10% Happier Notes: Using Meditation to Tame the Voice in Your Head and Reduce Stress Without Losing Your Edge
Rating: 9/10
Last Fall I started to look seriously into meditation for the first time. I came to it very begrudgingly. I’ve always been incredibly skeptical about meditation. I thought it was mostly for the vegan yogi types who quarantine themselves to silent retreats in Thailand for weeks on end.
And yet, you hear of the very successful and normal people who meditate like Ray Dalio, Jerry Seinfeld, Phil Jackson, David Lynch, etc. (okay maybe Lynch isn’t normal, but that’s also what makes him cool right?)
I also kept seeing study after study about the science and many health benefits of meditation: lower anxiety, reduced cortisol (the “stress hormone”), more energy, reduced insomnia, increased focus, improved memory, etc. So how could I not explore it further?
But the time and effort you have to put into meditation kept me at bay. (Hours of uncomforable sitting with nothing but my own terrible thoughts? Thanks but I’ll pass). The lazy me wanted someone to really investigate meditation from a skeptic’s point of view. That’s why I was really excited about Dan Harris’ book 10% Happier.
Dan Harris is a co-anchor of Nightline and the weekend edition of Good Morning America on ABC News. And he came to meditation with exactly the skeptical, investigative lens I was hoping for. In an interview with Sam Harris he describes how he “had a long-standing aversion to anything touchy-feely or New Agey” and further, how “meditation seemed like the quintessence of everything I was most wary of”.
But after a series of interviews with experts, retreats, and hours spent alone, Harris came to an entirely different view on meditation.
This is his personal story of trying to calm the non-stop stresses of everyday life while also avoiding the pitfall of cliché. And in my opinion, it’s a story every ambitious person can benefit from.
Here are my notes:
As one Buddhist author put it, the “craving to be otherwise, to be elsewhere” permeated my whole life.
In a nutshell, mindfulness is the ability to recognize what is happening in your mind right now— anger, jealousy, sadness, the pain of a stubbed toe, whatever— without getting carried away by it.
According to the Buddha, we have three habitual responses to everything we experience. We want it, reject it, or we zone out. Cookies: I want. Mosquitoes: I reject. The safety instructions the flight attendants read aloud on an airplane: I zone out. Mindfulness is a fourth option, a way to view the contents of our mind with nonjudgmental remove.
I spent so much time, as one Buddhist writer put it, “drifting unaware on a surge of habitual impulses.”
Mindfulness is an inborn trait, a birthright. It is, one could argue, what makes us human. Taxonomically, we are classified as Homo sapiens sapiens , “the man who thinks and knows he thinks.”
The Buddhists had a helpful analogy here. Picture the mind like a waterfall, they said: the water is the torrent of thoughts and emotions; mindfulness is the space behind the waterfall. Again, elegant theory — but, easier said than done.
On still wanting to be ambitious and thinks through problems:
I was still unshakably certain that looking at a problem from all angles and searching for the right move gave me an edge. And yet I was also still concerned that too much worrying was driving me nuts.
The idea of leaning into what bothered us struck me as radical, because our reflex is usually to flee, to go buy something, eat something, or get faded on polypharmacy. But, as the Buddhists say, “The only way out is through.” Another analogy: When a big wave is coming at you, the best way not to get pummeled is to dive right in.
She nailed the method for applying mindfulness in acute situations, albeit with a somewhat dopey acronym: RAIN. R: recognize A: allow I: investigate N: non-identification
The final step— “non- identification”— meant seeing that just because I was feeling angry or jealous or fearful, that did not render me a permanently angry or jealous person. These were just passing states of mind.
I’m remembering that time when my friend Kaiama stumped me by asking how anyone can be in the present moment when it’s always slipping away. It’s so obvious to me now: the slipping away is the whole point.
“Is this useful?” It’s a simple, elegant corrective to my “price of security” motto. It’s okay to worry, plot, and plan, he’s saying— but only until it’s not useful anymore.
When I got into a rut, it didn’t take long for me to jar myself out of it. I would use RAIN— watching how the feelings would show themselves in my body and then labeling them with some degree of nonjudgmental remove.
The answer is in non-attachment.
“It’s like, you write a book, you want it to be well received, you want it to be at the top of the bestsellers list, but you have limited control over what happens. You can hire a publicist, you can do every interview, you can be prepared, but you have very little control over the marketplace. So you put it out there without attachment, so it has its own life. Everything is like that.”
Striving is fine, as long as it’s tempered by the realization that, in an entropic universe, the final outcome is out of your control. If you don’t waste your energy on variables you cannot influence, you can focus much more effectively on those you can. When you are wisely ambitious, you do everything you can to succeed, but you are not attached to the outcome— so that if you fail, you will be maximally resilient, able to get up, dust yourself off, and get back in the fray. That, to use a loaded term, is enlightened self- interest.
It brought to mind a meeting we’d had at ABC a few months before the 2012 election. A small group of reporters, anchors, and executives were in a conference room, clustered around David Axelrod, who was conducting President Obama’s reelection campaign. At one point, Ben asked the preternaturally even- keeled Axelrod about the existential challenges of conducting a campaign in an environment where there were so many factors out of his control— from the European debt crisis to a potential al- Qaeda plot to Israel’s saber- rattling against Iran. Axelrod responded, “All we can do is everything we can do.”
This clunky phrase “nonattachment to results” was my long- sought Holy Grail, the middle path, the marriage of “the price of security” and “the wisdom of insecurity.”
The Way of the Worrier
1. Don’t Be a Jerk
2. (And/But …) When Necessary, Hide the Zen
3. Meditate
4. The Price of Security Is Insecurity — Until It’s Not Useful
5. Equanimity Is Not the Enemy of Creativity
6. Don’t Force It
7. Humility Prevents Humiliation
8. Go Easy with the Internal Cattle Prod
9. Nonattachment to Results
10. What Matters Most?
Mindfulness, happiness, and not being a jerk are skills I can hone the rest of my life— every day, every moment, until senility or death. And the payoff is less reactivity, less rumination, and— who knows?— maybe stream- entry. I have willingness and curiosity. I have confidence and trust. I guess another word I could use is … faith.
