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Katie O'Connor: Hi, listeners. I'm Audible Editor Katie O'Connor, and today I'm excited to be speaking with Dan Harris, bestselling author of 10% Happier and host of the 10% Happier podcast. Welcome, Dan.
Dan Harris: Thanks for having me.
KO: Thanks for being here. Your Audible Original, Even You Can Meditate, co-authored with meditation teacher Sebene Selassie, sets out to show people how easy it is to start a practice of meditation. How did you come to team up with Sebene on this and what made you want to create this Original?
DH: I teamed up with Sebene because she's a friend, quite an old friend at this point, and I was in conversation with your team about what I could do for Audible and I realized that I really wanted and needed to have a partner, somebody with more experience than I have as a meditation teacher. I kind of think of myself as a meditation evangelist. I popularize the practice and spread the good word, but I have a ton of respect for fully trained teachers.
As a bit of a sidebar, I'm married to a physician and both my parents are physicians, and so I have a lot of respect for doctors too, and I see how much training they go through. It's not dissimilar when you think about meditation teachers. Many of them, I think the good ones have spent years of their lives on silent retreat, really training the mind and understanding all of those sort of back alleys and byways. While I've done a decent amount of meditation retreats in my life, I haven't done as much as someone who I would consider fully trained. Sebene definitely meets that bar, and I like her and she's funny, and so that's why I asked her to come with me on this ride.
KO: Yeah, you two have a great back-and-forth. It was very enjoyable to listen to that and feel a little bit of that relationship come through as well. You are a former journalist. You worked at ABC News for over 20 years, and you rather famously got into the practice of meditation after an on-air panic attack in 2004. Your experience and the meditation journey that ensued, of course, inspired your bestselling book 10% Happier. That book came out during a period of my life when I myself was having panic attacks, and I can't tell you how much you and your story helped my own journey. I'm sure you get that a lot at this point. But before you launched 10% Happier, did you have any moment of hesitation in being that vulnerable with the larger world about your story?
DH: Yes, I did. I was freaking out. That book came out in 2014, and just for context, you mentioned this, but the inciting event for the narrative in that memoir was a panic attack that I had on Good Morning America in front of more than five million people. That was really embarrassing. Sidenote, if you want to see the panic attack, if you just Google “a panic attack on television,” it's the number one result, which is great. So, the panic attack was embarrassing in and of itself, but even more embarrassing was what caused it. It was the result of some very dumb behavior in my personal life, including the use of recreational drugs, which I turned to after spending a lot of time in war zones as a young, ambitious correspondent after 9/11.
"My job has switched from covering the worst news in the world to delivering one very good piece of news, which is that the brain and the mind are trainable, that happiness is not something that happens to you. It's a skill you can train."
Anyway, that's a long way of saying that I really put myself out there, and this book came out in 2014, which was before meditation was as popular as it is now, and also before we were in an era where people were talking about mental health struggles so publicly and prominently. So, I had a lot of fear. In fact, my mom sent me an email a couple of weeks before the book came out, so the book was already printed and sitting in warehouses all over the country, and she sent me an email begging me not to publish the book.
KO: Wow.
DH: So, I was really worried about it, but a lot of people in my life, including my wife, some of my colleagues, including Diane Sawyer, who's a legendary news anchor, they really kind of stiffened my spine and I was able to go through with it.
KO: So many of us are so grateful that you did. I'm sure that was a very hard moment, but look at everything that came after, right? Nearly five years ago now, you retired from your career at ABC, and you say briefly in Even You Can Meditate how you went from delivering hard and often sad news to now really being in the business of spreading happiness. What was that transition like for you and how has that shift impacted your own meditation practice?
DH: Yeah, I was nervous about that. It was in September of 2021, I decided to retire from ABC News after 21 years as an ABC News anchor and reporter and seven or eight years before that as a local news guy. That was really scary because my whole identity really was, or much of my identity, was built up around being an anchorman and I was walking away from it to focus on this somewhat odd mental health meditation side hustle. I had a few moments of waking up in the middle of the night after that and thinking, "What have I done? Am I like Sampson who's cut his own hair?"
But it's been almost entirely positive. And it's funny because I think there are a lot of people who, even though it's a big part of my identity being a now-former newsman, I think to the extent that anybody knows who I am, I think it's quite common for people to have no idea that that's my background. I think if people know who I am these days, it's generally as the meditation guy, which is such a strange pivot, because most of my life I was the guy who goes to war zones or natural disasters or mass shootings and asks the hard questions, et cetera, et cetera. That's really where I kind of made my bones. But now my job is, as I say in Even You Can Meditate, now my job has switched from covering the worst news in the world to delivering one very good piece of news, which is that the brain and the mind are trainable, that happiness is not something that happens to you. It's a skill you can train.
KO: Was it sort of a natural progression for you to land on meditation education as the next step of this career?
DH: Yeah, I feel like what I do now is a logical extension of my journalism career. I interview people on my podcast, and I write books, often memoirs, reporting on my own life, or sometimes I write how-to books. In the case of this Audible Original, it's really a how-to where I'm sort of synthesizing information in the most palatable and often, I hope, funny way so that people can actually act on it.
KO: Don't worry, the humor's there, Dan. I definitely chuckled along the way. You and Sebene share several different types of meditation in Even You Can Meditate. You talk about how you personally have an affinity for walking meditation. I guess I was surprised to hear that you still have insomnia. I definitely fell into the misconception that people who consistently meditate, surely they're very Zen and have no fears or panics or worries. Can you talk a bit about that juxtaposition of being a regular practitioner of meditation and mindfulness and still battling insomnia?
DH: Yeah, well, I'm still screwed up in lots of ways, and it is quite common for people to come to me and say, "You know, you're really anxious for a meditation guy." And I'm like, "You have the causality wrong. I'm a meditation guy because I'm so anxious." Just because you've started to meditate, and even among really experienced practitioners, the problems of life don't go away. Unless you believe in full enlightenment, and we can have that discussion, there is no complete defeat or surmounting of your past, your genetics, I believe. And this is the really good news, that we can make messy marginal improvement over time, but that doesn't mean that you're never going to make any more mistakes or you're somehow now immune from all of your prior conditioning.
"It really is like a political act, I think, in these troubled times to take care of yourself so that you can take care of the world, and in whatever ways you have the opportunity to."
So, yeah, I do have insomnia, although I've made some huge strides on it. As it turns out, my insomnia is based a little bit in anxiety but is largely a sort of diagnosable condition called restless leg syndrome. I'm pissed because of all the syndromes to get, this is like the least dignified one you can have. Restless leg, what a ridiculous name. But it is a life-destroying thing if you can't sleep and your legs are just kind of moving on their own because they're so uncomfortable. So, meditation has helped me, in particular walking meditation, which is a great way to get the ants in your pants out before you go to bed. But then there are also medication or medical fixes that I don't need to go into detail on but that are also very helpful.
KO: Yeah, I would imagine. Is there a type of meditation that you shared in the Original that you struggle with that maybe it's harder for you to settle into?
DH: Well, when you're as nearly perfect as I am, all of the meditations are perfectly blissful.
KO: Easy peasy.
DH: No, I would say I struggle equally with all of them. There is one form of meditation that I really hated at first, which Seb and I talk about in the Audible Original. The specific style that I'm referring to is something called loving kindness meditation. I'm a man of a certain age, Gen X dude who was raised in an era where being overtly loving and kind was likely to get you smacked in the face or bullied. So, because of my conditioning, I had a negative reaction to this style of meditation, which I sometimes refer to as Valentine's Day with a gun to your head, because you sit there and the goal is to envision various people in your life, starting with an easy person, like a little kid or an animal, and then moving through a succession of categories, then you move to yourself, a mentor, a neutral person, and on and on. And as you envision these people, you send them phrases like “May you be happy, may you be safe, may you live with ease.”
I had a very negative reaction to that because it just struck me as ridiculous. However, it is now actually my principal practice, and there's a ton of evidence and a lot of research to show that this practice can have psychological, physiological, and even behavioral benefits, like little kids who are taught loving kindness meditation, preschoolers, then become more likely to give their stickers away to kids they don't like. So, I am convinced not only through the science but also through my personal experience that this practice that I had a negative reaction to is really helpful.
KO: Yeah, as someone who is raising young children, I found that preschooler detail very, very interesting. And there's a moment, too, where you guys talk about not just happiness being a skill, but compassion's also a skill. That's also something that can be trained and that can grow. I did also get in my head a little bit during that meditation. I started getting a little too specific in my thoughts about how I was ranking people [laughs]. I was like, "Well, is this really a person that I maybe tolerate but still like?" It got a little in the weeds. But at one point you jokingly say that your wife noticed that meditation was helping you be a bit less grumpy, and I am politely paraphrasing here, before you noticed the effects. Now that perhaps you have some more awareness of its benefits, is there any area of your life that it improved that surprised you?
DH: Well, I think it really does have to do with this loving kindness practice. By the way, the loving kindness is kind of an annoying term. It's not a word that most people use. The better description is friendliness. I say this in the Audible Original, that my factory settings are pretty firmly dialed at frosty New Englander. That is just kind of how I am. But that statement, “That's how I am,” that's the kind of thing that we all say about ourselves all the time, and it overlooks the fact that change is possible. Those are my priors. I grew up in New England and am a little bit of an armored person for a bunch of reasons. But doing this practice has just made me more open and friendly in ways that I never thought I would be.
I'll just give you an example. My TikTok feed—I think your feed says a lot about you because the algorithms are really learning what turns you on—my TikTok feed is dominated by comedy clips, animal videos, and videos of emotional reunions, which regularly bring me to tears. Like, that is not the type of thing I could have said about myself as recently as five years ago.
KO: Look at you growing over there. Forget Gen X. [laughs]
DH: I'm a big softie.
KO: I'm in a stage of my life right now where I'm doing a lot of reflecting on how my being self-regulated can really have an impact in the self-regulation of my children. So in listening to the different types of meditation that you and Sebene share, I thought that maybe vedanā in a meditation, observing sensations, hopefully leading to an understanding of what you react to before it's happening, and also equanimity meditation, focused on having a balanced reaction to things that happen, whether good, bad, or ugly—those two felt like they could be extremely helpful in parenting. Is there a particular type of meditation that you have found helpful as a parent?
DH: Anything that increases mindfulness, in my experience, is really helpful for parenting. My biggest challenge as a parent is reactivity. Kids are designed to push our buttons, and it's our responsibility to ride those negative urges and afflictive emotions as successfully as we can, as smoothly as we possibly can. And that's not to say that we're never going to lose our tempers, and it's definitely not to say that I never lose my temper, but it is really important, in my experience as a parent, to be able to be a source of stability, sanity, and soothing for the kid, as opposed to being in a cycle where you're ratcheting up one another's emotions. And when you do screw up, being able to catch it more quickly and repair is incredibly helpful.
"This practice has a ton of evidence. It has 2,600 years of contemplative history to recommend it, but also now just hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of high-quality research studies to recommend it."
One of the larger points I want to make here is, often, people, and I think this is especially true for parents, worry about meditation as perhaps being self-indulgent, like you're asking me to take five, 10 minutes out of the flow of the day, out of work, out of dealing with the kids to sit quietly. What could be more self-indulgent than that? But I actually think it is a public service to take care of your own mind, because how you are internally redounds to how you are externally, inexorably. What's happening in your mind is going to show up in your behavior. So, it really is like a political act, I think, in these troubled times to take care of yourself so that you can take care of the world, and in whatever ways you have the opportunity to.
KO: I do appreciate, towards the end of the Original, you also really handhold us through how easy this is to start integrating into your daily life and give us some practical steps. You talk about the bare minimum amount of time and also a little bit about habit stacking and everything. I think to your point, we're all in a place where that metaphor of putting on your own oxygen mask first is just going to help everyone else around you, both in the short term and the long term.
DH: Yes. And just to put a little meat on the bone there, yeah, at the end of the Original, I talk a lot about how to form a habit, because habit formation is really hard and there are some simple evidence-based ways to make this process more successful. One of the things that I was unaware of when I was writing the Original that I now know, and this is really interesting, is that there's new research that shows that five minutes of informal meditation is just as powerful as five minutes of formal meditation. Meaning, you can get all of the benefits of five minutes in a dark room, in a quiet place, focusing on your breath, you can get those benefits washing the dishes mindfully, or taking a walk between appointments mindfully. I think that's really helpful to know.
KO: Yeah. That bar for entry just got even lower. That's amazing. I think, to your point, people are concerned that it is looked at as some selfish act and “How can I possibly fit this in?” and “I can't start my day any earlier” or whatever it is, but you can incorporate it into your daily tasks.
DH: Yes. Lowering the barrier to entry is really, like, my job on the planet. This practice has a ton of evidence. It has 2,600 years of contemplative history to recommend it, but also now just hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of high-quality research studies to recommend it. And it can seem out of reach, the way it's presented in the popular imagery. It's usually somebody seated with a beatific look on their face in a really uncomfortable position, like they're floating off into the cosmos and they've got plenty of time and no dishes to do and no diapers to change. That, I think, is really just not the right way to think about it. There are lots of ways to fit this into your life.
KO: Yeah, absolutely. Your big underlying message here is that your brain and mind are trainable. Happiness is a skill. What else do you wish you had known before starting meditation? What do you think would have helped younger Dan the most?
DH: This may not be the answer that you were looking for, and I think this can be de-emphasized by people like me who are trying to lower the barriers to entry. But what's really cool to think about is what's on offer at the deep end of the pool, how far you can take this. Right now, you may be at a point in your life where you've got an all-consuming job and little kids, but we move through lots of phases in our life. And there may be points in your life where you have the time and motivation and opportunity to go deeper, and extraordinary levels of well-being are an offer that I find highly motivating now that I'm aware of it and have even tasted it to a certain extent.
KO: What's next for you?
DH: I have an even more embarrassing memoir coming out in January of 2027 that I am even more freaked out about releasing into the world. This book will build on the discussion that you and I had earlier about the fact that, just because you've started meditating doesn't mean you don't do toweringly stupid things and then have an opportunity to learn from them.
KO: Well, if 10% Happier is any indication, let me be one in the column of push that thing out into the world and let's see what happens.
DH: That's where I'm at with it, but, as is my want, anything but confident.
KO: I think we've got lots of listeners here that would disagree with that, and I'm sure we're all looking forward and eager to hear it. In the meantime, we can enjoy and meditate alongside you and Sebene in Even You Can Meditate. Thank you so much for your time today. It was really a pleasure getting to speak with you.
DH: Thanks for having me on, and just to say everybody I worked with at Audible was awesome.
KO: Good. I'm so glad to hear it. And listeners, you can get Even You Can Meditate by Dan Harris and Sebene Selassie right now on Audible.
