How to cultivate the skill of happiness (w/ Dan Harris)

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1:29You're listening to How to Be a Better Human. I'm your host, Chris Duffy. On today's episode, we're going to be talking about ways to recognize and change the voice inside your head. And to let you in on the voice that lives inside my head, mine is a guy who sometimes is very fun and notices hilarious things that other people have overlooked. And other times, my guy gets extremely focused on a tiny thing that is not going perfectly and then spirals that into a giant catastrophe that is completely overwhelming. For example, a coworker didn't use an exclamation point in a reply to my text. That probably means that he's furious at me and that definitely means that I'm about to get fired.

2:06I can't find my wallet? Well, that probably means that it's gotten stolen, my credit cards are already maxed out, and my identity is currently being sold for Bitcoin on the dark web. You know, saying these things out loud, it's obvious to me how ridiculous they are. But at the same time, when I am in the moment and I am feeling those things and I'm thinking them, it can be really hard to see that they are ridiculous or to have any perspective at all. Today's guest, Dan Harris, thinks a lot about ways to get some perspective and how to disrupt those thought cycles that can really torment us. Dan is also one of the funniest and most refreshingly skeptical people that I have ever met.

2:41I am so excited for you to hear from him today. Here's a clip from his TED Talk. I should give you a little background on me. I used to be an anchorman. I worked at ABC News for 21 years. It was a very stressful job. In fact, I had a panic attack live on the air in 2004 while delivering some otherwise mundane headlines. The good news is that my nationally televised freakout ultimately led me to meditation, which I had actually long rejected as ridiculous. I was raised by a pair of atheist scientists. I'm a fidgety, skeptical guy. And that kind of led me to unfairly lump meditation in with aura readings, vision boards and dolphin healing.

3:24But the practice really helped me with my anxiety and depression. And so my goal became to make meditation attractive to my fellow skeptics by ditching the new age cliches and liberally using the F word. We're going to hear more from Dan, including, if you're lucky, at least one F word right after this break.

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5:59Today, we're talking about meditation and mindfulness with Dan Harris. Hi, I'm Dan Harris, host of the 10 % Happier podcast. Person who freaks out in public. Dad, husband, plenty of other things. One of the things that I find so compelling about your book and your podcast and your work in general is that you really get people who are skeptical of meditation and a lot of these ideas like having compassion for yourself or feeling loving kindness towards other people to take them seriously. I guess two parts of a question about that. One is why do you think that people are so skeptical inherently of those kinds of ideas?

6:38I think there's a lot going on in terms of why people are skeptical of meditation or in particular self-compassion or compassion for other people. One is that it's been presented traditionally in ways that are kind of perfectly designed to annoy skeptics with a lot of over-promising and some cliched language. So that's all problematic. I think another thing is that we live in a very achievement-oriented, individualistic, capitalistic society. And I'm not saying those things are all bad, but they can definitely have some downsides. And a lot of people worry that concepts like mindfulness and compassion will erode their capacity to achieve.

7:24And then the final thing is, I think, and I don't hate to kind of like virtue signal here, but here I go. I do think there's some latent sexism at play here. I speak I'm speaking of my own mind, really, like these ideas are coded as feminine, stereotypically female. And many of us are raised to associate that with like weakness. So how do you get people to take these ideas seriously and try them out in their own life? The greatest evangelical tool is the science. And there's just so much research to suggest that this stuff works. It's incredibly helpful. I was just interviewing for my podcast a comedian named Bill Hader, who I think a lot of people will know from SNL and the amazing HBO show Barry.

8:14And he was joking about how he's embraced all this stuff in his own life, meditation, therapy, nature. And he was like, man, the hippies were right. The hippies were right. It sucks. And so that's all very helpful to have the science. The second thing, I find it very helpful to relanguage a lot of this. You know, there's a reason why I came up, I called my book and subsequent podcast 10 % Happier, because I take the ideas seriously, but I don't take myself seriously. I'm not overpromising. I tell really embarrassing stories about myself. And I think that kind of, you know, aerates the whole thing because it can it can feel a little stuffy and self-serious.

8:57And I try to be a little bit lighter and funnier and and really emphasize what a fuck up I am. And not in a hopefully not in the spirit of false modesty, but more in the sense of I heard this term. I didn't make it up, but I like this term cathartic normalization. that if I can, as somebody who's got a public platform, talk about all of my stuff in a way that is open and honest and feels real, then it gives everybody else permission to be a mess. And also then a sense that you can work on this stuff. This is one of the ways that you for sure won me over is I'm a comedian. I really resonate with things when they're funny.

9:36I know you don't necessarily identify as a comedian, but you have a great sense of humor. There are hilarious jokes in your book. There are really funny jokes in your TED talk. And I think that is not necessarily a thing that I actually associated at all with mindfulness or meditation is funny and laughing, right? Like I think about them as like Zen and kind of like everything passes me by. But, you know, reading your book and hearing you talk, I was able to see them in a different way of like, oh, laughter isn't the opposite of that. It can be part of it as well. Absolutely. Because it's my job now.

10:09I'm like kind of like the beat reporter for Buddhism. I get I know all of these a huge percentage of the living teachers today because they come through my show and I write about them in my books. And so I know a lot of these people like I really know this, you know, I have done meals with them. I do business with them. They sleep over at the house. I really know these people and they're really funny. They don't tend to emphasize the humor in their public facing work, which I'm not quite sure why that is. I'm a little bit glad because it's created a market opening for me. But I do think that if you spend any amount of time taking a look at your mind, you will have to laugh eventually because it's ridiculous.

10:58I mean, the teacher, the meditation teacher that I work with personally, his name is Joseph Goldstein. He's, you know, a great friend of mine and just a huge figure in my life. He uses that word. It comes up a lot because if you are looking at your mind, I mean, it's chaos and it's embarrassing and it's humiliating. But after a while, you can learn to laugh at it. And I find that that spirit is shot through many of the teachers that I know. The greats don't take themselves seriously because how could you after looking at your mind for an extended period of time? There's also this thing that I've been thinking about a lot with humor, how you have to be really present to notice the unusual, weird, ridiculous things in the world.

11:42Like a lot of our day to day, we're programmed both by society and just by, you know, the sheer fact that so many pieces of stimulus come at us. If we've seen something a million times, we just ignore it. And yet when you start to really look at things, that's when you can see the funny. And I noticed that comedians that I know, one of the few things that they all have in common, even if they have wildly different styles, is that anytime they notice something funny or strange, they take a note of it. That is actually quite a similar practice to some forms of Buddhist meditation, to just be noticing and paying attention to the things that go through our heads and through our perception.

12:17Gold star. That's a great observation. Observation is a huge part of comedy. And you can't observe if you're asleep. So for sure, there is an overlap right there between comedy and contemplation. Because contemplation or meditation is all about waking up. We live our lives in this kind of automatic pilot. And not much can get done when you're in that mode. And sadly, we're in that mode a lot. You know, it's bringing to mind a story about how, and I wrote about this in my first book, where I was on the beach with a friend of mine who's a very successful comedy writer. this was many years ago, but he's gone on to be way more successful.

12:57And he spotted me reading a book about Buddhism. And he said, I don't think I could go down that path because I need to stay judgmental because my comedy comes from being judgmental. But I wish that the technology worked that well, that you could start meditating and you're not going to be judgmental or cranky or crazy or whatever, all the stuff. It doesn't, what happens is you just get to be more familiar with the way the mind works. And so I think it can put your comedy on steroids because you can notice the judgment that's gonna come inevitably. And then instead of being owned by it, you can make a joke out of it.

13:33And that's really helpful. It makes me actually think about, this is the subtitle of 10 % Happier, right? How I tamed the voice in my head, reduced stress without losing my edge and found self-help that actually works, a true story. It's actually very similar to ideas that I sometimes hear people say when they are considering sobriety, right? Like, oh, well, if I got sober, I wouldn't be as creative. Oh, I need to drink to come up with the unusual ideas or I just wouldn't be the same person. People wouldn't like me as much. And that, you never talk to a person who has gotten sober who then says like, oh, that was true.

14:07It's never the case. It's a fear that happens beforehand, but then afterwards, like, oh, I'm so much better at the work that I do. These actions that we think are gonna like dull our edge, whether it's sobriety or meditation, They actually, they don't get rid of those things. In fact, they enhance our ability to do all these things. Absolutely. To be creative, to be caring, to be kind, all of them. What does meditation do for you? What does the science show? It improves the part of the brain associated with attention regulation. In other words, it makes you more focused. It makes you overall more calm.

14:37It creates a kind of self-awareness that's known as mindfulness, which is just the ability to see what's happening in your head without being owned by it. So you might see a judgment. You might see a desire to commit a homicide or whatever it is, but you don't have to act on it. That mindfulness, that ability to respond wisely instead of reacting blindly to all of your internal and external stimuli, it's an incredibly valuable skill. Taken together, increased focus, less emotional reactivity, higher degree of calm in the face of whatever's happening. Those will make you much sharper. they will enhance your edge rather than eroding it.

15:19And so I think this fear is based in a misunderstanding of what happiness is. I think that somehow you can see the misunderstandings about happiness baked right into the etymological roots of the word. H-A-P is the same root of the word hapless or haphazard, so it denotes luck. But actually, happiness is a skill that you can practice through meditation and other forms of mental exercise. I would put therapy in that reading, beholding, or making art. There are lots of practices you can do that will boost your happiness. And further, just to say that happiness is not to be conflated with excitement or complacency.

16:05Happiness I think of as a kind of a balance or equanimity in the face of whatever happens in your life. And so that's not the same as winning the lottery or not giving a shit about anything. No, I think happiness is really is inherently engaged. Yeah. And sometimes I've heard the idea that like happiness is actually a byproduct of trying to find meaning or connection. Yes. That like if you aim for happiness, you fall short. But if you aim for these other things, you find that you're happier along the way. That's probably true. I don't know if I got into meditation or all the other things that I do to maintain my equilibrium specifically to be happier.

16:42It's more like I got into it to specifically to be less miserable. I think that's really the doorway that people go through. It's suffering. I'm anxious and it feels like shit or I'm depressed or my relationships are all going haywire. And so if you work on that, yes, I think happiness can be the byproduct, but it also can just be the byproduct of being less miserable, maybe that in and of itself equals happiness. I wrestled with whether to use it in the title of the book because it is such a squishy term, but it is also something that everybody recognizes and knows they want, even if they can't define it.

17:20So I'm choosing to lean into the ambiguity. It also makes me think about how, you know, you talked about how happiness is a skill that can be built, but I've also heard you say that love is a skill that can be built, that you can practice and learn. We may think we want things out of life, achievement, a kid, a relationship, whatever. But what we actually want are the mind states associated with those real world developments. All of those mind states, calm, connection, happiness, compassion, generosity, ease, those are not factory settings that are unalterable. They are skills that can be developed through meditation, through therapy, through many other modalities that we can talk about.

18:06That's really, really good news. That's when I sometimes joke about being an evangelical. I mean, I covered evangelicals as a news reporter for a long time, and they often talk about the gospel, and what the gospel translates into good news. And so my good news is you're not stuck with all of the aspects of your personality and your mind states that you can actually take responsibility for them and it can have really meaningful benefits. There are no miracle cures, but there are definitely workable tools.

18:41We're going to take a quick break right now, but we will be back with a look at those tools that Dan just mentioned and some tips on how to use them. Don't go anywhere.

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20:31And we are back. So Dan, for someone who is listening and they're new to meditation or mindfulness, so maybe they've heard a little bit about it before, but they've never actually tried to implement it in their own life. What are some of the tools that you would recommend they start using this week? If you're not doing any of these, I would just pick one at a time. Don't try to rush out and fix everything. Human behavior change is a slow process. And just pick one of these and work on them systematically. But number one is sleep. I sometimes refer to this as the apex predator of healthy habits.

21:02And just nothing works if you're not getting enough sleep. And most of us need seven to eight hours of sleep. It is very rare that somebody can truly function on less than that, even though you can go on fumes for a long time. You're just degrading your health in the process. So seven to eight hours a night. The second is movement. depending on what your body is able to do. There's just a ton of research to show that this is really important and has lots and lots of benefits. The third is healthy eating, but with a big asterisk, which is don't get too crazy or fixated on this. I think we want to eat healthy, but without getting into body dysmorphism or eating disorders.

21:45The fourth is meditation. There's a lot of data to show that it can boost your immune system, improve your cardiovascular health. It's really helpful for anxiety and depression. And it's been shown to rewire key parts of the brain, including the areas associated with stress and self-awareness and compassion. So it's quite compelling, the data. The fifth would be access to nature and any sort of art or beauty, so nature and aesthetics generally. And then the final is the, and this for me is the most important and most overlooked one, which is the quality of your relationships. We are, as everybody in every TED talk ever has said, we are social animals.

22:26We evolved for collaboration, cooperation, connection. We're not the strongest animal. We just have this ability to work together. And if you overlook that, which is very easy to do in a society where everything militates against connection, where We're in an individualistic, capitalistic society. Tech pushes us further and further into our own little bubbles of entertainment and information. We have social media, which the social should be in quotes. My friend Maria Popova has said it's selfing masquerading as connection. And so everything about modern society or so much about modern society pushes us away from our relationships.

23:08But again, the data are quite clear. This is probably the most important variable when it comes to human happiness. Just one evidentiary point here. Great study done out of Harvard for the last 80 or so years, which has tracked people over several generations to see what leads to a long and healthy life. And what comes screaming out of the data set there is that the people who live the longest and healthiest lives had high quality relationships of all sorts, friendships, marriages, family relationships. What's the mechanism there? Well, stress is generally what kills us. And stress is mitigated by being able to process it with somebody else.

23:47And if I were to give you one piece of advice to walk out of this with, it would be that. And then all the other little hacks, all the other little practices like exercise and sleep and meditation and getting access to nature, I would just pick one at a time, start real small and see if you can integrate it into your life. How does that play out for you? Who do you worry with? Oh, well, my first line of defense is my wife. I sometimes joke that I don't know what I think until Bianca tells me what I think. So, yeah, she's the first person I talk to. But I have I've been very deliberate after many years of screwing this up, where I was so focused on my work and wasn't really focused on maintaining my relationships.

24:29I have been very deliberate to develop a large net of friends and some of them through work, some of them just pure friendships. And so I have people I will call, including meditation teacher Joseph Goldstein, who I'm really close with, my brother, lots and lots of social friends, depending on what the problem is. And just a word, I know we're two married people talking to each other and not everybody listening will be married, but a lot of you guys are married or in a committed relationship. There's a lot of research to suggest that a healthy marriage is supported by having many other relationships surrounding it because you can't count on one person for everything.

25:09And so for me, the quality of my life has gone up as I've paid more attention to what is sometimes called social fitness. That's a Dr. Robert Waldinger term that I've been very influenced by his work. And social fitness just means just getting good at maintaining your social connections. And it's just a huge part of my life now. I have often found that the most effective and powerful things in my own life are also kind of embarrassing. I'm like, oh, it's so embarrassing that like self-help works. Oh, my God. It's so embarrassing to like call up my friend and be like, I just wanted to talk to you because I'm feeling sad.

25:48Like, oh, it's so embarrassing that that works. It's so embarrassing that like having a check in with my wife where we talk about like what's going well and what it doesn't. These things that I'm like, oh, it's so humiliating on paper. And then in practice is like incredibly helpful for my life and my relationships. How do you reconcile those things like that? The things that work a lot often tend to be like so profoundly uncool. Just draw on the training you already have, Chris, which is laugh at it. it's hilarious. You know, it's absolutely hilarious, but it's non-negotiable. The shit works.

26:19So what's your option? Suffer or swallow hard and deal with the fact that it actually, the data suggests that if you're stressed, if you put your hand on your heart and talk to yourself in a nice way, you will feel better. So for me, I just, you know, I fight it and fight it and fight it until I realize I'm being a moron. And then I just cave. And then I turn around and write a book about it and, you know, pay my mortgage. Hey, listen, that's great. If that's the solution, that's a good one. Something that I wonder is like, as a person who is a real face of meditation these days, and also, you know, you have the podcast, you have a meditation app.

26:57How do you think about the fact that as meditation has become more mainstream, there are almost to the point of like parody, a company will be like, hey, we're doing all these things that are really fucked up for our employees and we're making your life miserable. But good news, everyone gets a free subscription to the meditation app. How do you reconcile or how do you think about this tool that is really helpful, but is also sometimes used in this like corporate capitalistic way to mask bad behavior or to not fix structural issues? Well, I don't like that. Well, I'll tell you what, the one thing I do like is that I do think that more mindfulness is better than less mindfulness.

27:41And there are folks who are deeply, and I think actually correctly critical of what they call Mick mindfulness, the rampant commercialization and popularization of these ancient techniques, because there are many forms of meditation. And I think that some of those criticisms are correct. And I'd rather have there be more meditation and more mindfulness available than less, even if I don't fully agree with the way it's being promulgated, if that's even the right word, even if I don't agree with the way people are doing it. I'd rather have folks being exposed to this stuff. You know, another concern people have is that we have these burning structural issues in the society, just to name a few, war, bigotry, inequality, the climate, AI, loose nukes, lots of big problems.

28:33And so some people were worried that we're promoting meditation as a way to self-soothe and anesthetize and reduce the stress that is being caused by these structural issues, but not to actually deal with the structural issues. And I actually just don't think that's the way meditation works. I think properly understood meditation, especially in the Buddhist tradition, which is what I come out of really is about waking you up. And it starts with dealing with your own suffering and pain and stress and hangups and ancient neurotic storylines. It starts there because it's hard to be effective if you don't deal with that.

29:16I've been thinking about making t-shirts, you know, like the six figures, you know, it starts with like a chimp and it turns into like a homo sapien or whatever. But the first figure in mine would have its head up its ass and it would slowly be taking its head up out of its ass and then looking around and being helpful. And like, I think that is what the point of this practice is. It is to get your shit together so that you are helpful. You know, you start by just dealing with your stuff and then you increase the amount of bandwidth you have to be helpful to other people. Then you very quickly see that being helpful makes you happy.

29:51And so then you have more bandwidth and you can help more people. It's not going to be like a forever thing. It's not like an unbroken hockey stick trend where you're on this virtuous spiral, which I call the cheesy upward spiral. You're not on that in an unbroken way. I retain the capacity to be a schmuck. I mean, I make all sorts of mistakes. But if I can make that my default pattern rather than a rarely accessed one, then I'm in good shape. So I think if meditation is being taught correctly, it will put you on a glide path toward more of that and less of being stuck in your own stuff. I love that.

30:28You know, sometimes when you start this work, it's actually there's a dip at first, right? Like it's not. And I actually think that's why pulling your head out of your own ass is a great example of this, because when your head's fully in, it's not nearly as bad as when your head is out, but right next to your ass and you're seeing it all. That's probably worse. That's the worst of the phases. And so when you first start, you're like, I'm clueless. I don't even know how bad things are. And then when you start seeing all the ways you're self-sabotaging, you're like, oh, no, I really am full of it.

30:59I'm a horrible person. And it takes a couple more steps before you start to actually see the benefits of pulling your head out. This is a common report. People say when they start meditating, it's like, wait a minute, I'm more anxious. But actually, that means you're doing it right. The whole goal here is not to like become super Zen. I hate when people use that word actually because Zen Buddhism is actually not at all what we think of as Zen. It's pretty like hardcore. So but the goal is not to become blissed out. But I don't even think that's doable without, you know, like an IV drip of Klonopin.

31:32Like it doesn't work like that. So what the goal is is to get familiar with the chaos and cacophony of your own mind so that it doesn't own you as much. But definitionally, that requires seeing the chaos and cacophony. And that is going to be uncomfortable. It's like it's humiliating. But what's the alternative? The alternative is all that shit's happening anyway, and you're just owned by it a thousand percent of the time. So what do you want? You want to sort of wake up to this stuff, take the red pill in the positive sense of that term and start to get out of the matrix to see, you know, what your life is actually about, which is, you know, mostly random thoughts and, you know, inappropriate impulses and all that to see, you know, your ancient storylines, all of that stuff.

32:19Do you want to see your anxiety, your depression, whatever, rather than have it own you and rule you like a malevolent puppeteer? I think it's pretty obvious what the right answer is. And it's not going to be, you know, all barfing unicorns. You know, we're recording this at a time when things are really bad in the world. But when it comes out, you know what? Pretty good guess that things will still be bad in many parts of the world. And I think that like one solution that I've found for social media that I think actually applies more broadly and it certainly applies to like news as well is to try and make myself aware of the ratio between how much I take in and how much I put out.

33:01So like if I'm going to read news about a tragedy in the world, don't spend 10 hours reading and one second acting to try and make it so that I'm doing more and absorbing less. Because that is the way to not feel hopeless, right? Is to like do something about it, whether it's a small thing or a large thing and not just to constantly feed it in. And I feel the same way about social media is like if I'm on it and I'm just absorbing, absorbing, absorbing, it feels really bad. And if I put something out there, it feels slightly less bad. So I'm not trying to make a direct parallel between these two, but I think there's a broader principle.

33:36I think you're on to something. And specifically as it pertains to the consumption of news, it's very easy, especially when things are really hot, to get into despair and rage. And that's totally natural. I go there too. But the antidote, as you just said, Chris, is action. And it doesn't even have to be action on the problem itself. There's not much I can do right now. I mean, I used to, when there was a war, I would go and cover it. And in fact, that felt like a positive thing to do. You know, I was informing people about it. I don't have that option anymore because I quit my job. And so I can't do much about a war in the Middle East or a war in Europe.

34:21I can't do much about it. But I can do things in my sphere of influence, whatever it happens to be. I'm lucky that I have a reasonably big sphere of influence so I can create helpful content. But if I'm just a regular person and without a podcast or books to write, I can volunteer locally on something that has nothing to do with the acute problem that everybody's obsessed with in the news. I can hold the door open for strangers. I can give money away on the street. I can call a friend who's struggling. There are limitless ways to be useful. And all of them will help you feel less swamped, will give you a sense of agency, will remind you of your, and I hear I'm going to be a little highfalutin here, but they will remind you of your innate nobility.

35:11and I highly recommend that people try to operationalize the ratio that you, Chris, talked about, which is if you're going to take in a bunch, but try to counteract that with something proactive. As a host of a show called How to Be a Better Human, of course, so many friends give me so much shit about being like, oh, look at the little better human. Are you a better human right now? Especially whenever I'm doing something that's clearly not a good human. So I wonder, do you get that a lot when you are in a terrible mood and people are like, oh, 10 % happier. Can't be 10 % happier right now, Dan?

35:41Yes. My agent, Jay Siris, is a great agent at UTA. He's kind of a legendary agent. But every time he and I are talking and I'm complaining about something or we're talking about money, he's like, oh, Mr. Meditation, look at you. So absolutely. And so many of the great meditation teachers I know have bad hair days and get divorced or have you know, business conflict. It doesn't, you can learn how to be a better human, but I don't think you're going to learn how to be a perfect human. And I'm learning how to be 10 % happier. And I do believe that the 10 % compounds annually. So you can be way more than 10 % happier, but it's not a hundred percent happy.

36:26In Buddhism, they talk a lot about enlightenment and maybe that's true, but I haven't met somebody who's perfect. Well, Dan Harris, thank you so much for being on the show. It has really been an absolute pleasure talking to you. Likewise. You ask great questions. Thank you. Thank you so much.

36:45That is it for today's episode of How to Be a Better Human. Thank you so much to today's guest, Dan Harris. His book and his podcast are both called 10 % Happier, and they are both excellent. I am your host, Chris Duffy, and you can find more from me, including my weekly newsletter and other projects, at chrisduffycomedy.com. How to Be a Better Human is brought to you on the TED side by Daniela Balarezzo, Banban Chang, Chloe Shasha Brooks, and Joseph Debrine, who I can say with certainty all have their heads nowhere near their own asses. This episode was fact-checked by Julia Dickerson and Mateus Salas, who appreciate a skeptic, and they achieve enlightenment through rigorous peer-reviewed research.

37:20On the PRX side, our show is put together by a team who add far more than 10 % extra happiness to my life, Morgan Flannery, Nora Gill, Patrick Grant, and Jocelyn Gonzalez. And of course, thanks to you for listening to our show and making this all possible. If you are listening on Apple, please leave us a five star rating and review. If you're listening on the Spotify app, please answer the discussion question that we've put up on mobile. We would love to hear your thoughts. We'll be back next week with even more how to be a better human. Thanks again for listening and take care.

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