How to Talk to People - How to Build a Happy Life: Be Self-Aware

Episode Date: October 5, 2021

Only when we admit we have a problem can we begin to find solutions. On the first episode of How To Build a Happy Life, we explore the neuroscience of emotional management, practices that help us befriend our inner monologue, and challenges to getting in touch with our feelings. Our journey to happier living starts with the question: How do I feel right now? This episode features Dan Harris, former ABC News anchor, meditation expert and founder of Ten Percent Happier. --- This episode was produced by Rebecca Rashid and hosted by Arthur Brooks. Editing by A.C. Valdez, Katherine Wells, and Gillian White. Fact-check by Ena Alvarado. Sound design by Michael Raphael.  Listen to full length episodes on Youtube Do you like what you hear? Read Arthur's columns on self-awareness, success addiction, and why failure is OK. Be part of How To Build a Happy Life. Write to us at [e-mail] or leave us a voicemail at 925.967.2091. Music by Trevor Kowalski ("Lion's Drift," "This Valley of Ours," "Una Noche De Luces"), Stationary Sign ("Loose in the Park"), and Spectacles Wallet and Watch ("Last Pieces"). --- Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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I'm Arthur Brooks, Harvard professor, and happiness correspondent at the Atlantic. In this series, I want to figure out how we can live more joyful lives. Through scientific discussions and an exploration of what happiness is, I'll uncover the how-toes of happy living and assign new exercises to make happiness a daily practice. Popular culture tells us that feelings happen to us and that we should get in touch with them. The problem is, we don't get very much training in the way that we can turn the tables and manage our own feelings. Most people probably think they can't manage their own feelings. They just hope they get better feelings. Excessive negative feelings are not just something to try to get rid of.

Now, sometimes they're a true medical problem, things like depression and anxiety. Negative feelings are a part of everyday life. It would be weird. It would actually be dangerous to eradicate them completely. The problem is, they're out of balance in our lives so often. We feel like they're managing us instead of us managing them. Can we find a balance where we don't eradicate bad feelings, but we manage them appropriately? The answer is yes. This time on how to build a happy life. Manage your feelings so they don't manage you. Let's say that you're crossing the street, you're in a big city, and a car is about to run a red light and run you over. Well, the visual stimulus of that, you see the car barreling toward you, is processed by the visual cortex of your brain, which signals a part of your limbic system called the amygdala. The amygdala lights up like a Christmas tree, sending an electrical signal through your hypothalamus instantaneously to your pituitary glands, which signals to your adrenal glands, which are all the way down by your kidneys, to crank out a bunch of stress hormones. This all happens, by the way, in milliseconds.

Your conscious brain is way behind. You've already jumped out of the way, and your heart is pounding, and you're sweating, and you've already probably flipped off the driver. Look, you don't want to eradicate these emotions. You need them because they keep you safe. But what we don't want is for this kind of negative emotion to manage us either. Excessive fear can make us miserable. We need to learn to manage your emotions.

The way to do this is to do what we call making them metacognitive. For example, say you're angry a lot, and the anger is interfering with your life. Say to yourself, how interesting. I'm feeling angry right now. The moment you do that, it becomes metacognitive. You become aware of it. And in so doing, it goes to your prefrontal cortex. And your prefrontal cortex, also known as your executive brain, you can actually start

to manage your feelings. The science of emotional management is pretty straightforward. But doing it, that's the tough part, isn't it? Here at how too, we want to make it a part of our daily lives. So let's sit down with Dan Harris and learn how. Most of us walk around completely unaware, at least consciously, of a thunderously obvious fact, which is that we have minds and are thinking. When you're unaware of that nattering inner voice, it owns you.

And so that every thought your mind secretes becomes, as my meditation teacher likes to say, a little dictator. What meditation does is kind of systematically wake you up to the tumult, the inner cacophony so that you're not so owned by it. Dan Harris is the founder of the mindfulness media company 10% happier. Harris, a former broadcast journalist and news anchor, recently dedicated his life full time to sharing the benefits of meditation and mindful living through his project 10% happier. Following a panic attack on live news, in 2004, his challenge was to not only overcome negative emotions, but regulate them through newfound self-awareness. On today's episode, I ask our expert about how meditation changed

his life, why self-awareness is important, and how we can all manage that nattering inner monologue with just a few moments of stillness. I quite famously or infamously had a panic attack on Good Morning America back in 2004. Backstory there was I had spent a lot of time in war zones as an ambitious young correspondent. I gotten depressed, didn't know I was depressed, very unwisely self-medicated with cocaine. I was not high on the air, but I had been using drugs enough for the preceding year that it was enough to change my brain chemistry, according to the shrink I subsequently consulted. That change to my brain chemistry most likely made it more likely for me to have a panic attack. And that kind of set me off on this strange journey that included psychotherapy. And then ultimately

meditation, I had no preexisting interest in meditation. I actually had preexisting hostility. But then I saw the science that really strongly suggested can lower your blood pressure, boost your immune system, rewire key parts of your brain. So then I wrote a book about it. I didn't think that book was going to succeed. To my surprise and delight, it did succeed. And so then I turned it into a podcast and a meditation app. That was probably more than 60 seconds, but I think it's the whole story. It's pretty good. And I mean, there's so much that we could dig into. But what I really want to dig into is basically what, what actually you were solving with meditation. I mean, clearly, you were self-medicating because your emotions were managing you in a way that you didn't like.

And so you fought back by trying to block out those emotions. That's what people do when they self-medicate with drugs and alcohol. They're trying to not be managed by their emotions. And when you actually took control of your life, you did something so that you could manage your emotions. Is that fair? It's very fair. In my case, the first application of it was exactly as you described. I was owned by my thoughts, urges, and emotions, which is very common. Most of us walk around completely unaware, at least consciously, of a thunderously obvious fact, which is that we have minds and are thinking. When you're unaware of this nonstop conversation that you are having with yourself, which if we broadcast aloud, you would be locked up. When you're unaware of that

nattering inner voice, it owns you. And so that every little, every thought your mind secretes becomes, as my meditation teacher likes to say, a little dictator. So, okay, yeah, I should eat a sleeve of Oreos right now. Or I should say something that's going to ruin the next 48 hours of my marriage and then you just do it. What meditation does is kind of systematically wake you up to the tumult, the inner cacophony so that you're not so owned by it. What does it feel like when you're actually meditating? How does it feel like it has changed your life? There are a gajillion types of meditation and the kind of meditation I'm talking about is called mindfulness meditation. It's derived from Buddhism, stripped of any metaphysical claims or religious

lingo. It is the kind of meditation that's been studied the most in the labs. When you hear about the science around meditation, most of that, if not all of it, is really mindfulness meditation. The beginning instruction for mindfulness meditation is to kind of sit quietly, spine reasonably straight, close your eyes. Closing your eyes, you can kind of just gaze softly at the ground. Second is to bring your full attention to the feeling of your breath coming in and going out. Pick one spot where it's most prominent, your belly rising and falling, your chest rising and falling, air, entering, exiting your nostrils. The third step is the most important. As soon as you try to do this seemingly easy thing of just feeling your breath, your mind is going to go most likely into mutiny mode. You'll have all sorts of random thoughts. What kind of bird was big bird? Who was Casper the friendly ghost before he died?

Blah, blah, blah, blah. Just like random thoughts, powerful urges, powerful omelitary. emotions, you're just going to see very quickly how distractible you are. Many people have the experience of trying to do this, realizing how distractible they are and thinking that they have some sort of bespoke lunacy that precludes them and only them from doing this thing called meditation. But that's a pernicious misconception. Clearing your mind is impossible unless you're enlightened or you've died. The goal of meditation is not to stop all thoughts, but just to change your relationship to these thoughts. So every time you get hit by a random thought or urge or emotion, you just notice that it's happened and start again and again and again. And every time you notice you've wandered off

and you start again, that's like a bicep curl for your brain. And that's what shows up on the brain scans. And what this does, to get to the question you actually asked me, what this does is develop a skill called mindfulness, which is you could just translate into self-awareness. Once you start to engineer this deliberate collision with the voice in your head, then when off the cushion in regular life, you're ambushed by anger or fear or sadness, you're less likely to be owned by it. It's a skill, you know, the first time you sit to meditate, it may be humbling, maybe humiliating. Over time, you will get better. And the periods of time where you're able to stay focused on your breath,

will extend your ability to catch distraction before you've gone off in 10 minutes of fantasizing about a homicide or an expletive-filled speech you're going to deliver to your boss. You catch it quickly and recover. The recovery is filled with less self-recrimination. It's really kind of a skill and an art form that you get better at on the cushion

and off the cushion, where you're just developing this self-awareness that allows you to, surf the waves of life rather than drowning it. You said that you started out as kind of a cynic about meditation. I've heard you talk about this before, and of course I know about your journey and love your book and your podcast. And you went from cynic about meditation to skeptic about meditation.

The skeptical make the case. Well, for me, what got me over the skepticism or the cynicism, well, probably both, really, was the science. The science is particularly strong around anxiety and depression, both of which I have struggled since I was a little kid. My parents, when I had a big scare, I'm almost 50, so I was coming of age in the late 70s and 80s when there was a lot of Cold War stuff going on

and that TV show The Day After or the Day After Tomorrow, and it was about the aftermath of a nuclear holocaust, and it aired in primetime. My parents let me watch it. Anyway, I was really freaked out about that. They ended up putting me in some big study by a rather prominent guy named Dr. Beardsley who was looking at the impact of the cold.

war on kids. All I remember is playing soccer with him. Again, there's the neuroscience, which is really the sort of wow stuff, and it shows how even short daily doses of meditation among people who've never done it before, it can change the way your brain looks. You know, it can shrink your amygdala, the stress center. It can boost your prefrontal cortex, which is the home of our logical, rational thinking. It can really have a nice impact, it seems, on the area of the brain associated with attention regulation, self-awareness, compassion. I could go on. Okay, so this is important for us to underline as well, which is that meditation and the practices that you promote and have practiced and gotten a lot of benefit from other compliments,

not substitutes for traditional Western therapies, for emotional disorders, mental illness, whatever it happens to be. And that's an important thing for our audience to keep in mind. Now that you've talked to several thousand or million people about this, I mean, it started off by getting the benefits from this yourself. What are the telltale signs that somebody's being managed by their emotions. Temper tantrums? I have a six-year-old. You watch a kid and their emotions are all over the place. And another metaphor that from my meditation teacher, this guy, Joseph Goldstein, is a complete mention. He talks about us being like bees in a jar, just kind of like moving up and down, but, you know, still kind of captive. But we're just going between delight and despair all the time.

So when I see somebody just losing it, first of all, I see myself. I am not above that. There's a reason I called the book 10% happier, you know. So I'm probably 100% happier, if not more, than I was when I started meditating 12 years ago. But I'm not 100% happy. I still experience all sorts of negative emotions and still retain the capacity to be a schmuck in many, many ways. But there are times when I back when I would fly in air. airplanes, which I don't do anymore, well, at least not for now. You know, I'd see somebody else at the

counter losing it with the person behind the counter, and I would both feel like I know that feeling, and I used to do that a lot more, and I would feel compassion for them, because I know that that is suffering. And the Buddha talked about anger as having a honeyed tip and a poison root. And I think if you're paying close attention to what fury feels like. There's some satisfaction in the release, but it's also toxic. And so that's one telltale sign. There's an ancient Buddhist saying that expressing anger is like picking up a hot coal to throw at somebody else but with your bare hand.

Who actually winds up getting burned? Perhaps the person you want to throw it at, but for sure, you. It seems to me that what you're saying is that people who are managed by their emotions are highly reactive. And so we find ourselves to be highly reactive. You know, something happens, something crosses our visual cortex, and we just react emotionally. For good or for ill, that means kind of the limbic system of the brain is in charge. So people learn how to self-medicate precisely because they don't have the prefrontal hardware to try to manage their emotions in the other direction.

Okay, back to Dan Harris in a second. But right now, a quick time out for science. I've been talking with Dan Harris about emotional management. So let's take a look at the science of science of science. emotions. Specifically, I want to focus on the work of Carol Isard. He was one of the world's leading experts on human emotions and proposed a very strong theory of our basic emotions. So what are our basic emotions? The definition of basic emotions is something that leads to actions that are critical for, as Azard said, adaptive responses to immediate challenges to survival or well-being.

Now, many of these emotions happen in the limbic system of our brains, the part of our brains that we don't consciously control. That's the part of our brains that give us feelings that are kind of happening to us. This is a very ancient part of the brain. It evolved millions of years ago. Carol Lizard hypothesized that our basic emotions come in six categories, two basic positive emotions and four basic negative emotions. The two positive emotions are interest and joy. Now, joy, of course, that makes sense. I mean, joy in the pursuit of it, that's why we're here. It's something quintessential to the human experience, and it's something so uniquely human

and what we all want. But the other positive basic emotion is sort of less obvious. That's interest. If you're interested in how to build a happy life and it's giving you pleasure right now, that's interest. That's a basic positive emotion, just like joy. And if you think about it, you can see why it would be evolved. to make you more attuned to things that will help you make progress in your life.

The basic positive emotions, they're great, but then there are the negative ones, anger, fear, sadness, and disgust. These are arguably more important than the positive emotions, or at least they're more dominant. They take up literally more brain space. And the reason for that is that basic negative emotions keep you safe. For example, anger will make you more likely to defend yourself. fear will trigger you to freeze or run away. And disgust, it alerts you to pathogens that can harm you.

So that's a tour through Carol Lizard's work on emotions and the science of why we feel the way we do. And now, back to Dan Harris. I came up in a world at ABC News that was populated by many what we called anchor monsters. I didn't have the best role models when it came to sort of personal and professional comportment. And so, yes,

had it within my repertoire to lose it and be just deeply uncool. Whether it's on the set or at the airline ticket counter, as referenced earlier, I could get really unpleasant and did not like that about myself, but I did it anyway. With meditation, and this has been slow, a slow progression, and sometimes one step forward, two steps back, I am much more likely to see, just actually, to be honest with you, to feel anger in my body. This is something that happens when you meditate.

You get better at sort of listening to the signals of your body, so I can feel my chest buzzing or my ears turning red or whatever and have become slowly over time much less likely to lose it. I want to be clear, though, My temper is still something I work at, but I am much less on a hair trigger than I used to be.

If I'm on my game and I'm mindful, I will start to notice, oh yeah, my chest is really starting to buzz. And I have this urge to discharge this restless energy by saying something sharp, and I can watch it come and go. And that is really liberating. It's interesting this is coming from you because you go from being really well. well-known TV anchor, important shows, doing good journalism, traveling all over the world, doing it, which created problems, as you mentioned before, but tons of success to being an entrepreneur and a best-selling author. How do you use the very things that you're talking about to fight against the natural tendency that we all have, and especially successful people,

toward addiction to success itself? I struggle mightily to this day. with this addiction to success. I'm working on a sequel to 10% Happy right now, and it didn't intend it to be a sequel. I was going to write a book to publicize or to make more prominent these loving kindness meditation practices because I was going to be sort of going to be a slim how-to book.

As part of the narrative conceit for the book, I decided to get a 360 review, which is for people who've never heard of 360 reviews. It's something to do in corporations a lot where they talk to the person's bosses, peers, and direct reports about what are the strengths and weaknesses of this person. So I did the kind of colonoscopy version. Well, I also added in my family and friends.

And it was brilliant. It was such a clever idea that was a carmic torpedo aimed at my cranium. So I got the results about three years ago, and they were devastating, devastating. And here I was Mr. Happiness, and people around me were unhappy with me. and I had to really re-examine a lot of things. And that's what made me much more serious about love and kindness meditation, made me much more serious about therapy.

I got communications coaching. I've got executive coaching, marital counseling. And so I bucket all of this under love. I went into a big spiral of self-loathing, but ultimately really directed me toward thinking differently about love. I mean, the fact that we're trying

to make improvements and we're aware, of the fact that we need help, that's a virtue. That's not a sign of the fundamental inconsistency. I mean, people often ask me because I do, I write about happiness. I'm a social scientist and I specialize in happiness. People say, well, man, you must be super happy. It's like, why do you think I write about it? And the fact is that you recognize that there is an area for improvement,

that you need to be touched up, that you can go into the toilet spiral at any particular time should be incredibly encouraging to everybody who is listening to us today. You know, Dan Harris is a work in progress. But one of the real constant fears that I see for people who have achieved a lot in worldly terms is a fear of failure. Do you think that you've suffered from a fear of failure over the course of your career? And you realize that you were being managed by feelings. And you had been blocking out the dictator of the feelings with drugs. And that wasn't going to work anymore.

It's probably going to kill you if you didn't stop doing that. And so you developed a practice to stimulate the executive function of your brain to turn the tables and manage that. has that way of life as manifested in your meditation practice, has that helped you with a fear of failure? It has helped me, but it hasn't eradicated the fear of failure. Yes, being more mindful. In other words, being able to cut the strings of the malevolent puppeteer of my ego on occasion, helps with fear of failure. But another thing that also helps with fear of failure is to fail and to see that you survive. And so, you know, I mean, the stakes weren't that high, but, you know, I hosted a primetime game show on ABC.

It failed. Terrible ratings. I tried years ago to do a digital show around indie rock, which was one of my favorite things to talk about. And the number of times I was called a douchebag in the comments was just incalculable. And so I euthanized the thing. I found that seeing that I can try something and I can fail and the sun comes up the next day is really reassuring. And so for sure, I worry.

Am I like banana rambo? I think they only had like one hit. Am I a one-hit wonder? I do 10% happier and nobody's going to ever like what I do again. And I've spent so much time on this book. I care so much about what I'm trying to say. And people are going to, like, is it going to be criticized or even worse, greeted with crickets? You know, that may happen.

But I know when I'm saying, I know that I'll be fine. People have had a lot of good things. A lot of things go right in their lives, you and me. It's pretty easy, I guess, to talk about, you know, loving, kindness, meditation. and just meditation in general when you've had a lot of programs in your life. When people who level this accusation, talking about meditation and managing your feelings is a privileged conversation. What do you say? I'll speak for myself that I, I mean, I have two loving parents, upper middle class household, white and male and straight.

But happiness is something that every sentient being wants, whether you have had the amount of luck that I've had or not. whether you're a grasshopper or a human. There's a reason why these practices are being taught in foster care homes and juvenile halls and prisons and hospitals. And there's a reason why it speaks to so many people no matter their socioeconomic status. I mean, the Buddha's first utterance was life is suffering. But I can use this position to spread evidence-based practices that, that are helpful for everybody. Do these practices nullify the many, many layers

of injustice that exist in our society? Absolutely not. Are they gonna help us better address them? Yes. So yes and no, this is a privilege discussion. I think it's a shame that meditation is largely sort of confined to sort of Upper West Side, SoulCycle, Holes Foods, that whole world.

And I don't say that with any hate because I am, I've moved out of the city in the pandemic, but I used to be all of those things. You know, the evidence shows this is good for everybody. And so I like to use my platform to spread the word about this and to give a megaphone to folks who look different than I do who can speak to communities that don't want to hear from me. Last but not least, when our listeners are next caught behind the most idiotic driver they've ever seen in their entire lives, and they want to scream out the window or flip them off or get in front of them, and cut them off. What do they do? Well, there are many sort of meditative moves you can try, but let me just try this as an

experiment. If you notice, and by the way, you may notice it late. You may be already, you know, giving the person the finger. So, but at some point you may notice that you're enraged. Try just repeating in your mind. You may have to grip the steering wheel while you do this, but may you be happy. Try that. Because what we're doing, doing here is, is I use this phrase before, it's like counter programming against the habitual storylines and narratives and thought patterns. And, you know, if you, if you were an alien and you landed on this planet and you went to a gym and you saw people running in place for 45 minutes or systematically lifting and dropping heavy weights, you'd think it was really forced and strange.

But this is what we do to exercise our bodies. And we have to do forced and uncomfortable things to exercise our brains and by extension our mind. And so this is just a little one you can do. Just when you find yourself enraged, you can even be justifiably enrage. May you be happy? That doesn't mean you want the person to continue being a jerk because if they're happy, they wouldn't be a jerk.

But can you understand that maybe they're rushing their kid to the hospital or maybe they've had a really bad life and they found themselves in a terrible position and they're making bad decisions? May you be happy? The words get caught in my feet. throat saying it just because it is a little forced, but I think you can try it.

I know, and I don't want our listeners to miss the truly radical thing that you said in that answer. Notice that you're in a rage. That's it because reactivity starts with you not noticing it and acting. Notice that you're in a rage. Say to yourself, I'm in a rage. You can't say,

may you be happy until you notice something about yourself. And the moment that you notice your own feelings. It's the moment that it becomes something that you can manage. This observation, this way of being, this way of thinking, and the practice to make it so is an incredible gift. And it's been a gift to me in the last hour and gift to our listeners as well. Thank you, Dan Harris. As a social scientist, people are always my subject of choice.

Each week, we'll share little audio snippets from our listeners around the world. They answered this question. When is the last time you remember being truly happy? The last time that I felt our experience happiness was the other day when I took my children to play in the park. I wasn't distracted by my phone. I wasn't streaming something on a device. I wasn't trying to read or debate

or find out about something polemic or partisan in the media. I was in the moment with my children. letting them chase me, chasing them. In that moment when we were running together in this big field at the park, I felt happiness. It was definitely one of those moments when I felt joy. I could tell that this was a moment that I did not want to forget anytime soon. We've gotten a huge amount of useful and interesting information on living better and more happily from Dan Harris.

There's so much to digest, I know. But what I want to do now is to go back to the initial goal for this show, how to manage your feelings so they don't manage you. Here's where we start. Each day, this coming week, set aside 15 minutes in the evening. After the end of your day, well, before you go to bed, of course, but where your day is more or less behind you. Go to some place where you can sit comfortably and relatively quietly. I mean, I know some of you are in circumstances, if you have. little kids, for example, where quiet is a bit at a premium. So let's just say relative quiet

and where you're unlikely to be disturbed. Now, think a little bit about the strongest negative basic emotion you had today. Was it anger? Were you sad? Did you feel disgusted? Were you afraid? Think about it. Observe it as if it had happened to somebody else. State the emotion out loud, and it's context specifically. Let me give you an example. Let's say you're having kind of a health challenge. Everybody does from time to time. And it's giving you some fear, some anxiety about the future.

You might say, today after lunch, I felt kind of afraid because I thought about the medical tests that I have coming up with my doctor. I thought about it for about an hour, and I thought about really all the worst-case scenarios. I kind of ruminated on them. I even Googled my symptoms.

Now, don't judge yourself. Don't judge your feelings. Don't judge your actions. Just observe them in this way and state them out loud. This is what happened. Now, you can do so using Dan's meditation techniques if you want, or just do it simply like I described it right here. Second, let's analyze the feeling that you had, as if you were doing it for somebody else, a close friend. For example, say, look, I'm not a doctor, so I don't know what the outcomes, might be. That uncertainty that I feel about this problem is the reason I thought about the worst-case scenarios. What was I doing? I was really trying to explore the possibilities so I could manage them emotionally. That's what I was doing. But here's the thing. I found it didn't help at all, because I didn't learn anything. In fact, I think it made me feel a little worse. And I wasted a bunch of my time. Now, move on to step three. Manage the feeling with a positive resolution. For example, say, you know, a much better way for me to deal with this anxiety I have about these medical tests

is to say to myself, I don't know what these tests are going to reveal. I'm going to know soon enough. Now, it's on a long list of uncertain things in the world. There's so many things that I don't know. I'm going to choose to focus on what I do know. And what I do know is that I'm alive and well right now. And I do know that I will not waste the gift that is this moment. I will not waste my time after lunch tomorrow, which can be spent doing generative, creative things, and maybe showing love to other people.

Now, don't forget to put the resolution into practice. One good way to do it is to write down your resolution. your resolution about how you're going to deal with your feelings tomorrow, and then put an alarm on your phone to remind you to actually think about your resolution proactively so your mind doesn't wander in this darker direction. Do this every day for a week, by which I mean every day after dinner, before you go to bed, do this 15-minute activity. Sometimes it will be the same negative emotions.

These are hard to get rid of. Don't kid yourself. This is not a one-day deal. sometimes there'll be different emotions. That's okay. But stick with the exercise. If you make this a routine, if you stick with this for three weeks to a month,

I promise you, you're going to be amazed at the level of self-management you attain because you're going to get better and better at it, like any other skill. Are you going to be perfect? No, of course not. And you will still have negative emotions, which you need to have.

But at the same time, as time goes on, you'll be more and more the one in charge. And your happiness will rise. That's all for this week's episode of How to Build a Happy Life. This episode was produced by Rebecca Rashid and hosted by Arthur Brooks, editing by A.C. Valdez, Catherine Wells, and Jillian White. Fact check by Anna Alvarado. Our engineer is Michael Rayfield. Thank you.