The Dr. Hyman Show - Is One Minute of Meditation Enough? with Dan Harris

Episode Date: January 9, 2019

How did a skeptical journalist find his way from depression and panic attacks to a more balanced, mindful life? Meditation. For a long time, meditation was sold in a way that made many people wary of its actual benefits. But now, we know this practice of sitting calmly, focusing on the breath, and watching thoughts come and go can actually produce physiological shifts in the brain and in our ability to cope with the stressors of life. Our guest on today’s episode of The Doctor’s Farmacy, Dan Harris, walks us through his own journey into meditation and the amazing payoff it’s had in his life. Dan is an Emmy Award-winning journalist and the co-anchor of ABC's Nightline and the weekend editions of Good Morning America. He is the author of two New York Times best-sellers, 10% Happier & Meditation for Fidgety Skeptics: A 10% Happier How-to Book. He went on to launch the 10% Happier podcast and an app called 10% Happier: Meditation for Fidgety Skeptics.

Welcome to the doctor's pharmacy. That's F-A-R-M-A-C-Y, a place for conversations that matter. I'm Dr. Mark Hyman, and today's guest is an extraordinary man who's broken out of his skeptical world to invite himself into a world that isn't typically where a journalist would go as a skeptic, And it's the world of meditation. Dan Harris is an Emmy Award winning journalist. He's a co-author. Sorry. Dan Harris is an Emmy Award winning journalist and the co-anchor of ABC's Nightline and the weekend editions of Good Morning America. He's the author of two New York Times bestsellers, 10% Happier. And I once got interviewed with you on the show for that. And I gave you my book, which was about eating healthier.

And I said, if you do this, you'll be 20% happier. Thank you for that. And I gave you my book, which was about eating healthier. And I said, if you do this, you'll be 20% happier. Thank you for that. And also meditation for fidgety skeptics. I would, not exactly me, but I'm a little fidgety, but not necessarily skeptic. A 10% happier how-to book.

And he's also launched his 10% happier podcast, which is amazing. You should all listen to that. And an app to help people with meditation, 10% happier meditation for fidgety skeptics. He lives in New York with his wife bianca and their son alexander and their three aspca cats so welcome dan thanks for having me appreciate it okay well first met you

at mind body green event in a spa in arizona and uh you were speaking about your experience on television having a panic attack in front of five million people and I thought it was fascinating that a you know independent-minded skeptical New York sort of journalist would be at a touchy-feely wellness event in Arizona at a spa but you were there and you told an extraordinary story about what changed you from being someone who was anxious and depressed and and had this panic attack on national television to someone who's learned about how to access a different part of the mind and how did that happen and tell us about the experience on television and then how do you

get into this doorway of meditation well the meditation the panic attack was key because it really set me off on the road to finding meditation the story of the panic attack was key because it really set me off on the road to finding meditation. The story of the panic attack, which everybody always wants to hear, is that I came to ABC News when I was really young. I was 28. So that was kind of an intense experience for me. And my way of coping with my insecurities about being in such a high-pressure world at a young age was to become a workaholic. And shortly after I got to ABC News, there was a huge news event, which was 9-11. And being ambitious and idealistic and curious, I volunteered to go overseas to cover whatever was going to happen next and i then spent many years in war zones like

afghanistan and iraq and um i came home from a really long trip to iraq in right i said i think it was like six months before the invasion during the invasion and after the invasion it all was uh that whole period of time i was basically living in iraq and i got depressed when i came home and i didn't know i was depressed and um i did something incredibly dumb which is i started to self-medicate with cocaine and ecstasy which made me feel better temporarily and as they do yes yeah yeah it works i mean it doesn't really work but it does work on some level um it's like taking morphine when you have a broken ankle and thinking you're okay exactly exactly that's that that's a great analogy so i uh then i then i had a panic attack and i didn't

know why i had a panic attack it was on good morning america in the spring of 2004 i was on Good Morning America in the spring of 2004. I was on the air, and I was reading the news headlines that morning. There used to be a person on Good Morning America who would come on at the top of each hour and read the headlines. And we no longer have that position. But I had filled in in this job before, and I didn't have any reason to foresee what was about to happen, which was that I just freaked out. You can see it if you Google panic attack on live television. It's the first result. Yeah, I've seen the clip. Yeah, it's unpleasant.

Although what's interesting about the clip is that a lot of people, if you've ever had a taste of anxiety or panic, then those people know exactly what they're looking at and it's very anxiety-provoking to look at the clip. If you haven't, then you may think, oh, well well it's really not that bad um it doesn't make a difference really what it looks like but inside it was horrible for me and after i had the panic attack i went to a doctor who was an expert in panic

and he said he was asking me a bunch of questions to try to figure out what had happened. One of the questions was, do you do drugs? And I said, yes. And he's, you know, I often make the joke that he leaned back in his chair and gave me a look that communicated the following sentiment. Okay, moron, mystery solved. I think all he said was mystery solved. And he pointed out that it was that these drugs artificially raised the level of adrenaline in your brain. And it made me more likely to have a panic attack, even though I wasn't high on the air that morning. And I wasn't even using drugs that frequently.

My drug career was pretty intermittent. Anyway, so I had this panic attack that morning after I saw the shrink. I quit doing drugs. And because quitting doing drugs is not easy, I agreed to go see him once or twice a week for years that uh is what ultimately set me off on a long and winding and weird road that ultimately led me to meditation and i write about it a lot in 10 happier i won't regurgitate the whole story right now but the punch line is i uh started mean, I always thought meditation was ridiculous and had no desire to do it and no interest in it

and never really even thought about it. But to the extent that I did, I thought it was for crystal lovers and fans of Enya. Sorry, fans of Enya. I used to like Enya. He's not so bad. Well, okay. I was going to agree to disagree on that. It's good to do yoga too. I used to like Enya. She's not so bad. Well, okay. We can agree to disagree on that.

It's good to do yoga, too. I'm fine. I'm not even sure I agree with that. That's okay. No offense to Enya. I don't even remember. I pick on- You can do yoga to Barry White.

I don't know. You can do yoga to Barry White. Sure. Cold play. Anyway, what ultimately changed my mind was I saw the science. I'm not a scientist i'm not good at math um but my wife's a scientist my parents are both scientists and uh i was really convinced when i saw the science which is i don't want to you know you're did someone say hey dan

you should check out meditation or the diorama came to town you want to hear him talk like what was the trigger the long story is and i won't i won't make it too long but um i i had been assigned to cover faith and spirituality for abc news and uh i didn't want that assignment i was raised in the people's republic of massachusetts my parents are both atheists scientists um as often say, I had a bar mitzvah, but only for the money. So I was not... The envelope, please. Exactly. I was not interested in this stuff at all. Peter Jennings, my boss at the time, was really interested in the subject and wanted me to do it. So it actually turned out to be great for me. And I met a lot of interesting people and I saw my own ignorance about these issues. And I really sort of i didn't i

didn't join a church or go kosher or anything like that but i i was interested in the subject and that ultimately led me to reading a book by eckhart tolle oh the power of now i think it was a new earth that was the first book i read, which I thought was really annoying. And it was, you know, triggered me in all the predictable ways as a skeptic. He uses a lot of gooey language and pseudoscientific language about vibrational fields and stuff like that. But he was the first person I ever heard describe the fact that we have a voice in our heads. Yeah. This inner narrator that's just a voice in our heads. Yeah. This inner narrator that's just hammering all the time at us, mostly thinking about the past or the future.

The crazy ant in your head. Yeah, or the Buddha calls it the monkey mind. But I had never heard that theory before. And when I read that book, just to fight my overwhelming annoyance with him and his tone and some of his strange claims about how he lived on a park bench for two years in a state of bliss and blah, blah, blah. That was a major aha moment for me because I realized, okay, this is just intuitively true, A. And B, this theory about the human situation that we have this nonstop voice in our heads really explained why how i had a panic attack yeah because the voice in my head my ego my inner

narrator um is what sent me off to war zones without thinking about the psychological consequences then i came home and i got depressed and didn't even really know it and then did this dumb thing of self-medicating so that So that was really interesting to me. So I agreed. One of my producers had recommended that I read this book by Tully. So to her delight, I said, okay, let's go do a story on Tully. And I did. And I found him.

He's a very nice man, but I found him very frustrating in that a friend of mine has described Tully as correct but not useful. In other words, he doesn't tell you much to do he doesn't give you a lot of practical advice for dealing with the voice in the head this phenomenon that he describes so well i then spent a bunch of time sort of marinating in the self-help world and um looking around for answers to this question of what do you do about the voice in the head and that ultimately led me to meditation. My wife gave me a book about Buddhism written by a shrink here in New York City named Dr. Mark Epstein. Yeah. Who's written a series of beautiful books about the overlap between Buddhism and psychology.

And that is what pointed me toward meditation, which initially I didn't want to do. And then I started looking at the science. And then I started thinking, okay, maybe I'll try this. And as soon as I tried it, I realized, okay, this is not like hacky sack or lighting incense. It's not some hippie pastime. This is exercise for your brain. And around for thousands of years. Yes.

And it has a huge PR problem because it's the victim of the worst marketing campaign for anything ever. It's been sold to us the wrong way for a bunch of reasons that we can discuss. And I had this entrepreneurial, well, I had a personal selfish feeling of, oh, this would be really good for me. And I adopted it as a habit pretty quickly.

I mean, immediately, really. But the entrepreneurial feeling was, maybe if I write a book that you know uses the f word a lot and talks about this in a different way it would make it accessible to skeptics and so that's why i wrote the first book and then it went on to become a podcast and an app yeah 10 happier it's really true and it's it's happens without effort in other words you just have to do the practice it's like exercise you do the exercise and your body will get in shape whether you like it or not and just that happens in that way yeah no i i um i actually uh came at it in a different way through exploring eastern thinking i read thoreau's walden and in that there was a lot of you know asian and eastern

religious influence and upanishads and so i So I kind of navigated down there and actually studied Buddhism in college as my major. And essentially it's a phenomenology of the mind. It's a way of describing the operation of the mind, how we perceive things, the meaning we give to those things, how our beliefs determine our experience and suffering. And you can read about it all you want, but unless you begin to know your mind, which is what meditation helps you do, it like slow down what's going on it's not this like blank slate you close your eyes and you're in bliss and nirvana that's not how it goes right it's a very it's a very interesting way to sort of reset your relationship to yourself to your world your experience to the

meaning you give things uh and everything just sort of shifts whether you want to make it shift or not it's just the act of doing it. And I think a lot of people read meditation books, but don't. A lot of people read diet books and don't actually eat differently, right? So it's really about the practice. So I remember when I came back from Haiti after the earthquake, I was working in Port-au-Prince Hospital. It was just really rough.

And the 82nd Airborne there came in, and they said, this is worse than anything we've seen in Iraq or Afghanistan. Thisghanistan this is just horrific 300 000 dead 300 000 wounded and uh you know i came back and i was in that same state of panic and anxiety and unreality and disassociation how could the world not know what's really going on everybody's just in their little life and it really um it was really a very powerful shift in sort of understanding this anxiety and panic I'd never had before. So I can relate to what you're saying. I was there too. Yeah.

In Haiti. Oh, yeah. It was the worst thing I've ever seen. It was. I mean, I remember walking the first night. It was actually a 60 Minutes piece on it. We got off the plane with Paul Farmer and we went to the Port-au-Prince Hospital, a general hospital there.

My friend did that piece, Byron Pitts. Oh, yeah, Byron, yeah. Yeah, he was the guy. Yeah, so we came, and we went. I said, actually, I grabbed him, and I said, Byron, let's go to the back. And there was this area where the morgue was, and it was just full of bodies on the concrete,

just rotting in the sun. I saw Byron that night. And they were using forklifts to dispose of the bones. Yeah, yeah. It was unbelievably bad. It was rough. So I get it. And, you know, when you have that, it's like, how do you get out of that?

And a lot of people have different types of trauma and different types of stress. And, you know, the question is, you know, we all are inundated every day with massive amounts of inputs that cause our psychology to be affected our mood our energy our anxiety level our sleep and meditation seems to be a way to help people navigate through that in a way that's very powerful so what were the things that you noticed when you started meditating and what was the kind of meditation you did

uh can i swear you can um my the first thing i noticed the first data point that emerged was that i overheard my wife at a party telling friends that i was less of a shithead which i thought was interesting because that was even before i saw any benefit for myself that's hardly a swear that's uh yeah it'll get worse now that i have so uh there are two big benefits as i noticed showing up in my own mind after a couple of weeks really of doing and i was just doing five to ten minutes a day yeah that's it um and i really that's what i recommend people start with and i also believe one minute counts you know because time is the biggest in the second book i wrote i uh i was really trying to it was was a how-to book,

and I was really trying to figure out how do we get people over the hump from being interested in this to actually doing it. And the biggest obstacle, I believe, is time. Yeah. And so if you tell people, look, what I tell people is one minute counts and try to aim for daily-ish. Yeah. And what I've found, and we've tested this with, we do a meditation challenge every year

for the employees at Apple. Mm. And we, meaning the folks from the 10% Happier app, and we set it up as a way to, as, hey, do meditate, try to meditate for at least one minute, 25 out of 31 days in the month of October. And if you don't have that minute, you got to look at your life and figure out what's wrong. Absolutely. What we find is the buy-in rates are incredibly high. So we're actually, this challenge that we run for Apple, we're about to roll it out to the public.

So anybody can take the challenge starting in January. And so I see this as a really important sort of behavioral hack to tell people look i get it you feel time starved here's how to get over the hump um but anyway for me what i found was just after a few weeks of doing this the two big benefits are focus you know really what meditation is and and you asked me what kind of meditation so So when I talk about meditation, I'm talking about mindfulness meditation, which is derived from Buddhism but secularized and stripped of all the metaphysical claims and religious lingo. Really the beginning instruction is sit, close your eyes,

try to feel your breath coming in and going out. You don't have to breathe in a special way. Just feel the breath as it naturally occurs. And then every time you get distracted which is going to happen a million times you just start again and again and again and that noticing you become distracted and beginning again is like a bicep curl for your brain and it's what shows up on the brain scans of all the all these fascinating studies that have been done where neuroscientists look at the brains of people who meditate this is the mechanism by which or at least one of the mechanisms by which you change your brain and your mind and your life by extension

anyway focus uh was a huge thing for me because what meditation is is a focus exercise in many ways you're you're trying to focus on your breath and then every time you get distracted start again and start again and start again and studies have found that this simple exercise changes the part of the brain associated with attention regulation so for me focus was a huge win it doesn't mean i'm in you know impenetrably you know undistractable or something like that i'm still a twitter checking sort of uh email checking fool a lot of the time i just think i'm i'm less prone to that than i used to yeah the other but the bigger benefit is is called mindfulness which is in our world of health and wellness is such a huge buzz phrase buzz word i fear that often people use

the word without knowing what they're talking about so mindfulness really is it's an ancient word with a lot of different, and you know this from your days of studying Buddhism, it's, you know, the ancient word is sati in the Pali language, which was the Indian language that the Buddha spoke or said to have spoken. It actually has many meanings, but a very simple serviceable definition is the ability to know what's happening in your head without getting carried away by it yeah the mindfulness is just the scale of being able to see oh this this is anger that's coming up right now i don't have to be owned by it i don't have to

take the bait and act on it it's lowered emotional reactivity is essentially or another way of saying it would be emotional intelligence and that is incredibly useful to know you're angry less fights with your spouse for sure doesn't mean no fights with your spouse i mean again or how you show up in them absolutely absolutely and but but again i always want to give permission people for people to mess up this is the 10 ideas i think very powerful because it's not like you're going to start meditating and then you'll never have a fight with your spouse or you're never going to show up in one of those fights in a way that's really nasty and vindictive it just means you

may catch yourself earlier actually my friend Sam Harris who has a great podcast called waking up and he wrote a book about meditation called wakingaking Up, he has said, and I love this, that meditation doesn't mean you will never feel anger again, but it may cut down on the half-life of anger. You may catch yourself two minutes into a bout of fury rather than an hour into a bout of fury. And the amount of damage, as Sam says, that you can do in an hour of anger versus two minutes, I mean, that's just an incalculable difference and that's

really what meditation in my experience does it also helps you break the it seemed like unbreakable bond between your feelings your thoughts and your actions yes so often we conflate the what we have a feeling and that you know our thought and that creates a feeling and that creates an action when you realize that everything you think in your brain is not necessarily worth listening to you know you shouldn't believe every stupid thought you have basically meditation helps you see that and you can break down that space where really it used to be one it used to be thought feeling reaction and that that's a powerful set of tools to have in any work a walk of life whether it's your relationship whether it's work

or anything because it in my in my experience it's a it's a massive game changer because you're and this is the cliche this is like the only cliche meditation cliche that doesn't make me want to put a pencil in my eye it teaches you how to respond wisely to things instead of reacting blindly yeah because we have this non-stop conversation going on in our heads all the time that of course if we broadcast aloud people would think we're insane but we have this non-stop chatter and because we're unaware of it it owns us so every neurotic obsession that flits through our mind we just act it out blindly because we're not aware that this is just a thought what meditation does is force you into a collision with the

asshole in your head so that you you're not taking every shitty idea he or she is offering up to you and that is what stops you from you know eating the 75th cookie or saying the thing that's going to ruin the next 48 hours of your marriage or whatever and it makes a huge difference again we're not talking about infallibility here we're just talking about reduced levels of the your moron quotient so what's the dose because you know you talk about the one minute meditation and i get that it's a way to get people over the hurdle of starting but is it really effective and and for me i noticed that the first few minutes is like being in a wild ocean in a storm and then after a while it kind of calms down and things settle down and i got to i got to a much different space of of being aware uh and

and i think you know when you look at the science around meditators you've got richard davidson i know you've uh worked with and dailama has done all this research with the Tibetan Olympic meditators who meditated for nine years in a cave, for example, versus one minute here and there during the week. And their brains are different. They look different. Their brain waves are different. The shape and size of their brain is different.

Their behavior is different. Their happiness is different. So what is that sort of like Goldilocks dose that is really the right dose? We don't know. You know, I've asked Richie Davidson, the eminent neuroscientist who's really led the charge on bringing scientific tools to bear on these inner technologies of meditation and contemplative practices.

I've asked him and many other neuroscientists who have been looking at meditation, and we don't actually know. The consensus that I've been able to generate among these folks is if you were to do five minutes a day what i've been able to gather from these folks is that they are of the view that that would probably give you access to many of the advertised benefits of meditation um so i think that's the good news the better news and now i'm in the So I think that's the good news. The better news, and now I'm in the realm of opinion, the better news, in my opinion, is that one minute truly does count. Because what are we trying to do in meditation? We're trying to wake up from the

autopilot of being owned by this sort of malevolent puppeteer in our head, our ego. The monkey mind. The monkey mind, right? And so in a minute, can you sit and then try to focus on your breath and then get distracted immediately? And in that moment of seeing the distraction, what are you doing? You're waking up. You're waking up from this dream that we're in of just being controlled by this thought-producing machine in our head.

And I think that can happen in a minute. I know it can happen in a minute. Do I think it would be better to do more? Absolutely. I think if I could snap my fingers and say, yeah, everybody in the world is going to do five to ten minutes a day, I would, but I can't.

And we're dealing with the fact that we did not evolve. We did not evolve for healthy habits. Evolution didn't care about you flossing your teeth. Evolution cared about you getting your DNA into the next generation. And so we evolved for threat detection and finding sources of pleasure like mates and food. We didn't evolve to develop these long-term healthy habits. It's really hard we're wired for failure and so i'm always thinking of ways little hacks to get people over the hump

because the best way to create a habit is to access the benefits so that it becomes blazingly obvious you should do it not because somebody's telling you to do it because your life is better because you like the act of doing it and because your life improves as a consequence and so the little tricks i use are like one minute counts and daily ish etc etc and again we're finding and by we i mean my team at 10% happier we're finding that this really does work with people and so that's why i stick with it but you're absolutely right i think doing more would be better and of course as somebody who's done a not insignificant amount of meditation myself, it's totally clear that it takes a while for the mind to settle.

And especially, for example, I've done a few meditation retreats where that's all you're doing for 10 days. 12 hours a day. Yeah. And then you really see the mind settle and then when then actually you're accessing levels of happiness well-being contentment that were in my experience heretofore sort of unavailable i didn't even know they existed sort of better than the best drug for sure yeah i've done that too i've done those new come on you feel like you're on acid or something the world looks just so bright and yes clear and that's right it's really quite amazing the pharmacy we've got in there and

what's fascinating is in the west we've really focused on the outer world and mastering the outer world, science, technology, and we're good at it. We pretty much ignored the inner world, the science of the mind and the ability to actually work with it and control it and do things that are pretty stunning. And I don't know if you ever read this book. It's called The Way of the White Clouds by Lama Govinda, who was an incredible Austrian sort of man who went to the East

and became a Buddhist, and then he became a Tibetan Buddhist. And he catalogs in the 30s, and a time when it was before the Chinese sort of decimated Tibet, what these traditions were, what the practices were, what the powers they would get are from really mastering this inner technology. And I think we really have only sort of begun to scratch the surface of what that is. And it's happening in an interesting way. It feels like it's a meditation.

Forty years ago when I was doing it, it was weird and strange and bizarre and wacky. But now it's sort of mainstream. You look at sports teams like the Chicago Bulls under Michael Drozda and the Cubs and the Seattle Seahawks all meditating. You've got CEOs all meditating. Novak Djokovic yeah 50 cent I mean yeah it's really interesting do you have a practice I do yeah so I didn't for a long time I did when I was younger and then I didn't and then a number of years ago I kind of got connected to a friend of mine who sort of convinced me to try it again and I did yoga I do this i do that with anya playing yeah

well not always not for maybe 20 30 years i haven't but uh i like krishna das actually and and i and i started doing 20 minutes twice a day uh tm yeah which is it's a version of tm it's a vedic mantra based yes meditation uh and it was profound uh the quality of my energy my focus my happiness the ability to not be reactive to be present and clear to sleep better i just and now i'm sort of addicted to it because if i don't do it i don't feel as good so that's when it's got its hooks in you that's yeah the key point because you know you really notice a difference and your performance and your happiness and it's it's that it is that happiness because it's like okay well things don't bother you anymore you don't get stressed anymore it's like i was like how can we never get stressed

about anything like what's the point you know it's like i i just tend and there's some family stuff that does trigger me but other than that it's like if you think you're enlightened go home for thanksgiving right but it's it's a very interesting phenomenon when you start to do it on a regular basis you see the changes now there's a lot of science. When you start to do it on a regular basis, you see the changes. Now, there's a lot of science behind this, right? Richard's worked on this and others have worked on it. And what are some of the scientific benefits that you've become aware of? I think it's really important, and I'll talk about this,

to say that at the beginning that the science is really in its early stages. And some of the science is bad and sometimes the methodology yeah uh it's just the studies aren't rigorous and uh richie co-authored a book recently called altered traits yeah with daniel goldman daniel goldman um and they really tried to sort you know separate wheat from chaff in that book. And I think they did a really good job. So I think it's important just to know that sometimes people in my position, and I would, as you have described me as an evangelist, really at my core, that's I think what I'm trying to do is spread.

Most evangelists and journalists don't go in the same sentence. No, I know. They often don't. In fact, I would say almost never do right but the good news i'm trying to spread is is not metaphysical it's not um sectarian in any way it's just that there is a kind of exercise for the brain available to people and at the core of the proposition is that the mind is trainable yeah and we think we're stuck with the level of happiness calm patience emotional activity generosity creativity creativity

that we were born with that these are factory settings that can't be redigitized but in fact these are skills that can be learned and trained and that is a huge piece of good news and so that is what i'm trying out there trying to sell sell i mean sometimes in the crass sense of hey subscribe to my app or sell in the more high-minded way which i'm more comfortable with which is hey you should investigate these practices and see which one works for you and go for it sometimes people in my position who are evangelists hype the science in a way that i think is irresponsible so i just want to issue that caveat before i answer your question that being said i think what we can i think the right phraseology is there's an enough science to say

that it that that it strongly suggests that doing short daily doses of meditation can confer a pretty long list of tantalizing health benefits from lowering your blood pressure boosting your immune system um it's been shown to and the strongest science is really about anxiety and depression both of which i've suffered since i was a kid um and then there's the neuroscience which suggests it can rewire key parts of the brain i'll tell you about one study that was done at Harvard, 2010 or 11. This is the study that convinced my mom, who's a physician at Harvard, to meditate. And she is a hardcore skeptic of everything, especially anything her son is interested in. Why is that?

I don't know. But so what convinced her to meditate was a study at Harvard that they took people who never meditated before, and they scanned their brains to get a baseline sort of reading of their neurological activity. And then they had them do eight weeks of a little bit of meditation every day. And then they scanned their brains again after eight weeks. And they found that in the area of the brain associated with self-awareness and with compassion, the gray matter literally grew.

And in the area of the brain associated with stress, the gray matter literally shrank. the area the brain associated with stress the gray matter literally shrank it's amazing that's really compelling um and and there are a lot of neuroscience out there richie again is i think the leader in this field and he's done incredible work to show that meditation can make a real difference and you don't have to be an olympic meditator you don't have to be an olympic meditator and again it's not going to solve all of your problems it's not magic you have to do the work and it's not going to make you uh imperturbable i get pissed off all the time it's just you know it is i told you right before we sat down i was a little annoyed because i had to wait outside in the cold and so like i still am susceptible to negative emotions um i just find that you know as we said before that cutting down on the half-life can make a big difference.

That's huge. So you made it your mission to sort of go outside the typical journalistic framework and actually start to share this as something you really believe in and that you want the world to do. So if you were sort of king for a day and you could change people's lives, habits, laws,

what would you do? Would you make meditation mandatory learning in school as a basic reading, writing, arithmetic, and meditation? I'm worried about mandatory. Maybe that's the right move. Now I'm thinking aloud. It's a skill. It's a life skill.

It is a life skill. The reason I worry about mandatory is that I find that – so one of the rules that I've adopted for myself is that I never talk about meditation unless people ask me to talk about it so you come here and give me a microphone i'll talk about it until the cat i love talking about it but in my personal life i never talk i never bring it up because it's very annoying there's actually a great cartoon that was ran in the new yorker a couple years ago and i had two women having lunch and one of them says to the other i've been gluten free for a week and i'm already annoying uh and i think that is true for meditation people start doing it and then they start recommending it to everybody but this

this not so subtle undertone of the recommendation is you're broken right or you're you're not good enough if you don't do this thing and so i really try not to I'm an evangelist but I'm I am very careful about how I do it because I've learned the hard way that if you lecture people about it and I did this with my wife at the beginning it created a life sort of a long-lasting resistance and resentment on traumatized yeah so now I don't talk about it and I think she does some of it but I don't ask and so yes it really if i had my druthers would it be introduced in in um preschool and then taught all the way through school yes uh would it be taught in med schools and um in workplaces in basic training in the military?

Absolutely. But I just think you want to be ginger about how you do it because you can turn people off if you force them. I have less of a problem of forcing kids to do it, especially if their parents don't have objections, more of a problem when you start talking about grownups and how you introduce it. So, for example, people often ask me, I speak in a lot of corporations,

how can we introduce this in the workplace? And I say carefully because you don't you want to you want to offer it like you might offer a cold beer or something like that but you don't want to force it down people's throats because then they'll rebel yeah no we at cleveland clinic we actually brought someone in to train our whole team meditation i met with the surgeon Surgeon General, the last one, Vivek Murthy, and he basically got everybody in his Surgeon General's office to meditate every day. They take a break at 3 o'clock and they all meditate together. Wow, that's great.

Yeah, which is very impressive. The thing is, though, there may be a few people in the office who resent that or don't want it. Sure, sure. So you really have to make it voluntary. I don't know if they forced them, but I think most people were into it. And I was surprised how many people were into it in Cleveland Clinic. And these were people from all socioeconomic strata, you know,

from the medical assistants all the way to the doctors. And it was pretty interesting. And we set aside a meditation area in the office. We took one of the obesity exam rooms where they have these massive tables. And we changed that into the meditation room. And it's been really powerful. Yeah, I've been really surprised. For example, our experience.

Apple is an incredible company and we they're pretty secretive so i'm not allowed to say too much but in my in my experience working with apple um doing this meditation challenge for their employees um and and their employee base is incredibly diverse because you get people who work in the retail stores you get people who work in the retail stores, you get people who work in the corporate headquarters. I've been just blown away by the level of adoption when introduced in the right way as here, do this thing if you want. Do this thing if you want and here we're going to lower the barriers to entry in terms of the practicality and all that stuff. You find that lots of people want to do it. One of my concerns is that it's often people like us talking about meditation.

We're wealthy, white, Manhattan dwellers, and we probably both shop at Whole Foods, and we're probably no stranger to a SoulCycle class or whatever. And so my worry is that it can get ghettoized in that way, of this this rarefied air that you and i breathe but it's really important to point out that this is um this was not invented by whole food shoppers uh in the upper west side and i don't say that with any hate because i am somebody who lives on the upper west side and goes to whole food

um but this was invented thousands of years ago by people in the Indian subcontinent, and similar practices have been a part of every major organized religion, which is why we've made it a big, on my podcast and on the app, I make a big effort to get people of all different backgrounds and ethnic extractions, et cetera, et cetera, because we want to send the message. This is for everybody, not just the elite. And one of the side effects I think you're going to be writing about in your next book,

which is kindness. Yes. And it sounds like a little woo-woo, but it actually helps you be more loving. And one of the foundations of Buddhism is loving kindness. And it kind of emerges out of knowing yourself knowing your mind and being more compassionate can you chat just for a couple minutes yeah i mean i i'm really fascinated by the issue of kindness i think it also kind of needs a um a marketing revamp yeah it's not wimpy right it's not just that it sounds wimpy. For sure it does, potentially, in some cases.

But also it can just sound, there's like a finger wag. It sounds like an exhortation, you know, or you're being lectured to. Or it just sounds syrupy and boring. There haven't been a lot of self-help books around kindness that have sold. They're usually around weight loss or making more money or being happier. Kindness is, we want other people to be nice, but we don't necessarily see the benefit to ourselves. So I'm trying to reframe it more as actually your life will be better. I wrote a book, I wrote a chapter in my first book called The Self-Interested Case

for Not Being a Dick. and i think that's the right way to talk about it probably got to change the language a little bit especially on appeal to women but that's really what i'm thinking about in this new book and yeah there is a lot of there's a lot of research here that shows people who are kinder are more successful happier healthier more popular yeah and uh there's there are right ways and wrong ways to do this our mutual friend adam grant wrote an excellent book called give and take about the fact the difference between people who are wisely compassionate in the workplace and people who are sort of foolishly compassionate in the workplace the tibetans sometimes refer to this as idiot compassion

which is a great expression so you can do kindness the the wrong way in a way that does not redound to your benefit or perhaps anybody's benefit. But done correctly, meditation, I mean, kindness can be incredibly enriching. And the thing to know is that it's, through meditation, having that self-awareness shows you that it feels better to be nice. Just think about the moment of holding the door open for somebody, that moment of courtesy.

What does it feel like if you're paying attention? It feels good. Well, that feeling is infinitely scalable. It's huge. And that is what I, that's the way I want to start talking about this. I haven't figured it out. I love it. It's true. I mean, we are social beings. In fact, you know, E.O. Wilson wrote a book called The Social Conquest of the Earth, which is that we all need to work together and in altruistic ways to actually help us survive. And one of the things we know now scientifically is that the brain in the area of dopamine stimulation, which is what we get from our phone or from cocaine or drugs, it is activated by altruism. So our bodies and our brains are designed to get pleasure and satisfaction and even healing from kindness, which is kind of a crazy idea.

I think they call it the helper's high. Yeah, that's how I've lived my life. And Adam Grant has really picked up on something that I've sort of learned just by intuition, which is that if you are kind to people, if you help them with no sort of looking for something in return, that actually it's a big cycle that keeps coming back and back. And I've seen that in my own life over and over again. The less contracted I feel, the less needy I feel, the less grasping I feel, the more

generous I feel, the happier I am, the more good stuff happens just automatically. It's incredibly powerful and I don't know the mechanism. who knows but it works yeah yeah i mean i once had a friend of mine you know i don't understand why this great stuff happens to me she says well you've just done so much to help so many people over so many years and all that's coming back at you and i'm like right it sounds good yeah yeah so dan thank you so much for joining the doctor's pharmacy you've been listening to the doctor's pharmacy with dan harris who's uh taking us on an interesting road to understand meditation its effects on our mind our happiness our life our health and uh if you like this podcast please share with your friends and family anywhere you get your uh social media and take a moment to leave a comment we'd

love to hear from you and we'll see you next time on the doctor's pharmacy