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.