It's great to welcome to the program today.
Dan Harris is the author of Meditation for Fidgety Skeptics and also the book 10 Percent
Happier, which I read couple years ago, I think, at this point.
He's also an ABC News anchor who I mean, I hate to say, Dan, you're known for anything
in particular, but you came to mindfulness after what I guess we now have determined
was a panic attack on air some years ago.
That's exactly right.
I don't mind being known for it, at least at least not now that I've kind of reframed
it.
If that if it was just Dan Harris known for freaking out on the air, full stop.
That would kind of suck.
But the panic attack led me in a weird and windy way to meditation, which has been incredibly
valuable to me.
But the story of the panic attack basically is that I was on the air on Good Morning America,
one warm June morning and two of 2004, and I found myself unable to speak, which is inconvenient.
If you want to anchor the news.
And after the panic attack, I went to a doctor who asked me a bunch of questions.
And one of the questions was, do you do drugs?
Right.
And I said, yeah.
And the story there is that I had spent a lot of time as a young, ambitious correspondent
in war zones after 9/11.
I was in Iraq and Afghanistan, et cetera, et cetera.
And I'd come home, gotten depressed, and I didn't even know I was depressed and then
blindly self medicated with recreational drugs.
And even though I wasn't high on the air and I wasn't even doing drugs, that frequently
was enough to change my brain chemistry per this doctor.
And so that was a big wakeup call for me and had a lot of positive impact.
And so when this happens, when the actual acute incident happened, you believe that
it was because of other it wasn't the stress of being on air or the fear of having a problem
speaking on air that perpetuated it.
It was just sort of how the stress that was going on elsewhere in your life manifested.
I think I think for me, there had always.
There had.
And is there had been and still is a baseline amount of nerves when it comes to speaking
publicly.
Right.
So but but the the changes to my brain chemistry just made my ability to manage the underlying
nerves much worse.
And when people don't understand what it means to have a panic attack, because to a lot of
people who don't don't get it, it seems like, well, hold on.
You just tell yourself you're fine and then that's it.
And just recentre in that way.
That's not the way it works.
No, no, no, no.
I wish.
A pet panic you can think about as just a malfunction of the very useful fight or flight
impulse that we all have, which we evolved for.
Often when we came face to face with the saber toothed tiger or something like that, the
brain was flooded with adrenaline.
The body had the heart starts to race.
There are a lot of very evolutionarily sound things that happen in the body that prepare
us to fight a runaway.
In our modern context, we're often having this fight or flight impulse triggered to
one extent or another inappropriately in traffic.
In a meeting with our boss while on social media, et cetera, et cetera, it doesn't always
escalate to a panic attack, but it can create background levels of stress that are really
corrosive to our health.
In extreme cases, when you have panic disorder, as I do.
It can result in a full on panic attack where you are.
It runs away and it enters into a kind of vicious cycle where the body is having this
response.
The mind freaks out in response to the body's response.
The body then gets worse.
The mind gets worse.
The body gets worse.
The mind gets worse.
And off we go into out of the zone of stress and into the zone of panic.
I want to be careful in how I ask this question, and this applies to me as much as it applies
to you, but how much of a predisposition to this could be?
I don't know if I want to say cultural or I mean, listen, Jewish neuroticism is something
that in my family, right?
I mean, I think we you know what I'm getting at here, which is there's a lot about upbringing.
There's a lot about expectations.
There's all of this baggage that people tend to arrive as adults with that comes from earlier
in life.
Could there be cultural components to predisposition to some degree?
Look, I'm not an expert on this stuff.
I'm half Jewish.
I was raised by my dad's Jewish, my mother's a WASP, and it's a little bit like that movie.
Annie Hall, if you ever seen Woody Allen.
And yes.
In that movie.
And so might my dad had an expression that he used, which was the price of security is
insecurity.
It is kind of a veneration of anxiety.
And, you know, for a variety of reasons, anxiety is quite common among Jewish people.
I think there may be something very powerful to the argument that historic persecution
can lead to a hyper vigilance and that gets handed down into generationally.
So I think there's a lot going on there.
Plus, you have the the Jewish cultural trait of really wanting to to be successful.
And so I think if you combine all of that, which, by the way, was there on the other
side of my and the non Jewish side of my family tree as well.
And by the way, if you look at my family tree, it's just filled with a lot of people who
have depression and or addiction.
So it's a pretty ripe environment, in my case for freaking out.
There's a debate that exists, and I've interviewed people on both sides of it, including speaking
to folks like Johann Hari, who has written about anxiety and depression.
Anyway, there's this debate about like how much of this is physiological?
How much of it is something that has become more common because of sort of Western society
that includes it doesn't have to be just apps and phones.
It doesn't have to be getting ahead or keeping up with the Joneses, but sort of like this
package of realities that that exist.
Do you have any insight into that from what you've experienced?
Are these all factors maybe to different degrees for different people?
Yeah, I like Johann Hari.
I've had him on my podcast.
And as I understand, I'm going to try to.
And my apologies to Johan if I reproduce his thesis.
Unfaithful.
Yeah.
My understanding is his argument is, yes, there are physiological genealogical factors,
too, that can contribute to things like depression.
But the way we've structured society, he argues, is actually perhaps an even bigger contributor.
He talks about junk values.
We have junk food.
We also have junk values and the value of individualism, which he argues we've taken
too far in Western culture, where we it's all about the myth of the rugged individual
divorced from the incredible wellspring of of relate interconnection and human relationship
and community.
And when community withers, when our emphasis on relationships withers, we get stuck in
loneliness and solipsism.
And that can lead to depression.
And in my case, I would say it's all of that.
I want to get to the meditation, peace and mindfulness piece in a second, but a couple
other things just to touch on first.
So all these videos now are going viral of, you know, the stuff, the Costco's and the
people saying they're not going to wear masks and confrontations that are just completely
horrifying in a number of different ways and like politic.
I have my political view of it.
But then also, politics aside, these are this is just clear.
These are people who are not in a good place in a bunch of different ways, more than likely
that go beyond just your view about masks.
Do you see any of the panic type elements in some of these these rants where people
seem to be almost like outside of their own bodies, acting in ways that they claim they
never have in public settings?
I, I, I see so much in this in these videos.
I see the panic or sort of, you know, losing king, being hijacked by the reptilian folds
of your brain, by the by the what's called the amygdala, the stress center of the brain.
So I see that.
I see.
Again, this myth of individualism where we don't have any responsibility to our neighbors.
And I see a kind of twisting of masculinity because in particular, at least one study
shows that men are more likely to resist mask wearing than women.
And in and, you know, I don't know how I feel about the term toxic masculinity just because
I feel like it sometimes gets used.
And I really finger wagging way.
And I don't I'm not big on finger wagging, but I do think that it we are due for a rethink
of masculinity, which has often been, you know, rejecting what anybody tells me what
to do, rejecting being in touch with your emotions.
And in fact, this idea and I say this is a guy who never wanted to be in touch with his
emotions ever at all and thought it was just annoying and disgusting.
We shouldn't talk about it.
But in fact, emotions are there nonetheless.
They are non-negotiable.
They are physiological.
If I would argue that the the baller thing to do, the most manly thing to do is to actually
tune in to the chaos of your own mind so that you are not owned by it.
And in that in that process, if you were to look at your shame, your fat, your vanity,
your selfishness and be okay with it, you have a warmer relationship to your own ugliness,
which we all have.
You would wear a mask, right?
And it seems like this is now.
I want to start to get into the path into my mindfulness and meditation.
But in getting to where you eventually get or describe being at the end of the book,
10 percent happier.
You talk about this journey through, you know, the sort of woo that is that is inherent in
some of these fields and healing and wellness and all of this different stuff.
And what I would consider scammer's, although I don't know that you necessarily use that
word in the book, is that I mean, from if you don't know anything about meditation and
mindfulness and you've just kind of gotten to pictures of it, one is that's for girlie
men, so to speak, to take a kind of meme that spreads or it's wou you would probably be
predisposed to to resist it as as many people do.
Yeah, I think that's exactly right.
I think that's probably why.
No doubt, probably.
That is certainly why I was rejecting it initially, because I because as I often say, meditation
has been the victim of the worst marketing campaign for anything ever.
The traditional art around the traditional depictions of meditation, you know, show people
sitting on top of a mountain top, you know, on top of a mountain wearing loincloth with
a beatific look on their face, et cetera, et cetera.
That is not the experience of meditation for most people that I know.
For most people that I know, you can think about meditation as a kind of exercise for
the brain and for the mind where you are to training the mind in certain skills and the
the animating insight.
For me, the thing I'm about to tell you, which is which was electrifying for me, which is
why I've been doing what I've been doing this practice personally for more than a decade
and writing books about it and having a podcast on it and having a meditation app and blah,
blah, blah.
The reason I do all of this is because what the science is showing us, the science this
time typic research into people who meditate is that the mind and the brain are trainable,
that you are not stuck with your characteristics like factory settings that are on alterable,
that the that happiness, compassion, generosity, connection.
These are all skills that can be trained and that is a radical and empowering notion.
One of the things that I wonder if you would agree can be tough for people is everybody
wants results and you want to feel and see results.
But this is like a really slow moving thing.
It's sort of like a, you know, start a glacier moving a couple of inches a year or something
like that.
And I wonder if in your experience, people abandon their practice because from day to
day or even month to month, it doesn't really feel like that much is necessarily changing.
Yeah, I think this is a big issue.
So it is both slow and it's not.
So, for example, I've had this one when my book first came out six years ago, my first
book came out six years ago.
I started saying this thing, which was meditate for a month, everyday or daily ish, and if
by the end of that time you see no benefit.
Send me a note on Twitter and tell me I'm a moron.
Right.
People tell me I'm a moron all the time.
Right.
But for other reasons, maybe.
Yes.
Never that.
And so I do think that if you do it consistently for a short for a few weeks or a few months,
you will notice that your inner weather becomes balmier.
You're not so yanked around by this inner conversation that you are having with yourself,
which if we broadcast the loud, you would be locked up.
Right.
Most of us aren't even aware that we have this inner narrator, this malevolent puppeteer
that's, you know, giving us terrible ideas all the time.
So I actually do think you can derive some of the advertize benefits of meditation, self-awareness,
calm, compassion, focus in a few weeks.
But but that take that that's that's slower than the gym.
And over time, it's very easy to to to get into this mire where you're thinking, okay,
I've been doing this for a year.
But what what are my results been in the last six months and.
Yes.
And that is when people do fall off.
And I actually think there is some side effects from falling off, because when I stop meditating
for a couple of days, I notice that my inner atmosphere becomes much more toxic and that
I'm much less likely to be able to fend off the terrible ideas served up to me by my inner
narrator, like, you know, eat the seventy fifth orio or say the thing that's going to
ruin the next 48 hours of your marriage or whatever.
And so I actually find that there is real benefit to falling off time.
So in terms of the simple practice, you know, people you don't need to have to pay someone
to give you a mantra.
You don't need any specialized equipment.
I mean, for to start, it's really just about I mean, you can talk about how you did it,
but it's just making a habit of sitting for ten minutes a day is essentially, yes, you
should take what I say.
On this score with a little bit of a grain of salt, because I am co proprietor of a meditation
app.
So I do believe that there is some utility to subscribing to meditation apps.
But you don't need to use an app.
So there are several ways you can get started.
One, instantly.
You didn't start with one.
I did not.
That's exactly right.
I started meditating before apps were a thing.
Right.
Well, at least before meditation apps.
Right thing.
Yes.
Thousand nine.
I think I read a book or I read a series of books.
But I think the book, the proximate cause for my actually sitting down and starting
to meditate, was a book by a former molecular biologist by the name of John Cabot Zen called
Wherever You Go.
There You Are.
And he described the basic steps of mindfulness meditation shooby.
He described the basic steps of mindfulness meditation very clearly.
One, sit in a reasonably comfortable place and close your eyes to bring your full attention
to the feeling of your breath coming in and going out.
Three, whenever you get distracted.
Start again.
Not super complicated.
Now it can get really interesting and complex in nice ways from there.
Hence the utility of reading books or finding a person teacher which is hard to do during
a pandemic or using an app.
But the basic instructions, which I did on my own for at least a year before I finally
went on our meditation retreat are, you know, you could take what I just told you and go
for it.
Yep.
And that that book is sort of the classic that is the entry, the entry way for for so
many people.
John Cobb is in teaching for a long time, right down the road from from us in Worcester,
Massachusetts, in fact, that UMass Medical Center in Worcester.
Dan Harris, author of Meditation for Fidgety Skeptic's and the book 10 Percent Happier.
I really appreciate you sharing your story with us.