Nightline anchor Dan Harris embarks on an unexpected, hilarious, and deeply skeptical odyssey through the strange worlds of spirituality and self-help, and discovers a way to get happier that is truly achievable.
After having a nationally televised panic attack on Good Morning America, Dan Harris knew he had to make some changes. A lifelong nonbeliever, he found himself on a bizarre adventure, involving a disgraced pastor, a mysterious self-help guru, and a gaggle of brain scientists. Eventually, Harris realized that the source of his problems was the very thing he always thought was his greatest asset: the incessant, insatiable voice in his head, which had both propelled him through the ranks of a hyper-competitive business and also led him to make the profoundly stupid decisions that provoked his on-air freak-out.
We all have a voice in our head. It’s what has us losing our temper unnecessarily, checking our email compulsively, eating when we’re not hungry, and fixating on the past and the future at the expense of the present. Most of us would assume we’re stuck with this voice that there’s nothing we can do to rein it in but Harris stumbled upon an effective way to do just that. It’s a far cry from the miracle cures peddled by the self-help swamis he met; instead, it’s something he always assumed to be either impossible or useless: meditation. After learning about research that suggests meditation can do everything from lower your blood pressure to essentially rewire your brain, Harris took a deep dive into the underreported world of CEOs, scientists, and even marines who are now using it for increased calm, focus, and happiness.
Chapter 1: air hunger
After being diagnosed with depression in his early 30s from the overseas journalism, he started to experiment with cocaine
He says you never reach satiety
He also loves experience of ecstasy but they come down was just as intense as the high
The lesson he learned was that there was no free lunch neurologically speaking in terms of drugs
His third psychiatrist helped him understand that his drug use was triggering his on-air panic attacks
Chapter 2: unchurched
There is research that says regular churchgoers tended to be happier in part because having a sense that the world is infused with meaning, and suffering happens for a reason helps them deal more successfully with life’s inevitable humiliations
Chapter 3: genius or lunatic?
From a book he read by Eckhart Tolle, he learned that the failure to recognize thoughts for what they are is the primordial human error
When we are unaware of the egoic mind, we blindly act out our thoughts and the results are not pretty
All we have is the present moment
We experience everything in our past through the present moment, and we will experience everything in the future the same way
Ekardt told him to make the present moment your friend, not your enemy
Many people live habitually as if the present moment was some obstacle meant to be overcome in order to get to the next moment
Imagine living your whole life like that where the moment isn’t quite right, not good enough because you need to get to the next one
That is continuous stress
Chapter 4: the Jew-Bu
According to a psychotherapist, Buddhism was better than seeing a therapist and the mental health community seemed to be embracing the teachings
Book reference to Siddhartha and how the Buddha came to be
The Buddha’s main thesis was that in a world where everything is constantly changing, we suffer because we cling to things that wont last
A central theme to the Buddha’s teaching revolved around the idea of impermanence
An understanding of impermanence will take you off the emotional roller coaster and allow you to see your dramas and desires through a wider lens
It allows you to let go, to drop your attachments
The key is to recognize the wisdom of insecurity
The Jew-bu’s were Jewish people who got into Buddhism and wanted to translate that eastern wisdom for a western audience, mostly by making it less hierarchical and devotional
Chapter 5: the power of negative thinking
He decided to give meditation a try
The instructions were simple:
Sit comfortably anywhere and make sure your spine is reasonably straight
Feel the sensations of your breath as it goes in and out. Pick a spot on your body and try to feel the breath
Whenever your attention wanders, forgive yourself and gently come back to the breath. You don’t need to clear your mind of all thinking
At first, he didn’t like meditation. But he respected it because he discovered that taming the mind was a rigorous mental exercise
Buddhist secret sauce was mindfulness
Mindfulness is the ability to recognize what is happening in your mind right now without getting carried away by it
According to the Buddha, we have three habitual responses to everything we experience:
- Want it
- Reject it
- Zone out
Mindfulness is a fourth option, a way to view the contents of our mind with non-judgmental remove
Mindfulness represented an alternative to living reactively
The mindfulness and Buddhist philosophy is to be aware of our self-hatred without trying to make it go away or love it particularly
The idea of leaning into what bothers us seemed radical because our reflex is usually to flee or numb against it
As the Buddhists say, “the only way out is through“
What mindfulness does is create some space in your head so you can respond rather than react
You can’t control what comes up in your head, it all arises out of a mysterious void
The only thing you can control is how you handle it
Chapter 6: Retreat
After retreat, he started to experience what was called “choiceless awareness“
Once you’ve built up enough concentration, you can drop your obsessive focus on the breath and just open up to whatever is there
You’ll be able to focus on whatever object is there with total ease and clarity until it is replaced by something else
There is something about the act of being present and awake in this way that produces a gigantic blast of serotonin
The Buddhist words of “life is suffering” was actually mistranslated
The real meaning was more like “everything in the world is ultimately unsatisfying and unreliable because it won’t last“
Hedonic adaptation: when good things happen, we bake them very quickly into our baseline expectations and yet the primordial void goes unfilled
The real super power of meditation is not just to manage your ego more mindfully, but to see that the ego itself has no actual substance
Reaching nirvana is when the self is seen as unreal, the negative emotions are uprooted from the mind, and the meditator becomes “perfected”
When back in the real world, when you are faced with stress or emotional situations that require thinking and planning, ask yourself, “is this useful?“
Thinking and planning should only be used up to that point until it is no longer useful
Chapter 7: 10% happier
He came up with the tagline of how meditation “makes him 10% happier” as an easy and concise way to explain to those around him why he meditates
When people make the leap and attend a retreat, they get the first glimpse of what the mind is actually doing
You’re getting a real close, intimate look at what our lives are about
The point of “getting behind the waterfall” wasn’t to magically solve all of your problems, only to handle them better by creating space between stimulus and response
It was about mitigation not alleviation
The pursuit of happiness becomes our unhappiness
This is because we are never satisfied with the moment and we are always looking forward to the next thing
Reader’s note: This idea of the pursuit of happiness becomes our unhappines reminds me of ideas in the book Everything is F*cked: A Book About Hope by Mark Manson. He talks about how hope becomes our demise because it sets expectations and skews our reality. The main takeaway from both is being content in the moment.
Chapter 8: “the new caffeine”
There was a ton of scientific research on meditation that gave a long list of benefits and propelled meditation from something counter culture into the mainstream
He found research that suggests pausing could be a key ingredient in creativity and innovation
Studies show that the best way to engineer an epiphany was to work hard, focus, research, and think about a problem, and then let go by doing something else
Reader’s note: This sounds like how an epiphany happens in every TV show plot ever, lol. The protagonist comes up with the idea that solves his or her main issue while they do some other activity, chatting with a friend or confidant until their epiphany occurs.
Chapter 9: the self-interested case for not being a dick
The Dalai Lama taught him that there is a self-interested case for being compassionate
The practice of compassion is ultimately benefitting to you
We are selfish, but be wise-selfish rather than foolish-selfish
He started to add compassion and empathy into his meditation practice
It began to have a strong positive effect on his daily life and interactions with the people around him
He started to see karma as a real thing in the sense that your actions have immediate consequences in your mind, which cannot be fooled
Behave poorly, and whether you are fully conscious of it or not, your mind contracts
Chapter 10: hide the Zen
The Way of the Worrier:
- Don’t be a jerk
- And, but when necessary, hide the zen
- Meditate
- The price of security is insecurity until it’s not useful
- Equanimity is not the enemy of creativity
- Don’t force it
- Humility prevents humiliation
- Go easy with the internal cattle prod
- Non-attachment to results
- What matters most?
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