This is how to build a happy life, the Atlantic's podcast on all things happiness.
I'm Arthur Brooks, Harvard professor and happiness correspondent at the Atlantic.
In this series, I want to figure out how we can live more joyful lives.
Through scientific discussions and an exploration of what happiness is, I'll uncover the how-to's
of happy living and assign you exercises to make happiness a daily practice.
Popular culture tells us that feelings happen to us and that we should get in touch with
them.
The problem is, we don't get very much training in the way that we can turn the tables and manage
our own feelings.
Most people probably think they can't manage their own feelings.
They just hope they get better feelings.
Excessive negative feelings are not just something to try to get rid of.
Now sometimes there are true medical problems, things like depression and anxiety.
Negative feelings are a part of everyday life.
It would be weird, it would actually be dangerous to eradicate them completely.
The problem is, they're out of balance in our lives so often.
We feel like they're managing us, instead of us managing them.
Can we find a balance where we don't eradicate bad feelings, but we have managed them appropriately?
The answer is yes.
This time on how to build a happy life, manage your feelings so they don't manage you.
Let's say that you're crossing the street, you're in a big city, and a car is about to
run a red light and run you over.
Well, the visual stimulus of that, you see the car barreling toward you, is processed
by the visual cortex of your brain, which signals a part of your limbic system called the
amygdala.
The amygdala lights up like a Christmas tree, sending an electrical signal through your
hypothalamus instantaneously to your pituitary glands, which signals your adrenal glands,
which are all the way down by your kidneys, to crank out a bunch of stress hormones.
This all happens, by the way, in milliseconds.
Your conscious brain is way behind.
You've already jumped out of the way, and your heart is pounding, and you're sweating,
and you've already flipped off the driver.
Look, you don't want to eradicate these emotions.
You need them because they keep you safe.
But what we don't want is for this kind of negative emotion to manage us either.
Excessive fear can make us miserable.
We need to learn to manage your emotions.
The way to do this is to do what we call making them metacognitive.
For example, say you're angry a lot, and the anger is interfering with your life.
Say to yourself, how interesting.
I'm feeling angry right now.
The moment you do that, it becomes metacognitive.
You become aware of it.
And so doing, it goes to your prefrontal cortex.
And your prefrontal cortex, also known as your executive brain, you can actually start
to manage your feelings.
The science of emotional management is pretty straightforward, but doing it, that's the
tough part, isn't it?
Here at How Too, we want to make it a part of our daily lives.
So let's sit down with Dan Harris and learn how.
Most of us walk around completely unaware, at least consciously, of a thunderously obvious
fact, which is that we have minds and are thinking.
When you're unaware of that, nattering inner voice, it owns you.
So that every thought your mind secrete becomes, as my meditation teacher likes to say, a
little dictator.
What meditation does is kind of systematically wake you up to the tumult, the inner cacophony,
so that you're not so owned by it.
Dan Harris is the founder of the mindfulness media company, 10% happier.
Harris, a former broadcast journalist and news anchor, recently dedicated his life full
time to sharing the benefits of meditation and mindful living through his project 10%
happier.
Following a panic attack on live news in 2004, his challenge was to not only overcome
negative emotions, but regulate them through newfound self-awareness.
On today's episode, I asked our expert about how meditation changed his life, why self-awareness
is important, and how we can all manage that nattering inner monologue with just a few moments
of stillness.
I quite famously, infamously, had a panic attack on Good Morning America back in 2004, back
story there, as I had spent a lot of time in war zones as an ambitious young, correspondent.
I got depressed.
I didn't know I was depressed, very unwisely, self-medicated with cocaine.
I was not high on the air, but I had been using drugs enough for the preceding year that
it was enough to change my brain chemistry according to the shrink-eye subsequently consulted
that change to my brain chemistry, most likely made it more likely for me to have a panic
attack.
That kind of set me off on this strange journey that included psychotherapy and then ultimately
meditation.
I had no pre-existing interest in meditation.
I actually had pre-existing hostility.
Then I saw the science that really strongly suggested that it can lower your blood pressure,
boost your immune system, rewire key parts of your brain.
Then I wrote a book about it.
I didn't think that book was going to succeed to my surprise and delight.
It did succeed.
Then I turned it into a podcast and a meditation app.
That was probably more than 60 seconds, but I think it's the whole story.
It's pretty good.
There's so much that we could dig into, but what I really want to dig into is basically
what actually you were solving with meditation.
Clearly, you were self-medicating because your emotions were managing you in a way that
you didn't like.
You fought back by trying to block out those emotions.
That's what people do when they self-medicate with drugs and alcohol.
They're trying to not be managed by their emotions.
When you actually took control of your life, you did something so that you could manage
your emotions.
Is that fair?
It's very fair.
In my case, the first application of it was exactly as you described.
I was owned by my thoughts, urges, and emotions, which is very common.
Most of us walk around completely unaware, at least consciously, of a thunderously obvious
fact, which is that we have minds and are thinking.
When you're unaware of this non-stop conversation that you are having with yourself, which if
we broadcast aloud, you would be locked up.
When you're unaware of that nattering inner voice, it owns you.
That every thought your mind secretes becomes, as my meditation teacher likes to say, a
little dictator.
Okay, yeah.
I should eat a sleeve of Oreos right now, or I should say something that's going to ruin
the next 48 hours of my marriage.
Then you just do it.
What meditation does is systematically wake you up to the tumult, the inner cacophony,
so that you're not so owned by it.
What does it feel like when you're actually meditating?
How does it feel like it has changed your life?
There are a gajillion types of meditation.
The kind of meditation I'm talking about is called mindfulness meditation.
It's derived from Buddhism, stripped of any metaphysical claims or religious lingo.
It is the kind of meditation that's been studied the most in the labs.
When you hear about the science around meditation, most of that, if not all of it, is really
mindfulness meditation.
The beginning instruction for mindfulness meditation is to sit quietly, spine reasonably
straight, close your eyes.
Closing your eyes, you can just gaze softly at the ground.
Second is to bring your full attention to the feeling of your breath coming in and going
out.
Pick one spot where it's most prominent.
Your belly, rising and falling.
Your chest, rising and falling, air entering, exiting your nostrils.
The third step is the most important.
As soon as you try to do this, seemingly easy thing of just feeling your breath, your
mind is going to go most likely into mutiny mode.
You'll have all sorts of random thoughts.
What kind of bird was big bird?
Who was cast by the friendly ghost before he died?
Blah, blah, blah, just like random thoughts, powerful urges, powerful emotions.
You're just going to see very quickly how distractable you are.
Many people have the experience of trying to do this, realizing how distractable they
are, and thinking that they have some sort of bespoke lunacy that precludes them and
only them from doing this thing called meditation.
That's a pernicious misconception.
Clearing your mind is impossible unless you're enlightened or you've died.
The goal of meditation is not to stop all thoughts, but just to change your relationship
to these thoughts.
Every time you get hit by a random thought or urge or emotion, you just notice that it's
happened and start again and again and again.
Every time you notice, you've wandered off and you start again, that's like a bicep curl
for your brain and that's what shows up on the brain scans.
What this does to get to the question you actually asked me, what this does is develop
a skill called mindfulness, which is you could just translate into self-awareness.
Once you start to engineer this deliberate collision with the voice in your head, then
when off the cushion, in regular life, you're ambushed by anger or fear or sadness, you're
less likely to be owned by it.
It's a skill, you know, the first time you said to meditate, it may be humbling, maybe
humiliating.
Over time, you will get better.
The periods of time where you're able to stay focused on your breath will extend your
ability to catch distraction before you've gone off in 10 minutes of fantasizing about,
you know, a homicide or an expletive field speech you're going to deliver to your boss.
You catch it quickly and recover.
The recovery is filled with less self-recrimination.
It's really kind of a skill and an art form that you get better at on the cushion and
off the cushion where you're just developing this self-awareness that allows you to surf
the waves of life rather than drowning it.
You said that you started out as kind of a cynic about meditation.
I've heard you talk about this before and of course I know about your journey and love
your book and your podcast and you went from cynic about meditation to skeptic about
meditation.
But the skeptical makes a case.
Well for me, what got me over the skepticism or the cynicism, well probably both really
was the science.
The science is particularly strong around anxiety and depression, both of which I've struggled
since I was a little kid.
My parents when I had a big scare, I'm almost 50 so I was coming of age in the late 70s
and 80s when there's a lot of cold war stuff going on and that TV show the day after or
the day after tomorrow and it was about the aftermath of a nuclear holocaust and it aired
in prime time.
My parents let me watch it.
Anyway, I was really freaked out about that.
They ended up putting me in some big study by a rather prominent guy named Dr. Beardsley
who was looking at the impact of the cold war on kids.
All I remember is playing soccer with him.
Again, there's the neuroscience which is really the sort of wow stuff and it shows how even
short daily doses of meditation among people who have never done it before, it can change
the way your brain looks.
It can shrink.
You're a meagre below the stress center.
It can boost your prefrontal cortex which is the home of our logical rational thinking.
It can really have a nice impact.
It seems on the area of the brain associated with attention regulation.
Self-awareness, compassion, I could go on.
Okay, so this is important for us to underline as well which is that the meditation and the
practices that you promote and have practiced and got a lot of benefit from other compliments
not substitutes for traditional Western therapies for emotional disorders, mental illness,
whatever it happens to be.
That's an important thing for our audience to keep in mind.
Now that you've talked to several thousand or million people about this, I mean, it started
off by getting the benefits from this yourself.
What are the tell-tale signs that somebody's being managed by their emotions?
Temporate tantrums.
I have a six-year-old.
You watch a kid and their emotions are all over the place and another metaphor that
from my meditation teacher, this guy Joseph Goldstein, is a complete mention.
He talks about us being like bees in a jar, just kind of like moving up and down, but
still kind of captive, but we're just going between the light and despair all the time.
When I see somebody just losing it, first of all, I see myself.
I am not above that.
There's a reason I call the book 10% happier.
I'm probably 100% happier if not more than I was when I started meditating 12 years
ago, but I'm not 100% happy.
I still experience all sorts of negative emotions and still retain the capacity to be a
schmuck in many, many ways.
But there are times when I, back when I would fly an airplane, which I don't do anymore,
well, at least not for now.
I'd see somebody else at the counter, losing it with the person behind the counter, and
I would both feel like I know that feeling, and I used to do that a lot more, and I would
feel compassion for them, because I know that that is suffering.
The Buddha talked about anger as having a honeyed tip and a poisoned root.
I think if you're paying close attention to what fury feels like, there's some satisfaction
in the release, but it's also toxic.
That's one telltale sign.
There's an ancient Buddhist saying that expressing anger is like picking up a hot coal to throw
at somebody else, but with your bare hand.
Who actually winds up getting burned?
Perhaps the person you want to throw it at, but for sure you.
It seems to me that what you're saying is that people who are managed by their emotions
are highly reactive.
And so we find ourselves to be highly reactive.
Something happens.
Something crosses our visual cortex, and we just react emotionally.
For good or for ill, that means kind of the limbic system of the brain is in charge.
People learn how to self-medicate precisely because they don't have the prefrontal hardware
to try to manage their emotions in the other direction.
Okay, back to Dan Harris in a second, but right now, a quick time out for science.
I've been talking with Dan Harris about emotional management.
So let's take a look at the science of emotions.
Specifically, I want to focus on the work of Carol Isard.
He was one of the world's leading experts on human emotions and proposed a very strong
theory of our basic emotions.
So what are basic emotions?
The definition of basic emotions is something that leads to actions that are critical for,
as Isard said, adaptive responses to immediate challenges to survival or well-being.
Now many of these emotions happen in the limbic system of our brains.
The part of our brains that we don't consciously control.
That's the part of our brains that give us feelings that are kind of happening to us.
This is the very ancient part of the brain.
It evolved millions of years ago.
Carol Isard hypothesized that our basic emotions come in six categories, two basic positive
emotions and four basic negative emotions.
The two positive emotions are interest and joy.
Now joy, of course, that makes sense.
I mean, joy in the pursuit of it.
That's why we're here.
It's something quintessential to the human experience and it's something so uniquely human
and what we all want.
But the other positive basic emotion is sort of less obvious.
That's interest.
If you're interested in how to build a happy life and is giving you pleasure right now,
that's interest.
That's a basic positive emotion, just like joy.
And if you think about it, you can see why it would be evolved to make you more attuned
to things that will help you make progress in your life.
The basic positive emotions, they're great.
But then there are the negative ones.
Anger, fear, sadness, and disgust.
These are arguably more important than the positive emotions, or at least they're more dominant.
They take up literally more brain space.
And the reason for that is that basic negative emotions keep you safe.
For example, anger will make you more likely to defend yourself.
Fear will trigger you to freeze or run away.
And disgust, it alerts you to pathogens that can harm you.
So that's a tour through Carol Lazar's work on emotions and the science of why we feel
the way we do.
And now back to Dan Harris.
I came up in a world at ABC News that was populated by many what we called anchor monsters.
I didn't have the best role models when it came to sort of personal and professional
comportment.
And so yes, I had it within my repertoire to lose it and be just deeply uncool.
Whether it's on the set or at the airline ticket counter as referenced earlier, I could
get really unpleasant and did not like that about myself.
But I did it anyway.
With meditation and this has been slow, slow progression and sometimes one step forward
to steps back, I am much more likely to see just actually to be honest to you, to feel
anger in my body.
This is something that happens when you meditate, you get better at sort of listening to the
signals of your body.
So I can feel my chest buzzing or my ears turning red or whatever and have become slowly
over time much less likely to lose it.
I want to be clear though, my temper is still something I work at.
But I am much less on a hair trigger than I used to be.
If I'm on my game and I'm mindful, I will start to notice.
Oh yeah, my chest is really starting to buzz and I have this urge to discharge this restless
energy by saying something sharp and I can watch it come and go and that is really
liberating.
It's interesting this is coming from you because you go from being really well known TV anchor,
important shows doing good journalism, traveling all over the world, doing it, which created
problems as you mentioned before.
But tons of success to being an entrepreneur and a best-selling author.
How do you use the very things that you're talking about to fight against the natural
tendency that we all have and especially successful people have toward addiction to success
itself?
I struggle mightily to this day with this addiction to success.
I'm working on a SQL 10% happier right now and it didn't intend to be a SQL.
I was going to write a book to publicize or to make more prominent these loving kindness
meditation practices because I was going to be a slim how to book.
As part of the narrative conceit for the book, I decided to get a 360 review which is
for people who have never heard of 360 reviews.
It's something to do in corporations a lot where they talk to the person's bosses, peers
and direct reports about what are the strengths and weaknesses of this person.
I did the kind of colonoscopy version.
I also added in my family and friends and it was brilliant.
I was such a clever idea that it was a karmic torpedo aimed at my cranium.
I got the results about three years ago and they were devastating.
Here I was, Mr. Happiness and people around me were unhappy with me.
I had to really re-examine a lot of things and that's what made me much more serious about
loving kindness meditation.
Maybe much more serious about therapy.
I got communications coaching.
I've got executive coaching, marital counseling.
I bucket all of this under love.
I went into a big spiral of self-loathing but ultimately directed me toward thinking
differently about love.
The fact that we're trying to make improvements and we're aware of the fact that we need help,
that's a virtue.
That's not a sign of the fundamental inconsistency.
People often ask me because I do, I write about happiness.
I'm a social scientist and I specialize in happiness.
People say, man, you must be super happy.
Why do you think I write about it?
The fact is that you recognize that there is an area for improvement that you need to
be touched up that you can go into the toilet spiral in any particular time should be incredibly
encouraging to everybody who is listening to us today.
Dan Harris is a work in progress.
One of the real constant fears that I see for people who have achieved a lot in worldly
terms is a fear of failure.
Do you think that you've suffered from a fear of failure over the course of your career
and you realize that you were being managed by feelings and you had been blocking out
the dictator of the feelings with drugs and that wasn't going to work anymore.
It's probably going to kill you if you didn't stop doing that.
So you developed a practice to stimulate the executive function of your brain to turn
the tables and manage that.
Has that way of life as manifested in your meditation practice?
Has that helped you with a fear of failure?
It has helped me but it hasn't eradicated the fear of failure.
Yes being more mindful, in other words being able to cut the strings of the malevolent
puppeteer of my ego on occasion helps with fear of failure.
But another thing that also helps with fear of failure is to fail and to see that you
survive.
And so the stakes weren't that high but I hosted a prime time game show on ABC failed.
Carrival ratings.
I tried years ago to do a digital show around Indy Rock which is one of my favorite things
to talk about.
And the number of times I was called a douchebag in the comments was just incalculable.
So I euthanized the thing.
I've found that seeing that I can try something and I can fail and the sun comes up the next
day is really reassuring.
And so for sure I worry.
Am I like banana rambo?
Like I think they only had one hit.
Am I a one hit wonder?
Is I do 10% happier?
And nobody's going to ever like what I do again and I've spent so much time on this
book.
I care so much about what I'm trying to say and people going to be criticized or even
worse greeted with crickets.
You know, that may happen.
But I know when I'm saying I know that, but I'll be fine.
People have had a lot of good things.
A lot of things go right in their lives.
You know me, it's pretty easy I guess to talk about loving kind of this meditation and
just meditation in general when you've had a lot of probatives in your life.
When people who level the seclusion, talking about meditation and managing your feelings,
this is a privileged conversation.
I'll speak for myself that I, I mean, I had two loving parents, upper middle class, household,
white and male and straight.
But happiness is something that every sentient being wants.
Whether you have had the amount of luck that I've had or not, whether you're a grasshopper
or a human.
As a reason why these practices are being taught in foster care homes and juvenile halls
and prisons and hospitals.
And as a reason why it speaks to so many people in the matter, their socioeconomic status.
I mean, the Buddha's first utterance was life is suffering.
But I can use this position to spread evidence-based practices that are helpful for everybody.
Do these practices nullify the many, many layers of injustice that exist in our society?
Absolutely not.
Are they going to help us better address them?
Yes.
So yes and no, this is a privileged discussion.
I think it's a shame that meditation is largely confined to upper west side, soul cycle,
holes, foods, that whole world.
And I don't say that with any, you know, hate because I am, I moved out of the city in
the pandemic, but I used to be all of those things.
You know, the evidence shows this is good for everybody.
And so I like to use my platform to spread the word about this and to give a megaphone
to folks who look different than I do who can speak to communities that don't want to
hear from me.
Last but not least, when our listeners are next caught behind the most idiotic driver
they've ever seen in their entire lives.
And they want to scream out the window or flip them off or get in front of them and cut
them off.
What do they do?
Well, there are a lot of many sort of meditative moves you can try, but let me just try this as
an experiment.
If you notice, and by the way, you may notice it late, you may be already, you know,
given the person of the finger.
So, but at some point you may notice that you're enraged.
Try just repeating in your mind, you may have to grip the steering wheel while you do this,
but may you be happy.
Try that because what we're doing here is, I use this phrase before, it's like counter
programming against the habitual storylines and narratives and thought patterns.
And you know, if you were an alien and you landed on this planet and you went to a gym and
you saw people running in place for 45 minutes or systematically lifting and dropping heavy
weights, you'd think it was really forced and strange.
But this is what we do to exercise our bodies.
And we have to do forced and uncomfortable things to exercise our brains and by extension
our mind.
And so, this is just a little one you can do.
Just when you find yourself enraged, you can even justifiably enrage.
May you be happy.
That doesn't mean you want the person to continue being a jerk.
Because if they were happy, they wouldn't be a jerk.
But can you understand that maybe they're rushing their kid to the hospital or maybe they've
had a really bad life and they found themselves in a terrible position and they're making
bad decisions.
May you be happy.
The words get caught in my throat saying it just because it is a little forced but I think
you can try it.
I know.
And I don't want our listeners to miss the truly radical thing that you said in that answer.
Notice that you're in a rage.
That's it because reactivity starts with you not noticing it and acting.
Notice that you're in a rage.
Say to yourself, I'm in a rage.
You can't say may you be happy until you notice something about yourself.
And the moment that you notice your own feelings, the moment that it becomes something that
you can manage.
This observation, this way of thinking and the practice to make it so is an incredible
gift.
And it's going to give to me in the last hour and gift to our listeners as well.
Thank you, Dan Harris.
As a social scientist, people are always my subject of choice.
Each week we'll share little audio snippets from our listeners around the world.
They answered this question.
When is the last time you remember being truly happy?
The last time that I felt my experience, happiness was the other day when I took my children
to the planet park.
I was at distracted by my phone.
I wasn't straining something on the device.
I wasn't trying to read or debate or find out about something polemic or partisan in
the media.
I was in the moment with my children.
But it then chased me, chasing them, and that moment when we were running to give them
this big field at the park, I felt happiness.
It was definitely one of those moments when I felt joy.
I could tell that this was a moment that I did not long to forget and to serve.
We've gotten a huge amount of useful and interesting information on living better and more
happily from Dan Harris.
There's so much to digest, I know.
What I want to do now is to go back to the initial goal for this show.
How to manage your feelings so they don't manage you.
Here's where we start.
Each day, this coming week, set aside 15 minutes in the evening.
After the end of your day, before you go to bed, of course.
But where your day is more or less behind you.
Go someplace where you can sit comfortably and relatively quietly.
I know some of you are in circumstances, if you have little kids, for example, where
quiet is a bit at a premium.
So let's just say relative quiet and where you're unlikely to be disturbed.
Now think a little bit about the strongest negative basic emotion you had today.
Was it anger?
Were you sad?
Did you feel disgusted?
Were you afraid?
Think about it.
Observe it as if it had happened to somebody else.
State the emotion out loud and it's context specifically.
Let me give you an example.
Let's say you're having kind of a health challenge.
Everybody does from time to time.
And it's giving you some fear, some anxiety about the future.
You might say, today after lunch, I felt kind of afraid because I thought about
the medical tests that I have coming up with my doctor.
I thought about it for about an hour and I thought about really all the worst case scenarios.
I kind of ruminated on them.
I even Googled my symptoms.
Now don't judge yourself.
Don't judge your feelings.
Don't judge your actions.
Just observe them in this way and state them out loud.
This is what happened.
Now you can do so using Dan's meditation techniques if you want or just do it simply
like I described it right here.
Second, let's analyze the feeling that you had as if you were doing it for somebody else,
a close friend.
For example, say, look, I'm not a doctor so I don't know what the outcomes might be.
That uncertainty that I feel about this problem is the reason I thought about the worst case
scenarios.
What was I doing?
I was really trying to explore the possibilities so I could manage them emotionally.
That's what I was doing.
But here's the thing.
I found it didn't help at all because I didn't learn anything.
In fact, I think it made me feel a little worse and I wasted a bunch of my time.
Now move on to step three.
Manage the feeling with a positive resolution.
For example, say, you know, a much better way for me to deal with this anxiety I have
about these medical tests is to say to myself, I don't know what these tests are going
to reveal.
But I'm going to know soon enough.
Now, it's on a long list of uncertain things in the world.
There's so many things that I don't know.
I'm going to choose to focus on what I do know.
And what I do know is that I'm alive and well right now.
And I do know that I will not waste the gift that is this moment.
I will not waste my time after lunch tomorrow, which can be spent doing generative, creative
things and maybe showing love to other people.
Now don't forget to put the resolution into practice.
One good way to do it is to write down your resolution, your resolution about how you're
going to deal with your feelings tomorrow and then put an alarm on your phone to remind
you to actually think about your resolution proactively so your mind doesn't wander in this
darker direction.
Do this every day for a week by which I mean every day after dinner, but before you go
to bed, do this 15 minute activity.
Sometimes it will be the same negative emotions.
These are hard to get rid of.
Don't kid yourself.
This is not a one day deal.
Sometimes there'll be different emotions.
That's okay.
But stick with the exercise.
If you make this a routine, if you stick with this for three weeks to a month, I promise
you you're going to be amazed at the level of self management you attain because you're
going to get better and better at it like any other skill.
Are you going to be perfect?
No, of course not.
And you will still have negative emotions which you need to have.
But at the same time, as time goes on, you'll be more and more the one in charge and
your happiness will rise.
It's all for this week's episode of How to Build a Happy Life.
This episode was produced by Rebecca Rashid and hosted by Arthur Brooks, editing by AC
Valdez, Catherine Wells and Jillian White.
Fact check by Anna Alvarado.
Our engineer is Michael Radio.
