Ten Percent Happier with Dan Harris - 21: Arianna Huffington

Episode Date: June 15, 2016

Arianna Huffington has a multimillion-dollar media website that reacts to world events by the millisecond, she's a mother of two -- and yet she says she always gets a good night's sleep. Not only that, she says wants to help everyone else do the same. Huffington, the co-founder and editor-in-chief of The Huffington Post, has a new book -- her fifteenth -- called "The Sleep Revolution: Transforming Your Life One Night at a Time." In the book, she traces sleep deprivation back to the Industrial Revolution and argues that our culture's chronic need to be "plugged in" is hurting our health, productivity, relationships and happiness. She started researching the effects of sleep deprivation after she collapsed from exhaustion in 2007, two years after launching The Huffington Post. It was also around this time, Huffington said, that she went back to meditation, a practice she had first started at age 13 while living in her home country of Greece. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

It kind of blows my mind to consider the fact that we're up to nearly 600 episodes of this podcast, the 10% happier podcast. That's a lot of conversations. I like to think of it as a great compendium of, and I know this is a bit of a grandiose term, but wisdom. The only downside of having this vast library of audio is that it can be hard to know where to start. So we're launching a new feature here, playlists, just like you put together a playlist of your favorite songs.

Back in the day, we used to call those mix tapes. Just like you do that with music, you can do it with podcasts. So if you're looking for episodes about anxiety, we've got a playlist of all of our anxiety episodes. Or if you're looking for how to sleep better, we've got a playlist of all of our anxiety episodes, or if you're looking for how to sleep better, we've got a playlist for that. We've even put together a playlist of some of my personal favorite episodes. That was a hard list to make. Check out our playlists at 10%.com slash playlist. That's 10% all one word spelled out..com slash playlist singular.

Let us know what you think. We're always open to tweaking how we do things. And maybe there's a playlist we haven't thought of. Hit me up on Twitter or submit a comment through the website. How we doing? It's a show. It's a show. It's a show.

Are you good or do you want to be in a minute? I have my research on you here. Well, I'm sure that dossier is thick. That dossier, yeah, my FBI sources. Mm-hmm. You went to Colby College. I did go to Colby College. You gave the commencement to Colby College?

Wow, what did you think? That's Ariana Huffington, who brought a little dossier along with her to the interview that you are about to hear. Before we play the whole interview for you, by way of intro, let me just say that, according to New York Times, Arianna has, quote, done more than anyone else to invent the internet news business.

She's the founder of The Huffington Post, as I'm sure you know. She's written 15 books, including the number one New York Times bestseller Thrive, and more recently, and this is the book she's come here to discuss. The Sleep Revolution, which is also a New York Times thrive and more recently and this is the book she's come here to discuss the sleep revolution which is also a New York Times best seller and is a very effective call to arms or call to bed actually so we're gonna be talking about sleeping and all sorts of stuff with her and also gonna ask her a few tough questions

about whether she does actually sleep and meditate as she recommends to folks. And so ladies and gentlemen, I give you Ariana Huffington. From ABC, this is the 10% happier podcast. I'm Dan Harris. Ariana Huffington, thank you for coming in. We're gonna talk about thriving and sleeping and all that, but since this is ostensibly a podcast about meditation, I just want to start there. How when, why, where did you start meditating?

So I started meditating when I was 13. My mother was a real original. Just think of us living in Greece, in a wide bedroom apartment in Athens. And she had separated from my father. It was my sister, my mother and me. And the Maharishi came to Athens. Maharishi, Maharishi, yes. Transcendental Meditation.

Exactly. And my mother started meditating through Maharishi and then came home and told us, if you meditate, everything will be better, which is the same thing she said about sleep, your grades, your health and your happiness. She sounded like a modern scientist except she had not been to college. And so my sister and I started meditating. And then it was something which I would return to regularly in my life, but it wasn't an everyday occurrence until my own collapse from exhaustion and my own wake-up call nine

years ago when it has become a daily occurrence. I want to talk more about the meditation in a second, but tell me about the collapse. So nine years ago I was two years into launching the Huffington Post and also I was a single mother with two daughters, one of whom was going through colleges to decide what college she was going to apply to. So I wanted to be the perfect entrepreneur, the perfect mother, and no blackberries or communications with the office during the day to be fully present for my daughter. And then at night she would go to sleep and I would start working,

which I'm sure was on top of many years of sleep deprivation. So I got back home and in the morning at my desk I literally started feeling cold, I got up to get a sweater and I collapsed and hit my head on the way down and broke my cheekbone. So that was what started me. Did you need surgery? Well, I needed to be patched up. But more important was what happens if you have something that comes out of the blue. I don't know if it happened to you when you had your epiphany, but I was sent from doctor

to doctor to find out what was wrong with me. You know, did I have a brain tumor, did I have a heart problem, and at the end of this journey, I think that if this was a movie, I would have all my doctors in white coats come into a room, look at me sternly and say, Ariana, you have modern civilizations, disease, burnout. There's nothing we can do for you. You have to change your life. And I think that the wake up call was scary enough that I did change my life.

And it started with my reading a lot of modern science that made it clear that we were living under a collective delusion, that burnout is the way to succeed and be productive and get everything done. And so that was really the beginning of my changing my own life and also introducing these ideas into the Huffington Post. We launched the dedicated sleep section in 2007 when people were laughing at us. We started writing about these things in a healthy living section. We have two nap rooms at the H-in-one post, etc., etc. And it was around, and we're going to talk a lot more about sleep coming up, but it was

around this time that you started, you went back to meditation as well. Yes, yes. Around this time, I went back to meditating every day. And now my routine now is I meditate in the morning before I do anything else. Get up out of bed, go right to the cushion or go to a chair. To a chair, not even in bed. I don't have any problem meditating in bed.

How long will you go? About, it depends. I can do 20, 30 minutes in the morning. And then over the weekend I do longer. I can do 20, 30 minutes in the morning and then over the weekend I do longer. I can do an hour more. But then what is great is that if I wake up in the middle of the night, I just prop up myself up in bed and I meditate. And I find it's been absolutely amazing. I've had some of the best meditations because you don't have an end point. And I invariably fall asleep at some point because I'm not trying to fall asleep. And I also remember, you know, the Dalai Lama said,

he gets eight hours sleep and he wakes up at 3 a.m. to meditate. And so, when I wake up at 3 a.m., I think, hey, great, the Dalai Lama Naya, are meditating. I mean, I have had notice something similar, I mean, I, and again, we will talk at length about sleep and everybody's sleep habits, but the beauty of meditation as it pertains to sleep is when you wake up in the middle of the night, instead of freaking out about the fact you're not sleeping and projecting forward to the next day and how horrible it's going to be, take that time to meditate, and there's some sort of letting go that happens that allows for sleep some percentage at the time. Yes, exactly. So you do 20 to 30 minutes in the morning, and then if you wake up in the middle of the night, but do you have an evening meditation

too, or generally speaking, that's what you do. And tell me what I know what it involves, I think, but because we've had T. Emmer's on the show before, but just for the uninitiated, what is the practice? So, I then, after my 13-year-old experience, I also started meditating in many different traditions. I went to India and started comparative religion at Shantani Ketan University, outside Calcutta, which was founded by Rabbi Dranav Tagore. And I'm meditated there.

I worked with John Roger, who founded the movement of spiritual awareness. John Roger, who founded the Movement of Spiritual Awareness, and I'm meditated through the practice that he gave. So I'm very eclectic in my meditation practice. I believe there is no wrong way to meditate, and different practices bring you different benefits. Some help you slow down your mind and stop the endless chatter. And some connect you more with a deeper dimension of yourself and have more of a transcendental quality. So I just feel that whatever resonates more with each person is the practice to follow

and people may want to experiment with different practices. So you mix it up every day, something different? Yes. I mean, it depends on what I'm more drawn to. I don't, I'm not familiar with some of the names you just talked about. I have not familiar with them or their work. So, he just described for me a little bit about what that meditation actually entails. Well they basically give you different mantras.

Okay, so these are all Hindu-based. Yes, they're different mantras and different emphasis on focusing on breathing, but also different goals. Not that the meditation has to have a very definite goal, but that, I mean, like, transcendental meditation talks about going deeper, sort of, under the waves into the stillness of the ocean. So it has to do more with silencing the mind and the chatter. John Roger and the woman, Switzerland Awareness,

Awareness talk more about salt transcendence and has a more transcendental quality to basically moving beyond your identification with your job and your success of failure and your daily to-do lists and projects. So this was the collapse was nine years ago, you say? Yes.

And I know you made a lot of changes subsequently, but what kind of impact do you think meditation specifically going back to daily meditation specifically has had on you in these nine years? Oh, a huge impact. First of all, it's something that I can go to beyond the times that I mentioned. Any time during the day, even feeling stressed, I can literally close my eyes, chant my tone, and connect with my breath, and it can take a minute, and it has an amazing impact of course, correcting.

chant my tone, so that's the use of the silent mantra internally. internally, yeah. so it's not that I wouldn't hear you chant it. you wouldn't hear me, but unless you had some special talents, which I have no doubt you have. I don't discuss it publicly much, but it's definitely there.

I have a feeling. So that, you find that gives you a course correction in the middle of the day. Yes. If you need it. Yes, which I often do. I would imagine, even your schedule is crazy. I mean, and by the way, you must have some baseline level of stress

because you just sat through a horrible traffic jam to get to this interview. Yeah, but that actually, once I knew you were not live, I had no stress. Got you. You see, that's really another way of dealing with stress. I mean, a lot of the time we don't need to stress. I mean, if I was keeping you waiting into a live show, I would have the stress of feeling, well, this is not very professional,

or I would hear the obnoxious roommate in my head beating me up for somehow not starting at 10 a.m. You know how hard it is to go up town. But once I knew it wasn't live, and that you were not upset, because you thought I was coming at 4.30. And that's an hour's coming at 3.30. So, it's early. Then I just literally used the time to work and make calls and answer emails. But in equivalent times, when I might have

stressed, I find that getting into that place, which is my favorite word actually is imperterpable, where you actually don't let outside events disturb your equanimity, it's kind of key. And for me, it's kind of very fundamental. It goes back to the recognition that everybody, everybody who is alive, has that centered place. You know, Marcos Arilio's called it, the inner citadel, that we can go to, you know, that retreat into ourselves. And we all have it. And there is in a single human being that I have met who is there all the time. So, kind of life is like an endless process of on-course, off-course, in the inner citadel, out of the inner citadel. So, the inner citadel, that place is imperturbable, but doesn't mean you are perennially imperturbable.

No, no, but I feel that kind of my goal in my life now is how quickly can I cross correct? How quickly can I catch myself? Hey, I'm not impertable right now or I'm stressed or I'm upset. How quickly can I get back in the inner Citadel? I really agree with that. I think, I mean, I am very skeptical about the idea of perfection, I'm skeptical that it's possible and I'm skeptical of those who profess to have achieved it. And I think it's a very counterintuitive thing to pitch to people, not counterintuitive, counterproductive thing to pitch to people. But what you just said makes a lot of sense, and I've seen in my own life in my minimal meditation career, which is that I still make mistakes, but I'm quicker to apologize.

Yes, or even to forgive yourself, because it isn't just apologizing to others. Very often it's the way we don't just move on because we can see who made a mistake. I'm a big believer in giving myself feedback and seeing how I could have done better. But I'm no longer a believer in having to chew myself up for 24 hours as I would have done in the past. A lot of people think you can't succeed unless you have that internal cattle prod. I totally disagree. I think that cattle prod that I call the obnoxious roommate is actually the most draining thing we can do in our lives. And I speak as somebody who had it so strongly.

I mean, I started life as an incredibly self-judgmental person. And nothing in my life was more draining. I mean, I would literally leave your show and spend the next few hours critiquing what I did, what I didn't say, what I didn't say, until I was literally exhausted and the show in itself wasn't exhausting but the process in my brain was and so when I stopped doing that I mean that voice now only makes occasional guest appearances and when I stopped doing that you have no idea how much energy was suddenly available to me. So some of it is useful.

In my experience, I'm speaking in my own views here, but some cattle prodding is useful, gets you off the couch, maybe some constructive postmortem, etc., but hours and hours of it is where it runs out of its utility. But it's also like the approach. It's like the factual, you know, this question could have been answered better. You could have done that better. That's one thing.

It's the emotional energy we put into it. The judging that will bring to it that is draining. It's not the fact, obviously. I mean, we need to be in a process of constant feedback and ideally welcome feedback from others. When we come back, one of the producers of the show said he can't remember the last time he slept through the night.

David over here gets up and has sugar cereal before he goes to bed. So how do these guys, how do we make the changes that allow us to have a good night's sleep? After this. Hey there listeners, while we take a little break here, I want to tell you about another podcast that I think you'll like. It's called How I Built This, where host Guy Razz talks to founders behind some of the world's biggest and most innovative companies, to learn how they built them from the ground up. Guy has sat down with hundreds of founders behind well-known companies like Headspace,

Manduka Yoga Mats, Soul Cycle, and Kodopaxi, as well as entrepreneurs working to solve some of the biggest problems of our time, like developing technology that pulls energy from the ground to heat in cool homes, or even figuring out how to make drinking water from air and sunlight. Together, they discuss their entire journey from day one, and all the skills they had to learn along the way, like confronting big challenges,

and how to lead through uncertainty. So if you want to get inspired and learn how to think through uncertainty. So if you want to get inspired and learn how to think like an entrepreneur, check out how I built this, wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen early and add free on the Amazon or Wondery app. We'll talk a little bit about meditation.

We'll talk a little bit more about sleep. So that was another big change you made after you're collapsed. What did you, how did you go from really not sleeping enough to sleeping enough? What were the steps you took? So the first thing is that I recognized that I had to take micro steps. Like not say, I'm going to completely overhaul my life,

overnight, but to actually begin to make small changes, I'm a big believer in that. And so, when it came to sleep, I started by adding like 30 minutes to how much sleep I was getting. How much were you getting? I was getting about four or five hours. Oh, that's ridiculous.

Yeah, I'm not surprised. So, I started getting 30 minutes and 30 minutes and then what actually made it much easier is that the person I became when I was getting more and more sleep was became like a magnet. I wanted to be that person and I wanted to be this. I did not want to be the slave, the sleep deprived person. How bad were you when you were sleep deprived? Well, I was more cranky, I was more irritable, and I was definitely much less imperturbable, you know, because I was much hours, which was my optimal time.

And as I had been reading endless scientific findings about sleep since my collapse, I knew that the vast majority of people, unless they have a genetic mutation, that means I would have been fine on four or five hours, and I knew I wasn't. Most of the rest of us need seven to nine hours, and where you are in that spectrum is individual. How do you know? You know because you wake up without an alarm and you wake up completely recharged. So my sweet spot is eight hours. I have friends who are great on seven, I have friends who need nine. So do you set an alarm now? No.

I mean, I may set an alarm if I have something very important to make sure that something doesn't happen and I oversleep, but I never need my alarm, if I've gotten my eight hours. I always wake up before it. What time do you go to bed? I don't go to bed at the same time.

I don't think in most of our lives that's possible. So I go to bed eight hours before I have to get up. So it depends on what I have to do in the morning. Like do I have a... I just came off a book tour. Do I have an early morning show to do? Then I'll go to bed earlier. What if you have an event the night before?

You just can't leave it. If I have to get up very early, yes. And something's got to go. Something's got to go and you know, here's what is interesting. The way you are saying it now sounds like a sacrifice. In my life right now, it's not remotely a sacrifice because the alternative is getting up in the morning and going through my whole day in a zombie-like exhausted state and I can't stand that anymore. So I'd much rather cancel something, or not book it, ideally.

So you don't have to be canceling the night before. I'd much rather not watch Game of Thrones. I've only watched one episode, I have to confess. Then of this season or ever. Ever. Ever. All right, we got to talk because it's a good show.

I know, but it's been a very busy couple of years. Now, I know you've been in the news, so I follow your work and you have a lot of it. So I get it. That seems like a worthy sacrifice. You say in the book that we are in a sleep crisis. We meaning all of us, our culture. What do you mean by that? What I mean is that in the States, but it's a global crisis, but let's just look at our

country. 40% of people don't get the sleep they need and the consequences are pretty dramatic in terms of our health and our healthcare costs. In terms of productivity just for example last year and regularly every year we lose over 60 billion dollars and about 11 days in productivity. And it's kind of ironic because most people sacrifice sleep in the name of productivity. And yet modern science is absolutely conclusive. That if you don't get enough sleep, you are not going to be as productive, you are not going to be as creative, you show up at work

with 40 or 60 percent of yourself, you are not going to be as engaged. And also we are not going to make good decisions. What is fascinating now is because we are going through this transition of more and more people being aware of that and making changes in their own lives and in their workplace. We see every kind of behavior, co-existing. We see people still bragging about just God for our sleep last night because I'm so busy and important to congratulating employees for working 24 seven, which is the cognitive equivalent of coming to work drunk, all the way to CEOs

like Jeff Bezos saying, I need eight hours to be an effective leader and I get it. And in fact, I saw him at a conference recently and he said to me, I may make fewer decisions, but if my decisions are 5% better than they would have been if I was sleep deprived, that's much better for Amazon. So it's not just better for me, it's better for the company I run. And that's something which is the new norm that's emerging, but we're not there yet. It's kind of exciting to be in the middle of a culture shift. I think a little similar to what was happening with smoking. I think sleep deprivation is the new smoking.

If you go to the 50s and 60s and look at the history, there were doctors literally in white coat advertising cigarettes in the sixties saying things like, I smoke mentals because they refresh my throat. Now, all the science that the back of us killing us was already in. It was in a matter of lack of science, but the perception had not caught up with the science. And that's where we are now. The science about sleep is in. This has been an incredible a few decades,

really since 1970, of scientific findings around sleep. But the perception has not yet caught up. And you say there are lots of changes we need to make like moving the school day later for teenagers where their brains, you know, because of their circadian rhythms and you sleep later, we, you talk about accidents on the road with long haul truckers. There are so many changes we need to make.

Do you think we're equipped to make them? Oh, absolutely. I feel that the first step is changing our minds about sleep and then we'll be able to change our habits and change policies. But where we are right now is changing people's minds around sleep. And there are also movements that have begun. Like the start school later movement is very impressive. And by the time Alexander, your son goes to school, I hope that they want these ridiculous early times, not just for high schoolers, but for kindergarteners and elementary and middle

school kids. And we have now evidence that a lot of the diagnosis of ADD is really sleep deprivation. And you have so many children misdiagnosed as having ADD put on medication with all the vicious cycle consequences. You talk about this book, the book is sleep a sleep revolution, and you say that we're really in the middle of a health, a cultural shift around sleep. Do you think that it is in any way tied to what appears to me to be a cultural shift around mental fitness and meditation, which I think is kind of the will be thought of in the not too distant future as the same as physical exercise that you'll do mental exercise too. And you tie those two to the idea of the third metric that you often talk about.

In other words, do you think we're seeing a bigger shift toward well-being? Absolutely. I think in Thrive, I talked about how we are going beyond the two metrics of success and measuring a successful life, you in a money and power status to include the third metric which starts with well-being. And goes on to include wisdom and wonder and giving. And that that's really a complete life. And without those elements, it's like trying to sit

on a two-legged stool. And I think sleep and mindfulness meditation are very interconnected and because it's really the recognition that we need to disconnect from our world to reconnect with ourselves and that's it's basically the same impulse and the same recognition that drives both movements. So for years were you on a two-legged stool? Well, you know, I was kind of very lucky in that I was always very interested in meditation

and spiritual teachings, so I would very often return to meditating and go to retreats. So my life was a mixture of having very intense periods where I would fall off the wagon and then get back on the wagon, meditating, doing retreats, sleeping more. I was not, I think I would be dead if I was on a continuous trajectory of not including these parts of my life in what I was doing. It's interesting because your spiritual background didn't prevent you from having to collapse, but it gave you somewhere to go after the collapse. Exactly, exactly. And that was incredibly important. It made the, it made making changes

after the collapse much easier. You talk in the book about the process of making change around sleep. I think there are a lot of people I was listening to my colleagues talk about their horrible sleep patterns, especially on the video. But not after the day, right? Everything is going to change, Josh. So how did Josh, who's behind the boards here, is one of the producers of the show, said, he can't remember the last time he slept through the night.

David over here gets up and has sugar cereal before he goes to bed. So how do these guys make changes so that they can have? And this is not just a question about sleep, but I really do want to know about sleep, but behavior change is so tough for all of us. How do we make, let's start with sleeping and go bigger from there, but how do we make the changes that allow us to have a good night's sleep?

Well, the first step is actually recognizing it's important. You see, these are smart people here that you're not. You don't don't. Over at the end. smart people here that you might give. You don't don't overestimate. So, once they convinced themselves of sleep's importance by reading the science, by understanding how we came to devilely sleep, that was a big question for me. So how come, as a culture, we came to believe something so false? Well, in the book, you'd say dates back to the Industrial Revolution when we started treating human beings like machines.

And we thought since the goal with machines is to minimize downtime, it's the same goal with human beings. And on top of it, you had many cultural icons, like Thomas Edison, who are completely wrong on sleep. I mean, there was this great guy, he invented the light bulb, but he said things that were so absurd about sleep. That sleep will be eliminated. They will come at a time when we never actually sleep, but he was like a hero. So people were reading about him thought, well, you know, he's a great man, you know, I need to cut down on my sleep if I'm going to be a great man. I actually had really touching email from Harry Reid saying, you know, I said, I don't know how you read.

Yeah, saying, and he said it was okay to talk about it. He said, I had read Edison as a young man, and I thought, I'm going to cut down on my sleep. Look at what Edison is saying. And then he said, I read your book, and I realized this was absurd. And he said, I started sleeping more, and I told my staff, then it will sleep more. So that's just one example. It may not have been reading about Edison. It may have been what happened with Bill Clinton.

He had a professor who said, great man, you know, don't really sleep more than four or five hours. And he tried to arrange his life not to sleep more than four or five hours. And David Gurgon paints a fabulous portrait in his book about Clinton, of what it was like to work for Clinton and have him exhausted and not being able to focus and talking about how this damaged the beginning of his presidency. And of course, Clinton himself later said that the most important mistakes I made in my life I made when I was exhausted. And he did not specify what mistakes, but don't we all wish that he had gotten a good

eight hour sleep? First step is recognizing the issue. Exactly, that's the first thing. What do you do after that? After that, the most important thing we need to do, and you will understand that being a new dad, is create a transition to sleep. You don't just drop Alexander in bed at night. You just, I'm sure, have a ritual. Yes. You give him a bath. But you have a ritual. If you move a bath, you put him in his PJs, you sing him a lullaby, you read him a story, you lower the

lights, etc. You pee on my foot and laugh He pees on your foot and laugh, whatever. There is a, like the hall of good night moon. It's really what we need for adults. Good night moon is basically saying good night to your world. So we need to say good night to our smart phones. Good night what to do lists. Good night what to do lists. Good night were pending projects. Good night were mistakes and incompletions are worries about the next day. And each person will have to

construct their own transition ritual. In the second part of the book, after you've convinced yourself that sleep is important, in the second part, I go into how do you change your habits so that you can get a good night's sleep. And I can talk to you about my reach, which may be different than yours. Mine starts 30 minutes before I'm going to go to sleep. I turn off all my devices and gently escort them out of my bedroom.

You are the head of an organization. It's been valued in the hundreds of millions of dollars. How do you turn off your devices without, I don't know. I'm also a mom, a very neurotic mom of two, twenty-something daughters, which is an even bigger problem because I always want to be available to them if something happens I have a dumb phone. I remember this phone. Yeah, yeah, sure. It has no data It's a phone that my daughters have and My overnight editor on duty has and so if anything happens They call me I have to say

That's good That I've never been called, but it gives me this piece of mind that if something happens, I will be called. But it has no data, so it's not a temptation. It sits there. But if I wake up in the middle of the night, I'm not tempted to pick it up because there's nothing. So anybody who needs to be reached for whatever reason or wants to be reached by an elderly parent, a child, whatever can get a cheap dumb phone. then after remove all the devices from my bedroom and lower the lights, in the meantime,

my temperature in my room is about 67 degrees and I have invested in blackout curtains, but if you don't have blackout curtains, I recommend a nice eye mask. Then I have a hot bath with ebbsum salts. If you don't like baths, have a shower. There is something about the water purification ritual that slows down the brain and begins to wind down the body and it's kind of that ritual of a demarcation line between our day and our sleep. I actually love kind of rekindling the romance with sleep, so having beautiful lingerie or anything that is not the clothes you go to the gym in, you know, that you, the same t-shirt that you wore during the day. Just something that's special. I only read physical books in bed, and I love to read spiritual books,

philosophy, poetry. So you're not getting the blue light from a machine? No, not only are you not getting the blue light from the machine, but I'm not reading anything that's going to stimulate me to be thinking about Donald Trump, the election, the state of the media. In fact, even when I read novels, I like to read all novels like Trollop or Jane Austen or things that are outside my world. Committees of manners. Committees of manners, exactly. Just things that have nothing my world. Committees of manners. Committees of manners, exactly. Just things that have nothing to do with my life or my world. And I end the day, and I think that's really important because every one of our days

is a mixture of good things and bad things happening. And we can give the closing scene of the day to the bad things or to the good things. It's up to us. And I like to give the closing scene of the production to the good things. So I write down three things I'm grateful for. You actually write them down. Even my daughter lives my younger daughter, lives with me. she's a painter, so she's probably going to be living with me for a long time. And which I love, my Greek mother, I don't understand what is the problem when we will complain about their children living with them after college.

I think that's fantastic. Why shouldn't they live with you even after they get married and have live in babysitting? So anyway for the time being she's living with me and Sometimes we we tell each other like before We go to bed we tell each other things that we are grateful for. Oh, okay So so it's funny in the book you listed somebody who and I can't remember who I think was an Executive of some sort who does this thing that he made up, which is just listing all the things he's grateful for, which I started to do about six

months ago and I just made it up and I find that it actually quite regularly puts me to the book. That's fantastic. In fact, he is a real prominent. He's very hockey. Actually, you said something really important, which is your transition ritual is going to be hockey. You don't have to share it on Dan Harris' podcast. You can keep it to yourself. Because... You're listening, Josh, you can do a hockey thing.

You can be on the other day hockey. But please tell me, because I'd like to have verbally abused you. Just write about it on the half-intent talk. You don't have to tell Dan. But my point is who cares? I really care what you're how hockey and unsophisticated married choice. Actually that person that you mentioned is a very prominent and extremely successful financial

guy in Chicago. And he sees his blessings, he counts his blessings in the form of his children and his grandchildren jumping over the fence. Right, right, right. Which is like a version of counting sheep. And his daughter is a psychologist in cognitive behavioral therapy and she taught him that this is very much cognitive behavioral therapy, which incidentally, if anybody is listening and has a real insomnia problem and is tempted to be on sleeping pills chronically, cognitive behavioral therapy is unbelievably effective.

You talk about the research in the book that shows the CBT is actually significantly more effective than sleeping pills. Absolutely. Without the terrible adverse effects. Well, I was wondering, I want to just put out there because I want to get back to the issue of behavior change, but now that we're here talking about sleeping pills, you go hard at both the sleeping pill industry and the caffeine industry. And I wonder if you've had any backlash on that.

No, I'll tell you why, because there's nothing they can say. I think they want to keep the spotlight as far away from themselves as possible. First of all, let me just say, when we say the caffeine industry, I don't mean coffee. I love coffee. I start my day with coffee. I drink coffee until 2 p.m.

which is when if you drink it after two, it's more likely to stay in your body and get in the way of your sleep. I went hard on the energy drinks. What's the problem with sleeping pills? Have you listened to the side effects? I read the book so I know what the problem is is I'm just seeing you have to talk about it. I was worried for a moment then. So, you know, first of all, we in New Zealand are the only countries allowed to advertise sleeping pills.

And this ad should absolutely be abolished on television, because here you are. you have all this happy people, frolling King in beautiful fields, while a cheerful voice reads at least of terrifying side effects that includes what for me is the deal breaker. You may get in your car and drive without being aware of it. I would do nothing. That means I make it in my car and drive without being aware of it. What about, okay, I'm just, and now I'm gonna ask a personal question,

a personal on my end. I have this crazy schedule where I anchored nightline during the week and then I anchored weekend, good morning America on the weekends. Right. So I need something to help me go to sleep on Friday night. What time are you done on Friday night? Usually I don't have to anchor nightline on Friday night.

So I have the time to get a full night sleep, but the problem is I usually anchor nightline on Thursday night, sleep in Friday morning, and then I want to go to bed at 8 o'clock Friday night, but I've slept in. Right, so what time do you go to bed on Thursday night? Around midnight. What time do you finish nightline? Usually we finish around 11, but if we have to do it live, I'm not finished until one, but on a good night, we're finished at 11. At the late night. We

pre-taped. So you get you're good about going going home, having your transition ritual, which you're going to refine after this day. And then... No, actually, you and I once spoke on an internet thing together, like a Skype thing, and we're co-hosting it or something, and I asked you about sleep rituals, and you said a few things, like keep the room cold, keep it dark, don't have your devices in there, and I've stuck to that ever since. So my ritual's pretty good. Except you don't have anything hockey and I'm sophisticated, but I hope you don't have your devices in there and I've stuck to that ever since. So my ritual is pretty good. Yeah, except you don't have anything hockey and unsophisticated, but I hope you don't have that. No, no, I have lots of hockey unsophisticated.

Tons. Rainbows and unicorns. Great. So, well, if you go to bed at midnight, you're up by eight. Yeah. So what time do you have to get up on Saturday morning? I try to get up at 3.45. You have to get up at 3. So what time do you have to get up on Saturday morning? I try to get up at 3.45. So I try to get up at 3.45. So I try to go to bed by eight to get seven hours and 45 minutes.

Right. So I think I understand that you are not likely to be very tired by eight o'clock at night. So that's the time when the ritual is to get much harkier. Like the bath has to be get longer flickering candles. Sex is pretty good. Did you know that orgasms are Mother Nature's Ambien? Is that okay? Saying that. Yeah, you can say that. I'm just hoping that my wife listens to this. Yeah. So you have to tell her that it's really part of her, of her duties. Okay, all right. This is awesome.

You can go back anytime. And just basically making sure that you have help with Alexander on that night, because that's like, it's like game day, Saturday's game day. It's like Roger Federer when he has game day at Wimbledon. He rents two houses, one for his wife and children, because he has young children, and he knows, if something happens to one of the children, he's walking up in the middle of the night.

He won't be as good at Wimbledon. So that's how intense a lot of athletes get because they know the connection between performance and sleep. So you have to perform on Saturday morning. So you need to be ruthless about prioritizing your sleep without stressing about it, because then that becomes its own problem on Friday night. So you think I need to add a bath to the mix keep it long low lights flickering candles

say I can sex if I can make it happen and And then get some get a book also. Yeah. That again, takes you to another world, you're equivalent of Good Night Moon for Adam and write your gratitude list and meditate. All right, this is what I can do all of it. Don't think of it as I'm going to sleep. Think of it, I'm going to do an indefinite meditation. I don't have to stop this meditation at any time.

Whether you meditate before or after sex, it's up to you and your wife. But I promise you, we'll be able to sleep without taking anything. I like it. This is a win. This whole interview is a win. Interesting. You brought up meditation again, and I meant to ask this before, the link in my mind between meditation and sleep is interesting because if you go

on a long meditation retreat which I try to do once a year, you actually end up not needing much sleep. So I have a neuroscientist friend who once explained to me that that's because you're suffering less. I feel like when I go on retreat, I'm suffering more. But in other words, you're doing less useless rumination and therefore, which takes so much energy that the body needs less sleep. I don't know where he gets that from, but that's just one theory. I wonder if you have any thoughts on this.

I think it varies a lot among individuals. Like for example, the Dalai Lama, who after all meditates more than most of us, still sleeps eight hours. But there are others, after I've talked to Mathieu Ricard, for example, the Buddhist monk and biologist, who finds that when he meditates, but we're talking about long meditation sessions of hours and hours, he needs less sleep. And I think exactly for the reason you mentioned that we don't, our brains are not so preoccupied with all this chatter and worries and anxieties.

And therefore it's easier for us to fall asleep, go very deeply, and be fully recharged. I want to get back to the thing I was talking about before about behavior change, because it's interesting, you talk about this too, that you had to do a huge set of behavior changes after you're collapsed. And I wonder if you have general thoughts about how, because our habits are so deeply ingrained, how do we change our lives when we need to? It's very clear, as you said before, that the first step is admitting it. They say it in AA. Yes. And they're right. They're right about a lot of things in AA.

What else do you recommend? You talk about the importance of baby steps, for example. Yes. I'm, well, it's admitting it, understanding why changing your habit is really important, being absolutely crystal clear about that, and then taking baby steps and encouraging yourself along the way. I think that's a very important part. I'm sure you've just watched your son learn to walk. And a right in the book about what it would be like if your son had the same mind-shotted that we have when we learn a new habit, you know, he would take a step

and fall and say, oh, this is never going to work. This is so clumsy. This is terrible. That's what we do to ourselves. So taking baby steps and then when we don't do it as well as we want to or when one baby step doesn't lead to the next baby step or we regress just accepting it, not judging ourselves and moving on. That's the single most important thing about behavior change for me. Also happens to be the single most important thing about meditation. Yes. When you get lost, no big deal.

Not big deal. But that's how you change anything in your life. Absolutely. So let me ask you this. As you know, you certainly, you personally have some critics. In the New York Times magazine profile that I mentioned at the top, you had, there were some people who were critical of you. I just want to get your sense about this.

You talk a lot about sleep, but the article, some ex-employees said they were getting emails from you in the middle of the night. Is that true? No, you know, a lot of people have asked me about that. And the truth of the matter is that we have an amazing culture that having been pushed. Where among the people I work with directly, I get emails regularly saying, I had a bad night.

You know, my child was sick or my flight was late or whatever, I'm going to get in at 12. They don't even have to ask, because that's the culture. We have let everybody know that when they finish work, they are not expected to be an email, they are not expected to be text, to be on text, that if something urgent happens that we need them for, we'll call them. We have introduced as of last summer a holiday email tool. Holiday email tool. Yes, so when you go on vacation,

you can opt in to instead of getting this out of office, which is kind of useless, how often do you get an out of office and five minutes later, you get a response from the person. Because we are all addicted to responding. So let's say if you had emailed me last summer, when I was in Greece on a two-week vacation, you would have gotten an email back that said, Ariana's on vacation.

If this is urgent contact her chief of staff, if it is not contact her again after 11th of August when she'll be back, this email will be deleted. Oh, this email will be deleted. That's awesome. So that when you got back from vacation, you don't have to go through a backlog of thousands. Exactly. Two good things. One, when was the last time you had two weeks with zero emails in your inbox? Okay, I can't remember when I was seven.

Yeah. Before email was invented. Yeah. So it's just amazing. I mean, you have no idea how I came back so truly deeply recharged with so many great ideas for the Huffington Post. And now I love how many of our employees have adopted it. So you're not up in the middle of that I am e-mailing people?

No, I mean, unless I'm in a different time zone and they get it in the middle of their night, but no, absolutely not. I'm very religious about not touching my phones, three of them, until I wake up in the morning and then when I wake up in the morning to give myself at least a minute, when I don't go to my phone when I set my intention for the day. Look, I had at what I want to accomplish that day rather than immediately allow the world to dictate what my priorities are going to be based on what's at the top of my inbox. So what do you, I mean, I'm just curious to hear your thoughts about that article.

Look, the reporter says, quote, despite its nap rooms, meditation rooms, and breathing classes, which were introduced as Huffington entered her thrive phase, it is described as a surpassingly difficult place to work. Now that is based on anonymous ex-employees. So I want to say that right up front. Are these just disgruntled people or is it just tough to run what is a 24-7 operation, the Huffington Post, a massive operation, which is responding at a hair trigger to news

events and institute these higher ideals that you talk about so publicly. There is no question that we need to be constantly getting better at creating a culture that prioritizes well-being and makes it clear to everybody that employees well-being and what is best for the company are absolutely integrated. But also remember, we are swimming in a culture which has a very different message. And we have a lot of young employees. So how they operate or what drives them or the pressures they put on themselves

are not just dependent on what the employer and the culture around the dictates. So, you mean you can say to people, look, we've got an app room, some meditation rooms here, but you can't, you can only lead the horse to water, you can't force these folks to play. Exactly. Or you can say when you leave work, you don't have to check your email, but people may be checking their email all night.

You know, I'm not their mother and nobody can impose these things. This is just the culture we're working to create. And it also is a big part of our editorial initiatives. I mean, you have three big editorial buckets. The first is obviously news and politics. The second is solutions journalism, identifying solutions to problems, not just putting the spotlight on the problems. And the third is our whole wellness initiative.

And we have, I mean, you are part of our pioneer series that focused on what people are doing in this arena. I interviewed Mark Bertolini for this series to talk about what he's doing at Etna, around wellness and sleep and meditation. So this is also something that a large part of our journalist are working on every day. So it's not just our culture, it's not just what I'm saying and writing about every day. It's not just the nap rooms and the healthy free snacks and all that. It's also what so many of them are literally writing about and doing videos about and snapchatting the way about incidentally.

We had a discovered pop-up channel on snap Snapchat for a day last month when we launched a Sleep Revolution College tool, which now has hit 350 colleges. And nobody predicted that we would have 10 million people on. It was an entire day on Sleep and Recharging which shows again how the sideguys did shifting. I think there's no question the sideguys did shifting. I also think that there's no question that you've played a role in that. I just wonder, I guess what I'm trying to get at is the difficulty of bridging the talking of the talking, the walking of the walk when you're running a company such as yours,

where you're not Ben and Jerry's, you're not just selling ice cream or whatever, you are reacting to world events, cultural events. But I don't really think that's the problem because I think there is going to be no company that doesn't have to have someone available 24-7 except not the same person. You know, basically, if you're a customer service company, you need somebody to be available. If you're an agency, you need somebody to deal with clients. Most companies are increasingly operating on multiple time zones. That in itself is like a huge pressure on employees. That's why we need to change what we prioritize and how we structure companies, because more

and more companies are 24-7 companies, even if they are not working on well-dafares. So you feel like you've done that? Yes, I feel we've done a normal amount, and we are constantly coming up with ideas, improving what we are doing. We are really looking forward to doing more. What's your next book? Okay, you won't believe me. No, I'll believe you. You will believe me?

I will, well maybe. Let's have a bet. Okay, let's have. Is it going to be about UFOs? This is the last book. This is the last book? You're, you're vowing now. I'm vowing now on the 10% happier podcast with Dan Harris.

This is the last book. Why? I feel very complete. This is my 15th book. I feel that in the same way, after I've written a lot about politics, I've done a lot of books on politics, and I reach the point where I felt, there's not the book I want to write about politics. I mean, I can write about politics every day on the half-ington post. In the same way, I feel now, I'm very passionate about these issues of how we live our lives, about our well-being,

sleep, reconnecting with ourselves, but I feel I have said everything I want to say in a book form. And I'm sure we'll have a lot of more ideas and constantly new things are happening in this field that I want to comment on, but I have a great platform to do it in. I love speaking about these topics. I speak around the world on these topics. I have absolutely no intention to do another book. Do you have a sense of what your next big mission might be? I think it's going to be related to this, but it's not going to be a book. I can speak from first-hand experience that books are torture, but your books are reaching a lot of

people. I found it very useful. I think it's a very effective call to arms on the sleep front and I learned a lot and I've learned a lot from sitting here talking to you. Anything else I should ask before we or anything else you want to say before we wrap it up. I've loved it too. This is really great. And what I want to say is that the great thing about a book like Thrive or the Sleep Revolution or 10% happier is that they're evergreen. So the messages are not any less important or real or significant as time goes by. And it's great to know that they're always there. They're being translated into other languages.

I mean, I'm sure you get people suddenly in another country reaching out to you because they read something that inspired them. So I love that too, that it's something that can continue to have an impact without my having to do any more work on it. You've put them out into the world, they will have a long tail. Exactly, they will have their own life and their long tail is really wonderful. Don't you love it when you go on social media and you see somebody posting a picture of you of themselves reading 10% happy or thrive?

And you want to say, hey, you know, there's a sleep revolution, you're still on thrive? You should reply and tell them that, I'm sure you do. Thank you very much, really appreciated, a pleasure to finally meet you in person. We've communicated in lots of digital mediums media, but never in person so it's really nice to meet you Great to meet you and I hope to meet Alexander one day Yeah, not now. I'll do a bite you or do on you if you meet him now, but soon I

Want to thank as well the producers of this show? Lauren Effen Josh co-hands the aforementioned Josh Cohan, who will now be getting full-night sleep. I see a lot of hope. You do? OK. All right, well, I'm going to try to channel that as well. I also want to thank Sarah Amos, Dan Silver, Steve Jones,

and Andrew Calb, and all of you for listening and watching. And if you like what we're doing, rate us, review us, and share it with a friend. We'll be back with more guests and guided meditations very, very soon. Take care. Hey, hey, prime members. You can listen to 10% happier early and ad-free on Amazon Music.

Download the Amazon Music app today. Or you can listen early and ad-free with 1-3-plus in Apple podcasts. Before you go, do us a solid and tell us all about yourself by completing a short survey at Wondery.com slash survey.