The Happiness Lab with Dr. Laurie Santos - Calm Can Be Contagious

Episode Date: March 26, 2020

In normal times our minds can be filled with unhelpful thoughts, but during this crisis you might be finding it even harder to calm your anxious internal monologue. Meditation could be helpful.Dan Harris (host of the Ten Percent Happier podcast) had a panic attack while reading the news live on ABC - and found that meditating brought him a calm he'd never previously known. He tells Dr Laurie Santos how we can all use simple meditations to help us and our families during the pandemic.The show includes a guided meditation from Dr Santos. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Pushkin. that one filled with show tunes. More of you finding Gemini is because you know you always like them. More of you dating with intention because you know what you want. And you know what? We love that for you. Someone else will too. Be more you this year and find them on Bumble. Welcome to a special set of episodes of The Happiness Lab. The now global spread of coronavirus is affecting all of us. This disease has brought a host of medical, economic, and political problems. But it's also given us a ton of uncertainty and anxiety, which are beginning to have an enormous negative impact on our collective well-being. But whenever I'm confused or fearful,

I remember that looking for answers in evidence-based science is always the best way to go. And that's where I'm hoping this podcast can help. If your brain works anything like mine does, you may have spent a lot of this challenging COVID-19 crisis in a near constant state of mental rumination. My inner monologue has been constantly racing. From students and family members I need to check in on, to what's left in my pantry for dinner, to the latest scary statistics, to, oh no, did I just touch my face? My entire brain is like zip, zip, zip, zip, zip,

from one stressful thing to another. The continued uncertainty of this awful situation has made it nearly impossible for me to switch my thoughts off. And I know I'm not alone. One friend recently mentioned that even when she has gotten a chance to relax, to sit down with a good novel, she feels like she ends up reading the same sentence over and over again because her brain keeps jumping from one scary scenario to the next.

If we're going to make it through this collective crisis with our mental health intact, we need to find ways to keep all our ruminative thoughts under control. The good news is that modern science and ancient traditions have converged on an effective and completely free way to quiet our racing minds. That's the practice of meditation. If you've listened to past episodes of the Happiness Lab, you've probably already heard about the practice of meditation. If you've listened to past episodes of the Happiness Lab, you've probably already heard about the benefits of meditation. But today I want to talk with someone who's seen these benefits firsthand.

Someone who started out as a huge skeptic, but has converted to the power of mindfulness. And so I was super excited to welcome to the Happiness Lab, ABC News correspondent Dan Harris. He's the author of 10% Happier, How I Tamed the Voice in My Head, Reduced Stress Without Losing My Edge, and Found Self-Help That Really Works, A True Story. We'll start the episode with how Dan first came to this practice of meditation. So this was back in 2004. I was anchoring the news updates on Good Morning America.

was anchoring the news updates on Good Morning America. The main hosts of the show were Diane Sawyer and Charlie Gibson. Diane and Charlie said, okay, over to Dan for the headlines of the morning. And as soon as that happened, as soon as the red light went on, my body went into mutiny. I could feel my chest tighten. I could feel my lungs seize up. My palms were sweaty. My mouth went dry. But my mind, in reaction to what was happening physiologically, started to freak out. And so the more I freaked out psychologically, the more my body reacted. And the more my body reacted, the more my mind reacted. And it was just a death spiral. And I just couldn't breathe, which is a prerequisite for being a news anchor. And I had to do something that I'd never done before, which is quit right in the middle of my shtick. So yeah, that sucked. What was the follow-up after that? I mean, you never had one of these episodes before you go to your doctor and talk to him about it. So the first panic attack happened. Everybody asked me what was wrong. And I lied and said nothing. I went backstage and my mom called me and she said, you just had a panic attack. I didn't really do much about it. She hooked me

up with one doctor who I talked to on the phone and we didn't really do much about it. So I just carried on with my life and I was able to go on the show at the top of the next hour and I was fine. with my life and I was able to go on the show at the top of the next hour and I was fine. So I kind of got away with it. Then many months later, I had another one, but that was like a real wake up. So I then went to go see a doctor and he asked me a bunch of questions to try to figure out what was going on. And one of the questions was, do you do drugs? I said, yeah, I do do drugs. And he leaned back in his chair and gave me a very shrinky look, which communicated the following sentiment. Okay, asshole, mystery solved. So actually I should back up at this point, the drugs. I had spent a lot of time after

9-11 in places like Afghanistan, West Bank, Gaza, Israel during the Second Intifada. I was in Iraq many, many times. And when I came home from Iraq, after one six-month stint, I got depressed. And I didn't know I was depressed, and I didn't know what to do about it. So a friend of mine offered me some cocaine. I had never done drugs before. And I said, yes. And I really liked the cocaine. It made me feel better. But I was never high on the air. I wasn't high the mornings. I had panic attacks. So I didn't connect the two. But as soon as the doctor asked me about drugs, I made the connection. And he argued that it was enough to change my brain chemistry and make it more likely for me to have a panic attack. And so that is what really made me change my life.

And it was partly the drugs, but in some ways, the cocaine you were doing was a symptom of something else, right? In some ways, it was the workaholism plus the drugs, probably, right? I think it was ambition. Yes, I think you put your finger on it. You know, I had volunteered to go cover these wars after 9-11 without really thinking much about the psychological consequences. And yeah, it was an intense time. And I think it's fair to draw a straight line back to my desire to make a mark in the world. Right. Which was unique to you, I think, being an anchor in the midst of the post 9-11 world. But I mean, lots of us go through this where we feel like our work is everything and we have to be on all the time and do whatever is necessary, whether that's drugs or work 100 hours a week or I mean, this is not in some ways unique. So and so so I want to follow up on the story from there.

So, you know, your doctor tells you get off the drugs, but it sounded like after that, you still started searching for ways to kind of find a better path. So it actually a bunch of things happened after that fateful morning when I sat with that doctor in his kind of shabby little office. He didn't think I needed to go to rehab, but he definitely said I needed to quit doing drugs and that I needed to come see him once or twice a week indefinitely. So I did do that. famous news anchor named Peter Jennings. I mean, this guy at his peak was reaching 30 million people a night. And he was a very smart, interesting guy. And he asked me to start covering faith and spirituality, which I did not want to do. I was raised in the People's Republic of Massachusetts, and my parents are both left of Trotsky, academic physicians, atheists. As I often joke, I did have a bar mitzvah, but only for money. So I was not spiritually inclined.

And I told some of that to Peter and he said he didn't care. He wanted me to do it anyway. And it became great transformative assignment for me. I realized how ignorant I was about issues related to faith and spirituality. I made a bunch of friends. I spent a lot of time in mosques and mega churches and Mormon temples. And it was fascinating. That said, none of what I encountered spoke to me personally. I didn't, you know, join a church or go kosher or anything like that. But eventually, one of my producers, Felicia Baberica, she had been turned on to a self-help author by the name of Eckhart Tolle. And Eckhart Tolle was not somebody I had ever heard of, but Felicia said he might make a good story for me. So I did a little Googling,

and it turns out he's beloved by celebrities. Oprah has put copies of his book in every bedroom in every house she owns. So it struck me as weird enough for a good TV story. So I ordered one of his books. At first, the book just struck me as ridiculous you know he's using pseudo-scientific terms like vibrational fields and he's making these grandiose claims about how he had a spiritual awakening and lived on a park bench in the city of london for two years in a state of bliss and then i and then he started to unfurl a thesis about the human situation that i thought was so spot on his argument is that we all have a voice in our heads that chases you out of bed and is yammering at you all day long and has you

constantly wanting stuff, not wanting stuff, judging people, comparing yourself to other people, judging yourself, thinking about the past or thinking about the future to the detriment of, you know, whatever's happening right now. That just struck me as spot on true. And this thesis explained the most embarrassing moment of my life, that the panic attack was the result of me just being yanked around by this voice in my head. And that just struck me as a massive and important realization. And so that was sort of like point number one, where you sort of realized that there was this interesting take on the human condition that if we could just get control over this crazy voice in our head, we might live a better life and sort of flourish a little bit more. But the real step forward was when I think

you got a book from your wife, if I remember the story correctly, that really pointed you more towards meditation as a specific path to controlling that voice in your head. Yeah. So I was super confused when I read Tully's book because I couldn't see any actionable practical advice. It was just really frustrating. And I didn't know what to do about this. I ended up spending a bunch of time looking into the self-help world. I met a lot of people who promised that you can solve all of your problems through the power of positive thinking, which is not a possibility. Actively bad, actually, the research suggests. thinking, which is not a possibility. Actively bad, actually, the research suggests.

Yes. Yes. It's reckless hope, I think, that they're peddling. And then I came in the middle of all of this. I came home and my then fiance and now baby mama, Bianca, gave me a book by a guy named Dr. Mark Epstein. Bianca said, you know, she'd been hearing me yammer on about Tully and whatever, and this might be useful for me. So I read the book that night and I had a big aha moment, which was that all the stuff that was most compelling from Eckhart Tolle was lifted from somebody called the Buddha. And the Buddha actually had practical advice, which was meditate. I was a little hung up on that because I didn't want to meditate. I had a bad attitude about it, but it was interesting to finally have something real to do. And so what did that feel like when you first started meditating, right? Because now you have to sit there for five minutes, kind of being like adopting this practice that you probably before with your scientist hat thought of as like hippy dippy

or like people in robes do that sort of thing? Or I mean, what was the first what was the first few steps like? It was humbling. You're absolutely right. I was I did not want to do it. I was super intrigued by the notion of this voice in our head. And I had this powerful intuition that managing that voice would change my life. And as you indicated, I had a really bad attitude about meditation. I thought it was for people who are really into aromatherapy and Cat Stevens and use the word namaste with no irony. And that's not entirely untrue, by the way.

But what really changed my mind was the science. There's just all this. You know this. There's a ton of science that suggests that meditation can literally rewire your brain and the parts of the brain associated with stress or attention regulation. It's been shown to lower blood pressure, boost your immune system. So that was super intriguing, given that my parents are scientists, my wife is a scientist. I was not good enough at math to go into that direction. So now I wear makeup and talk to TV cameras, but I respect science. So that's really what changed my mind. And so I was reading a book by Jon Kabat-Zinn, who's a former MIT scientist who

pioneered something called mindfulness-based stress reduction, which is a secularized version of Buddhist meditation. And I was reading his book and I said, all right, I'm going to do this. And I set an alarm on my BlackBerry. This is how long ago this was, like 2009. I set an alarm for five minutes and I sat on the floor, not cross-legged because I don't like that. And I'm not so limber. And I was kind of, my back was leaning up against the bed and my legs were splayed out in front of me. And, you know, the basic instruction is to sit, try to feel your breath coming in and going out. And then when you get distracted, start again. It was humbling. It was like holding a live fish in your hand. It's just your mind's always squirming away from you. Once you see where it's going, it's really embarrassing. You know, you're just, you know, composing tweets, plotting revenge, thinking about

lunch, random thoughts, you know, where do gerbils run wild? And then you just have to catch it and begin again and again and again. And after the first five minutes was up, I realized, okay, this is not some nonsense hippie pastime. This isn't hacky sack. This is really a powerful exercise. And I just decided I'm going to try to do this every day for the foreseeable future. And here I am. And so now a decade on doing it every day, like what's the difference in terms of your inner monologue? Well, look, I entitled my book and then everything I've done subsequently 10% Happier. So I'm kind of stuck with math jokes the rest of my life. But you know, it's true enough, right? It's not going to solve all of your problems. Nothing's going to solve all of your problems. That's why

I called the book 10% Happier. My publisher didn't get the joke and she was trying to bargain me up to 20% happier. Let's shoot for 30%. It sounds better. Exactly. So you can think about it like an investment. So I think the 10% compounds annually. This is a skill. The ability to work with and have a different relationship with the voice in your head is a skill and you get better over time. I find that my inner weather has become significantly balmier, but does that mean that I'm perpetually blissed out? Absolutely not. I'm super anxious right now in the middle of this pandemic. I'm worried about my business. I'm worried about the state of the world. I'm worried about- And your wife works in healthcare too, right?

Yeah. Well, there you go. My wife is incredibly stressful. She is an intensive care specialist. And so she works in the ICU. She knows how to work a ventilator. Her skills are very much in demand. She's highly, highly skilled and trained.

And I think it's the right thing for her to do to go back to work but i'm worried about you know these people are dying and so i'm worried about that you know if i'm being honest i'm worried about her infecting me when she comes home and we have a kid and i would be super frantic if kids were getting sick regularly which doesn't appear to be the case but still there's there are a lot of things stressing me out and i don't think meditation is going to solve all that. I just think it makes you more balanced, more resilient, more thoughtful in the face of life's ups and downs.

So let's dig into some of the specific things that meditation might be helping in this domain. Again, with the caveat that it's not going to make this pandemic perfect, but even if it's making each of these things 10% better, that's pretty big in the current crisis. So let's talk about meditation and anxiety. So what's some of the evidence suggesting that just this simple act of following your breath for five to 10 minutes a day will allow you to reduce this fear that we're all feeling right now? I want to be clear, you know, I, the people in my position tend to hype the science. I worry that some of the reporting around meditation and science has been a little bit irresponsible or overblown. And so I try to be careful, largely because my wife polices what I

say about this, to point out that the research around meditation is very much in its early stages. It's been going on for 10, 15, 20 years. It's really ramped up in huge ways now, but it's still early days. So I usually use the term like the research strongly suggests the following. But where the research is the strongest is around anxiety and depression. That's really where it's the strongest. And anxiety and depression are two things that I've been dealing with my whole life. I was a little kid. My parents had to send me to shrink because I was worried about nuclear war. So these are not new phenomena for me. And it's really heartening to see that

meditation is good for those two conditions. How does it work? Because I think if you're an individual human being, you may not care so much about what the data show. You probably just care about like, what's this going to do for me and how is it going to do it? The act of sitting and trying to watch your breath, inevitably getting distracted over and over and over, and then noticing what's distracted you and starting again and again and again, that over time boosts your self-awareness. You have more visibility into your inner life. And once you see clearly these anxiety loops, these thought patterns, these ancient habits, these storylines embedded into us by our parents or by the culture,

once you can see those clearly, they have less of a chance of owning you. And that is a game-changing skill that you can, you know, after a few weeks of meditation as a beginner, you start to really see it show up in your life. But over time, you just get better at it and better at it. And for me, that has been one of, if not the most powerful results of meditation. And so the second domain I wanted to dig into is the domain of sleep, right? We know that one of the things that anxiety does and stress does in general is it kind of jacks up our sympathetic nervous system in a way that's hard for us to rest in any form, but particularly in sleep. Have you found personally that this act of meditating every day has helped your sleep and no of any other evidence for it? Yeah, so there is evidence that meditation is good for sleep. But there's no shortage of irony here

because the word Buddha means awake. So meditation was not designed to help you sleep. It was designed to wake you up to your inner cacophony so that you have a different relationship to it and so that you can see other fundamental truths about the universe, like impermanence, the fact that everything's changing all the time and there's not much we can do about it, which is actually scary and liberating at the same time. That was the original purpose of meditation. But in our modern life where our ancient sort of racing mind for which we evolved, you know, we evolved to be able, you know, for threat detection and finding food

and mates, we evolved to have a racing mind. It's not serving us in a modern context in many ways. So you get into bed at night and the mind is racing and we don't know what to do about it. And so meditation is really useful for calming you down, focusing you on something other than your thoughts, even if just for a nanosecond, kind of a circuit breaker on our repetitive inner loops. And for many people, that really helps the process of going to sleep. And so I have, I'm very much in the habit of the last thing I do every day is meditate. Yeah, me too. That's, that's the main time that I do it. And I can tell when I'm not doing it, when I'm like really busy and get to bed late. And I'm like, again, fall prey to all the biases

that make us not do this stuff. I'm like, oh, I'm just going to fall asleep right now. My sleep is just so much worse than if I'd taken even three minutes to just follow my breath. But that gets to the problem, which is, and I think one of the reasons that you wrote your second book. I think I heard you interviewed at one point and you said, you know, you thought when you wrote the first book and gave all the evidence that everybody who read it would just instantly meditate and the world would be a better place. Hurl themselves into the lotus position. That's what I thought they would do. instantly meditate and the world would be a better place. Hurl themselves into the lotus position. That's what I thought they would do. But alas, we are creatures of like horrid neuroses that prevent us from doing really good things that would be awesome for us. So when we get back

from the break, I actually want to talk more about the things that prevent us from doing it, especially right now during the COVID crisis and what we can do to overcome those voices in our head that are telling us not right now won't work try it later we're so done with new year new you this year it's more you on bumble more of you shamelessly sending playlists especially that one filled with show tunes more of you finding gemini's because you know you always like them more of you dating with intention because. More of you finding Gemini is because you know you always like them. More of you dating with intention because you know what you want. And you know what?

We love that for you. Someone else will too. Be more you this year and find them on Bumble. Meditation could be a huge help for all of us right now. But that doesn't necessarily make it easy to sit down and get our own on during this tough time. And so I asked Dan Harris for some help. I wanted him

to walk me through the reasons why we don't necessarily make it onto our meditation cushion, especially when we most need it. It's probably super frustrating and deeply annoying to hear people extol the virtues of meditation. And then many people listening to this are thinking, well, I haven't done it. So now this thing that's supposed to de-stress me is just making me more stressed because I'm engaged in self-laceration around not doing this thing that everybody says I should do and blah, blah, blah. So I get it. So I'm here to make this easier for you and lower the bar. I don't think 20 minutes is a reasonable ask for many people at the beginning, which is why one of my little slogans is one minute counts. I get that people

are time starved. Even when we're locked in our homes, we feel time starved. I've been meditating at night with my elderly neighbor. She's got some anxiety, but for lots of legitimate reasons. And so we go out into the hallways and stay physically distanced and meditate together and and sometimes my son comes out to see he's five he doesn't like meditation but he comes out to say hello and i've noticed that she talks about how she has nothing to do all day and she's beating herself up for not meditating during the day and i get it we feel time starved no matter what's going on in our lives. And I'm not here to talk you out of that. What I do think is useful, though, is to lower the bar enough so that people can actually can and will actually do this thing. And so one

minute counts as I think it sets people's minds at ease. It seems so eminently doable that I like that. You know, I'd rather see people do five to 10 minutes, but I think one minute definitely does count and you are getting real benefit from that. And I think it can lead to a deeper practice over time. The other thing I love about the one minute counts is that the one minute doesn't necessarily have to be you in the lotus position, you know,

in some fake meditation shrine in your, you know, tiny apartment with your family around you. It can be when you know, in some fake meditation shrine in your, you know, tiny apartment with your family around you. It can be when you're washing the dishes. It can be when you're unloading the dishwasher. It can be when you're washing your hands, I've heard is another great one. Like if you just take time to follow your breath and be present during those moments, in some sense that can count too. Okay, so you've actually said something very important. Two things are true. One, it is true that we can co-opt our daily activities to turn them into meditation. So I have a bunch of things to say about that.

But it is also true that there is a difference between sort of free range meditation, as I call it, you know, on the go daily life meditation, where you're, you know, mindful while you're washing the dishes or washing your hands or whatever, and formal practice. And I believe that if you're doing on-the-go practice, mindfulness practices, that's great. You should feel good about that. And if that's all you ever do, great, bravo, done. But I also believe that there is immense value to formal practice, even if it's just for a minute or five minutes, and that that can turbo charge the free range practices. So I just want to make that plug. But on your point about these sort of on the go mindfulness practices, absolutely, you can turn anything you're doing into meditation just by paying

attention to it. Let's take washing your hands, because we all have to do this for 20 seconds, a million times a day. And now my hands are hands are just you know as dry as the sahara and cracked and painful which is a good sign we should all we should all have painful hands right now yeah let's let's take uh washing your hands you can sing happy birthday twice fine or you can use those 20 seconds to just feel the raw data of your senses. What does it feel like when the hot or cold or warm water hits your hands? What does it feel like as your fingers intertwine? What does it feel like as you put the soap on and the soap washes off? What noises are you hearing? What are you seeing in front of you? And then every time you get distracted, which you will, you'll get distracted

a million times. You'll get carried away by your to-do lists, by your phantasmagoric projections into the future about this pandemic. And just gently catch yourself and return to the physical sensations. I think that's a better way to spend 20 seconds than just singing happy birthday or neurotically worrying about any number of things. Yeah, I think that's fantastic. So that's kind of one thing, this idea that people don't have enough time. I think another thing that's coming up for a lot of people right now, especially given that everybody's squished with their family into small apartments and things and can't get out to leave, is it feels like I don't have any privacy to do this right now. That like, you know, my kid could kind of walk in while I'm sitting there trying to

follow my breath. You know, There's stuff going on everywhere. It's hard to find silence. What advice do you have for people who just feel like they're too kind of trapped in their homes with so many folks around to do this? Well, first of all, I feel you. I'm in my home with my wife and our five-year-old, and it's a lot. So I think you've got to give yourself a break and recognize that some days, many days, perhaps most days, you won't get to it.

However, there are little tricks. So for bedtime, for example, if you've got younger children, you're putting them to bed, there's always that space between when they stop talking and when you can actually extricate yourself. So if you're lying there spooned with your kid or sitting in a chair next to the bed, steal that minute or two right before you go to bed. Great time. We have a comfy chair in the corner of our bedroom and I use that. My policy is I just meditate until I feel super tired. I don't know how long that is. I'm not timing it, but I think it's a while. That you will definitely have time for that. Lock yourself in the bathroom. Use noise canceling headphones first thing in the morning before anybody else is up.

Lots of little tricks you can use and give yourself a break if you don't get to it. The final thing, and this one comes up a lot for me when I'm sitting to like literally sit down and meditate is I'm kind of more scared now than I normally am. I feel like when I first started meditating, I was really worried about the Pandora's box. You know, what crap from my childhood is going to come up? What insecurities are going to fly by. It can, in some sense, be really scary when you're really listening to this voice closely. And I feel like that's even more scary now when, in some ways, our anxieties are justified in certain senses, right? Like, our mortality is coming closer than it's ever been for some of us, especially those with pre-existing conditions. And so how do you fight this one where it's like, it just seems like if I sit down to just follow my breath and pay attention to what I'm feeling, it's going to feel really awful, particularly in the current time. Well, let me just validate the point. I think it's true. It's true. If you meditate, it's possible that difficult things from your past will surface. I think it's also true that if you meditate right now and you don't have a lot of trauma in your past, the trauma of being alive right now,

it may surface for you. And so I don't want to sugarcoat that. But I think the choice is, do you want to have this stuff? Because it's there. The trauma is there. Would you like to have it lurking in the background of your psyche, driving you blindly in many ways? Or would you like to drag it into the sunlight and investigate it journalistically, non-judgmentally, in a friendly, kind way so that you have a choice? This is what meditation offers to us us is instead of reacting blindly to everything because we have no visibility into our inner life, you can respond wisely. And so, yeah, we are in an extremely uncomfortable and difficult situation right now. Do you want to face that forthrightly so that you can be calmer and saner and that you can

be more effective and more helpful to other people? I think meditations are going to be very useful in that sense. I don't think, I'm not a meditation fundamentalist. I think there are other ways that can also be useful, calling your shrink. If you need medication, taking that medication, getting enough sleep, exercising, eating well, making sure you have social connection, tuning into your capacity to help, which can elevate you out of the black hole of self-obsession. There are many ways to cope with this moment. I would just submit that meditation should be one of them that you should consider. And in some sense, if you're doing it right, meaning that you're doing it non-judgmentally, in some ways, you're supposed to not embrace those yucky emotions, but at least be there

with them and be compassionate about the fact that you have them, which in our daily lives, we tend not to do with the yucky stuff going on. Gold star. I mean, that's exactly right. That's the radical move of meditation, which is our habitual response to difficult emotions is fight it or feed it. This is something completely different. This is just being with it, investigating it. So the great meditation teacher Tara Brock has a little acronym that I like called RAIN, R-A-I-N. You're hit by a big powerful emotion. R is just recognize what's happening right now. A is allow it. Instead of fighting it or feeding it, giving into the anger and,

you know, making the phone call that you wish you or feeding it, giving into the anger and making the phone call that you wish you hadn't made, or giving into the fear and buying all the surgical masks that the doctors actually need, just allow it to be here, and then I investigate it. Feelings, they call them feelings for a reason. They show up in your body. And you can take a look at your chest tightening, your head thrumming, maybe some nervous energy down your body. And you can take a look at your chest tightening, your head thrumming, maybe some nervous energy down your arms. Take a look at that, kind of non-judgmentally. And then N can mean nurture. It's a little syrupy for my taste, but have a friendly attitude toward it. Instead of judging yourself for having this emotion or wishing it away or giving into it,

you can actually have a warmer relationship to see that the anxiety is just your mind's way of protecting you. Maybe not super skillfully, but it is this little neurotic voice in your head is trying to help you and you can generate some warmth toward that. And then you can, you know, blow it a kiss and go in another direction. Yeah, I've heard the phrase used. This is the one I like to use for my end is like, you're cool. Hey, you're cool. Yeah, chest tight. You know, you're cool. That's all right. You know, just not like nurture and love it and, you know, try to, you know, encourage it. But just like, it's cool. You're there. I'm not going to freak out. Just hang out. You know,

when we talk about meditation, we often talk specifically about breath-based meditation, where we're just kind of following our breath. But lots of folks have argued that right now, what we need is a different kind of meditation, one that focuses on other people right now. Yes. I'm going to make a pitch for, and this is, I can't believe I'm saying this, but I'm going to make a pitch for love. And let me just say something about love here, because I think that love has been pounded, pulverized into meaninglessness through rote repetition and Hollywood cliche and bad Bon Jovi songs. I think we kind of need to knock love off of its pedestal and just define it down. Just something super simple that doesn't

require string music or anything like that. It's just the capacity to give a shit. We all have that. It's deeply wired into us, or we are a social species. The human who was a lonely human on the savannah back in the day was probably a dead human because you needed to be part of a tribe, a pack. So we can all tap into this innate ability we have to care about other people and about ourselves. There's a pretty good argument to be made that if you can't have a friendly relationship to yourself, you're going to have a hard time doing it for others. So there's a kind of meditation that, as you might imagine, I had a negative reaction to when I first heard about it. It's called loving kindness meditation. It is like using all the cheese from meditation technology to make us feel really hippy-dippy about it.

Yes. But I was interviewing somebody recently. They were doing this loving kindness meditation, and she went to the teacher to complain about it. And the teacher said, if you can't do cheesy, you can't be free. I think that is an incredibly powerful thing to say. So let me tell you what the meditation is, because some of you, if you're like me, an anti-sentimentalist, you're going to have a reaction, which is you basically picture a series of beings. Often we start with ourselves, and then you move on to like a close friend, a mentor, a neutral person, a difficult person, and then everybody. And as you're envisioning these people, you repeat silently four phrases. May you be happy, may you be safe, may you be

healthy, may you live with ease. To me, at least, it sounded like Valentine's Day with a knife to my throat. But there's been an enormous amount of study of this kind of meditation, and it's been shown to have really powerful effects not only on our physiology, but also on our psychology and behavior. right now is love as I defined it before. It doesn't have to be super gooey. It doesn't have to be something out of a movie, but it can be as simple as having compassion has been described as empathy, which is feeling other people's feelings plus action, just having the desire to help. So what are you doing with your elderly neighbors? What are you doing with the people with whom you share an apartment? What are you doing if you live alone? Are you supporting local businesses? Just that move of tapping into your innate capacity to give a shit about other people and yourself can elevate you out of the morass of kind of self-centered neuroses. And as I said a moment ago, I think it's what will

help us survive this thing individually, but also as a culture. Given all the science of this stuff and what you've seen in your own life, are you hopeful that if you add just small doses of daily-ish meditation, it's going to make a difference in your life. I'm not laboring under the delusion that immediately all 350 million Americans or 7 billion humans are going to just start meditating, million humans are going to just start meditating. But I think calm is contagious, just like panic is contagious. I was talking to a great meditation teacher the other day who quoted something that the very famous Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh said, which is that you can think about our current situation or any stressful situation like a bunch of people in a boat in a storm. Of course, that's a stressful situation. Some people are going to be freaking in a storm. Of course, that's a stressful situation.

Some people are going to be freaking out, but one calm person on that boat can change the atmosphere dramatically. And so, yeah, I don't think we have to expect that everybody's going to meditate. Don't try to like browbeat your spouse into doing it or your parents into doing it. If you do it, the way you show up will be different some percentage of the time, and that can make an incalculable difference. I hope you've gotten some helpful tips for how you can reap the benefits of a little mindfulness in this stressful time. And I hope you'll also check out Dan's podcast, 10% Happier, where he'll give you even more tips for becoming present in this stressful time. But I also wanted to take Dan's charge seriously, that one minute is all you need to get started. So let's end this episode with a quick one-minute-ish meditation together.

If you're walking around listening to this, why don't you hit pause on this recording for a second and go find a comfortable seat. So now that you're sitting down, I want you to quickly close your eyes and become present. Just pay attention to how your body is feeling right now. Then I want all of you to take a long, deep breath in. And then breathe out really smoothly. Now let's take another long, deep breath in,

really filling your belly. And then breathe it out. And one more time, just a really deep breath in, really filling that belly, and breathe it out. Now I just want you to have your breath return to normal, and I want you to just follow where your breath feels like it's moving in your body. to normal and I want you to just follow where your breath feels like it's moving in your body.

Sometimes this will be at the edge of your nose or at the edge of your lips, but it could also just be in your chest or in your belly, where you see your belly rising and falling. And for the next few seconds, just pay attention to where your breath is. Don't try to change it, just follow it. And if your mind wanders from your breath, which it will inevitably do, just really non-judgmentally bring it back and just go back to focus on your breath, we'll end with one big deep breath in. And then give it a big sigh out.

And so that's it. Y'all just did a quick one minute meditation. I'll invite you to take a second to see how you feel. Take a second to notice how that one minute of taking time to be mindful feels in your body right now. If you're like me, it feels pretty good. And so it's worth remembering that you can do that at any time. The mindfulness benefits are there for you. You just need to take a moment to breathe. We'll see you for the next episode of The Happiness Lab with me, Dr. Laurie Santos. Our original music is written by Zachary Silver. Special thanks to Ben Davis, Heather Fane, Carly Migliori, Julia Barton, Nia LaBelle, Jacob Weisberg, and the rest of the Pushkin crew. Ugh, we're so done with New Year, New You.

This year, it's more you on Bumble. More of you shamelessly sending playlists especially that one filled with show tunes more of you finding gemini's because you know you always like them more of you dating with intention because you know what you want and you know what we love that for you someone else will too be more you this year and find them on bumble