10% Happier: How I Tamed the Voice in My Head, Reduced Stress Without Losing My Edge, and Found Self-Help That Actually Works--A True Story

by Harris, Dan

  My superiors expressed sincere concern over the incident. When they asked what happened, though, I lied and said I didn’t know—that it must have been a fluke. I was ashamed, and also afraid. I thought that if I admitted the truth, that I had just had a panic attack, it would expose me as a fraud, someone who had no business anchoring the news. For whatever reason, they seemed to accept my explanation. To this day, I’m not sure why. Maybe it was because it all happened so quickly, or because it was out of character, or perhaps because I managed to get through my next newscast, just an hour later, without a hitch. In the news business, memories are mercifully short; everyone moved on to the next crisis.

  I called my mom from backstage. She had been watching, and she knew exactly what was up. She’d always been impossible for me to fool. I was frantic, but her response, a mixture of the maternal and the clinical, was enormously comforting. Within hours, she had me on the phone with a psychiatrist colleague from her hospital in Boston. This was the second shrink I had consulted since returning from Iraq. It never crossed my mind to mention my drug use to him, because I hadn’t gotten high in the days or weeks leading up to the incident.

  Stage fright seemed like a reasonable enough explanation. Performance anxiety had actually dogged me throughout my entire life, which, of course, made my choice of profession a little odd. One of the only lighter moments in the whole crisis was when I jokingly said to my mom that my career up until this point had been a triumph of narcissism over fear. I had experienced a few minor episodes of panic before this—in Bangor in 1993, I nearly fainted when my boss announced that she wanted me to do my first live shot that night—but a meltdown of this magnitude was unprecedented. I was put on an immediate, steady dose of Klonopin, an antianxiety medication, which seemed to bring things under control. For about a week, as I became habituated to the drug, it gave me a pleasant, dopey feeling. With the Klonopin on board, you could have marched an army of crazed chimps armed with nunchucks and ninja stars into my apartment and I would have remained calm.

  Meanwhile, I kept on partying. Which is how, a little over a year later, it happened again. Same basic scenario: I was at the news desk on GMA. The terror cut straight through the Klonopin even before I started to read the first story. The anchors tossed it to me, and from the very first word you could hear my voice getting thinner as my throat constricted. I had five stories to get through, and no respite, no lifeline. I was determined, though, to make it all the way.

  I had to stop to catch my breath at a few points, but each time I would then physically will my face back up toward the camera and start reading again. This verbal Bataan Death March continued through four stories until I arrived at the “kicker” (news-speak for the requisite light, closing note), which was about the Miracle-Gro company coming out with a plant that blossoms with the words I LOVE YOU on it. As I read the last words off the prompter, I even felt confident enough to attempt a little extemporizing, although it fell flat. “We’ll keep tuned—stay tuned on that.” (Halfhearted laugh; awkward pause.) “Now to Tony for more on the weather.”

  This time, there was no crowd hovering around me after it ended. None of my colleagues or friends said anything to me at all. I hid it well enough that I don’t think anyone even knew it had happened.

  I may have gotten away with it, but once again I knew full well what had gone down, and I went into DEFCON 1. If I couldn’t reliably speak on the air—even while taking antianxiety meds—my entire working future was up for grabs. From a professional standpoint, this was an existential issue.

  My folks found me a new psychiatrist—now the third shrink I’d seen since returning from Iraq—and purportedly the “best guy” in New York City for panic disorders. He was a tall, sturdy man in his mid-fifties named Dr. Andrew Brotman. He had a twinkle in his eye and an un-ironic salt-and-pepper goatee. In our first meeting, he asked me a series of questions, trying to get to the source of the problem. One of them was, “Do you do drugs?”

  Sheepishly, I said, “Yes.”

  He leaned back in his large office chair and gave me a look that seemed to say, Okay, dummy. Mystery solved.

  He explained that frequent cocaine use increases the levels of adrenaline in the brain, which dramatically ups the odds of having a panic attack. He told me that what I had experienced on air was an overwhelming jolt of mankind’s ancient fight-or-flight response, which evolved to help us react to attacks by saber-toothed tigers or whatever. Except in this case, I was both the tiger and the dude trying to avoid becoming lunch.

  The doctor decreed in no uncertain terms that I needed to stop doing drugs—immediately. Faced with the potential demise of my career, it was a pretty obvious call. I agreed then and there to go cold turkey. He did not think I was a heavy enough user to require sweating it out in rehab. He did, however, say I needed to take better care of myself, with a steady regimen of exercise, sleep, healthy food, and temperance. He compared it to the way trainers take good care of racehorses. He also suggested that I come back to see him twice a week.

  As I sat there in Dr. Brotman’s office, the sheer enormity of my mindlessness started to sink in. All of it: from maniacally pursuing airtime, to cavalierly going into war zones without considering the psychological impact, to using cocaine and ecstasy for a synthetic squirt of replacement adrenaline. It was as if I had been sleepwalking through the entire cascade of moronic behavior.

  It was now thunderously clear to me that I needed to make changes—beyond just giving up drugs. Psychotherapy seemed like a reasonable route. This is what people like me did when things got rough, right? I mean, even Tony Soprano had a therapist. So I agreed: I would come back twice a week.

  The sessions were held in Brotman’s ground-floor office in a cavernous hospital located in an extremely inconvenient part of Manhattan. Initially, the principal topic of our biweekly sessions was, of course, drugs. While I may not have been physically addicted, I was certainly psychologically hooked. I missed getting high so badly that it was the first thing I thought about in the morning and the last thing I fantasized about before I drifted off to sleep. I’d had some of the happiest moments of my life while high, and pulling the plug was wrenching. I worried I might never feel happy again—that I’d shorted out my brain circuitry for pleasure. Certain friendships had to be sacrificed because simply being around some of the people I’d partied with was too powerful a trigger. I went through the various Kübler-Ross stages of grief, including sadness, anger, and a robust phase of bargaining, where I fruitlessly tried to convince the doctor to let me have a big night, like, maybe once a month. Comments like these would inevitably provoke Brotman to pull what I soon learned was a signature move: leaning back in his chair and shooting me a skeptical look that sent the following nonverbal message: Really, asshole?

  I found a degree of comfort in the fact that my case was not an aberration. I learned of soldiers returning home and attempting to re-create the adrenaline rush of combat by driving at excessive speeds. And while the psychological impacts on veterans were well documented, an underreported study of war correspondents found high rates of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), major depression, and alcohol abuse. The psychiatrist who conducted the research noted that, despite the risks, many journalists insisted on repeatedly returning to war zones. As one veteran reporter put it, “War is a drug.”

  Despite having this larger context, I still could not get over that I had allowed this whole train wreck to happen, that I had risked everything I’d worked so hard to achieve. I felt disappointed—defective, even. I kept pushing Brotman to produce some sort of blockbuster psychological revelation. I hoped that I would be able to give him some magic set of data points from my past that would lead to an aha moment that would explain not just my mindless behavior, but also my penchant for worry, as well as the fact that I was a thirty-three-year-old with zero propensity for romantic commitment. Approximately a million times, Brotman—who had a pronounced allergy to the dramatic—tried to explain that h
e didn’t believe in such epiphanies and couldn’t suddenly conjure some “unifying theory.” I remained unconvinced.

  Still, the mere fact of having someone smart to talk to—and to make sure I didn’t go back to doing coke in the bathrooms of Lower Manhattan bars—was enormously valuable. But there was something else afoot—another development that would also play a role in putting me on the weird and winding path toward finding the antidote to mindlessness. This new X factor was the emergence of an unsought and long-neglected assignment from Peter Jennings.

  Chapter 2

  Unchurched

  Seemingly unprovoked, the woman standing next to me erupted in a high-volume stream of feral gibberish.

  “Mo-ta-rehsee-ko-ma-ma-ma-ha-see-ta!”

  “Ko-sho-toh-toh-la-la-la-hee-toh-jee!”

  She was scaring the crap out of me. I wheeled around to gape at her, but she didn’t notice because her eyes were closed, with her head and arms inclined skyward. It took me a few beats to put together that this person was speaking in tongues.

  I looked around the packed 7,500-seat evangelical megachurch and realized that a whole bunch of these people were also doing it. Others were singing along with the surprisingly good band that was playing strummy, Christian rock up on the stage.

  Coming through the crowd, glad-handing and backslapping as he went, was a sandy-haired guy in his forties. He caught a glimpse of me and started heading right in my direction. He thrust out his hand and said, “Hi, I’m Pastor Ted.” I took in his toothy grin, his boyish face, and his freshly pressed suit and immediately reached a whole set of conclusions about this man. All of which would eventually explode in spectacular, salacious fashion.

  After the 2004 elections, the religion beat didn’t look like such a back-of-the-book dead end after all. Evangelicals had just mounted an impressive display of electoral muscle, helping George W. Bush remain in the White House. Questions of faith seemed to be at the core of everything, from the culture wars at home to the actual wars I’d covered overseas.

  Even though I could now see the opportunity in the assignment Peter had given me some years before, it did not change my personal attitude about faith, which was one of disinterest bordering on disdain. Technically, I was not an atheist, as I’d told Peter when he’d first asked me to take over for Peggy Wehmeyer. Many years prior, I had decided—probably in some hackneyed dorm room debate—that agnosticism was the only reasonable position, and I hadn’t thought about it much since. My private view was quite harsh, and rooted in a blend of apathy and ignorance. I thought organized religion was bunk, and that all believers—whether jazzed on Jesus or jihad—must be, to some extent, cognitively impaired.

  I had grown up in one of the most secular environments imaginable: the People’s Republic of Massachusetts. My parents met in medical school (where they shared a cadaver—true story). This was in the San Francisco area during the late 1960s, and they subsequently moved east and raised my brother and me with a mix of hippie warmth and left-of-Trotsky politics. Our childhood featured Beatles records, homemade tie-dyes, and touchy-feely discussions about our emotions—but zero faith. When I was maybe nine years old, my mother sat me down and matter-of-factly told me that not only was there no Santa Claus, there was also no God.

  In seventh grade, I managed to convince my folks to let me go to Hebrew school and have a Bar Mitzvah, but that had nothing to do with religion; I was gunning for social acceptance in our heavily Jewish hometown. I also wanted the gifts and the party. My family being mixed, we found a reform temple that didn’t require that my mother convert. At Temple Shalom, I studied the basics of the Hebrew language, learned a bunch of Jewish folk songs, and flirted unskillfully with the girls at the annual Purim party. I don’t remember there being much God talk. No one I knew, other than maybe the rabbi, actually subscribed to the metaphysics, and since that time I hadn’t had a conversation of any significant length with a person of faith until Peter strong-armed me into this assignment.

  After a three-year reprieve, during which time I covered the global, post-9/11 convulsions and then John Kerry’s failed presidential bid, I now decided the time was right to take a deep dive into religion. Weeks after Bush’s reelection, I traveled to a hard-right church in Florida, where I interviewed parishioners who were clearly feeling elated and empowered. One of them told me, “I believe our Lord elected our president.” Another said he wanted a Supreme Court that would enable him to take his kids to a baseball game and not have to see “homosexuals showing affection to one another.”

  I interviewed the pastor, a televangelist by the name of D. James Kennedy, who was straight out of central casting: a tall, imposing man who dressed in robes and spoke with a booming voice. I asked, “What would you say to the people in those states who are really worried about the impact Christian conservatives can have on our government?” I expected him to offer an answer that was at least partially conciliatory. Instead, he issued a mirthless chortle and said, “Repent.”

  In that moment, I converted happily from war reporter to culture war reporter. When the story aired, Peter and the rest of my bosses loved it, and I realized this beat that I very much hadn’t wanted was, in fact, tantamount to a full employment act for me—it got me on the air a lot, which was, of course, the coin of our particular realm.

  For several years, I reported on every twitch, every spasm—or, as Jesus said in the Sermon on the Mount, every “jot or tittle”—of the national argument over abortion, gay marriage, and the role of faith in public life. There was a new tempest seemingly every day, from Christians boycotting Procter & Gamble for sponsoring Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, to the uproar over a two-hundred-pound, six-foot-tall, anatomically correct sculpture of Jesus made out of chocolate called “My Sweet Lord.”

  When I wasn’t gorging on the culture wars, I was out producing lighter feature stories about evangelicals, feeling like a tourist in an open-air zoo. I filed reports on Christian reality TV shows, Christian rock festivals, Christian financial advisers, Christian plumbers, Christian cheerleaders, Christian health insurance—you name it. During a story about a Christian fitness club in California, I noted, “You can work your thighs while you proselytize.” Not my finest moment.

  After an extended run of this, the producer who’d been assigned to work with me started to grow weary of my approach. He was a young man with a pleasingly alliterative name: Wonbo Woo. Like me, he was also not an obvious choice for the faith beat. He was a secular, second-generation Korean from Boston. And, he was openly gay. Over long car rides through the Bible Belt, we had some pretty epic debates. Not about the fact that we were interviewing a lot of homophobes—Wonbo was too professional to let that deter him. What he objected to was my proclivity for pieces that revolved around conflict and caricature. He wanted me to stop acting like the Anthony Bourdain of spirituality, feeding on the most bizarre fare I could find. He was tired of the culture wars; he wanted to focus not just on people shouting about their faith but rather on how their faith affected their daily lives. In sum, he wanted to go deeper. I told him he should go work for NPR.

  I was in pursuit of another of my fetishistic, look-at-what-the-wacky-evangelicals-are-doing-now stories when I landed in that megachurch filled with people speaking in tongues. My crew and I had traveled to New Life Church in Colorado Springs, a complex of large buildings perched atop a hill with sweeping mountain views. We were here to see the “NORAD of prayer.” Our guide was a super-solicitous man of God by the name of Pastor Ted Haggard.

  Moments after I was jarred by his noisily reverent congregant, the pastor ushered me and my team out of the main sanctuary, into the brisk Colorado air, and then into a gleaming, new, $5.5 million, fifty-five-thousand-square-foot building about a hundred yards away. We pushed through the glass doors, and walked down a long hallway decorated with religious art, the crew backpedaling in front of Ted and me, recording our conversation. Then we entered the main room, a rather astonishing space lined with enormous glass wind
ows, at the center of which was a huge, spinning globe. It was meant to be a sort of mission control for human communication with God, outfitted with computers, and piping in news feeds from around the planet. “We’re watching the whole world all the time for events that need to be prayed for,” he told me with earnest excitement. Ted was what’s called a “prayer warrior”—someone who believes in the power of targeted, “intercessory” prayer to effect real-world changes. “If there’s any indicator that there’s a problem, we notify hundreds of thousands of intercessors immediately.”

  Ted was really excited about this place—although I got the feeling he could muster equal ebullience while discussing parsnips or annuities. He did, in fact, have the air of a man who could be a top regional insurance salesman. With his short, parted hair and his sparkling eyes, he had the Clintonesque way of locking in on you and making you feel that, at least in that moment, you were the most important person in the world.

  He and his wife, Gayle, had started New Life in their basement several decades earlier, with a congregation of twenty-two people. It grew with fevered intensity as Ted led his followers on a sort of siege of the city, praying outside government offices, gay bars, and the homes of suspected witches. He and his troops “prayer-walked” nearly every street in the city, and even prayed over random names in the phone book, all in an attempt to chase the Devil out of town. Undoubtedly, part of Ted’s appeal was that he had a way of invoking Satan while remaining ceaselessly chipper.

  At the time of our visit, the church had fourteen thousand people on its membership rolls, and Ted was one of the leading lights in Colorado Springs, which, because it was home to many large Christian organizations, such as Campus Crusade for Christ and Focus on the Family, had come to be known as the “evangelical Vatican.” He wore his authority lightly, though, insisting that everyone simply call him “Pastor Ted.”