How Being Wired Differently Can Be an Advantage | Jeff Warren

0:04This is the 10 % Happier Podcast. I'm Dan Harris.

0:18Hello there. How we doing? Today, we're going to talk about how to meditate with the brain you actually have, as opposed to the one you wish you had. You're going to be hearing from the great meditation teacher and great friend of mine, Jeff Warren, who is hilariously and also admirably open about his ADHD and bipolar diagnoses. I do want to make one thing clear from the jump here. This is not just a conversation for people who have official labels or diagnoses. As Jeff points out, there may not even be such a thing as a neurotypical brain. Every one of us has quirks, sensitivities, and idiosyncrasies that shape how we show up when we meditate.

1:00As you're about to hear, Jeff is relentlessly practical. He's going to break down how to figure out what works for you, whether that's deep breathing practice, open awareness, movement, journaling, just taking a bath, whatever. He talks about why paying attention to your own wiring is not self-indulgent. It's actually a foundation for clarity, regulation, and frankly, being less of a menace to everybody around you. Just a few items of business before we dive in here. First, we will not be holding our weekly live this Tuesday, December 30th. I will be back with you live, though, three times during our New Year's Challenge.

1:38So I'll be doing the regular live session on Tuesday the 6th at 4 p.m. Eastern. We do our live sessions every Tuesday at 4. But that week, when we'll also be doing our meditation challenge, I'll also be doing live sessions at 4 Eastern on the 8th and also on the 11th. Speaking of the meditation challenge and also So speaking of our live video meditation and Q &A sessions, you can get both the challenge and our live sessions. And of course, this podcast without the ads on our new app, which is called 10 % with Dan Harris. You can sign up at danharris.com. There's a free 30-day trial if you want to try before you buy.

2:21All right. After the break, Jeff Warren in conversation with the executive producer of this show, DJ Kashmir. Jeff Warren. Welcome back. DJ, good to be with you, bud. So I'd be curious to hear from you a little bit today about how to practice with our own specific idiosyncratic brains, minds, nervous systems. I know you have been very open about your ADHD and bipolar, and you and I talked before starting this recording about how we've got both OCD and ADHD in my little nuclear family unit. And I think the more I learn about neurodivergence, the more I wonder if neurotypical is even a thing at all.

3:09And so I would just be curious to hear from you broadly about, yeah, how do we befriend our own specific minds and figure out what does and doesn't work for us as we enter the practice? I mean, it's a huge question. It's the one I've spent my life trying to figure out for myself. I can talk personally about the things I've learned, but maybe just to say generally, it's also very immediate. Like you just said, I have my kids, my partner. I mean, autism and ADHD are a big part of our kind of family group, and I've got my own stuff. So I had to learn this in my practice for myself, and now I'm having to learn it as a parent.

3:46Oh my gosh, what's going to work to settle my guys? And so I'm really interested in this question. I think the most important principle is what works is what works. The right practice is the one that works for you. And there's almost always going to be a period of experimentation around that. Don't believe the monolithic stories, even within the neurodivergence literature that might say, oh, you're ADHD, you can't meditate, or you're this, you can't do that. There's different presentations of ADHD, but you may find that as an ADHD person, your capacity to hyperfocus lets you really get into the breath.

4:20And it turns out that you're just a natural meditator with that very simple, quote, accessible object that you often hear about in meditation. On the other hand, you may be an ADHD person who it's utterly intolerable staying for more than a minute with something because there's just a claustrophobia of it, you know, in which case you need to experiment. Like, that's what I like exploring different meditation objects for. I like to get people to notice what does it feel like to be with the breath? Does it feel claustrophobic or too much? Okay, can we expand out? What about the whole body, the feeling of the whole body?

4:54Okay, even that, what about expanding out more of an open awareness practice? I mean, And my friend Ofosu with OCD, when he stumbled on open awareness practice, it was like, oh my God, that was the game changer for him. It gave him all this more space. So there's that. I weave in like how intolerable is the restlessness? So let's do a movement practice. You know, let's shake it off. You can totally work with that. There's so many ways to reconfigure the skills of meditation. This core skills, our very first framing skill is just that I care enough about myself to try to learn, to go through this learning, to notice that there's a difference in how I am.

5:30I'm going to learn about this. I'm going to read books about neurodivergence. I'm going to, you know, pay attention to some boards and hear what other people are saying about that. I'm going to go, oh yeah, that's true of me. Or I do have that. I'm going to care about thinking about how to implement self-regulation for myself. Like my roommate is autistic and just had this massive autism burnout situation yesterday and had to totally change her plans. But she knows enough about herself to know to do that. Because in the past, she's gone way too far. And there's been these downstream causes. So she already has been in a process of learning about that and can say, oh, I can protect myself here.

6:06So I can change. So you have this high level caring about your difference, caring about yourself. That's one skill. And then you have the skill always within a practice of where am I at? What do I need? The clarity. What can I pay attention to that's not the usual stuff of my worries. That's the concentration. So maybe I need to go for a walk in nature. Maybe I need to do a journaling practice or listen to some music or take a bath. Those things can be regulating. So the concentration piece is choosing where you want to put your attention. The clarity is learning where you're at, what's happening.

6:38The equanimity always, super key. That's one that's not represented much in the neurodiversity literature because there's not really a contemplative understanding there. There's like, own your identity, be your identity, but the equanimity is like, hold it lightly. Let yourself be in a humble place of learning. Notice the changeability of you, how the part of you that's noticing your ADD traits is not actually ADHD or OCD or anything. And you can kind of begin to rest back in that. In other words, experiment. Learn from others. See it as this necessary part about, oh how am I wired once I can get clarity about how I'm wired I can begin to communicate that to other people I can communicate accommodations that I need or I let people know when I first meet them like they tell me their name I'm like awesome if I don't write this down on my phone I'm going to instantly forget it because I'm ADHD and I have like a short-term memory buffer that's like a micro filament thin I am not going to remember this but I'm going to write on my phone if I don't write on my phone sorry I'm going to forget like I can at least communicate that up front now and having because I had that insight and that actually creates a lot less suffering for me downstream.

7:49And so that's a kind of an ADHD answer to your question. But yeah. No, I love it. Let me see if I can try to reflect some of it back. I mean, just first to say, there are going to be plenty of folks listening who have one of these diagnoses and plenty of folks who don't. The folks who don't, that may be because they don't qualify for one of these. and it also may be just because they don't have one, right? But I think everything you're saying is relevant to every single person listening because every single brain and nervous system is by definition different in the same way that every fingerprint is different.

8:27Diversity is the rule. Right, right. So I feel like I'm hearing a couple of important things in here. One is just at a baseline, at an absolute baseline foundational first step is just the learning to give enough of a shit about yourself and have enough warmth towards yourself to start to try to understand how your specific brain, body works, suffers, thrives. And then you mentioned this trifecta, which I know you mentioned on the show before. I think it comes from Shinzen, but correct me if I'm wrong. But the trifecta is the clarity, concentration, equanimity, right? These are sort of the three-legged stool of mindfulness.

9:10And clarity in this context could range everywhere from clarity about your particular diagnosis or your brain or your nervous system or your body or your family's needs, clarity. And that's broadly, but that's also in a specific moment. Right? Like right now, I need a bath. Right now, I need a walk. Right now, I need to sit. Right now, I need Netflix. So clarity about who you are, what you need, concentration, however you personally come by concentration and whatever concentration looks like for you. It could be hyper-focus on the breath, could be a much looser open awareness, could be something else.

9:49And then crucially, you landed on that third leg of the stool, equanimity, which is about whatever the answers to any of the foregoing are, a basic okayness with those answers, and also holding them lightly because they, like everything else, are also impermanent. That was a masterful summary. Yeah, a couple of things in there. The concentration is about what do you want to devote your attention to that you've chosen for you. You may already, most people already have a sense of certain things that regulate them. It's what's interesting is that we often have a kind of intuitive sense of a practice already, or we do.

10:29We know hanging out with this person or these friends is kind of like settles me in a deep way. I know going into nature is very settling. So I like to honor where people are already putting their attention. And that is the name of the game. You know, don't just put it on your worries. Start to choose where you're going to put it for this period of time. That's what a practice is. It's a kind of protected space where you set the intention of where you're going to put your attention, including you're going to let yourself wander all over too, because that's part of it, that learning. But that's one piece in there.

10:57And then the other piece, you know, maybe more of an empowering. Well, first of all, there is no such thing as a neurotypical brain. That's everyone in the neurodiversity literature is very clear on that. Neurodiversity is the rule, just like biological diversity is the rule. The word that may be more appropriate is more neuronormative, that there are a set of norms about how to function in a culture that some people find impossible to move along with. They really chafe, but others feel like there's almost a set of cultural agreements that they can manage or make do with. Those who can make do with it, who can flow along with it, are more aligned with the kind of neuronormative sort of way of being.

11:33Like they get, of course, they're going to have their uniqueness and differences in the way they're wired, but they're not. The reason we came up with neurodiversity in the first place was the way to empower people who felt like they couldn't be in that. There was so much suffering caused by trying to mask or jam your way into this way of operating that where you're just were wired differently. You were like a square peg in a round hole. So that's just a little bit about the what is neurotypical. It's like no one's neurotypical. We're all neurodiverse, but it's up to us to figure out how we are in order to flow into what's happening in the world.

12:05And then there's this, this is the exciting thing to put people in the moment. This is the expansion of consciousness in real time. This is the world we're living in. Enormous demands are placed on us that have not been placed there before. In response, nature is creating even more diversity in nervous systems. If these nervous systems are there to be solutions, their creativity, their differences will be solutions to the world's problems, but not if they can't see how to work with themselves. Otherwise, they'll just add to the world's problems. We're in this time where neurodiversity is asking us, it's saying, where there used to be a clump of saying, oh, this is what it is to be human, this kind of a person.

12:42And we get really close up into that fist and we see that it's lots of little spectrums of sociality, spectrums of sensitivity, spectrums of how we pay attention, spectrums of emotionality, of arousal levels. There is this much more diverse, undulating octopus person. And our being is spread out through those different tentacles in different ways. And can we begin to get clear about what those different spectrums are? Oh, then we know ourselves more. We can reflect back to each other more. We can find ecosystems that we can all fit in, as opposed to the opposite of that, which is like, this is how we got to do things.

13:19And then you're either in or you're out. And if you're out, all those resources are not going towards helping the world, you know? So that's how I see the big picture. To have that curiosity this time is the cutting edge of what the world needs now, because it'll be turning into the solutions to the world problems eventually, you know, if you're hopeful about it. That's such a rich answer. And I'll be thinking more after we hop about what you said about there's no neurotypical but there's definitely neuro normative and what it feels like for people who fall outside of that that's really helpful i just want to ask one more question before i let you go here as i'm listening to you talk about not just the personal but and this is i hesitate to say this but it's kind of a danism but you know the sort of geopolitical case for figuring out your own nervous system it's putting me in mind of the conversations i've had over the last few months with Kyra Jewell, with Dawn, with Cara, with Vinny, with Seb, you know, with Christiana, all of these wonderful teachers.

14:14And over and over and over, it doesn't seem to matter what the question even is. We keep coming back to this same central tenet of the importance of being present enough with yourself and open enough with yourself to figure out what genuinely works for you. And that comes up in the context, whether we're talking about like, how do I choose which meditation to do? Or what do I do when I'm in pain? Or how do I meditate with anger? Right? Like, the answer is always shot through with some sense of like, well, it depends. Learn to listen to yourself. And I guess as I've heard that answer come through again and again over the last several months, I'm putting myself in the position of a listener who may be wondering something like, okay, but does that just mean like everything is on the table?

15:06How would I know when it isn't practice anymore? How would I know when the experiment isn't working? How would I know when trying on everything is taking me too far from myself, you know, and I need to pick something and try it for a while, go deep instead of go wide? Can you just speak to that side of it to wrap us up here? Yeah. You know, the whole point of all of this is to locate yourself where you are. You're back here. You're not overextended. You're right, present, and available. It only ever asks that you're available in the fraction of this moment. That's it. From this place, what is the signal that wants to come through about where you want to put your attention, how you want to respond?

15:51It's always coming back to this place. so that's what you're looking for in a practice whatever practice you're trying out does it bring you to that place does it help you find that place and that's it that is the measure of a successful practice it's not any special effect happening inside the meditation itself it's not some it's is that ever more true for you and so some people are going to find that through they devote themselves to one thing, to the breath in a particular tradition, and they're finding that this is true. They're ever more present in that way. Great. Ain't broke. Don't fix it.

16:30There will be a necessary time of devoting yourself. We're talking about you have to first get settled so that you can find that sense of presence. So whatever will settle you. If that's not you, you may need to be a little more exploring to figure out what's going to work. And that's just because you're wired that way. It's not obvious what that thing is, but the litmus test is in life, are you more available and present for the signal of what wants to come true, what wants to happen? You never need to go beyond that. You only ever need to live in the micro thin filament layer of the moment. Boom.

17:05Back here, more settled, what wants to happen? Back here, more settled, what wants to happen? Whatever will support you in that, that's your practice. It might be a journaling practice. It might be your yoga practice. You're flowing with the breath. It helps you feel more settled. And so you work with what you already know about yourself. But it's true. At a certain point, the way I get through my ADHD, I jump around all the time with different practices, but I'm always cultivating those skills. I know what they are. I'm always coming back to accepting what's happening in this moment. What am I noticing here?

17:41What do I want to devote my attention to? Is that helpful? It's really helpful. Yeah. I think what I'm hearing, at least in part, is you can have a litmus test that you apply, whether it's to the one practice that you always do or to the 40 practices you're trying this month. And maybe that litmus test sounds something like, is this helping me be here? Is it helping me be settled? Is it helping me see more clearly about what wants to happen next, right? Or to go back to your framework from a few minutes ago, maybe the litmus test is like, am I more clear, more concentrated, more equanimous, right?

18:18But some version of not overcomplicating what it is that we're shooting for here, which is a kind of presence, a kind of calm, a kind of clarity, and you can - Availability is what I like to say. Availability, I love that. And you can ask that of whatever it is you're trying today. Exactly, well said. Love it. Always such a pleasure. Thanks, man. Great to DJ.

18:48Thank you to Jeff. Thank you to DJ. Thank you as well to our incredible intern, Malika Tatavarti, for her editing help on this episode. Don't forget, we will not be doing our regularly scheduled live meditation and Q &A session this Tuesday, December 30th. I will be back live, though, three times during the week of January 5th. That's the week of our seven-day meditation challenge, our New Year's meditation challenge led by the great Joseph Goldstein. I'm going to do a live session on Tuesday, as I always do at 4 Eastern, and then two more sessions, one on the 8th and one on the 11th, to hear your take on Joseph's meditations, answer your questions, et cetera, et cetera.

19:29If you want to join the challenge and if you want to join our live sessions, you got to sign up over at danharris.com for our new app, 10 % with Dan Harris. And finally, thank you to everybody who worked so hard on this show. Our producers are Tara Anderson and Eleanor Vasili. Our recording and engineering is handled by the great folks over at Pod People. Lauren Smith is our managing producer. Marissa Schneiderman is our senior producer. DJ Kashmir is our executive producer, and Nick Thorburn of the band Islands wrote our theme.