The School of Greatness - 705 The Power of Meditation with Dan Harris

Episode Date: October 12, 2018

MEDITATION WILL CHANGE YOUR LIFE. Why do we set aside time to take care of our bodies, but not our minds? You need to work out your mental health just as often as you work out your physical health. Meditation is basically a bicep curl for your brain. When you meditate, you’re training your brain to come back to the present moment over and over again. It’s scientifically proven to alter your brain waves. That’s why I’m revisiting a conversation I had with someone whose life was changed by meditation: Dan Harris. Dan Harris is a correspondent for ABC News, an anchor for Nightline and co-anchor for the weekend edition of Good Morning America. He is a New York Times bestselling author who wrote 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 and Meditation for Fidgety Skeptics: A 10% Happier How-to Book. Dan found meditation after suffering an on-air panic attack. Now he works to make meditation accessible for everyone. Learn how meditation helped Dan and why he thinks it’s health’s next big thing in Episode 705. In This Episode You Will Learn: The crazy thing Dan Harris did (00:50) The hardest part of a 10-day meditation (1:10) The happiest Dan has ever been (2:20) Why mediation helps (3:00) About the next big public health revolution (3:40)

This is 5-Minute Friday! Welcome everyone to the School of Greatness podcast. So pumped up for today's episode. It's with my man Dan Harris. And for those that don't know who Dan is, he's a number one your time best-selling author of 10% Happier. He's the co-anchor of ABC News Nightline, and he's also the co-anchor of the weekend edition of Good Morning America. He has covered many of the biggest stories in recent years, including combat in Afghanistan, Israel, and has made over six visits to Iraq.

He has led ABC News coverage of faith and spirituality and is just an incredible human being. Then I did a crazy thing, which is I went on a 10-day silent meditation. Yeah, I have a lot of friends who've done that and they say it's unbelievable. What did you learn about yourself during that? Well, first of all, the first four or five days are the worst thing that ever happened to you. It's the worst. The worst. There's like a little bit of talking in here like with the teacher or something maybe at night if you have a question. That's essentially it. Yes.

And you're just alone. You can't look at anyone. Yes. The silence is not the hard part. What is the hard part? Because it's not like the other people there that I'm like dying to chat with. Right, right. The hard part is meditating all day long.

You wake up at 5 in the morning. You're basically meditating until you go to bed. It feels like time is forever. The seconds are landing hard, man. It's – Tick. Yes. Tick.

Wow. That's the tough part. It's like eight hours of meditation or more. You have breakfast, lunch. You do like some walking or something. I added it up. I can't remember. It's between seated and walking meditation.

It's like between six and eight hours a day. Unbelievable. And you're supposed to be mindful like on your mindful game, basically paying attention all the time. So as you eat, you're supposed to eat really slowly. When you're walking between things, you're supposed to be doing it really slowly. There are some people on this meditation retreat that I was on who were like moving in slow-mo all the time. But what happened was the first four or five days, terrible. And then I had, I don't know. Breakthrough days terrible and then i had i don't know breakthrough

breakthrough that i don't know if whatever i don't want to be overly dramatic i just had a moment that lasted i would say about 36 hours where i was probably the happiest i've ever been wow why i was dragged kicking and screaming into the present moment. Instead of wandering off into rumination or projection, I was like right there with whatever's happening. And my senses were incredibly sharp. Everything looked vivid. I could hear the birds in the trees. My food tasted amazing. I wasn't obsessing about things.

I was just enjoying and being right there with everything that was happening right there. And that's your life, by the way. I mean, that should be our lives, except we're cursed with these prefrontal cortices, which gives us the ability to make iPhones and build skyscrapers, but it also yanks us away from reality all the time. Meditation is a really good tool to help you not get so yanked down the rabbit hole of rumination or projection. Because basically you're training your brain to come back to whatever's happening right now over and over and over again. And every time you get lost in thought while you're trying to meditate and you notice you've become lost and you start again, that's a bicep curl for your brain, man.

And it shows up on the brain scans. Right. You're changing your brain. You're doing a kind of neurosurgery on yourself. Yeah. And we have a lot of science now to suggest strongly that it works. Lots of corporations have meditation rooms now. Lots of, you know, I mentioned before the lead singer of Weezer is a daily meditator.

Katie Perry, Lena Dunham, 50 Cent. A lot of people. A lot of people are meditating. So I think it's an awesome thing. I don't know where it's all heading. Where I hope it's heading is that this is the next big public health revolution. Yeah. I think that...

The next yoga. Yes. Like the way yoga is becoming mainstream. Yes. It's like this is the next. I think we're going to view mental exercise the same way we view physical exercise. Yeah. It's the gyms.