine's Day with a gun to your head and it is super annoying at the beginning but there's a there is a lot of science that suggests that not only does it have a lot of health benefits but that actually can change behavior kids preschoolers who were taught loving-kindness meditation are more likely to give their stickers away to kids they don't know having a preschooler at home I as a big deal and so I think at this point in time in fact I think my next book is gonna be about these practices and they the title that I'm working on is 10% nicer and the subtitle is the self-interested case for not being a dick and there is a self-interested case that when think about this when you hold the door open for somebody what does that feel like in your mind if you're paying attention it feels good that is scalable compassion generosity kindness these are skills that you can work on and would make a huge difference in the age in which we find ourselves right now yes selflessness when perpetrated from fur for selfish reasons only still work yes yeah it does it's a beautiful thing because somebody like me who's not naturally altruistic if you turn it into if you show me the science that suggests you could live longer you could be happier you could be more popular and more successful which is what the science suggests about kind people if you show me that science and then you give me some practices even if they are a little annoying I will do them because my motivation is that I want the the popular happier healthier thing I want all those things right it's so it's so counterintuitive and it and it goes against all the messaging that work constantly it's supposed to which is that our happiness is Wed to you know getting the Tesla or the new house or being able to go on this vacation when in truth it's completely accessible by extending yourself selflessly to another human being and by the way I got nothing against the Tesla like I would love to have it I would love to - that's why I always use it as an example because I'm thinking about it too much so so that isn't to engage in a whole self flagellation cycle around that it's just to see that actually on a moment-to-moment basis the happiness being kind to yourself and others he's perennial e available and did you try it out you know don't take my word for it that's the way the boot the Buddha's approach was like don't take my word for it I'll teach you a bunch of things go and do it test it in the laboratory of your own experience and so I'm just telling you I've tried it it does work doesn't mean I'm never an [ __ ] because I'm definitely still an [ __ ] time at times but when you're mindful enough you can see what does it feel like when you're an [ __ ] feels like [ __ ] and that powerfully disincentivizes you you know powerfully does incentivizes you yeah all right well we got to wrap this up in a second here but but before we do that what are you like what are you working on now like what is emotionally like what is what's your biggest stumbling block or what isn't you know what's what comes up for you in your practice as a recurring issue that you need to like work through the biggest change to my practice came from Jeff Warren my co-author diagnosing in the course of spending 11 days of this tin-can traveling across the country together he diagnosed that I have a lot of inner antagonism that I have the potential that while I can be an [ __ ] externally most of it is self-directed and that my meditation practice had a had a real grim quality as a consequence that as I discussed this earlier that I'm always telling people you know when you get distracted it's no big deal but when I got distracted like I you know somehow I was operating on this theory that I'll win it meditation I'll never get distracted and then I was blending yes type-a yeah yeah what didn't what a schmuck and so I was engaged in all this self laceration internally and Jeff helped me inject a huge dose of sunshine into my practice by he had an idea that I thought was really cheesy and I rejected it like I do with all good ideas initially I'm like the anti blink you know blink is about the wisdom of our our you know rapidfire my my rapid-fire intuitions always off so Jeff's idea was look when anger arises for you internally like name it after your [ __ ] grandfather Robert Johnson who you got it from so when it arises be like hey what's up Robert and and I thought that is dumb that is corny but after a while I started to realize actually and this is because Jeff pointed out to me there are five or six kind of neurotic programs that are are always running for all of us that are running that sort of compete for salience in your mind at any given time so for me anger logistical planning ambition writing like creativity and there are a few more and I forgotten them right now but I gave them names so like goofy little names like so Robert Johnson for anger Sammy for my ambition after the book what makes Sammy run which is about an ambitious Hollywood type Julie the cruise director for Julie after Julie the cruise director for the love boat for the logistician Arthur which sounds like author for every time I'd like to do some writing in my head and D personalizing it in that way making it lighter and literally saying the words welcome to the party when I see the arising of these neurotic patterns has just lowered the temperature in such a constructive way and it's made me see that all the sappy talk about being kind to yourself you have to be kind use of blah blah blah which I also dismissed is totally true and that my whole meditation practice is to become a much more congenial place I'm gonna close my eyes to meditate you know and I see I actually sometimes smile when I see my anger come up or when I see you know my ambition overtaking me and I'm carried off on this train of you know planning world domination through meditation like oh my god I see there's pleasure in seeing it and so Jeff is that Jeff is Jeff is a hedonist and I lacked hedonism in my practice and now I have it and there's a massive gift that he's given to me even though as I write about in the book there were many times when we wanted to murder each other right well I would imagine part of that derives from the fact that now you know for better or worse like your the meditation guy like that that's how people see you and I'm sure people stop you on the street and say hey it's a meditation dude you know and and and the pressure that that probably you know puts on you a little bit too you know kind of monitor your behavior and like well if you freak out and get angry at somebody you know how do you how do you like you know walk your talk and in the best way possible is can be without you know it could be like an unhealthy relationship that you have with yourself yeah it could be though I think frankly for me wasn't really that it was just it was just this I have this conditioning then that veers me toward anger right you know my grandfather Robert Johnson's a real person and not a nice dude Oh later in his life he actually became very nice but most of his life I remember one time he in the 80s or something like that he got his first VCR and I took me in my little brother and to see it and he said if you touch this I'll break your arm that was the you know that was the kind of dude he was and like I have Robert Johnson in my veins and like and there have been many times in my life and to this day where I am capable of very cutting comments and most of it though is self-directed and Jeff just saw that in me you know there's a benefits being locked up on a bus with a brilliant meditation teacher interesting [ __ ] that you may not want to face will be dragged out of your subconscious and and and presented to you and that's what happened I like that idea of giving all of these qualities names though and recognizing that they exist rather than trying to deny their you know that they're there even or it's certain it reminds me of Elizabeth Gilbert right she wrote about this in her book big magic yeah for that but like she when you go on a creative endeavor you know your your whatever that voice is that talks you out of your self-worth not particularly to not pretend that it doesn't exist like okay we're going on this road trip you can come but you got to sit in the backseat and you can't pick the music and you can't tell you can't give directions yeah it's just similar idea the the the weapon may not be the right word it's like a nerf weapon you know the sort of non-violent weapon we are equipping you with here through meditation is just seeing clearly when you see this stuff it can tone you and so there are all these little techniques that we use you know and and coming up with goofy names for your inner dramatis persona is one of these techniques you don't have to do it but I've found it to be very useful and bringing it back to the book you know in terms of techniques I mean it's broken down in such simplistic terms like you know anybody can do this I mean literally there is if you read this book you will learn how to meditate and you will you it will be so accessible and so you know easy to incorporate into your life and I think that's one of the great kind of like gifts of this message that you put forth in the new book Thank You Man I appreciate that because the you have like these chapters but then you break it down at the end and like here's the here's how we're doing it and it's like oh that's a very elementary like I get it completely it doesn't have to be some major ordeal where you're giving me two hundred things to think about and tasks to do it's just very simple that's that was the goal I mean it was very hard to get there but that was the goal make it as user-friendly as possible simple simple simple and also tell you an engaging story in the process right so for somebody who's now listen to us for 90 minutes and is thinking all right I'm sold I'm onboard other than getting your app and getting a new book what's a way to just launch into this and again look the okay this is gonna make me the worst shittiest businessman of all time I will I love selling books I love having people subscribe to the app but the basic constructions are really amazing you know sit in a reasonably quiet place close your eyes if you don't like having your eyes closed you can kind of keep them open just a little bit and stare at a neutral spot on the floor second step is to just bring your full attention to the feeling of your breath coming in and going out pick a spot where it's most prominent your nose your chest your belly the third step is the most important because as as soon as you try to do this your mind is going to go crazy you have all sorts of random thoughts where the gerbils run wild whatever blob but what kind of bird was big bird whatever blah blah blah and then the whole game is just to notice when you become distracted start again and again and again those are the instructions this is the way they've been doing it for millennia you don't need a book you don't need an app you just need your mind and your breath and a reasonably quiet place and if it's not quiet just put some headphones on you could do that one minute a day truly one minute daily ish so like most days and I think you'd start deriving a lot of the benefits that we've discussed from meditation it helps to have support in the form of a teacher if you like to go to a local class or an app where you have a bunch of teachers like ours or there are lots of other good apps as well also makes me a shitty business man but it's true or reading a good book these can all be very helpful tools but the basic instructions are just what I just described so just play that back to yourself and go sit for a minute and do it set a timer on your phone and go do it good talking to dad always a pleasure a huge pleasure Thank You Man appreciate for doing it that was awesome definitely pick up the new book meditation for fidgety skeptics download the app the 10% happier app available wherever you get your apps listen to the podcast September you've done a good job with branding here yep podcast and you know turn your television on and you're sure to catch him on ABC 10 and Dan B Harris on Twitter right and yes website 10% happier dr. Tom yeah there you go here we go alright man thanks how can you like buzz peace peace namaste namaste peace is why is it pains you Jesus day you

Channel: Rich Roll

Views: 57,955

Keywords: rich roll, vegan, health, fitness, diet, nutrition, athlete, podcast, inspiration, motivation, plantpower, plant-based, wellness, spirituality, mindfulness, meditation, self-help, dan harris, gma, nightline, abc news, 10% happier, news anchor, happiness, mindset, self-improvement, relationships, career, business, entrepreneurship, attitude, psychgology, neurology

Id: WgyLfbdPTP8

Length: 103min 14sec (6194 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 08 2018