10% Happier

by Dan Harris

In my view, the balance between stress and contentment was life’s biggest riddle.

Peter Jennings, at the news desk in New York, asked me questions about our journey. After talking to me, Peter—who still had a national newscast to prepare for—took the time to call my parents and let them know I was okay.

In a war zone, the rules are suspended. You ignore traffic lights, speed limits, and social niceties. It has an illicit, energizing feel not unlike being in a major city during a blackout or a blizzard.

While the internal wrangling was, in many ways, a sign of a healthy, vibrant organization, it was also stressful and provoked me to dedicate way too many hours to measuring myself against people I worked with.

Like the time I was in the middle of a crowded, angry street demonstration in Pakistan and engaged in a supremely unwise shouting match with a protestor who’d just told me the Israelis were behind 9/11. The one situation in which my peevishness remained firmly bottled up was, of course, when dealing with Peter Jennings himself.

He explained that it is entirely possible to be depressed without being conscious of it. When you’re cut off from your emotions, he said, they often manifest in your body.

On a few occasions, pot had made me so intensely paranoid that I felt like I was incarcerated in an inner Mordor. I figured harder drugs had the potential to be even worse.

With coke, you never reach satiety. It hits, it peaks, it fades—and before you know it, every cell in your body is screaming for more.

I knew I was high when we passed a piano bar where they were playing Bon Jovi’s “Livin’ on a Prayer,” and it sounded transcendent.

On the day after ecstasy, my serotonin stores would be utterly depleted. I often found myself overwhelmed by a soul-sucking sense of emptiness, a hollowed-out husk of a man.

In fact, during one of the years when I was using drugs, I was ranked as the most prolific network television news correspondent. This only served to compound my master of the universe complex, convincing me I could fool everyone and pull it all off.

I kept using drugs well past the point where I had been diagnosed with depression. I failed—or refused—to connect the dots.

I had always had an addictive personality. It’s a lucky thing that the first time I tried cigarettes, at age fourteen, I puked. Otherwise, I might have picked up a lifelong habit.

Every drug recovery narrative has to have its bottom, and mine—or at least my first one—came on that warm June morning on the set of GMA when I melted down on live TV.

Which is why I was shaken to my core when that irresistible bolt of terror radiated out from the reptilian folds of my brain.

My mind was in outright rebellion. My lungs seized up in what pulmonary doctors call “air hunger.” I could see the words scrolling up in front of me on the teleprompter, but I just could not get myself to say them.

But as the panic subsided, humiliation rushed in; I knew with rock-solid certitude that, after having spent the previous decade of my professional life trying to cultivate a commanding on-air persona, I had just lost it in front of a national audience.

I thought that if I admitted the truth, that I had just had a panic attack, it would expose me as a fraud, someone who had no business anchoring the news.

In the news business, memories are mercifully short; everyone moved on to the next crisis.

Stage fright seemed like a reasonable enough explanation. Performance anxiety had actually dogged me throughout my entire life, which, of course, made my choice of profession a little odd.

One of the only lighter moments in the whole crisis was when I jokingly said to my mom that my career up until this point had been a triumph of narcissism over fear.

With the Klonopin on board, you could have marched an army of crazed chimps armed with nunchucks and ninja stars into my apartment and I would have remained calm.

If I couldn’t reliably speak on the air—even while taking antianxiety meds—my entire working future was up for grabs. From a professional standpoint, this was an existential issue.

He explained that frequent cocaine use increases the levels of adrenaline in the brain, which dramatically ups the odds of having a panic attack. He told me that what I had experienced on air was an overwhelming jolt of mankind’s ancient fight-or-flight response, which evolved to help us react to attacks by saber-toothed tigers or whatever. Except in this case, I was both the tiger and the dude trying to avoid becoming lunch.

Except in this case, I was both the tiger and the dude trying to avoid becoming lunch.

It was now thunderously clear to me that I needed to make changes—beyond just giving up drugs. Psychotherapy seemed like a reasonable route. This is what people like me did when things got rough, right? I mean, even Tony Soprano had a therapist. So I agreed: I would come back twice a week.

I found a degree of comfort in the fact that my case was not an aberration. I learned of soldiers returning home and attempting to re-create the adrenaline rush of combat by driving at excessive speeds.

And while the psychological impacts on veterans were well documented, an underreported study of war correspondents found high rates of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), major depression, and alcohol abuse. The psychiatrist who conducted the research noted that, despite the risks, many journalists insisted on repeatedly returning to war zones. As one veteran reporter put it, “War is a drug.”

I kept pushing Brotman to produce some sort of blockbuster psychological revelation. I hoped that I would be able to give him some magic set of data points from my past that would lead to an aha moment that would explain not just my mindless behavior, but also my penchant for worry, as well as the fact that I was a thirty-three-year-old with zero propensity for romantic commitment.

After the 2004 elections, the religion beat didn’t look like such a back-of-the-book dead end after all. Evangelicals had just mounted an impressive display of electoral muscle, helping George W. Bush remain in the White House. Questions of faith seemed to be at the core of everything, from the culture wars at home to the actual wars I’d covered overseas.

I thought organized religion was bunk, and that all believers—whether jazzed on Jesus or jihad—must be, to some extent, cognitively impaired.

I had grown up in one of the most secular environments imaginable: the People’s Republic of Massachusetts.

When I was maybe nine years old, my mother sat me down and matter-of-factly told me that not only was there no Santa Claus, there was also no God.

In seventh grade, I managed to convince my folks to let me go to Hebrew school and have a Bar Mitzvah, but that had nothing to do with religion; I was gunning for social acceptance in our heavily Jewish hometown.

Weeks after Bush’s reelection, I traveled to a hard-right church in Florida, where I interviewed parishioners who were clearly feeling elated and empowered. One of them told me, “I believe our Lord elected our president.” Another said he wanted a Supreme Court that would enable him to take his kids to a baseball game and not have to see “homosexuals showing affection to one another.”

During a story about a Christian fitness club in California, I noted, “You can work your thighs while you proselytize.” Not my finest moment.

He was tired of the culture wars; he wanted to focus not just on people shouting about their faith but rather on how their faith affected their daily lives. In sum, he wanted to go deeper. I told him he should go work for NPR.

Then we entered the main room, a rather astonishing space lined with enormous glass windows, at the center of which was a huge, spinning globe. It was meant to be a sort of mission control for human communication with God, outfitted with computers, and piping in news feeds from around the planet.

Ted was really excited about this place—although I got the feeling he could muster equal ebullience while discussing parsnips or annuities. He did, in fact, have the air of a man who could be a top regional insurance salesman. With his short, parted hair and his sparkling eyes, he had the Clintonesque way of locking in on you and making you feel that, at least in that moment, you were the most important person in the world.

Undoubtedly, part of Ted’s appeal was that he had a way of invoking Satan while remaining ceaselessly chipper.

To be sure, he was against abortion and homosexuality, but he didn’t go out of his way to talk about it.

“I have an actual congregation that I see face-to-face every week,” Ted added, “so I see what their real issues are, like their marriages, children, and finances. If I’m consistently negative, it doesn’t help them. Dobson, on the other hand, runs what’s called a ‘parachurch ministry.’ His ministry grows in the midst of controversy, because that attracts interest and funds.”

Sitting there with Pastor Ted, I realized, with genuine regret, how unthinkingly judgmental I’d been—not only of Ted, but of religious people, generally. It hit me that I’d blindly bought into the prevailing stereotypes. The Washington Post had once declared these people to be “poor, uneducated and easy to command.” Pastor Ted’s story about the inner clashes of the movement put the “easy to command” notion to rest. As for my assumption about all religious people being unintelligent—Ted clearly wasn’t.

I never saw him again. By the time I got home, he had taken medical leave. Just a few months later, he was gone. Despite the fear and frustration he had provoked in me over the preceding five years, I felt enormous affection for him, and the night he died was one of the few times I could remember crying as an adult.

He was a restless soul, an idealist, and a perfectionist—a man who definitely followed my dad’s “price of security” maxim. No matter how hard he was on me, I always knew he was exponentially harder on himself.

Interestingly, during the entire time I knew Peter, the subject of his personal faith never came up. It wasn’t until years after his death that I learned that Peter himself was not particularly religious at all. He hadn’t needed faith in order to see that religion was a vital beat for us to cover; he was simply an insatiably curious reporter with a peerless instinct for what would interest the audience.

Only weeks after his ascent to the Big Chair, however, Bob was hit by a roadside bomb in Iraq and nearly died, which sent the news division reeling.

I was then tapped to replace Terry on the Sunday edition of World News—a promotion I considered to be incalculably awesome.

Yes, it was insanely great to be given the steering wheel of the news division every Sunday night—to pick the stories we’d cover, frame how they were presented, and then deliver it all right from the chair that Peter Jennings once occupied. Whenever anyone asked me, I told them I had the best job on the planet. And I meant it. But perversely, my good fortune meant I now had that much more to lose, and thus that much more to protect.

Like almost all correspondents, every day I would check the “rundowns” for various shows—the computerized lists of stories the broadcasts would be covering—to see who was doing which ones.