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

  It quickly became clear that Ben was going to be the most hands-on boss most of us had ever had. He personally presided over the division-wide conference call every morning, putting on a master class in TV producing, variously engaging in pointed critiques and lavish praise of our work, including details as small as the graphics and the individual shots that producers chose in their stories. The call became appointment listening.

  His emails—evocative little tone poems—showed up in our inboxes at all hours. The man did not appear to sleep. He watched every minute of every show we did, and nothing escaped his attention. One day, I did a story for World News about a new poll showing that mainline Protestant churches were losing membership. Distracted by other work, I hadn’t put a lot of time or effort into the piece—I had basically phoned it in. As soon as the story aired, I got an email from Ben saying the writing seemed flat and unimaginative. He was right and I had no defense. It was both terrifying and invigorating to have a boss who knew your job as well if not better than you did. He had served notice: no one would get away with lazy work.

  As I watched the entire news division scramble to reorient to this dynamic new presence, I made a calculation: I wasn’t going to crowd him or go out of my way to impress him. I didn’t put in any extra effort to produce special stories that might catch his eye, and I didn’t angle for face time. My motives were opaque, even to me. Maybe I thought it’d be unseemly. I was now a guy who was hanging out with the Dalai Lama; I shouldn’t be striving so nakedly, right? I figured he knew me, knew my history; I’d be fine. I’d lived through these seismic events before—including Peter’s death and Charlie’s retirement—and always emerged unscathed, if not enhanced. I had seemingly stowed my internal cattle prod in favor of a new, creeping passivity.

  Very quickly, my strategy—or lack thereof—began to backfire. When massive street protests flared up in Egypt against the dictator Hosni Mubarak, Ben flooded the zone with ABC News staffers. This was history in the making—the kind of thing I lived for. In the past, it was exactly the type of story for which I’d been first out the door, but this time I did not get the call. Instead, I watched from the discomfort of my living room couch as Terry Moran and David Muir, among others, covered the story. The old me might have made an impulsive phone call or two. But the new, metta-meditating me thought that approach, which involved making my case to the detriment of my peers, uncompassionate.

  As I pondered this dilemma, the situation at work only got worse. When a real, not figurative, earthquake and tsunami hit Japan, Ben sent David and Bill Weir over to cover it. At home on the couch with Bianca, we watched the horror play out on-screen. The images were overwhelming. My wife was in a puddle of tears, while the freshly minted brown belt in loving-kindness was feeling badly both for the victims—and himself.

  Not long after Ben’s arrival, I reluctantly went up to snowy central Massachusetts for a metta meditation retreat. Sharon Salzberg, an old-school Jew-Bu and new friend of mine, had invited me up several months before. It was a nice gesture, and I had accepted the invitation, but given recent developments at the office, I just wasn’t in the mood for it. Even so, I drove the four hours to endure three days of straining to generate good vibes.

  The setting was nice, at least. Sharon, Joseph, and another teacher named Jack Kornfield had founded the Insight Meditation Society (also known by regulars as IMS or, sometimes, “I’m a mess”) back in 1976. They’d scraped together $150,000 for a down payment on a multiwing, one-hundred-room redbrick mansion that had most recently served as a Catholic monastery. They had converted the chapel into a meditation hall, although they’d left up the stained glass images of Jesus. The rest of the building was decorated with potted plants, large geodes, and ancient Buddhist artifacts, which reminded me of the living rooms of my childhood friends with progressive parents.

  Sharon happened to give a very timely talk on the subject of mudita, the Buddhist term for sympathetic joy. She admitted that sometimes her first instinct when trying to summon this feeling was “Ew, I wish you didn’t have so much going for you.” The meditation hall erupted in laughter. Sharon said the biggest obstacle to mudita is a subconscious illusion, that whatever success the other person has achieved was actually somehow really meant for us. “It’s almost like, it was heading right for me,” she said, “and you just reached out and grabbed it.” More laughter, as everyone in the room enjoyed one of the most satisfying of all dharma delicacies: an accurate diagnosis of our inner lunacy.

  On the second day, I spotted a little note with my name on it posted to the message board in the main hallway. Sharon would see me that afternoon. As I padded into her interview room, she gave me a big hug. She was a jolly woman in her late fifties who, like pretty much every long-term meditator I knew, looked significantly younger than her chronological age. As we chatted, I mentioned that I was somewhat preoccupied by things at work; I described my concern that I’d suddenly become more of a bench-warmer.

  “When faced with something like this,” she said, “often it’s not the unknown that scares us, it’s that we think we know what’s going to happen—and that it’s going to be bad. But the truth is, we really don’t know.”

  The smart play, she said, was to turn the situation to my internal advantage. “Fear of annihilation,” she said, “can lead to great insight, because it reminds us of impermanence and the fact that we are not in control.”

  This got me thinking again about the “wisdom of insecurity.” From the comfort and remove of the sylvan idyll of IMS, it hit me afresh that the “security” for which I had been striving was an illusion. If everything in this world was in constant decay, why expend so much energy gnashing my teeth over work?

  I began to examine the source of my drive. Was it rooted in my privileged upbringing? Maybe this is just what “people like me” did? Was it because I grew up in a town crawling with rich kids whose parents drove Porsches and BMWs, while my folks—academic physicians, not bankers—drove a shit-brown Plymouth Valiant and a gray Chevy Chevette? Much of my adolescence was characterized by a self-imposed feeling of lack. Now that I was a “spiritual” guy, maybe it was time to transcend my bourgeois conditioning?

  I snapped out of it quickly enough. The Buddha never said it was un-kosher to strive. Right there on his Noble Eightfold Path, his list of the eight things you had to do to get enlightened, “Right Livelihood” was number five. He was proud of everything he built, including his ranks of monks and nuns. He wasn’t particularly modest, either. This was a man who regularly referred to himself in the third person.

  Here I was, two and a half years after I’d first discovered Eckhart Tolle, still wrestling with the same question: Was it possible to strike a balance between “the price of security” and the “wisdom of insecurity”?

  Back at the office, what I viewed as a downward spiral only continued. 2011 was a huge news year: the death of Osama bin Laden, the fall of Qaddafi in Libya, the Royal Wedding of William and Kate, and I didn’t get tagged to cover any of it. (That last one fell into the didn’t-want-to-do-it-but-would-have-liked-to-have-been-asked category, but still . . .)

  At times, I managed to convince myself I was handling it pretty well. When I got into a rut, it didn’t take long for me to jar myself out of it. I would use RAIN—watching how the feelings would show themselves in my body and then labeling them with some degree of nonjudgmental remove. It reminded me of how soldiers and police officers I’d interviewed described their reactions in emergency situations. They would almost always say something to the effect of “My training kicked in.”

  I also thought, with a degree of self-satisfaction, that having a calmer, more compassionate mind was allowing me to take a dry-eyed view of the situation, unclouded by unhelpful emotion. Rather than take it personally, I tried to see it through Ben’s eyes. He was just doing the best he could to turn the news division around. Maybe I just wasn’t his cup of tea? I comforted myself with the conclusion that I was engaged in a healthy ac
knowledgment of reality that would ultimately allow for the virtuous cycle of less unnecessary straining and better decision making.

  My loving wife, however, thought I was being a total wuss. While she was glad I wasn’t losing my cool, she was bewildered by the fact that her husband seemed so suddenly gelded. When a big story broke, she and I would often have text exchanges in which Bianca would urge me to advocate for myself. For example:

  Me: “I feel I still don’t have a good approach yet to asserting myself in these situations w/o reverting to my old dickish ways.”

  Bianca: “I understand. But you’re not going to risk anything by being slightly more aggressive about it instead of a passively available team player.”

  I knew she wasn’t trying to criticize, but I could feel defensiveness welling up anyway. I struggled not to misdirect my frustration at the one person who was trying to help me. All I wanted to do was bury my head and hope the situation went away. I just couldn’t figure out the right play.

  By now, the nice emails from Ben had stopped—because I wasn’t doing anything to deserve them. Not only was I not getting tapped to cover the big stories, but I’d somehow lost my motivation to pitch and produce special investigative reports, my longtime specialty. I’d hear Ben praising people on the morning call, summoning rounds of applause from the attendees, and I wanted to do work that merited this reaction. And yet the more discouraged I got, the more trouble I had overcoming inertia.

  After months of drift, in July of 2011 I finally decided to act.

  I emailed Ben to schedule a chat, and a few days later I was in his corner office, ready to see if I could fix this thing. Between where I sat on the couch and Ben’s chair was a large coffee table covered in snacks, including tall glass jars filled with pretzel sticks and licorice. There was even, curiously, a bunch of bananas. He joked that he liked to see how people managed to peel and eat a banana in front of their boss.

  I assumed he’d be expecting me to come at him with a litany of complaints, so after a lot of strategizing with Bianca, I decided to take a different tack. “I’m concerned,” I said, “that you do not see me as part of the A-team, and I want to know how I can change your mind.”

  His response was a thing to behold. I could practically see the wheels in his head turning as he calibrated, then recalibrated, his approach. After maybe five seconds of buffering, he launched into his speech.

  “First of all,” he said, “you’re wrong. I do see you as a major player.”

  But, he went on, there were some real problems I needed to address. Chief among them: I wasn’t hustling and getting on TV enough. He said, “I think you’ve fallen into that classic weekend-anchor trap where you have your little pocket of airtime on Saturday and Sunday, and then the rest of the week you’re nowhere to be seen.” This was unquestionably true. “You need to up your game,” he declared.

  The second issue was weekend GMA. Too often the show was going off the rails, he said, with our anchor banter devolving into silliness. I needed to play a larger role in getting this under control. “I need you to be a leading man,” he said. When I put up a mild protest, arguing that I didn’t want to be bossy or imperious, Ben—who knew I’d become a meditator—looked me dead in the eyes and said, in a tone that was both playful and serious, “Stop being so Zen.”

  In mere minutes he had pinpointed and pronounced my errors. Behind the fig leaf of being a good yogi, I had gone so far down the path of resignation and passivity that I had compromised the career I had worked for decades to build. It was just as my dad had feared; I had become ineffective. What I should have done when faced with this adversity was buckle down and work harder. Instead, I had confused “letting go” with going soft.

  It was my toughest and most productive professional meeting since that encounter with my boss back at the local station in Boston who told me I was being an asshole. Except this time, ironically, the problem was almost diametrically the opposite.

  Serendipitously, on the very night of my meeting with Ben, I had scheduled a dinner with Mark Epstein. In the taxi on my way downtown I called Bianca and told her how it’d gone.

  “He’s right,” she said. Which came as no surprise; Ben had basically affirmed her thesis. “This is good. Now you know what you need to do.”

  Mark and I met to eat at a fussy Japanese restaurant called Brushstroke, where they only served a tasting menu and the waiters took themselves very, very seriously. Once we’d placed our orders, I told Mark what had just gone down in Ben’s office. He responded with a catchy little suggestion: “Hide the Zen.”

  “People will take advantage of you if they’re reading you as too Zen,” he said. “There’s a certain kind of aggression in organizational behavior that doesn’t value that—that will see it as weak. If you present yourself too much like that, people won’t take you seriously. So I think it important to hide the Zen, and let them think that you’re really someone they have to contend with.”

  But I was attached to my rep as a Zen guy. “I don’t want to be an asshole at the office.”

  “No,” he said. “That’s the tricky thing about what he’s saying to you. I’m sure there’s a way of doing it where you don’t have to be an asshole. I think it might be possible that you could give the appearance of being one of those guys while deep inside of you, you wouldn’t be.”

  I had fallen, he said, into several classic “pitfalls of the path.” People often misinterpreted the dharma to mean they had to adopt a sort of meekness. Some of Mark’s patients even stopped using the word “I,” or disavowed the need to have orgasms during sex. He recalled scenes from his youth when he and meditation buddies would have group dinners at restaurants and no one would have the gumption to place an order. They didn’t want to express a personal preference, as if doing so was insufficiently Buddhist. Another pitfall was detachment. I thought I was being mindful of my distress when I was left out of the big stories, but really I was just building a wall to keep out the things that made me angry or fearful. The final pitfall to which I’d succumbed was nihilism: an occasional sense of, “Whatever, man, everything’s impermanent.”

  At this point, the waiter came by to deliver an extremely long description of the dish that had just been placed in front of us. “For your next course you have the grilled anagi, which is freshwater eel . . .”

  As he prattled on about kabocha squash and “large, translucent bits of daikon radish,” the nature of my missteps became radiantly clear. The Sufi Muslims say, “Praise Allah, but also tie your camel to the post.” In other words, it’s good to take a transcendent view of the world, but don’t be a chump. Joseph often told a story about his first meditation teacher, an Indian guy named Munindra, who used to advise all of his students to keep things “simple and easy.” One day, Joseph came upon Munindra in the village marketplace, haggling fiercely over a bag of peanuts. When confronted about this apparent contradiction with his simple-and-easy mantra, his teacher explained, “I said be simple, not a simpleton.”

  When the waiter left, I said, “This is really humbling.”

  Mark, always eager to put things in the best possible light, said, “I think it’s like a revolution in your understanding of this material—a deeper understanding. This makes it so much more alive.”

  “Right. Right,” I said. “Because when everything’s going well and you’re being mindfully aware of stuff, that’s pretty easy.”

  “That’s easy! This is, like, a real conundrum.”

  The same conundrum I’d been fixated on for years, in fact—the balance between Buddhist principles and ambition. It was, I mused aloud, frustrating after all this time not to have the answer. As I sat there feeling bad for myself, it slipped right past me when Mark offered up that he actually did have an answer. It was simple, brilliant advice, but I was too preoccupied to hear it.

  Nonetheless, back on the job, things began to improve. At the top of the to-do list I kept in my BlackBerry, I wrote down my marching orders from the m
eeting with Ben: “UP YOUR GAME,” and “LEADING MAN.” I’d never been one for this type of sloganeering—I liked my mottoes to be a touch more arch—but having these exhortations blaring out at me in all-caps every time I checked the list was extremely useful.

  I started saying yes to every assignment that came my way, no matter how small—the way I used to do when I was an eager cub reporter. It did not go unnoticed. A mere three days after our meeting, the emails started coming again, the first about my writing in a GMA piece on the phone-hacking accusations rocking Rupert Murdoch’s British newspaper empire:

  Metastasizing scandal . . .

  V deft, Dan.

  Good to see you on GMA (and everywhere since our talk :)

  I covered the arrest of the so-called “Craigslist killers,” who allegedly lured their victims through a help-wanted ad; I reported from a hospital on Staten Island where they had to send away all their patients because Hurricane Irene was bearing down; I covered the child sex abuse allegations that brought down legendary coach Joe Paterno at Penn State, where I got pepper-sprayed on camera during student riots.

  Like any good coach, Ben was satisfying to please. He savored the little things—“grace notes,” as he called them. When he gave a shout-out to my work on the morning call, my chest swelled more than I cared to admit.

  I got back into the habit of finding, pitching, and producing special reports, which I had neglected during my long slide into professional lethargy. I chased down the CEO of Philip Morris International on the street, and confronted him about the sale of cigarettes to young children in Indonesia. I reported on suburban moms who stole Adderall from their children. I investigated con men who ran a scam that involved calling people who had illegally ordered prescription drugs online and pretending to be DEA agents. They would threaten criminal charges, and then ask for bribes to make the case go away.