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

Studies also show meditation can reduce violence in prisons, boost productivity in the workplace, and improve both behavi...

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.

(In defense of Buddhism, by the way, it is often practiced not as a faith but as a set of tools to help people lead more fulfilled lives in a universe characterized by impermanence and entropy.

One of my favorite quotes on the matter is “Buddhism is not something to believe in, but rather something to do.”)

Sit comfortably. It’s best to have your spine reasonably straight, which may help prevent an involuntary nap. If you want to sit cross-legged on the floor, go for it. If not, just sit in a chair, as I do. You can close your eyes or, if you prefer, you can leave them open and adjust your gaze to a neutral point on the ground.

2. Bring your full attention to the feeling of your breath coming in and out. Pick a spot where it’s most prominent: your chest, your belly, or your nostrils. You’re not thinking about your breath, you’re just feeling the raw data of the physical sensations. To help maintain focus, you can make a quiet mental note on the in-breath and out-breath, like in and out.

3. The third step is the key. As soon as you try to do this, your mind is almost certainly going to mutiny. You’ll start having all sorts of random thoughts, such as: What’s for lunch? Do I need a haircut? What was Casper the Friendly Ghost before he died? Who was the Susan after whom they named the lazy Susan, and how did she feel about it? No big deal. This is totally normal....

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.

Meditation as an act of radicality

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 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.”

The voice is insatiable. The default mental condition for too many

human beings is dissatisfaction. Under the sway of the ego, nothing is good enough. We’re always on the hunt for the next dopamine hit. We hurl ourselves headlong from one cookie, one promotion, one party to the next, and yet a great many of us are never fully sated. How many meals, m...

The voice is unrelievedly self-involved. We are all the stars of our own movies, whether we cast ourselves as hero, victim, black hat, or all three. True, we can get temporarily sucked into other people’s stories, but often as a means of comparing ourselves to them. Everything ultimately gets subordinated to the one plotline that matters: the Story of Me.

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.

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

Respond, not react: this is a game changer.

“constructive anguish.”

The less enchanted you are by the voice in your head, the more you can make room for entirely new kinds of thoughts and feelings to emerge.

From Deeply Flawed to Merely Flawed.

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

Choose another sensation: maybe the feeling in your hands, or the feeling of contact with the chair or cushion. You can even use sound if you prefer—continuous background sounds work best, like the distant drone of traffic, or the hum of a ceiling fan or radiator. Many objects can work. Choose one and then stay on it as best you can. Try not to jump around looking for a “better” sensation. Any sensation can get weirdly fulfilling with time.

For particularly busy minds, some teachers recommend the use of “touch points.” So: breathe in, feel your rear/hands/whatever, breathe out, feel your rear/hands/whatever, and so on. The idea is to keep your mind occupied by filling up every possible “down” moment with a new noticing.

Meditation is unlike anything else you do in life, in that here, “failing”—that is, noticing you’ve gotten distracted and starting again—is succeeding.

When you wake up from distraction, that is the magic moment, the victory.

“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.”

in our overtaxed, overscheduled, overstimulated era, the perception of time starvation is very real.

Big inhale: “One.” Counting breaths helps us pay attention. Make the out-breath nice and long. See if you can let it be a release, your whole body softening as the diaphragm relaxes. For the next few in-breaths, experiment with holding in the air for a moment. As you breathe out, imagine you are breathing out whatever worry or concern may have been spinning around in your head. After three or four breaths like this, move into breathing normally.

As you count each breath, get interested in how fully you can feel the sensation of breathing, its softness and rhythm.

The cushion is the lab. Or, if you prefer, the gym. It’s where you train and experiment in a relatively simple and distraction-free environment.

But most people don’t pump iron in the gym so they can feel good pumping iron in the gym. The idea is to bring your healthy body into your life.

For this reason, some teachers and traditions deliberately emphasize meditation techniques meant ...

Shift your attention to the sensation of the warm water flowing over your body. Can you experience the water as a massage? Zoom in on the little pressure changes, on the individual streams against your skin. Stay with exactly what’s happening; try not to get lost in a daydream. Now, this is already a good enough meditation—quite lush and sensual, to say nothing of wet. But I like to add an extra something to test my openness. I’ll start by noticing the receptivity of my body to the warm water—pores open, body relaxed. And then I’ll switch the water to cold, and see if I can maintain the same open attitude. Not bracing or rigid, but letting the cold flow into and through me. As with cold water, so with life. How long can you keep your composure?

Who the heck pays attention to brushing their teeth? Normally we’re on automatic pilot as we do this, grinding down our gums as we mentally rehearse our day. In this sense, tooth brushing is terra incognita. See if you can slow the whole activity right down: squeezing the toothpaste, first contact, the rhythmic flexion of the bristles on your teeth.

That term speaks to the revolutionary message at the heart of the meditative endeavor. To “go against the stream” is to refuse to be swept up in the dominant culture of unconsciousness, to carefully examine the conventional narratives and assumptions of the day.

So for this meditation, we’ll begin with a loose focus on the breath, but as soon as we get distracted by something, we’ll get curious about the nature of that particular takeover. What hidden drama is happening here? For this, noting helps—using little silently spoken descriptors like spacing out, stewing, tension. The idea is to keep the words simple and accurate, and to try not to overthink the whole thing.

The general rule is if it’s strong enough to pull you away from your breath, note it and then explore it for a while. Where are you experiencing this distraction? In your body? Your mind? What part? How tight is it? Where does it grip? Can you let it go? Follow this strange pattern like a private investigator of consciousness. When you’re ready, go back to feeling the breath.

Choose a home base for your attention, somewhere to start and return to—the breath, hands, seat, belly, sound. Do this for a while.

If something pulls you away—or if you happen to notice something subtly interfering with your experience—get curious about that something. Note it: thinking, anger, discomfort, etc. Try to have a welcoming attitude.

Make this distraction the new object of meditation for a while. Where is it happening? Is it familiar? What happens when you observe it? Does it get more intense or less? Does it change or stay the same? Explore for a minute or two, and then return to the breath.

There are five main hindrances: sloth/torpor, desire, aversion, restlessness/worry, and doubt. These categories are broad enough to cover most of the big issues that can arise in a practice.

Often a subtle quality of stillness or silence already exists in some part of our experience: under the softest part of our breath, or at a point in the belly, or as a noticeable quiet around us or even inside us.

That reminds me of a famous Buddhist parable about “the second arrow.” A man is walking through the woods and he gets hit by an arrow. He immediately engages in a round of self-pitying thoughts: “Who shot me with an arrow? Why am I always the one who gets hit by an arrow? Is this going to totally ruin my dinner plans?” Those painful thoughts are the second arrow.

We suffer a legitimate wound—a physical blow, a difficult emotion, a professional disappointment—and then we compound the misery with our secondary stories about, say, how we don’t deserve this, or how thoroughly screwed we are. We literally add insult to injury.

The definition of “compassion” in Buddhism is the intention that suffering be relieved.

“An intention is not a feeling, nor is it a plan.” It is more like a simple wish, in this case for someone’s hurt—i.e., your own—to diminish.

One of the learning curves of this practice is maintaining your intention without being attached to a particular outcome, incl...