Table of Contents
10% Happier is a book about Dan Harris and his discovery of meditation. He takes us through his personal journey, starting with his addiction to the rush of adrenaline from covering live news events in dangerous locations to his subsequent breakdown on live TV as a news anchor.
This prompted him to seek out the convenient solutions that various self-help gurus promised. Among these was meditation, a practice he was initially skeptical about – not least for its association with other popular fads that originate from The Secret. But he came to appreciate the value of meditation by speaking to more sensible advocates of it like Sam Harris and Mark Epstein – who explained to him the benefits of the practice without the unnecessary jargon.
Meditation Pervasiveness
The pervasiveness of meditation can be seen in unlikely places like Silicon valley – where it is being viewed as a “software upgrade for the brain.” Wired magazine called meditation as the tech world’s “new caffeine.”
There’s a central reason why meditation has become so widely adopted: the science backs it up. Studies have shown that meditation contributes to lower levels of stress hormones, a boost in the immune system, improved focus, and better GRE test scores.
“Apparently mindfulness did everything short of making you able to talk to animals and bend spoons with your mind.”
Another study from Yale indicated that regions in our brain that are responsible for negative thought patterns such as ruminating about the past are deactivated while meditation was practiced (and afterwards).
Harris explains his personal experience with meditation.
“In other words, meditation created a new default mode. I could actually feel this happening with me. I noticed myself cultivating a sort of nostalgia for the present, developing the reflex to squelch pointless self-talk and simply notice whatever was going on around me: a blast of hot halitosis from a subway vent as I walked to work, the carpet of suburban lights seen from a landing airplane, rippling water reflecting sine waves of light onto the side of a boat while I was shooting a story in Virginia Beach. In moments where I was temporarily able to suspend my monkey mind and simply experience whatever was going on, I got just the smallest taste of the happiness I’d achieved while on retreat.”
While these studies are still in its early stages, the results have already debunked old neuroscientific dogma that insisted that the brain could not change. The new paradigm, “neuroplasticity”, holds that the brain is constantly changing due to experiences. Meditation is such an experience – thus making it possible to train yourself to become happier.
Mindfulness
“In a nutshell, mindfulness is the ability to recognize what is happening in your mind right now—anger, jealousy, sadness, the pain of a stubbed toe, whatever—without getting carried away by it. According to the Buddha, we have three habitual responses to everything we experience. We want it, reject it, or we zone out. Cookies: I want. Mosquitoes: I reject. The safety instructions the flight attendants read aloud on an airplane: I zone out. Mindfulness is a fourth option, a way to view the contents of our mind with nonjudgmental remove.”
The alternative is to be a victim of whatever is happening in your mind or “drifting unaware on a surge of habitual impulses.” Harris realized that this lack of awareness was not only responsible for his panic attack on live television, but for his drug addiction, overeating, and overreacting. To Harris, mindfulness was a reasonable alternative to a reactive life. And meditation is a birth right – we have the ability to be aware of thinking. Homo sapiens are classified as Homo sapiens sapiens taxonomically. “Our minds have this other capability – a bonus level – that no one ever tells us about in school.”
Mark Epstein, a psychologist, author, and one of the few people who renewed Dan Harris’ faith that meditation could be a solution to his problems said: “People come to me a lot feeling like they ought to be loving themselves, and I actually counsel against it.” Instead, we need to get in touch with our ugly side. Mindfulness gives us a way to examine our self-hatred without trying to make it go away, without trying to love it particularly. Just being mindful of it could be tremendously liberating.”
Far from leaving you with an edge – a concern shared by Harris’ friend (a comedian), mindfulness brought you “closer to your neuroses, acting as a sort of Doppler radar, mapping your mental microclimates, making you more insightful, not less. It was the complete opposite of the reckless hope preached by the self-helpers. It was the power of negative thinking.”
Being mindful in practice has benefits that can extend to other, less obvious areas in your life. Instead of stuffing your face until you’re sick, you learn to put your fork down and take your time between bites. You walk with more precision – your movements are more deliberate and less clumsy.
Skepticism
Harris’ early exposures to the meditation subculture included people like Eckhart Tolle, who was a favorite of Oprah. Tolle was the author of A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life’s Purpose and The Power of Now – he argued that our lives were governed by a voice in our heads. That this voice was engaged “in a ceaseless stream of thinking – most of it negative, repetitive, and self-referential. It squawks away at us from the minute we open our eyes in the morning until the minute we fall asleep at night, if it allows us to sleep at all. Talk, talk, talk: the voice is constantly judging and labeling everything in its field of vision. Its targets aren’t just external; it often viciously taunts us, too.”
Tolle’s thesis centered around his concept of the ego. Colloquially, we refer to “ego” as something akin to pride or conceit. Freud described it as the psychological mechanism that mediates between your id (animalistic desires) and ego (moral compass). But to Tolle, our ego represented our inner narrator, our sense of “I.” Even though that voice is the foundation of our interior lives, we take it for granted. And that the failure to recognize thoughts for “quantum bursts of psychic energy that exist solely in your head—is the primordial human error.” Harris related Tolle’s words to his own experiences and found them to be (mostly) true. He agreed that the ego is never satisfied – no matter how much stuff you buy or arguments you win. That it was constantly comparing itself to others and that it thrives on drama (on keeping old resentments alive). Most importantly, that it was obsessed with the past and the future – at the expense of the present.
While Harris describes his first intimations of Tolle’s work positively, he is eventually disillusioned.
“Just as I was coming to the conclusion that Tolle was a sage who perhaps held the key to all of my problems, he started saying some ludicrous shit. It was no longer his rococo writing style that was throwing me; I was getting used to that. No, now what was sticking in my craw was his penchant for making wild, pseudoscientific claims. He argued that living in the present moment slowed down the aging process and made the “molecular structure” of the body “less dense.” He asserted that “thoughts have their own range of frequencies, with negative thoughts at the lower end of the scale and positive thoughts at the higher.” Sometimes in the course of a single sentence, he would say something lucid and compelling, and then veer straight into crazy town. I honestly could not figure out if he was a genius or a lunatic.”
Wisdom of Insecurity
One of the main protagonists in Harris’ story is Mark Epstein, a psychologist who was able to explain meditation clearly and simply. He thinks meditation holds the key for a true route to happiness because through meditation, you develop an understanding of impermanence. This, he argued, would remove you off the emotional roller coaster and give you a better perspective of the dramas and desires that are taking over your attention. The key is to recognize the “wisdom of insecurity”.
“That phrase “the wisdom of insecurity”—really struck me. It was the perfect rejoinder to my “price of security” motto. It made me see my work worries in an entirely different light. If there was no such thing as security, then why bother with the insecurity?”
RAIN
Another useful idea was RAIN – an acronym Harris discovered on his journey that helped him apply mindfulness in a way that was easy to understand. “Recognize” was the first step and it involved voluntarily hitting the pause button and to acknowledge your feelings. “Allow” is when you let go or let it be. “Investigate” was when you then to contemplate how your feelings are affecting your body. “Non-identification”, the final step, asks you to remember that feelings of anger or fear were temporary states of mind that didn’t make you an angry or fearful person.
Enlightened Self-Interest
One of Harris’ conversations with Epstein was about Harris’ skepticism about meditation – mainly because of the trade-off between ambition and equanimity. Mark’s response was that “the answer is in non-attachment.” Harris wasn’t satisfied with the answer because it undermined the credo of any ambitious person. Surely, the reason you work hard is because you do in fact care about the results. But in a subsequent meeting Harris asked Epstein, “When we last spoke, you said it’s okay to be ambitious, but don’t be attached to the results. I cut you off, as I usually do—but what does that mean?”
“It’s like, you write a book, you want it to be well received, you want it to be at the top of the bestsellers list, but you have limited control over what happens. You can hire a publicist, you can do every interview, you can be prepared, but you have very little control over the marketplace. So you put it out there without attachment, so it has its own life. Everything is like that.”
Mark’s advice simply was to “do your best.” This seemed like worn out advice parents were notorious for giving, but the deeper point is that doing your best and failing can cause you to be unconstructively upset, and make it more difficult for you to recover. In other words, striving is fine – as long as it is balanced with the understanding that “in an entropic universe, the final outcome is out of your control.”
If you conserve your energy only for the variables you can influence, you stand a better chance of succeeding, and you are also better off in case you fail – because you will have the energy and resilience to bounce back. That is “enlightened self-interest.”
“We are constantly murmuring, muttering, scheming, or wondering to ourselves under our breath,” wrote Epstein. “ ‘I like this. I don’t like that. She hurt me. How can I get that? More of this, no more of that.’ Much of our inner dialogue is this constant reaction to experience by a selfish, childish protagonist. None of us has moved very far from the seven-year-old who vigilantly watches to see who got more.”
Meditation Retreat with Goldstein
Another major influence on Dan Harris was Goldstein, a philosophy major and meditation expert who organizes meditation retreats – Harris attends one of them. Goldstein acknowledges that for non-monks, the idea of putting an end to craving seems unattainable, but ultimately the process that ends in recognizing the self. Not the illusion of self or “Nibbana” that we typically understand as the observing “me.” It is a different type of self that does not create thoughts about guilt, hatred, and confusion. Enlightenment is the achievement of this self. But why bother reaching enlightenment if it’s so rare? Harris was not satisfied with Goldstein’s explanation of enlightenment – which seemed too extraordinary to be something an ordinary person could relate to. To Harris, the Buddhist’s practical, workable system (meditation) is impressive enough, without the need to add the possibility of magical transformation.
The final day (day 9) of Harris’ meditation retreat brought with a long-awaited boon of insight. But not before Goldstein bothers Harris one last time. He urges the group of meditators Harris was with to spend little time thinking about the things they should after the retreat – that these thoughts were a waste of time. Harris objects to the absurdity of Goldstein’s proposition – to function in the real world you need to deal with the real problems in it. Missing your plane is a real problem – worrying about it is not a useless thought. Goldstein concedes, but cleverly replies, “But when you find yourself running through your trip to the airport for the seventeenth time, perhaps ask yourself the following question: ‘Is this useful’?”
Goldstein’s point wasn’t to stop worrying about anything, but to be wise enough to know when worrying won’t make things better and stop worrying then. This was similar to the advice Harris received from Epstein. “is this useful” is an elegant question to ask when encountering a stressful, anxiety-producing situation. This moment for Harris was most valuable part of his meditation retreat.
Don’t Multi-task
Human beings have one processor, multi-tasking is none existent for us as a possibility. Only computers can do it. Applying yourself intensely to accomplish seventeen different tasks may give you the illusion that you are being productive when in reality you aren’t. As your mind moves on from project to project, you become unable to pick up where you left off. Add to this the “info-blitzkrieg” that is constantly demanding your attention (blinking red lights on your phone) and succeeds at getting part of it.
“Continuous partial attention” is exceedingly common in the age of limited attention spans and information overflow. The solution is to do one thing at time. Another tip is to take short mindfulness breaks during the day. These “purposeful pauses” involved watching your breath instead of fidgeting. While driving or waiting for your computer to start up, notice the way things feel – whether that’s your breath, physical sensations, or nagging thoughts. The mistaken assumption is that these short breaks can rob you of valuable time you could have spent working, but this position misses the point. The short mindfulness breaks help you think more clearly, prioritize, and work on one thing at a time. All features that do far more for productivity than relentlessly switching from one futile, unfocused task to the next.
“Studies showed that the best way to engineer an epiphany was to work hard, focus, research, and think about a problem—and then let go. Do something else. That didn’t necessarily mean meditate, but do something that relaxes and distracts you; let your unconscious mind go to work, making connections from disparate parts of the brain. This, too, was massively counterintuitive for me. My impulse when presented with a thorny problem was to bulldoze my way through it, to swarm it with thought. But the best solutions often come when you allow yourself to get comfortable with ambiguity. This is why people have aha moments in the shower. It was why Kabat-Zinn had a vision while on retreat. It was why Don Draper from Mad Men, when asked how he comes up with his great slogans, said he spends all day thinking and then goes to the movies.”
Life is Suffering
After a dinner Goldstein had with his meditation group, he made an important point. Buddhism is known for its signature pronouncement “Life is suffering”, but the exclamation is a source of a lot of misunderstanding. The more accurate translation of the word “dukkha” was more similar to “unsatisfying” or “stressful”.
“When the Buddha coined his famous phrase, he wasn’t saying that all of life is like being chained to a rock and having crows peck out your innards. What he really meant was something like, “Everything in the world is ultimately unsatisfying and unreliable because it won’t last.””
“We don’t live life as if they recognized basic facts; we are constantly anticipating the next pleasant hit, meal, relationship, or vacation. We live in perpetual anticipation of the next enjoyable thing right around the corner. And while many of us are blessed with great experiences, what remains of them?
Even if we were handed everything we could ask for, would we be sustainably happy? Aren’t there countless examples of the rich and famous that never felt their success was enough? How many times have we heard the same script about the rock star with drug problems and the lottery winner who kills themselves. The term for this is “hedonic adaptation.” Good things that happen to us quickly replace our previous baseline expectations, but the “primordial void goes unfilled.” We must break free from the spell we are under due to our own unrealistic ideas about the world – such as believing that this or that thing would bring us ultimate happiness. Goldstein makes clear that his central point isn’t that we cannot enjoy pleasant things in life, but that a deeper understanding and acceptance of the innately tragic nature of reality aligns us with what is true and leads to more happiness.
Dan Harris comes off as a loud, noisy, obnoxious, self-obsessed, extremely extroverted guy. He would be the last person you would think of when it comes to meditation, and yet – it may be the very reason I enjoyed this book. It was his skeptical, boisterousness that made me comfortable as he approached a controversial and often misunderstood ancient practice. A more introverted, spiritual person wouldn’t have asked the mischievous questions that Harris didn’t shy away from. His style is not very focused or succinct, but by reading through till the end, you are left with an honest account of what would stick in your head if you bothered everyone you suspected knew anything you didn’t about meditation.