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

  “People stopped coming to the group because I came,” he told me, laughing. “You’ve probably been to groups like that, where there’s that one person who doesn’t shut up. That was me. Finally, one of the monks who was leading the group said, ‘Joseph, I think you should try meditating.’ ”

  So he did. Alone in his room, he set an alarm clock for five minutes, and was instantly “hooked.”

  “I saw that there’s actually a systematic way of becoming aware of one’s own mind,” he said. “It just seemed so extraordinary to me. Before one is clued in, we’re living our lives just basically acting out our conditioning, and acting out our habit patterns, you know?”

  He was so excited that he started inviting his friends over to watch him meditate. “They didn’t come back,” he said, laughing.

  “So you were slightly insufferable?” I said.

  “Ah, yes—slightly insufferable. But I think the meditation over the last forty years has helped.”

  After the Peace Corps, he moved to India for seven years to study meditation. Eventually, by the mid-1970s, he decided to move back home to the United States, where he’d been writing books, teaching, and leading retreats ever since.

  On the subject of retreats, I asked, “Most people think nine days of all vegetarian food, no talking, and six hours a day of silent meditation sounds like—”

  “Hell,” he said, interrupting me with an utterly nondefensive chuckle. But, he added, when people do make the leap and attend a retreat, they get “the first glimpse of what the mind is actually doing. You know, we’re getting a real close, intimate look at what our lives are about.”

  That notion really struck me: until we look directly at our minds we don’t really know “what our lives are about.”

  “It’s amazing,” I said, “because everything we experience in this world goes through one filter—our minds—and we spend very little time bothering to see how it works.”

  “Exactly. That’s why once people get a taste of it—it’s so completely fascinating, because really our life is the manifestation of our minds.”

  With things going well, I figured this was the moment to float my new catchphrase. “People ask me—if I dare admit to them I meditate—‘So, is your life better?’ And I like to say, ‘It’s about 10% better.’ ”

  “10% is good for beginning a meditation practice. 10% is huge. I mean, if you got 10% of your money—”

  “Yeah, it’s a good return on your investment.”

  “It’s a good return, and it gets more—the return gets more and more.”

  This turn in the conversation was perhaps inevitable. By the return on investment getting “more and more,” Joseph was, of course, signaling that one could not only be 10% happier, but also 100% happy.

  “I will admit,” I said, “I remain skeptical about this notion of enlightenment. So I want to ask you, do you feel that you have achieved it?”

  “No,” he said. But he very quickly went on to say something that surprised me. While he hadn’t reached full enlightenment—the complete uprooting of greed, hatred, and delusion about the nature of reality—he was, he claimed, partway there.

  I’d read up on this issue a little bit since the retreat. According to the school of Buddhism to which Joseph belonged (there were many, I’d learned), there were four stages of enlightenment. The schema sounded like something out of Dungeons & Dragons. Someone who’d achieved the first stage of enlightenment was a “stream-enterer.” This was followed by a “once-returner,” a “non-returner,” and then a fully enlightened being, known as an “arhant.” Each stage had sixteen sublevels.

  “So you’ve achieved some of the early stages?”

  “Yes, and there’s more work to be done.”

  “How do you translate that into your daily life? When you start to lose your hair, or when somebody you love dies, or when your favorite baseball team starts to not be so good anymore, you don’t suffer?”

  “I would say that the amount of suffering in those situations has diminished enormously. It’s not that I have different feelings, but I don’t identify and attach to them—or make them a huge drama. You allow your emotions to come pass through with ease.”

  “Are you not afraid of dying?”

  “One never knows until we’re at that doorway, but right now I’m not.”

  How was I supposed to compute this? Here I was, sitting across from a fiercely intelligent, self-deprecating guy who, like Mark Epstein, could easily have been one of my Jewish uncles. Nothing about this person screamed “crazy.” And yet he was telling me that not only did he believe in enlightenment—a seemingly fantastical transformation that denudes the mind of all of the things most of us believe make us human—but also that he was partway there. Was this some sort of affinity scam?

  Making things more confusing was the fact that even though enlightenment sounded about as realistic as my cats being able to control the weather, everything about Joseph’s bearing signaled that he was, in fact, an uncommonly happy guy.

  I’m not sure exactly why, but this enlightenment thing really stuck in my craw. Maybe it was because it made me feel like my 10% solution was insufficient. Or maybe it was because I couldn’t reconcile my admiration for Joseph with the seemingly outlandish things he believed. Did those beliefs call into question the validity of the whole enterprise? If he really bought into enlightenment, could I take anything he said seriously?

  Fortunately, back at the office, I was able to shelve that theoretical 10%-versus-100% debate and apply what I’d learned on retreat to the very practical challenges I was facing. I was, in fact, finding mindfulness to be extremely useful.

  After an initial period of “how dare he” indignation over Jim Murphy telling me I was never going to be a big-time anchorman, I decided to approach the problem in a Buddhist style: to lean into it, to take his views seriously, no matter how inconvenient they may have been—to respond, rather than react. I forced myself to consider an unpleasant possibility: Maybe I was like a shih tzu who thinks he’s a bullmastiff? A kitten who looks in the mirror and sees a lion?

  But no: I wasn’t willing to fully concede—either to myself or anyone else—that Murphy’s pessimistic forecast was accurate. Careers in TV news are too frequently influenced by factors like luck, timing, and executive-level caprice to ever really count anything out. However, the new mindful me, instead of automatically recoiling into denial or rage, was able to see that Murphy probably was trying to be helpful—although he was also undoubtedly aiming to put me in my place so I’d finally sign the damn contract.

  On that score, he succeeded. His unsolicited dose of career perspective helped persuade me to throw in the towel and close the deal.

  In signing, I told myself that at least now I would be able to officially make the jump to GMA, a job I was convinced would almost certainly propel my career in new and marvelous directions. Untethering myself from the rigid formalism of the evening news would, I believed, open up heretofore unseen vistas. As it turned out, being a morning TV host was not as easy as it looked.

  For five years on Sunday World News, I had been helming a true one-man show. Ninety-seven percent of what came out of my mouth was prescripted verbiage written by me and loaded into a teleprompter. When correspondents came on the show to do live shots, I knew in advance what they were going to say. In other words, there were very few surprises. Now I would be part of a cast of four—including a female cohost, a News Reader, and a meteorologist—all of whom were free to say whatever they wanted whenever they wanted. This loss of control created some interesting challenges.

  GMA was structured in a way that was loaded with opportunities for ad-libbing, right from the minute we went on the air. That was the point of it, really. The audience wanted to see the hosts interacting spontaneously. The very first thing we did after the “Open” of the show—the preproduced part where you see snippets of the morning’s big stories and then the Good Morning America animation—was called the “Hell
os,” during which we would greet the viewers and preview a few of the other stories coming up that morning. Our lines were written into the prompter, but mostly that was just a guide; we were supposed to be having a conversation. However, when the chatter went down a verbal tributary for which I wasn’t prepared, I would sometimes find myself tensing up, nervously shuffling my papers or letting out a forced Ed McMahon–style belly laugh.

  This was frustrating for me. Off camera, I was usually able to defuse situations with humor. Part of what was holding me back now was the dawning realization that the jokes that came naturally to me were often better suited to a late-night cable show than to morning television.

  Basic logistical questions could also be tricky. How did I sit on a couch—where we did some of the lighter segments toward the end of the broadcast—without slouching or spreading my legs too widely? How did I smoothly extricate the group from conversations when the producers were screaming in my earpiece that we were running out of time to hit the commercial break? No one gave me the memo.

  There was also the challenge of adjusting to the content of the show. I had been around morning television for a while, so I knew when I accepted the job that we’d be peddling softer fare than the evening news. I also considered myself an info-omnivore who enjoyed crime and pop culture empty calories along with my nutritious hard news. Nonetheless, I would sometimes find myself outside of my professional comfort zone: playing judge in a live weigh-in contest to determine which Chihuahua was the world’s smallest, competing in a gingerbread house–making contest with my fellow anchors, and—the coup de grace—dancing on live television with a box on my head, dressed up like the Shuffle Bot from the hip-hop band LMFAO.

  Fortunately, Nightline and World News continued to provide me with opportunities to do work that put me firmly back in my comfort zone. Wonbo and I did a piece where we interviewed evangelical pastors—whose faces and voices we agreed to alter in order to protect their identities—who had secretly become atheists but hadn’t yet ginned up the courage to tell their flocks. I confronted Governor Jan Brewer of Arizona about her refusal to set free an elderly convicted killer even after her own clemency board unanimously recommended his sentence be commuted. (I surprised the governor by bringing the inmate’s son to a news conference. The two of us fired questions at her in tandem. She fled pretty quickly.) Most significantly, I did a full half hour on Nightline about the saga of an eighteen-year-old boy I’d met in Iraq and helped move to America to attend college. Much as the Bush administration had naively believed that Americans would be “greeted as liberators” after the invasion, I had assumed this young man (who, ironically, was also called Dan—a Kurdish name) would thrive upon arrival here. I had grown very attached to him, and when he got kicked out of school for misbehavior, I spent several years—and an enormous amount of emotional energy—trying to get him straightened out, only to be frustrated at every turn by his adolescent intransigence. I recorded every twist of this running drama, shooting much of it myself on a small camera. I couldn’t help but view Dan’s actions through the lens of the Buddhist concept of suffering. He was never satisfied where he was; he always assumed that the next big life change would solve all of his problems. Ultimately, to my profound disappointment, he ended up moving back to Iraq—a decision he regretted immediately.

  Back on weekend GMA, I was discovering that the gig did have some upsides. Notwithstanding my occasional stiffness, our little team was getting nice feedback. Our colleagues and bosses gushed about how we had “good chemistry.” I really liked the other members of the on-air team. My female cohost was a lovely young woman of Moldovan descent, named Bianna Golodryga. We had known and liked each other for several years before she became my TV wife. (The similarity of her name to that of my real-life wife was a bit delicate, though. On my first official day on the job, I said, “I am now permanently one consonant away from destruction.”) The News Reader was Ron Claiborne, a drily funny former print reporter. At first, we had a rotating cast of weatherpeople, until the bosses hired a vivacious young meteorologist from Chicago named Ginger Zee. (Zee is a shortening of her real—and awesome—last name: Zuidgeest.)

  I also started to appreciate that even though the morning audience was smaller than the evening audience, the relationship with the viewers was much more intimate and intense, the result of the fact that the format was looser and more personal. Morning TV, I came to see, was a potent way to convey useful and important information. Being in people’s living rooms and bedrooms as they prepared for their day, and discussing current events in a more casual manner, had a unique impact—perhaps even more powerful, at times, than the intoning-from-the-mountaintop nature of evening news. I felt enormously lucky to have the job.

  The intimacy with the audience was, however, a double-edged sword. While I enjoyed the opportunity to chat with viewers via Facebook and Twitter (as a broadcaster, you’re always curious about people who watch), I couldn’t help but notice that people felt free to share their opinions about me in ways that an evening news anchor rarely endures. I kept a file in which I saved some of my favorite messages (in their original, uncorrected form):

  “will you plz unbutton ur jacket????? U look uncomfortable :)”

  “Please please please tell Dan to sit squarely at the desk and QUIT leaning to his right, the viewers left towards Bianna. It is so distracting.”

  “make dan go away please”

  “Just thought i would let you know that your tie doesnt look centered it almost looks crooked.”

  “Don you have a hair out place that is making you look like ALALFA !”

  “please do me a favor, slow the blank down and stop trying to take over the show. it makes you look like a major clown.”

  “u should really dvr @gma and listen to yourself. As u give the news and the story is of a serious nature u shouldn’t sound happy.”

  I was, in fact, DVRing myself—and my criticism of my own performance was much harsher than anything the viewers had to offer. I was not a huge fan of the guy I saw on television enthusing about the waistcoated kangaroo.

  This was where meditation really paid off. Post-retreat, I was up to thirty minutes a day. Every morning, I would scan my calendar to figure out when I was going to be able to fit in work, meditation, exercise, and spending time with Bianca. Some afternoons I’d bang out my thirty minutes on my office couch as I awaited script approval from World News or whichever show had assigned me a story. I didn’t necessarily look forward to sitting. In fact, the first thought to pop into my head after I’d shut my eyes was usually How the hell am I going to do this for a half hour? But then I’d see the thought for what it was: just a thought. I rarely missed a day, and when I did, I would feel not only guilty, but also less mindful.

  When I got tense about work, I would watch how it was manifesting in my body—the buzzing in my chest, my earlobes getting hot, the heaviness in my head. Investigating and labeling my feelings really did put them in perspective; they seemed much less solid. The RAIN routine, plus Joseph’s “is this useful?” mantra, almost always helped me snap out of it.

  But while meditation made me more resilient, it certainly was not a cure-all. First, it didn’t magically make me looser on GMA. Second, while I recovered more quickly, it didn’t seem to prevent all churning. On some weekend mornings, I walked out of our studios haunted by Irwin the kangaroo.

  On one such day, I left the office and headed downtown for brunch with Mark Epstein. In the two years since I’d met him, we had become genuine friends. He and his wife, a talented and successful artist named Arlene, had been to our apartment for dinner. Bianca and I had been to their airy downtown loft—and also met their two grown children. When I went to spend time with Mark solo, Bianca—who adored the guy—was just a tiny bit jealous.

  I tried to orchestrate a get-together once every two or three months. Usually, it would be brunch after one of my weekend GMA shifts, and before Mark headed upstate to the country house where Arlene h
ad her studio. I’d be the only one in the restaurant wearing a suit.

  On this morning, having long since branched out from the Tribeca Grand, we were meeting at one of our other regular spots: Morandi, an Italian bistro in the West Village. I arrived with a list of items in the “Questions for Mark” file in my BlackBerry. Chief among them: Even though I was rebounding more quickly, were my self-recriminations over my job performance a sign that I was somehow a JV meditator? Should mindfulness be more effective at extinguishing this kind of thing?

  “How would I accurately describe how meditation is helping me here? It’s just allowing me to step back and watch it all happen, nanoseconds at a time, and through that process it takes some of the fangs out of it?”

  “Yes,” he said.

  “It’s not going to make it go away.”

  “No. It might help it go away a little quicker. It might. It might,” he said, his head shaking slightly as he carefully chose his words. “To the extent that it loosens the way you would ordinarily be caught by how terrible this all is, it might loosen your own attachment to whatever melodrama is unfolding.”

  “My remedy these days combines some things that are non-meditative,” I said. “I think to myself, ‘So if this whole thing blows up, what’s the worst-case scenario? I lose my job? I still have a wife who loves me—and the only person who can ruin that is me.’ It works, but it has nothing to do with meditation.”

  “No—that’s insight!” As he spoke, his voice rose an octave with insistence.

  “Insight into the nature of reality?” I asked sarcastically.

  “Yeah,” he said, not taking the bait. “That’s insight, because you’re not clinging to success so seriously.”

  “But maybe I’m just clinging to Bianca.”

  “That’s better. You’re clinging to something that’s far more substantial.”