The One You Feed - How to Embrace Mindfulness on the Path to Personal Growth with Dan Harris

Episode Date: September 8, 2023

In this episode, Dan Harris underscores the importance of mindfulness in fostering personal growth. As a self-proclaimed “meditation evangelist,” Dan explores how by practicing mindfulness, we become more aware of our thoughts and emotions, which allows us to shape our attitudes and reactions consciously. In this episode, you’ll be able to: Learn how mindfulness becomes a cornerstone in the journey of personal transformation Grasp how the power of selecting thoughts and emotions can shape your reality Cultivate the practice of self-compassion Survey a range of routes for self-improvement, underscoring practices like meditation, loving-kindness, and self-compassion. Understand the nature of panic and anxiety, and how to skillfully work with it To learn more, click here!See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Does meditating feel like a chore, another to-do list item to check off, or perhaps it's even fallen off the list entirely? If you sense that meditating regularly would benefit you, but you struggle to find a sustainable place for it in your schedule, I can help. There are reasons people struggle with creating and maintaining a meditation practice, and it isn't because meditation isn't right for them. In my free guide, The Top 5 Reasons You Can't Se seem to stick with a meditation practice and how to build one that lasts, I teach you why it can be a struggle to build a meditation practice that lasts and the small fixes that can have a big impact when it comes to getting you where you want to be with meditating regularly. Go to

oneufeed.net and sign up for this free guide right on our homepage. These skills of mindfulness, compassion, calm, concentration, the various skills that can be taught through meditation, you just keep getting better. And there's not as much of a physical limitations, like there's a ceiling on how good I can get at basketball. Welcome to The One You Feed. Throughout time, great thinkers have recognized the importance of the thoughts we have. Quotes like, garbage in, garbage out, or you are what you think, ring true. And yet, for many of us, our thoughts don't strengthen or empower us.

We tend toward negativity, self-pity, jealousy, or fear. We see what we don't have instead of what we do. We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it's not just about thinking. Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction. How they feed their good

wolf. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together, our mission on the Really Know Really podcast is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why the bathroom door doesn't go all the way to the floor, what's in the museum of failure, and does your dog truly love you? We have the answer. Go to reallyknowreally.com and register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast, or a limited edition signed Jason bobblehead. The Really Know Really podcast. Follow us on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks for joining us. Our guest on this episode is Dan Harris. He's the author of the number one New York Times bestselling memoir, 10% Happier, about a fidgety skeptical news anchor who finds

meditation. He's also the host of the 10% Happier podcast and a co-founder of the 10% Happier meditation app. For 21 years, he worked at ABC News where he anchored such shows as Nightline and the weekend editions of Good Morning America. Hey, Dan, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me. It's a pleasure to have you back on. I was saying to you right before we started that I think the last time we did this, we did it in person and you were still at ABC at the time. So we came to your offices in New York and did it there. You and me and Oren, who I know is a part of your app and been on your podcast a few times. That's right. Well, I think in the interim, both of us have been able to quit corporate jobs. Yes. So that is good news. Has that transition been good for you? In most ways, yes. It's great because I'm in control of my own schedule for 21 years. As much as I loved ABC News and I really loved it, my life was really

at the whims of some crazy person walks into a supermarket with a AK-47, I got to fly there, you know? And yeah, I think when I was younger, it was exciting to be at the whims of the news cycle. And as I got older and had lots of other stuff and a family, it was harder and harder for me to do. So that part is great. And, you know, I'm around my family much more, you know, I was, you know, at the peak of my time at ABC, I was working nights, anchoring Nightline and then weekends anchoring Good Morning America. So that really took me out of the mix. And so now I have a lot more time to be with my son and my wife. And so all of that's great. Once in a while, I feel some identity crisis stuff around, you know, I'm no longer an anchorman and, you know, what am I then?

That kind of thing. But that's pretty fleeting. Yeah. Yeah. I, by and large, love my change, but there were things about it that I liked. I liked, you know, we went into an office and there were problems that kind of needed solved that didn't have anything to do with the human mind, you know, and I kind of occasionally liked, you know, something like a software problem that I could go fix that was very straightforward. Yeah. You were working kind of crazy hours. I know there for a while, for a long time. Yes. Yes. Crazy hours. Yeah. So we always start this podcast the way that we have all along, which is by the reading of the wolf parable. So I'll go ahead and read that to you and kind of get your up-to-date take on it. So in the parable, there's a grandparent who's talking with their grandchild and they say in life, there are two wolves inside of us that are always at battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and

bravery and love. And the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the grandchild stops and they think about it for a second. And they look up at their grandparent and they say, well, which one wins? And the grandparent says, the one you feed. So I'd like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life and in the work that you do. I can't remember what I said last time. And I apologize if it's the exact same thing, but I love that either. So I love the parable because it speaks to the animating insight of my former side hustle. And now in whole career as a meditation evangelist,

which is that the mind is trainable and we are not stuck with factory settings that we can work on the aspects of ourself that we might struggle with and we can further hone our positive attributes. I would say the one thing that I've really noticed recently, perhaps this would be new, is that I think that I told myself a story, probably subconsciously, I don't know if I intellectually believe this, but subconsciously that maybe I was one way, you know, I think I harbored a long suspicion that I was, you know, kind of irredeemably selfish on some level. Of course, you know, there's a boundary between inside and outside when it comes to psychology or the mind is really permeable. And so you tend to project your conclusions about yourself onto

the world. And I think I felt that way about individuals in the news with whom I disagreed, that they were all one way. But I've realized that it's much more complicated than that. And that I think leads to me taking it easier on myself so that when I screw up and do something that might fit into the old story about how I'm a bad boy, I can see it as an isolated incident or even part of a pattern, but not a reification of a non-negotiable truth. And that's really helpful. And also it makes it easier to be less judgmental about other people. And that being judgmental is a, it's a pain in the ass. You know, you're carrying around this view that on some level, you know, isn't true, but you're sticking to it. I've heard that that's actually

the definition of hysteria, sticking to a view that you know on some level isn't true. And, you know, so we look at the world of people we disagree with on social media or in the news, or maybe even in our family and harbor some belief that they are fundamentally one way, but I don't think that's how it works. And I think that if we do the experiment of putting ourselves in their shoes and coming out of the same womb and living in the same circumstances, we may very well do the same things that they're doing. There's a great figure, you may have interviewed him, Father Gregory Boyle. You're nodding your head, so you know who he is. Father Boyle was on my podcast one time and he said, I don't believe in evil.

I believe in horrible behavior, but not evil. Yeah. I mean, it gets to the point that most of these things that we might call the bad wolf are typically coming out of some reaction to something that's happened. And I think you're right that it's far more complex than like there's a good and and a bad side of us, right? Life is, we are, we are far more complex than that. And one thing that I think I've seen in your work evolve over the years, and maybe I saw it most clearly seeing your recent TED talk, is this sense of really recognizing that these patterns inside of us, I want to find your line here because it's really good. You said my demons were actually fear-based neurotic programs probably injected into me by my culture or my parents and they were trying to help me.

It's a really beautiful idea around recognizing the ways in which we aren't showing up in the world as the person we want to be is because of some habitual reaction pattern. Now, again, I don't want to go down the rabbit hole of is everybody that way and what about psychopaths or any of that stuff. But for the vast majority of us, right, our fear, our anger, our greed, they're coming from these deeper things within us that can be used differently and related to differently. Yes. Yes. Just to clarify one thing. I don't think I was making the case that, you know, we're either part good or part bad, but I actually agree with that case. It's a more sophisticated case than the one I was making. I was more arguing that other people, I judge them and myself, I judge them to be wholly bad.

Right. And I think that's not true. In terms of our demons, our wolves, and I think there are lots of bad wolves. If you want to use the word bad, let's use that word even though it's probably overly simplified. Yeah, I think it's really helpful to view them warmly, to give them a high five instead of trying to slay them. Because the aggression just makes them stronger. I have an executive coach who I really like, Jerry Colonna, and he's often told me that I can't bully my inner bully out of existence. It just doesn't work that way.

You drive him underground and he comes out in other places. And so the only route that I've found to dealing with the aspects of our personality that are difficult is to view them warmly as, you know, ancient programs that are trying to help us, but are not, you know, highly functional and move on because that's the fundamental and radical disarmament. Yeah. And that's a phrase that you used in the TED talk. You know, you said that this counterintuitive extension of warmth to these things was not indulgent, but was indeed radical disarmament. I just love that phrase. It really jumped out to me when I heard it. And I was like, yeah, that's kind of what we're talking about. And where I always find the nuance for me is in recognizing and allowing that those things are there and befriending them and not feeding them.

You know, that to me is where the nuance gets to be. Even if I want to think about something like thinking more positively, knowing that I have a mind that goes towards the negative, right? Like I don't want to just the minute negative thoughts show up, like squelch them down. And so I want to allow them to be there and recognize them and explore them. And then there's a certain point for me where it's like, okay, we need to move on here and change the channel or work on cultivating different thoughts. And so I've always found that dynamic to be one of the higher arts of sort of mindfulness, healing, all this stuff is kind of knowing how much to devote to each of those sort of areas.

Yeah. I mean, you're putting your finger on the key issue here. In my view, you can make the philosophical switch of not hating yourself, because you might have venal impulses. But then what do you actually do with said impulses? And there are many strategies from modern psychology, to ancient meditation. And, you know, I am not Olympic level. I can get carried away by my lesser impulses hourly, but I have been able to use some of these tools and we can talk about them in whatever order you would like to achieve, you know, maybe 10% of the time, a different relationship to my stuff, so that I'm not completely handing over all of the power to voices in my head that are, you know, not so constructive. Yeah. And I don't know if you've seen this in your work, because you talk to a lot of different people like I do. And I'm oversimplifying, but I've seen it in psychology.

And I've seen it in Buddhism, these sort of two different approaches. And one is very much an acceptance approach, be with what's there, befriend it, let it be there. There's that. And then there's another approach, which is more, I might call more of a cognitive behavioral approach, right? But it shows up in Buddhism too, which is you recognize the thought and then you choose to put a different one in, right? You might think of that as I'm choosing to pull out a weed or I'm putting in a flower in, but there's an active changing. And I've really noticed as I've talked to people, seeing both of those things and a

less evolved version of me would have said, well, which is the better approach? And now I know that's a foolish question, right? But the question is, and the art is, when do I use which approach and for how long? Yes. Yes. I'm just doing a little math in my head as we're talking. Like, I think there are probably, for me personally, like five different approaches that I interweave when I could remember to do it. And some of them are, you know, meditative, contemplative Buddhist practices, and some of them are more sort of modern psychological practices. And the overlap between them is very significant because I think the Buddha made some insights 2600 years ago that modern psychological researchers and practitioners are just coming to see the wisdom of.

Yep. So let's explore what some of those are. You just came up with the number five. I'm sure if I gave you 10 minutes to think that number might become four or seven or, but let's go through what some of those categories are. All right. So let me list them and then we can go through them. First, I would say it's just straight up mindfulness. Second, I would say, is loving kindness. So both of those come out of Buddhism. The third would be a modern psychological tool that has been perfected, at least to the extent of my knowledge, by a school of psychology called Internal Family Systems, IFS. The fourth would be self-compassion. These are all very related. That is, self-compassion is a mixture of modern

psychology and ancient Buddhism, pioneered by some researchers, Dr. Kristen Neff and Dr. Chris Germer. And then the fifth is, I don't know what he would call it, but Dr. Ethan Cross at the University of Michigan wrote a book called Chatter. And the way I would describe what he is teaching is a kind of internal counter-programming where you kind of talk back to your thoughts. And so I want to be clear that I'm speaking here not from the mountaintop as some expert. I'm sure I'm leaving out CBT or DBT or lots of other modalities. These are just the five that have worked for me.

Yeah, I think you've talked to many of these people. I've talked to many of the same people. I'm curious your experience with IFS. When did that enter your life and what did it look like for you? Well, I don't have extensive experience with it. Richard Schwartz, the godfather of IFS, Internal Family Systems, came on my show and we actually did a session live. Just for the uninitiated here, the basics of IFS, and my apologies to Richard if I'm mangling this, but you look at the term of art within IFS is

parts of your mind. You just kind of do a taxonomy of the various parts of your mind. You may have a prominent jealous mode, a prominent anger mode, a generous mode, whatever. If you've ever seen the movie Inside Out, the Pixar movie where they have all these different characters representing human emotions, that's not far off from the IFS model. And in the IFS model, you actually give the characters names. And I haven't done much IFS therapy beyond the one experience with Richard, which was interesting, very interesting. We got a lot of response to that. Before I met Richard, I had given names to the inner characters, which I found to be quite dopey. At first, I was like, I'm not going to name

my inner characters. But actually, many of these practices, at least of people like me who are, you know, skeptics, at first are going to appear either dopey or forced or annoying. But I often think of this great quote I heard from a meditation teacher. I don't know who said it, but I love it. Somebody was complaining to some meditation teacher about some of the Buddhist practices that we will, I think, eventually get to being cheesy. And the teacher said, well, if you can't be cheesy, you can't be free. And I think that's very true in my experience. And you got to kind of get over yourself to do this awkward stuff. And the comp I often use is exercise. If you landed here on Earth from another planet and you went to a gym, you would

think this is nuts. People are running in place for 30 minutes and then systematically picking up and putting down heavy things. What is going on? This is ridiculous. But we call that exercise because we know that repetitive motion, repetitive exercise can lead to cardiovascular and muscular benefits. And the same is true with your brain and by extension, your mind. And that's what's on offer here. So in terms of IFS, yes, I found the idea of labeling my inner characters. One of them I call RJ or Robert Johnson, who was my grandfather, complicated dude, had many good parts to his own personality, but was quite an angry man and could be abusive and a bully. And I see that in my own inner

repertoire quite clearly, unfortunately. And so just giving it a name and being able to, I don't know, usefully objectifies it instead of having this miasmatic juggernaut feel within your head. It's just like, oh yeah, that's just one aspect of my mind and I can work with it better once I've identified it. Does that make sense? 100%. You know, acceptance and commitment therapy is another one that often encourages you to give a name to these things because it just, to use the Ethan Cross term, right? It gives you a measure of self-distancing. And I think I listened to your interview with Richard in preparation for one that I did. And I think I did something similar to you where we did a little of the work online. And I think I did something similar to you where we did a

little of the work online. And I remember, and it was the exact experience that I have. And I often have with that stuff where I think you were like, I don't know if I'm really feeling that or if I'm just making this up, like what's actually going on in here, right? This stuff gets so complicated. And, you know, it's like, we know, you know, he's asking a question apart and you know, that the part is supposed to have some kind of answer. So an answer comes in, is that the real answer? I mean, I did, this was a long time ago. This is probably 2000.

So 25 years ago, I did some therapy work after my first marriage failed and it was under the rubric of inner child work. That was what it was called. And I just couldn't stand that name. The whole idea of it made me a little bit crazy. But when I looked at what was going on inside of me, and I went like, oh, there do seem to be these times that the way my brain and my mind is reacting is exactly like what a three-year-old would be reacting like, I kind of went, well, I kind of get to get over myself here and recognize that this makes sense. I may choose to call it something different. And you're a skeptical guy. You talk about in your TED talk, how putting your hand on your heart initially for self compassion made you cringe. I think we both come from a very similar place with all that stuff. And yet, a lot of that stuff really does seem to help. And I love that phrase, if you can't, what was it? If

you can't get cheesy, you can't get free. Something like that. Yes. Something like that. That's really good. It is. Yeah, your inner child experience. I resonate with that. IFS, as Richard did with me and with you, he basically has, you know, the sane part of you talk to the various insane parts of you, or maybe that's probably an overly negative way to describe it, but the various parts of your personality, you have a dialogue with them. And doing that feels very strange. And you're not even sure, like, am I articulating what that part really thinks? I don't know. It's very strange. And so I'm not saying you, dear listener, need to do all of these things. What I'm saying is, in my experience,

it's very helpful. And just to repeat your phrase, Eric, getting over yourself can really be a key to dealing with some of these things. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together on the Really No Really podcast, our mission is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why they refuse to make the bathroom door go all the way to the floor. We got the answer. Will space junk block your cell signal?

The astronaut who almost drowned during a spacewalk gives us the answer. We talk with the scientist who figured out if your dog truly loves you and the one bringing back the woolly mammoth. Plus, does Tom Cruise really do his own stunts? His stuntman reveals the answer. And you never know who's going to drop by. Mr. Brian Cranston is with us tonight. How are you, too?

Hello, my friend. Wayne Knight about Jurassic Park. Wayne Knight, welcome to Really, No Really, sir. Bless you all. Hello, Newman. And you never know when Howie Mandel might just stop by to talk about judging. Really? That's the opening? Really? No, really. Yeah, really.

No, really. Go to reallynoreally.com. And register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast, or a limited edition signed Jason Bobblehead. It's called Really? No, Really? And you can find it on the iHeartRadio app, on Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. So we've talked about five broad approaches that have worked for you that have been really important. And in your TED talk, you say the massively empowering news is that love is not an unalterable factory setting. It is a skill you can train. It's actually a family of

skills. And I was kind of curious, are these the skills that you mean, the things we just listed here, the self-compassion, the compassion for others, or the loving kindness, the IFS work, are these sort of to you that family of skills, or did you have something else in mind when you use that line in the TED talk? Yes. And I think those five skills that I referenced, those five modalities that I referenced earlier are all really good for inner work. But there are other skills that I would also put in the family of love skills. And as you know, I define love quite broadly, not just romantic or familial love, but just our capacity to give a shit, which is wired into us via evolution. You know, we're social animals. We needed to have this care capacity and it's omnidirectional,

it applies not only to people in your life, but also to yourself. And so those five skills that I was referencing, yeah, those are all really kind of on the self love side of the spectrum, you know, having a better relationship with yourself, which, of course, inexorably leads to better treatment of other people. Yeah, but there are skills in the family that I think are really just about working, you know, with other people in a more effective way. Communication skills, I would put right there at the top. I've spent a couple of years, maybe five years, I think, coming up in five years, working with a pair of Buddhist inflected communications coaches who have utterly changed the way I interact with other people. So yeah,

that's just one example. Is Oren one of those? So Oren J. Sofer is an incredible meditation teacher who's been on my podcast and teaches on the 10% Happier Meditation app. And he has written extensively and he's written a whole book about how to communicate better. The coaches that I work with are slightly different. Their names are Dan Klerman and Mudita Nisgar. If you're looking for great guests for your show, I highly recommend them. They're incredible. And their system, in my opinion, it's simpler than Oren's. And so I've gravitated in that direction. Oren bases his stuff on nonviolent communication, which is this incredible system for communication. Dan and

Mudita, it's a little bit more stripped down and I've just found it very easy to get into. It's easy to understand, very hard to do. Yes. You know, there's a book out there. They wrote a number of them. One of my favorites is Crucial Conversations and they've got other ones, Patterson and Carey and different people. And that's always been the one that just like turned on a light in my head about like, how do you relate to other people? And, you know, they were talking about this sort of idea of, you know, psychological safety, you know, decades before it became a buzzword like it is today. So you recently mentioned on your podcast that you've had a resurgent and very inconvenient set of panic attacks recently. And I very recently have had something come up in my life that I can't really

share much about because other people are involved, but it has caused me to have a level of anxiety that it's been 20 years since I felt anything like it. And it creeps up towards panic, you know? And so I thought maybe we could talk a little bit about what works for you there. You know, you've got a great recent podcast with, I don't have her name in front of me, Luana. Yes. Dr. Luana Marquez. So do you have any sense of why the panic resurfaced for you after having worked with it skillfully for a number of years?

Or is that not even important to you? That's definitely important to me. Okay. This is a rich area. I have so many things to say. I'm going to try to do what the aforementioned Dan and Mudita often urge me to do, which is to chunk rather than flood. To not say too much at one time rather than flooding you with information to give it out in chunks. So I want to talk about what's going on with you. I think an important definitional

thing to get straight up front is there's, in my mind at least, a difference between panic and anxiety. I mean, I think anxiety at its peak can become panic, but I have found different ways to deal with both. So for example, for me, my recent bouts of panic have almost all been brought on by the two triggers that have always been there for me. One is public speaking. My most famous panic attack was on television in 2004. What's it like to have a famous panic attack? Yeah. Most people don't say that. My most famous panic attack. I often joke about how I've been dining out on that story for a long time.

Yeah, it's turned out to be great to have a famous panic attack at the beginning of a new career, but it's not great to have panic attacks. And in the fall of 2022, I started having panic attacks, not only when I had to give public speaking, but also when I was in situations where I felt trapped physically, so elevators and airplanes. And I'd struggled occasionally with elevators, you know, over the years, but never like this. I was having to, if I was in the city, I would just walk up 15 flights instead of taking the elevator. That's how terrified I was. And I was either getting off of planes because I was unwilling to fly or having to take a lot of Klonopin in order to get myself onto the plane. It was very embarrassing. You know, here I am,

Mr. Meditation guru, not really a guru, but meditation evangelist is the phrase I often use. And, you know, mental health, quote unquote, expert. And I'm freaking out. I can't even get on a fucking plane. And that was very embarrassing and demoralizing. The good news, though, is that I did a bunch of exposure therapy where I literally rode in elevators with a shrink. You know, I did it over the course of months and I consistently, you know, went back on planes and sometimes I had to take meds, but then I would taper down so that I was taking very small doses and then none. I just went at it. I want to say aggressively, but that's not the right term, but I would say persistently and doggedly. I really just did not want to let my life get small because panic was stopping me from doing things. And

it really worked. It really worked. I'm on planes and in elevators now, and sometimes I feel a little nervous, but it's really helpful. I'm going to stop talking in a second, but I just want to say that to me, that high, high, high anxiety of panic is slightly different from daily anxiety, even when it rises to a level where it's kind of debilitating, and I use different tools for each. So what to you is the difference between something that would be like high anxiety and panic? Oh, so I kind of think of high anxiety and panic as the same thing as opposed to, you know, garden variety, anxiety, background static of fear. So I mean, I'm not really an expert. I mean, I'm an expert in my own experience,

but this is my way of thinking about it. You know, the daily background of fear that I think I certainly live with as somebody with anxiety can go up or down depending on the circumstances or whether I've slept or whatever. And it can get pretty high and really be intrusive. But panic or high anxiety is when fight or flight really kicks in and your heart races, lungs seize up, you're completely debilitated and you feel like you're having a heart attack. So to me, that's the bright line. Yeah. And because we know that what we might call garden variety anxiety, which makes it sound like a lady's gardening club, which is not what it feels like. There tend to be two elements to it in my mind, right? There's all the thought patterns and then there's the degree of fear in the body. And so you're saying that from your perspective, panic is when that fear is at

like a 10. Whereas if it's only at an eight, that's anxiety to you. Even though you might notice that your heart is racing, you might notice that you're feeling a little bit short of breath. You might notice like, okay, I can't quite get my bearings here. Yes. What you just did there is called reflective listening where you, this is a thing I learned from Dan and Mudita, which is you repeated back to me in a more succinct fashion, what I was trying to say in your own words. And yeah, exactly right. Well, you and I both sort of do it for a living. So I should be good at it after almost a decade. You know, if not, I picked the wrong field. And so you've got acute events, you've got to give a public talk, you've got to get on an elevator, those cause panic. The rest of the anxiety,

you know, does it get up into that seven, eight level for you? Or is that mostly floating? And again, I'm talking less about the thoughts and more about the physical sensations. Yeah. To me, and again, I cannot stress strongly enough, I'm not a clinician and I'm not an expert in this, but stuff that's giving me garden variety anxiety. And yes, I agree with you. there are the thoughts and then there are the physical manifestations, rarely gets close to panic. I can get very angry or very distracted. I'm not able to focus on stuff because I'm worried. But the source of the daily anxiety is quite different, at least consciously. I think subconsciously,

maybe all the same thing. But what's giving me anxiety on a day-to-day basis is not claustrophobia. What gives me panic on the regular is claustrophobia or public speaking. Yeah. And you said you had some theories as to why it was resurfacing, if you're comfortable sharing it. No, I don't mind sharing it at all. I think one very practical explanation is that we were in a pandemic. So I wasn't getting on airplanes as much. And I had moved out of the city where I live, New York City, to the suburbs with my family. And so I wasn't getting on elevators as much. And so after a couple of years of not being exposed, when I started getting back onto planes, especially with masks on, it was harder for me to do. And it was just one experience I had where I was getting on a flight

to LA for a big talk and I was getting over COVID. I was cleared to travel, but I had to have a KN95 on and I was sitting on the plane. I hadn't been on a plane in a long time and I had the mask on and I didn't feel good. And I started to freak out and I got off the plane and that just set me so far back. And then it just started showing up everywhere. And that's, in my experience, the way panic works. Once it creeps in, it just metastasizes into lots of areas of your life. And if you're not really on top of it, you can start pulling back from everything, you know, not doing the things that might give you panic and then your life gets super small. Right. And so luckily, I have a lot of experience like you do interviewing mental health experts. I just started calling

my shrink. I called Dr. Marquez and got some advice from her and I just started getting treated right away. But it took months. Yeah. You know, I find what you just shared and the fact that you are sharing it to be courageous in kind of like you said, that you are positioned in a certain way in the world. You know, I know I do this with myself when I'm struggling. I'm like, you've interviewed all the leading people in the world about this stuff. You teach programs on this stuff. Like what is the matter with you? The Buddhist idea of the second arrow and the shame that comes with it can be so pernicious. obviously, and then starts telling himself a whole story about like, why am I always the guy who gets hit by the arrow? And, you know, I'm not gonna be able to make dinner tonight and all that stuff. And that's the second arrow that we inject voluntarily. And I think we're doing this to

ourselves all the time. And I think what has been helpful for me, as allegedly an expert in mental health and meditation and Buddhism, who, you know, continues to make lots of mistakes and have lots of setbacks in his life is to recognize that this was never promised to be linear. Personal development, personal growth, the spiritual path, not afraid as I love. It's not supposed to be like a hockey stick that just goes up in an uninterrupted way. Like life is going to happen to you. And I think it's just been important for me to remind myself of that. And I don't know, it's another example of self-love actually. Yeah. That is the way we tend to think about growth as in to remind myself of that. And it's another example of self-love, actually.

Yeah, that is the way we tend to think about growth as it goes in one direction. And when it doesn't, it can be very, very discouraging. And, you know, I often think of it almost like a, I don't know who I heard say this, but like a spiral staircase, you know, like if you go on a spiral staircase, you may come by that very scary picture. You know, like if you go on a spiral staircase, you may come by that very scary picture. But ideally, when you get to it next time, you're slightly better than before or at least have more tools in how to work with it than before. But it doesn't mean that the picture doesn't scare the shit out of you. Yes. A friend of mine told me a story about something that his shrink said to him. My friend was complaining to his shrink about how he yet again made the same mistake that he had made a million times.

I can't believe I did this thing X again. And the shrink said, was it as bad as the last time? That's just a great way to look at it. And that is a great way to remove the second era. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together on the Really No Really podcast, our mission is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why they refuse to make the bathroom door go all the way to the floor.

We got the answer. Will space junk block your cell signal? The astronaut who almost drowned during a spacewalk gives us the answer. We talk with the scientist who figured out if your dog truly loves you, and the one bringing back the woolly mammoth. Plus, does Tom Cruise really do his own stunts? His stuntman

reveals the answer. And you never know who's going to drop by. Mr. Brian Cranston is with us today. How are you, too? Hello, my friend. Wayne Knight about Jurassic Park. Wayne Knight, welcome to Really, No Really, sir. Bless you all. Hello, Newman. And you never know when Howie Mandel might just stop by to talk about judging.

Really? That's the opening? Really No Really. Yeah, really. No really. Go to reallynoreally.com. And register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast, or a limited edition signed Jason bobblehead. It's called Really No Really, and you can find it on the iHeartRadio app, on Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I think it's so important to do what you are doing or I'm attempting to do, which is to share that it doesn't matter where you get in life.

You know, life still can kick your ass. And I've talked to enough people, and I think you have too, where I've recognized that after a while. It's like, oh, they're incredibly wise people. They have a lot to share with the world, and they still have their moments. Now, you know some people I don't know, like the Dalai Lama. So you might say, well, not the Dalai Lama. There's some people that maybe get to a different level. But most of us in Western society, there is some degree of life still comes at you. And sometimes it takes a while to recalibrate. Yes. Yes. One of the best Buddhist book titles is by a teacher named Jack Kornfield, incredible meditation teacher. And he wrote a book called After the Ecstasy, The Laundry. And, you know, you can have these incredible transformative experiences in meditation, with psychedelics, in therapy, in nature. And then you got to do the laundry.

And sometimes the laundry sucks. Yeah. So a recent podcast series that you guys started doing, I love the idea of. And the question really is, can you get fit sanely, right? In that, you know, many of us have a relationship with exercise that has been driven by very often poor body image or insecurity or trying to look a certain way or going overboard. And I'm curious, what did you learn from doing that series about getting fit in a sane way? I know I'm asking you to condense what were many episodes into a few

key thoughts, but what were some of the big takeaways for you for that? First of all, thank you for the kind words about the series and also that it was six episodes. And so there was so much stuff in there, but the thing that leaps to mind as you asked me that question, like what was the takeaway when after interviewing all of these experts and getting healthier in various ways? One of the people we interviewed was a teacher named Kara Lai, L-A-I is her last name. She's a Buddhist teacher and also a social worker and used to run marathons barefoot. teacher and also a social worker and used to run marathons barefoot. She was a hardcore exerciser and then got Lyme's disease and has really not been able to exercise as much and has really wrestled with that. And she talked a lot about why we exercise, like what is driving you to do this?

driving you to do this. And that really got me thinking, like, why am I spending so much time in the gym? What is my motivation? Is it to keep up with people I'm seeing on Instagram? Yeah, I think in part, and that's fine. We live in this culture. We're going to be impacted by the culture. I'm not saying that it's bad to have that motivation. What I'm saying is, is that the fuel you want? Can we switch to something else? And what impact might that have? So for example, can I really consciously boost my attention on my motivation being staying healthy for my now eight-year-old son as he gets older. And what would the ramifications of that be? So yeah, maybe I'll spend less time working on my biceps because I like the way my arms look in t-shirts and more time working on, I don't know, my core because that will help me

get up or tie my own shoes when I'm a hundred, if I live that long. And so I think it can change your goals. And also, it can really, in my experience, lead to stickier habits. You know, I've tried to get into the habit, and again, this is going to be one of those things that's going to sound cheesy, but of, you know, when I get on the exercise bike, or I, this morning, I took a run, just taking a second and saying, like, I'm doing this to make myself happier and stronger, so that I can make other people happier myself happier and stronger so that I can make other people happier and stronger. And so that I can be around for my son and my wife. I don't know. I have more grit in my exercise regime and my priorities have changed because my motivation

is clearer. Yeah, I agree. I also think that for whatever reason, the fuel, the ego fuel doesn't work for me in the way that it did when I was 25. It's just not strong enough necessarily to get me to do it consistently. I think the biggest change for me was when I realized, like you said, this makes me healthier and stronger. And for me, it was really emotionally and mentally. When I realized emotionally and mentally, this is the practice that is better for me than any of the others. If I had to set meditation aside, if I could keep one of the two, I would say, let me keep exercise. You know, let me keep exercise strictly from a mental health, emotional health perspective. And that's really good because it shrinks the time horizon between like the action and

the reward. You know, even wanting to be healthy for your son, there's a way in which you can be like, well, but yeah, I mean, I've got 20 more good years before I have to really start to worry about that. Whereas I'm like, if I want to feel better this afternoon so I can, you know, have more energy, like the benefit is so close. As humans, the bigger that span gets between the action and the benefit, the harder it is to sort of really work with

ourselves when we're facing resistance. I agree. And if you're doing a class in the, you know, just say you're doing spin quite a bit and sometimes the teacher's having you sprint a bunch and it can be nice to picture my son or my wife in those moments. Yeah. So I think it's yes. And a shorter time horizon is always a powerful motivator. And if I'm doing it for my own abs, I'm going to be less likely to push that hard. Yeah. I interviewed a woman years ago and she had done some research on this and I've asked her since like, has this really been replicated or not? And I'm kind of curious what you think about it because it was counterintuitive to me and I don't know that I think it's true. And she said that when you start to layer multiple motivations on, you weaken what can be a primary motivation. And to me, I've always been under the

school of thought of like, you know what, have a bunch of them because different ones may pull me through on a different day. well, if you reward somebody for doing something with just money, they have less intrinsic reward to do it. And I've just found that most things in my life seem to be a blend of those things anyway. And that leaning into that has been helpful for me, but I'm kind of curious what you think. Well, I don't really know what's coming to mind is something that my meditation teacher, Joseph Goldstein has often said to me and others, which is that if you look carefully at your motivations, and it's not just your motivation to exercise, it can be your motivation for saying a certain thing in any given moment or for having a career goal or whatever, you'll probably see a range from the high-minded to the crass. That just feels like a part of human nature that we have many motivations seen and unseen.

And a good life goal is to try to emphasize the wholesome and de-emphasize the unwholesome. I've heard you talk about this and I've thought about it a lot over the years, particularly as I went from doing this as something that I just did because I wanted to do it to something that paid the bills, you know, the motivations start to get confused. And instead of making that a problem, right, I just kind of go, well, of course, I'm motivated by making money because everybody is motivated by making money to some degree. And now it's how I make a living. And of course, I'm motivated by being seen and approved of.

But can I try, like you said, to focus more of my energy and tension on the more wholesome motivations? You know, can I try and let that be what drives me more without making it a problem that these other things are there? Because like what your teacher Joseph said, it just feels fundamentally true to me. Yeah. You know, I've had that conversation with myself that you just described of I'm out here supposedly helping people. But, you know, am I just lining my own pockets or just, you know, trying to get clout or influence or fame or whatever? And I have gone down the toilet on that many times. I had a really useful conversation about this with the guy who I mentioned earlier, Jerry Colonna, who's also might be a good guest for this show.

earlier, Jerry Colonna, who's also might be a good guest for this show. He's quite a famous executive coach and he's also written a bunch of books about leadership from a really sort of psychological slash Buddhist perspective. And I found his stuff to be very helpful, both one on one and his public pronouncements. And I was talking to Jerry once about, you know, my motivations and raising the question of whether I'm maybe broken in some way. And he's like, look, you know, we all have the desire for money and to be liked by our fellow mammals. And that's natural. And can you just look at it as like an exchange of, and he used the term love, which is a complex word and carries a lot of cultural baggage. But back to my sort of capacious, broad understanding of it, can you look at this as an exchange of love? And I think this applies

to you, Eric. Yes, you get paid for doing this podcast and you might get more Twitter followers or somebody stops you in an airport and says they love your show. And all of that makes you feel good and makes you safe and gives you the capacity to do more good work to help more people. And that's a beneficial cycle. Yep. I agree. I definitely go that way. You did a recent thing for the podcast meditative story with that team. And you did an episode where you share taking a trip with your son. And it's a really beautiful episode. We had Rohan on recently, and he did a meditation based on the two wolf parable. But I loved your story in that talking about how spending time one-on-one with him kind of brought you together. And I'm kind of curious,

you know, this was sort of your first trip, you know, with your son. And I don't know when you recorded that episode, but I'm kind of curious, has that trend of spending time with your son one-on-one in that way continued? And has it continued to sort of be a way of giving you more quality time with him in a way that still feels really good? Yeah, a thousand percent. So I did this story for meditative story about how, what my son was four. I think I took him on the road with me to go see my parents. We went from New York to Boston. My parents were living in Boston at the time. So this was pre pandemic. He's eight now. Okay. So this is a while ago. Yeah, it was a while ago, but there's some cool updates. And I, I mean, I obviously, I hope this is obvious. I love my son.

I loved him then. And I was at a time in my life where I was working all the time. You know, I was working nights on Nightline and weekends on Good Morning America. And I was traveling to give speeches. I was writing books. I was traveling to do investigative television stories. I was hosting a podcast. I started a meditation app. It was insane. And as a consequence, I didn't get that much time with my son. And he really didn't have time for me. When I was around, he was just like all about his mother. And it just brought me back into the place of feeling like I was a monster. And so I took him on this trip and we had a great time.

And you can listen to the episode if you want. But the update is that now he travels with me all the time. So I do a lot of corporate speaking and will fly around the country to talk to different professional groups or corporations. And so I have this eight-year-old who's my right-hand man, and I pull him out of school, and we go. And so we just did a 10-day trip. I had three speeches, one in Vegas, one in New Orleans, one in Jackson Hole. And he's my little guy, and it's awesome. We are really close now. And part of that

is because of the travel part of it is because I'm not working as much. And part of it is because he's gotten older, and I'm a little bit more interesting to him. Yeah, but it's phenomenal. It's completely changed our relationship. And what did he say to me in the middle of the recent trip? He said, Daddy, I love you, but I'm sick of you. He's got a sassy mouth on him. Eight is such a great age. I think, I mean, they're all great ages, but five to 10 just felt like the glory years to me. I was just like- How many kids do you have? Just one. And he is grown and he is currently a wildland firefighter. So he's been in Canada

for much of the summer. But I loved that five to 10 range. When I was listening to that story, it took me back. His mother and I split when he was like two and a half. And he was very attached to his mother, which, you know, as a two and a half year old, you know, stretches of time. And it was difficult in some ways, but I'm so glad also that it gave me a relationship with him that was just different than it would have been had I remained sort of the secondary parent, you know, or the parent that wasn't around as much. And so suddenly I was getting these big blocks of time with him. So when I heard that story, it kind of took me back to, you know, the sweetness of that one-on-one time, not that time with like you and your wife and son, I'm sure isn't wonderful also, but there is a difference there. Definitely. I don't know if you get asked this question a lot, but I can't resist it, but I'm sure you get asked it a lot because it's the obvious question, but I'm sure you get asked it a lot because it's the obvious question, which is, you know, you are a decade or so off of writing 10% Happier. It's a great book title, right? I'm sure you wouldn't change the book title because it's so good. Would you change the degree to which you think these things have made you happier, better? Is 10% really the right number? Or would you revise that upwards to some bigger number? I have never been good at math. And I came up with this title. And as a consequence,

get math questions a lot. So the way I think about it, and I actually think this is a very important question, love getting it is I'm going to make a math assertion here. And, you know, just with the caveat that I'm not good at math, but I think about it like an investment and the 10% compounds annually. And so I'm way more than 10% happier 10 years out from writing that book. I think it's because you just have to keep at it. These skills of mindfulness, compassion, calm, concentration, the various skills that can be taught through meditation, you just keep getting better. And there's not as much of a physical limitations, like there's a ceiling on how good I can get at basketball. You can go pretty far in the

interior realm. And I'm not saying that I've gone that far, but I like the possibility. I love that answer. And it speaks very much to what I think is a truth, which is if you were to compare how much happier you are in the recent time, you might go, well, I'm getting a little bit better, you know, but the accumulation of that, you know, I've studied a lot just like, bam, thundercloud enlightenment, right? You know, I've been fortunate enough to have some really profound experiences in that way. But I often think about this, and I've said this on the show a bunch of times, that I think if you were to take the 23-year-old version of me who was a homeless heroin addict, and you were to drop him into this brain today, he would think he was suddenly enlightened. and you were to drop him into this brain today, he would think he was suddenly enlightened. Because the gap between where I am now and where I was then is so vast. The gap between where I am now and where I was last year might not be in the same way. It's harder to see. It's, you know,

the nature of progress. And to your point, it's not always linear. But I do think that answer of compounding really does make sense to me that over time, I've radically transformed as a person due to many of the things that we've talked about on the show, the psychological principles, the Buddhist principles, you know, all these different things have made such a big difference over time. So I love that answer that, yeah, you may not expect to earn more than 10% in a year. And to take your market analogy further, you know, if you talk with the financial planner, they'll say, well, you know, we think we can get you like 7% over the long term, knowing that some years you're going to get 14% and some years you're going to get 1%. And that over time, it's going to sort of average out. And that feels like a apt way of thinking about the growth and healing journey. Yeah. I mean, I love your story. That's amazing. It's incredible that you've been able to make that progress. And I think the takeaway for people listening is that

you shouldn't get too hung up on the day-to-day improvements in your meditation practice. You shouldn't be thrusting more arrows into your thigh because you lost your temper yesterday and you've been meditating for a month and you can't believe that happened. That's just the way it is. The best way to look at it over time is from a pretty broad lens. This is a long, long path. Joseph Goldstein, who we talked about before, the great meditation teacher, sometimes jokes about how when he was a kid, he did some gardening and he kept

pulling the carrots out of the ground to see how they were growing. And it's not a great way to garden and it's not a great way to meditate or to engage in any kind of personal growth if you're just constantly and obsessively checking your progress. Yeah. Well, I think that is a great place to wrap up, Dan. It's lovely to talk with you again and see you again. And I appreciate you coming on. It's a pleasure. Thanks for having me on. Great conversation.

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