ABC's Dan Harris on How Meditation Can Make You Happier
Released on 09/24/2014
I arrived at ABC News at age 28.
I was working with Diane Sawyer, Barbara Walters,
Peter Jennings, and I was very aware
of how green I was,
and my way of compensating for that was
to become a workaholic, I just threw myself into the job,
and when 9/11 happened not long after I arrived,
I raised my hand to go overseas
and cover the ensuing conflicts.
In 2003, after a particularly long stay in Iraq,
I came home and I got depressed.
Instead of dealing with it forthrightly,
I did something incredibly stupid,
which was that I started to self-medicate
with cocaine and ecstasy.
It was somewhat intermittent.
It was never while I was working,
or definitely not when I was on the air.
When I went to see a doctor,
he asked me a series of questions,
one of which was, do you do drugs?
At which point I said, yes,
and he gave me a look that said,
okay, asshole, mystery solved.
(laughter)
In that moment, I actually wasn't laughing.
It's funny now.
I was in a shame spiral, I really realized
what an idiot I had been for such a long period of time,
and that I had imperiled this career that I loved.
So, I knew I had to make some changes,
not the least of which was quitting drugs,
which I did right there.
Totally coincidentally,
and as it turns out, serendipitously,
my boss and mentor at the time, Peter Jennings,
this guy, assigned me to cover faith and spirituality
for ABC News.
This position assignment I very much did not want.
As it turned out, it was a great thing for me.
One of my producers recommended that I read a book
by this gentleman, Eckhart Tolle.
So I got the book in the mail and I thought,
initially, it was irredeemable garbage.
It was filled with pseudoscience
and talk about vibrational fields.
Just as I was about to throw the book out the window,
he started to unfurl a thesis about the human condition
that I had actually never heard before.
His argument is that we all have a voice in our heads,
the inner narrator that is the central feature
of all of our lives.
It's the voice that chases you out of bed in the morning
and is yammering at you all day long
and has you constantly wanting things,
comparing yourself to other people,
thinking about the past and the future,
instead of focusing on what's happening right now.
And for me, this was a huge aha moment.
This is what made me do all the things
that I'm most embarrassed about.
I didn't know that 2500 years before Eckhart Tolle,
it was this guy who was talking
about the voice in the head.
All the stuff that I liked most in Tolle
seemed to be lifted from the Buddha.
At this point, a fresh problem arose
because the Buddha had an explicit prescription
for dealing with a voice in the head,
but my problem was what he was suggesting
sounded repellent.
Meditation.
But then, I did some research and I learned that
actually there's this explosion of research,
of scientific research, into meditation
that seems to suggest an almost laughably long list
of health benefits.
From lowering the release of the stress hormone cortisol,
to lowering your blood pressure,
to boosting your immune system,
to mitigating depression, anxiety, ADHD,
helping with things, bizarrely,
like psoriasis and even irritable bowel syndrome.
And the neuroscience gets straight-up sci-fi.
They've been putting meditators heads
into brain scans and finding incredible things.
Just as a quick example, in 2010,
Harvard did a study of novice meditators,
people who had never meditated before.
They were taught how to meditate for just eight weeks,
and what they showed was that they literally grew
their gray matter in the areas of the brain
associated with self-awareness and compassion,
and they shrank the gray matter in the area
associated with stress.
Now, I should also say the other thing I learned
at this point was that despite its massive PR problem,
it's actually very simple brain exercise.
Step one is, you just sit comfortably,
you just wanna have your spine straight
so that you don't fall asleep.
Step number two, oh, you should close your eyes, too.
Step number two is you wanna find the place
in your body where you feel your breath most prominently,
usually your belly, your chest, or your nose.
And you just wanna feel the breath coming in and going out.
Step number three is the biggy, and this is the final step.
As soon as you start doing this,
your mind's gonna go bazonkers.
You're gonna start thinking about,
why did I have that extra cookie?
Why did Dances With Wolves
beat out Goodfellas for best picture?
Ancient resentments will come up.
It's gonna be tough.
The whole game is you catch your mind wandering
and bring yourself back, bring your attention back
to your breath.
This is gonna happen a million times.
And every time you do that, it's a radical act.
You are doing a bicep curl for your brain.
You're breaking a lifetime of habit
of walking around in a fog of memory and anticipation.
You're actually focusing on what's going on right now.
So, when I learned all this, I decided to give it a shot.
I started doing five or ten minutes a day,
and I found out pretty quickly that it had two
significant benefits.
The first was focus, which in this era
of text messages and emails and tweets and status updates,
focus is a very difficult thing.
But the bigger thing is this word mindfulness,
which has become a bit of a buzz phrase of late,
but a very simple, serviceable definition
is the ability to see what's going
on in your mind at any given moment
without getting carried away by it.
This is an enormously powerful thing.
Just by way of example, you're at Starbucks,
somebody cuts you off in line,
the way our minds work, most of us
will automatically think, I'm angry.
And then, we will immediately and reflexively
inhabit that thought.
We will become angry.
With meditation on board, some percentage of the time,
you will have a buffer
between the stimulus and the response.
You'll be able to see that you're thinking
there's a starburst of angry thoughts happening
and you're feeling self-righteous,
but you don't necessarily have to take the bait.
Some of you may be thinking,
aren't there times where you should be angry?
Aren't there things in the world where you,
that you need to fight for or against,
and my answer is yes, of course.
Meditation, the idea isn't that you should
become some sort of lifeless blob.
There is a difference between
wisely responding to things and blindly reacting.
And in my view, this is a superpower,
and is an incredibly scalable skill,
which is why it is now being adopted
in a whole, strange variety of corporations,
from Google to Procter & Gamble to Aetna
to Target to General Mills.
Hat tip to our hosts here,
Wired Magazine ran a great article not long ago
about how meditation is really taking off
in Silicon Valley.
They called it the new caffeine,
which I loved, actually.
In fact, it's not just corporations who are doing this.
It's now athletes, including the Super Bowl Championship
Seattle Seahawks who have a meditation teacher.
Most interestingly to me, both the US Army
and the US Marines are spending millions of dollars
to find out whether meditation can make more effective
and resilient warriors.
I believe that meditation is
the next public health revolution.
I think that in the not-too-distant future
we're gonna start seeing meditation
the way we see physical exercise.
It's gonna join the pantheon of no-brainers
like brushing your teeth.
It's gonna be one of those things that we do,
and if we don't do, we feel guilty about.
It presents a radical notion which is,
happiness, which many of us have long
sort of assumed is entirely dependent
on exogenous factors such as
were our parents nice to us,
did we marry well, are we making enough money?
Happiness is actually a skill.
Something that can be self-generated and practiced
just the way you can build your body in the gym.
If I could leave you with anything today
it is that you should set aside your preconceptions,
which are most likely misconceptions,
and give this a try.
Five minutes a day.
Everybody's got five minutes
and I think it can genuinely alter
the relationship with the voice in your head.
Featuring: Dan Harris
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