10% Happier: How I Tamed the Voice in My Head, Reduced Stress Without Losing My Edge, and Found Self-Help That Actually Works - A True Story

by Dan Harris

Straight from childhood, I was a frequent mental inventory taker, scanning my consciousness for objects of concern, kind of like pressing a bruise to see if it still hurts. In my view, the balance between stress and contentment was life’s biggest riddle. On the one hand, I was utterly convinced that the continuation of any success I had achieved was contingent upon persistent hypervigilance. I figured this kind of behavior must be adaptive from an evolutionary standpoint—cavemen who worried about possible threats, real or imagined, probably survived longer. On the other hand, I was keenly aware that while this kind of insecurity might prolong life, it also made it less enjoyable.

Back home, people would ask me whether my experiences overseas had “changed” me. My reflexive answer was: no. The old line “Wherever you go, there you are” seemed to apply. I was still the same; I just had the proverbial front-row seat at history. My parents openly worried about whether I was traumatized by what I’d seen, but I didn’t feel traumatized at all. Quite the opposite; I liked being a war correspondent. Loved it, in fact. The bodyguards, the armored cars, being driven around like I was a head of state. I also liked the way flak jackets made my diminutive frame look larger on TV. 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. And then, of course, there’s the added romance of risk. We used to repeat to one another bastardized versions of an apt old quote from Winston Churchill: “Nothing in life is so exhilarating as to be shot at without result.”

While I had never really thought about it before, I suppose I’d always assumed that the voice in my head was me: my ghostly internal anchorman, hosting the coverage of my life, engaged in an unsolicited stream of insensitive questions and obnoxious color commentary.

We wax nostalgic for prior events during which we were doubtless ruminating or projecting. We cast forward to future events during which we will certainly be fantasizing.

“When you have one foot in the future and the other in the past, you piss on the present.”

It was a little embarrassing to be reading a self-help writer and thinking, This guy gets me. But it was in this moment, lying in bed late at night, that I first realized that the voice in my head—the running commentary that had dominated my field of consciousness since I could remember—was kind of an asshole.

When his follow-up, A New Earth, came out, Oprah put on an unprecedented, eleven-part “webinar.” Millions of people tuned in to watch her and Tolle sit at a desk, deconstructing the book, chapter by chapter. Their personal styles were almost comically mismatched: Oprah would whoop and holler as Tolle looked on placidly; Tolle would prattle on about “energy fields” as Oprah mmmed and aahed credulously. At one point she threw up her arms for a double high five, and Tolle, clearly not knowing what such a thing was, awkwardly clasped her hands.

This was my major beef with Tolle. Setting aside my qualms about his flowery writing, questionable claims, and bizarre backstory, what I truly could not abide was the lack of practical advice for handling situations like this. He delivered an extraordinary diagnosis of the human condition with basically no action plan for combating the ego (never mind for achieving living-on-a-park-bench superbliss).

What I found in this distinctly American subculture was beyond crazy—a parade of the unctuous and the unqualified, preaching to the desperate and, often, destitute.

When I opened my eyes, I had an entirely different attitude about meditation. I didn’t like it, per se, but I now respected it. This was not just some hippie time-passing technique, like Ultimate Frisbee or making God’s Eyes. It was a rigorous brain exercise: rep after rep of trying to tame the runaway train of the mind. The repeated attempt to bring the compulsive thought machine to heel was like holding a live fish in your hands. Wrestling your mind to the ground, repeatedly hauling your attention back to the breath in the face of the inner onslaught required genuine grit. This was a badass endeavor.

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 found this theory elegant, but utterly unfeasible.

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.

It was a revelation: the voice in my head, which I’d always taken so seriously, suddenly lost much of its authority. It was like peering behind the curtain and seeing that the Wizard of Oz was a frightened, frail old man. Not only did it ease my agita in the moment, but it suddenly imbued me with a sense of hope about better handling whatever garbage my ego coughed up going forward.

If a civilian were to stumble upon all of us yogis out here walking in slow motion, they’d probably conclude that a loony bin was having a fire drill.

Whenever I was asked about meditation, I would either clam up and get a sheepish look on my face, the way dogs in Manhattan do when they’re going to the bathroom on the street, or I would launch into an off-putting, overly emphatic lecture about the benefits of mindfulness, how it was actually a superpower, how it really wasn’t as weird as everyone thought, and didn’t involve “clearing the mind,” and so on. I could see the tinge of mild terror in my listener’s eyes—the cornered interlocutor politely but frantically looking for any means of egress.

Public health revolutions can happen quite rapidly. Most Americans didn’t brush their teeth, for example, until after World War II, when soldiers were ordered to maintain dental hygiene. Exercise didn’t become popular until the latter half of the twentieth century, after science had clearly showed its benefits. In the 1950s, if you had told people you were going running, they would have asked who was chasing you. The difference with meditation was that if it actually took hold, the impact would go far beyond improving muscle tone or fighting tooth decay. Mindfulness, I had come to believe, could, in fact, change the world.

We all have an innate feeling of being separate from the world, peering out at life from behind our own little self, and vying against other isolated selves. But how can we truly be separate from the same world that created us? “Dust to dust” isn’t just something they say at funerals, it’s the truth. You can no more disconnect from the universe and its inhabitants than a wave can extricate itself from the ocean. I couldn’t imagine myself conquering these bedrock feelings of separation, but the effort seemed worthwhile.

I had to swallow hard and admit that perhaps the concept of karma did, in fact, have some validity. Not the stuff about how the decisions we make now play out in future lifetimes. In my emerging understanding, there was nothing mechanistic or metaphysical about karma. Robbing a bank or cheating at Scrabble would not automatically earn you jail time or rebirth as a Gila monster. Rather, it was simply that actions have immediate consequences in your mind—which cannot be fooled. Behave poorly, and whether you’re fully conscious of it or not, your mind contracts. The great blessing—and, frankly, the great inconvenience—of becoming more mindful and compassionate was that I was infinitely more sensitive to the mental ramifications of even the smallest transgressions, from killing a bug to dropping trash on the street.

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.

There’s a reason why they call Buddhism “advanced common sense”; it’s all about methodically confronting obvious-but-often-overlooked truths (everything changes, nothing fully satisfies) until something in you shifts.

All successful people fail. If you can create an inner environment where your mistakes are forgiven and flaws are candidly confronted, your resilience expands exponentially.