About ten years ago in front of 5.019 million people according to the Nielsen ratings I
had a panic attack on live television.
I was doing a job that I'd done many times before which was filling in as the news reader
on Good Morning America.
The job basically entails coming on at the top of each hour and reading a series of headlines
to the audience, bringing them up to date on the news of the day.
And I was happy and excited to be there.
I had no way to foresee what was about to happen.
As soon as the anchors tossed it over to me I was in the middle of the first story and
I was overtaken by this irresistible bolt of fear.
My heart started racing, my palms were sweating, my mouth dried up and my lungs seized up.
And I was simply unable to breathe.
You can see it and hear it on the tape.
I'm gasping for air.
It would have gotten a lot worse, it would have become something like the famous clip
from Broadcast News where Albert Brooks breaks out in flop sweat except for I did something
halfway through my newscast I'd never done before which is I quit.
I gave up.
I punted.
I sent it back to the main hosts of the show.
What I said was, "Back to you Robin and Charlie."
But it was actually Diane Sawyer and Charlie who were anchoring and in my panic I was unable
to remember that.
And you can see that actually in an absurd little crescendo roll video of Harry Potter
which was the next story I was supposed to read that the control room thought I was going
to read but I was unable to do so.
And in the moments afterwards I realized that I'd had a panic attack.
And I was deeply, deeply embarrassed.
It wasn't until later that I learned what caused it.
I went to see a doctor who is an expert in panic and he asked me a series of questions,
one of which was do you do drugs.
And I sheepishly said, yes, I do.
And he leaned back in his chair and said, "Mystery solved."
The backstory is I got myself into trouble basically because of a desire to do great
at my job which is something I think a lot of people can relate to.
You might call it ambition or just a drive for excellence and being in love with my job.
I got to ABC News when I was 28 years old.
And if you look at the pictures I look like I'm barely post pubescent.
And I was working with these giants like Diane Sawyer and Peter Jennings and Charlie Gibson
and Ted Koppel and I was keenly aware of how green I was, especially when compared to these
famous people I had been watching on television since I was a kid.
And my way of coping with that was to become a workaholic.
And I threw myself into the job and after 9/11 I volunteered and spent many years overseas
in Iraq and Afghanistan and the Middle East.
And when I came home from that I developed a depression and I self-medicated with recreational
drugs which was a toweringly stupid move on my part.
And even though I wasn't doing it when I was working and definitely not when I was on the
air, I learned from my doctor in his office after my panic attack that the drugs I was
taking, cocaine and ecstasy raised the level of adrenalin in your brain and basically guaranteed
that I had the panic attack.
So that moment in the doctor's office when he explained to me what a moron I'd been,
I knew I had to make some changes in my life.
And that set me off on a strange little unplanned journey that I talk about in my book, 10%
Happier.
Coincidentally at around the same time my boss at the time, Peter Jennings, had assigned
me to cover religion for ABC News, a job I didn't want because I had been raised in a
very secular environment.
My parents were both scientists.
And I tried to tell him I didn't want to do it and he told me, "Shut up kid, you're gonna
do it."
So I ended up spending many years meeting people of faith and it really changed my view
of the world and it showed me the value of having a view of the world that is larger
than your own narrow self-interest.
I read a book by a self-help guru by the name of Eckhart Tolle.
He has sold millions of books.
I had never heard of him.
A producer recommended I read the book because she thought maybe it would be a good story.
So I read the book and at first I thought it was irredeemable garbage, nonsense.
There's a lot of grandiose language in there and pseudoscience and over promising about
how this book is gonna change your life.
But then I stumbled upon this diagnosis of the human condition that I'd never heard before.
Eckhart Tolle says we all have a voice in our head.
He's not talking about hearing voices in the schizophrenic sense.
He's talking about our inner narrator, the thing that wakes us up in the morning and
yammers at us all day long.
It's an unpleasant stew of negative, repetitive, ceaselessly self-referential thoughts constantly
judging, wanting, not wanting, comparing ourselves to other people, casting forward into an imagined
future, remembering an idealized past as opposed to being where you are right now.
And I thought yeah, that describes me.
In fact, that voice pretty much is responsible for all the things that I'm most ashamed of
in my life including that panic attack in front of millions of people.
And so I was completely captivated by this description of the human condition and I went
and met Eckhart Tolle and I found him to be almost exactly the same in person as he is
on the page which is he's half incredibly interesting and incisive and half deeply,
deeply confusing.
So unsatisfied by that encounter I then went off and met a bunch of other self-help gurus
who also left me confused.
Many of them left me mildly infuriated because they were full of a word that starts with
S and ends with T. And my wife at some point after hearing me yammer on about Eckhart Tolle
and the like for many, many weeks gave me a gift.
She gave me a book by a guy named Dr. Mark Epstein who's a psychiatrist in New York City
who writes about the overlap between psychiatry and Buddhism.
And I realized when I read this book that all of the smartest stuff in Eckhart Tolle's
book was actually taken pretty much from the Buddha.
And unlike Eckhart Tolle the Buddhists have some actionable advice for dealing with the
voice in your head.
The problem was I didn't want to do it.
Their advice is to meditate which I always thought was uniquely ridiculous and only for
people who live in yurts and are really into aromatherapy and collect crystals, et cetera,
et cetera, and wear little cymbals on their hands.
But, in fact, as I learned there's an enormous amount of science that says that meditation
is a simple brain exercise that can have an extraordinary impact on your brain and your
body.
It can lower your blood pressure, boost your immune system and literally rewire key parts
of your brain that have to do with self-awareness, compassion and stress.
So when I heard that I decided to give it a shot.
So now I find myself in this funny position.
I always thought that meditation was uniquely ridiculous.
Now I'm a daily meditator and, even worse, I'm a public evangelist for meditation.
What I like to say though is it's not gonna solve all of your problems.
All those self-help gurus who tell you that you can magically cure everything in your
life through the power of positive thinking -- that's baloney.
It's not gonna happen.
It's demonstrably untrue and possibly even a damaging message to send.
However, meditation is a scientifically tested simple thing you can do every day that will
make you significantly happier.
I called the book 10% Happier for a couple of reasons.
One, I wanted to counter-program against the over-promising of the self-help gurus.
But also it's -- I think we're ready for a more mature, realistic dialogue about happiness.
And nothing's gonna solve all of your problems but meditation can change the relationship
between you and that voice in your head which is responsible for most of the things you're
probably most embarrassed about in your life.