Making Sense with Sam Harris - #193 — Meditation in an Emergency

Episode Date: March 20, 2020

Sam Harris speaks about social contagion and about the importance of understanding one's own mind in an emergency. If the Making Sense podcast logo in your player is BLACK, you can SUBSCRIBE to gain access to all full-length episodes at samharris.org/subscribe.

I'm recording this on March 17th, 2020, as the coronavirus pandemic becomes a reality for most of the globe. Many of us are at different stages in our understanding of what's happening. Reports out of Italy are, frankly, terrifying. frankly, terrifying. And the United States, as of 48 hours ago, it seems, has finally understood what's coming. And it's clear that that understanding has come too late to respond in a way that really would have been optimal. So I want to talk about meditation in the context of a growing emergency, because on the one hand, it can seem like the most dispensable of things. Who has time to meditate in an emergency? But I want to suggest to you two things. That's the wrong way to think about your resources in any emergency.

But particularly in this one, all the usual considerations are reversed. This is a very strange emergency. This is an emergency in which the most effective contribution you can make to your own well-being and the well-being of others is to stay home. Unless your presence out in the world is critical for the survival of others, if you can possibly afford to stay home, you should do that. I won't rehearse the epidemiological arguments here. You've heard a lot about them, but that is absolutely clear. So you are being forced into a kind of retreat, right? You very likely have more time on your hands, and now you're left alone with your mind and with the stream of information coming to

you through social media and the news and the phone calls from worried friends and family and now you have a choice of what to do with your attention so this really is a unique situation this is something that most of us have never experienced. And at this point, the reality of it is only beginning to set in. This is also a situation in which, because we're dealing with a contagion, a biological contagion and a social contagion, and a social contagion, the spread of fear and bad ideas. I mean, contagion is the order of the day here. Because that's the case, our responsibility to get our heads straight seems unusually acute. We affect people very directly in a crisis like this, All too directly. If you don't take sufficient care with your hygiene here, you literally put the lives of others at risk. And mindfulness,

a basic awareness of what you're doing with your hands, is in many, the only tool you have to keep you and others safe. Many of us grimly laughed at the video of the public health spokesperson who, at a press conference, was insisting on the importance of no longer touching one's face in public, only to then demonstrate her total lack of self-awareness by licking her fingers before she turned the page of her speech. I think I tweeted at the time, only to then demonstrate her total lack of self-awareness by licking her fingers before she turned the page of her speech. I think I tweeted at the time, how can we avoid touching our faces if we have no idea what our hands are doing? That really is a problem. So I want to talk

about this basic situation, and I'm speaking to those of you who understand the value of meditation and have made it a practice. And I know that even many of you who understand the value of meditation and have made it a practice. And I know that even many of you who have a practice are struggling now to do it in the context of this increasingly stressful situation. But I'm also speaking to those of you who are just beginning and are not yet sure of training attention in this way. And I'm speaking to those of you who are frankly skeptical of the whole enterprise. I'm sure many of you think that something as a feat and apparently inward and impractical as paying attention to the breath or to the nature of your mind can be safely ignored under conditions like these. So I'm speaking to everyone. I hope what I have to say is useful. But before I begin speaking

about meditation per se, I want to linger on this point about contagion. And I'm not just talking about the virus, I'm talking about the way we affect one another. I'm talking about our ethical and emotional entanglement with our friends and family members and with the wider world at this moment. Everything we say and do and how we say and do it affects the minds of others. And many people are worried about spreading panic at this moment. Honestly, I've been worried about convincing people that this situation has to be taken seriously

and that we should have begun the self-quarantine that is now being imposed on many of us several weeks ago. So whether you think people need to be comforted or have their concern aroused, it really matters what you communicate and how you communicate it. And I know that in my personal interactions with people in the last few weeks, I felt in myself an agitation which is ultimately unnecessary and unhelpful and quite personally toxic. And it is something for which mindfulness as a quality of mind is really the only remedy. For instance, if I'm speaking with my wife or my daughters and I have an ambient level of anxiety

running in the background, I either notice that or I don't. And if I don't, everything is coming from that place. Whatever message I'm imparting, I'm imparting my own stress in those moments. And it's contagious, and its effects are there to be seen. You know, in those moments, I am no comfort to my daughters, you know, one of whom is definitely old enough to understand the situation we're in and to worry about it, right? And there have been moments where my wife Annika has said,

listen, you need to take a moment and relax. You're too agitated. You're not good company right now. Very appropriately putting the onus on me to get my act together. But without a real insight into the nature of anxiety through mindfulness, I would simply have no tools with which to follow that advice. I mean, yes, I could go watch television. I could go work out. I could go divert myself. But I couldn't actually respond in the moment by releasing the stress, simply letting go

of it, standing free of it, and beginning again. That takes training. That is a skill. It's every bit as much a skill as being able to ride a bike or perform a handstand. Either you can do it or you can't. And practicing mindfulness is the way you learn to do it. So I view mental training very much like physical training as, among many other things, a kind of disaster preparedness, right? Who will you be on the most stressful day of your life? When you lose your job or when someone close to you gets sick or dies. You will only have the mind that you have built for yourself. You will only have the skills that you've acquired. And honestly, the writing is on the wall here. We are all going to experience, in a wide variety of ways,

an extraordinary amount of stress in the coming months. There are very few occasions in life when you can more or less guarantee a kind of common fate for societies. I think war is probably the only other example I can think of. We have all been inducted into a war of sorts, and we really need to take care of ourselves and those around us. And again, what is so unusual about this situation is that, unlike almost any other crisis, the thing that is being asked of us, unless we happen to be doctors and nurses or working directly to keep the supply chain moving, the greatest contribution we can make at this moment is to do nothing, to stay home. And many people are saying this could last for weeks. I can't say I know what I expect here, but I don't see what the off-ramp would be apart from

a true breakthrough in effective treatment or a vaccine. And I have to believe that both of those things are many months away. So virtually all of us have a lot of time on our hands at the moment. us have a lot of time on our hands at the moment. And the challenge, certainly in every place where quarantine is voluntary, the challenge will be to maintain this condition of social distancing. And this very quickly becomes a mental health challenge. We are deeply social creatures. challenge. We are deeply social creatures. It is quite telling that solitary confinement is considered a punishment inside a prison. People seem to prefer the company of even murderers and rapists to the prospect of being locked alone in a room with their own minds. And that is because an untrained mind, which is to say a perfectly normal one, can be an extraordinarily unhappy place to be in. Your own mind can be terrible company. And if it is, you

can be sure it's less than ideal company for others. So if you care about your own sanity and you care about offering effective support for the people around you, it's worth paying attention to the mechanics of your own mental suffering, your own anxiety and self-concern and agitation. Because the alternative is just to promulgate your unhappiness to others. So a few thoughts on anxiety in this circumstance. Well, first we should acknowledge that anxiety is very useful. It's not something you'd want to banish entirely from your mind. It's a signal, right? It is the emotional valence of certain thoughts, perceptions, social interactions that gets your attention. People who are incapable of feeling fear are deprived of a response to life that has an obvious evolutionary rationale. There's no mystery as to why we readily become afraid. This has protected us physically and socially for eons. So it's

not a matter of getting rid of anxiety or fear, but what you can do, what you want to do, what those who care about you wish you could do is let go of these emotions when they're no longer useful, right? The difference between feeling acutely anxious in response to new information that demands your attention and being made chronically anxious by that information is total. anxious by that information is total. Those are descriptions of completely different minds. And you really do have a choice of which mind you'll have, just as much as you can choose to maintain your physical health. You can choose what to eat and whether or not to exercise. You can choose what you do with your attention. But to be able to make that choice, you have to notice the mechanics here. You have to notice thoughts

as thoughts. You have to notice the peripheral cascade of emotion for what it is, right, as fully divorceable from the thoughts themselves. And you have to learn to pay attention to these processes in a way that allows you to achieve equanimity with them in the present moment. So I'll give you a concrete example of this. So today, again, is March 17th. I was listening to the New York Times podcast the daily this morning where they interviewed an Italian doctor who's working on the front lines of the coronavirus pandemic outside of Milan the part of Italy that has thus far been hardest hit and he's describing the experience of being a doctor in an ICU there. And his emotion comes through, right? He is holding back tears. He's talking about being inundated with desperately ill people

and having to triage them with limited resources, literally having to decide whose life to try to save and who to let die. And increasingly, these people are his colleagues, right? Other doctors and nurses who are coming down with COVID-19, the illness born of this virus. And certain things become absolutely clear when listening to this interview. We're now hearing from doctors who are scared and overwhelmed and grief-stricken by what they're experiencing, and they are urging us to understand that this is coming to your city too. And I'm hearing this in the context of knowing that my city has been very slow to respond. So as I'm listening to this, I can feel that I'm getting anxious. I'm hearing reports of a tsunami that is coming. I'm hearing about the devastation. And I know that there is no principle of physics that is going to keep this wave from inundating the spot where I'm

currently sitting. So what do I do in that moment? Well, there's part of this change in my emotion that is useful. It's getting me to record this piece of audio, for instance. It was directly upon hearing that where I thought, okay, there's something I need to say on this topic that might strike a different note than the podcasts I've recently recorded. So it's energy that I could put to some use, and hopefully some of you will find this useful in turn. But most of the cascade of emotion that began to be kindled there, beyond feelings of just compassion for our collective circumstance, most of it is worth letting go of. Who I was when I came down to the kitchen to see my wife, it was better for me to be

free from anxiety in that moment, right? Because there was nothing that would be helped by my imparting a feeling of urgency. So given my experience with meditation, I was able to notice the machinery here, the thoughts that were getting triggered by listening to this podcast, and the emotions that were being dragged into consciousness by them. And if you don't have enough attention to notice thoughts, they simply seem to become you. If you think, oh my god, we're 10 days behind Italy. In 10 days our hospitals are going to be just like this. It's worth understanding the probability of that. It's not worth helplessly ruminating about that because you can't notice thoughts arise in your own mind. Again, the difference is not a matter

of whether or not thoughts arise. Thoughts will continually arise in your mind. They're arising right now, competing with your ability to even understand what I'm saying. I'm speaking and you're trying to listen, but your mind is also speaking. If you can't notice this process, it just feels like what you are. Paradoxically, you feel identical to each thought as it arises in consciousness. And now there is so much to think about. Health concerns aside, we are witnessing an economic emergency unfold before us. The U.S. stock market dropped more yesterday than it has at any point in history. more yesterday than it has at any point in history. Even if there were no coronavirus,

even if no one had any heightened health concerns, what's happening to the economy at this moment is devastating. Again, part of that emotional arousal will likely be useful. It will get you to pay attention to things that you should pay attention to, to make decisions. But most of the emotional response will be detrimental to anything you want to do, to your relationships, to your own creative and emotional resources that you'll need even one hour from now. If you have work that you can do from home, right? If your career is relatively spared by recent events, how useful is it for you to be feeling excruciating anxiety while doing that work? How many minutes of every hour will it be useful for you to feel terrified. These questions answer themselves, right? So you do want to get a handle on this, whether you ever thought meditation was your cup of tea or not. And all I can promise you

is that you can do that, but it takes training. And it is training that most of us now have time for, and it is training that most of us now have time for or should have time for. Again, the greatest contribution you could make to society now is to stay home. And many of you are hearing this in places where your government has told you to stay home. So it's a very unusual situation we're in where this feeling of urgency needs to be channeled into solitude and apparent inaction. So I just want to say that all the resources I think I have to give you direct insight into the nature of your own mind in a way that makes a difference. I'm putting all of that into the Waking Up app. This is where I'm talking about these things. And I want to reiterate something here that I have said several times on my podcast and emailed

about and tweeted. Both the Waking Up app and the Making Sense podcast are now subscription services. And of course, they have to function like any other business. They both have employees and contractors. But it's very important to me that money never be the reason why someone can't get access to these platforms, right? So if you can't afford a subscription to Waking Up or Making Sense, please send us an email and you'll be given a free one. And if you're a subscriber to Waking Up, you probably already know that you can give free months away on the app to anyone. You can just post a link on social media or text it to a friend. And if you ever hear that someone who has benefited from a month on the app is not subscribed because they don't feel they can pay for it,

please remind them of this policy. Because the last thing I want under these conditions of growing economic stress is to become a source of stress for any of you. And with that, I will leave you to the rest of your day. I just urge you to take a few minutes out of it to pay attention to the nature of your mind.