Ten Percent Happier with Dan Harris - Eight Things I’m Doing To Stay Sane During Election Season | Dan Harris

Episode Date: August 9, 2024

A personal program for working with election-induced anxiety. We’re dropping a special/experimental pod today, because we know a lot of you are freaking out about the election — so Dan’s going to talk through some strategies he is personally using to keep it together during this turbulent time. Additional Resources: Podcast episode with Bill Doherty (Braver Angels)Feedback form: let us know what you think!Sign up for Dan’s weekly newsletter hereFollow Dan on social: Instagram, TikTokTen Percent Happier online bookstoreSubscribe to our YouTube ChannelOur favorite playlists on: Anxiety, Sleep, Relationships, Most Popular EpisodesFull Shownotes: https://www.tenpercent.com/tph/podcast-episode/dan-harris-electionAdditional Resources:Download the Ten Percent Happier app today: https://10percenthappier.app.link/installSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Hello, I want to tell you about a podcast that I think you're going to love on We Can Do Hard Things, bestselling author of Untamed, Glennon Doyle, former guest on this show, and her wife, Abby Wambach, also a former guest on this show, and Glennon's sister, Amanda Doyle, who's never been on this show, but I bet she will at some point. All three of them do the only thing they have found that has ever made life easier, drop the fake and speak honestly about the hard things. You can hear more from Abby, Glennon, and Amanda as they chat with guests such as First

Lady Michelle Obama, Tracee Ellis Ross, Gloria Steinem, Elizabeth Gilbert, Brandi Carlile, and Brene Brown for honest conversations about sex, gender, parenting, blended families, bodies, anxiety, addiction, justice, boundaries, fun, quitting, overwhelm, all of it. Life is hard. Let's do it together. Meet Blen and Abby and Amanda every Tuesday and Thursday for We Can Do Hard Things, one of Apple and Spotify's top shared podcasts of 2023. Listen and follow We Can Do Hard Things on the Odyssey app and everywhere you get your

podcasts. It's the 10% Happier Podcast. I'm Dan Harris. Hey, Dan here. We're dropping a special experimental episode down the feed today. No guest is just going to be me yammering at you because I know we're in the middle of a period of time where some of you, I would include myself in this category, some of you are freaking out about the presidential election in the United States. And so I want to talk about what I'm doing to keep it together during this turbulent time. Before I dive into my list of practices, let me set the table here for a second.

I want to acknowledge that this is a tricky time. I understand this whole process quite intimately from the inside. For 30 years, I was a TV news anchorman and correspondent, so I covered many, many presidential campaigns. I really understand how turbulent this period of time can be. So I covered many, many presidential campaigns. I really understand how turbulent this period of time can be. So that's the bad news. But the good news is the central plank of my platform, the animating insight of my whole post-news career, is that the mind and the brain are trainable. That peace of mind, happiness, compassion, gratitude,

generosity, These are not Unalterable factory settings their skills that can be trained through various modalities And so I want to kind of reframe or at least I've been trying to do this for myself to reframe this presidential Election as a workout as a kind of dojo where you get to practice these skills that will not only help you to deal with all of the mishegas and the larger culture, but also help you in the rest of your life. So that's going to be the overarching thesis of this episode. Before I dive into the list, let me just issue a few caveats. The first is I'm not trying to make any political points here.

The skills I'm going to talk about should be useful no matter what side of the aisle you're on. And even frankly, if you don't live in the United States, this is all designed to be universal and evergreen. The second caveat is that I'm gonna lay out eight strategies that work for me, but these are not commandments. The point is not to add something to your to-do list that is gonna further stress you out

during a stressful time. Think about this as a menu, to your to-do list that is gonna further stress you out during a stressful time. Think about this as a menu, not a to-do list. So you can just pick and choose whatever works for you. And speaking of that, that kind of leads to my third and very much related caveat, which is these all are strategies that work for me, but they may not work for you or maybe not all of them work for you.

I like how the Buddha used to talk about this to his followers. He would say, don't take what I say at face value, test it out in the laboratory of your own mind. I don't think those were his exact words, but you catch the drift, I think. All right, here are the eight things that have been working for me during this election season.

Skill number one will be of no surprise to anybody who knows me at all, mindfulness. You can think about mindfulness as the ability to see what's happening in your mind at any given moment without getting carried away by it. It's the ability to see with some non-judgmental remove what's happening behind your eyes, between your ears, without acting it out as my meditation teacher Joseph Goldstein likes to say, without acting it out like it's a tiny dictator. Every thought, every urge,

every emotion just becomes the thing that you just act upon blindly. So for me, the best way to develop this skill of mindfulness is mindfulness meditation. I'm not gonna make you do mindfulness meditation right now, but just so you know, I'm gonna lay out the basic instructions. There are really three steps

for beginning mindfulness meditation. Some of you have heard me talk about this before, but this is like the opposite of airline safety instructions. It actually is more useful the more times you hear it. So the three steps are find a comfortable position in a reasonably quiet place. If you want to twist yourself into a pretzel on the floor, that's fine. Or you can do what I do, which is sit in a chair, you can lie down, just get comfortable and close your eyes. The second step is to bring your full attention to the feeling of your breath coming in and going out.

Pick one spot like your nose or your chest or your belly. Just feel the raw data of the physical sensations. You don't have to breathe in any special way. Just feel the breath as it comes and goes. If the breath makes you anxious, and that's true for some people, just pick something else like the feeling of your full body, the feeling of whatever your hands are touching, sounds in the environment. And then the third step is the most important

because as soon as you try to do this, as soon as you commit to just feeling your breath or something like that, your mind is likely to go into mutiny mode. You're gonna have all sorts of random thoughts and urges and emotions, start planning a homicide, whatever it is, and the whole goal is just to notice when you've become distracted and to start again and again.

It's funny because a lot of people assume when they notice how distractible they are, that's proof that they're a failed meditator. But actually that is proof that you're succeeding. The whole goal here is not to clear the mind, it's to get familiar with the mind. And in that familiarity, once you see how wild the mind is, it doesn't own you as much. You can learn to respond wisely instead of reacting blindly to stuff.

And you can imagine how helpful that is in the middle of a turbulent collection. There's a ton of science here. This practice, mindfulness meditation has been shown to reduce anxiety and depression, boost your immune system, lower your blood pressure. So definitely worth checking out. And for me, it's the foundation for everything else that's gonna follow in this episode. Before I move on to skill number two, let me just say that if you're interested in trying this for yourself,

I've got some free guided meditations over on my website, danharris.com. All right, enough self-promotion there. Here's skill number two. And this is where mindfulness is very helpful is that I try to limit my news consumption. I say this with some degree of embarrassment given that I spent 30 years in the news business

but I think it's important to do two things at the same time to be a good citizen and stay informed and also not to lose your mind, to take care of yourself so that you are not absolutely letting this tsunami of news overtake you. And mindfulness is very helpful, as I said, because for me, it allows me to notice when I'm on hour eight of doom scrolling on Twitter,

or I'm posting in all caps, actually don't do either of those things, but you get the point. It allows me to see when I've taken my news consumption or my social media consumption too far and it's time to change the channel. And it's hard to do that if you don't have self-awareness. For me, this is a very important strategy, limiting my news consumption. Scale number three, for me, it's also very important to diversify my news consumption, which means I spend a lot of time consuming lots of different news sources from all over

the ideological spectrum. So I listen to podcasts, left, right and center. I read newsletters and subscribe to newsletters from people on the left, on the right and in the middle. I follow people on social media I disagree with. I sometimes think about this great tweet I saw from Ian Bremmer, who's a political scientist who I happen to admire.

Ian has his tweet, it used to be his pinned tweet, I'm not sure it still is, that if you're only following people on this website who you agree with, you're doing it wrong. And I agree with that. You might be tempted to think that consuming across the ideological spectrum would boost my anxiety, but actually, and this may be counterintuitive,

I find that it calms me down because even if I don't agree with some of these people, at least I understand clearly what their logic is. I don't buy their logic per se, but rather than just hating people blindly, I find it oddly soothing to understand where they are coming from. There's a lot of science here around the benefits of developing an open mind or avoiding what some researchers call epistemic closure.

Having an open mind has been shown to reduce depression and anxiety and increase life satisfaction. This is not necessarily political, but if you're in a workplace and open-mindedness is a cultural value, it's been shown to mitigate conflict and create more highly functioning teams that produce better ideas. Studies have also shown that curiosity and openness

are the key to successful startups and American presidencies. And people have been talking about this skill of open mindedness, the value of having an open mind for millennia. I sometimes find it comforting to look back at quotes from Great Minds. Emerson called consistency the hobgoblin of small minds. Yates said the best lack all conviction. Rumi encouraged us to exchange our cleverness for bewilderment. Frank Zappa, the rock musician, said, a mind is like a parachute.

It doesn't work if it's not open. And my guy, the Buddha has this quote where he says, myself, I am not a dogmatist, but an analyst. So anyway, long way of saying having an open mind is a great skill. It will improve your life. And honestly, I think if we could inculcate open-mindedness into the culture writ large, it would solve a lot of our problems. Okay, skill number four.

For me, practicing loving-kindness meditation or Metta meditation, M-E-T-T-A, really helps me when I'm encountering ideas that I don't agree with, or people that I don't agree with. I believe strongly that encountering ideas that I don't agree with makes me stronger, but it really helps if I do some work in my own mind as I'm heading into these situations. Okay, so let me just briefly describe what this practice is, just for the uninitiated. A little bit of history, the Buddha is just briefly describe what this practice is just for the uninitiated. A little bit of history, the Buddha is said to have designed this practice as an antidote to fear. Keep that in mind as you hear me describe it.

One little caveat before I dive in, I have made no secret about the fact that when this practice was first introduced to me, I found it revolting, just like unbelievably cheesy. But there's a ton of science to show that it can have very powerful physiological benefits, but also psychological and behavioral benefits. So there's a lot to this practice. Here it is. Basically what you do is find a comfortable position,

close your eyes, and you start by bringing to mind an easy person to love. Can be a little kid, a great friend, a cat or a dog or a pet, and just create a mental image. Or if you're not good at that, you can just create a felt sense in your body of this person or animal. And then you're going to silently send four phrases. May you be happy, may be safe, may be healthy, may you live with ease. And then from there you move from an easy person to yourself. It might help to imagine yourself as a kid, or you can just feel yourself sitting or lying down, whatever position you're in. And then you

send the same phrases, happy, safe, healthy, live with ease. Then you move to a mentor. So somebody's helped you out in your life, a teacher, a parent, an uncle, a good friend, somebody at work who's helped you. If there's nobody in real life who fits the bill, you can think of a public or historical figure who you admire, who has been a sort of mentor by proxy. And then repeat the same phrases, happy, safe, healthy, live with ease. And then you move to a neutral person, somebody you might overlook. Could be a barista, somebody at the dry cleaner, somebody who is on the cleaning

staff somewhere, somebody who might be tempted not to pay too much attention to. And send that person the phrases. Two more categories, a difficult person. As I often say, best not to start with the most difficult person, like the person you don't want to win the presidential election or pole pot or whatever. Just start with somebody mildly annoying and build your way up to the most difficult.

And then finally, everybody, all beings everywhere, and send the phrases, may we all be happy, safe, healthy, live with ease. And like I said, I didn't like these instructions when I first heard them. I sometimes joke that it felt like Valentine's Day with a gun to my head. However, if you think about what it would look like

if you were an alien and you landed on this planet and went to a gym, it would look strange that people were systematically picking up and putting down heavy things or running in place for 45 minutes. They're doing that for muscular or cardiovascular health, repetitive motion. And the same is true for your mind.

This capacity for warmth, you might even say love, is not, to echo the phraseology I used at the top of this episode, is not an unalterable factory setting. It's a skill, and that's a radical notion. And it really is helpful in the middle of a presidential campaign. It can help you put on a different set of goggles when you're confronted with or

thinking about people with whom you disagree. I've got a few more quotes that are helpful for me in this regard. A long fellow said that if we were to read the secret history of our enemies, we would find enough sorrow to disarm all hostility. Robert Bly spoke about a metaphorical black bag that we all lug around with us, which is filled with an ever-expanding load of our past traumas. And I like to sometimes if there's somebody difficult in my environment, if I have the wherewithal, if I can remember to do this, just to imagine them with their own black bag. There's a reason they are this way.

And if I came out of whatever womb that person came out of, I'd probably believe and act in the same way in which they are. Thich Nhat Hanh, the great Zen master has said, and this is a quote, our real enemy is not man. It's not another human being. Our real enemy is our ignorance, discrimination, fear, craving, and violence. One last quote here that I find hilarious. It's from Sonia Renee Taylor who's been on this show before. Thou shalt not judge because thou has fucked up before too. Nothing to add. No

notes. Perfect. Skill number five, communication skills. I find it very helpful not only to have the right mindset when I'm confronted with people with whom I disagree, but also to have technical skills for communicating that allow those interactions to be as successful as possible. You may have heard me say this before, but I often think about the fact that human beings are intensely social, and yet very few of us ever learn basic skills for interacting with other human beings.

And over the last six or so years, I've learned some basic communication skills that have revolutionized my interactions with other human beings. So let me tell you a brief story and then give you three skills that I think will help during the election. In 2018, I actually spent some time

with a group called the Braver Angels. I'll actually drop a link in the show notes because I interviewed Bill Daugherty, who was a former couples counselor, and he still does that work. But he's also involved with Braver Angels. And the mission of Braver Angels is that they bring together reds and blues. And Bill is able to orchestrate really healthy conversations between people who vote Democrat and people who vote for Trump. And I actually went and witnessed this in person

and it was stunning how well these folks were getting along. And they have three rules that I'm going to share with you that could be helpful in your day-to-day life. Rule number one, don't try to change anybody's mind. If the person you're talking to feels that you're trying to change their mind, it's going to turn off the parts of their brain that have the capacity for openness, for hearing, because they're going to feel attacked. So if you go into a conversation, the best move is not to try to get somebody to see things exactly the way you do.

The best move, according to the folks at Braver Angels, and I happen to agree with this, is to just understand why they think the way they do. The goal at Braver Angels, and this is a term that I love, the goal is not ever to convince somebody, it's to arrive at what they call accurate disagreement. Love that. Rule number two from Braver Angels, make I statements, the letter I, talk about yourself, rather than truth statements. In other words, when you're talking about the issues, keep it in your own experience.

For example, if you're a Democrat, you might say, I'm worried that Trump is violating the emoluments clause of the constitution and that's setting a bad precedent, rather than making some grand sweeping statement like, President Trump is irredeemably corrupt and you're a terrible person for supporting him. Which formulation do you think is likely to go down easier in the ears of the person you're talking to? Which leads me to the third rule that I picked up from the folks at the Braver Angels, which is don't characterize the other person's opinion or the other side's opinion.

Just characterize your own opinion. If you're in favor of President Trump, you might say, I'm worried about high taxes damaging the economy. Instead of saying you Democrats just want to feed at the trough of a bloated welfare state and you're hopeless socialists or whatever. Again, you see the difference here that if you keep things in your own personal experience rather than declaring them as undisputed facts or characterizing other people, you're much more likely to be successful. Okay, a few more skills here that I'm gonna list before I let you go. Skill number six that helps me a lot, actually a phrase that I think is incredibly insightful. And here it is, action absorbs anxiety. Action absorbs anxiety.

It's very easy, I find, in the middle of a turbulent election or an overseas war to feel really helpless, like there's nothing you can do. And it may be true that there's very little you can do to affect the macro situation, but you have an enormous amount of power to take action locally. So volunteer. You can volunteer on a political campaign because that, that would be a little bit more relevant to the issue at hand during the election. But honestly, I think if you volunteered at a local animal shelter or helped out the elderly in your neighborhood, that would be enormously empowering for you

and ennobling to give you a sense that you are taking some sort of action that is in accordance with your values. And really, if you don't have time for this kind of volunteer work, which I think many of you may not, just helping out people in your family or your friends or at work, getting in the habit of being useful can stiffen your spine, or at least that's what I find, and be a nice sort of counter-programming move against the overwhelming sense of helplessness we can get in the face of what's coming at us via the news.

One other thing to say about this, and this kind of goes back to the mindfulness piece, which is that for me, when I sit in meditation, I can see what is beneath what feels like the dominant emotion. In other words, I might be experiencing a lot of anger, but if I pay attention and sit still in meditation, I might notice what is beneath the anger. And often that's fear. But what's beneath the fear is often caring, giving a shit. That's really what's at the root of a lot of our political

opinions and concerns and anxiety is that we actually care. You might call that love. And if you can tune into that and let that be what motivates you rather than fear or anger, that be what motivates you rather than fear or anger? I find that is a much cleaner burning fuel and will allow you to take more effective action for a longer period of time. Again that's how it's worked for me. Just a few more quotes on this one. I love this one from the Dalai Lama. If a problem can be solved there's no use worrying about it. If it can't be solved, worrying will do no good. Basically, worrying never helps or rarely helps. Sometimes a little bit of worrying helps. I might disagree slightly with the Dalai Lama on that, but can obviate the need for excessive worrying. And then one little catchphrase I recently picked up from Devin Berry right here on the show,

actually. He's a great meditation teacher. And he taught me this phrase that comes right out of ancient Buddhism. It may take a second to learn how to pronounce this, but it's Tatra Majatata. Tatra Majatata. It's like the Buddhist version of Hakuna Matata, except Hakuna Matata is like no worries. There's nothing to worry about here. At least that's the way I remember it from The Lion King. Tatra Majatata is, I think it translates roughly into right there in the middle of it, standing in the middle of all of the chaos and being okay with it. It doesn't deny that there are problems. What it does do is emphasize that we all have this ability, no matter how bad things are,

to drop into your body, to drop into some reservoir of calm, to not be so caught up for a few nanoseconds. And just invoking that phrase in your mind might help. It has for me, even in the weeks since I first heard it from Devin, Tatra Majatata, it's like some sort of incantation or spell that you can use on yourself to be like, all right, things suck right now, but I have the capacity to breathe. I don't need to be swamped 24 seven.

There is within me the ability to become for a few seconds. Two more skills. And these are pretty quick. Number seven is never worry alone. I picked this phrase up from Robert Waldinger, who I think got it from somebody else. Robert is the head of what's called the Harvard Study for Adult Development, which is the longest running study in science, I believe, where they've been looking

at people, several generations of people in the Boston area. And the idea is to figure out what leads to a long and healthy life. And there's just one data point that comes screaming out of this long study, which is that the most important variable for long and healthy and happy life is not sleep or exercise or achieving ketosis or whatever. It's the quality of your relationships.

And very few people are selling you that on Instagram, but it is the most important variable. It is often overlooked. And so in the middle of a tough election, I find it incredibly helpful to be pretty frequently texting or calling my friends and asking what they think. What are they doing? What's their take on this? For me, this just gives me a buffer

against overwhelming stress. And this is born out in the data. The people with the strongest relationships in this Harvard study for adult development were the most immune to stress and stress is what kills us. So never worry alone. Finally, number eight, self-compassion.

You may have heard me say this before, but the hardest part of personal growth or personal development, whatever you wanna call it, is remembering. You can listen to a podcast like this, you can read a great book, you can go see somebody speak, and you hear really enlightening things, and then you get sucked right back into the habit patterns.

But the good news there is that you don't need to kick your own ass if you're forgetting to apply the advice you're hearing here or anywhere else. Understanding is completely natural to fall off the wagon, to apply the advice you're hearing here or anywhere else. Understanding is completely natural to fall off the wagon. And that's where self-compassion comes in. I probably should have defined it. Self-compassion is a field that was really invented and pioneered by an incredible researcher

named Kristin Neff at the University of Texas. And the idea is that many of us talk to ourselves like a drill sergeant. We're very hard on ourselves. We're unforgiving. We would never talk this way to our friends or our kids, or hopefully we wouldn't. But if you can learn how to talk to yourself the way you would talk to a good friend or a little kid, a mentee, that has been shown through Kristen's research to make people more effective, to help them establish habits, to help them have their resilience to finish projects, to achieve their goals. Self-compassion is incredibly important

in the middle of a dumpster fire of a presidential election. You can have the goal to pursue some of these healthy habits that I've listed. Some days you're gonna lose your temper or you're not gonna meditate or whatever it is and that's cool. Let me leave you with one last phrase from the world of self-compassion. The preeminent question that proponents of self-compassion and I guess I would now consider myself one of them. The preeminent question they would like to

get you to ask yourself on the regular is, what do I need right now? What do I need right now? Do I need to keep reading Twitter? Do I need to kill myself in order to finish this next piece of work? Do I need to sit through this annoying conversation with my uncle who sees things very differently than I do? What do I need right now? If you let this be your North Star through these next couple of months, I suspect it will make everything much easier. All right, those are the things I'm doing to keep my shit together in the middle of this presidential election. Again, I want to emphasize you don't

have to do all or any of these things. The point of this podcast is not to add things to your to-do list that is going to further stress you out. It's to give you some tools that you can take or leave. And again, I want to encourage you to test them out in the laboratory of your own mind. They work for me, but they may not work for you or some of them may work for you. Others may work better. And speaking of that, I want to add that we are going to launch very soon a lengthy series of episodes right here on the show to help get you through what is coming

at us through the course of this election. We're going to be doing episodes on how to handle anger, including your own anger and the anger of other people, the dangers of cynicism, the value of intellectual humility, the value of cynicism, the value of intellectual humility, the value of equanimity, how to handle conflict. The idea is we're going to try to give you not just the eight skills that I talked about today, but many more that can help you deal with a tricky time. Before I let you go, I do want to ask a favor, which is this is the first time we've done a podcast like this, which is where it's just me, no guest talking.

I would love some feedback so you can hit me up on Twitter X or on Instagram, or I'll put a link to an email address where you can send feedback to the team. Let us know if you want us to do more things like this. Yeah. So thank you for listening. Thanks to the whole team who worked so hard on this. Specifically want to shout out DJ Kashmir and Tara Anderson who are working on this episode, but of course that applies to everybody on the team. They say about there

If you like 10% happier and I hope you do You can listen early and ad-free right now by joining Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple podcasts. Prime members can listen ad free on Amazon Music. Before you go, tell us about yourself by filling out a short survey at Wondery.com slash survey.