The Dharma of Anxiety and Depression | Leslie Booker

0:05This is the 10 % Happier Podcast. I'm Dan Harris.

0:36talking about this shit serves to normalize and aerate it. But also because, especially in this conversation you're about to hear, there are lots of really practical ways to handle anxiety and depression, evidence-based techniques grounded in both modern science and ancient Buddhism. And it is enjoyable to hear that you can work with this stuff. So what you're about to hear is a conversation between me and my friend, the great Dharma teacher, Leslie Booker, which was recorded in front of a live audience at the New York Insight Meditation Center, a great place. Booker, and that's what she prefers to be called, Booker, Booker and I in this conversation get pretty candid.

1:14We talk about our own mental health struggles and then we talk about how to deal with them. We also talk about how anxiety and perfectionism show up differently across gender and race, what it means to mask your suffering, and how the cultural conversation around mental health has changed, both for better and for worse. A quick reminder before we dive in to go sign up over at danharris.com. If you're a member, you get custom guided meditations that come with our full-length Monday-Wednesday episodes, and you get weekly live meditation and Q &A sessions every Tuesday at 4 Eastern. Also, one last very quick plug here.

1:46If you want to meditate with me in person, I'm doing an intimate little event at a hotel called Troutbeck, which is in the Hudson Valley, north of New York City. That's on November 23rd. It's a Sunday. There's a link in the show notes if you want to come. Okay, after the break, it's me and Leslie Booker. We're talking about anxiety and depression today, which, all right.

2:11I'll just say that these are two things that I've been dealing with since I was really little. I'm trying to remember the first time I had a bout of depression, probably 8, 9, 10, something like that. I got really scared about the Cold War. There was a TV movie called The Day After. Yeah, that fucked me up. I had to go see a shrink. There was a landmark study at Harvard of messed up little kids by Dr. Beardsley. It was looking at kids who were messed up by fear of nuclear war. So I was one of the kids in that study. So that was my first depression. then I just came back every once in a while when I usually have big transition moments.

2:55So when I went to college, I got hit and then graduation and yeah, big transition moments like that. And then the anxiety as a half Jew, I come into the world with plenty of karma on that score. I think the first panic attack was when I was smoking weed when I was 14. How many teachers talk about drugs and use the F word? Me, Vinny, Joanna. Okay, Vinny. Our friends. Our friends. Yeah, so like 14, I've had my first panic attack. And then once the brain learns how to do that, it gets really good. So I'm awesome at it. What else to say? I think the good news is there are lots of ways to deal with it.

3:35I have not experienced a fix or a cure. I'm assuming, unless I hit full enlightenment in this lifetime, that I'm going to be dealing with this all the way to the lip of the grave. But, you know, there are so many practices that I found helpful. Another great way to reduce fear and sadness is another thing we are doing today, but more implicitly than explicitly, although we did just do it explicitly, which is being in the same room with other people without our phones, which is an extraordinarily powerful thing to do. There's an enormous amount of science behind this. And yet very few of us actually do it.

4:11I will just say on a personal note, one thing that I've found helpful for me over the years has been medication, key consonant change from meditation, although they do share the same linguistic root for a reason. And so when I had a panic attack on television in 2004, you should Google that. It's got 10 million, 20 million views. That's the most successful thing I've ever done online.

4:45Since that happened, I've been on this one medication, and recently my doctor and I have decided to pull me off of it. I'm just kind of like going like fully off of it starting yesterday, and I am so tired. If you see my torso cantor levered over my lap during the meditation, that is why. Okay, that's all I have to say. Thank you. How about you give us your anxiety and depression resume? Yeah, yeah. Yeah. So when we were thinking about this course, I was like, Dan, what do you want to talk about? He's like, let's talk about anxiety and depression. I was like, that's a great idea. I am more of like a depression, ADHD girl.

5:21Depression started, I feel like, right around the time of the first period, just like a hormonal thing. And depression is just something that has always been a part of my life. There was so much shame around it because I am very like outgoing and da-da-da. And so my depression was like my dirty little secret. I didn't really tell anybody about it. I just hid out. As we try to hide things, they actually get bigger. I would just hide for three days and stay in bed. And that's how I would deal with it. Come back, hey, I'm back, everyone. I'm the party girl. Lots of drugs and alcohol, which covered it up, but then actually made it worse.

6:00In the ADHD thing, I was diagnosed about 30 years ago, which was a very early diagnosis. I was in college and thought I was just a kooky artist type. They actually slapped a diagnosis on me. I was one of those kids that my report card was A through F, and no one thought there was something going on. No one ever thought, oh, maybe there's a learning disability. Maybe there's some ADHD going on. This is not what we're doing in the 80s. So I was led to believe that I was just lazy. I wasn't smart enough and all of these things. Academically, my self-esteem was really low. So I kind of leaned into more being an artist because I could just really be myself.

6:42I was a dancer and worked in the fashion industry. They tried, when I was in college, they put me on Ritalin. I learned very soon after that, when I was running low on cocaine, I could smash my Ritalin and snort it. I was like, I'm getting prescribed cocaine. This was amazing. But then I was like, I don't want to do this. So I went off of it. This is the how-to section. Yeah. We used to smash Adderall and put in beers and call it cervezas especiales. What?

7:18I never drank beer. If I drank beer, I would have been doing that too. I didn't do medication. I just had this sort of life for a long time. In 2020, I got a traumatic brain injury. I fell on my head and I had this traumatic brain injury. So I went to a concussion clinic, occupational therapy, medication, it's a whole thing. And that's when I got on antidepressants because I got like the rage. You hear about athletes who end up murdering people because they've got like post-concussion syndrome. That's real. I got very rageful. I had to go on antidepressants and months of occupational therapy to get me able to work again.

7:59Yeah. So it exacerbated the ADHD that was already there. The traumatic brain injury actually made it to the point where I now have to be medicated. I have to be on Adderall and antidepressants just to keep this party going. And I'm so grateful. And as a meditation teacher, and just naturally, I'm a mover. And as a meditation teacher, when people say, all right, close your eyes, don't move and meditate in a room full of 100 strangers, I was like, that is not the right instruction. And so it was really for me in supporting my mind, my body is how I became the kind of teacher that I am. Did you grow up with parents who had anxiety?

8:44I'm always curious about that. I know you said there was an epigenetic inheritance from being half Jewish, but did you have parents that were actively anxious, actively medicated? There was some self-medication. My dad was pretty anxious. A lot of pacing around late at night when he couldn't sleep, that type of thing. We would ask him, what are you doing? He would say, worrying.

9:08Yeah. How about you? Oh, yeah. My mom is anxious. I actually think she has ADHD. I've been thinking about that a lot lately. She was on Prozac when I was a kid. And there is like a couple of years where she just wasn't able to like really be there, you know? I mean, there, but like a lot of fear around driving for a while. Is that absence, even though it was absence slash presence simultaneously, are there kind of reverberations for you of that now? I think that I learned around that age that I can just do it myself. I can just take care of myself. There's definitely some reverberation. As I've gotten older, there's a lot more compassion.

9:58As I look back on my childhood, I'm like, wow, she was really struggling. That must have been a tough period for her. So a lot more compassion around it. Yeah. The I can do it myself energy is interesting. because sometimes it's like, I don't feel worthy of asking for help. That is connected to that. I asked for help and it's not going to be available. So I'll just figure it out. The work I did with my teacher, Gina Sharp, founding teacher of New York Insight. And the only other guiding teacher besides myself. So it's a huge honor to be in this seat. But for a year, my practice of saying yes, thank you to whatever was offered to me because I also couldn't receive anything.

10:41Oh, no, no, I'm good. I got it. I got it. Don't worry about it. I didn't want to be a burden on anyone. And so there was, yes, that was my practice to say, yes, thank you for a year. It was real. Yeah. And must have been really uncomfortable. To this day, receiving compliments. I can feel my body tensing up. Yeah. Back to you. Tell me more about your anxiety. I was just thinking about this, not to deflect, and I'm happy to talk about my anxiety, But when you're talking about I'll do it myself, I was interviewing Brene Brown recently, and she was talking about how when she's freaking out or when she's dysregulated, she calls it below the line.

11:22One of the ways she knows something is glitching for her is when she hears herself say, forget it, I'll just do it myself. There's a lot of resonance. Yeah. Yeah. Uh-huh. Yeah. I'm always reluctant to generalize in this way, but I feel like that might resonate more with the women in the room than the men. There are some...

11:54Yeah. I have to say, I've always identified with, like, depression, ADHD. It wasn't until we did our course that I began to experience anxiety for the first time. Really? Yeah. During the filming? The whole process of it, yeah. Interesting. What about it was anxiety-provoking? It was very alive for me in the moment when I was doing it, yeah. What was anxiety-provoking? You know what it was? I was six months post-traumatic brain injury. Oh, okay, yeah. Yeah, and so the way that I'm used to doing it, I had to relearn everything, and then also working within a very tight structure of this is how we do it.

12:34It was really hard for my brain just in general to do this. Like a crash course teaching about anxiety. Yeah.

12:47My whole life is just one thing, one project like that after the next. So maybe I am used to it or I'm so swimming in the waters of anxiety that I'm not even seeing. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So before you came to meditation, like how did like, because you had a very successful career as a journalist and big events were happening in life. And so as a journalist, it's always a big event happening. I would get depressed in big moments of transition, leaving home to go to college, leaving college and looking down the barrel of the rest of my life and not knowing what I was going to do. I didn't, as a grown-up, have not dealt with that much depression.

13:28It's mostly been anxiety. And the anxiety at work as a journalist was not so much about major events that I was witnessing. It was, and this is more embarrassing, it was kind of like the competition with my peers or the other networks around who's going to advance to what position and when. What's my relationship with my bosses, with the audience at any given time? What are the ratings on my shows? That was really the source of a lot of my anxiety. I wish I could say that it was that I had so much compassion for the state of the world, et cetera, et cetera. But I think especially in my early days, I was much more careerist and was, I think, blocking out a lot of the stuff that I was witnessing and more thinking about it as a game.

14:17Not a game in that I didn't take it seriously, but I was thinking about it in terms of career advancement. I still have trouble watching TV because I know that's the way a lot of journalists are feeling about the stories they're covering. And over time, that really went away from me, which made covering the stories much harder because I was actually feeling it more. Oh, wow. Yes. So you're always in strategy mode. Yeah. How do I do this? Because I'm working. You know, I arrive in Haiti after an earthquake and I have to figure out how am I going to get on the air? What's the right story? How do I look?

14:54Because I have to be on TV. You know, all these things that are not related to the suffering around you. You really do have to think about it. So it's a lot cognitively. That's a big cognitive load. How do you deal with it? Cocaine. Yeah. Nobody's ever high-fived me for that. I know. Talk about permission structures. No, I was not using drugs in the field. I could be really, to use Brene's, and it's actually not hers. She learned it for somebody else whose name I'm forgetting. But Brene Brown has this thing about above the line, below the line. Below the line means are you caught in fear or anxiety?

15:32And above the line means you have the fear and anxiety because it's often, for many of us, it's omnipresent. But you can handle it. I kind of think of it like those tethers when you're water skiing. Are you being dragged by your head under the water or are you up on the water skiing? Do you handle it or can you not? When I was below the line, even though I didn't have that terminology, often the manifestation was snapping or being unpleasant. I think there were two modes that I can at least I can remember. One is heads down, shutting everybody out, just focused on my thing. or if things weren't going my way, just kind of being an asshole.

16:15How about you? I don't mean, you were anxious and below the line a little bit during the filming of the anxiety course. I didn't notice it at all. Because I'm like, I'm cool as a cucumber on the outside. Yeah. Okay. And I think with all of these things, you learn to mask it, right? I think also as a black queer woman, I was explicitly taught as a kid that you have to be better than dominant culture because people are expecting less of me. Like someone's 100%, I have to give 110%. I had already been trained by my military dad to keep my head up and keep going and be the best, which is hard. I learned to mask it a lot.

16:58Anxiety is something that stayed. I definitely would say I have some anxiety now. It definitely manifests as perfectionism here at New York Insight. There's a perfectionist tendency, but I also know when it's happening. And I try to always be like, listen, I know what's going on right now. I know that I'm being a little too, but can we meet halfway? So being able to recognize it, to name it has been really helpful. But it's definitely the perfectionism connected to oppression. I find that those of us who have historically been oppressed, there's a lot of anxiety about being above that proving that you're not an oppressed person the anxiety to succeed to be above it and i don't think i recognized it as anxiety it's just like i had to be there on time i had to be there early i have a friend who said something to me once that i have has really stuck with me and she is uh quite a prominent i won't name her because i didn't have permission to do it but she's quite a prominent executive producer in the broadcast news world She said there is a tax that I pay that you don't pay.

18:03As a black woman, I have to be better because I am the first. And therefore, everybody who comes after me, there may be nobody who comes after me if I fuck this up. Talk about a cognitive load, a bandwidth suck that I don't have to deal with. Yeah. When I first started teaching retreats, one of my dear friends who is, he said that we should ask for hazard pay because there was so much educating and so much that we had to hold. They would hold something in such an unskillful way and create so much harm in the sangha. Then we would have to come in as the assistant, as the trainee and fix a whole thing.

18:44So we had a joke that we should start charging hazard pay. Like Donna hazard pay. Yeah. I heard on a really practical tip a couple of minutes ago, you say something anybody could operationalize in a moment of anxiety, especially in a work situation. You feel your perfectionism kick in. Your mindfulness, at least ideally at some point, kicks in. You know what's happening. And then you propose a compromise. Hey, guys, I know I'm being a little, you didn't use the word and this is a kind of a loaded word but like maybe let's say crazy or I don't think that's probably what you're being in that moment but if I was saying it I would say to my team hey I know I'm being a little crazy or demanding here but can we meet in the middle yeah so it's mindfulness plus the willingness to compromise yeah and also not shaming ourselves that we're having these experiences either I think that's a huge part I'm in a very conscious effort when I interviewed for this job to be like, listen, I have ADHD.

19:42I'm still recovering from a brain injury. This has also been my community for 20 years. I came in being very direct about and with my team, what I need, like the structures I need to be able to be successful in this. And there's something that has just been such a, and I'm curious too, after like writing the book and having the podcast, like the whole world know, hey, listen, like I've got anxiety. is there just such a huge burden off your shoulders? I still have anxiety though. Yes. Yeah, it is a yes. But things have really changed. I put out my first book in 2014 and my mom sent me an email.

20:23She had read the book. She sent me an email a couple of weeks before it came out begging me not to publish it because there was mention of drug abuse and anxiety and panic and all this stuff. The book was printed and sitting in warehouses, so there was nothing I could do. But it definitely didn't help with the anxiety I had about the book. Yeah. And there were many people in my life, both at work and outside of work, who were very worried about me admitting this stuff. I think we are in a very different time now where it is OK to say this stuff. I think there are downsides to that. One is we are in a world, especially online, where it's great that people can talk about their anxiety and depression, but there's a kind of marinating in it that I don't think is healthy.

21:09I think it's important to talk about it and then add, here's what I did. Here's what works for me. Otherwise, it's not just there's the normalization part, then there's the contagion part that isn't good. So that's one of the downsides. The other downside is the weaponization of therapy speak, which I think is another sort of deleterious impact of this. But overall, I think it's really great in the last 10 years or so that it's become OK to mention that you have anxiety and depression. The fact that we sold this thing out talking about anxiety and depression, I think it's great. It's not so great what it says about the culture right now that this has been on the rise for a long time.

21:52But again, I will emphasize that we identified one tool, which is mindfulness to be able to spot it in yourself and to name it to the people around you, especially if you feel safe. Or in this case, if you're the boss. We are a shared leadership model here at New York Inside. One of the bosses. That is really helpful. I do think there is something powerful if you're in a position of leadership in a family, in an organization to talk about it. To say this is something I'm dealing with. Yeah. And I appreciate that you brought up the weaponization of it because that is real. My ex was the executive director of an organization with a lot of young people.

22:36They were like straight out of college. It was one of those things like this Gen Xer versus Gen Z or millennials were like, Gen Xers, we just plowed through it. We did cocaine, apparently, is how we got through it. But we just plowed through it, right? Whereas younger generations are really owning it and telling their bosses and taking a lot of mental health days. One person that my ex was the boss of, I was like, when does she work? Every month, five days for her period. I mean, that's legit. That is legit. That should be standard, right? But then it was like three days a week were like mental health days.

23:14I really appreciate that she's taking care of herself. But what is she doing to not have to take three mental health days every week? It didn't feel like she was wanting to do any reflection. She wasn't wanting to engage with therapy. She wanted to live in that narrative and make everyone else around her pay for it. Yes. A couple of thoughts coming to mind. One is, you know, I think it's overall really positive that we're in a world where it's OK to talk about anxiety and depression freely. The other thing I'd say, but I'm always wary of generational critiques because. If the younger generations have quirks, we're the ones who created it for them because they're growing up in the world we invented for them.

23:59I've heard this a lot. They're like, we saw Gen Xers working for free, working 18-hour days, being abused by their bosses, and we're not going to do that. And I'm like, oh, that's legit. It's really smart. I thought you were supposed to do that. I didn't know I had a choice in the matter. So they are legit. Yes, I've learned a ton from my younger staffers about how to be a human being. But let me just give you, you mentioned in passing having a recent ex, did that process, which I'm sure was not easy, did that create any anxiety or depression? No. Is she what? I mean, I mean, the relationship did the decision to leave the relationship in the aftermath.

24:49I'm like, you'll learn if you allow yourself to let things be teachable moments, I was realizing that I was walking on eggshells in my home always. And when I needed things to be a certain way, it was like, oh, you're being silly or you're being too specific. I started to do that thing where I made my needs smaller. And there's just a lot, especially when you're sharing home with someone, there are so many things that I didn't like the way that they were organized. Placement of certain things is they didn't make sense for me. And I couldn't really navigate that well. For example, with these really deep cabinets in our kitchen, whenever I needed anything, I'd have to take everything out to get to the one thing in the back.

25:30And then because I had ADHD, I would forget that I had taken everything out and I would walk away from it for days. And then that would be a big fight. And so when she moved out, I was like, what is going to make my life easier? I went through a phase where I ADHD'd my home. instead of these deep cabinets. I got pull-out shelves installed in my cabinets. So I pull the whole thing out and I get that thing in the back without removing everything else. I'm learning all of these things that would have really supported my self-preservation and mental health for years. But I chose not to. Why did you choose not to?

26:15Because it would just turn into a fight. I see. It was always like there was a judgment. For a lot of people whose brains are a little bit more neurotypical, they don't understand that little tiny things, these little quirks, like fabric that doesn't feel good on our skin can ruin the day. If the grid doesn't look like the grid, I think the way the grid should look, I have to redo the grid so that the grid looks the way that I can see it. So it's just a lot of things like that. I like a very specific font. It helps me to see it more clearly. Every document I create, I change the font on it so it's easy.