Ten Percent Happier with Dan Harris - How To Work With Insomnia, Pain, and Your Mom's Voice in Your Head | Jeff Warren

Episode Date: February 13, 2026

A live Q&A session with meditation teacher Jeff Warren, where Dan and Jeff tackle some of the hardest questions in meditation and life. Jeff Warren is a meditation teacher, author, and co-founder of the Consciousness Explorers Club. In this live session recorded on Zoom with subscribers to the 10% with Dan Harris app, Jeff and Dan take questions about insomnia, chronic pain, caring for aging parents, existential fears for loved ones, and what to do when your meditation practice feels stuck. We talk about: How to get equanimity around existential fears for your kids (which Jeff calls "the single hardest thing in human life") Why acceptance is a terrible word and equanimity is better The difference between doomsday spirals and what's actually happening right now Practical strategies for insomnia and chronic pain (including why your goal shouldn't be eight hours of unconscious sleep) What to do when you feel stuck in your meditation practice (hint: the plateau is normal) Three strategies for turning down the volume on your constant mental narrator Jeff also introduces the practice of asking your meditation a question—literally seeding a question in your mind during practice and seeing what bubbles up. It's surprisingly effective for creative blocks and getting unstuck. These live sessions happen every week in the 10% with Dan Harris app, where you can meditate with Dan and guest teachers and ask questions in real time. Get the app at danharris.com — there's a free 14-day trial. Join Dan's online community here Follow Dan on social: Instagram, TikTok Subscribe to our YouTube Channel Thanks to our sponsors:  LinkedIn:  Spend $250 on your first campaign on LinkedIn ads and get a $250 credit for the next one. Just go to linkedin.com/happier. To advertise on the show, contact [e-mail] or visit https://advertising.libsyn.com/10HappierwithDanHarris

This is the 10% Happier Podcast. I'm Dan Harris. Hello, my fellow suffering beings, how we doing? We've got a conversation today with one of my best friends and favorite meditation teachers, Jeff Warren. We talk about insomnia, chronic pain, how to turn down the volume on your inner critic, how to handle the existential fears that many of us feel for our loved ones, especially our kids, what to do when you feel stuck in your meditation practice, and the difficulty that many of us face when we're caring for our aging parents. What you're about to hear is me and Jeff taking questions live from subscribers to my new

app, which is called 10% with Dan Harris. We do these live sessions every week on video where we meditate and then take your questions. And if you sign up for the app, you can join us in real time. To get the app, go over to Danharis.com. There's a free 14-day trial if you want to try it before you buy. All right. Here's my conversation with Jeff Warren. The best B2B marketing often gets wasted on the wrong people.

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Spend $250 on your first campaign on LinkedIn ads and get a $250 credit for the next one. Just go to LinkedIn.com slash happier. That's LinkedIn.com slash happier. Terms and conditions apply. Right before I recorded this ad, I was. in my closet, looking around for what I was going to wear tomorrow. I've got a family lunch, and I was a little disappointed to see that my favorite pair of pants, literally my favorite pair of pants for two years now, they're unavailable. I think they're still in the laundry. You know who makes those pants? Quince. Quince has the everyday essentials that I love

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Yes. This one's from Rebecca. Meditation is very helpful in managing my anxiety about life and well-being. Acceptance works. When anxious about the well-being of my child, however, it is actually triggering. acceptance that is, I think. How do we get equanimity around existential fears for our kids?

Jeff, just to broaden the question for those who don't have kids, you know, around anybody that you love and feel responsible for. Yeah, I mean, it's the hardest thing. I would say it's the single hardest thing in human life. That question.

Thanks for asking the single hardest thing in human life. It's a practice. It's an endless life practice. every parent, every human with any relationship will know that, well, however old you are. Sometimes people get hung up on the word acceptance. I mean, it's not the best word to use. That's why I prefer to use something like equanimity or think of it as this is the situation.

Being able to truly recognize that this is what's happening, that's what the acceptance means. It's like, this is a real struggle. This struggle is actually happening. This is actually here. I'm not going to try to avoid it. but also I'm not going to endlessly feed on it and obsess over it. It's more like, can I just be present with this exact clear seeing of how the suffering is? And from that place of just like accepting that this is what's happening because it is what's

happening, then what is the response? It's like you can hear that a million times, but then you have to try to put it into practice. And that's where that lives. I have a regular practice outside of my seated practice for that reason so I can come into the practice of going, okay, this is my experience. This is the breaths. These are the sensations. This is what's here. Can I really let myself be with what's here? Can I not fight against what's uncomfortable? Can I not try to grab onto some way to secure myself? Can I really be there? From that training, when I'm in front of my kid and they're having a hard time, that's the thing I'm trying to implement. I wish my kid had an easier time in life. I wish my six-year-old had less suffering, but he has suffering. This is how it is for him. So I have to accept that's the case.

And then when I'm really present with him, I find I have better responses around what I can do and I can begin to implement some of what I'm learning in this life. I mean, I'm just trying to be dead honest because I feel like I'm right in the middle of that too. And I'd be interested in here with the wisdom of the group says, but that's what I do. This really is not easy.

It's where the rubber hits the road in many ways in practice. It's easy to practice with joy. It's relatively easy to be mindful of an itch in meditation, but when it's worrying about somebody you love and you can't really control how things are going to go, that is hard. And that's the reason why we keep coming back to do this practice. What I have noticed is that I can get into these. real doomsday spirals about things that are based on what I see happening. I'm like, I project

into what it look like for his future. I project what his experience is. And those are mind states. Those are like, there's our passing convictions that you live inside and they feel so authoritative. And if I can back out of the story of that and just come into being, well, what's actually here? That is the practice again and again and again. That is why we meditate. Interestingly, if I'm less infected, I guess, with my own convictions about how things are, then I have a cleaner way of responding to my little guy and actually often it creates better patterns of relationship and even helps him feel better. So I think being able to approach as much as possible, these people in our lives with more of a sense of kind of presence and spaciousness, that also is enormously

supportive. And which isn't to say that there aren't endless other resources and perspectives around this, but then we could be more available for those from that place. very helpful Jeff. Marie writes that she's got a nightly struggle with insomnia and chronic pain. Anything to say on that score, Jeff? Yeah. There are so many different ways to work with pain, and it's one of those things where you have to kind of do a little bit of experimenting.

I'm actually going to be writing a post about this, but some people find to what we were just talking about, that there is the physical pain, and then there's the kind of stories, and this is definitely true with insomnia that happens, you know, you're not getting enough sleep. Then the stories about, oh, you're not getting enough sleep and how screwed you're going to be the next day.

And all of that, the way they chain out and get bigger and bigger and bigger, then create more cascading stress hormones, which prevent you to sleep less and increase the pain. And so to be able to notice all of that happening and back down into the actual experience can be helpful. And then it's like, well, what can you do around the actual pain? Like some people find going right into it, the very center of it and trying to stay. and trying to stay with the heart of it can actually begin to, they start to notice that a lot of the discomfort happens in the radiation,

the radiating around it and that bringing it down is more helpful. Other people find that that creates too much intensity so that they need a really good distraction. They can find that they have a natural interest in doodling or in this, that they can pour their attention in that and that helps. And then doing self-compassion practices can really help. That's around the pain. I mean, even if you Google different meditations response to pain like

my teacher Shinsen had a great book called Breakthrough Pain with all of these really good pain strategies. But just to say on the insomnia tip, I think I mentioned this last time, but having a framework that my objective at night is not to get eight hours of solid unconscious sleep, but instead to get eight hours of rest or whatever it is, like I'm going to, I don't have to be asleep for all of it. But if I wake up in the night, if I can let myself settle and find some just almost like meditate in the night, then you can still get a lot of the restorative benefits of that kind of that nighttime rest period

without being unconscious. So that's been helpful for me too. Jeff, just on an audio tip, is there somebody clanking or is there some sort of knocking a pen on the table or something? Oh, this chair might be. Ah, okay.

This chair is kind of loud. Hold on. Eric, everybody. Not a huge deal, but thank you for doing that. Just one thing on the, and I think I said this, Last time I have pretty bad insomnia. I have to get up super early tomorrow at 545,

and I know what I'm going to do to manage that is tell myself whatever sleep I get is fine. I've been through many, many days of zero sleep, and I've always been fine. And just calming my nervous system by reassuring myself that my amount of sleep tonight, even though I've got something important to do tomorrow, is not a referendum on my overall fitness and health or on how I will do tomorrow, I'll do fine because I've done fine before with little to no sleep. And just saying the thing to myself that I would say to my kid or any of you, if you were in that situation, is massively helpful.

And on pain, I don't want to pretend to be an expert on this. One little thing that I picked up from Joseph Goldstein is just, and I'd be curious, Jeff, what you think of this. zeroing in on and being mindful of the unpleasant feeling tone of the situation. So just to step back in Buddhism, everything that arises has a feeling tone associated with it. Any sensation, mental or physical, is either pleasant or unpleasant or it's neutral.

And so if it's pleasant, we want more. If it's unpleasant, we don't want it. And if it's neutral, we zone out. And so just noticing, oh, unpleasant, just tuning in just to the unpleasant, instead of just labeling it as unpleasant instead of proliferating out on the stories about how this pain is just going to get worse.

I'm always the guy who's pain. How am I going to deal with this? Does that make sense, Jeff? Oh, yeah. It's hugely helpful. It's all part of the same move, which is to disembed from the inevitability of things because so much of the suffering comes from the sense of inevitability.

It will always be this way. Just any way to kind of pop out of that. And so whether you're noticing, quality of the sensation, whether you're noticing whether it's pleasant or unpleasant, whether you're noticing a story. All of that has the same effect, which is to give us a little bit more space and to realize that we're not as subject to what's happening in the moment as we had previously imagined. And that's the freedom of practice. A pre-submitted question here from Louis or Lewis. I can never decide how to pronounce that.

Can you comment, Jeff, on the link between focus in meditation and focus in peak performance in sports or other activities? Yeah, I think they're the same skill. I mean, meditation is a bunch of skills gathered together. So you have the getting more clear, you have the accepting what's happening in the moment, you have the quality of kind of appreciation, but primarily what you have is concentration.

We have a capacity to choose what we want to pay attention to. It's the most important human capacity. What you pay attention to becomes your life. And so meditation is the practice of choosing what you want to pay attention to and then committing to that. So there's this first you select. Are of the many things you could be paying attention to? You select something and then you kind of commit to it and you let your focus pour into it. In sports and all the stuff when people talk about flow or people talk about being in the zone,

it has to do with there's our high states of concentration where you're paying attention to something that's not your worries. And the more you, and what's really interesting here is the more you gather or you recollect the pieces of your attention, the waving strands, the more you bring them into one direction, the more inherently fulfilling it gets. And conversely, the more times attention splits, the less inherently fulfilling anyone strand. So the reason it's so fulfilling to get absorbed in music and art and sports and your work is because of that concentrated quality. So, and all that's to say, when you're meditating and you're practicing, concentration, that capacity to concentrate gets bigger in other areas of your life as well. So there's a direct correlation there. It's also a recipe for happiness. There's so many ways that meditation is a training around happiness. One of the ways is this concentration piece like, what are you doing where you're losing track of time?

That's something you should do more. No matter whatever the circumstances are in the rest of your life, find ways to like drop your attention and lose track of time and that's just in medicine for the nervous system. Yes. Yes. Another question from online here. This is from Mary. I started meditating as relief for depression a couple of years ago. It's been tremendously helpful, but I feel like I'm stuck in my meditation practice just going through the motions. Any tips on moving forward? Yeah, well, I mean, the first tip is noticing that's happening and normalizing the plateau. It's always like that. You start with the, it's a new skill. It's kind of novel. There's this contrast between before and

after. It's exciting. You have momentum. and meditation practice can be really, there's an upslope sometimes, but there can be this real period of kind of honeymoon period. And then it's like, all right, now I'm used to it, and the contrast is less huge. And so much of this part when you're in the plateau is about just that kind of confidence of like coming back to the cushion again and again,

like, you know, that statue of the Buddha, whether it's rain, snow, leaves, sunshine, still you sit. So I would say like staying with the practice despite the plateau as part of it, it will change. And this is a good time to consult with someone who maybe knows your practice or get a little bit of extra advice because it can happen that we do get kind of in cul-de-sacs. I would want to get a little more information about your practice, like what you're paying attention to, the way you're paying attention. Because there may be ways to just shift up either the object or the way you're meditating that can create, that can unblock something. And that's also true. And that's why, you know,

and you can get insights that way also from just reading Dharma books or doing things like this or hearing other people report on their practice. I wish I could give something more conclusive, but that would be what I would say about that. That's great. Makes me think that one service that this nascent operation could eventually provide is the opportunity to speak one-on-one to a teacher occasionally. Super valuable.

Or be listening to other people speaking one-on-one or not one-on-one or speaking in a group because then you're like, oh, yeah, that happened to me. And that's why I think also trying different techniques a little bit. That's like why trying different kinds of meditations can be helpful. Like notice when you're doing different ones, you're doing a bunch of guided practices, well, which are the ones that have seemed to click are working more? And what is it about that? And then do them a little bit more. And you can get into a good stream that way. Yeah, I mean, I think even for these sessions, these live guys,

meditation and Q&A sessions, we haven't figured it out yet, but we're going to start bringing people on from the audience and letting them talk to the teacher directly. Because I think there's enormous value, not only for the person, as you just indicated, the value is not just for the person asking the question, but it's for everybody else who gets to listen in because even though you might not think it, actually, there's going to be something useful in there for you. Yeah, and actually, can I say one more thing, too? Please. Something about the inner teacher. The most important teacher in all of this is the quiet. It's in you. And that sometimes just spontaneously to the act of getting settled, you can get insights about, oh, where there's an impasse or there's something blocked. And you can

also do this more explicitly by at the beginning of your meditation, ask, you know, drop in a question like, you know, I'd like to understand more about where I'm blocked in practice or what is it that I need to know about my meditation. And you kind of just drop it in and let it go. And it's, It's like you kind of planted this seed in your subconscious and you sit, you get quiet. You'd be amazed. Like the amount of insights to things that just come up spontaneously through you without needing to talk to anybody else. If you haven't tried that in a practice, I would recommend everybody try that in some way or another and just see what happens. Yeah, Joseph has recommended that very thing to me, specifically as it relates to creative blocks.

You know, you're in the middle of writing. You don't know how do you end chapter two? I'm saying that because I had that very question today. How do I end chapter two? And, you know, you seed the question in your mind, sit for a while. I mean, it's kind of like you may not get the meal you ordered. Exactly. Something will come.

Another question here that was pre-submitted. Leonie, how can I turn down the volume on the constant narrative in my head? Sometimes it's evaluating. often it's just commentary, but it feels increasingly intrusive. It seems to take up so much space and gets in the way of just experiencing what is. Yeah. Well, it does because you're doing, you're meditating. You're meditating on your constant stream in your head.

You've chosen the terrible meditation object, as we all do. We are all meditating all day long on, we're just choosing to meditate on all this agonizing stuff in our head. So you're in really good company, and I've found the single, you know, the two primary, three primary strategies, three primary meditation strategies. You can choose what works best for you. They all work to some degree or another. One is replace the inner talk, the agonized inner talk with more friendly messaging.

You know, you do a loving kindness practice. May I be well, may you be well? You just start to like, you substitute different phrases in. That's a legit way to go. Second is you choose to pay attention to something else. That stuff's happening. But, you know, there's only so much real estate in consciousness. So instead of putting all of your attention in that real estate,

you put your attention on the real estate of the brass, the real estate of that sound of the hum and the heat vent. And the more you bring to it, the more you find those other strands cool out. They may still be there in the background, but they don't have as much robustness. And maybe the one I'd most recommend, based on the vibe of the person who asked the question,

I would say go directly into the thinking and get really curious about what those thoughts are made of. When you are listening to the narrator, first of all, where are you hearing it? Then more by your right ear, your left ear, more down below. Where is it happening spatially if that makes sense? What is the tone? Is it urgent? Is it frenetic?

Whose voice is it? Is it your voice or does it kind of sound like your mom's voice or whatever, your grade three teacher? Just get curious about it is it's just a sensory object. Our thoughts are like inversions of our sensory. experience. Thoughts happen. There's visual components. There's auditory components. They're somatic components. So kind of go into the thinking and get really, really, really curious about it. And I have practices like that on my substack, and we have one in our book where you just basically

deconstruct the thoughts. And I'm telling you, for some people, it's a revelation. Because even just the act of turning towards them and getting curious about them, it often actually just cools out a lot of the thinking. So not only are you able to deconstruct the narrator or or the problem or whatever it is, sometimes now it doesn't even show up at all. And so now you have this tool of just like turning with curiosity towards your thoughts can be one of the things that cools out. Now, not always,

but there is many, many things that can emerge from turning towards your thoughts that are very unexpected and quite liberating. So that's what I'd say about that. Yeah, I mean, Joseph often recommends that you just ask the question, what is a thought? Yeah.

Because investigating that gets you right at this, this whole and often confusing idea of non-self, the self-being illusion. What the thoughts feel so real and so authoritative, but if I look for where is this thinking, who's doing it, who's receiving it? There's some fruitful not finding there.

Profoundly. And the only thing I would add to that is thoughts, you're noticing a thought, they're not just happening. They seem to be happening for someone, to someone. So you can look and go, well, where is this person, who are they happening to?

You know, and you kind of like do this 180 and you look back and go, where are they happening to? And you realize there's nothing you can find in there that they're happening to. It's like the thought is happening and then there's a feeling of you behind your eyes. A bunch of visual stuff is happening to the bunch of sensations of your eyeballs. There's no you in it. Some people love that and find that deeply liberating. It's like, oh my God, there's nothing to take personally in here.

The part that's most intimately you is just all of it's happening kind of in space. So if you look at like Zog Chen teachings in Tibetan Buddhism around the space of mind, those kinds of teachings can be really helpful around like not taking thoughts personally. And then they just become this hilarious thing happening as part of the creativity of nature. Just to say, I find everything you just said, Jeff, super helpful. And I know there are some people listening who are like, what the fuck is he talking about? That's also fine. Like you're not a bad meditator if this is confusing to you. What I recommend to people is to play with this very lightly and don't worry about any result or insight. It's just just knock on the door every once in a while

and don't worry about any specific outcome. Let's see if I can sneak one more question in. This is from Thomas. I'm struggling now and have been for months with one parent who is sliding into dementia and is anxiety written and the other who is trying to valiantly hold things together but lacks empathy and often loses it and speaks in a demeaning fashion to their partner. How could I better deal with this very difficult situation providing enough support to the one parent, but not get too exhausted because I get sucked into their world and then calling the other parent on their abominable behavior while also acknowledging all the shit they're going through? Does that make sense the way I read it, Jeff?

Absolutely. And just, is it Thomas? Thomas, yeah. Oh man, just that is such a hard situation. And so first, just my feel you is self-compassion to start. Like this is a very, very hard situation to be in. Of course, compassion for the people you're caring for. There is no perfect way through this situation,

at least from what I can tell and to my friends who are dealing with similar kinds of things. It's like it's about doing the best you can and the best you can do will get better if you're able to pull back and take care of yourself to whatever degree you can take care of yourself. And by that, I mean some activity where you can settle the intensity of the situation and let it settle inside you and underneath you and you can kind of come to center and then you can come back into that situation with a little bit more presence. From that place, there'll be more clarity around the right time to have the right conversation with the right parent if indeed that time ever comes.

I've noticed that with family members, if I go in with an agenda around talking about something then or at a right time or whatever, it almost always goes pear-shaped. It has to be more like, for me, it's been like drop the agenda, just be a kind of compassionate presence.

And often from that space, opportunities emerge to be able to mediate more skillfully. But, you know, the more you can do the self-care for yourself to settle and just to come in there and be in a place of kind of greater grounded, availability, I think the better it goes. But it's just a really, really, really hard situation. And I was just talking to a friend who's got a young autistic son and they're just, it's a really hard situation. It's going to be a really hard situation for a long time.

So he's a meditator. He knows that what he has to do and what his partner has to do is just they got to take time for themselves to build up capacity because it's going to be a long haul. On this situation with a parent, I relate to it. I had this moment, as you is actually a scene that I'm including in my next book five years ago where I had to drive my parents one of my parents not my mother has dementia um I had to drive my my mom and dad from their apartment in Boston to this assisted living facility that I had my brother and I had chosen for them near me in the suburbs of New York and it was just this like head splitting role reversal here I am like at the wheel literally and figuratively uprooting them from their lives.

after having been, you know, in the reverse situation where they're in the front seat and I'm in the backseat and I'm in this situation where they're in the backseat bickering a little bit. I've got their cat in a cat carrier strapped into the, in into the front seat. She's screaming the whole ride. This is a four hour ride. She's screaming. This is like cabin is filled with feline eulations and like my mom and dad kind of complaining about what's on the radio and when's lunch and this guy. making a mess and it was just like this total role reversal from when I was seven and in the

backseat and I just had this moment of like I'm going to send everybody including the cat and myself meta yes I'm just going to go through may you be happy may you be free from suffering which is a cousin of meta or loving kindness it's compassion or Karuna that practice helped me stop trying to control the situation, jarred me out of my profound self-pity, and just gave me the golden fruit of patience. It was very, very helpful. It didn't fix anything.

It just kind of helped me get right inside so that I could just manage the ups and downs of the moment. Does that make sense what I'm saying, Jeff? Oh, my God. It's beautifully said. Beautfully said, brother. The sacredness of this. life. These are the people. These are the challenges. This is the reality. Can I lean into it? Can I

embrace it and like not have this, you know, it's like kind of a broken heart of nature of reality. It's so much bitter sweetness. And you need both ends to feel the full. Here's what it is. Yes, the poignancy of the whole thing. I mean, that's why we show up and do this practice so that we can train for those moments and for all moments, frankly, the good one. you want to be more there for them to savor them, make them last a little bit longer, and the shitty ones you want them to last a little bit less long, and you want to be as nimble and supple as possible.

So that's the point of this practice we all do, and then supercharge it all by practicing together, which Buddha had this insight 2,600 years ago, validated by modern science that, as I often say, life is better and easier in the carpool lane. So, Jeff, Thank you for being so awesome generally and in response to these questions. Thank you.

Thank you all for being here. It's enormously meaningful to me to see all of your faces. So thank you. Me too. I love you guys. Me too. Friends, you don't have to do it alone. Come to these things.

Yes. Well said. It's all about, you know. Yes. Dan. Thanks, buddy. Love you, buddy. Okay.

Bye, buddy. Peace. Big thanks to Jeff. Don't forget to check out my new. where you can hear lots of guided meditation from Jeff and many other amazing teachers. You can get the app if you go to Dan Harris.com. There's a free 14-day trial. Finally, thank you very much to everybody who works so hard on this show.

Our producers are Tara Anderson and Eleanor Vassili. Our recording and engineering is handled by the great folks over at Pod People. Lauren Smith is our managing producer. Marissa Schneiderman is our senior producer. DJ Kashmir is our executive producer. and Nick Thorburn of the band Islands wrote our theme.