Ten Percent Happier with Dan Harris - Bonus Talk: How to Build a Meditation Habit That Sticks | Dan Harris

Episode Date: January 6, 2020

Dan shares four best practices to help you build and keep up the meditation habit. Join the Free New Years Meditation Challenge: https://10percenthappier.app.link/IpETZ7CAX1 Have a question for Dan? Leave us a voicemail: 646-883-8326 See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Before we jump into today's show, many of us want to live healthier lives, but keep bumping our heads up against the same obstacles over and over again. But what if there was a different way to relate to this gap between what you want to do and what you actually do? What if you could find intrinsic motivation for habit change that will make you happier instead of sending you into a shame spiral? Learn how to form healthy habits without kicking your own ass unnecessarily by taking our healthy habits course over on the 10% happier app. It's taught by the Stanford psychologist Kelly McGonical and the Great Meditation Teacher Alexis

Santos to access the course. Just download the 10% happier app wherever you get your apps or by visiting 10% calm. All one word spelled out. Okay on with the show. to baby. This is Kiki Palmer on Amazon Music or wherever you get your podcast. Hey guys, special bonus episode. Is this an episode? I don't know, it's a bonus thing we're posting in the podcast feed this week. If you're new to the show, you may not know that 10% happier is not only a podcast, but it's also an app that teaches you how to meditate and also helps you stay engaged. And this year we're doing a free 21 day challenge during the month of January. And the goal is to get people excited, motivated,

inspired, and engaged, challenges seem to really help people do that. So it starts on January 6th. And you can sign up today inside the 10% happier app or look at the show notes here and click the link. And you'll be able to join that way. Meanwhile, today I want to post something that we've ripped out of the app or we're going to post on the podcast feed. One of the features we have in the app is a section called Tox where we recruit all these great teachers and

scientists and researchers to record what I call little wisdom bombs, five to seven minute chunks of audio that you can listen to on the go if you don't have time to meditate, but you want some inspiration in your life, you can check out the talks. And I am not a meditation teacher or a researcher, but I've written a few books. And so they asked me to record a few talks and we're posting this one which is about how to build a meditation habit that sticks. So here it is. Forming healthy habits is hard and there's a reason most of our resolutions ultimately go down in flames. We may be wired to fail. Evolution has bequeathed us a brain that optimizes for survival, not for long-term

health planning. Natural selection primed us for detecting threats and finding food and sexual partners, not for flossing our teeth. The fact that we are up against this evolutionary challenge is why sticking to your intention to meditate can be so hard. Here are four tips that I've found can help. First, aim to meditate most days rather than every day. Consistency counts the more often you meditate, the easier it gets and the deeper and more enduring the benefits.

But if you set the goal of meditating most days, you can miss one day without your inner critic swooping in and calling you a failure. I call this approach daily-ish. It has elasticity or psychological flexibility, a key concept from behavior change research, which can help lead to an abiding habit, be it meditation or a new gym routine or a commitment to learn Esperanto. Second, commit to just one minute a day. This is a supremely low bar. The proposition of a single minute is unintimidating and what's more, it's scalable. After one minute of meditation, people often think to themselves,

hey, I'm already here, might as well keep going a bit. As the meditation teacher Corey Muscara explains, this is a key moment because you're moving from extrinsic motivation, that is meditating because you feel like you have to, to the more powerful intrinsic motivation, that is meditating because you want to. The second you opt in for more meditation, even if it's only for another 30 seconds,

you're doing it out of actual interest, which makes it much more likely to have a lasting effect. That little moment of yes counts for a lot. Third tip, think strategically about your schedule. Some people find that having a set time every day, right before bed, first thing in the morning, just after a workout, really helps establish a habit. Scientists who study habit formation talk about Q-Routine Reward. You can experiment with constructing a Q- reward loop that gets you to meditate. For example, after I park my car, Q, I will meditate for five minutes, that's the routine,

and I'll feel a little calmer and more mindful. Reward. Repeat this loop to ingrain the habit. You can even put your daily session in your calendar, which some people find helpful. That being said, if, like me, you have an unpredictable schedule, thinking strategically might mean trying to fit your meditation in whenever and wherever you can. Tip number four, make yourself accountable. Some people may not institute a healthy habit on their own, but they will do it when other

people are holding them accountable. One way to create that kind of accountability is to join a community of some sort. It can be as simple as just getting a few of your friends together and starting. Another option is to join a regular sitting group at your local meditation center. Many major cities have meditation centers where you can drop in, such as mindful in New York City or unplug in LA. So those are four very simple tips. Meditate daily-ish, commit to just one minute each time, schedule it in, and make yourself accountable. In fact, these tips are so simple, I think they teach us something worthwhile in and of themselves.

We may have all sorts of high-flown ideas about ourselves, but in many ways we are all like rats and amazes, constantly pressing the levers that deliver food pellets to us. Don't take that personally, maybe very cute rats. Behavior chain science strongly suggests that the best way to create good habits is to identify where and how to get those pellets. Just like rats, we are much more likely to keep doing something if it feels good and we get something out of it. It's that simple. Why make it complicated? All right, that's the talk.

Lots more on the 10% happier app if you want to check out the Tuck section there. And if you want to join our free meditation challenge, go in the show notes and click the link there or just go inside the app and sign up there. Thanks for listening and we'll be back in a few days with a new episode. 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.

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