10% Happier

by Dan Harris

I mean, he’s so right. In cartoons, when the characters slurp down some delicious food or drink, they smack their lips and seem totally sated. But in the real world, it doesn’t work that way. Even if we were handed everything we wanted, would it really make us sustainably happy? How many times have we heard from people who got rich or famous and it wasn’t enough? Rock stars with drug problems. Lottery winners who kill themselves. There’s actually a term for this—“hedonic adaptation.” When good things happen, we bake them very quickly into our baseline expectations, and yet the primordial void goes unfilled.

At the end, the meditator arrives at the true goal of Buddhist meditation: to see that the “self” that we take to be the ridgepole of our lives is actually an illusion. The real superpower of meditation is not just to manage your ego more mindfully but to see that the ego itself has no actual substance. Close your eyes and look for it, and you won’t find any “self” you can put your finger on. So, for example, in my backbirdknee jag, if I were more enlightened, I would have been able to see that not only is reality not as monolithic as it appears, but also the “me,” who was noting all the arising objects, isn’t solid either. “The strong, deeply entrenched reference point of ‘I’ has been seen through,” says Goldstein from the front of the room. “That’s Nibbana.” The illusion of the self is, per the Buddhists, the wellspring of all our negative emotions—specifically, greed and hatred and confusion about “the nature of reality” (i.e., that we’re much more than our egos, that we are connected to the whole). Once the self is seen as unreal, these emotions are uprooted from the mind, and the meditator becomes “perfected.” The mind goes from a monkey to a gazelle.

“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. I’ve spent the better part of my life trying to balance my penchant for maniacal overthinking with the desire for peace of mind. And here, with one little phrase, Goldstein has handed me what seems like a hugely constructive tool for taming this impulse without throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

Back then, at our Tribeca Grand beer summit, Mark had helped me see that 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.

I had subconsciously assumed that if only I could get the weekend GMA gig, I would achieve bulletproof satisfaction—and I was shocked when it didn’t work out that way. This, as Joseph had pointed out on retreat, is the lie we tell ourselves our whole lives: as soon as we get the next meal, party, vacation, sexual encounter, as soon as we get married, get a promotion, get to the airport check-in, get through security and consume a bouquet of Auntie Anne’s Cinnamon Sugar Stix, we’ll feel really good. But as soon as we find ourselves in the airport gate area, having ingested 470 calories’ worth of sugar and fat before dinner, we don’t bother to examine the lie that fuels our lives. We tell ourselves we’ll sleep it off, take a run, eat a healthy breakfast, and then, finally, everything will be complete. We live so much of our lives pushed forward by these “if only” thoughts, and yet the itch remains. The pursuit of happiness becomes the source of our unhappiness.

Kabat-Zinn designed something called Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction (MBSR), an eight-week course that taught secularized meditation to tens of thousands of people around America and the world. Having a simple, replicable meditation protocol made it easy to test the effects on patients.

A blockbuster MRI study from Harvard found that people who took the eight-week MBSR course had thicker gray matter in the areas of the brain associated with self-awareness and compassion, while the regions associated with stress actually shrank. This study appeared to confirm the whole respond-not-react superpower. The regions where the gray matter shriveled were, evolutionarily speaking, the oldest parts of the human brain, which sit right atop the spinal column, and are home to our most basic instincts. (As one person has called it, these are the “want-it-don’t-want-it, have-sex-with-it-or-kill-it” zones.) Conversely, the areas that grew were the newer parts of the brain, the prefrontal cortices, which evolved to help us regulate our primal urges.

Another study, out of Yale, looked at the part of the brain known as the default mode network (DMN), which is active when we’re lost in thought—ruminating about the past, projecting into the future, obsessing about ourselves. The researchers found meditators were not only deactivating this region while they were practicing, but also when they were not meditating. In other words, meditation created a new default mode.

“So you’re telling me that I can’t multitask?” I asked as we sat down for an interview. “It’s not me telling you,” she said. “It’s neuroscience that would say that our capacity to multitask is virtually nonexistent. Multitasking is a computer-derived term. We have one processor. We can’t do it.”

“Yes, because when you’re moving from this project to this project, your mind flits back to the original project, and it can’t pick it up where it left off. So it has to take a few steps back and then ramp up again, and that’s where the productivity loss is.”

Scientists had even come up with a term for this condition: “continuous partial attention.” It was a syndrome with which I was intimately familiar, even after all my meditating.

Marturano’s point was that too much mental churning was counterproductive. When you lurch from one thing to the next, constantly scheming, or reacting to incoming fire, the mind gets exhausted. You get sloppy and make bad decisions.

The traditionalists did not appreciate the irony of capitalists and marines embracing a practice with a history of disdaining violence and accumulation of wealth. They worried that mindfulness would simply create better baby killers and robber barons. They pointed derisively to the proliferation of books such as Mindfulness for Dummies, The Mindful Investor, and The Joy of Mindful Sex. Critics had a term for this phenomenon: “McMindfulness.” There was something important being overlooked, they argued, in the mainstreaming of meditation—a central plank in the Buddhist platform: compassion.

In other words, practicing compassion appeared to be helping their bodies handle stress in a better way. This was consequential because frequent or persistent release of cortisol can lead to heart disease, diabetes, dementia, cancer, and depression.

From a traditionalist standpoint, my approach to meditation—and that of most Western practitioners—was backward. In the Buddha’s day, he first taught generosity and morality before he gave his followers meditation instructions. The logic was self-interested: it’s hard to concentrate if your mind is humming with remorse over having been a shithead, or if you’re constantly scrambling to try to keep various lies straight. In his typical OCD fashion, the Buddha even compiled a list of the eleven benefits to practicing metta, which promised that you’d sleep better, your face would be radiant, people and animals would love you, celestial beings would protect you, and you’d be reborn in a happy realm. As usual, the list lost impact for me as it edged toward the supernatural.

The Buddha captured it well when he said that anger, which can be so seductive at first, has “a honeyed tip” but a “poisoned root.”

In my view, Buddhists underplay the utility of constructive anguish. In one of his dharma talks, I heard Joseph quote a monk who said something like, “There’s no point in being unhappy about things you can’t change, and no point being unhappy about things you can.”

Over plates of pasta one day, I pressed Jud on the whole notion of liberation. “Why am I wrong to think enlightenment is this weird piece of bullshit baked into this otherwise really helpful program?” He explained that the brain is a pleasure-seeking machine. Once you teach it, through meditation, that abiding calmly in the present moment feels better than our habitual state of clinging, over time, the brain will want more and more mindfulness. He compared it to lab rats that learn to avoid an electric shock. “When you see that there’s something better than what we have,” said Jud, “then it’s just a matter of time before your brain is like, ‘Why the fuck am I doing that? I’ve been holding on to a hot coal.’ ” If you give your brain enough of a taste of mindfulness, it will eventually create a self-reinforcing spiral—a retreat from greed and hatred that could, Jud insisted, potentially lead all the way to the definitive uprooting of negative emotions (in other words, enlightenment). “Why would it stop?” he said. “Evolutionarily, it doesn’t make sense that it would stop. Does water seek out the lowest level?”