Meditation for Fidgety Skeptics: A 10% Happier How-To Book

by Dan Harris

In recent years, there has been an explosion of research into meditation, which has been shown to: • Reduce blood pressure • Boost recovery after the release of the stress hormone cortisol • Improve immune system functioning and response • Slow age-related atrophy of the brain • Mitigate the symptoms of depression and anxiety

In recent years, neuroscientists have been peering into the heads of meditators, and they’ve found that the practice can rewire key parts of the brain involved with self-awareness, compassion, and resiliency. One study from the Harvard Gazette found that just eight weeks of meditation resulted in measurable decreases in gray matter density in the area of the brain associated with stress.

The word “meditation” is a little bit like the word “sports”; there are hundreds of varieties.

Every time you catch yourself wandering and escort your attention back to the breath, it is like a biceps curl for the brain. It is also a radical act: you’re breaking a lifetime’s habit of walking around in a fog of rumination and projection, and you are actually focusing on what’s happening right now.

the goal is not to clear your mind but to focus your mind—for a few nanoseconds at a time—and whenever you become distracted, just start again. Getting lost and starting over is not failing at meditation, it is succeeding.

Meditation can be difficult, especially at the beginning. It’s like going to the gym. If you work out and you’re not panting or sweating, you’re probably cheating. Likewise, if you start meditating and find yourself in a thought-free field of bliss, either you have rocketed to enlightenment or you have died.

Meditation forces you into a direct collision with a fundamental fact of life that is not often pointed out to us: we all have a voice in our heads.

It’s often fixated on the past and future, at the expense of whatever is happening right now. The voice loves to plan, plot, and scheme. It’s always making lists or rehearsing arguments or drafting tweets. One moment it has you fantasizing about some halcyon past or Elysian future. Another moment you’re ruing old mistakes or catastrophizing about some not-yet-arrived events. As Mark Twain is reputed to have said, “Some of the worst things in my life never even happened.”

Studies show the more you meditate, the better you are at activating the regions of the brain associated with attention and deactivating the regions associated with mind-wandering.

Mindfulness is the ability to see what’s happening in your head at any given moment, so that you don’t get carried away by it.

What mindfulness has allowed me to do is respond wisely to things, instead of reacting impulsively.

Respond, not react: this is a game changer.

happiness is not just something that happens to you; it is a skill

sometimes you won’t know how good a relationship can be until you get out of your own way and commit.

This is the beauty of meditation. The superpower. The judo move. What you see clearly cannot drive you. Ignorance is not bliss.

Everyone laughed at how ridiculous the notion was. So we did it.

I try to remain mindful of a great New Yorker cartoon that shows two women having lunch. One of them says to the other, “I’ve been gluten free for a week, and I’m already annoying.”

The dreaded clear-your-head myth is responsible for untold numbers of aborted meditation careers. I hear people espousing this faulty belief all the time. “I know I should meditate,” they tell me, “but I can’t stop thinking!” People tend to assume they are distinctively distractible—that they exhibit a sui generis kind of lunacy that prevents them, and only them, from ever meditating. I call this the “fallacy of uniqueness.”

“Equanimity is the capacity to let your experience be what it is, without trying to fight it and negotiate with it. It’s like an inner smoothness or frictionlessness.”

When Jeff’s inner chipmunk was active, he explained, he had developed the ability, through meditation, to sit back and “just let it all play out. It’s kind of like you’re getting a little inner massage with your agitation. It stops becoming a thing that’s bugging you, and starts becoming a thing that you’re mildly and affectionately curious about. Like, some little critter in your body.”

“It doesn’t change your circumstances,” said Paula, “it just changes your reaction to those circumstances?”

Prapañca is when something happens in the present moment—a stray comment, a bit of bad news, a stubbed toe, whatever—and you immediately extrapolate to some catastrophic future.

The fact that the person who knew me best in this world couldn’t tell I was in a bad mood was incredibly reassuring. I might have been dealing with a raging internal Robert Johnson, but I wasn’t acting on it.

The most important thing to do when you notice your mind wander is to feel satisfaction that you noticed it in the first place.

I loved to quote the Harvard physician Dr. Sanjiv Chopra: “Everyone should meditate once a day. And if you don’t have time to meditate, then you should do it twice a day.”

She told us it gives her “the ability to step back and see what’s going on instead of just reacting to it. I always had a pretty short fuse.”

What’s more, after one minute of meditation, people often think to themselves: I’m already here; might as well keep going a bit. As the meditation teacher Cory Muscara argues, this is a key moment, because you’re moving from “extrinsic” motivation (that is, meditating because you feel like you have to) to the much more powerful “intrinsic” motivation (that is, meditating because you want to). The second you opt in for more meditation, you’re doing it out of actual interest, which makes it much more likely to have a lasting effect. So if you’re struggling to find time to meditate, look for opportunities for this kind of quickie. After you brush your teeth, after your morning coffee, after you park your car at work, after you sit down on the train, after you put your head down on the pillow…You get the picture.

Meditation is basically the end of boredom. Standing in line at the ATM? Meditate on the feeling of your feet on the ground. Sitting on a bus? Soften your gaze and meditate on the flowing movement of color and form. Bored out of your mind at a dinner party? Meditate on the sound of clinking silverware or the taste of the food—chewing slowly, eyes closed, in a way that is guaranteed to disturb the other guests. Having sex? Meditate on the feeling of stunned gratitude and incredulity.

I always worry that if you’re overly rigid about dailiness, it can backfire. It sets up a situation where, if you miss a day or two, the voice in your head—that slippery little storyteller—can weasel in and whisper, “You’re a failed meditator.” Then boom: you’re done. “Daily-ish actually has enough elasticity, I think, to lead to an abiding habit,” I said to my new friend in the cheap seats. “Thank you, appreciate it.”

Elasticity is a key concept from behavior change research. Scientists call it “psychological flexibility.” A related example that Jeff uses, when it comes to his diet, is the “80/20 rule”: 80 percent of the time he eats healthy food, and the rest of the time he eats whatever he wants. This way, he rarely feels deprived. It’s like a steam-release valve. I liked this concept so much I instituted my own version: the 60/40 rule.

Behavior change scientists tell us that while some people will not institute a healthy habit on their own, they will do it when other people are holding them accountable. One way to create that kind of accountability is to join a community of some sort.

meditation extends your life—not necessarily by making you live longer, but by boosting your level of focus, so that you’re squeezing more juice out of every moment.

For busy staffers on the Hill who worry that, in Tim’s words, “you’re slacking if you’re going to do this,” he relies on strategic name-dropping. “You’ve got to say, ‘Phil Jackson.’ You’ve got to say, ‘Kobe Bryant did this.’ Not exactly slackers. They found it is a performance enhancer.” This is a technique I heartily endorse. When I speak publicly about meditation, I am constantly referring to unlikely meditators, including Steve Jobs, Novak Djokovic, the Chicago Cubs, and employees at major corporations such as Google, Procter and Gamble, Aetna, Target, and General Mills. It’s not entirely dissimilar to the way I’ve long defended myself against people who accuse me of being soft for liking cats. I point to icons of machismo such as Ernest Hemingway, Winston Churchill, and Dr. Evil.

even though most of us spend an inordinate amount of time worrying about how we appear to others, the hard truth is that they really don’t care that much about you.

This quickly devolved into a debate about whether we should call this book The Loving Heart by Dan Harris, featuring a gauzy picture of me on the cover, with the wind blowing through my hair. Someone offered the alternative title Awakening to Your Inner Douche by Dan Harris.

There is an important caveat here. If you have trauma in your personal history, if you suffer from mental illness, or if you experience any psychological difficulties upon starting a meditation practice, it is prudent to consult a mental health professional before going any further. This does not mean that meditation isn’t the right move for you, but when it comes to addressing our mental health it’s rarely one-stop shopping.

When we catch ourselves thinking or acting in unkind or ungenerous ways, it can produce a running dialogue of second-arrow self-reproach.

I have come to firmly believe that, applied correctly, mindfulness enhances rather than erodes your edge. Increased focus helps me get more work done in less time. Decreased emotional reactivity sometimes allows me to stay calm during heated meetings. Having compassion for colleagues can lead to more allies, which in an intensely collaborative atmosphere like ABC News is incalculably valuable.

Not for the last time, I will remind you that this is a game of gradual improvement.

(There’s an expression I frequently call to mind: “These are the good old days.”)

When we interviewed the singer Josh Groban back on day one of the road trip, he asked about the interaction between meditation and creativity. Jeff’s response: “If you’re just crowding your head with the violence of your own anxious and neurotic preoccupations, how are you ever going to mine a deeply fertile experience? You’re blocking it.”

Amplifying the point, Jeff added that meditation helps us see that everyone is caught up in their own baggage. “There are no true enemies. They’re just people in screwed-up situations.”

“You can never completely wipe your past out, but I’ve learned how to control it and focus it and center it, to where it’s now my motivation and my drive, not a hindrance.”

My answer whenever anyone asks me whether the aforementioned activities constitute mindfulness meditation is: maybe. It depends on how you do it. For instance, if you go running the way I do—spending most of the time rehearsing elaborate speeches you’d like to hurl at your boss, or listening to music and pretending you’re the drummer—it is definitely not mindfulness meditation. If, on the other hand, you’re deliberately paying attention to the sensations of your footfalls, the wind on your face, and the movement of your muscles, and then every time you get distracted, you start again—well then, that, to me, is legit.

Bottom line, though: it’s not mindfulness meditation unless you are knowingly paying attention to whatever you’re doing, and then, when you inevitably get lost, beginning again and again and again.

It was also instructive for me as someone endeavoring to spread the word about mindfulness because these young people were demonstrating so many of the qualities that can be cultivated through meditation: listening closely, confronting emotions head-on, and living with compassion. They didn’t need us; they were doing it already.

The genius of meditation is that it basically says: “Hey, relax, bud, all you need to worry about is this moment.

The first thing I told the woman in the back of the hall was that the consistency issue is incredibly common, and the most important step is to “give yourself a break.”

Jeff echoed this sentiment, pointing out that there will inevitably be times when “you fall off the wagon,” and that the key is to realize that this is a “pattern that lots of people are in.”

Even on days when you really don’t feel like meditating, try to see if you can wrangle yourself onto your cushion or chair or wherever you sit, even if only for a few seconds. Often just being in the posture will lead to a few minutes of practice.