Mayim Bialik on: Anxiety, Imagination, Manifestation, Faith, and the Best Time of Day to Meditate

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

0:18Happy Sunday, everybody. Dropping into your feed today with a fun little bonus episode with a couple of friends of the show and friends of mine. Just a little background. In April of 2023, we did an episode with the actor, neuroscientist, author, and podcast host Mayim Bialik. Turns out Mayim and I have a lot in common. Anxiety, for one thing. Also, one-time game show hosts, although she was a much bigger deal. She hosted Jeopardy, and I hosted a short-lived, quickly euthanized primetime game show called 500 Questions. Anyway, since April of 2023, Mayim and I have become friends. Her podcast, just so you know, is called Mayim Bialik's Breakdown.

0:57She also focuses quite a bit on mental health issues. And so when Mayim and her podcast co-host and also life partner, Jonathan Cohen, decided to launch their own sub stack, I wanted to welcome them to the platform with a live video conversation. And today we're going to bring you that chat. It was a wide ranging conversation. Very funny. We talk about anxiety, of course, about creating habits. What's the best time of day to meditate? We even talk a little bit about faith and the power of imagination. I think you're going to enjoy it. And also just let it be a nice little gentle provocation for you to check out Substack.

1:32Also, I have a Substack, danharris.com. Before we get started with the conversation, though, if you haven't already heard me rhapsodize about all the new and exciting offerings in the 10 % world, let me just quickly take this opportunity to plug. We're in month two of offering companion meditations for every full-length Monday and Wednesday podcast episode. Each month, we have a new Teacher of the Month to shepherd us through. And this month, it's meditation teacher extraordinaire, Don Mauricio. These guided meditations are only available for paying subscribers over at danharris.com, my aforementioned sub stack.

2:06So sign up today, and we'll have fresh meditation in your feed tomorrow morning. Okay, my conversation with Mayim Bialik and Jonathan Cohen right after this.

2:41a geopolitical case for you to get your shit together. In other words, taking care of your own mind is good citizenship. I think about it like an upward spiral. You train your mind, that makes you happier and less reactive. Because you're steadier, that improves your relationships with everybody around you. And because relationships are crucial to human happiness, you get even happier, then your relationships get even better and up you go. Our mission over at this new app is to guide you through this process with a growing library of meditations from world class teachers like 7A Selassie and Joseph Goldstein and on and on.

3:14Also add free access to our full podcast archive, exclusive live stream events where we guide meditations and take your questions. We do those every week and much more. Head on over to danharris.com. You can try it for two weeks free. And if you cannot afford a subscription, we'll give you one, no questions asked. I'm so happy that our son is now back from summer camp. He went away for three and a half weeks to make his re-entry smooth and joyous. We bought him a few gifts, one of which was a floating basketball net for our little pool in the backyard. And he is very happy about it. And we bought said basketball net from Wayfair, one of our sponsors today.

3:55You can find quality materials on Wayfair that stand up to real life. They've got this vast selection, all of it, really high quality. And you can shop with Wayfair Verified, your shortcut to durable pieces, hand vetted by product specialists using a 10-point quality inspection, testing things like the quality of the materials, functionality and features, and even how long it takes to build. You can join Wayfair Rewards today to get 5 % back on every purchase and start saving on your next home upgrade. Head to wayfair.com to shop all things home. That's W-A-Y-F-A-I-R.com. Wayfair. Every style, every home.

4:34Hi, everyone. I'm Mayim Bialik. That's Jonathan Cohen. And we're so excited to get to talk to Dan Harris, someone we consider a friend. He interviewed me, I interviewed him, and then the love affair began. And here we are. The love affair is mutual, just to say. Thank you. So Jonathan and I are new to Substack. We kind of like announced, had like a soft launch last week. and then we just kind of formally went live. I've been riding up a storm. Jonathan's been riding up a storm. Yeah, we're just sort of learning the landscape. And one of the first people that I ever knew was on Substack was you, Dan.

5:11And we figured it would be great to just have a conversation and let our audience see what it's like for us to talk to you and let your audience see what it's like for you to talk to us. I'll start by saying I'm very nervous. I'm very anxious, which Dan, you know, from the times that we've spoken, I said to Jonathan, I don't excel in like this kind of arena. I like the script. I like a script. I like a list. I like a beginning, middle and end point, but I'm prepared to handle whatever happens. Should we do a grounding exercise with you? No, I, I actually, I did. Dan is actually, you know, a huge part of my journey into trying to Do not be anxious.

5:55I usually do like my meditation and my sort of stuff at night, even though everyone says do it first thing in the morning and I will do it for a while and then I get out of the practice. But this morning I did. I tried to see what it was like to feel calm in my body right when I woke up. Can I just jump in on this? Everybody. You could run the whole thing. Just run the whole thing. this idea that you should do it first thing in the morning. I really question that. I think you should do it when it works for you. And if it's working for you to do meditation or whatever it is you're doing to soothe your anxiety in the evenings, just stay with that.

6:35Let's have you define, I don't know that it works for me what I'm doing. So that's why I was trying something new. But how do you sort of define like if it works for you? There are two things I think about when you raise this. There's habit formation. So like, when is the time you will actually do the damn thing? So that can be for meditation or exercise or whatever. And so just stepping back, habit formation is incredibly difficult. and that sounds pessimistic, but actually it should be soothing to you because then you don't feel like you're uniquely dysfunctional because you're struggling to create a habit.

7:13Actually, most people struggle and just knowing that can allow you to navigate the process with a sense of exploration, play, resilience, so that you can start again when you inevitably fail. So that's one thing I'm thinking about. And all I heard is you're going to inevitably fail. Yes, that's okay. You should feel the permission to start again and to reassess like, all right, why did it go wrong this time? Because I'm doing it at the wrong day part, the wrong length, the wrong flavor, whatever it is. So that's one thing I'm thinking about. And the second thing is you're asking, and I'm trying to get to the heart of your question.

7:53It could be about it's working for me in terms of like, I'm just doing the thing or it could be I'm doing the thing and I'm still anxious. Okay, so let me just say something on that. When it comes to meditation specifically, I think there's a little bit of trust or confidence or even, dare I say, faith involved, not in a metaphysical sense, just that it takes a while and it is mysterious how and when these practices kick in and what the benefits are for you and your individual mind. You should just trust that people have been doing these practices for millennia. They've stood the test of time.

8:34And you're a neuroscientist. There's all this neuroscience to show that it's beneficial. So I kind of relax into it. Just do the thing. See what happens over time. Okay. Not to quote Dan from the interview that we did with you quite a while ago, but what you told us then was that just doing it is success, even if it's broken, even if it's just coming back to the practice. and that it is cumulative. Yes. And one thing I think I see a lot is that people will do something, get some benefit, but are looking for like, I don't ever feel anxiety again. And so the goalposts move. So like you're doing it, you're actually having success in the practice.

9:16You're actually, someone else outside of you will notice, hey, wait, there are incremental changes, but the person is like, but I'm not 100 % better yet. or I still have an experience of being human and I have emotions where it's not working. And so we don't have a sense of what working actually means for anyone. I mean, I obviously totally agree with that since you're quoting me back to me, but let me ask you then, Jonathan, are you seeing anxiety reduction? A hundred percent. Okay. A hundred percent. I see a massive, massive change. And from her perspective, she's like, I feel anxious and I'm like but it's not wait wait hold on different examples hold on Dan are you asking Jonathan if he can see a change in me yeah yeah because you can't see the label from the bottle so just because this is how my brain works hold on you said 100 are you using that colloquially like 100 yes or you see a hundred percent difference in who I am math is not my specialty.

10:22So I can't say plot you on a graph, but I see significant change that if we use the metaphor, you can't see the label in the bottle. Like I just think it's very, very hard because there's a certain amount of anxiety that just exists in the human condition. And you are someone who's aware of it and has an even your, your experience of a range of emotion is what makes you an amazing human being on both ends. And so you experience things very intensely. And so So I think just that is a unique part of you. So it would be hard to say, oh, I don't have any anxiety. So meditation is working. But I've seen a massive change in you through your meditation practice.

11:00Is this live really an intervention that you and Dan are doing to try and keep me meditating? The conclusion I'm drawing from this live thus far is you've chosen a really good partner. My. Success. Success. This is not going the way I thought it was going. Not how it was scripted. No, this is not in the script, Dan. I do want to jump in. I just think this expression you're using, you can't judge the label from the bottle. I'm going to steal that. I just think you can't judge the label from inside the bottle. You can't read the label from inside the bottle. Yes. Yes. So it's perfect. This is such a huge issue in meditation, but also in self-improvement generally.

11:44Am I doing it right? Are there benefits? you get into this paralytic doubt around self-assessment. And I get it. I've done it. I've had huge periods of doubt. And I think that's part of the process and can be healthy, but it can also be really unhealthy. To a certain extent, you need to surrender, especially with meditation practice. And my teacher, Joseph Goldstein, who I love and has said so many transformative things to me, one of the things he said to me on many an occasion in the midst of like a 10-day meditation retreat where I'm complaining about my progress or lack thereof, he'll say surrender.

12:23Surrender to this process. This practice has been done for 2 ,600 years. Stop obsessing about your progress. Just sit and walk. Sit in meditation, do walking meditation, eat your meals, just to the best of your ability, drop the self-assessment. And I have found that to be hugely useful. So does that land for you, Mayim, as we're talking about this? Yes, I think that part of what's hard for many of us is shutting off that analytical mind that is constantly not only assessing the process, right? Is it working? Will it work? Am I doing it right? Am I doing it wrong? But, you know, we've been encouraged to analyze every feeling, every emotion, every, you know, so it's kind of like it's this hyper analysis.

13:11And what I get, and Joseph Goldstein is, through you, one of my favorite people. I mean, like, if I had to choose one person to only listen to about meditation for the rest of my life, it would be Joseph Goldstein. And so, so much of what he talks about when we had Sharon Salzberg on our podcast, like, it is about the slowing down, right? Slowing down and not judging, right? Not having judgment. And then I'd say the kind of third component is being kind, right? That loving kindness notion. So yeah, those are things it's very hard for a lot of people to slow down. My therapist yesterday was like, what if you also did a meditation midday?

13:50I was like, what? What do you mean midday? It's not like I haven't been told this before. So then I feel like there's like a glitch in the matrix. Like how many times am I going to hear the same thing and keep forgetting it and keep being reminded that we need to train our bodies throughout the day, all day, to feel that centeredness, that calmness, that kindness, that lack of judgment. For me, I'm just going to be like, I appreciate Jonathan saying he sees a difference. What I'm doing now is not sufficient, like the right before bed. Because what I'm saying when I'm meditating before bed is the only time I will allow myself to pin myself down and to know where I'm going to be is when I literally am in my PJs under the covers because I'm about to fall asleep.

14:37That doesn't feel mindful to me. It feels like I'm slipping on the banana peel of meditation, and I would like to step over the banana peel of meditation. Okay, I want to respond to a bunch of things in there. Directionally, I think you're correct that you can increase your practice. I would add a few, from my perspective, a few just flags. One is I don't think you're giving yourself enough credit for the practice before bed. Okay. She's very consistent and it's not easy to implement that consistently. Yes. So I would give yourself credit for that. And I would play with adding in another session, but I would start very small, one, two, five minutes, you know, whatever works for you.

15:23Really what we know from the research around habit formation is small is really effective to get it up and running. And then the third thing, just from way back at the beginning of your last set of words, you said something about shutting down the analytical function of mind. I just want to tweak that where it's not shutting, we're not shutting anything down in meditation. We're just seeing it. so you can make a little mental note in your mind oh that's judgment that's self-judgment and it's joseph does this little thing he calls it cowboy dharma where as you're watching the doubt or the self-judgment you've got these little nerf guns you're pulling out of your play holsters and gently playfully without aggression shooting at the thoughts as they come oh that's judgment That's doubt.

16:13And when you do that, it has the function of helping you not take these habitual neurotic thoughts so seriously. You've got a skeptical look on your face as I say this. No, I was thinking maybe we're popping bubbles with our finger. Holsters, Nerf guns, it just got elaborate for me. But yes. I want to touch on something Dan said many chunks of words ago, which is he brought up the idea of faith. and I was just speaking about this I just released um a live about this the other day which is you my sister had chronic pain for a decade of her life and she talked about the need to believe in something that is not our current experience that it can change and how dangerous that can be for some people but how powerful it is as a first step to create a version of ourselves a sense that something can be different before we've actually moved in that direction.

17:09And I think you were speaking to something similar. So you're saying, just to want to make sure I understand that, your sister dealt with chronic pain for a long time and to conjure an image of a life where that pain was not so salient was powerful for her. It was almost the very first step in sort of how she imagines any sort of intense disease is that this is not all that there is, that there is a version even before we've experienced it or integrated it as a tool for habit formation. And almost, if we go a little bit more metaphysical as a version of ourselves that exists outside of our current condition, we know that physiologically building the mental model will create the physiological change that we start to move towards that.

17:56Yeah, this is, yeah. Sorry, I was just going to say, we had Bruce Lipton on who talked about this. Joe Dispenza obviously talks about this. And yeah, I mean, this is even a conversation of like, do other versions of us already exist in a consciousness plane? And we just need to kind of slice into it and grab them. When we imagine it, it's what a lot of people call manifesting, right? I don't necessarily choose to call it that, but drawing on another version of us that isn't stuck where we are now is a tool. On a very simple, secular level, visualization, athletes do it. The night before the game, you're visualizing yourself dunking or whatever it is.

18:33That, for me, I have, we're talking about anxiety before, I have really persistent claustrophobia that has cropped up over recent years. And I'll sometimes visualize myself getting on the plane and not freaking out, you know, and that can be very helpful. Sorry, now I need to ask claustrophobia just on planes, or do you mean also in elevators and other spaces? Yeah, it's elevators, MRIs, planes. Yeah, but the plane, you're like there for hours. Yeah, it's not great. No. Well, that rehearsal has been shown that you're building that mental model, you're rehearsing in that way. And it also is helping your body be like, oh, I can know that I can feel okay in the rehearsals, so that when you're in that space, you're not sort of left to figure it out in that moment.

19:22Yes, exactly right. So I work with an exposure therapist, great guy, Paul Green. He will have me imagine claustrophobia inducing situations and get the physiological response and see that I can survive it. And then he and I also like will ride elevators together or fly on airplanes together. And I've seen some of your elevator videos. It's pretty amazing. I'm actually I'm doing a round trip to D.C. with my wife. I do fly all the time, but for the last couple of years, I've been medicated when I fly. We just knock you out and drag you on the plane. My family is getting really tired of it because I'm very annoying when I'm medicated.

20:03So I'm really going hard at dealing with the claustrophobia now because my family's like running out of patients. And so I took a round trip to D.C. from the airport near my house in White Plains in New York recently. It was literally the hardest thing I've done in my life. And I've covered war. I've been in war zones and I've never been more terrified than on this plane, unmedicated. So I'm doing it again on Saturday and I'm not looking forward to it. Not to turn this into dance therapy as we explore this, but I'm fascinated. Did this just come on in later? Yeah. I had had little bits of it early on in my life.

20:45But during COVID, when I was not on elevators or airplanes for a while, then I got back on a plane for a big speech. I was flying out to where you guys live in L.A. from New York. And I was wearing a mask and I was just getting over COVID. So I was like run down. And I was like, I'm panicking. And I got off the flight. And that's the work. I understand it's occasionally you do have to remove yourself from a situation. But when you do, I mean, the brain is kind of dumb in some ways. So if you teach the brain that a situation is unsafe, it will really get good at associating that situation with danger.

21:24You're laughing, Mayim. I don't know. No, I'm thinking about how good my brain is at associating things with danger. I can tell. She's scanning. She's like, oh, I've made this association. Yeah. So hopefully after today's unscripted fiesta, bonanza, rumspringa with me and Jonathan, you'll be less scared of subsac lives. Yeah, maybe. I mean, I still I'm always going to like structure. That's not going to change. I mean, I'm still sort of fascinated by something in our not our younger years. Coming on like this, that is so intense. Oh, that actually was the most interesting thing that Dan said to me, because this is like the whack-a-mole of being a human.

22:10Yeah, that's where I go, too. I'm like, what is this? And not that we have to intellectualize it and say, oh, this is where it's coming from. But the sort of investigator in me is like, where does something like, is it something from somewhere else that's manifesting here? It's like, you know, this unprocessed anxiety of something that like is under the curtain on that side that is now claustrophobia. And I was just looking before this live at your YouTube page, which is awesome. And you had an episode that's titled, if it's hysterical, it's historical. Now, it may not translate directly to this, but I'm like, where does that come from you?

22:48Or do you not know? No, I actually I can answer this. So, again, I'm not speaking as an expert in panic. I'm just speaking as somebody that expert in his own panic. And so my family and I took a trip in February or March to Florida and Costa Rica. So there were a lot of plane rides and therefore a non-trivial amount of Klonopin to get me on. And by the end of the trip. You're a pretty expensive partner from what I'm learning. It's expensive in many ways, psychically, financially. So anyway, by the end of this trip, my wife was like, yo, you need to deal with this. This is unacceptable. So I have gotten very aggressive in the last couple of months in dealing with it.

23:30I see it as at least two tracks. There's this sort of dumb brain track, exposure therapy, brute force of exposing yourself to the thing that you're terrified of so that the brain learns, this is totally fine. And then there's the other sort of creeping around subcortically into your subconscious to figure out like, what could be the cause of this? So for that, I've been working with something, and I'd be curious, Maya, if you've ever heard of this, it's called brain spotting, and it is kind of a successor to emdr yeah yep emdr i think stands for like eye movement desensitization yeah something basic idea and i'm definitely not an expert in this is that there's something about the movement of the eyes associated with the right kind of therapy that can rummage around in the sub-basement of your mind and figure out like where is all of your current anxiety coming from i like the term sub basement but keep going so anyway brain spotting basically asks you to look at a a spot and then conjure the thing you're terrified of and then let the brain wander and i did this i did a bunch of sessions speaking of faith like i just nothing happened in the first couple of sessions a couple of sessions in though i had this memory which is and i'd It had this memory before, but it really came up in relation.

24:59I was imagining being in an elevator. My friend Zev, one of my best friends, has an elevator, a coffin like elevator in his New York City brownstone where his apartment is on the fifth floor of this brownstone. And this elevator is like diabolical. And I was imagining getting on this elevator and it getting stuck and I was having to pound at the door. and I got this memory of my mom's first day back to work when I was two years old. I was standing at the front door watching her go to her car and screaming and looking back into the kitchen where our new nanny was moving around in the kitchen with my little brother in a bassinet on the kitchen table.

25:45That's insane. Yes. I mean, that's a very specific articulated memory. Apparently two years old is a little early, very early. You're very, very precocious remembering your trauma, Dan. And I talked to my mom about it and she didn't remember it. So it's not like she said things that reconstructed the memory for me. Anyway, so there's some connection between where I've gone with this is for. There's something about powerlessness and aloneness that is fueling my panic. And I think that is a very human thing. We are, I, you know, I can conjure an image of early humans, naked apes, shivering, huddled together on the savannah, terrified because we weren't at the top of the food chain at that time.

26:34We were a prey animal. And like we've owe any safety we've ever felt as a as an animal has been through connection or the opposite of aloneness. And so to me, I think that's what's coursing through my panic. That's just a profound memory. And I very much appreciate you sharing that with us, because it's interesting to hear you doing the top down and the bottom up at the same time, dealing with the symptom while also really doing the work of exploring where that's coming from. I mean, Em, it kind of makes me want you to explain a little bit about that stored memory that we know in the body like that.

27:11Because we can do a lot of the let's deal with the symptoms, but trying to understand where this is coming from for most people is just a very difficult and time-consuming process. As you said, it's kind of buried often. You're not getting it in the first session, potentially. Yeah, I mean, I think that there's also, I mean, there's many aspects of this that also we are particularly interested in, Jonathan, as we talk a lot about consciousness, right, on our podcast, and it's been kind of a hot topic, like, separating mind from brain, from body, from kind of like, what is consciousness separate from those things.

27:52So there's, you know, the brain encodes memory. It's literally, that's what it's doing. Memories that are emotionally complicated tend to get encoded differently, and in some cases, differentially. But it also doesn't mean that we can access them when we want to, because the brain has a whole other set of mechanisms that seek to protect us from having to process the terror of being a lonely, scared human, which we're all experiencing. The thing about EMDR is they don't really know why it works. And EMDR is not, even though it's called EMDR, you don't always just use eye movements. People do it with paddles that vibrate.