The Voice in Your Head Doesn't Have to Ruin Everything | Rachel Martin and Dan Harris

28:56His name is Joseph Goldstein. Oh, this is your teacher. Yeah, he's my meditation teacher. He has been for a long time, and he's a very close friend. And he's 82 years old, does not wear robes or anything like that. He's a Jewish guy from the Catskills who wears khakis and button downs. He doesn't present as a guru. But he is a walking example of what can happen with sustained practice. He is funny and smart and other-oriented and helpful and teaches using these very pithy phrases, just little one-liners that are kind of like Buddhist earworms. They just wriggle their way into your mind stream and then surface when you need them the most.

29:51So I'll give you an example. The next time you're in a spiral of anxiety, maybe if you can catch yourself in one of these overthinking periods, ask yourself this question. And again, this comes from Joseph. Is this useful? Like some amount of worrying makes sense, but we often and very quickly cross the line between constructive anguish and useless rumination. And that little question of, is this useful? Or should I think about something else? Maybe even help somebody else. That's an incredibly helpful little earworm. And so at the beginning of this year, 2026, I dropped two episodes with Joseph where we went through a bunch of these phrases.

30:42And you just get to hear this truly brilliant human being who I don't love this word inspiring, but it is inspiring in the true sense of that word because it gives you a sense of, oh yeah, like this is what's on offer if I follow this path. Thank you for that. I'm going to go check it out. Everyone else should too.

31:07We're back in the game. Round two, insights. One, two, or three. One. What do you enjoy complaining about? My own mind. The first line, maybe my favorite thing, I don't love my own writing, honestly. I think my writing is fine, and I do write books, but my favorite thing I ever wrote was the first line to my first book, which was, The voice in my head is an asshole. and I think that is true I think it's true for many people like we have this like nattering inner voice that you know is chasing us out of bed in the morning and we're just constantly wanting stuff not wanting stuff judging people comparing ourselves to other people and when you're unaware of this this in inner conversation it owns you and this is like the this is my mo I think it's very useful to talk openly, especially I've been blessed with this public platform.

32:19It's very useful, I think, to talk openly about all of my craziness. One of the most common words that Joseph Goldstein uses is ridiculous. And he uses it to describe the mind. It's ridiculous. We're just, we're always in the past or the future instead of right now. We're always comparing ourselves to other people. We're always judging other people, putting ourselves down. It's ridiculous. One of the little things he gets people to do is, if you're in one of these periods of time where you're just totally down on yourself, count the judgmental thoughts. Count the self-judgmental thoughts. But by the time you hit 87, you just start laughing at it.

33:01Yeah. You know, it just saps it up its power. Well, that's why I like the word ridiculous. Yeah. Yes. Because there's an element of just, it's silly. It's just, it's not worth it, right? Correct. Like it doesn't give it so much power and agency. It's just ridiculous. Just let it go. And that feels powerful in and of itself, just the word. Okay. Your own brain. That's what you like to complain about. Next three. One, two, or three? Two. Two. When has envy been a problem for you? Oh, man, all the time. I just deleted Instagram because it was just like I have an amazing life. I have such an incredible life.

33:43Somehow, every time I looked at Instagram, I felt like I had a terrible life. It's funny, though. And it's such a reliable source of unhappiness for me. It really is. And, you know, everybody's at a party I'm not invited to or everybody's career is taken off in ways that mine is not. And so, deuces. I'm out. Isn't that part of your job? It's like embedded in your job, like the metrics, how many followers you have, how many subscribers you have, how many Instagram posts. Like you do them. I see you walking down the street and you do them and they're really good and powerful. But it's all on that same platform that is the source of so much angst and envy and sadness.

34:22Yes. And I have a lot of problems with social media. So why then am I creating content for it? It's where the eyeballs are. And if I can be a little node of sanity, as by the way, as are you, because I see your stuff on social media. And in particular, you and I texted about this offline, the Melinda French Gates clip that I thought you handled so beautifully. So I think we can, I think it's possible to put little nuggets of goodness out there on social media, but it is largely a morass. Yeah. One, two, or three? Three. What's something you thought about yourself that you had to unlearn? Can I flip it again?

35:09No.

35:12I mean, yes. Fine. Yes, you can. Yeah, you can. Yeah, you can. This is a hard one. Okay, so my answer to this question. Oh, it's kind of sad. It's not that sad. I thought that I was like a chill, relaxed person that was friendly all the time and like just like a chill person. This was how I thought of myself in my mind. And after many years of working on this morning news show, I got enough data back. I got enough feedback from other people I worked with to prove otherwise. And it was a shock for me when I heard, not directly, but I'm a smart person. I can figure out what you're communicating between the lines.

36:06And the feedback I was getting was, oh, you are not chill. You are not a chill person. Like you're actually a super intense person and your vibes can be intense and it can kind of elevate everybody. It's not chill. That was a hard thing. So I think at its core, the question tends to be about what's a thing, a negative thing you thought about yourself that you had to unlearn. But the thing that comes to my mind is like, I thought I was pretty great. And it turns out I was kind of a jerk. That was a revelation to me. Have you ever heard the expression, self-knowledge is always bad news? No, but that's so true.

36:51Yeah. I had a story in my head that I didn't fully crystallize until a couple of years ago. And the story was that I'm a bad person. I think it has its roots in childhood and some of the kind of family dynamics. And, yeah, I just got it in my head that I was just irretrievably selfish and mean. I had a bullying incident when I was a kid where I was the bad guy. and I think that was a key moment where I just kind of internalized like oh yeah I'm the bad guy and that was just a big part of my operating system and was why I would get very defensive anytime I got tough feedback I would I would just overreact because it was triggering this thing that I didn't want to look at, taking it in after periods of defensiveness.

38:02A friend of mine, a really smart friend of mine, her name is Dolly Chug, and she's a professor at NYU School of Business. And she has this expression, goodish. And that actually has been a key unlock for me. So many of us have a story that we're a good person or a bad person, but when we get feedback, we get defensive because it either reminds us that we think we're a bad person or it challenges our core belief that we're a good person. And so that's the wellspring of defensiveness. If, however, you change your self-concept to good-ish, which by the way, it just makes complete sense. We're all a mix of good and bad.

38:45But if you change your self-concept to good-ish, Well, then when you find out you screwed up and you're not as chill in the hallways of NPR as you thought you were, well, then, okay, well, that's fine. It's not fundamentally threatening because I'm good-ish. And so there's always room to grow. It's what the psychologists call a growth mindset. And so talking to Dolly about that was one of the things that really turned things around for me. I love the idea of good-ish. It's interesting to try to teach your kids that. That's where I'm at right now. It's like talking about the good-ish of human nature and that we're all good and bad.

39:27And it's a complicated concept, actually, to wrap your head around because so much of parenting and so much of children's literature and storytelling is about the good and the bad. And they are separate and distinct characters. And it's like next level to think about, oh, it lives in all of us. And what do we choose to lean into and what is activated and what are our triggers for each of those components? But we all have that duality. Well said. And I think it's a big problem in our news environment, too, especially in this algorithmically driven news environment where you are being fed outrage porn all the time from your side.

40:07And it's giving you a cartoonish version of the other side. So we're good. They're bad. There's no nuance. And, you know, that's a good way to destroy a civilization.

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42:51Last round. Beliefs. Three new cards. One, two, or three. One. One. What's your best definition of the soul? Well, in Buddhism, the founding principle of Buddhism is that there is no soul. The Buddha came out of a Vedic or Hindu context. And in Hinduism, they talk about the soul. But the Buddha's concept was actually there is no soul. Actually, if you tune up the microscope of the mind, you see that everything's changing so rapidly that there can't be some solid, unchanging nugget of anything. And by the way, this goes back to my story about being a bad person. How could I be permanently bad when nothing is permanent?

43:46There is no bedrock. And this is just intuitively true when you say it out loud, but hard then when you apply it to something like a soul. And so the key to understanding this, again, from a Buddhist context, which nobody has to believe if they don't want, is that two things are true at the same time. On the one hand, Rachel Martin is real. I'm looking at her, and if she looks in the mirror, she will see herself. And she's got a social media feed, and she's got a podcast and a resume and all that stuff. And yeah, Rachel's real. However, if you close your eyes and look for some core nugget of Rachel, you won't find it.

44:24You'll find physical sensations, thoughts, emotions in a fluxing gumbo. So that is what our self is? Just fluxing gumbo? There is no – it's like this chair I'm sitting in right now, bring a high-powered microscope to it. I would find mostly empty space populated by spinning subatomic particles. That's true. At the same time as this chair, I trust it and I sit in it. And so Rachel's real and she's not real at the same time. Rachel doesn't have a soul, though, from this, you know, sort of high-powered microscope perspective. Does that make sense? Yeah, but I mean, we're all just living in this weird social contract where we've just decided to agree that we all exist.

45:08And just by deciding, we make it thus. Yes, and I think actually this is where this construct that I'm proposing to you via the Buddha starts to become practical. because, yes, we do live in a consensual reality or what the Buddhists call relative truth as opposed to the ultimate truth, which is back to the spinning subatomic particles. And these two levels of reality speak to each other. So the next time you're stuck in some story about how Rachel's this way, she's not this way, life is going this way or that way, you can switch into To the ultimate perspective for a second. Okay. No, no, no.

45:54On some level, this is all an illusion. This is all like in a movie, a play of light and sound projected on a screen. There isn't solidity. It's just 24 frames per second. And then for people who tend to drift off into that kind of nihilistic space of, oh, none of it matters. No, no, no. It does matter. Both things are true at the same time. Like we are human beings and our ethical conduct has consequences or lack of ethical conduct has consequences too. And so you want to hold – it's a paradox. Much of life is understanding and utilizing paradox. And this is the big one in my opinion, that these two things are true at the same time and can you toggle back and forth between them with some skill.

46:43How does that affect your idea of your feelings about being forgotten, about there being no remainder of you? I mean, I know you have a child. There's like a physical remainder of you. But how many generations before, nobody remembers who great-grandpa Dan was. Does that freak you out or is that just part of the deal? It doesn't freak me out that much. You know, about a year and a half ago, I was interviewing somebody on my show, an amazing Buddhist teacher named Vinnie Ferraro, who has an incredible story, which I'll tell very quickly, which is that he grew up in a very low-income environment in Rhode Island and was an addict and a criminal and served several stints in jail and prison.

47:32And during one of his terms, he was in there with his own father and got out, got sober, found the Dharma and has become this incredible teacher. He's the only teacher I've ever interviewed who throughout the whole interview will call me bro. He's very funny and very wise. And he got me interested in an aspect of Buddhism that a lot of people might be tempted to reject. And that's totally fine. It's hardcore. But the Buddha himself recommended that twice a day you recall five things. This body that I'm occupying is of the nature to grow old. It's of the nature to get sick. It will die. Here's the grimmest one.

48:13Everything and everyone I cherish will someday be lost to me. And the fifth one where he kind of pulls the knife out a little bit, as Vinny says, the only true possessions I have in this context are my actions. And so that's where the kind of hope resides, which is, okay, so yeah, if you want to look at it, the truth of this reality that we inhabit is that it is relentlessly impermanent and chaotic and entropic and very little is in your control. But you are in control of your actions to a large degree, and the karmic consequences of those actions will outlive you. And so if you take that seriously, it will impact how you behave.

49:06And that to me feels like a soul. Like, I guess when I use that word, it's just some kind of what difference do we make? Who are we? And if we are the sum total of how we behave here, the choices we make and the actions we take and the consequences of those actions. That makes sense to me. Makes sense to me, too. I'm totally cool with calling that a soul. I don't, you know, I have no desire to, like, police people's language. So soul is, it's certainly inoffensive to me. But from a Buddhist perspective, you know, it's not a thing. It's not a thing. Three more. One, two, or three? Two. Is there a religious practice or ritual that you're envious of?

49:52I have this odd interest in something that simultaneously repulses me, which is devotional practice. There are aspects of Buddhism where you really and other traditions as well, where you sort of you bow to a statue of the Buddha or it could be Kuan Ying, who's this is where my Buddhist knowledge is going to run out of road. But I think she is like the avatar of compassion in certain schools of Buddhism. And so I don't know a ton about this devotional practice. I just know that I have some friends who've done it. And I see that my initial response to it is revulsion. Like prostrating yourself in front of some kind of— Prostrations, literally prostrations.

50:47Yeah, okay. And when I have that kind of response, I always try to investigate it. Like, all right, what's going on there? Yeah. Because my life has just been a succession of things that I dismissed and was totally wrong about and later came to embrace. And so I'm just curious, like, huh, what's going on with that? It is interesting, that practice. And at the same time, I, like you, see a person who can do that, and it feels also like a beautiful surrender. It feels like beauty and liberation in that kind of surrender. In my first book, I wrote about how I was on my first retreat and everybody was bowing to the Buddha and I thought it was like I really hated it.

51:28And then I wrote about how I started doing it, but only for a hamstring stretch.

51:36I think the way I've come to understand devotional practice, to the extent that I understand it at all, which is very limited, is that ultimately what you're bowing to is an aspect of the mind, of the human mind. So like compassion that is papered over and sometimes cemented over by the world, by the world we live in where we're just armoring up and hardened. But we have this, it is quintessentially human capacity for compassion, for love. Just to put it in plain English, to give a shit about ourselves and others. This is, you know, love is this panoramic inner capacity that we have. Yeah. Bowing to the avatar of compassion is a way to, it's like a snake charming that you're doing on yourself to bring that aspect, that hidden aspect of the mind into greater salience.

52:40Last one. One, two, or three. Three. what's an experience you wish you could give every person? I think most of us consciously or subconsciously kind of think we're stuck with how we are. We have X amount of patience, X amount of generosity. But what we know from the science is that the brain, and by extension, the mind, it's trainable. The brain is the organ of experience. So how you arrange your life, the practices you do or don't do, that you're just constantly training your brain. You learn how to play violin, your brain's going to change. You see it on the brain scans. You learn how to meditate, your brain will change.

53:32You get better at social fitness, your brain changes. We are not stuck with the aspects of our personality that we may be struggling with. This change is possible. It's messy and marginal. And even people like me who have been meditating for a while and write books about it, I continue to be a schmuck in lots of ways. But the trajectory is the right one for me and it can be for anybody. And so you can be this little node of sanity in a chaotic world. And so that's the experience I want people to have. Like you can improve your life and it matters. Like it is a political act. It's not self-indulgent.

54:17It doesn't make you a doormat. It, yeah, it really matters. And so that kind of hope, not gaslighting you and telling you everything's fine because everything's not fine. But you do have more power than you think to improve your own mind and by extension the world. Thank you for that. Yeah, I'm on a fucking soapbox. Oh my God. I love a soapbox. I love it.

54:47Dan Harris, we end the show the same way every time with a trip in our memory time machine. In the time machine, you revisit one moment from your past. It is not a moment you would change anything about. It's just a moment you'd like to linger in a little bit longer. What moment do you choose? Oh my God, there's so many to choose from. The moment that's coming to mind is I had this completely random experience the summer after my junior year in high school, where I had been a total screw up my whole high school career, had a thriving weed business, just like really just not a good student. And I kind of was starting to get it together.

55:31And I ended up getting into the summer school at Harvard, which isn't like getting into Harvard, not at all, because I was not, I didn't get into Harvard. I was never going to get into Harvard, but you can apply to the summer school and be a mediocre student and get in. And so I, but I was surrounded by all these smart kids and I had a great summer And I was sitting on a warm Cambridge night on the front stoop of the dorm where I was living. And I just kind of entered into this calm elation. And it comes back for me once in a while on a meditation retreat of just like, I would say the underlying feeling is everything's okay.

56:14And for an anxious person, that is delicious. What a lovely thing. Where would you go? Oh, in my memory time machine? I mean, I'm grateful that I'm the host of the show and that I don't have to answer the memory time machine question. Because it's hard to narrow it down. Yeah, it's hard to narrow it down. Do you want to say the birth of your children and all that stuff? Of course. But it's also like, you know, what comes up? It's like, right now, okay, so part of what the memory time machine is, is you just let whatever come up, come up. And like, so right now, the thing that is coming up, I don't, I have no idea why, is driving with my mom.

57:02My mom's been, passed away a long time ago. But driving with my mom, like in high school, in Idaho Falls, my hometown in Idaho, through one of those coffee shacks. Like, Idaho Falls didn't have proper coffee shops when I was growing up. So it would be like in a strip mall, there'd be a coffee shack. And it was like a new thing. And she would have her little punch card. And we would just, she would look at me like with such glee, like, let's stop for a coffee. And we would pull up. Oh, I'm getting weepy. And I don't know what's significant about that. That's just what came up. And I would love to sit in the car with my mom and get a drive-through coffee.

57:42from the coffee shack in front of the Safeway in Idaho Falls. I did not expect to do that, Dan Harris. Well, it's totally beautiful.

57:55And, yeah, you said something like, well, I don't know why this is coming up. Well, it's a moment of love.

58:10Dan Harris is the host of the wildly successful podcast, 10 % Happier, the author of many books. And I'm so glad to talk to you. Thank you. Huge pleasure. Always. Thank you.

58:31Thank you so much for listening. If you like this conversation, I would suggest going back and checking out my episode with the actor Jesse Eisenberg. He's got this kind of anxious wisdom that feels very honest and hard-earned. You can watch that episode and many more on our YouTube page. It is at NPR Wildcard. This episode was produced by Mitra Arthur and Lee Hale. It was edited by Dave Blanchard and mastered by Josephine Mione. Wildcard's executive producer is Yolanda Sangweni, and our theme music is by Ramteen Arabuy. You can reach out to us at wildcard at npr.org. We'll shuffle the deck and be back with more next week.

59:09Talk to you then.

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