How To Increase Performance By Working At Your Edge -- Plus A Quick Hack For When Panic or Anxiety Swells

16:18Dr. Michael Gervais:100%. Thank you for asking. Self-talk is one of the great tools to be able to work with one's own self. And first and foremost, if you're not aware of your inner dialogue, it's really hard to be good at it. So that's why mindfulness is foundational. There's three practices for awareness. Mindfulness, journaling, and conversations with people of wisdom. Those are the three that I know that increase my awareness of what fill in the blank is. But then you need some skills and self-talk can be a skill. But I still want to know what you would whisper to yourself.

16:53Dan Harris:Giddy up.

16:56Dr. Michael Gervais:That's cool. Okay. So let's do it this way. Let's think about it as a slide. Okay. Think about a water slide.

17:01Dan Harris:Okay.

17:01Dr. Michael Gervais:Okay. And so sometimes you get to the top of a water slide and you're looking around from the platform. You're like, ah, here we go. This could be fun. And you jump in and you kind of go for the ride and it's exactly what it's intended. That kind of threshold of excitement, fear, you know, fun. Okay. Sometimes you get to the platform and you say, oh boy, I don't think I really want this. So if you're at the platform and you don't know which way it's going to go yet, okay, let's do that self-talk. And then when you sit on that platform and you're kind of holding the bar above you, I think most people have been on a water slide, right?

17:35Dr. Michael Gervais:And you're holding the thing above you, the water's ripping down, and you know that you're not in a good spot. That's a different frame. And then when you're in the throes of the thing, your feet are spilling all over the plays and you're kind of feeling upside down in disaster so there's three distinct moments of self-talk so upstream ready for the rapids and in the complete throws i would say i think about

17:57Dan Harris:this a lot with airplanes and with anything i'm afraid of i would say a couple things one you're gonna be fine two it's really important that you face your fears because you want your kid to see you doing that. I have a child who has plenty of anxiety and he needs a father who is modeling a consistent facing of fears. The third thing is listen to yourself. If you're really on tilt right now, sometimes actually the most courageous thing to do is take a break, re-attack it tomorrow.

18:31Dr. Michael Gervais:Cool. So the two things that you're doing is you're being, I'll work in reverse order, three things. There's an agility to your approach. The middle is purpose mindset. that. So you're anchoring to something bigger than you. And the first is you're backing yourself. So, you know, there's some efficacy, self-efficacy is the first thing you're doing, which is that felt sense of like, yeah, I make things happen. I feel pretty powerful. Like I can, I can do things. So if you can anchor into that type of self-talk, it's cool. And then make it bigger than you. It's cool. And the, all of the requisite skills to be agile in this topsy-turvy kind of wild world that we're in, that's a really nice formula.

19:10Dan Harris:So are these exactly the skills you would present to a client? Yeah, if I'm working with an athlete or an executive

19:17Dr. Michael Gervais:that is like wanting to take a step in their abilities to execute in high stress conditions or be a little bit more home with themselves in high stress conditions, the three theories that we just worked from, self-efficacy purpose and um psychological agility would be definitely at the foundation and and each one of those has a set of protocols so self-efficacy albert brandor was the kind of the original theorist on self-efficacy he said look he said there was five ways to increase efficacy now if you do a search there's only four so i'm not sure what happened to the fifth one but um but there's very specific ways to enhance your sense of feeling efficacious.

20:00Dr. Michael Gervais:And that word is like feeling powerful in your own self.

20:05Dan Harris:How do you with your clients work with the subtle thing around agility? Because agility could be misused as a cop-out.

20:16Dr. Michael Gervais:It's a cool question. You understand the nuance here, don't you? Because facing down your...

20:21Dan Harris:It's only because I've done it. Yeah, no, right.

20:23Dr. Michael Gervais:Like wrestling with your dragon, you know, or like saying, I'm going to fight this dragon tomorrow, or I'm going to get to know this dragon tomorrow. Okay, so psychological agility, it for me pins on or rests on emotional agility, not to confuse the two. But there's a ability to work with your emotions allows you to be more agile in navigating the world. So there is an emotional intelligence that I'm pointing to for the agility piece. the other thing though is if you think about stress inoculation and you think about systematic desensitization or flooding those are all words maybe that need some explaining but the idea that the very simple idea is that when you when you face down something and you stand toe-to-toe with it and you don't retreat your body becomes more familiar with that stress and then is less fearful of it and at the moment that you stand toe to toe with something either in your imagination or in physical life and then you retreat you strengthen the response of retreating from the stress so i would use that one sparingly right yes like there's a place to say excuse me i need to like i need to go to the bathroom or i need to tie my shoes or i need to go to pull yourself from the throes of a thing that is clever, but on your own terms, when you decide that you want to tackle this thing, tackle it and do not retreat.

21:54Dan Harris:Okay. So let me, I'll give you a real life example and you just tell me what you think. So I, you're good at interviewing.

22:02Dr. Michael Gervais:I see why you had a long career at ABC. Well done, mate. Yeah, that's really good. And it also points to like, you know, you are a true learner, right? Like that's probably the genius that you rest on is that you're curious and you want to understand. Right. So curiosity is probably the crown jewel in yourself.

22:20Dan Harris:Maybe. But what I can't do is, unlike you, I am not a mental health professional. I can't. When people ask me for advice, I always have to say, I'll give you advice. But, you know, it's like you're talking to a guy who slept at a Holiday Inn last night. Like, I don't really know. I didn't, you know, I've done hundreds of interviews.

22:39Dr. Michael Gervais:But the fact that you know that actually creates a felt sense of safety.

22:43Dan Harris:I think so. I think so. That's right. But I, you know, legally, like I really can't treat patients or, and I, so I don't, I don't, I'm not even particularly interested in that, but, um, that's quite, that's, I think a, that's, I think a major difference between the two of us. My only real training is as a journalist, um, as opposed to as a caregiver, which is really within your wheelhouse. Yeah. Anyway, getting back to the specific situation, I, so I have, as I mentioned earlier, I have panic disorder. It's not just a panic attack I had on TV. I think that was a seminal event in that it like once the brain as you nodded toward this, well, once the brain gets good at panic, it gets really good at it.

23:24Dan Harris:So not only do I sometimes worry about public speaking, but for that, I take a beta blocker, which is really helpful. And so I don't shy away from it. I take a beta blocker, which is a non-narcotic medication that you need a prescription for, but it doesn't like alter your mind. It just, it puts a cap on how quickly your heart can beat. So it's kind of like a physiological, you can be as nervous as you can manage to be, but the body can't go into mutiny mode. And so that's really helpful. but for elevators and airplanes i really struggle and a beta blocker is not gonna cut it during the pandemic i had a bunch of stressful things going on it was a fucking pandemic a b i wasn't on i had moved out of the city i used to live in new york city now we live in the suburbs my wife insists that i call it the country uh because she doesn't like the connotation of the suburbs suburban we i'm suburban douche um and so we live in the suburbs so I wasn't on elevators as much and everybody was grounded so I wasn't on planes that much.

24:26Dan Harris:Oh, you were out of practice. I was out of practice and I was going through a very difficult separation with my co-founders at a meditation app that I had started back in 2015.

24:38Dr. Michael Gervais:I didn't know that you had that separation. Yeah, I didn't know that. It was brutal. It was really hard. I still associate you with it and you're not with that. I'm not with it. We don't need to name it?

24:47Dan Harris:No, you can name it. The app used to be called 10 % Happier It's now called Happier. So anyway, in the middle in 2021, as all the or maybe 2022, as all this shit's going down, it's a pandemic. I'm starting to get back on elevators and airplanes. I have this like deeply wired propensity for panic. I started freaking out on on planes and elevators and bad. I did a classic no-no. I was on my way out to LA to give a speech and the panic hit. I hadn't felt panic like that in a long time and I got off. And, you know, I can defend the decision. That's by myself. I didn't have anybody to calm me down, but that just set me on a spiral.

25:29Dan Harris:And so I've really been working. I've been doing a lot of exposure therapy. I have a great therapist, uh paul green shout out to paul green and he and i will will take planes together unmedicated little planes like not like cessna's but small commuter planes from the white plains airport to washington dc you know 70 seaters and it is i'm a guy who's spent huge chunks of my life in war zones i've never been more terrified than doing these flights unmedicated and um so i did like four of those and I was able to do it, but it was still really hard and now kind of on my own. And so like I flew yesterday, I was on my own.

26:10Um, I, so I, I take a really small dose of, uh, of Klonopin,

26:15Dan Harris:which is a, which can really ease your nervous system. And it's interesting. I, it's a small enough dose that I still feel nervous, but it's just like, gives me a little bit of comfort and I can manage it.

26:28Dr. Michael Gervais:Shallow pool instead of the deep pool. Yes. Yeah.

26:30Dan Harris:And so then I'm flying back Sunday and I'm thinking I'm going to break the pill in half and take even less. And then I have a bunch of flights coming up, some of them on small planes, some of them on big planes. Most I'm by myself, but I have one with my son and I'm taking the one with my son. It's on a big plane. I can go unmedicated. And so this is the way I'm thinking about it. It's like I'm just trying to be careful because the avoidance problem is real. But the other problem is you actually push too hard when you're not ready and you traumatize yourself. um so anyway this is the way i'm thinking about it i'm curious what you think yeah first of all badass awesome like you're working yeah like yeah you're working and that's what that's what

27:12Dr. Michael Gervais:psychology let's call it what our parents thought about psychology what they missed that you go talk to somebody and you sit on a couch and it's a comfy couch and it's maybe a poorly lit room and And you need to talk about your parents, all the mistakes they made or whatever, right? Like, or you complain or somebody is going to give you advice and fix you, which is all not right. And what you're pointing to is psychological skills training. And that is the, just like you do physical skills training to have a strong cardiovascular system or increased muscularity, that you do psychological skills training so you can be more free in your own body.

27:53Dr. Michael Gervais:you're training badass that's exactly how it works and i think what most people miss in elite sport because we see them on sunday in the nfl and we watch them and we say wow and then we say

28:06Dan Harris:it must be nice born that way no you know like that's not how this yes there is a probably good

28:14Dr. Michael Gervais:match between genetic coding and the environment that they're in but on monday tuesday wednesday thursday friday and saturday they are working right at the edge of their capacity because that's where you grow in front of their coaches that decide if they're going to get playtime or not in front of their teammates who's trying to take their job so they're right at the edge nearly every day where they could drop a ball make a ball in a situation that they're not necessarily good at because they're practicing things that they're not good at to get better right and the consequences are larger than we recognize most of us never get to our edge on monday tuesday wednesday thursday friday and certainly not on a sunday in front of handfuls of millions of people so what you're doing is getting up on your edge first and foremost i say badass that's exactly keep going and at some point you can become a professional patient too which would be a problem okay so unpack that what do you yeah uh this the professional patient is somebody who likes who's really good at being a patient okay i'm not suggesting you're there yet but there is a pathway for you to extinguish not just manage but extinguish the fear that's a whole different

29:37Dan Harris:kind of apple to swallow here okay i want to jump in on that for a second because there's hope here Well, there's hope, but I also, for sure there's hope. What I'm, what I'm a thousand percent confident in is that there's hope for messy marginal improvement. Where I, where I wonder is around the extinguishing. I think it's possible that I'm going to live with this the rest of my life and that I will just have to continue to dance with it. I don't know that that's being a professional patient. I think that's, you please point out where I'm being delusional here. I'm not envisioning a lifelong having Paul Green move into my house and do exposure therapy with me every day.

30:21Dan Harris:It's more that this is such a powerful thing for me that I almost feel worse if the goal is extinguishing because that it feels so far away. I'd rather have this story of, Hey, it's possible. I never extinguish it, but I'm just going to have to dance with it for the rest of my life.

30:37Dr. Michael Gervais:I think that that's a cool safety valve. I think it's really, I understand that. And I think what I hear, I really understand it. Okay. And also what I hear is like, it feels unreasonable in my mind to think that this could go away, no matter how much training I do. And I would say that there might be some room to expand that thought for you. and not to not to like at any point in your training arc to feel like that's a that's what am i doing why am i getting my hopes up for that so if you lower the hope which is like no i can do this i can train and i can be uh i don't know 40 uncomfortable in flights and that's cool i can do that i can be i can bring a change of clothes so when i get off the plane you know i know that i'm kind of sweaty during the plane.

31:28Dr. Michael Gervais:And that's okay.

31:29Dan Harris:I thought you were going to say in case I shit my pants.

31:31Dr. Michael Gervais:You can go there too. So I think that both can be true. I don't hear professional patient. I'm kind of placing that out there that there is a way to extinguish fear and you playing with that idea would be cool. And just working it out with your psychiatrist or psychologist. I'm not sure it's training. Is it Paul?

31:51Dan Harris:Paul is a psychologist. Yeah.

31:53Dr. Michael Gervais:Work out with Paul, like, is Mike being sloppy here? Or is there a thing here? You know, like, that would be cool to work out. And I would also say that the harder somebody trains, the more likely or the quicker you can get results. But training hard alone doesn't necessarily get you the results. There's this appreciation for recovery. There's this appreciation for consolidation of information from the training. You know, so, yeah, I think you're going to win both ways. Totally. and i don't know your brain chemistry but you're going to win both ways because you're training at your edge and you're going to be x percent better at it and if you invite this idea that one day i might just fully extinguish this loop that i find myself in yeah and i can extinguish that thing completely that is the work that we did i did with felix baumgartner um for rebel stratos

32:42Dan Harris:oh yeah the guy who like went up into the into the edge of space yeah and he was terrified to be in the spacesuit and so he we called it claustrophobia you know because that's it was a

32:55Dr. Michael Gervais:panic attack claustrophobias experience and he couldn't just manage that fear because the consequences were too dire if he got if he was just managing that plus managing all the other things he needed to so we needed to extinguish that fear so there's a model there of somebody that you know was able to do it and it doesn't mean that everyone can yeah i'm sort of middle

33:17Dan Harris:path on this. Like, I'm open to the idea that extinguishing could happen. And I know it can happen for some people. And if I cling too tightly to that idea for myself, it actually doesn't help my nervous system. So having the notion that it's just a thing that I work with forever, I'm also open to that.

33:36Dr. Michael Gervais:Yeah, that's what I'm saying. But I think you're going to win either way.

33:38Dan Harris:Yes.

33:39Dr. Michael Gervais:You know, and so I would play both games. I'd be like, where's the threshold that I can manage well and feel cool with this? And then how much more work or what kind of work would I do differently once I'm to that threshold for extinguish? You know, so it's a stepwise approach.

33:55Dan Harris:My head's going in a slightly different direction now. When you talk about working at your edge, I don't know that I've thought a lot about that concept, but as you said it, I was just kind of interpolating back through my life. And I think, I think not only in this area of panic, but I think most of my life, especially in my professional life, but also as I'm talking many areas of my personal life, I'm pretty consistently working at my edge. I believe that. And I'm not as I don't even know it was a deliberate strategy. I just, maybe it's, I don't like boredom, but so I'm just curious for you, what does it look like?

34:34Dr. Michael Gervais:Well, let's do a model first and then answer it. So to the edge with intelligent recovery following, then I replenish so I can go back to that edge again. So what we're talking about is really working yourself up with acute stress and then intelligently recovering from that. And what most of us do is we have acute stress moments, experiences, and then hold on to it. We drop maybe like 3 % from that acute stressor, and then we talk about it and ruminate about it and kind of relive it. And so we go from acute stress to moderate stress instead of acute stress recovery from that. So we don't empty our cup, if you use that kind of metaphor.

35:16Dr. Michael Gervais:And we're holding up at the full cup for an extended period of times, weeks, months. and then what happens from acute stress unmanaged to moderate stress unmanaged leads to chronic stress unmanaged leads to early death so if we can instead of like this spike of acute stress is holding on for top volume and then a slide to early death as an arc if you think about an x y axis if we went big spike big recovery so it's this act it looks like a seismograph yes and that is what I want my day to look like. So let's say Monday, I want as many acute stressors as I can have and then recover from them as quickly as I can throughout the day.

35:57Dr. Michael Gervais:And then a big recovery process with the eight hours of sleep, you know, and the mobility work that I do and the good conversations I have with loved ones. And so those are all recovery mechanisms. So I want great stressors to keep me on my growth arc and then really intelligent recovery process. What are the stressors? For me, that was the question you asked. So for me, I'll do some physical. So I'll do some heart rate stuff to get me up there. And that's no more complicated than, let's say you're doing some sort of squat or something. You could put the weight down or you could do one more rep or two more reps.

36:35Dr. Michael Gervais:So there's a little bit of a stressor to think in the most concrete way. That would be probably 10 % of how I do stress. The other 90, I'm kind of ballparking here, is emotional, where I'm getting to the edge of saying something that is difficult to say, or listening to something that's difficult to listen to. And so it's a vulnerability meets holding the space for it. And most of that for me is relational. And that's where it happens. So I need to stay in that space long enough. And then the other, I shouldn't do that as 90, let's call that like 60 or something. And the other percentage is when I'm doing something where if I do make mistakes, there's some consequence to it, you know, like public speaking, or there's probably some consequence in this, but we have the controls to, you know, edit things that are completely out of whack.

37:26Dr. Michael Gervais:But there's some things that, where there's real consequences to myself and others. And so does that help?

37:32Dan Harris:Yeah. No, I was just curious.

37:33Dr. Michael Gervais:Yeah. Curiosity. And you know what I'm curious about is like, if you didn't change your trajectory from the moment of that panic attack and invest in sorting that out and you just white knuckled grinded and stayed your path and didn't go the dual path of mindfulness even a second career arc you know through mindfulness what do you think that cost would have been for you i think about

38:02Dan Harris:this a lot but like what's the counterfactual you know the sliding doors you know if i had just stayed in news and not gotten interested in any of this stuff. I don't think it would be great. It's possible with all of my energy and intensity that I could have climbed to the top of the news business, whatever that looks like. You know, some of the people in my vintage are now at the top of the pyramid. So I'm thinking about like Jake Capper and David Muir and Anderson Cooper and I We're all kind of in the same litter, if you want to put it in puppy speak. And so those guys really made it. I actually never in the news business, I was kind of like always right at that second tier.

38:46Dan Harris:I was the anchor of Nightline, which is a great job. I was the anchor of the weekend edition of GMA, Good Morning America, which is awesome. But I was never like the weekday guy. And, you know, I got to do reporting all over the world. And, you know, one of the coins of that realm is our do win Emmys. and I won some Emmys and all that other stuff that kind of mattered a lot to me in the time. But I was doing all of that, you know, from 2010 on when I started writing the book and the book came out in 2014. I was doing all of that while I had a very robust side hustle. And in the years before that, when I had no side hustle and I was just focused on the news, I was pretty unhappy.

39:23Dan Harris:You know, I loved what I did and I felt like it was really important. And so I wasn't thorough goingly unhappy, but I was really stressed and really frustrated. And every time I got passed over for a job, which happened a lot, I would spin out and take it out on the people in my life. And so I think if I hadn't found this stuff, I would have gone probably hardcore down that route of trying to advance in the news industry, which even at its best, it would have been a hard place for me to advance because there are so few slots at the very top, but it's not at its best. The economic underpinnings of the of the industry are being decimated the ratings are you know when i had that panic attack in 2004 on gma there were more than five million people watching now on a regular day at gma it's somewhere between two and three million people and it's going down quickly and i say this with no disrespect uh or schadenfreude or anything like that i still think what they're doing at abc news and the other networks is really important a lot of my best friends work in the industry, but it's really hard time.

40:27Dan Harris:So like you're competing for limited slots in a sandcastle that is being attacked by waves. And so I think I, in the stress of that situation with my preexisting predilections for overwork and irritability, it could have gotten pretty gnarly.

40:46Dr. Michael Gervais:How gnarly?

40:48Dan Harris:I don't think, you know, front page of the newspaper, you know, shiv somebody in the kidney gnarly but just like not as happy a life as i i really could have had and okay and not you know what would have been like for my kid that's what my wife that's what i think about would i have been abusive no but what i've been absent and unpredictable Yeah. Consumed with self. Consumed with self. And then also like, you know, prone to outbursts. Again, not like volcanic outbursts, but scary. You know, even, even my team now, I think a lot about my grandfather. I had a grandfather, Robert Johnson, who was scary, scary guy.

41:34Dan Harris:And lots of things in his life, he had been thwarted. And he was a middle manager at the Yellow Pages. Remember the Yellow Pages? Those big, like Bible thick compendiums of phone numbers that we used to have. So my grandfather, who's a really smart guy, but really, he could be pretty gnarly. I remember him once when he got his first VCR, bringing me and my little brother in to show it to us. And he said, if you touch it, I'll break your arm. That kind of shit. And my mother describes him as really funny sometimes. But then he would have these little napkin wars that they would play at dinner. They would ball up the napkins and throw at each other.

42:11Dan Harris:But if you hit him in the face, he'd slap you in the face. it would just turn like that and like that dude's blood is coursing through my veins and that's a real aspect of my personality i have to work on and even like within the last five or six years i remember somebody on my team one of my producers at my little meditation company right so not the news saying you just have a scary face to you yeah which you know i love the fact that she felt comfortable enough to say that yeah my wife has made the same observation like i just have this like this, I can, my face can get like stony and hard to read.

42:45Dan Harris:And usually it has nothing to do with my irritation at anybody in my orbit. It's just that I'm thinking about something else. And so there's, there's vestiges of, of Robert Johnson in me now. I just think it would be uncontrolled if I didn't have all of these measures to control it. Tools. Tools. Yeah, absolutely. I want to say in defense of Robert Johnson, I, the way I'm describing him now is something of a caricature. All the things I said are true, but actually in his 80s, he lived until he was 90, but at 80, somebody got him a computer. Somebody got a computer for his wife, actually. His wife didn't want to use it.

43:23Dan Harris:So Robert got really involved in the, this is the early days of like social media. So he got on Twitter and he was really funny on Twitter and he was very active in emailing all of his grandchildren. And I went through recently, read all of his old emails and they were really loving so people can change and also it's you know

43:43Dr. Michael Gervais:never fair to completely caricature right yeah that's cool that's a good nuance back to the news folks for just a minute like i love the sandcastle analogy and the people that you mentioned that were your peers or contemporaries like they are taking big voices in kind of the narrative of of our country given the context of what's happening with jimmy kimmel right now and censorship and the entire landscape. Can you share your thoughts on how you're understanding this?

44:11Dan Harris:Well, with the caveat that I'm not on the inside, I would say that I didn't love what he said, just because it seemed factually inaccurate. I think by the time he said it, we knew that the guy who murdered Charlie Kirk was not a Trumpist. So it just seemed factually questionable and maybe not the wisest thing. And yet free speech is a thing, you know, like I would die for Jimmy's right to say some stupid shit on a show. And by the way, like everybody on the right has been carping about free speech for a long time with pretty good reason. You know, I think I think there is a bit of a monoculture in American media where it's very far to the left.

45:00Dan Harris:And so I think some of the complaints about that and the left leaning tendencies of the media and the disproportionate use of what you might call censorship on folks from the right. Yeah, I think there's something to that. But what we saw here appeared to be the state leveraging its power on a private company, Disney, or I guess it's a public company because it's publicly traded, but it's not a government company. You know, in these seemingly sort of economically laden threats from Brendan Carr at the FCC, all that that that's worrisome to me. Sometimes I think, you know, as an outsider now observing the news, one of the little phrases that comes into my head a lot is everybody sucks.

45:48Dan Harris:It's like everybody on all sides of this, of everything, of the issues. It's so hard to find a reasonable voice. There are reasonable voices on both sides, but they seem very reluctant to acknowledge that there is anybody reasonable on the other side. And so it's all of this motivated reasoning. And there's an expression I heard, conflict entrepreneurship. People out there making money off of fomenting division in our country. And so what I'm really interested in is when can you get smart, well-intentioned people who disagree with each other having civil conversations? I think one guy who's modeling that is Ezra Klein at The New York Times.

46:34Dan Harris:Caveat, he's a friend of mine. But he had a great conversation on his show with Ben Shapiro, who is on the right, Ezra's on the left. I had I know Ben a little bit because I had profiled him back when I was at ABC News and I disagree at times with things both of those guys say but at least they were talking to each other and so much of what we see in the media these days is people throwing red meat to their followers people looking to have their priors confirmed their prejudices confirmed instead of operating on the one thing that I think should be really powering our civic lives which is the word that you keep using.

47:13Dan Harris:to describe me, which is curiosity. Why not have, one of the great things about my journalistic training is it's just always a healthy second guessing. Is that true? Is that really true? I know, I think I believe this, but you know, all the shit I just said, I don't agree with Jimmy Kimball, what he actually said, but I do agree with his right to say it. Huh, let me go back can check that too you know our brains should be constant reconsideration machines this is like deep in the dharma the buddha is said to have said i'm not a dogmatist i'm an analyst and i would just i see i see so little of that and the jimmy kimmel thing just seems like a great example of

47:54Dr. Michael Gervais:of it on all sides do you think that we're on this media censorship path that speaking the way that you want to speak has too great of a consequence even not just being canceled but being pulled from your ability to speak freely evidenced by i think in the pentagon folks have to the media has to sign some stuff saying that they won't necessarily share what they see not from a not from a protection of secrets but like a protection of narrative type of uh thing and i don't again i'm i'm watching from the outside i was unaware of this thing you were referencing at

48:31Dan Harris:the Pentagon, I do worry about intimidation from the state. Let me just say, though, I mean, this is where history is useful. This isn't the first time we've dealt with this. This was happening during the Red Scare, during World War II, during Vietnam, LBJ. People with power have repeatedly, even in this democracy, attempted to use it to silence their critics. So nothing's new. The question is, is it more intense, more concerted? Are the folks with power now more willing to disregard the guardrails? That's my concern. You know, I try as somebody who's not in the news game anymore, not to get carried away by every like jot until in the news cycle.

49:21Dan Harris:I'm really keeping my eye on a number of things, but one thing in particular, and that's the rule of law. Are we going to have a democracy? That's what I'm keeping my eye on. Because all the culture war stuff and all the taxes stuff, it matters, but none of it is going to matter if the foundation on which all of this is built, which is our ability to work and live together peacefully and by a set of mutually agreed upon laws, If that goes away, you can't count on anything.

49:54Dr. Michael Gervais:Two-part question. What needs to happen for you to feel better about that dilemma? And then two, what do you think folks can do to move closer to ensuring democracy stands?

50:06Dan Harris:No one individual, myself included, can wave a wand and fix everything to their liking. The most power you have is that you are a node in an interconnected society and we live in a, we are a species where emotions and behavior is contagious. And so I think if you can model for your friends and family an open-mindedness, a consistent, relentless curiosity, a willingness to reconsider and to engage, to not rest on your prejudices and your priors, that to me is a very Buddhist attitude about world events. Specifically in the engagement piece, yeah, if you can engage with ideas that you do not like, that is going to make you stronger.

50:51Dan Harris:That is a kind of exposure therapy or a psychological fitness that I highly recommend. Even better, if you can talk to actual human beings with whom you disagree and create a relationship. I believe I can't remember who said it. It was a congressman whose name is evading me right now. He's no longer with us. It's hard to hate up close. So we need more engagement with people with whom we disagree.

51:17Dr. Michael Gervais:I don't think you and I have ever talked about this, but for 18 years, I ran, developed. It was an idea I had when I was just out of undergraduate school was it's called late night sports. and it was an idea to bring athletes in, not midnight basketball, but close. And it was one center here in LA and it was pretty intense of an environment. And I quickly learned, and I was there every Saturday night. And the only price to admission was to listen to me for five minutes on sports psychology and how they could take a lesson from sports psychology, practice it on the court in an intense competitive environment across gang lines, and then help them translate how they could practice that later in their week.

52:04Dr. Michael Gervais:It was awesome. High school to college-aged kids. It was an amazing training ground for me and an incredible healing for me in a lot of ways that I learned so much and vice versa for the folks that were in the gym. And so one of the things we quickly and I quickly learned is like, hey, if we shake hands before and after every game, I think we're not going to fight.

52:25Dan Harris:Yeah.

52:26Dr. Michael Gervais:And that one intervention, they were to play in this gym you had to shake each other's hand not just one person and f that dude over there i'm not shaking his hand to play the game you had to shake every all five people's hands and then you'd see them they do that and the person that they were having a beef with they'd still do it because they wanted to play more than they wanted to fight and then they go dap their team and then it'd be like a great game and eye contact and a brief physical contact changed the trajectory of the propensity of violence in that gym. So you're right on. And I think that's not new information to anybody, but then practicing it is a whole different thing.

53:05Dan Harris:It is. I think one of the things that makes all this worse is that we are atomized and disconnected. And as a culture, we're not only are we lonely and disconnected and on our phones, but we are self-sorting geographically by ideology. And so it's becoming harder and harder to actually come face to face with people with whom you disagree on political and cultural and social issues. You know, the major pillars of society, which were all flawed, of course, but, you know, labor unions and religious organizations and civic organizations have lost their, have seen their memberships decline rapidly.

53:43Dan Harris:So there just aren't opportunities for many of us to get involved. And yet I believe I know this. I could be wrong. So somebody will fact check me and let me know on Twitter if I fuck this up. But there's some evidence to suggest that exactly what you were doing, where you bring people together who disagree, but get them to engage in a cooperative activity. And it could be sports or it could be working in an animal shelter or it could be the local school board. Get them to work together in a non-hierarchical activity where nobody's the boss and nobody has to kiss up to anybody. You're just having to cooperate, which, by the way, is what we were designed for.

54:21Dan Harris:This is how we evolved. Cooperation is how we got to the top of the food chain. Put people in those situations, all that shit around polarization and tribalism can get vastly diminished.

54:32Dr. Michael Gervais:I think you might be pointing to what's called superordinate goals. And it's evidenced in jail that if you got three fashions in jail, you know, three different gangs, if you will, none of them like each other, but two of them will come together and work together to create a stronger bond to go fight the other one. So the superordinate goal, it's like, let's just say China and the US or whatever, we'll come together if we got to go fight some aliens.

54:56Dan Harris:Yes.

54:57Dr. Michael Gervais:Right? So that's a superordinate, there's a bigger goal than the immediate goal of just taking care of yourself. And so I think that that's what you might be pointing to, which is a pretty well-established understanding, you know, in grade school, high school, colleges, and for us adults that somehow we've missed that piece.

55:14Dan Harris:There's a really smart person on these issues, Amanda Ripley, who's written about conflict and the difference between healthy conflict and toxic conflict. And she was on my show and I found her work to be really compelling. And the truth is we need conflict. We need healthy conflict. I heard it when you were talking before about how, yes, getting to your edge. There's a friction. Yes. Well, human beings, we need each other. And but we're not all going to get along all the time. And we want to have differing viewpoints in the room. And so conflict is just it can be really healthy. But we have very few skills to navigate these situations well.

55:56Dan Harris:And so it can then get into a kind of toxic conflict. And what we are seeing culturally and on a macro level in this country and honestly throughout the world is the latter, is the unhealthy conflict. And we're in a tangle and it's hard to get out. But, you know, for anybody listening, I would say, you know, it's great if you can join a civic organization or a volunteer group where you can get out. By the way, if you're lonely, it's also a great thing to do. But even if you're not going to do that, I think going through the work of engaging with ideas that are difficult for you is good civic hygiene.

56:36Dan Harris:I also find personally, and I don't think there's, I don't know of any data on this, but I actually find for me that listening to podcasts and reading writers, but with whom I disagree, I find that it actually eases my nervous system because it is hard to hate up close. if I listen to these folks, I understand that they have a logic. I may not share it. Sometimes I actually do share it, but nobody gets up in the morning or very few people get up in the morning and they're like, I'm going to be a dick today. I'm the bad guy in this movie. Everybody gets up trying to do what they think is the right thing.

57:15Dan Harris:And I don't know, if I just can engage with all of this on that level. It's not like a self gaslighting where I convince myself that people are trying to harm the country or doing the right thing. It just it turns down the volume on the rage enough because the rage doesn't help. A certain amount of anger like does get you off the couch for sure, but it very quickly becomes counterproductive. How do you want to be engaging in these difficult times from a position of blind rage, which burns you out really quickly and makes you do dumb shit or with like consistent values based energy that burns clean, keeps you clear, keeps you motivated.

57:58Dan Harris:You know, another word for that would be love. Like I, I just, I strongly feel for myself that that's where I want to go.

58:06Dr. Michael Gervais:You want to operate from that place.

58:08Dan Harris:I want to operate from that place. Yeah. And that, that involves curiosity. That involves being very clear about my values and what I care about, which is to put it in Buddhist terminology, to like reduce suffering for beings everywhere. That's what I'm about. And I'm pretty clear on it. And so if I just tune into that instead of like getting wrapped up in, I hate Trump, and I can't believe he got away with that again.

58:31Dr. Michael Gervais:I'm like, I just don't see how that helps. In athletics, we talk about knowing your ideal competitive mindset, your ICM. and that becomes a bullseye before you go on the field you know that's what a whole pre pregame warm-up is really about is to switch on your icm now in the nfl we play one game a week but you wouldn't want just sunday to be the time that you're in your icm your ideal competitive mindset you want to find it on wednesday and thursday because you're trying to compete to be your very best every you know as many times as you possibly can be and by the way competition being a great competitor does not mean in my mind being better than somebody else it means competing to be your very best right which is an interpersonal navigation not a comparison to another's prowess so the icm one of the things that we do for icm is when we label it which you just did your icm your ideal mindset take the c out of it for a moment is love yes okay so now what do we do for athletes to help them be in that state more often?

59:34Dr. Michael Gervais:We train for it. We label it. We ask them to describe what does it feel like, look like. Then we back in a training mechanism so that's more familiar to them, more closer to the surface. For you, that would be, that backing in would be meditation, would be a practice, writing conversations, practicing in conversations. So you got a whole set of things. The thing that I want to just introduce is we actually start, when you wake up with a just a quick hit of imagery and we design a four-step process for folks a morning mindset routine and one of the four steps is use your imagination to see yourself being exactly the person you want to be at a specific time or phase of the day right and so it's super mechanical and simple but it's using this powerful engine of your imagination to see yourself being brilliant in a difficult, challenging moment.

1:00:27Dr. Michael Gervais:Okay. And then we do things, so that's a morning kind of thing. And then right before you are going to engage in anything, let's just say walking into a training facility for an athlete or into a stadium, what do you do to get connected to that state? Maybe you tap something, you tie your laces a certain way, you do something to kind of get that activation going. And that is a nearly invisible practice that elite athletes across the board embrace that most of us do not put into practice. So I just want to kind of share that.

1:01:01Dan Harris:What does it look like for you? Like, how do you, Mike, get into your IM?

1:01:06Dr. Michael Gervais:So for me, I'll call it like an ideal performance mindset, if you will. And I have trouble with the performance piece because I'm not performative. It's more of an ideal being mindset for me, but that sounds like a little complicated so it starts with the morning mindset routine which is four things one breath one gratitude one segment of gratitude one segment of uh imagery and then i just pull my sheets off and take a moment to be where i am so now i'm practicing presence just start that again so you

1:01:35Dan Harris:wake up in the morning and you have sheets are still on okay and you have one breath at least

1:01:39Dr. Michael Gervais:one so i'm i'm i am sending a signal to my brain hey we don't need to get in the rapids yet we're cool so an exhale sends the signal to the brain we're good i like that okay so maybe it's three breaths maybe it's 10 breaths i don't know but i commit to one dearest choice yeah dearest choice with a great intention intentionality behind it and then i do a little bit of and this is like 60 seconds to maybe three minutes of work while i'm still in bed and then i do some gratitude stuff where i'm just kind of lighting up the parts of my brain that are like yeah there's a lot of good here i'm so today i was like i'm really glad i have two eyes so i just the classic like you know and i'm really i'm really grateful that my wife is healthy next to me i think about

1:02:26Dan Harris:that with my legs yeah yeah it's like yeah let's not take these fuckers for granted yeah right yeah

1:02:32Dr. Michael Gervais:yeah so so anyways there's that it's not a check the box as you it's a feeling yeah yeah yeah it's activating the felt sense of gratitude. And then I'm using a quick hit of imagination, seeing myself, the way I walk and feel and the thing behind my eyes and inside of my chest when I'm at my very best. And I did it for us today. How do I want to be with you when I see you for the first time? And so there's just a quick hit of that imagination. And then that kind of gives me a thing to work toward. And then the last is just a moment to be present. So that's a small example of four things I do in the morning.

1:03:10Dr. Michael Gervais:And there's other things that I do as well throughout the day.

1:03:12Dan Harris:But that creates a foundation.

1:03:14Dr. Michael Gervais:Okay, let's go back to you. And let's go back to meditation for just a minute or mindfulness. In this topsy-turvy world that we're in, what do you know now that you didn't know five years ago? You know, call it midstream of your meditation, mindfulness practice. What do you know now that you didn't know then?

1:03:32Dan Harris:I would say the major development of the latter half of my contemplative career has been really starting to get interested in this incredibly fraught and widely misunderstood word of love or concept of love because it's it's it's been abused as a word you know like i'm a huge beatles fan but when i think about all you need is love like you also need to go to the fucking dentist you know like but then actually thinking about love in a broad sense Well, going to the dentist is part of love. It's you loving yourself and taking care of yourself. And so then I started to think about love really broadly understood as a whole set of skills from self-love.

1:04:18Dan Harris:Again, self-love can easily veer into selfishness or self-gratification or self-indulgence. But actually, I think of it more as the self-talk stuff, or at least inclusive of the self-talk stuff we're describing before, where you're able to look clearly at your own, like a good coach. A good coach sees your flaws and just isn't a jerk about it. So he or she or they will tell you what your flaws are, but they're not going to be like a drill sergeant. Most of us are like drill sergeants with ourselves, but we actually need to move into a coach mentality. So that's the self-love piece. But then there's a whole other set of skills.

1:05:00Dan Harris:Like, how are you with people, with strangers? How are you with the person at the, with your barista? How are you with the tradespeople who come through your house to work on things? And then there's, how good a friend are you? How's your, what's often called social fitness? Are you keeping up your relationships? How good a family member are you? What's up with your spouse? Often the spouse or your romantic partner is the hardest person to apply all the personal growth work you do. You just made a face and indicates you have some sympathy for what I'm saying. How are you with your kids? This is a whole suite of skills, communication skills, which we haven't talked about, but is a discipline in and of itself that I find very interesting.

1:05:41Dan Harris:Back down to this level of strangers, there's a whole body of research around something called micro interactions. so we can inject massive doses of happiness into our life by just paying attention to these little interactions we're having throughout the day that most of us sort of just ice out. So I've started to think a lot about this. It's actually what my next book is going to be about. And I see it becomes more and more, the value of it becomes more and more clear, the dicier the social, political and climate situation is on the planet. Because at the root of all of this stuff is a lack of love, a lack of willingness to deal forthrightly with our own suffering and the suffering around us.

1:06:28Dan Harris:And I'm pretty sure I as an individual can't fix all of it, but it still matters how I act, given that we live in a world that is non-negotiably interdependent. How I act, I'm lucky. I mean, people put microphones in front of me. So how I act actually does have some significance. But even if that weren't the case, how I am, what am I a vector of in my family and in my workplace and in my community? Like that shit really matters. And we all have agency in this regard. So, yeah, you can, if you want, spend a lot of time on the news, either celebrating or bemoaning it. I would argue do a little bit of that, stay an engaged citizen, but don't spend all of your energy there and instead start directing your energy to where you can make a change, which is in your actual orbit.

1:07:16Dan Harris:That's a huge focus for me that I really wasn't thinking much when I first got into mindfulness and I was really thinking of it in a quite a clinical way, you know, like, oh, I'm going to boost my self-awareness so I'm not so yanked around by all my neuroses yeah that's that's cool but it's it it was missing a lot of the warmth piece

1:07:35Dr. Michael Gervais:that the buddha was very insistent on yeah i think you're describing what i think about a lot as a pebble in the pond and it's a it's a bit of when somebody is suffering or in pain it's about mostly for them healing the suffering and pain which is a self-focused approach as opposed to being in the ripple in the pond, becoming as big of a pebble as you possibly can, as heavy of a pebble, so you create a bit more of an impact. And that cuts both ways. Like your grandfather, pretty big pebble, sent some ripples in one direction, and maybe later in life, sent those waves in a more benevolent way. But what I hear you talking about is like, from me to them, from me to we.

1:08:20Dr. Michael Gervais:And that idea is so at home with where I think the self-help industry has gone wrong, is that me be better. For what reason? So that I can help others in the best way that I possibly can. That is the central tenet into all 11 world religions. you know it's a we thing it's not a me thing yes and so i hear the let's call it the adulting

1:08:47Dan Harris:in in in that arc for you but i think the really cool thing is that this meet a wee thing is not a hair shirt you know catastrophic altruism self-sacrificing thing it is enlightened self-interest. If you want to be happy, you will be useful because that is the most sustainable source of happiness.

1:09:13Dr. Michael Gervais:Meaning?

1:09:14Dan Harris:Meaning that if you have positive relationships and you're, I often ask people to do this mental exercise. What is it like when you hold the door open for somebody? It's nice. Feels good. Infinitely scalable. That's right. Infinitely scalable. And it's so how do you is that selfish? Is it selfless? Well, in the end, that's a useless distinction because, yeah, you are a self on one level, but you're also like every thought you have is a manifestation of the living universe. so where's the self anyway and this is again back to the buddha like all of our striving and building up of our identity and acquiring of stuff is kind of misguided because it's all in service of a thing that's an illusion anyway which is the self you know on one level the self is real you and i are sitting here we're each you know we have a physical self a physical self But even this physical self, the atoms are switching out every seven years.

1:10:14Dan Harris:And it's, by the way, falling apart. The wheels are coming off. We are designed for planned obsolescence. We are walking ossuaries. Like one of my favorite ska bands from the 80s, the specials, had a line, enjoy yourself. It's later than you think. You know, that's the truth. So even this physical self isn't really defensible in an abiding way. And certainly the mind isn't. It's constantly, you know, in dialogue with the universe around it and never mind all of the causes and conditions that created it back through our ancestors and through our parents and all of that stuff. And so, yes, on one level, you are you, but on a deeper level, it's more like a river, like that's flowing all the time.

1:11:03Dan Harris:And you can use the word river as a designation, but it's really a flow. And so given the fact that we are a process, not a solid, unchanging entity, and we are in dialogue with a whole world of other processes that are not solid entities, the way to have the happiest possible flow and process is to have harmony in relationships with the whole. And that doesn't mean you can't take firm action when you see injustice. It just means that that firm action doesn't have to be motivated by hatred. And that's what I'm talking about when I was saying before the shit that might have pissed people off about like you should be curious and engaging with ideas and people with whom you disagree because it doesn't preclude you from doing the right thing as you see it.

1:11:53Dan Harris:but it can calm your nervous system so that you can do whatever right thing you've chosen on from a position of some level of equanimity and peace.

1:12:04Dr. Michael Gervais:You've done some work, Dan. You've done some work, my friend.

1:12:08Dan Harris:Or I've stolen from all of my smart teachers.

1:12:11Dr. Michael Gervais:Yes, and probably, but you've done some work.

1:12:14Dan Harris:Just a quick, quick note. The teacher that I'm closest with is this guy, Joseph Goldstein. he and i were joking one day about how like my whole shtick is just baked taken from him and he was like yeah well i did the same to my teachers and he said we're we're part of a lineage of thieves

1:12:30Dr. Michael Gervais:that's cool yeah yeah it gives some permission to appropriately so to you know respect where you've learned at the same time know that like reinventing something with a small t or big t for truth is not the game. No. But it's trying to figure out how to say it in a way that feels like you can connect to it and maybe help somebody else connect to it. You and I are not alone in this thing like, do I have an original idea? I'm not sure. You know, but I have a way that makes sense to me. And I'm trying to kind of work from that place.

1:13:03Dan Harris:Yeah. I just do Dharma and add the word fuck a lot. Dharma.

1:13:09Dr. Michael Gervais:So where can folks find you now that you're not at 10 % happier? Yeah.

1:13:13Dan Harris:So I started this thing. I was just when I when the divorce was was not fine. Divorce business. Yes. And I'm not getting I'm not getting divorced from my wife. But although actually in the early days when this business divorce was happening, my wife and I would use the shorthand of talking about the divorce. And our son would occasionally be like, wait a minute. Are you. So when the divorce was finalized, I launched I just as a experiment launched a sub stack where if you subscribe, I give guided meditations. that come along with all of my podcast episodes. And I also do a weekly live guided meditation where you can meditate with me or with one of my teacher friends.

1:13:51Dan Harris:And so it's really, it's kind of, I'm kind of thinking about like a next generation meditation app. You know, I was in the meditation app game for a long time and they're kind of static things. But what I think is missing, and I think there's a human thirst for this, especially as we get more and more saturated by technology, including now we're on the cusp with something big and dizzying with AI. We need each other. And so I've been adding in like a real community element, which I'm interested in and it's exciting. And that's continuing to evolve. And I can't say it yet, but I think we have a next stage that we're going to go into.

1:14:28Dan Harris:Yeah, my podcast, 10 % Happier. I got a new book coming out in 18 months about love, which is a whole embarrassing story that I can tell you another time. Could you do the same thing? Could you just tell everybody like what you're up to and where they can find you?

1:14:41Dr. Michael Gervais:the easiest place would be finding mastery.com. And that's kind of where the whole housing of everything is. That being said, the podcast is also an important way for us to communicate and be connected with our community. So that's also finding mastery. And so social media is fun. We're having a good time on LinkedIn and trying to find the most simple and clever way to share ideas that help move people in the business world. And then Instagram, you know, at Michael Gervais is the a place where I'm having more fun with sharing ideas.

1:15:14Dan Harris:I gotta go make sure I follow you.

1:15:16Dr. Michael Gervais:Yeah, how about that?

1:15:17Dan Harris:Awesome to talk to you, man.

1:15:18Dr. Michael Gervais:Dude, this is really fun. I absolutely appreciate all the time that we get to spend together. Thank you for sharing what you've come to learn and doing it in an honest way. Thanks, brother. Appreciate you.