The Rich Roll Podcast - How A Panic Attack On National TV Led To Meditation As The Path To Happiness

Episode Date: July 27, 2014

Everyone loves a good transformation story. We like it even better when it’s super dramatic. Preferably framed to appear like it all went down like some kind of overnight miracle. Bonus points for million dollar paydays, instantaneous cures, extreme but effortless weight loss and age reversal. But that’s just not how this stuff works, people. Growth and change are hard. And never overnight. It’s a process. 2, 3, 5 even 10 steps backwards for every single step in the right direction. Rinse & repeat, generally in obscurity. It requires dedication, faith, time, toil and pain — because getting out of your comfort zone is just that: uncomfortable. It means taking an honest look in the mirror and objectively evaluating your unpleasantries, missteps and weaknesses. Shedding light on blind spots. And grappling with demons, hardwired patterns and deeply ingrained perspectives on ourselves and our place in the world. But change is also simple. It begins with a basic a decision to do (or not do) something; anything. A decision generally followed by tiny — sometimes almost imperceptible — changes in behavior made consistently over extended periods of time. In other words, the trite annoying adage is true. Baby steps do move mountains. True, sustainable personal growth rarely comes about by changing everything overnight. Instead, it’s about exploring and ultimately developing some level of mastery over just a few small yet important shifts – or even just one aspect of how you spend your time each day. Adopt this approach – a slight shift in perspective and behavior – and you just might be amazed at how impactful this can be on your life experience. How you see, feel about and ultimately interact with yourself, others and the world at large. Do this — and like today's guest — you just might find yourself 10% Happier*. Dan Harris. This guy is impressive. Young and ambitious, Dan joined ABC News in 2000 and quickly rose through the ranks under the mentorship of broadcasting legends Peter Jennings and Diane Sawyer. Today he balances duties as co-anchor of ABC News' Nightline and co-anchor of the weekend edition of Good Morning America on top of filing reports and filling in on air throughout the week on various ABC News programs. Along the way, Dan has covered some huge stories. He reported on the mass shootings in Newtown, Connecticut, Aurora, Colorado and Tucson, Arizona, and anchored natural disasters from Haiti to Myanmar to Hurricane Katrina. He has also covered combat in Afghanistan, Israel, Gaza and the West Bank, including six visits to war-torn Iraq. The job is a relentless pressure cooker. The stress mounted, compounded by multiple tours as an embedded journalist in conflict ridden areas of the Middle East. Depression ensued, followed by self-medicating with recreational use of cocaine and ecstasy. Ultimately, these factors conspired to take a serious toll on Dan's mental and physical health. And it's here that things get interesting. In June 2004, it all caught up with Dan (as these things are wont to do), ultimately manifesting in a very public panic attack on national TV – on Good Morning America of all shows – in front of 5 million people.

Welcome to the Rich Roll Podcast, Episode 97 with Dan Harris. The Rich Roll Podcast. Hey, everybody. Hello, audience. My name is Rich Roll, and this is my podcast, aptly titled The Rich Roll Podcast. I want to thank you guys for tuning in. I want to thank you guys for telling a friend, for spreading the word, for using the Amazon banner ad at richroll.com for all your Amazon purchases. We appreciate the support. Thank you for all the emails, the social media messages, the posts, the Instagrams, and for just being an important part of what we're trying to do here. We're trying to raise the vibration. We're trying to get this plant-powered revolution message out to the masses. And you guys are everything.

You guys are the foot soldiers. You guys are the people that are carrying the word out into the hinterlands. And we thank you. I have a feeling today's guest, Dan Harris, is going to bring some new people to the show. So if this is your first listen, you're new to this, you're new to me, here's a quick breakdown. I am an ultra endurance athlete. I'm an author. I wrote a book called Finding Ultra. You can check that out if you haven't already. I'm a public speaker. I'm a husband. I'm a father of four. And of course, I'm a podcaster. So what is this podcast? Well, on a weekly basis and for free, always for free,

I do my best to bring you guys the best, most forward-thinking paradigm-busting minds in wellness, fitness, athleticism, creativity, diet, nutrition, art, entrepreneurship, personal growth, and spirituality. The people that inspire and intrigue me, the people that are making stuff happen, challenging the status quo, pushing the envelope, rocking the tools, the knowledge, the experience, and the inspiration you need to discover, unlock, and unleash your best, most authentic self. Everyone loves a good transformation story. I had a good transformation story myself, a good transformation story. I had a good transformation story myself. But we like it even better when it's super dramatic and framed to appear like it all went down like some kind of overnight miracle. But you know, that's just not how this stuff really works, people. Because

growth and change are hard. It's a process. Two, three, five, 10 steps backwards for every one step forward, rinse and repeat. It requires time, toil, pain, grappling with your demons, your hardwired patterns, your deeply ingrained perspectives on yourself and the world around you. But baby steps move mountains. It's not about changing everything overnight. It's about exploring and ultimately developing at least some level of mastery over just a few small yet important shifts or even just one aspect of how you spend your time each day. in your behavior, and you just might be amazed at how impactful this can be on your overall life experience, how you see, how you feel about, and ultimately how you interact with yourself, others, and the world at large. Do this, and you just might find yourself 10% happier. And that's what today is all about. Enter Dan Harris. Well, this guy's impressive. He was a young, ambitious journalist.

Dan joined ABC News in 2000, year 2000, and under the mentorship of legends, Peter Jennings, Diane Sawyer, he quickly rose through the ranks. And today he's co-anchor of ABC News' Nightline and co-anchor of the weekend edition of Good Morning America. This guy's done it all. He's filed reports for World News with Diane Sawyer, also Good Morning America throughout the week, ABC News Digital, ABC News Radio, and for four years he anchored World News Sunday. And along the way, this guy's covered huge stories. He reported on mass shootings in Newton, Connecticut, Aurora, Colorado, Tucson, Arizona. And he's anchored natural disasters from Haiti to Myanmar to Hurricane Katrina.

And he's also been an overseas war correspondent covering combat in Afghanistan, Israel, Gaza, and the West Bank. The guy has made six visits to Iraq. So I think you can gather that this job, his job is quite the pressure cooker. His coverage of conflict-ridden areas in the Middle East started taking a serious toll on his health. And this is where kind of the story begins for us and where things get really interesting. In 2005, Dan suffered a panic attack on national television on Good Morning America in front of 5 million people. He wasn't sure what was wrong with him at the time, only that he knew he had to make some changes in how he was living. around this time that there was this bizarre stroke of synchronicity because ABC assigned him to start covering stories on faith and religion and spirituality. And at the time, he wasn't very happy about this. A lifelong non-believer, he was less than thrilled,

I guess you could say. But what's cool is it sent him on this bizarre, unexpected adventure into the subculture of disgraced pastors and self-help gurus and a gaggle of brain scientists. And eventually, Dan realized that the source of his problems was the very thing he always thought was his greatest asset, the incessant, insatiable voice in his head, the incessant, insatiable voice in his head, which had both propelled him through the ranks of a hyper-competitive business, but also led him to make the profoundly stupid decisions that provoked his on-air freak out. Look, we all have that voice in our head. It's that thing that has us losing our temper

from time to time, checking our emails compulsively, eating when we're not hungry, fixating on the past or the future at the expense of the now, the present, the only thing there is. And I think most of us just assume we're stuck with this voice. This is just who we are, that there's nothing we can really do about it, nothing we can do to rein it in. But Dan stumbled upon an effective way to do just that, get the upper hand. It's a far cry from the miracle cures peddled by many of the snake oil salesmen, self-help swamis he met. Instead, it's something he always assumed to be either impossible or useless. Can you guess what it is?

I bet you can if you know the theme of this podcast, meditation. That's right, people. We're back to meditation. Do you detect a theme here? Anyway, after learning about research that suggests meditation can do everything from lower your blood pressure to essentially rewire your brain, Dan took a deep dive into the underreported world of CEOs, scientists, and even Marines who are now using meditation for increased calm, focus, and happiness. who are now using meditation for increased calm, focus, and happiness. So I first heard about Dan's story when I attended the MindBodyGreen Revitalize Summit.

He gave an amazing talk, which I will embed in the show notes on the episode page at richworld.com. So check that out. Super entertaining, like 15-minute talk that he gave. And I'm just so excited that I had this opportunity to sit down with him when I was in New York in his office at Nightline and hear all about this adventure close up. It's an adventure that he chronicles in his highly entertaining and illuminating memoir called, you guessed it, 10% Happier.

How I tamed the voice in my head, reduced stress without losing my edge and found self-help that actually works, a true story. So you should check that book out using the Amazon banner at richroll.com to pick it up or click the hyperlink on the episode page. It's a very cool book. It's an easy read. It's a fun read. It really gives you a peek behind what it's like to work at a national news organization. And it's pretty neat. He recounts basically throughout this book, how with the help of various mental health professionals, religious leaders, and self-help gurus, and news industry mentors, how he stopped using drugs,

familiar story to me, discovered the benefits of meditation and resolved the apparent conflict between meditation-induced equanimity and the aggressive competitiveness required for success as a TV news journalist. It's a book that takes readers on a ride from the outer reaches of neuroscience to the inner sanctum of network news to the bizarre fringes of America's spiritual scene and leaves them with a takeaway that could actually change their lives. So that's it. Let's get into it. Dan's a great guy. He's super busy. I was so honored and pleased that he took time out of his crazy schedule to sit down with me. So let's step into his world. We're brought to you today by recovery.com. I've been in recovery for a long time.

It's not hyperbolic to say that I owe everything good in my life to sobriety. And it all began with treatment and experience that I had that quite literally saved my life. And in the many years since, I've in turn helped many suffering addicts and their loved ones find treatment. And with that, I know all too well just how confusing and how overwhelming and how challenging it can be to find the right place and the right level of care, especially because, unfortunately, not all treatment resources adhere to ethical practices. It's a real problem. A problem I'm now happy and proud to share has been solved by the people at recovery.com who created an online support portal

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We're brought to you today by recovery.com. I've been in recovery for a long time. It's not hyperbolic to say that I owe everything good in my life to sobriety. And it all began with treatment and experience that I had that quite literally saved my life. And in the many years since, I've in turn helped many suffering addicts and their loved ones find treatment. I've in turn helped many suffering addicts and their loved ones find treatment. And with that, I know all too well just how confusing and how overwhelming and how challenging it can be to find the right place and the right level of care. Especially because, unfortunately, not all treatment resources adhere to ethical practices. It's a real problem.

A problem I'm now happy and proud to share has been solved by the people at recovery.com who created an online support portal designed to guide, to support, and empower you to find the ideal level of behavioral health disorders, including substance use disorders, depression, anxiety, eating disorders, gambling addictions, and more. Navigating their site is simple. Search by insurance coverage, location, treatment type, you name it. Plus, you can read reviews from former patients to help you decide. Whether you're a busy exec, a parent of a struggling teen, or battling addiction yourself, I feel you. I empathize with you. I really do. And they have treatment options for you. Life in recovery is wonderful, and recovery.com is your partner in starting that journey. When you or a loved one need help, go to recovery.com and take the first step towards recovery. To find the best treatment option for you or a loved one, again, go to

recovery.com. I make myself look busier than I actually am. Don't believe the hype. I don't know. Although it is a little, it looks a little quiet out in the hallways though. Is that a summer thing or? No, it's that we're at my office at Nightline and Nightline doesn't start getting active until later in the day because we're on at 1230. Right.

So how do you balance Nightline and GMA? Like, are you going back and forth between two different buildings and two whole different operations? Yeah. So this morning I was filling in on Good Morning America, reading the news. That's the person who comes on and does the news updates at the top of each hour.

And so I was up at 345 and now I'll work here for a couple of hours just taking care of – I won't anchor the show tonight because we have three anchors for Nightline. So when I'm doing Good Morning America during the week, one of the other anchors will do Nightline, but then I also do Good Morning America every weekend. So it's a pretty topsy-turvy. So you're only on air Good Morning America on the weekend, but you have to go over there and you're working there throughout the week. No. No. I'm only on the air. I'm on the air on the weekends, but sometimes I go on and fill in for one of the anchors during the week, which is what I did this morning, which is why I'm in a suit early in the day. So my responsibility, I don't know if this is interesting to anybody, but I have a whole wide range of responsibilities and end up showing up on the air in lots of different day parts. So you say that you're not that busy, but you got up at 345 this morning.

I did. I would take issue with that. Well, it was really great to hear your talk at the Revitalize Summit. And you probably spent more time traveling to and from there than you actually did at the event. We didn't get a chance to meet because you left shortly after you gave your talk to get back to do Good Morning America, right? Yeah, which is a bummer because it was actually, it seemed like a really cool thing. And I went in, I tend to go into some of these things with a bit of a bad attitude because I'm not, you know, traditional.

I would never read something on MindBodyGreen most likely. But the people I met were extremely cool at dinner the night before and then the morning of the talk. But unfortunately, I had to get on the plane and go home. Right. Well, we're sitting here today and I want to talk about your book. But I can't help the fact that right off of your right shoulder, I'm staring at the cover of a book that looks remarkably like your book, except it says, instead of saying 10% happier, it says 11% happier by Ron Claiborne. And so maybe I should be sitting with Ron. So Ron is one of my colleagues who's on the weekend Good Morning America show with me. And he's the newsreader on the show. I'm one of the hosts. So this may be a little bit in the weeds, the positions.

Anyway, he's another guy on the air on the show. And when my book came out in March, the book's called 10% Happier, he did a little bit on the show where he said, I want to congratulate my colleague Dan Harris for his new book, 10% Happier. No big deal, but I wrote a sequel. It's called 11% Happier. And if you're only going to buy one book, you do the math. That's great. And actually, you know, that joke, I could see it. It drove my Amazon rank up significantly.

Oh, it did? I mean, like making that joke on the air did remarkable things. That's very cool. So to get into your story a little bit, for people who are uninitiated, I want to hear a little bit about your background and what led up to the famous meltdown on national television. Sure. So I work at ABC News. I have been here since 2000. And before that, I was a local news guy in Boston and before that in Maine. And so it's kind of what I've done my whole life. And when I got here, I was really young and super ambitious and I was working with Peter Jennings and Barbara Walters and Diane Sawyer.

And 9-11 happened shortly after I got here. And I, as a way to kind of prove well first of all i was it was a huge story and uh i was really curious about what america was going to do in response but i was also eager to you know prove my chops and uh so i raised my hand to go overseas and i spent a lot of time in afghanistan and then i covered the second Intifada in Israel and Palestine and the West Bank and Gaza and then I spent a lot of time in Iraq and when I got home after one of those trips to Iraq in July of or in the summer of 03 I got depressed and I did a very very dumb thing which was that I self-medicated with cocaine and ecstasy.

And that produced a panic attack on live television on Good Morning America in June of 2004. The doctor explained to me that even though I wasn't doing it every day, and it was, you know, for a pretty short period of time, it was enough to raise the level of adrenaline in my brain. And so I was on Good Morning America reading some headlines headlines, and I just freaked out, melted down, couldn't talk anymore, and had to quit right in the middle of my newscast. If you watch it, and I know you've seen it, and I said this at Revitalize, it's not like, I mean, it's embarrassing, but it's not like broadcast news and Albert Brooks, you know? Right, it's not quite, like, once you know, and you watch it, you can see what's going on, and you can right it's not quite like if you once you know and you watch it you can see what's going on and you can see yourself unraveling but if you were just casually watching

it you might not really notice so it's not right yeah you don't have the albert brooks flop sweat so here's here's why because i had the opportunity to cut it short and got out back to diane sawyer and charlie gibson who were the anchors of the show, if, like Albert Brooks, I was stuck and marooned as the only person who was the anchor of the show, it would have been an epic disaster. So there's no question that it was worse in my head than it is on television, but it's not good on television. You can definitely tell that that's a news anchor who's struggling, which we're not supposed to do. So, I mean, that was really embarrassing and scary and raised all sorts of existential questions about whether I could keep doing the job.

In the middle of that, though, in the immediate aftermath of that event, what happened with your superiors? Like, did you get a dressing down or did Peter come to you? And, you know, he can – I know that your relationship with him is interesting and he, you know, he doesn't suffer fools lightly. No, he doesn't. You know, for lack of a better phrase, I kind of got away with it because it was so quick. And who knows if Peter was even watching.

My bosses were aware and everybody asked, you know, what happened? And I didn't tell the truth. I knew I had had a panic attack. I didn't know it was drug related. So I basically said, it's no big deal. It was just a momentary thing. And I was fine. I did another newscast an hour later. And so I think it kind of got, you know, everybody was reassured by the fact that I did fine an hour later, and didn't press me much further on my denials. And it just was everybody lurched on to the next crisis.

In the culture of broadcast news, though, is there sort of this idea that, hey, that happens to everybody once in a while? Or is that highly unusual? Yeah, no, I mean, when you're on air that much, something's going to go down. Yeah, I do think there is a little bit of like, yeah, we all screw up. We all have bad days. And because it ended so quickly, I mean, I don't think it was, you know, nobody really – I didn't say to everybody, I just had a panic attack. I don't know if I can do this again. So because I – and I don't – I'm not a proponent of dishonesty.

But because I was dishonest, I did kind of get away with it. And it wasn't until I actually had a second one a year later that I went to a doctor who explained to me, stop doing drugs, and you won't have any more panic attacks. And that was the key moment where I realized, okay, so I'm a huge moron. I mean, I'm jeopardizing everything. At this know, at this point I wasn't married. So it was like work was my primary focus. And so I was jeopardizing everything I had worked for. And so that was really the moment that sent me off on this kind of strange. Yeah. My version of that is getting a DUI and then saying, well, everybody gets a DUI.

But then six weeks later, getting another one and going, well, maybe you should stop drinking, you know. So, you know, sometimes you got to rally yourself a little bit, you know, it's sort of like the elevator's going down and when are you going to get off and everybody has their version of that bottom. So, what was the process of then kind of, you know, unwrapping this package and taking a look at what was really going on with you and addressing it. So it wasn't like a neat, it wasn't the way it's sometimes, unfortunately, you know, the media, the media are terrible. And sometimes in the media, this is your fault. Yes. Well, right. Exactly. It's been a great hoisting, being hoisted on my own petard here, because I've done a lot of interviews,

and I've seen my story being written up in places. And it's very consistently wrong. done a lot of interviews and I've seen my story being written up in places and it's very consistently wrong. It's often written as Dan Harris has panic attack, drug-induced panic attack, and then starts meditating. Not the way it happened. In fact, there was a huge lag between the panic attacks and the meditation. The first thing I did was the shrink who pointed out that, you know, idiot, you should stop doing drugs. I signed up to see him once or twice a week for a long time. But he oversaw my, you know, the quitting of the drugs, and he didn't think it was bad enough that I needed to go to rehab. But he did want me to see him frequently.

So I went to see him frequently, and we started, you know, untangling some of the issues. And that was very, very helpful. I mean, I really love this doctor. I still see him, you know, not that often, but I still see him once in a while. He read the book and, you know, he read the book before it got published to make sure it was, you know, kosher from a medical standpoint. And what really happened, the other key factor that came into play was that Peter Jennings

assigned me to cover religion for ABC News. And at first, it was complete, first of all, I didn't want to do it, because I'm not, I was raised in a very secular background, in a secular environment, and I continue to be an agnostic. And also, at first, none of the things that I encountered spoke to me in any way. It was all, I was hanging around the evangelicals and Mormons and Muslims and Jews, and I learned a ton and actually realized how ignorant I was on a lot of levels. But none of it really, you know, I didn't adopt any of these faiths, but it was through that that I stumbled onto meditation ultimately. It's this beautiful irony, though,

that you got assigned to cover faith and being the skeptic that you are, just whatever your preconceived proclivities were, that catalyzed this journey that allowed you to come to this place. It's fascinating. I mean, that's the stuff of novels. Yeah. Did you say beautiful irony? Mostly in the book, what I realize is that time and again, I'm like the anti-blink. You know that Malcolm Gladwell talks about the wisdom of our subconscious minds. For me, the quick decisions that I make are almost always very stupid. Right. You're just pounding on your head for endless times before you're realizing, like, oh, okay, this is the direction I need to go. Yes.

Or, you know, it's just like I reflexively write off things. You know, I reflexively wrote off faith, right? Didn't want to do it. I thought it was all just kind of dumb. And, you know, and I reflexively wrote off something like meditation. I, you know, I haven't reflexively written off a plant-based diet, but I'm, you know, somewhat against it. This is the first step. This is my real agenda today. You do make a good case. I should tell your listeners that we talked about it before the podcast. But anyway, so maybe it's a beautiful novelistic irony, but mostly for me, the way I look at it is that time and again, I rush to judgment and then I'm proven wrong spectacularly.

I like that. So I want to talk about this immersion into the world of self-help gurus and the evangelical movement and kind of your navigation through the subculture of faith and what that was like. So I covered, as I was saying before, I covered religion for a while and happily, you know, after my initial reluctance, I realized, actually, this is really interesting. And I have a lot to learn from these people. And I didn't know much. I was pretty ignorant. And I became really good friends with a lot of people of faith. And it really changed my life in terms of being able to understand the way the world works and that so many people on our planet view the whole world through this lens. And if you don't understand that, actually, you don't understand a lot about the world.

So that was all great. But then the first time that any of this material spoke to me personally or penetrated my defenses was when one of my colleagues, a producer, recommended I read a book by Eckhart Tolle. So I never heard of the guy, but my producer said, you should read it. It's all about controlling your ego. Which she, so to me, I thought that was hilarious. I thought she was telling me, you know, I'm an asshole, which, you know, I believe that I am. So I thought that was funny.

But actually, if you read Eckhart Tolle, you realize that he uses the term ego not as like self-love or, you know, having an inflated sense of your own importance or whatever. He's talking about what you think is you, the voice in your head, the inner narrator that you take to be you, yourself, quote unquote. And I actually, and nobody had ever pointed out to me in such a powerful and consistent way that we have this voice in our head. You know, I mean, I was vaguely aware of it, but it's this thunderous truism, right? It's so obviously true.

Yes, we have an inner narrator that chases us out of bed all day and is constantly color commentating on everything and judging and wanting and whatever. But nobody ever did in the Western culture. It's not often pointed out to you in a big, loud way. And so when I read Tully's book, I was just like, wow, that was a big moment for me, where I realized that that voice in my head had actually led me to do all the things that I was most embarrassed of, like going to war zones without really thinking about the consequences and getting depressed.

Not that there's anything wrong with getting depressed, but in my case, I got depressed and wasn't even really aware of it and then self-medicated blindly with these drugs and it blew up in my face. I will say, though, that the problem was with Tully, and I know you've had some experiences with him yourself, that he is, and I have respect for the man, and so I'm going to make fun of him respectfully, he is capable of saying brilliant things

and completely crazy things in the same sentence. So what would be a good example of that for you? Well, for example, when I ultimately went to meet him, he said a lot of really smart things. And then at the end, I asked him, well, there were a lot of crazy things, too. But one of them was I said, you know, how old are you? You look really young. And he said, well, I'm in my 60s, but I haven't aged since I had my spiritual acuning at age 29. So, you know, that's not true.

You know, and also, you know, he talks about the voice in the head. But the big problem is when you ask him what do you do about it, he doesn't have any actionable advice. You know, he told me, I said, what do you talks about the voice in the head, but the big problem is when you ask him what do you do about it, he doesn't have any actionable advice. You know, he told me, I said, what do you do about the voice in the head? And he said, you take one conscious breath, for example. What the hell does that mean? I have no idea what that means. That's not, to me, helpful advice. Yeah, there's this, I mean, first of all, there is this incredibly powerful, you know, sort of epiphany of an idea, the distinction between consciousness and the thinking mind.

And that's incredible, right? And when you start to explore that, a whole world opens up to you about how to deal with that and manage that. had that we talked about before the podcast was I had an opportunity to sit down and hear him speak before The Power of Now came out, shortly before it came out, long before the Oprah thing. And nobody knew who this guy was. He just happened to be friends with the yoga teacher whose yoga class that I went to. And my wife and I, who was my girlfriend at the time, we went and listened to him speak. And I was very early in my evolution in all of this. And I wasn't really in a place where I could really hear what he was saying. And I was very focused on just that he was this strange gnome-like man who, you know, I couldn't really kind of

connect with emotionally. And I walked away thinking there's a lot of really fascinating, interesting things that he's saying and a lot of true things, but I can't say that it changed my life in any way. And it was kind of many years later before I began to more embrace what he, what, you know, what he is talking about, but there's this dualism, right? And it's difficult to translate that into any kind of practical application that you can take with you and, and implement into your life. And I know that you talk about that in your book. So you're reading about these things that you're identifying as being true, but how can I use them? I'm in the world. I'm not sitting in a cave up in the Himalayas. So that kind of led you into kind of a new place with how to explore this, yes? Well, right. Well, the first thing was, so I, I, I'm, uh, I met totally and exactly. I had the same, very similar response that you did, which is that he's

saying a lot of smart things, but he's also saying a lot of crazy things and he's also weird. Um, and so I didn't know what to do with it. I think I said in the book that, um, it was like he had pointed out that my hair was on fire and refused to give me a fire extinguisher. So not knowing what else to do and really not knowing anything about this world, this sort of genre of spirituality, I kind of lurched into the self-help area. So I ended up spending a lot of time with people like Deepak Chopra, Wayne Dyer. I covered James Ray, the guy who got arrested and convicted in the deaths of some of his followers in a sweat lodge in Sedona, Arizona. Oh, right, right, right. I remember that. So I spent a lot of time looking at that. And what I found in many cases was quite repulsive, which is that people are making a lot of money by telling other people that you can solve all of your problems through the power of positive thinking,

which is just demonstrative bullshit. It's not true. You can't solve all of your problems that way. And, I mean, one has to look no further than any refugee camp. Like a child born in a refugee camp, does that mean they were thinking negatively in utero? No. Somebody who was caught up in the earthquake in 2010 in Haiti, does that mean all of Port-au-Prince, Haiti was thinking

negatively and therefore they were victimized by this earthquake? That's not true. So, I like Deepak, and Deepak doesn't do a lot of that, but he was also confusing for a whole other set of reasons. We don't need to go into it unless you want to.

You talk about it in the book, though. Yeah. You go into some of those encounters. Yeah. I mean, I think Deepak's a great guy, actually. I think he's really funny. But I'm not sure. I mean, he would claim to be both kind of a hustler,

not a hustler in the pejorative, but like an ambitious, hardworking guy who also is immune to stress. And just my observations of him, I think he actually does get stressed. And so I wasn't quite sure that I thought he was squaring that circle. Anyway, that's just my own personal opinion. He, I know, disagrees with me. The point is that I didn't know what to do after Toli. And so I spent a lot of time in the self help world. And I was kind of depressed by a lot of what I saw. And it was only after my wife intervened that I found something that was useful to me. I came home one night, and my wife gave me some books by a guy named Dr. Mark Epstein, who's here in New York City, which is where we're recording this podcast.

And he's a shrink, and he writes about the overlap between Buddhism and psychology. And I didn't know anything about Buddhism. I knew the Buddha was fat, and I knew they believed in karma or whatever. I didn't really know anything. It turns out the Buddha wasn't fat. The statues that people call Buddha statues is actually not the Buddha. Why is he always portrayed as fat? That's not him.

It's actually some sort of misunderstanding. There's a Chinese— It's a huge misunderstanding. Actually, if you go to a Buddhist center and you look at the statues of the Buddha, he's not fat. Historically, that guy, the historical Buddha, would not have been fat. Because he was probably eating a plant-based diet. And historically, that guy, the historical Buddha, would not have been fat. But the caricature of Buddha – Because he was probably eating a plant-based diet. He was eating two meals a day, one of which was donated by the villagers.

He would carry around a bowl and whatever they put in it, he ate. So he was a bag of bones, no question about it. I'm not to give a long history on this, but the laughing Buddha that you see smiling and having a roly-poly belly, that's actually an ancient Chinese sage who's revered among a lot of Asians. And so that has gotten somehow mixed up with the actual Buddha. So anyway, I didn't know much about Buddhism, but I read this book by Dr. Mark Epstein, and I realized, oh, shit, all the stuff that I love the most about Eckhart Tolle seems to have been appropriated from the Buddha. He was the guy who was talking about the voice in the head initially. He was talking, he called it the monkey mind. And his argument is that we,

that our minds are like monkeys and they're lurching through this forest of thoughts and urges and impulses and emotions and constantly clinging to things that won't last and um uh you know always looking for a one hit of pleasant experience in a meal or a sexual encounter or whatever and never fully satisfied those by those hits of pleasant experience and that diagnosis uh seemed very similar to toli's uh but delivered with a lot less froofiness and pseudoscientific stuff. And it was accompanied by a very simple, actionable piece of advice, which was meditation. And the problem was I didn't want to meditate because I thought that that was only for weirdos and people who like aromatherapy and ultimate frisbee or whatever. And I was not down with that at all, but it was clear advice. And when I learned that meditation has a huge PR

problem and is in fact, you know, simple exercise for your brain and that there's a lot of science to suggest that it's really good for you, I decided to do it. Right. I mean, a big part of it for you was seeing the science that supported this, that was able to speak to your sort of secular brain. And I think that that PR problem is starting to shift. I mean, when you see what's going on in Silicon Valley, how they've really embraced it, and large corporations are implementing these wellness programs, and people like yourself are writing these kinds of books, that PR scenario seems to be evolving in a good way. The science piece of it is really interesting because on the one hand, it's huge.

It really helps the PR problem. It's the science is the reason why the Marines are doing this now. Corporate executives are doing it. Wall Streeters. I just saw an article about prison guards. Prison guards, big time. Cops. It's really gone into lots of corners of the culture.

But one does not continue meditation because of the science. You know what I'm saying? The science is what you get interested in the fact that there is this science and so you try it. But you don't keep doing it year after year because you think, oh, maybe the fibers in my prefrontal cortex are thicker now. You do it because you realize, oh, I'm not reacting automatically and reflexively and immediately to my anger or whatever.

Actually, no, I notice I'm angry and I can try to respond wisely to it instead of react blindly. And that's a superpower. And that's why you continue to do it. You may actually continue to do it because you believe in enlightenment or you think that you can make fundamental changes to the nature of your mind. That's kind of a more esoteric subject, which is also, in my opinion, very, very interesting. But the science is like a kind of an interesting thing. It's just to repeat the point is it gets you in the door, but doesn't keep you in the room. Right.

So what was it that, I mean, you, so you're reading Epstein, you're reading about the Buddhism and the Buddha, but what was that first experience of saying, okay, I'm going to sit down and I'm going to try that, like walk me through like day one? Okay, so it was kind of a cumulative thing where I realized, okay, one, meditation does not require lighting incense, sitting in a funny position, chanting things in Sanskrit, or joining a group, or paying fees. That it's actually very, you know, it's a simple thing to do. The mindfulness meditation, the kind of meditation that's really been studied the most in labs, basically involves trying to watch the feeling of your breath coming in and going out. And every time your mind wanders, which it will a million times, you just forgive yourself and return your attention to your breath. So it's very, very simple. So when I learned that, that was one piece of the pie. When I learned that there was a science that showed that it can help with everything from blood pressure to your immune system to rewiring key parts of your brain that have to do with

compassion and well-being and happiness and stress. That was another thing. Well, let's just leave it there. When I learned those two things, I, over time, my resistance broke down. And I was on vacation in the summer of 2009, right after I got married, as a matter of and um i uh was reading a book uh by the pool at a house that we're renting with some friends and i was like fuck it let's just do it uh can i say fuck you say whatever you want um uh so i i put the book down and i went to our room i sneaked off to our my the room that i was sharing with my wife and locked the door and just did it. I did it for five minutes.

I set an alarm on my Blackberry and did it for five minutes. And it sucked, you know, it was like really hard. But I realized in that moment that it was kind of a baller ass activity. Like it's really hard to wrestle your mind to the ground. It was kind of a baller-ass activity. Like, it's really hard to wrestle your mind to the ground. And just like you find running triathlons to be a huge challenge that requires grit to be compelling because the challenge in and of itself is interesting.

And it pushes you further than beyond your comfort zone and tests you and also has beneficial effects, I realized this is the same thing. This is the same thing and actually has potentially – the effects are potentially even much more profound. So I just decided, you know what? I'm going to do this. I'm going to go for it. And I'm going to do it five minutes a day in perpetuity, see what happens. And you weren't, other than the two

principles that you related, there was no dogma around this or kind of super complicated strategy of how you're doing it. Because I think people get really caught up in, well, I don't know how to do it. You know, it's like, I don't understand how this works. And I think that that acts as a barrier or an impediment to just, you know, beginning. Yeah, so my whole game now is I'm trying to remove every single excuse you have. So the one excuse is that people say, I don't know how to do it, which is actually the worst, lamest excuse because you can Google how to meditate. And it's like, I explained it once to the tech reporter from the New York Times in fewer characters than it takes to send a tweet. So it's really simple. Like step one, sit down, close your eyes, keep your spine

straight so you don't fall asleep. Step two, try to feel where your breath is coming in. Usually it's your nose, your belly, and just feel the breath coming in and going out. And step number three is every time your mind gets lost, which I guarantee is going to happen a million times, a million times, you just catch your mind wandering and start again and start again. And don't get pissed at yourself because that's happening. Well, you may not be able to help it. You may actually get pissed at yourself, but just notice I'm getting pissed at myself and then start again.

And that's cool. And over time, what you learn is these waves of anger or self-judgment or an itch on your knee or pain in your back or whatever, that these are actually just passing phenomena that you can view non-judgmentally and dispassionately and objectively, kind of like journalists are supposed to view the news. objectively, kind of like journalists are supposed to view the news. And that is the aforementioned superpower, which is that in the rest of your life, quote unquote, off the cushion, when you're not meditating, and you're overtaken by anger or annoyance or impatience, some percentage of the time, you'll be able to resist, you'll be able to say, Oh, I see what's going on here. I'm starting to get angry, but I don't need to take the bait. And the bait is when we do the things that we regret most in our life, when we eat when we're not hungry, when we lose our temper with our loved ones, when we ignore our kids when they're trying to talk to us because we're checking our BlackBerry.

All the shit that we are most ashamed of is because we're getting yanked around by this voice in the head. This is the kryptonite. I'm sorry to interrupt. Yeah, go ahead. It's a massive pain in the head. This is the kryptonite. I'm sorry to interrupt. Yeah, go ahead. It's a massive pain in the ass. I'm not going to lie to you. So I'm not saying, like, you're going to – A, I'm not saying you're going to sit down and meditate

and it's going to be super sweet and fun. B, I'm not saying that it's going to turn your life into a nonstop parade of rainbows and unicorns. This is why I called the book 10% Happier. It's a hard thing to do, and it will have benefits in your life, but it's not going to solve all of your problems. Right. And it brings it back to this idea of – this dualistic idea of the observer and the monkey mind, right, which kind of brings it full circle back to Tolle. Yes.

Because Tolle is not wrong. Right. It's just – this is the practical application of actually getting in touch with that and dealing with it. Yes, yes, yes. But it does raise these kind of metaphysical questions because like who's – okay, so we realize we have a thinking mind. Who is the one realizing that we have a thinking mind? And so who is that? And I think the Buddhist assertion would be that it's an impermanent and unsolid formulation, that the self that you think is the ridge pole of your life actually doesn't exist.

Now, we're getting into esoterica here, but we're getting into metaphysical argument. But it's a very, very interesting thing because you realize the more you meditate that, okay, so I'm watching the voice in my head. I'm noticing

the voice in my head. Who's noticing, right? And so that's the mystery of consciousness, right? That is, it's actually not a complex debate. It's actually quite simple.

Close your eyes and listen to sounds, right? And we're not going to do this right now, but just later after the podcast. On the plane ride home, if you close your eyes and just listen to all the sounds that you hear, people talking, the hum of the airplane engine, and then ask yourself, who's hearing them? Who's hearing them? You won't be able to find the hearer. So there's hearing going on, but no hearer. there's hearing going on but no hearer there's thinking going on but no thinker this is the mystery like who's the hearer we don't know and you talked about that as a technique in the book for kind of dealing with the the ruminations of the mind during the practice yeah

well actually you know to be honest with you i avoided this stuff in the book because um i'm trying to where i read it somewhere when i was reading oh maybe it was an interview that you did yeah i've talked about in interviews and um uh it gets talked about by a lot of the teachers the reason why i didn't talk about it is because it's actually it can make your head hurt it's it's kind of in in the west in western culture we don't think about the self too often. We're thinking about ourselves. Yeah, all the time. No question.

We're thinking about ourselves all the time. That is definitely not a metaphysical or philosophical thing. It's more just like we're thinking about ourselves. It's a habitual thing. So I actually shied away from it, but I'm toying with the idea of writing another book where I do get more into it. I can guarantee you that that book will not sell. Because it won't be called 11% Happier. It will not be called 11% Happier. And I just don't know how one can make this stuff.

I find I'm getting really energized talking about it, but I just don't know if you're an average person. Oh, well, I'll go down the rabbit hole if you want to. I mean, I can do this all day. But I think, you know, for the listener out there who might be new or newly initiated to these ideas, it's sort of like thinking about when you dream, right? And in a dream, you're having a conversation with somebody. And that person that you're looking at is saying something to you and you're anticipating it. You don't know what they're saying to you. So who's coming up with that sentence that is being delivered to you that you're not consciously aware of?

So it can get tricky, right, with the layers of consciousness and unconsciousness. Yeah. These are the great mysteries. We think the great mystery is – and it is a great mystery. Why are we here and who created us and and who created the universe obviously that's a huge mystery but the other big one that we never talk about is who is the who are we you know like who is the eye that we take to be uh not eye but the eye that we take to be us you know who is that? And how is it that we can hear things,

but we can't find the person hearing them? You know, I just think that's an incredibly interesting, and nobody has the answer, but the Buddhist assertion is that the more you look, things in your brain will change, your mind will change, that you will stop clinging so hard to this identity that is the source of your unhappiness. And I think just developing as a first step, just a very basic awareness that the looping thoughts in your mind, whether, or the stories that you tell yourself about who you are, like, oh, I'm, you know, I'm an athlete, or I eat a plant-based diet, or I'm a correspondent on news. These are just stories, right? They're not really real, right? And we loop them, or like,

I'm the guy who gets anxious when he has to go and talk to people in a public place, or whatever it is, we reinforce those over time, we give them power, and then we look at that and decide that that is who we are. And we're not drawing that distinction between the monkey, that's really the monkey mind, right? And becoming the observer, there's a freedom with that, right? You can almost sort of unshackle yourself from that and realize that you have a lot more control and power over how you respond in a particular scenario. And when we were at Revitalize, I've told this story before, but you would believe, but Charlie Knowles, who was there, he did a couple guided meditation programs and somebody said to him, asked him a question, said, I'm very attached to my anger. And I feel like in a business context

that when I can conjure up that anger, that actually gets me a positive result from time to time. And so I feel like I need that. And I feel like if I start meditating, I'm going to lose that. I'm going to lose my edge. And he said something very interesting, which is echoed in your book, which is actually you develop this superpower. You can still have your anger, but you're having a choice in a scenario of a whole panoply of ways that you can respond to sort of get you from point A to point B. But you're not impulsively just being angry without having control over that. Yeah, you're harnessing the anger rather than it harnessing you and yanking you around. And I would, I think anger is probably, I would think passion is about work.

Yeah, I mean, anger is about work as we, you know, ultimately, I think we would be well advised to kind of try to transcend that. Yeah, but I think what he really means, I'm just guessing here, I think what he really means is passion rather than anger. There could be a righteous passion, a belief in the importance and the righteousness of what you're doing. And that actually, I think, if we're to get super technical about it, is different from anger, which has sort of an ill will and a hatred component to it, which I don't think actually feels good or is good in any way. But you have wisely and skillfully brought it down to the practical as opposed to the esoteric. And I'm glad you did that. And just to echo what you were, amplify what you were saying, you know, we, one of the other mysteries is, and this is a related mystery, is we don't know where thoughts and emotions come from. You know, they're coming

out of a void. We're not inviting all the thoughts that we're having right now into our head or the emotions that arise when bad or good things happen. They just come. And yet we tell ourselves a lot of stories about ourselves based on those emotions. So like your kids are being annoying to you or your wife's being annoying or your work is frustrating and you start telling yourself the story, I'm an impatient person, I'm an unkind person, I'm insufficiently compassionate. Well, you didn't actually summon the things, these emotions or thoughts, they just came up. And so if you actually have this basic understanding, well, the basic capacity to see what's happening in your head, and the basic understanding that you didn't put it there, you're unshackled, you're freed in some way to stop wasting your time telling yourselves these unconstructive stories and actually just to deal with the emotions and thoughts as they are.

And often the best thing to do is just let it pass. So to take it back to kind of the timeline here, understanding that that first, you're on vacation and you do that five minute meditation. First of all, that was five years after your panic attack on air. So it isn't this overnight thing. And that was your first time. So how long, and you make this commitment, which I think conjures up this really important idea of like making a decision and creating momentum around it. Like you made this sort of declaration, like, okay, I'm going to do this. I did it once, I'm going to do it. How long after that before you started to kind of really feel results or that something was shifting? I think there were a couple of, there were two things that happened quickly. And then the big

thing that happened eventually, the two things that happened quickly were one and they're very much related one is i i uh i got better at focusing not like amazingly better it didn't like cure any latent add uh um in in me you know i don't have a great attention span there's a reason why i got into television um so it didn't fix that. But the act of getting lost in thought and then yanking myself back to the task at hand every day in meditation just helped me do that more at work. So one. Two, I got better at just, it just made me calmer. You know, there's something about, even though meditation is, can be, or at least the kind of meditation we're talking about now, can be enervating because it's hard. It is actually fundamentally calming to sit down and take yourself out of the rat race for a couple minutes every day.

And you just feel a little bit more, for lack of a better phrase, grounded and calm. But the big thing is, is what we've been talking about already, and that's, we haven't used this term, but it is the right term. It's mindfulness. And mindfulness is, well, it gets talked about a lot these days. I think the word gets used in ways that people don't know what the hell they're talking about. But really, the simple definition, one simple workable definition is, it's the ability to see what's going on in your head at any given moment without getting carried away by it. And that's what meditation does for you, at least this kind of meditation. And that's the superpower that I keep talking about, which is you can be overtaken by a wave of anger or sadness or regret or whatever, but you don't need to act on it always.

Sometimes you do. There are times when something bad's happening, you got to act on it. But you want to have the ability to respond rather than react. And that's the key, this responding rather than reacting. And I found that this has enormous value in personal relations and in a professional context where I can sometimes be the calmest person in the room in a high-pressure, highly competitive, high-stakes environment. And that's just great. Do you have a good example of that that you could share? For me, actually, this is an example that is maybe not exactly what I was talking about,

but it's what's coming to mind right now, which is that not long after I started meditating, I got a job as the weekend anchor of Good Morning America. Before that, I had been anchoring the Sunday night newscast. So I was doing this kind of very serious, straight up newscast. And then I got switched over to a job where on Saturday and Sunday mornings, I'm kind of the emcee of a three-ring circus of morning show where we're just doing, you know, we definitely do news, but we also do a lot of, you know, there are cats and cupcakes on the set, you know, and so, and they're all the, and it's not, you know, the evening newscast is really scripted.

You know, it's all me and a teleprompter, you know, and maybe there's some correspondence coming on, but they're saying things that we've agreed upon beforehand. On a morning show, it's like a cast of characters. It's two main hosts. There's a newsreader. There's a weather person. There's somebody else talking about entertainment news.

Right, right, right. And everybody's unscripted. And I don't have full control anymore. And I reacted to that by kind of contracting. And I sucked at the job is the honest the, the honest way to describe it. And, uh, for a long time. And, um, ultimately I found primarily through the feedback of my wife that I wasn't using meditation. Uh, it was an opportunity to use what I'm learning in meditation to be better. And so, uh, now what I've found is that if I can stop trying to control everything

and just listen to what people are saying, that I can summon the same kind of wit that I might be able to summon at, say, a cocktail party or a lunch with a good friend. Because I'm actually listening to what people are saying instead of having some preset control, a game for, you know, a preset plan for controlling the game. And so if somebody says something that I you know i'm uncomfortable with rather than getting wrapped up in my disapprobation or anxiety over that i i can let it pass and just kind of more skillfully some percentage of the time lead us out of that conversation and toward the commercial break

um and so in this live, unscripted, millions of people watching scenario, I'm not perfect. Look, I screw up all the time and do things that I wish I hadn't done. But I'm much better than I used to be. And I'm much more relaxed and much more like in in and in the moment, which I kind of hate the term in the moment. It's a it's a cliche, but there's I can't think of any better phraseology right now. And and then that's important when you're, you know, like this morning, I was on the air for two hours on GMA with all these other, Good Morning America, with all these other co-anchors. And we're having these freewheeling discussions. And, you know, and you want to be like listening to what people are saying well enough so that you can, you know, come up with something funny or smart to say in response.

And that also doesn't violate FCC regulations. Right. I mean, you're able, essentially what you're saying is you're able to, for lack of a better word, be present so that you can be spontaneous as opposed to all up, wrapped up in your head, thinking, how am I coming off? People are watching me. What am I going to say? And, you know, all that kind of thing. And those things will come up. You're not, it's not like you're, you know, you can't control what comes up but you can control how you deal with it and so i will have moments of of fear or anger or whatever but i'm just much better at seeing them as they arise and and dealing with them effectively like you know if you actually sit and watch your mind it's like this video game of like constant everything's

coming at you fast but we're mostly unaware of it, right? But if you have this lens on what's happening in your head, you can see, okay, that's just a bolt of fear or a bolt of anxiety, but it's not yanking you around as much. And you're able to kind of navigate it, surf it as you will, as you would, I don't know, as it were, that's what I went to say. Surf it and so that you're, you're riding it and it's not pummeling you. And so, yeah, it's true that on the air, there are some times where I'm like, Oh, what the hell am I going to say now? Or I can't believe I just said that. Or, or I just suddenly become acutely aware of the fact that millions of people are watching, but I don't have to let that take me down, um, all the time.

Right. I mean, in certain respects, it's like a modern day path to, you know, becoming this Jedi Knight. You really develop these powers that really give you the ability to navigate whatever situation you are in, in an incredibly astute way. But it does involve some level of surrender, surrendering your logical mind, despite whatever you can read all the scientific studies, whatever, right? But you're still kind of having to give it up a little bit. And I think that what comes into play with this, particularly for men, is that that's very uncomfortable, right?

Like this is sort of a threat to masculinity. And, you know, women have no problem with this, but I think it's a lot harder for men, you know, professional men to embrace this idea. And I think why your book is so powerful is because you're allowing yourself to be vulnerable. You're talking about your mistakes and your life path, and you're coming at it from this highly skeptical point of view as somebody who's turned the dial in the other direction. turn the dial in the other direction. So I'm interested in how you can kind of speak to that issue for somebody who's like, it's like the idea for a man to like sit down and it's a vulnerable feeling and we're not really kind of trained to be okay with that.

You know, I don't think you have to, and I could be wrong about this, so I'm just kind of working this out. I don't think you have to suspend your logical mind so much as, I mean, the- But you're taking a leap of faith because you're like, all right, I'm doing this because I think this will improve my life. Yes, that's for sure. And it's not a tangible thing that you can like see. Right.

But you're taking a leap of faith in some ways every time you hop on a treadmill, right? Like you're like, this sucks. And at minute 29 of your 30 minute run, you're like- But you can see your gut going down over time. You can see the muscles getting bigger when you lift the weight. But you'll see it with meditation too. You won't be able to see, obviously, your muscles getting bigger, but you will notice and the people around you will notice. Like, I don't know anybody who's meditated and actually given it a shot who's like, yeah, it actually didn't work for me. The only times I've heard from people who say, I can't meditate or it didn't work for me, other people who tried it once

or twice realized how hard it was and told themselves this story, which a lot of people tell themselves, which is meditation may be good, but you don't understand I can't do it because my mind is somehow uniquely busy. Bullshit. Not true. Welcome to the human condition. That's the way every mind works. Meditation is hard for everybody, even the monks in the Himalayas. It's hard. There's just no two ways about it. And so is going to the gym. And if you go to the gym and it's easy, you're cheating.

And if you're meditating and it's easy, you're either dead or enlightened. And so that excuse is not operative. But anyway, your question was something about for men. You are taking a leap of faith. And I think in some ways it's not like you're Buddhism or meditative philosophy is like hyper logical. In fact, super, super interesting. The Buddhists are making all these. They're like the chemists, as a friend of mine has once said, the chemists of the mind.

They put together these long lists, almost like the periodic table of elements for the mind, you know, the seven things that, the seven things you can do in order to be enlightened, the, you know, the four things that will happen to you if you do X kind of meditation. They're just really, really, really logical and hyper, hyper detailed. But what you are doing is setting, you are taking a step back from your thinking. And you are realizing that the thinking that you are clinging to all the time as the you that's in control

is actually just a voice that may or may not be correct. And so maybe there's some fear around that, but I actually think where the real fear comes from is closing your eyes and seeing how nuts you are. Right. And you actually have to look at yourself. Yes. But it's not like you're looking at yourself in some maudlin, picking, you know, shrinks office kind of way.

And I got no problem with shrinks. But this is different. This isn't psychoanalytical. You're not like sitting down and like sorting through your feelings. You're actually sitting down and seeing what the feelings are dispassionately. So you're not like looking for what were your mommy issues necessarily. You're more like just noticing what comes up when I sit down and how can I navigate it and manage it from a distance. So it's really not touchy-feely. In fact, it's the opposite of touchy-feely. I think actually psychotherapy is a very good thing. It can work extremely well in conjunction with meditation because, as a friend of mine has said, a friend who is a shrink has said that psychotherapy often gives you understanding without relief.

And the meditation can help with the relief because you can understand what your problems are and what your triggers are, and then meditation can help you not be triggered. Sorry. No, yeah. So then what is it that makes it so uncomfortable? I mean, I'm trying to get at this idea. Like, I think it's a really easy sell for a lot of women, but it's a much tougher sell for a dude, right? And I think it does go beyond this idea of like, oh, well, you have to look at yourself.

Like I think that it does bring up issues of masculinity and kind of vulnerability. Well, look, on the vulnerability thing, you may be pointing out something that I'm unable to crystallize right now under the gun. But I will say the reason why I think most men don't want to do it, just in my view, is that the way it's been presented, meditation, in our public discourse has been like wussified. It's just presented in the way people talk in the meditation world. It's as if their voice, the timber of their voice is as if they're trying to give you a Reiki massage with their voice.

It's annoying. And they use language like sacred space and the earth mother and holding your emotions with tenderness and all this stuff. It's just talked about in a very, very specific way. I got no beef with that. I think it's actually helped a lot of people and actually can be very helpful to talk in that way. But it's off-putting to a lot of people and it leaves too many of us out of the conversation. So that's a huge problem. And I think it's why a lot of men would never do it. And by the way, I think also a lot of women. The other thing is because it's just hard. It's just hard. And I hear all the time from people who say, I can't do it. But that's bullshit. You know, you can, it's like, it's as if somebody came up to you at the gym and said, if somebody came up to you at the gym panting and sweating and said, I can't exercise because this happens to me. That is the exercise.

Right. So if you sit down and you're finding yourself pelted by a lot of annoying thoughts, you're meditating. That's the deal. Yeah, I think, yeah, the idea is that if that's happening, then you're not actually doing it right. But that is the doing. You're not trying to reach some special state. Maybe you will, but for years down the road, or if you're enlightened, you will reach some imperturbability, some unbreakable equipoise or whatever. But that's not going to happen to most of us.

Most of us are going to sit down and it's going to suck. It's going to be like you're going to be thinking about lunch or your to-do list or whether you need a haircut. And you're going to have to catch yourself doing that, which is often embarrassing, and return your attention to your breath, which can be boring and tedious. But it's a bicep curl for your brain. And it shows up on the brain scans. It changes your brain. And you're developing all sorts of healthy new connections in your brain that will make you less yanked around by your emotions, better able to focus, et cetera, et cetera.

Yeah. And also the health implications, like lowering your blood pressure and hormonal changes and all sorts of things. Not to mention, this is no small thing, it will make you nicer. And that is actually the point. I don't lead with that because I think a lot of, you know, it can sound a little like I'm sermonizing or moralizing. But you can't help, in my view, and this is, some people disagree with this, but in my view, you can't help but sit down and look at your own mind and how crazy you are with that.

And then over time, you're going to start understanding everybody's like that. I mean, you're going to see somebody going apeshit at the airport or whatever, at the airport counter, and you're going to, you know, you may get a twinge of self-righteousness like, I don't do that anymore. But you will in part also feel like, I know how poisonous feels and i feel bad for them you know and not in a self and not in a and again at its best not at a uh in a judgmental way but in an empathetic way like that sucks it sucks to be losing your temper um and um and i find that actually being more empathetic, being a better listener, and having better relationships with everybody in my life feels good, cuts down on the amount of rumination and regret, and makes me more effective. How has it affected your marriage? In a very positive way. We had a good marriage going in, but I was a huge pain in the ass.

I was taking my stress home with me from work in ways that were totally not constructive. And when we had fights, I was reacting immediately and reflexively and automatically to my anger, as opposed to just having the enlightened self-interest of not flying off the handle and saying things that I was going to be paying for for two weeks afterwards. Granted, if my wife was here, as I think I said at Revitalize, if my wife was here, she would give you the 90% still a moron lecture. She doesn't think I'm perfect at all. You know, we just got back from a two-week vacation.

She could give you a long list of the really, really annoying things I did while we were on vacation. And that's all totally true. I cop to that. It's just better than it was. Right. And it gets better all the time. You know, she's pregnant now. And so, yeah, thank you.

And it's been a battle. And, you know, it's hard to be pregnant. And I know, and I know that you would agree with this, I'm handling this much better. You know, I'm being much more accommodating, much more understanding now than I would have before. Right. for. Right. In recovery, there's an adage that says you don't ever want to go through a scenario like a sort of monumental kind of episode in your life and look back on it when you're on the other side of it and go, I wonder what that experience would have been like if I was really like dialed in with my recovery program, like instead of going through it as a dry drunk or what have you.

I think that that could be highly applicable in the meditation context too, to say, oh, I'm going to, you know, I have to navigate, you know, the passing of my father or whatever it is kind of episode in your life that can trigger a lot of stress or it's just an emotionally charged situation to get on the other side of it and go, I wonder what that experience would have been like if I had been actively engaged in a meditation practice throughout. And to kind of reflect on that and realize that, oh, you know, we have choices and more control over how we kind of respond and engage. Yeah, absolutely. All right.

Sorry, go ahead. So go ahead. Were you finishing? No, I was just going to say that in the case of dealing with a significant other, that it really can help to, you know, we're all the stars of our own movie, you know, and some of us more so than others. But for people like me who are on, you know,

who have the tendency to get wrapped up in their own bullshit, it really can help to disentangle and actually, you know, see things through other people's eyes and recognize that they have stressors that you may fully understand or may not. Um, and, uh, it just makes the relationship more rewarding for you and much better for them. And that's an upward spiral. Right, right, right. I want to kind of, before we sign off, leave people with a couple tips, like, okay, I'm sold, right? Like, I'm ready to do this. I've been dragging my heels on it. I want to get going. You kind of talked about what your first, you know, sort of meditation experience was like,

but, you know, maybe you could relate a couple simple practices or some tools to kind of, you know, pepper throughout your day when stuff comes up to help people kind of kick it off and begin. Well, in terms of starting a meditation habit, I think the first thing to do is get and, you know, read a good, like a good book or like find some good instructions. Like 11% Happier. 11% Happier is an awesome book. Actually, I don't, for kicking off a meditation habit, I wouldn't necessarily say, you know, you could read mine. Mine is mostly a memoir.

Right. But there are meditation instructions in the back. So if you want to read like a maybe amusing story about like a TV reporter who starts to meditate, fine, read my book. story about like a TV reporter who starts to meditate, fine, read my book. There's also, you can get rock solid meditation instructions in the back. I say rock solid because they were reviewed by people who actually know what they're talking about. So that you can do that. Or there's a book called Real Happiness by Sharon Salzberg, which is, and she's totally cool and very much, very legit. And she is, and that's a very simple book. I gave it to my mom, who is a scientist at Harvard and a very skeptical person who,

when I was eight, explained to me that there is not only no God but also no Santa Claus. But is this the same mom that put you in the yoga class where they had to – Yes, yes, yes. So she was down with touchy-feely stuff but not down with, like, religion. And so Buddhism for her was a tough sell. And, again, you don't have to be a Buddhist to meditate. Anyway, so she read the book and started meditating right away. And so Real Happiness is a very good book, and I think that's fine.

Or if you don't want to read a book, there's a very good app. It's called Headspace. It's run by two guys, Br uh brits who live in la uh and they're really cool and they and headspace has been adopted by lots of corporations like the western hotel chain and virgin america and uh virgin atlantic etc etc and those guys like the guy who who's the voice on the app is a former circus performer who's like a really good looking cool uh 40 year old uh british guy who looks like as the new york times said he looks like a really good-looking, cool, 40-year-old British guy who looks like, as the New York Times said, he looks like a soccer striker.

And so I totally recommend that. So there's a couple ways to get started right there. So read a book, get a general idea of how simple the instructions are, but also some of the theory. And then two, commit to doing it five minutes a day. Five minutes. Scientists haven't worked out the dosage question. We don't know for sure what the minimum amount you can do to develop some sort of benefits.

But I've asked all sorts of scientists and all sorts of teachers whether it's okay to just recommend doing five minutes a day. And everybody I've talked to has said that's a great idea because it takes away your excuse. One of the big excuses, which is I don't have time to do this thing. You definitely have five minutes a day. Everybody's got five minutes a day. No matter how busy you are, you've got five minutes. And do it right when you wake up, right before you go to bed, right when you're pulling your car into the driveway, before you go in at night, five minutes. And I think that is enough to change this relationship with the voice in your head. And you may find that it goes up over time or or maybe not. I think a five-minute-a-day habit for the rest of your life would be awesome.

And for you specifically, because we talked about this before the podcast, that where you sometimes get into it for, you know, 20, 30 minutes a day, but then sometimes drop off, I think if you commit to doing five no matter what, there's a power in the dailiness of it that is stronger than doing one hour a week. Yeah, I think it's the consistency is really the key to the kingdom. What you need is the daily collision with the asshole in your head.

Because then it's always top of mind, it's always close to the top of mind that this nonstop conversation you're having with yourself is illusory, isn't necessarily the whole truth. And you then can have some distance from it. So one, again, just to recap two steps here. One, find a good book, read it, just learn the basics or get the app, the Headspace app. And two, just tell yourself you can do five minutes a day. Give yourself a break. That's it. That's all you need. And I think that's enough to get you started.

Any more than that, I feel like we can talk about more practical tips, but those are really the two biggies. Great. All right, man. Well, thanks for talking to me. I could talk about this all day. We can keep going. You need more questions?

No, I don't want to take up too much of your time. So I appreciate it. The book is fantastic. Congrats on all the success with it, by the way. Thank you. It must be fun for you. You go on this journey. You've written a book, so you know how lonely it is.

And so I expected nobody to read it. And I don't know if anybody's read it, but a lot of people bought it. Well, it says New York Times bestseller right there on the cover, so I think a few people read it. Unless you bought all the copies yourself. Well, I wouldn't put it past me. But, yeah, it's pretty obnoxious to put that on the cover. But I wouldn't put that past me either. It's been awesome to write the book that, I care about the subject and to have people

also care about it. It's huge. It's the most meaningful professional thing I've ever done. And maybe even the most meaningful thing aside from getting married that I've ever done. Well, I think the greatest power in the book for me is just that you allowed yourself to be vulnerable and to approach this subject that is a tricky subject with a skeptic's mind. And you were able to kind of have the courage to tell your story and to talk about things that are embarrassing. And I know that when I was writing my book, that the only way that my book would really be personally meaningful to me

was directly related to the extent to which I would have the courage to be able to talk about some of those things. But I do remember, and I did that. And the only way I was able to do that is to imagine that I was writing in my private diary that no one would read. And I'd have these momentary flashes of the book being at Barnes and Noble, and I would have a panic attack, my own private panic attack, and be unable to write for days. But I've realized that, you know, that has been the power in the book and it's not easy. And I remember when I kind of sent my manuscript into the publisher, I looked at my wife and I said, I hope this isn't the biggest mistake that I've ever made, you know, in my life. It's a scary, scary feeling. So, but it's also, it's beautiful

and you've executed this really, really well. And so I just want to thank you for writing the book. I think it's helping a lot of people, and it's doing a lot of good. So I hope you keep writing on this subject. Thanks, man. So the book is 10% Happier, How I Tamed the Voice in My Head, Reduce Stress Without Losing My Edge, and Found Self-Help That Actually Works, a True Story. And you can get it on Amazon. Uh, you can use the, uh, Amazon banner at richroll.com that helps out the show. So we appreciate it when you guys do

that. And, uh, if you guys are down with Dan, you can find him on Twitter. He's at Dan B Harris, right. And, uh, other than buying his book, you should watch him on television on the weekends on good morning America, occasionally throughout the week. And on Nightline, are you Nightline every night? What's the Nightline agenda? There are three Nightline anchors, so we split it up. So I do it a couple times a week, and then I do Saturday and Sunday mornings. And yeah, we need the ratings.

Definitely watch us. Right. Are you working on some cool stories right now that you're excited about? Always, always, always. I'm trying to think if there's one particular thing I should tell you about real quick. Yeah, we're actually going to do a big investigation into, I can't say much about it, we're going to do a big investigation into prison gang. Wow, interesting. Yes.

Cool. All right, well, we'll be looking forward to that. Cool. And is there a website for yourself or the book, too? Facebook. Dan, if you go to Facebook, Dan Harris ABC. Cool. And everything's on there.

You can get the book and see whatever stupid shit I'm talking about. Right on. All right, man. We did it. Yes. It was a pleasure. Thank you. Do you feel okay about it?

I feel great about it. Anything else you want to say? Thank you. Other than that, no. All right, man. Thanks, Dan. Appreciate it. Peace.

Plants. say? Thank you. Other than that, no. All right, man. Thanks, Dan. Appreciate it. Peace. All right, you guys, that's our show. Hope you enjoyed it. Dan's a super cool cat. I appreciate him being so forthcoming and bringing his great message to you guys. If his ideas around meditation and how you can implement it into your life resonates with you, don't forget to pick up his book using the Amazon banner at richroll.com. You also might want to check out our meditation program, Jai Release. You can find that at richroll.com in the product section. It's a guided meditation program.

It takes all the guesswork out of it. It's a of mp3s you can just pop in your earbuds and it takes you through a really awesome practice that takes the thinking out of it you just have to follow along it's pretty cool julie recorded it it's amazing if you're feeling stuck in your life if you have goals but you don't know how to set about achieving them you might want to check out my new online course at MindBodyGreen. It's called The Art of Living with Purpose. It's all about how to properly set and achieve goals, among other things. If you're looking to get more plant-based in your life, you can check out my other online course at MindBodyGreen, The Ultimate Guide to Plant-B nutrition. Both of these courses are hours of online streaming video broken into five to 10 minute little nuggets with an online interactive community, a ton of downloadable

tools and helpful information. So check that out. Of course, go to richroll.com for all your plant power provisions. We've got the new Run RRP t-shirts, the homage, the tip of the hat to Run DMC. I love these shirts. They they're cool we're going to be coming out with a tech t running version of that soon but i dig that and you can rock your affiliation with the show and help spread the word by supporting that around town we also have our nutrition products jai repair jai b12 and our ion products the elect our new electrolyte replacement supplement, our plant-based protein product, Chai Repair, B12, of course, very important whether you're on a plant-based diet or not. We got other garments, other t-shirts, we got caps, we got beanies, we got signed copies of

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videos and share them with everybody under my story. And I've been doing that. I've been playing around with it. It's a really fun way for me to have little, you know, basically make spontaneous videos of what I'm doing throughout the day, whether it's training or nutrition oriented or podcasting, or just a daily slice of what it's like in our household, being a dad, doing stuff with the kids, stuff like that. So if you're into it, download the Snapchat app in the app store for your mobile phone and follow me there.

My name there is IamRichRoll, I-A-M Rich Roll. And that'll be a good time. All right, that's it, everybody. Until next week, get off your butt and just do that five minutes of meditation in the morning like Dan says. Five minutes. Everybody has five minutes.

Don't make it 20. Don't overcomplicate it. Don't overthink it. Shut off the brain and just do it. Before your day intervenes with everything that you're doing, just take that five minutes shortly after you wake up, set the tone for the rest of your day, and then watch it unfold in a better way. I promise you.

All right. That's it, everybody. See you next week. Peace. Plants. Thank you.