Dan Harris
Dan Harris challenges the myth of rugged individualism, advocating for mindfulness and altruism in the pursuit of happiness. He’s an author, former ABC News anchor, and host of the podcast 10% Happier. Find him at: www.danharris.com
Transcript
Dan Harris:
We had no tusks, no fangs, no claws. But we have this ability to cooperate, collaborate, and communicate, and that's what got us to the top of the food chain. That is an integral part of what makes us human and what allows us to thrive, and we have built a society that militates against this on almost every level.
Ted Roosevelt:
Welcome to Good Citizen, a podcast from the Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library. I'm Ted Roosevelt. Today's guest is a former ABC news anchor, Dan Harris, and the author of 10% Happier. In 2004, Dan had a panic attack on live television and he couldn't ignore that something wasn't working for him. He has since become an expert on mindfulness and meditation. More importantly, his self-deprecating and skeptical approach to these topics has introduced them to a world of people, myself included, who are not---I'll just say, obvious candidates. Dan hosts a podcast also called 10% Happier, exploring all aspects of human flourishing with a very diverse range of guests. Listen in as we discuss the ambition, ego, self-reliance, and our personal struggles with all of these. Plus Dan reveals how selfishness can align with good citizenship.
Dan, thank you so much for being on this podcast with us. What I want to talk about is sort of set the stage a little bit for some of our listeners. You describe yourself as a secular Buddhist. At the heart of that is a mindfulness practice. You've become a leader in this space, but I'd love if you could define that sort of amorphous term for so many people, "mindfulness."
Dan Harris:
First of all, thanks for having me on. So "mindfulness"--it's funny because the word gets thrown around a lot these days, and I think with insufficient specificity.
There's a way in which you can have quite a complex and rich conversation about what mindfulness means. But there's a very simple way to think about it. It's this innate ability we all have as humans to see what is happening in our minds right now. To be self-aware, to notice that we have thoughts and urges and emotions without, and this is the key part, without getting carried away by them. So mindfulness is the ability to see your thoughts and urges and emotions without acting them out reflexively and habitually, where every neurotic obsession that flits through our windshield of our mind, we just obey it like it's a tiny dictator. That phrase, by the way, comes from my meditation teacher, Joseph Goldstein, who talks about thoughts being tiny dictators. And that's the radical aspect of what mindfulness gets at, which is that you can cut the strings of what has become, for most of us, a malevolent puppeteer of this automatic, reflexive, egoic thinking. And there's a kind of freedom in that. It's not about ceasing all thinking, which would be impossible anyway, it's about having a different relationship to your thoughts. That's what mindfulness promises.
Ted Roosevelt:
I went back and looked at your panic attack in 2004 on Good Morning America. There's no question just in the way that you're breathing, the sort of need for you to throw back to the other anchors, that there is a lot happening inside your head in that moment. And just as another human watching it, I had a physical reaction to seeing you have a panic attack.
Dan Harris:
Have you had panic attacks before?
Ted Roosevelt:
I have had panic attacks before and I instantly--- I mean, I saw yours and I was like, oh, I know exactly what's happening there and it is a really painful thing to happen to someone. And then the idea of having it happen on national television is the stuff of night--- for me, of nightmares. I think the question I had is how do you view that moment in your life? Do you regret that that happened to you? Do you feel like it was a savior for you? Was it something else?
Dan Harris:
Well, first of all, just to say that it's not uncommon for people to say to me, I saw your panic attack video and it really didn't look that bad. And I always know in that case that that's somebody who's never had a panic attack. And so when somebody has a visceral reaction to it, my first suspicion is, oh, okay, well, a fellow sufferer. So welcome to the party. I'm very glad I had that panic attack. It happened 10 years before I wrote a book about it, so it was a kind of skeleton in my closet for 10 years and then I went public with it and it changed the course of my life and my career to do that.
So I'm happy I had the panic attack in that regard in that it really opened up a whole set of doors for me. It led me to meditation in many ways, and then it led me to a whole bunch of career opportunities that have made my life so much more meaningful. I would also say that being able to take something out of your closet and talk about it publicly is an incredibly liberating thing to do. It's liberating in that I feel like I move through the world with vastly fewer secret shames, secret sources of shame. And also because I realize this is helpful to people and that has infused my life with so much more meaning certainly from the contemplative traditions, but also from psychological research that if you can be in that mode of tapping into how you can be of benefit to other people, your stress goes down. You're less stuck in your own stuff and your own stories. And again, I want to be clear, I still get stuck in that stuff, but it's just happening less frequently and I have access to a pretty deep reservoir of the helpful and wholesome states of mind.
Ted Roosevelt:
The other thing I was struck by your panic attack on the air was I had a very similar experience where I was taught resilience is the highest virtue in the world and taking on as much weight as possible and never asking for anything, that was the end goal of the great, good person. And I had done that my entire life. And at 42, I broke my hip, which is virtually impossible for a healthy 42-year-old to do. I've talked to many doctors, I don't have any bone density issues. And two things happened. One, I was not able to hold anything up anymore, which is what I had been doing my entire life. And two, for the first time in my life, I became completely prone. I was not going to live through that situation unless other people came along and I allowed them to help me.
And when you talked about your 2004 panic attack, I heard you say that your first instinct was to not tell people that you had had a panic attack even though you knew very well that you had had a panic attack. And my first instinct in that moment, even though I was lying on the floor, I started to have a rush of adrenaline, I knew that I was going into shock, was to do everything I could to convince everyone around me that I was definitely fine. I do not need help in this moment. I'm okay. I'm actually a little annoyed that you're asking to help me right now. Give me a few minutes. I'm going to get up and walk out of here. And what I really love about that when I think back on that instance was how poetic it was that something made that happen to me. I mean, it was just the perfect thing to say, you need to stop. This is not working for you anymore and we need to take you out of commission and give you some space to think about your life and where it is. And I guess I'm curious whether you think the human mind has that capacity even to break a hip, to shut you down if it's really not functioning well.
Dan Harris:
You began that awesome story, and I love that story, by saying you had been taught that the number one value was resilience, and then you said something about being able to carry it all. I think that conflation is very useful in this discussion because I don't think you're alone in that. I think it's a very American thing and a very masculine thing, but it is a profound misunderstanding and I think disentangling it can lead to profound relief.
The data are pretty clear on this. The number one source of resiliency for a human being is the quality of your relationships. And if you are walking through the world, putting all this pressure on yourself to be somebody who doesn't need help, who's going to just have these big shoulders and carry everybody else's problems, your hip's going to break.
Ted Roosevelt:
I spent a bit of time going back and listening to some of the remarks that you've made, some of the prior podcasts that you've made, and I feel like you tend to caveat your skepticism before some of the platitudes that you say around Buddhism or you say around mindfulness, that sort of like "love is the answer"---you can't leave it at that. You have to say, I hear myself saying this and I can hear the skeptic in all of you hearing me say this, and I just want to acknowledge that point. And I wonder maybe if you can talk to why you feel you need to do that as opposed to just leave the platitude even though there's a truth in it. It is a truth.
Dan Harris:
Well, one answer is that I should drop it possibly that maybe I'm overdoing it and I'm open to that and I've gotten that feedback at times and I think if you went back and listened to the way I speak publicly, it has shifted over time. I lean, I still have skepticism but not cynicism so much. Having said that, I do think about my job on earth as revivifying really important concepts that have been ground into dust through rote repetition on throw pillows and maudlin Instagram posts and taking concepts like love or compassion or gratitude or inner peace and explaining them in new language feels very important to me. But I don't feel lost in all of that. I don't feel false making jokes about some of the cliches because the cliches genuinely do annoy me. Even the visual cliches, it's always like the message is always sent with a lotus flower or latte foam art or whatever it is that--- why can't we just say it more simply?
I make my content for everybody, but in my mind I'm speaking or writing to the 35-year-old version of myself who was deep and still really is deeply allergic to cliche and very skeptical if not cynical and slightly nihilistic, very selfish, very ambitious. And so I'm trying to get through that dude's thick skull. Often in my mind I'm thinking about men who walk around with the sort of misapprehensions that you walked around with, this idea of self-reliance, this idea that emotions are for wimps. And so I want to reach because that's an experience I understand from the inside.
Ted Roosevelt:
The work that you do, do you feel like it's either more useful for men or it's just more targeted to men? How does gender play into your thinking?
Dan Harris:
I think there's a flavor of mistake that I have made that handles the gender thing in the wrong way in that there's been some aspects of my joking about the cliches that has some misogyny in it, because the cliches are in what you might call stereotypical feminine. They're delivered in that way. I'm sure I've made mistakes in this regard and that there might be conscious or subconscious bias seeping in there. Having said that, there's a huge emphasis in my work in reaching everybody, no matter where you identify on the gender spectrum. We're very careful on my podcast to make sure that we're at least 50% female in our guests and we spend a lot of time thinking about representation of all varieties on the show with those caveats issued. I still believe that it's really important and I have a real opening to speak to men, and part of that is by turning down the volume on the cliches. So anyway, this is me saying to you, I believe there is a real gender issue here in how these messages are delivered. And I think about it a lot and I'm open to the fact that I've thought about it incorrectly and I'm constantly reevaluating.
Ted Roosevelt:
You've talked about this a bit in the past, but there is also a relationship between your thoughts and anxiety, and your thoughts and maybe your drive to succeed.
Dan Harris:
Yeah, that's interesting, the way you're putting it. I don't know if I've ever thought about it that way. I think there is a conscious or subconscious assumption on the part of many type-A successful people that we need our anxiety in order to be successful. And I think that's not true. And I say this as somebody who has a pronounced history of anxiety and is very ambitious, so I still think it's not true. I still have this anxiety, but having a different relationship to my thoughts, it really can have a beneficial impact when it comes to managing that anxiety. What it has not done is make me lack ambition. In fact, if anything, it's helped me find a cleaner burning fuel to drive that ambition.
Ted Roosevelt:
One of the themes we've talked about on this podcast is that there's a yearning---I think there's a yearning in this country for politicians to be quite a bit more vulnerable and that in the instances where they have been, it's been profoundly impactful positively for those politicians, and yet we so rarely truly see it.
Dan Harris:
I think our political discourse is just arrested in its development, and it kind of reminds me of this very funny thing. I once saw Chris Cuomo, I used to work with him at ABC News, and he said this thing once---he was being interviewed and somebody talked about his emotional repertoire and he said, "I have two gears: anger and self-pity." And I thought that was really insightful and hilarious, and that seems like our political discourse. It's outrage and victimhood. What if we had a world where it was okay to say "I'm sad or "I'm scared"? That would change the complexion of our dialogue, and I think in some pretty meaningful ways.
Ted Roosevelt:
I even have a lower bar, I would be happy just to hear politicians say, "I don't know. I'm not sure." To even show a bit of vulnerability along the way, I think is-- it feels like a very powerful tool in a politician's toolkit that's not being used today. We had Senator Chris Murphy on the podcast and he pointed something out to me that it was sort of hiding in plain sight for me that I had never really thought about. We were talking about the role of government in this country, and he pointed to the Declaration of Independence, which is sort of the origin document of the country. And the most famous line is one everybody knows really well, that we hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal, that they're endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights. And then he lists three of them, presumably the three most important: life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, which is such a contrast to what you think about what our politics are doing today. It's the pursuit of GDP, it's the pursuit of any number of things that are not necessarily rooted in happiness. From your seat, do you feel like that can be returned as a sort of national ideal, this idea of the pursuit of happiness first?
Dan Harris:
I don't look around and see a lack of people pursuing happiness. I just think we're looking forward in all the wrong places.
Ted Roosevelt:
Fair enough.
Dan Harris:
And I've read---on that line from the Declaration of Independence, I've read that that line was actually taken from a British philosopher whose conception of happiness was about a healthy overall community, not as an individualistic hunt for dopamine, which is I think where most of us go in our culture in terms of what the pursuit of happiness would look like: an accumulation of followers on Instagram and accumulation of money in our bank accounts. I'm not denigrating all of these per se, I'm just saying if you're relying on these fleeting sources of pleasure for happiness properly understood, it's unlikely to work.
Ted Roosevelt:
This circles back to the importance of our relationships and how our connections with others and the strength of our communities are crucial in tackling these bigger problems. Does that resonate with you?
Dan Harris:
Absolutely. We are at a point in this country, in the United States, where we have levels of anxiety, depression, suicide, addiction, and loneliness that we have never seen since they started keeping statistics. There's a sickness in our society that is directly linked to this uniquely American idea of rugged individualism, and that is a misunderstanding of what makes a good life. Just one great study that I love talking about is the Harvard Study for Adult Development. It's overseen right now by a fascinating guy named Dr. Robert Waldinger. He's the third person to run this study because it's been going on for nearly 90 years and it's been looking at several generations of people in the Boston area. And the goal was just to figure out, okay, let's track these people over several generations and find out what contributes to a long and healthy and happy and successful life.
What comes screaming out of all of the numbers they've crunched is that the number one variable is the quality of your relationships. There's a reason why we got to the top of the food chain, and it wasn't because we were the strongest. We had no tusks, no fangs, no claws, but we have this ability to cooperate, collaborate, and communicate, and that's what got us to the top of the food chain. That is an integral part of what makes us human and what allows us to thrive. And we have built a society that militates against this on almost every level. To my eyes, that is at the root of this extraordinary disconnect between our quality of life metrics on the one hand and our lived experiences on the other.
Ted Roosevelt:
That's a really important point, and human connections and relationships have consistently been shown to be the key to happiness. But I know you don't like platitudes, and of course in practice it's not always that easy. Not every relationship or connection is meant to be. And just this week you announced that you are separating from some of your longtime business partners and those types of separations can be really uncomfortable and difficult. And so I'm wondering if you're willing to both update us on what's happening with the podcast and the app and with 10% Happier and maybe a little bit about that experience.
Dan Harris:
I wrote a book 10 years ago called 10% Happier. It was kind of a memoir about how a skeptical dude got interested in meditation. I did not think that was going to be successful. I remember my colleague at the time, Barbara Walters at ABC News told me, literally, "don't quit your day job" when she found out what the book was about. And it came out at the exact right time, it just took off. It became a podcast by the same name. It also became a meditation app called 10% Happier. So I started the business with some co-founders and as is often the case in startups, we had some co-founder disagreements. In the end, we landed, I think in a reasonably good place. My co-founders are going to keep the app, which they're renaming to just "Happier." I actually think they have a lot of really interesting ideas about what to do with that app going forward.
So I sincerely wish them well, and then I'm going to keep doing my podcast, which will stay with the name 10% Happier. So that's where we're at.
And in the process, I can just only speak for myself that it's been one of the hardest things I've ever dealt with in part because I was embarrassed. Still I'm a little embarrassed that I'm a meditation guy in this situation. And part of my announcement was doing what I hope is going to be my move going forward and has been my move for a while, which is when I go through something embarrassing or difficult, I try to turn it into content that's useful. And so I announced the separation and then talked about the eight lessons I've learned going through this career earthquake.
Ted Roosevelt:
I had something similar happen in my career recently where I separated from a partner and I was struck by how much my own identity and ego was getting poked by a stick by this experience. Did you have a similar thing? Was that what was happening on your side?
Dan Harris:
Absolutely, totally. I've made so many errors and mistakes during this process that resulted, I believe, from my ego getting tickled or getting carried away by anger, not seeing things clearly because I was carried away. It was really complex and all of it exacerbated by the lack of sleep, and that led to panic attacks. And yeah, it was super messy. And my instinct now is just to---it feels better just to tell the truth. And so I think the fact that this process dragged on for a while is good in that I've been able to do some---here's another cliche, healing around it that I think has allowed me to talk about it in ways that are useful to people, I hope, rather than being in the middle of a thing and maybe saying some things that are ill-considered.
Ted Roosevelt:
I find myself really fascinated with the interpersonal, the experiences that you've gone through. And I hear in your description, your mindfulness practice allows you to take a step back, look at this emotionally charged situation in front of you with a bit more clarity, and that just sharing the experience is really helpful. And so I want to widen the aperture back out. I want to spend a second understanding how it relates to our society, how that your mindfulness practice or a mindfulness practice can be a balm, not just for your experience, but for some of the challenges, some of the anxieties, some of the political polarization that's happening in this country right now.
Dan Harris:
I don't know what can be done on a macro level, but I do know what can be done at an individual level that can ladder up. What we do as individuals does matter. That's a non-negotiable truth about the world, inexorably leads--- your taking care of your stuff, your taking care of your own mind and life will lead to benefit to other people. One of the things I talk about a lot, we're recording this in the middle of a heated presidential campaign in the United States, is this idea that action absorbs anxiety. And a lot of people feel helpless, myself included. And I think the wrong way to go with that feeling of helplessness is resignation apathy. The right way to take it is to recognize what agency you do have, which is that you can get involved locally and it doesn't even have to be relevant, your involvement to the issue at hand. Sure, if you want to get involved in politics locally, great, that's awesome. We need more of that. But it also can be just volunteering in an animal shelter or being helpful to the people in your environment.
Just as a tiny example that I talk about a lot is what does it feel like when you hold the door open for somebody? I think if you're paying attention, if you're being mindful, it feels good. That feeling is infinitely scalable because when you do good, you feel good. That is the feature about the human animal that makes me the most optimistic about our future.
Ted Roosevelt:
Well, I'm going to paint with a broad brush with this comment and just see how you respond to it. But it seems like people that are mentally healthy with some level of peace are not going to be inclined to go into American politics today. And that the inverse might be true, in fact.
Dan Harris:
I mean, I think this is a real problem. I don't know if I would use the exact same words you're using, but if you look at how nasty and polarized and structurally jacked up, with aspects of our campaign finance and gerrymandering, and if you look at how nasty it is in its tone and tenor and how difficult it is with its structural impediments, it's hard for me to imagine why most people that I know would--- any person I know would do it. And so yeah, I think that is a huge problem. It's a huge problem.
Ted Roosevelt:
So I've been using a tool recently that I'd be really interested to get your take on, particularly as it relates to the presidential election, but it applies more broadly, is that I find myself, in sort of heightened moments of political turmoil or national turmoil, that I start getting outraged by all sorts of things that I see on the news and I see in social media. And I realized that it was having an increasingly deleterious effect on my life. I've decided to break everything up into two camps: camp one is, this is upsetting enough that I'm going to take some sort of action. It may not be hugely substantive, but I'm going to do something and then I'm going to stop worrying about it. And step two is, I'm not going to change my behavior. I'm not going to take any action, in which case I'm going to stop worrying about it because I would find myself just sitting there and stewing on it without any action, and that was the most uncomfortable place for me. Does that make any sense to you or is that a cop out in some ways?
Dan Harris:
No, I mean I think it does, but you're not giving yourself enough credit because you are going to do something about it---I assume you're going to vote.
Ted Roosevelt:
That's true.
Dan Harris:
So that's doing something. But you also are a parent and you're a professional and you have a life to attend to. And so there's a limit to how engaged you can be on every single issue that provokes outrage. Some of us, not me, but some people--I'm glad this is the case--do have the time to go into politics or public service full-time or go into activism. I think it's great. But for the rest of us who have jobs and families that don't allow us to do that, we can only do what we can do. And I do think that action should absorb some degree of your anxiety in terms of news. I think you're right that the news media historically and to this day is overly reliant upon provoking outrage in its readers because that's what the readers are telling them through their actions that they want.
In other words, that's what they're clicking on. And then I think on top of that as an exacerbating factor, we now have these incredibly powerful social media companies whose algorithms more often than not, from what I can tell, reward outrage. And so the situation has gotten way worse. And so what can you do as an individual? I think titrating your news consumption is really important. Putting the phone down is really, I think, a helpful act. And this is where mindfulness can help because if you have the self-awareness to see that, oh, I'm getting dysregulated right now, or I'm typing in all caps or whatever it is that can help you pull yourself away.
Ted Roosevelt:
Dan, I want to close with a final question that we ask everybody, and it's a wide open question, so go in any direction that you want. And it is: what is a good citizen?
Dan Harris:
What is a good citizen? So on the subject of news consumption, I think this is a really interesting balance that we all have to strike because on the one hand, a good citizen is reasonably informed, and so it's up to all of us to figure out what's reasonable, what works for us, and how can we not cross the line between good at citizenship and being absolutely out of our minds because we're overdosing on the outrage. That's one thing that comes to mind.
Back to the definition of happiness in our Declaration of Independence and the pursuit of happiness, I think thinking about what actually works to make us happy. Once you see happiness, not as the wanton pursuit of gratification, and again, I'm not a monk. I'm all for delicious meals and making money, but once we see that real happiness is going to be the result of positive relationships, then we're harnessing. I think this fascinating relationship between self-interest and other interests and how intertwined they are that the more useful you are, the better citizen you are in your household, in your workplace, in our polity, in our society, the better, the more useful and helpful you are. Again, not about self-sacrificing, but just pitching in and helping in whatever way you can, the happier you are going to be. And so there's something in there about harnessing our true self-interest, understanding where real gratification and happiness lies that I think would make not only a better individual citizens, but also a healthier society.
Ted Roosevelt:
Well, I love that answer, and I'm going to end on that answer because I can't improve on anything you just said there, and I think it's the key platitude almost of where we want to go. So thank you very much, Dan. I really appreciate it.
Dan Harris:
This is a pleasure,
Ted Roosevelt:
Dan Harris, thank you. Your message on discovering happiness through service to others really resonates with me, and I appreciate your discerning perspectives on such a range of issues connected to mindfulness. I urge any hesitant listeners out there to try meditation. It may not change your life as much as Dan's, but it could just make you 10% happier. And that doesn't sound too bad.
Good Citizen is produced by the Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library in collaboration with the Future of Storytelling and Charts & Leisure. You can learn more about TR's upcoming presidential library at trlibrary.com.