How To Increase Performance By Working At Your Edge -- Plus A Quick Hack For When Panic or Anxiety Swells

How do you stay engaged without getting consumed? That's one of the central questions in this conversation between Dan and high-performance psychologist Dr. Michael Gervais. Together they explore: working at your edge in meditation, panic disorder, and professional life why love might be the most important skill we can develop navigating rage in difficult political times and the Ideal Competitive Mindset — a concept Dan found surprisingly useful. Originally recorded for Dr. Gervais' podcast, Finding Mastery https://findingmastery.com/, this one turned into a real back-and-forth. Join Dan's online community here http://www.danharris.com/ Follow Dan on social: Instagram https://bit.ly/3tGigG5, TikTok https://bit.ly/3FOA84J Subscribe to our YouTube Channel https://bit.ly/3FybRzD To advertise on the show, contact [email protected] or visit https://advertising.libsyn.com/10HappierwithDanHarris

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:04Dan Harris?

  This is the 10% Happier Podcast. I'm Dan Harris.

• 0:18Dan Harris?

  Hello, my fellow suffering beings. How are we doing today? What you're about to hear is a conversation between me and a high-performance psychologist about a host of fascinating issues.

• 0:31Dan Harris?

  What it's like to work at your edge, whether that's in meditation and managing panic disorder or in your professional life. Why love broadly understood, not just as romantic love, but why love might actually be the most important skill you can develop. How to stay engaged in these tumultuous political times without getting consumed by rage. And a concept called the Ideal Competitive Mindset, or ICM, which I found extremely useful. What you're about to hear is me ostensibly being interviewed by my friend, Dr. Michael Gervais, who, as I mentioned a few moments ago, is a high-performance psychologist, which means that he works with elite athletes and executives to perform at their best.

• 1:14Dan Harris?

  He was ostensibly, as I said, interviewing me for his podcast, which is called Finding Mastery. But I, of course, because I can't help myself, asked him a bunch of questions as well. So it's much more of a conversation. Couple of things to say before we dive in. First, Michael's been a guest on my podcast several times. I'll drop some links to those conversations in my show notes. Second, we recorded this a few months ago, right after the killing of Charlie Kirk and then Jimmy Kimmel's comments that temporarily got him fired or suspended. So that part of the conversation may seem a little bit dated, but the underlying stuff about how to stay engaged in this difficult time is evergreen sadly. And finally, I just want to say, don't forget to check out my new app. It's called 10% with Dan Harris.

• 1:59Dan Harris?

  You can sign up for it at danharris.com. We have a growing body of guided meditations from amazing teachers. We also do live video meditation and Q and A sessions every week. There's a 14-day free trial if you want to check it out before you spend any money. DanHarris.com. Join the party.

• 2:18Dan Harris?

  Okay, here's my conversation with Dr. Michael Gervais on the Finding Mastery Podcast.

• 2:24Speaker 01

  Hey, I'm running out to drop off a stack of letters and packages. Need anything shipped while I'm gone?

• 2:30Speaker 02

  Save the gas. Stamps.com lets you print postage and schedule pickups right from your desk. Sync your contacts into the address book, get detailed accounting insights, and get notified the moment your certified mail is delivered.

• 2:41Speaker 01

  All from my desk?

• 2:43Speaker 02

  All from your desk.

• 2:44Speaker 03

  Join the four million businesses using stamps.com right now with code PODCAST and get your free welcome gift. Stamps.com code PODCAST. Taxes and fees apply.

• 2:53Speaker 04

  Your joints help you keep doing what you love. Give them daily support with Ancient Nutrition Multi-Collagen Protein. Two scoops deliver 20 grams of collagen from 10 types, including clinically studied eggshell membrane. Plus, vitamin C and probiotics to support skin, hair, nails, and joint health. Visit ancientnutrition.com/protein and use code PROTEIN for $15 off. That's ancientnutrition.com code PROTEIN.

• 3:22Dan Harris?

  Probably the thing I'm best known for in my 21 years at ABC News was having a panic attack on Good Morning America. But it's too early to prescribe statins slowly for cancer production.

• 3:37Dan Harris?

  I wasn't high when I was on the air, but the doctor explained that my ambience drug use made me more likely to panic.

• 3:43Speaker 05

  When anxiety shows up, do you try to outrun it? Or do you try to learn how to work with it?

• 3:49Dan Harris?

  I had spent a lot of time in war zones after 9/11 and gotten depressed and then done this really dumb thing of self-medicating with cocaine and other recreational drugs. That moment sent me on this weird windy thing where I ultimately ended up finding meditation.

• 4:04Speaker 05

  Welcome back or welcome to the Finding Mastery Podcast, where we dive into the minds of the world's greatest thinkers and doers. I am your host, Dr. Michael Gervais, by trade and training, a high-performance psychologist. Now, the idea behind these conversations is simple. It's to sit with the extraordinaries, to learn, to really learn how they work from the inside out. Today's conversation is with Dan Harris. He's a journalist, bestselling author, and host of the 10% Happier Podcast. Many first met Dan after a panic attack on live television.

• 4:36Dan Harris?

  I was pretty unhappy. I loved what I did, but I was really stressed and really frustrated. And every time I got passed over for a job, which happened a lot, I would spin out and take it out on the people in my life.

• 4:47Speaker 05

  What followed was not a quick fix, but a serious commitment. To understanding anxiety, attention, and how the mind works.

• 4:55Dan Harris?

  Most of us are like drill sergeants with ourselves, but we actually need to move into a coach mentality. So that's the self-love piece. There's a whole body of research around something called micro-interactions. So we can inject massive doses of happiness into our life by just paying attention to these little interactions we're having throughout the day that most of us sort of just ice out.

• 5:16Speaker 05

  In this conversation, Dan and I explore what it looks like to live with anxiety. We also dig into identity, meditation, self-talk, and a process to choose growth over avoidance again and again and again.

• 5:28Dan Harris?

  A lot of people try meditation and then notice how distractible they are and feel like they're failures. You sit and try to focus on one thing at a time, then your brain comes in and starts like planning a homicide or whatever it is, and you notice that, start again, notice it, start again, notice it, start again. And what happens over time is you build this muscle of self-awareness that allows you to see the contents of your consciousness without being owned by it. So with that, let's jump into this week's conversation with Dan Harris.

• 6:00Speaker 05

  Dan, I always look forward to spending time with you. And so, thank you for coming back and sharing, you know, the adventure you've been on since we last spoke. But for folks that, the one folk or two folk that might not know, you know, kind of where you come from and how you and I became friends at this thing, can you, can you just share an overview, a flyover of the kind of major points of your life and what got you here?

• 6:23Dan Harris?

  I mean, I think that the story that most people associate with me, if they know who I am at all, is that I used to be at ABC News as an anchor correspondent, kind of globe-trotting newsman. And probably the thing I'm best known for in my 21 years at ABC News was having a panic attack on Good Morning America, which if you Google panic attack on TV, it's the number one result. You know, like 20 million views is like a, it's what will be on my tombstone. And that panic attack actually turned out to be, well, first of all, it was awful in the moment. And even worse in the aftermath, because I went to a psychiatrist afterwards, tried to figure out what had gone wrong. He asked me a bunch of questions. One of them was, do you do drugs?

• 7:08Dan Harris?

  And I had to admit, yes, I do. I had, as a backstory, I had spent a lot of time in war zones after nine 11 and gotten depressed and then done this really dumb thing of self medicating with cocaine and other recreational drugs. I wasn't high when I was on the air, but the doctor explained that my ambience drug use made me more likely to panic. So that was all terrible. However, that moment sent me on this weird windy thing where I ultimately ended up finding meditation. And it was incredibly helpful for me. And so I wrote a book about that called 10% happier. That came out in 2014, so quite a while ago. And that ended up swallowing my life and I, you know, started a podcast and meditation app.

• 7:53Dan Harris?

  And I was trying to do two things for a while, be a newsman and be Mr. Happiness. And then four years ago, I retired from ABC News and this is what I do full time.

• 8:01Speaker 05

  With your practice, did you start off strong, like, oh, there's a thing here. Let me, let me dive into meditating because I feel something? Or was it more intellectual for you? Like, I hear people talking about it. Uh, I'll try it a little bit. Like, where did you start?

• 8:19Dan Harris?

  I got turned on to Eckhart Tolle. He's a huge bestselling self-help guru. One of my colleagues at ABC News recommended I read the book because she thought it would be a good story because he was getting really big at the time. This was in like 2008.

• 8:36Speaker 05

  The power of now.

• 8:37Dan Harris?

  Power of Now, A New Earth, Oprah Winfrey was, you know, pushing his stuff. And so I did not go into that thinking, oh, I'm going to read something here that will be useful for me. I thought, oh, maybe it's weird enough for a TV story. He's an interesting guy. He's kind of like an elfin German man. And he's like the spiritual equivalent of like, of watching a Yule log. He's He is kind of compelling in his blandness. You know, he's very soft spoken, but in reading his book, he delivered what I know now to be not an original thesis, but it was new to me, which is that we all have this voice in our heads, this this inner narrator who chases us out of bed in the morning and is yammering at us all day long and has us constantly wanting stuff, not wanting stuff,

• 9:20Dan Harris?

  judging people, judging ourselves, comparing ourselves to other people. And Tolle's argument, which the Buddha made 2,600 years earlier, but Tolle's argument is that when you're unaware of this nonstop nattering, it owns you. You just act out all of your neurotic obsessions as if they're like, in the words of my meditation teacher, Joseph Goldstein, as if they're tiny dictators. And so that was an electrifying thing for me. I then went and interviewed Tolle. I, a friend of mine has described Tolle as correct, but not useful. So like he very incisively diagnoses the human condition, in my opinion, but doesn't, in my opinion, give you a lot to do about it. So I read Tolle, was frustrated.

• 10:05Dan Harris?

  And then my wife gave me a book by a guy named Dr. Mark Epstein, who is a psychiatrist, who's written a bunch of books about the overlap between psychology and Buddhism. And that is what made me think, oh, okay, there is something to do about it. It's called meditation. I, as a child of two ex hippies who dragged me to, you know, health food stores and camping trips and, you know, made me listen to like Free to Be You and Me and all that shit. I was not really down with the whole meditation thing at first, but then I saw that there was all this science. And my parents are also scientists. My wife is a scientist. I'm not good at math. So I became a guy who like wore makeup and talked to television cameras. But I was like, all right, this is there. There's some science here.

• 10:50Dan Harris?

  So that's when I gave it a try. I remember the moment exactly where I was. I was at a, my wife and I were with some friends at a share house. Like we rented a house that we all shared at the beach. And I was reading a book by John Kabat-Zinn. I was in the process of reading lots of books. And I was at the I was at the pool and I was reading this book and I was like, you know what? I'm just gonna do it. So I didn't want anybody to know. So I went into the bedroom, closed the door, turned off the lights, sat on the floor and did five minutes of trying to focus on my breath. And then every time I got distracted, I started again and again and again. And I I I realized, you know, this is really difficult and I see exactly the value. You're not trying to

• 11:32Dan Harris?

  achieve a special state. You're just trying to, it's like a bicep curl for your brain. You're you're trying to focus on one thing, your breath usually, but it doesn't have to be your breath. And then every time you get distracted, you start again. A lot of people think, a lot of people try meditation and then notice how distractible they are and feel like they're failures. But I had read enough to know, actually, no, the whole point is to get distracted, start again, get distracted, start again, because that is how you deal with what Eckhart Tolle was pointing out, which is that you have this crazy voice in your head. It's giving you shitty ideas all the time. What's the antidote? Awareness, seeing it clearly, AKA mindfulness. And so how do you develop that? You sit and try to focus on one thing at a time, then your brain comes in and starts like planning a homicide

• 12:16Dan Harris?

  or whatever it is, and you notice that, start again, notice it, start again, notice it, start again. And what happens over time is you build this muscle innate in all of us, but atrophied through disuse of self-awareness, again, AKA mindfulness, that allows you to see the contents of your consciousness without being owned by it. And so I knew really quickly in that share house and am against it that I, yeah, there's something here.

• 12:45Speaker 05

  Something here. Yeah, I had a similar experience. It is the art of starting over a thousand times.

• 12:50Dan Harris?

  Yeah.

• 12:50Speaker 05

  You know, within maybe a handful of minutes. And the way that you start over or the way that you refocus is equally as important because I can refocus this way. Let's say I'm focusing on my exhale and then the homicide thought comes in and I say, what is wrong with me? God, get back to the breath. Okay, now I'm starting over with a critical mind, a judgmental kind of chipping away at myself, right? Or I can notice that my wander and I say, well, that's interesting. Okay, come on back, you know, like, and it's more of a eloquent return back to the present moment, to the breath, if you will.

• 13:30Dan Harris?

  Can I tweak that just a little bit?

• 13:31Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 13:31Dan Harris?

  Because sometimes we really can't help the massive blast of self-directed opprobrium or whatever, that is sometimes it's just so quick that you really can't control it.

• 13:43Speaker 05

  Which the negative critical.

• 13:44Dan Harris?

  Yeah, the, oh my God, I can't believe, Mike, that you spent the last five minutes, you know, planning some expletive bill speech you're gonna give to somebody. The move there is just to note that. You can, you can have a little note in your mind of, oh, judgment. So everything can be co-opted.

• 14:01Speaker 05

  That's right.

• 14:02Dan Harris?

  Uh, and, and so what I don't want people to feel bad about is, oh, I'm kicking my own ass in meditation, that means I'm doing it wrong. No, no, no, all you have to do is be mindful of the kicking of your own ass.

• 14:13Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 14:13Dan Harris?

  And then you're back on safe ground. Everything can be included.

• 14:17Speaker 05

  That's good. Yeah, it's really clean. If, knowing what you know now, because you've been practicing here for, I don't know, 10, 15 years.

• 14:24Dan Harris?

  Less than you, I started in like 09.

• 14:26Speaker 05

  09. So knowing what you know now, if you could go back and kind of whisper to yourself the moment before you had the panic attack on air, what would you whisper to yourself?

• 14:38Dan Harris?

  But right before the panic attack?

• 14:39Speaker 05

  Right before, knowing what you know now.

• 14:41Dan Harris?

  It's interesting, I don't know that for that specifically, I would recommend meditation or mindfulness. Um, I still struggle with panic disorder and, you know, being mindful, having, you know, calming the nervous system through consistent meditation is really helpful, but in the moment right before I'm gonna freak out, actually self-talk is the most useful thing for me. And as, as you know, there's a ton of science around self-talk. You can call this self-love even, but self-love has really negative connotations for most semi-skeptical people. But the ability, another way to describe this is self-compassion, which is a robust

• 15:24Dan Harris?

  field of scientific study, as you know. There's just a ton of evidence, both out of the self-compassion world and from Ethan Cross at the University of Michigan, who's looked at our inner chatter.

• 15:35Speaker 05

  Chatter.

• 15:35Dan Harris?

  That if you talk to yourself the way you would talk to a good friend, or a mentee, or a kid. It has really powerful psychological and physiological benefits. And so I've gotten, I'm really into that. I think it works really well with mindfulness because you can use the mindfulness to notice, oh, I'm starting to become dysregulated. And then you layer on top of that. You can put my, you can put your hand on your chest, which is a little cheesy. You may not want to see, have anybody see you do it. But like me last night on a plane, I, I struggle on planes. All right, you know, I'm, I can, I can tell I'm feeling a little off hand on the chest, bro. By the way, it does actually supercharge it if you refer to yourself in the third person.

• 16:17Speaker 05

  It's a cool finding.

• 16:17Dan Harris?

  So.

• 16:18Speaker 05

  Ethan introduced that.

• 16:19Dan Harris?

  Yes.

• 16:19Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 16:19Dan Harris?

  It's deep. Dude, or bro, or use your own name, Mike.

• 16:24Speaker 05

  Dan.

• 16:24Dan Harris?

  Yes.

• 16:25Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 16:25Dan Harris?

  This may be uncomfortable. You are not going to die. You know, this is your brain overreacting to stimuli that are actually not dangerous.

• 16:34Speaker 05

  As opposed to, okay, I'm not going to die. When you talk to yourself in third person, Dan, you're not going to die.

• 16:40Dan Harris?

  Yes.

• 16:41Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 16:41Dan Harris?

  And it's like, because it really, for me, it channels that same energy of how I talk to my kid. You know, it's like, well, I'm Alexander or bro or stinky, whatever I call him. Um, I, we call each other lots of names. I, I, I've been joking recently that his rap name is Lil Dum Dum. So Lil Dum Dum, you're good. I know you don't want to go to school today because whatever you got in a fight with Luke or, but it's fine. Your teacher's there to intervene. What any wisdom I would impart, I could then impart to myself. Does this track for you? Did you use any of this stuff?

• 17:15Speaker 05

  A hundred percent. Thank you for asking. Self-talk is one of the great tools, you know, to be able to work with one's own self. And if you're first and foremost, if you're not aware of your inner dialogue, it's really hard to be good at it. So that's, that's why mindfulness is foundational. There's three practices for awareness. Mindfulness, journaling, and conversations with people of wisdom.

• 17:37Dan Harris?

  Yeah.

• 17:37Speaker 05

  Those are the three that I know that increase my awareness of what fill in the blank is. But then you need some skills and some, and self-talk can be a skill. But I still want to know what you would whisper to yourself.

• 17:50Dan Harris?

  Giddy up.

• 17:52Speaker 05

  That's cool. Okay, so let's do it this way. Let's think about it as a slide. Okay, think about a water slide.

• 17:58Dan Harris?

  Okay.

• 17:58Speaker 05

  Okay, and so sometimes you get to the top of a water slide and you're looking around from the platform. You're like, ah, here we go. This could be fun. And you jump in and you kind of go for the ride and it's exactly what it's intended. That kind of threshold of excitement, fear, you know, fun. Okay, sometimes you get to the platform and you say, oh, boy. I don't think I, I don't think I really want this.

• 18:20Dan Harris?

  Yeah.

• 18:20Speaker 05

  So if you're at the platform and you don't know which way it's going to go yet. Okay, let's do that self-talk. And then when you put your, you sit on that platform and you're kind of holding the bar above you. I think most people have been on a water slide, right? And you're holding the thing above you, the water's ripping down and you know that you're not in a good spot. That's a different frame. And then when you're in the throes of the thing, your feet are spilling all over the place. And you're kind of feeling upside down and disaster. So there's three distinct moments of self-talk. So upstream, ready for the rapids and in the complete throes.

• 18:52Dan Harris?

  I would say, I think about this a lot with airplanes and with anything I'm afraid of. I would say a couple of things. One, you're gonna be fine. Two, it's really important that you face your fears because you want your kid to see you doing that. I have a child who has plenty of anxiety and he needs a father who is modeling a consistent facing of fears. The third thing is, listen to yourself. If you're really on tilt right now, sometimes actually the most courageous thing to do is take a break. Re-attack it tomorrow.

• 19:28Speaker 05

  Cool. So the, the two things that you're doing is you're being, I'll work in reverse order, three things. There's an agility to your approach. The middle is purpose mindset. So you're anchoring to something bigger than you.

• 19:39Dan Harris?

  Yes.

• 19:40Speaker 05

  And the first is you're backing yourself.

• 19:42Dan Harris?

  Yes.

• 19:42Speaker 05

  So, you know, there's some efficacy, self-efficacy is the first thing you're doing, which is that felt sense of like, yeah, I, I made things happen. I'm, I feel pretty powerful, like I can, I can do things. So if you can anchor into that type of self-talk, it's cool. And then make it bigger than you, it's cool. And the, all of the requisite skills to be agile in this. Topsy turvy kind of wild world that we're in. That's a really nice formula.

• 20:07Dan Harris?

  So are these exactly the skills you would present to a client?

• 20:11Speaker 05

  Yeah, if I'm working with an athlete or an executive that is like wanting to take a step in their abilities to execute in high stress, you know, conditions, or be a little bit more home with themselves in high stress conditions. The three theories that we just worked from self-efficacy, purpose, and psychological agility would be definitely at the foundation. And, and each one of those has a set of protocols. So self-efficacy, Albert Brandor was the kind of the original theorist on self-efficacy. And he said, look, he said there was five ways to increase efficacy. Now, if you do a search, there's only four. So I'm sure what happened to the fifth one, but, but there's very specific

• 20:53Speaker 05

  ways to enhance your sense of feeling efficacious. And that word is like feeling powerful in your own self.

• 21:02Dan Harris?

  How do you with your clients work with the subtle thing around agility? Because agility could be misused as a cop out.

• 21:13Speaker 05

  It's a cool question. You understand the nuance here, don't you? Because facing down your-

• 21:17Dan Harris?

  Only because I've done it.

• 21:18Speaker 05

  Yeah, I know. Right. Like wrestling with your dragon, you know, or like saying, I'm going to fight this dragon tomorrow, or I'm going to get to know this dragon tomorrow. Okay, so psychological agility, it for me pins on or rests on emotional agility, not to confuse the two, but there's a ability to work with your emotions allows you to be more agile in navigating the world. So there is an emotional intelligence that I'm pointing to for the agility piece. The other thing, though, is if you think about stress inoculation and you think about systematic desensitization or flooding, those are all words maybe that need some explaining. But the idea that the very simple idea is that when you, when you face down something

• 22:03Speaker 05

  and you stand toe to toe with it and you don't retreat, your body becomes more familiar with that stress and then is less fearful of it. And at the moment that you stand toe to toe with something. Either in your imagination or in physical life. And then you retreat. You strengthen the response of retreating from the stress. So I would use that one sparingly, right?

• 22:31Dan Harris?

  Yes.

• 22:32Speaker 05

  Like, there's a place to say, excuse me, I need to like, I need to go to the bathroom. Or I need to tie my shoes or I need to go to pull yourself from the throes of a thing. That is clever, but on your own terms, when you decide that you want to tackle this thing, tackle it and do not retreat.

• 22:51Dan Harris?

  Okay, so let me, I'll give you a real life example and you just tell me what you think. So I.

• 22:58Speaker 05

  You're good at interviewing. I see why you had a long career at ABC. Well done, mate. Yeah, that's really good. And it also points to like, you know, you are a true learner, right? Like, that's probably the genius that you rest on is that you're curious and you want to understand.

• 23:13Dan Harris?

  Yeah.

• 23:13Speaker 05

  Right, so curiosity is probably the crown jewel in yourself.

• 23:16Dan Harris?

  Maybe, but what I can't do is unlike you, I am not a mental health professional. I can't, when people ask me for advice, I always have to say, I'll give you advice. But you know, it's like you're talking to a guy who slept at a Holiday Inn last night. Like, I don't really know. I didn't, you know, I've done hundreds of interviews.

• 23:35Speaker 05

  But the fact that you know that actually creates a felt sense of safety.

• 23:40Dan Harris?

  I think so, I think so.

• 23:41Speaker 05

  That's right.

• 23:41Dan Harris?

  But I, you know, legally, like, I really can't treat patients or, and I, so I don't, I don't. I'm not even particularly interested in that. But that's quite, that's, I think, a, that's, I think, a major difference between the two of us. My only real training is as a journalist, as opposed to as a caregiver, which is really within your wheelhouse.

• 24:03Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 24:03Dan Harris?

  Anyway, getting back to the specific situation.

• 24:05Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 24:06Dan Harris?

  I, so I have, as I mentioned earlier, I have panic disorder. It's not just a panic attack I had on TV. I think that was a seminal event in that it like, once the brain, as you nodded toward this, well, once the brain gets good at panic, it gets really good at it. So not only do I sometimes worry about public speaking, but for that, I take a beta blocker, which is really helpful. And so I don't shy away from it. I take a beta blocker, which is a non narcotic medication that you need a prescription for, but it doesn't like alter your mind. It just, it puts a cap on how quickly your heart can beat. So it's kind of like a physiological, you can be as nervous as you can manage to be, but the body can't go into mutiny mode.

• 24:48Dan Harris?

  And so that's really helpful. But for elevators and airplanes, I really struggle and a beta blocker is not gonna cut it. During the pandemic, I had a bunch of stressful things going on. It was a fucking pandemic. A. B, I wasn't on, I moved out of the city. I used to live in New York City. Now we live in the suburbs. My wife insists that I call it the country because she doesn't like the connotation of the suburbs.

• 25:12Speaker 05

  Suburban.

• 25:13Dan Harris?

  I'm suburban douche. And so we live in the suburbs. So I wasn't on elevators as much and everybody was grounded. So I wasn't on planes that much.

• 25:22Speaker 05

  Oh, you were out of practice.

• 25:23Dan Harris?

  I was out of practice and I was going through a very difficult separation with my co-founders at a meditation app that I had started back in 2015.

• 25:35Speaker 05

  I didn't know that you had that separation. Yeah, I didn't know that.

• 25:38Dan Harris?

  It was brutal. It was really hard.

• 25:39Speaker 05

  I still associate you with it and you're not with that.

• 25:42Dan Harris?

  Not with it.

• 25:43Speaker 05

  We don't need to name it?

• 25:44Dan Harris?

  No, you can name it. The app used to be called 10% happier. It's now called happier. So anyway, in the middle, in 2021, as all this, or maybe 2022, as all this shit's going down, it's pandemic, I'm starting to get back on elevators and airplanes. I have this like deeply wired propensity for panic. I started freaking out on, on planes and elevators. And bad. I did a classic no-no. I was, I was on my way out to LA to give a speech and the panic hit. I hadn't felt panic like that in a long time and I got off. And, you know, I can defend the decision as by myself. I didn't have anybody to calm me down, but that just set me on a spiral. And so I've really been working, I've been doing a lot

• 26:29Dan Harris?

  of exposure therapy. I have a great therapist, Paul Green, shout out to Paul Green. And he and I will, will take planes together. Unmedicated, little planes, like, not like Cessnas, but small commuter planes from the White Plains Airport to Washington DC, you know, 70-seaters. And it is, I'm a guy who's spent huge chunks of my life in war zones. I've never been more terrified than doing these flights unmedicated. And so I did like four of those and I was able to do it, but it's still really hard. And now I'm kind of on my own. And so like I flew yesterday, I was on my own.

• 27:07Dan Harris?

  Um, I, so I, I take a really small dose of, of Klonopin, which is a, which can really ease your nervous system. And it's interesting, I, it's a small enough dose that I still feel nervous. But it's just like, gives me a little bit of comfort and I can manage it.

• 27:24Speaker 05

  Shallow pull instead of the deep pull.

• 27:26Dan Harris?

  Yes.

• 27:26Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 27:27Dan Harris?

  And so then I'm flying back Sunday and I'm thinking, I'm going to break the pill in half and take even less. And then I have a bunch of flights coming up, some of them on small planes, some of them on big planes. Most I'm by myself, but I have one with my son and I'm taking the one with my son. It's on a big plane. I can go unmedicated. And so this is the way I'm thinking about it. It's like, I'm, I'm, I'm just trying to be careful. Because the avoidance problem is real, but the other problem is you actually push too hard when you're not ready and you traumatize yourself. Um, so anyway, this is the way I'm thinking about it. I'm curious what you think.

• 28:00Speaker 05

  Yeah. First of all, badass. Awesome. Like you're working.

• 28:04Dan Harris?

  Yeah.

• 28:05Speaker 05

  Yeah, you're working and that's what, that's what psychology, let's call it what our parents thought about psychology, what they missed. That you go talk to somebody and you sit on a couch and it's a comfy couch and it's maybe a poorly lit room and, and you need to talk about your parents. All the mistakes they made or whatever, right? Like, or you complain or somebody's going to give you advice and fix you, which is all not right. And what you're pointing to is psychological skills training.

• 28:37Dan Harris?

  Yes.

• 28:37Speaker 05

  And that is the, just like you do physical skills training to have a strong cardiovascular system or increased muscularity. That you do psychological skills training so you can be more free in your own body. You're training badass. That's exactly how it works. And I think what most people miss in elite sport. Cause we see them on Sunday in the NFL and we watch them and we say, wow. And then we say, man, must be nice born that way. No, you know, like, that's not how this Yes, there is a probably good match between genetic coding and the environment that they're in. But on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, and Saturday,

• 29:20Speaker 05

  they are working right at the edge of their capacity, because that's where you grow, in front of their coaches that decide if they're going to get playtime or not, in front of their teammates who's trying to take their job. So they're right at the edge nearly every day where they could drop a ball, make a ball, in a situation that they're not necessarily good at, because they're practicing things that they're not good at to get better, right? And the consequences are larger than we recognize. Most of us never get to our edge on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, and certainly not on a Sunday in front of handfuls of millions of people. So what you're doing is getting up on your edge.

• 30:02Speaker 05

  First and foremost, I say badass. That's exactly, keep going. And at some point, you can become a professional patient, too, which would be a problem.

• 30:14Dan Harris?

  Okay, so unpack that.

• 30:15Speaker 05

  Yeah. This, the professional patient is somebody who likes, who's really good at being a patient. Okay, I'm not suggesting you're there yet. But there is a pathway for you to extinguish, not just manage, but extinguish the fear.

• 30:33Speaker 05

  That's a whole different kind of apple to swallow here.

• 30:36Dan Harris?

  Okay, I want to jump in on that for a second because

• 30:39Speaker 05

  There's hope here.

• 30:41Dan Harris?

  Well, there's hope, but I also, for sure, there's hope. What I'm, what I'm 1,000% confident in is that there's hope for messy marginal improvement. Where I, where I wonder is around the extinguishing. I think it's possible. That I'm gonna live with this the rest of my life and that I will just have to continue to dance with it. I don't know that that's being a professional patient. I think that's, you please point out where I'm being delusional here. I'm not envisioning a lifelong having Paul Green move into my house and do exposure therapy with me every day. It's more that this

• 31:20Dan Harris?

  is such a powerful thing for me that I almost feel worse if the goal is extinguishing because that it feels so far away. I'd rather have this story of, hey, it's possible. I'd never extinguish it, but I'm just gonna have to dance with it for the rest of my life.

• 31:34Speaker 05

  I think that that's a cool safety valve. I think that's really, I understand that. And I think what I hear, I really understand it. Okay. And also what I hear is like, it feels unreasonable in my mind to think that this could go away, no matter how much training I do. And I would say that there might be some room to expand that thought for you. And not to, not to like, at any point in your training arc to feel like, that's a, that's, what am I do, why am I getting my hopes up for that? So if you lower the hope, which is like, no, I can do this. I can train and I can be, uh, I don't know, 40% uncomfortable in flights. And that's cool. I can do that. I

• 32:18Speaker 05

  can be, I can bring a change of clothes. So when I get off the plane, you know, I know that I'm kinda sweaty during the plane and that's okay.

• 32:26Dan Harris?

  I thought you were gonna say in case I shit my pants.

• 32:28Speaker 05

  You can go there too. Yeah. So, so I think that both can be true. I don't hear professional patient. I'm kind of placing that out there that there is a way to extinguish fear. And you playing with that idea would be cool. And just working and working it out, you know, with your psychiatrist or psychologist, I'm not sure his training. Is it Paul?

• 32:48Dan Harris?

  Paul is a psychologist.

• 32:50Speaker 05

  Yeah. Work out with Paul, like, is Mike being sloppy here? Or is there a thing here? You know, like, that would be cool to work out. And I would also say that The harder somebody trains, the more likely or the quicker you can get results. But training hard alone doesn't necessarily get you the results. There's this appreciation for recovery. There's this appreciation for consolidation of information from the training. You know, so yeah, I think you're going to win both ways. Totally. And I don't know your brain chemistry, but you're going to win both ways because you're training at your edge. And you're going to be X percent better at it. And if you invite this idea that one day I might just fully extinguish this loop that I find myself in.

• 33:31Dan Harris?

  Yeah.

• 33:31Speaker 05

  And I can extinguish that thing completely. That is the work that we did, I did with Felix Baumgartner for Red Bull Stratos.

• 33:39Dan Harris?

  Oh, yeah, the guy who like went up into the.

• 33:41Speaker 05

  Into space, the edge of space.

• 33:43Dan Harris?

  Yeah.

• 33:44Speaker 05

  And he was terrified to be in the space suit. And so he, we called it claustrophobia, you know, because that's, it was a panic attack claustrophobias experience. And he couldn't just manage that fear because the consequences were too dire. If he got, if he was just managing that, plus managing all the other things he needed to do. So we needed to extinguish that fear. So there's a model there of somebody that, you know, was able to do it. And it doesn't mean that everyone can.

• 34:13Dan Harris?

  Yeah, I'm sort of middle path on this, like.

• 34:15Speaker 05

  That's cool.

• 34:16Dan Harris?

  I'm open to the idea that extinguishing could happen, and I know it can happen for some people.

• 34:21Speaker 05

  That's right.

• 34:21Dan Harris?

  And if I cling too tightly to that idea for myself, it actually doesn't help my nervous system. So having the notion that it's just a thing that I work with forever, I'm also open to that.

• 34:33Speaker 05

  Yeah, that's what I'm saying, but I think you're going to win either way.

• 34:35Dan Harris?

  Yes.

• 34:35Speaker 05

  You know, and so I would play both games. I'd be like, where's the threshold that I can manage well and feel cool with this? And then how much more work or what kind of work would I do differently? Once I'm to that threshold for extinguishing.

• 34:48Dan Harris?

  Yes.

• 34:49Speaker 05

  You know, so it's a stepwise approach.

• 34:52Dan Harris?

  My head's going in a slightly different direction now. When you talk about working at your edge. I don't know that I've thought a lot about that concept, but as you said it, I was just kind of interpolating back through my life. And I think, I think not only in this area of panic, but I think in most of my life, especially in my professional life, but also as I'm talking, many areas of my personal life, I'm pretty consistently working at my edge.

• 35:21Speaker 05

  I believe that.

• 35:22Dan Harris?

  And I not as, I don't even know it was a deliberate strategy. I just, maybe it's, I don't like boredom. But so I'm just curious for you, what does it look like?

• 35:31Speaker 05

  Well, let's do a model first and then answer it. So to the edge with intelligent recovery following. Then I replenish so I can go back to that edge again. So what we're talking about is really working yourself up with acute stress and then intelligently recovering from that. And what most of us do is we have acute stress moments, experiences, and then hold on to it. We drop maybe like 3% from that acute stressor. And then we talk about it and ruminate about it and, you know, kind of relive it. And so we go from acute stress to moderate stress instead of acute stress recovery from that. So we don't empty our cup, if you use that kind of metaphor.

• 36:13Speaker 05

  And we're holding up at the full cup for an extended period of times, weeks, months. And then what happens from acute stress unmanaged to moderate stress unmanaged leads to chronic stress, unmanaged leads to early death. So if we can, instead of like this spike of acute stress, this holding on for top volume and then a slide to early death as an arc, if you think about a X Y axis, if we went big spike, big recovery. So it's this, it looks like a seismograph.

• 36:44Dan Harris?

  Yes.

• 36:44Speaker 05

  And that is what I want my day to look like.

• 36:46Dan Harris?

  Interesting.

• 36:47Speaker 05

  So let's say Monday, I want as many acute stressors as I can have and then recover from them as quickly as I can throughout the day. And then a big recovery process with the eight hours of sleep, you know, and the mobility work that I do and the good conversations I have with loved ones. And so those are all recovery mechanisms. So I want great stressors. To keep me on my growth arc and then in really intelligent recovery process.

• 37:14Dan Harris?

  What are the stressors?

• 37:15Speaker 05

  For me, that was the question you asked. So for me, I'll do some physical. So I'll do some heart rate stuff to get me up there. And, you know, that's no more complicated than, let's say, you're doing some sort of squat or something. You could put the weight down, or you could do one more rep or two more reps. So there's a little bit of a stressor to think in the most concrete way. That would be probably 10% of how I do stress. The other 90, I'm kind of ballparking here, is emotional, where I'm getting to the edge of saying something that is difficult to say, or listening to something that's difficult to listen to. And so it's a vulnerability meets holding the space for it. And that all, most of that for me is relational.

• 37:59Speaker 05

  And that's, that's where it happens. So I need to stay in that space long enough. And then the other, I shouldn't do that as 90. Let's call that like 60 or something. And the other percentage is when I'm doing something where if I do make mistakes, there's some consequence to it, you know, like public speaking, or there's probably some consequence in this, but we have the controls to, you know, edit things that are completely out of whack. But there's some things that where there's real consequences to myself and others. And so does that help?

• 38:29Dan Harris?

  Yeah, no, I was just curious.

• 38:30Speaker 05

  Yeah, curiosity. And you know what I'm curious about is like, if you didn't change your trajectory from the moment of that panic attack and invest in sorting that out, and you just white knuckled, grinded and stayed your path and didn't go the dual path of mindfulness, even a second career arc, you know, through mindfulness, what do you think that cost would have been for you?

• 38:58Dan Harris?

  I think about this a lot, but like, what's the counterfactual, you know, the sliding doors, you know, if I had just stayed in news and not gotten interested in any of this stuff? I don't think it would be great. It's possible with all of my energy and intensity that I could have climbed to the top of the news business, whatever that looks like. You know, some of the people in my vintage are now at the top of the pyramid. So I'm thinking about like Jake Capper and David Muir and Anderson Cooper and I were all like kind of in the same litter. Um, if you want to put it in puppy speak. Um, and so those guys really made it. I actually never in the news business, I was kind of like always right at that second tier.

• 39:42Dan Harris?

  I was, I was the anchor of Nightline, which is a great job. I was the anchor of the weekend edition of GMA, Good Morning America, which is awesome. But I was never like the weekday guy and you know, I got to do reporting all over the world and you know, one of the coins of that realm is our do win Emmys and I won some Emmys and all that other stuff that kind of mattered a lot to me in the time. But I was doing all of that, you know, from 2010 on, when I started writing the book and the book came out in 2014, I was doing all of that while I had a very robust side hustle. And in the years before that, when I had no side hustle and I was just focused on the news, I was pretty unhappy. You know, I, I loved what I did and I felt like it was really important, but, and so

• 40:24Dan Harris?

  I wasn't thoroughgoingly unhappy, but I was really stressed and really frustrated. And every time I got passed over for a job, which happened a lot, I would spin out and take it out on the people in my life. And so I think if I hadn't found this stuff, I would have gone probably hardcore down that route of trying to advance in the news industry, which even at its best, it would have been a hard place for me to advance because there are so few slots at the very top, but it's not at its best. The economic underpinnings of the, of the industry are being decimated. The ratings are, you know, when I had that panic attack in 2004 on GMA, there were more than five million, million people watching.

• 41:05Dan Harris?

  Now on a regular day at GMA, it's somewhere between two and three million people and it's going down quickly. And I say this with no disrespect, uh, or schadenfreude or anything like that. I still think what they're doing at ABC News and the other networks is really important. And a lot of my best friends work in the industry. But it's a really hard time. So like you're competing for limited slots in a sandcastle that is being attacked by waves. And so I think I, in the stress of that situation, with my pre-existing predilections for overwork and irritability, it could have gotten pretty gnarly. How gnarly?

• 41:45Dan Harris?

  I don't think, you know, front page in the newspaper, you know, shiv somebody in the kidney gnarly, but just like, not as happy a life as I really could have had and not, you know, what would it have been like for my kid? That's what, my wife. That's what I think about. Would I have been abusive? No. But would I have been absent and unpredictable? Yeah. Consumed with self? Consumed with self and then also like, you know, prone to outbursts? Again, not like volcanic outbursts, but scary, you know, even, even my team now, I think a lot about my grandfather.

• 42:27Dan Harris?

  I had a grandfather, Robert Johnson, who was scary, scary guy. Lots of things in his life, he had been thwarted and he was a middle manager at the Yellow Pages. Remember the Yellow Pages? Yeah. Those big like Bible thick compendiums of phone numbers that we used to have. So my grandfather, who was a really smart guy, but really, he could be pretty gnarly. I remember him once, when he got his first VCR, bringing me and my little brother in to show it to us and said, and he said, if you touch it, I'll break your arm. Oh. That kind of shit. Yeah. And my mother describes him as like, really funny sometimes, but then, you know, he would like have these little napkin wars as they would play at dinner, they would ball up the napkins and throw each other. But if you hit him in the face, he'd slap you in the face.

• 43:10Dan Harris?

  It would just turn like that. And like, that dude's blood is coursing through my veins. And that's a real aspect of my personality I have to work on. And even like, within the last five or six years, I remember somebody on my team, one of my producers, at my little meditation company, right? So not the news, saying, you just have a scary face. To you? Yeah. Which, you know, I love the fact that she felt comfortable enough to say that.

• 43:35Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 43:35Dan Harris?

  My wife has made the same observation. Like, I just have this, like, this, I can, my face can get, like, stony and hard to read. And usually it has nothing to do with my irritation at anybody in my orbit. It's just that I'm thinking about something else. And so there is, there is vestiges of, of Robert Johnson in me now. I just think it would be uncontrolled if I didn't have all of these measures to control it.

• 44:01Speaker 05

  Tools.

• 44:02Dan Harris?

  Tools, yes, absolutely. I want to say in defense of Robert Johnson, I, the way I'm describing him now is something of a caricature. He, all the things I said are true, but actually in his eighties, he lived until he was 90, but at 80, somebody got him a computer. Somebody got a computer for his wife, actually. His, his wife didn't want to use it. So Robert got really involved in the, this is the early days of like social media. So he got on Twitter and he was really funny on Twitter and he was very active in emailing all of his grandchildren. And I went through recently, read all of his old emails and they were really loving. So people can change and also it's, you know, never fair to completely caricature.

• 44:42Speaker 05

  Right, yeah, that's cool. It's a good nuance. Back to the news, folks, for just a minute. Like, I love the Sandcastle analogy. And the people that you mentioned that were your peers or contemporaries, like, they are taking big voices in kind of the narrative of, of our country. Given the context of what's happening with Jimmy Kimmel right now and censorship and the entire landscape, can you share your thoughts on how you're understanding this?

• 45:08Dan Harris?

  Well, with the caveat that I'm not on the inside, I would say that I didn't love what he said. Just because it seemed factually inaccurate. Like, I think by the time he said it, we knew that the guy who murdered Charlie Kirk was not, um, a Trumpist. So it just seemed like. Factually questionable and maybe not the wisest thing. And yet, free speech is a thing, you know, like, I would die for Jimmy's right to say some stupid shit on his show. And by the way, like, everybody on the right has been carping about free speech for a long time with pretty good reason.

• 45:49Dan Harris?

  You know, I think, I think there is a bit of a monoculture in American media where it's very far to the left. And so I think some of the complaints about that and the left leaning tendencies of the media and disproportionate use of what you might call censorship on folks from the right. Yeah, I think there's something to that. But what we saw here appeared to be the state leveraging its power on a private company. Disney, or I guess it's a public company because it's publicly traded, but it's not a government company. You know, in these seemingly sort of economically laden threats from Brendan Carr at the FCC.

• 46:33Dan Harris?

  All of that, that, that's worrisome to me.

• 46:38Dan Harris?

  Sometimes I think, you know, as an outsider now observing the news, one of the little phrases that comes into my head a lot is, everybody sucks. It's like, everybody on all sides of this, of everything, of the issues. It's so hard to find a reasonable voice. Somebody on the, there are reasonable voices on both sides, but they, they seem very reluctant to acknowledge that there is anybody reasonable on the other side. And so it's all of this motivated reasoning. And there's, there's an expression I heard, conflict entrepreneurship. People out there making money off of fomenting division in our country.

• 47:17Dan Harris?

  And so what I'm really interested in is, when can you get smart, well-intentioned people who disagree with each other, having civil conversations? I think one guy who's modeling that is Ezra Klein at the New York Times. Caveat, he's a friend of mine. But I, you know, he had a great conversation on his show with Ben Shapiro, who was on the right. Ezra's on the left. I had, I know Ben a little bit because I had profiled him back when I was at ABC News. And I disagree at times with things both of those guys say, but at least they were talking to each other. And so much of what we see in the media these days is people throwing red meat to their followers, people looking to have their priors confirmed, their prejudices confirmed,

• 48:01Dan Harris?

  instead of operating on the one thing that I think should be really powering our civic lives, which is the word that you keep using to describe me, which is curiosity. Why, why not have, one of the great things about my journalistic training is it's just always a healthy second guessing. Is that true? Is that really true? I know, I think I believe this, but you know, all the shit I just said, I don't agree with Jimmy Kimmel, what he actually said, but I do agree with his right to say it. Huh, let me go back and check that too. You know, our brains should be constant reconsideration machines. This is like deep in the Dharma. The Buddha is said to have said, I'm not a dogmatist, I'm an analyst.

• 48:45Dan Harris?

  I would just, I see, I see so little of that. And the Jimmy Kimmel thing, it just seems like a great example of, of it on all sides.

• 48:52Speaker 05

  Do you think that we're on this media censorship path? That speaking the way that you want to speak has too great of a consequence, even not just being canceled, but being pulled from your ability to speak freely. Evidenced by, I think in the Pentagon, folks have to, the media has to sign some stuff saying that they won't necessarily share what they see. Not from a, not from a protection of secrets, but like a protection of narrative type of thing. And I don't, again, I'm, I'm watching from the outside.

• 49:26Dan Harris?

  I was unaware of this thing you were referencing at the Pentagon.

• 49:30Dan Harris?

  I, I do worry about intimidation from the state.

• 49:35Speaker 05

  That's right.

• 49:37Dan Harris?

  Let me just say though, I mean, this is where history is useful. This isn't the first time we've dealt with this. You know, this was happening during the Red Scare, during World War II, during Vietnam, LBJ. People with power have repeatedly, even in this democracy, attempted to use it to silence their critics. So nothing's new. The question is, is it more intense? More concerted? Are the folks with power now?

• 50:06Dan Harris?

  More willing to disregard the guardrails. That's my concern. You know, I try as somebody who's not in the news game anymore not to get carried away by every like jot and tille in the, in the, in the news cycle. I'm really keeping my eye on a number of things, but one thing in particular, and that's the rule of law. Are we going to have a democracy? That's what I'm, that's what I'm keeping my eye on because all the culture war stuff and all the taxes stuff, it's, it's, it matters, but none of it is gonna matter if, if the foundation in which all of this is built, which is our ability to work and live together peacefully and by, and by a set of mutually agree upon laws. If that goes away, you can't count on anything.

• 50:51Speaker 05

  Two part question. What needs to happen for you to feel better about that dilemma? And then to what can, what do you think folks can do to move closer to ensuring democracy stands?

• 51:03Dan Harris?

  No one individual, myself included, can wave a wand and fix everything to their liking. The most power you have is that you are a node in an interconnected society. And, and we live in a, we are a species where emotions and behavior is contagious. And so I think if you can model for your friends and family, an open mindedness, a consistent relentless curiosity, a willingness to reconsider and to engage, to not rest on your prejudices and your priors. Uh, that to me is a very Buddhist attitude about world events. And specifically on the engagement piece, yeah, if, if you can engage with ideas that you do not like, that is going to make you stronger.

• 51:48Dan Harris?

  That is a kind of exposure therapy or a psychological fitness that, um, I, I highly recommend. Even better if you can talk to actual human beings with whom you disagree and create a relationship. I believe, I can't remember who said it. Um, it was a congressman whose name is evading me right now. He's no longer with us. It's hard to hate up close. So we need more engagement with people with whom we disagree.

• 52:14Speaker 05

  I don't think you and I have ever talked about this, but, um, for 18 years, I ran, developed, it was an idea I had when I was just out of undergraduate. School was. It's called Late Night Sports and it was an idea to bring athletes in, not midnight basketball, but close. And it was one center here in LA and it was pretty intense of an environment. And I quickly learned, and I was there every Saturday night and the only price to admission was to listen to me for five minutes on sports psychology and how they could take a lesson from sports psychology, practice it on the court in an intense competitive environment,

• 52:55Speaker 05

  across gang lines, and then help them translate how they could practice that later in their in their week. It was awesome. High school to college age kids. It was an amazing training ground for me and incredible healing for me in a lot of ways. And I learned so much and vice versa for the the folks that were in the gym. And so one of the things we quickly and I quickly learned is like, hey, if we shake hands before and after every game, I think we're not going to fight.

• 53:21Dan Harris?

  Yeah.

• 53:23Speaker 05

  And that one intervention, they were, to play in this gym, you had to shake each other's hand, not just one person, and F that dude over there, I'm not shaking his hand, to play the game, you had to shake every, all five people's hands. And then you'd see them, they do that. And the person that they're having a beef with, they'd still do it because they wanted to play more than they wanted to fight. And then they go dap their team and then it'd be like a great game. Eye contact and a brief physical contact changed the trajectory of the propensity of violence in that gym. So you're right on it. I think that's not new information to anybody, but then practicing it is a whole different thing.

• 54:02Dan Harris?

  It is. I think one of the things that makes all this worse is that we are atomized and disconnected and as a culture, we're not only are we lonely and disconnected and on our phones, but we are self-sorting geographically by ideology. And so it's becoming harder and harder to actually come face to face with people with whom you disagree on on political and cultural and social issues, you know, the major pillars of society, which were all flawed, of course, but you know, labor unions and religious organizations and civic organizations. Have lost their have seen their memberships decline rapidly. So there there just aren't opportunities for many of us to get involved.

• 54:46Dan Harris?

  And yet I believe I know this, I could be wrong. So somebody will fact check me and let me know on Twitter if I fuck this up. But there's some evidence to suggest that exactly what you were doing, where you bring people together who disagree, but get them to engage in a cooperative activity. And it could be sports or it could be working in an animal shelter or it could be the local school board, get them to work together in a non hierarchical activity where nobody's the boss and nobody has to kiss up to anybody. You're just having to cooperate, which by the way, is what we were designed for. This is how we evolved or cooperation is how we got to the top of the food chain. Put people in those situations, all that shit around polarization and tribalism can get vastly diminished.

• 55:29Speaker 05

  I think you might be pointing to what's called super ordinate goals. And it's evidenced in jail that if you got three fashions in jail, you know, three different gangs, if you will, that none of them like each other, but two of them will come together and work together to to create a stronger bond to go fight the other one.

• 55:46Dan Harris?

  Yeah.

• 55:47Speaker 05

  So the super ordinate goal, it's like, let's just say China and the US or whatever. We'll come together if we gotta go fight some aliens.

• 55:53Dan Harris?

  Yes.

• 55:54Speaker 05

  Right? So that's a super order. There's a bigger goal than the immediate goal of just taking care of yourself. And so I think that that's what you might be pointing to, which is a pretty well established understanding. You know, in in grade school, high school, colleges and for us adults that somehow we've missed that piece.

• 56:10Dan Harris?

  There's a really smart person on these issues, Amanda Ripley, who's written about conflict and the difference between healthy conflict and toxic conflict. And she was on my show and I found her work to be really compelling. And the truth is we need conflict. We need healthy conflict. I hear I heard it when you were talking before about how, yes, get into your edge.

• 56:33Speaker 05

  There's a friction in that. Yeah.

• 56:35Dan Harris?

  Well, human beings, we need each other and but we we're not all gonna get along all the time. And we want to have differing viewpoints in the room. And so conflict is just, it can be really healthy, but we have very few skills. To navigate these situations well, and so it can then get into a kind of toxic conflict. And what we are seeing culturally and on a macro level in this country and honestly, throughout the world is, is the latter is the unhealthy conflict. And it's, we're in a tangle and it's hard to get out. You know, if for anybody listening, I would say, you know, it's great if you can join a civic organization or a volunteer group where you can get out. By the way, if you're lonely, it's also a great thing to do.

• 57:21Dan Harris?

  But even if you're not going to do that, I, I think going through the work of engaging with ideas that are difficult for you is good civic hygiene. I also find personally, and I don't think there's, I don't know of any data on this, but I actually find for me that listening to podcasts and reading writers, but with whom I disagree, I find that it actually eases my nervous system because it, it is hard to hate up close. If I listen to these folks, I understand that they have a logic. I may not share it. Sometimes I actually do share it, but the, nobody gets up in the morning or very few people get up in the morning and like, I'm going to be a dick today.

• 58:05Dan Harris?

  I'm gonna, I'm, I'm the bad guy in this movie. Now, everybody gets up trying, trying to do what they think is the right thing. And I don't know, just if I just can engage with all of this on that level, it's not like a self gaslighting where I convince myself that people are trying to harm the country or doing the right thing. It just, it turns down the volume on the rage enough because the rage doesn't help. A certain amount of anger like does get you off the couch for sure, but it very quickly becomes counterproductive. How do you want to be engaging in these difficult times from a position of blind rage, which burns you out really quickly and makes you do dumb shit? Or with like consistent values based energy that burns clean?

• 58:52Dan Harris?

  Keeps you clear, keeps you motivated. You know, another word for that would be love. Like, I, I just, I strongly feel for myself that that's where I want to go.

• 59:03Speaker 05

  You want to operate from that place?

• 59:04Dan Harris?

  I want to operate from that place. Yeah. And that involves curiosity, that involves being very clear about my values and what I care about, which is, to put it in Buddhist terminology, to like, reduce suffering for beings everywhere. That's what I'm about, and I'm pretty clear on it. And so if I just tune into that, instead of like, getting wrapped up in, "I hate Trump, and I can't believe he got away with that again," I'm like, I just don't see how that helps.

• 59:29Speaker 05

  In athletics, we talk about knowing your ideal competitive mindset, your ICM. And that becomes a bullseye before you go on the field. You know, that's what a whole pre, pre-game warm-up is really about, is to switch on your ICM. Now, in the NFL, we play one game a week. But you wouldn't want just Sunday to be the time that you're in your ICM, your ideal competitive mindset. You want to find it on Wednesday and Thursday, because you're trying to compete to be your very best. Every, you know, as many times as you possibly can be. And by the way, competition, being a great competitor does not mean, in my mind, being better than somebody else. It means competing to be your very best, right? Which is an interpersonal navigation, not a comparison to another's prowess.

• 1:00:15Speaker 05

  So, the ICM, one of the things that we do for ICM is one, we label it, which you just did. Your ICM, your ideal mindset, take the C out of it for a moment, is love.

• 1:00:25Dan Harris?

  Yes.

• 1:00:25Speaker 05

  Okay. So now, what do we do for athletes to help them be in that state more often? We train for it. Okay, we label it. We ask them to describe, what does it feel like, look like? Then we back in a training mechanism, so that's more familiar to them, more closer to the surface. For you, that would be, that backing in would be meditation, would be a practice, writing conversations, practicing in conversations. So you got a whole set of things. The thing that I want to just introduce is, we actually start When you wake up with just a quick hit of imagery, and we design a four step process for folks, a morning mindset routine. And one of the four steps is use your imagination to see yourself being exactly

• 1:01:10Speaker 05

  the person you want to be at a specific time or phase of the day. Right. And so it's super mechanical and simple, but it's using this powerful engine of your imagination to see yourself being brilliant in a difficult, challenging moment. Okay. And so, and then we do things. So that's a morning kind of thing. And then right before you are going to engage in anything, let's just say it's walking into a training facility for an athlete or into a stadium. What do you do to get connected to that state? Maybe you tap something, you tie your laces a certain way. You do something to kind of get that activation going. And that is a nearly invisible practice that elite athletes

• 1:01:52Speaker 05

  across the board embrace that most of us do not put into practice. So I just want to kind of share that.

• 1:01:58Dan Harris?

  What does it look like for you? Like, well, how do you, Mike, get into your I am?

• 1:02:02Speaker 05

  So for me, my, I'll call it like an ideal performance mindset, if you will. And I have a trouble with the performance piece because I'm not performative. It's more of an ideal being mindset for me, right? But that sounds like a little complicated. So it starts with the morning mindset routine, which is four things. One breath, one gratitude, one segment of gratitude, one segment of imagery. And then I just pull my sheets off and take a moment to be where I am. So now practicing presence.

• 1:02:30Dan Harris?

  Just start that again. So you wake up in the morning and you have.

• 1:02:33Speaker 05

  Sheets are still on.

• 1:02:34Dan Harris?

  Okay. And you have one breath?

• 1:02:36Speaker 05

  At least one. So I'm, I'm, I am sending a signal to my brain. Hey, we don't need to get in the rapids yet. We're cool. So an exhale sends the signal to the brain. We're good.

• 1:02:49Dan Harris?

  I like that.

• 1:02:49Speaker 05

  Okay. So maybe it's three breaths, maybe it's 10 breaths. I don't know. But I commit to one.

• 1:02:54Dan Harris?

  Dealer's choice.

• 1:02:55Speaker 05

  Yeah, dealer's choice with a great intention, intentionality behind it. And then I do a little bit of, and this is like 60 seconds to maybe three minutes of work while I'm still in bed. And then I do some gratitude stuff where I'm just kind of lighting up the parts of my brain that are like, yeah, there's a lot of good here. So today I was like, I'm really glad I have two eyes.

• 1:03:14Dan Harris?

  Hmm.

• 1:03:15Speaker 05

  So I just, the classic like, you know, and I'm really, I'm really grateful that my wife is healthy next to me.

• 1:03:22Dan Harris?

  I think about that with my legs.

• 1:03:24Speaker 05

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:03:24Dan Harris?

  It's like.

• 1:03:25Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:03:26Dan Harris?

  Well, let's not take these fuckers for granted.

• 1:03:28Speaker 05

  Yeah, right.

• 1:03:28Dan Harris?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:29Speaker 05

  Yeah. So, so anyways, there's that. It's not a check the box as you, it's a feeling.

• 1:03:34Dan Harris?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:03:34Speaker 05

  It's activating the felt sense of gratitude. And then I'm using a quick hit of imagination. Seeing myself, the way I walk and feel and the thing behind my eyes and inside of like my chest. When I'm at my very best, and I did it for us today, like, how do I want to be with you when I see you for the first time? And so, so there's just a quick hit of that imagination. And then that kind of gives me a thing to work toward. And then the last is just a moment to be present. So that's a small example of four things I do in the morning. And there's other things that I do as well throughout the day.

• 1:04:09Dan Harris?

  But that creates a foundation.

• 1:04:11Speaker 05

  Okay, let's go back to you and let's go back to meditation for just a minute or mindfulness. In this topsy turvy world that we're in, what do you know now that you didn't know? Five years ago, you know, call it midstream of your meditation mindfulness practice. What do you know now that you didn't know then?

• 1:04:29Dan Harris?

  I would say the major development of the latter half of my contemplative career has been really starting to get interested in this incredibly fraught and widely misunderstood word of love or concept of love. Because it's, it's, it's been abused as a word, you know, like, I'm a huge Beatles fan, but when I think about All You Need Is Love, like, you also need to go to the fucking dentist, you know, like, but then actually thinking about love in a broad sense, well, going to the dentist is part of love. It's you loving yourself and take care of, taking care of yourself. And so then I started to think about love really broadly understood as a whole set of skills.

• 1:05:13Dan Harris?

  From self-love, again, not, self-love can easily veer into.

• 1:05:19Dan Harris?

  Selfishness, or self gratification, or self indulgence. But actually, I think of it more as the self-talk stuff. Or at least inclusive of the self-talk stuff we're describing before. Where you're able to look clearly at your own, like a good coach. A good coach sees your flaws and just isn't a jerk about it. So he or she or they will tell you what your flaws are. But they're, they're not going to be like a drill sergeant. Most of us are like drill sergeants with ourselves. But we actually need to move into a coach mentality. So that's the self-love piece. But then there's a whole other set of skills. Like, how are you with people, with strangers? How are you with the person at the, with your barista?

• 1:06:03Dan Harris?

  How are you with the tradespeople who come through your house to work on things? And then there's, how good a friend are you? How's your, what's often called, social fitness? Are you keeping up your relationships? How good a family member are you? What's up with your spouse? Often the spouse or your romantic partner is the hardest person to apply all the personal growth work you do. You just made a face and indicates you have some sympathy for what I'm saying. How are you with your kids? This is a whole suite of skills. Communication skills, which we haven't talked about, but, but is a discipline in and of itself that I find very interesting. Back down to this level of strangers, there's a whole body of, of research around something called micro-interactions.

• 1:06:43Dan Harris?

  So we can inject massive doses of happiness into our life by just paying attention to these little interactions we're having throughout the, throughout the day that most of us sort of just ice out. So I've started to think a lot about this. This is actually what my next book is going to be about. And, and I see, it becomes more and more, the value of it becomes more and more clear. The dicier the social, political and climate situation is on the planet. Because at the root of all of this stuff is a lack of love. A lack of willingness to deal forthrightly with our own suffering and the suffering around us.

• 1:07:25Dan Harris?

  And I'm pretty sure I, as an individual, can't fix all of it. But it still matters how I act, given that we live in a world that is non-negotiablely interdependent. How I act, and I'm lucky. I mean, people put microphones in front of me. So how I act actually does have some significance. But even if that weren't the case, how I am, what am I a vector of in my family and in my workplace and in my community? Like, that shit really matters. And we all have agency in this regard. So yeah, you can, if you want, spend a lot of time on the news, either celebrating or bemoaning it. I would argue, do a little bit of that, stay an engaged citizen, but don't spend all of your energy there. And instead, start directing

• 1:08:07Dan Harris?

  your energy to where you can make a change, which is in your actual orbit. That's a huge focus for me that I really wasn't thinking much when I first got into mindfulness. And I was really thinking of it in a quite a clinical way, you know, like, I'm gonna boost my self-awareness. So I'm not so yanked around by all my neuroses. Yeah, that's, that's cool. But it, it was missing a lot of the warmth piece that the Buddha was very insistent on.

• 1:08:34Speaker 05

  Yeah, I think you're describing what I think about a lot as a pebble in the pond. And it's a, it's a bit of when somebody is suffering or in pain, it's about mostly for them, healing the suffering and pain, which is a self-focused approach, as opposed to being in the ripple in the pond, becoming as big of a pebble as you possibly can, as heavy of a pebble. So you create a bit more of a impact. And that cuts both ways. Like, your grandfather, pretty big pebble, sent some ripples in one direction, and maybe later in life, set those, you know, those waves in a more benevolent way. But what I hear

• 1:09:13Speaker 05

  you talking about is like, from me to them, from me to we. And that idea is so at home with where I think the self-help industry has gone wrong.

• 1:09:25Dan Harris?

  Yes.

• 1:09:26Speaker 05

  Is that like, me be better. For what reason? So that I can help others in the best way that I possibly can. You know, that is the central tenet into all 11 world religions. You know, it's a we thing. It's not a me thing.

• 1:09:40Dan Harris?

  Yes.

• 1:09:41Speaker 05

  And so I hear the, let's call it the adulting in, in, in that art for you.

• 1:09:46Dan Harris?

  But I think the really cool thing is that this me to we thing is not a hair shirt, you know, catastrophic altruism, self-sacrificing thing.

• 1:09:59Dan Harris?

  It is enlightened self-interest. If you want to be happy, you will be useful. Because that is the most sustainable source of happiness. Meaning? Meaning that if you have positive relationships and you're I often ask people to do this mental exercise. What is it like when you hold the door open for somebody? It's nice. Feels good. Infinitely scalable. That's right. Infinitely scalable. And it's so, how do you, is that selfish? Is it selfless? Well, in the end, that's a useless distinction because yeah, you are a self on one level, but you're also like every thought you have is a manifestation of the living universe. So where's the self anyway?

• 1:10:44Dan Harris?

  And this is again, back to the Buddha, like all of our striving and building up of our identity and acquiring of stuff is kind of misguided because it's all in service of a thing that's an illusion anyway, which is the self. You know, on one level, the self is real. You and I are sitting here, we're each, you know. We have a physical self. We have a physical self. But even this physical self, the atoms are switching out every seven years. Yeah. And it's, by the way, falling apart. The wheels are coming off. We are designed for planned obsolescence. We are walking ossuaries. Like one of my favorite ska bands from the eighties, the specials had a line, enjoy yourself. It's later than you think. You know, that, that's the truth.

• 1:11:27Dan Harris?

  So even this physical self isn't really defensible in an, in an abiding way. And certainly the mind isn't. It's constantly, you know, in dialogue with the universe around it. And never mind all of the causes and conditions that created it back through our ancestors and, and our parents and all of that stuff. And so, yes, on one level, you are you. But on a deeper level. It's more like a river, like that's flowing all the time. And you can use the word river as a designation, but it's really a flow. And so, given the fact that we are a process,

• 1:12:09Dan Harris?

  not a solid, unchanging entity, and we are in dialogue with a whole world of other processes that are not solid entities, the way to have the happiest possible flow and process is to have harmony in relationships with the whole. And that doesn't mean you can't take firm action when you see injustice. Just, it just means that that firm action doesn't have to be motivated by hatred. And that's what I'm talking about when I was saying before, the shit that might have pissed people off about, like, you should be curious and engaging with ideas and people with whom you disagree, because it doesn't preclude you from doing the right thing as you see it, but it can calm your nervous system so that you can

• 1:12:53Dan Harris?

  do whatever right thing you've chosen on from a position of some level of equanimity and peace.

• 1:13:01Speaker 05

  You've done some work, Dan. You've done some work, my friend.

• 1:13:05Dan Harris?

  Or I've stolen from all of my smart teachers.

• 1:13:08Speaker 05

  Yes, Anne, probably, but you've done some work.

• 1:13:11Dan Harris?

  Which is a quick, quick note. My, my, the teacher that I'm closest with is this guy, Joseph Goldstein. He and I were joking one day about how like my whole shtick is just taken from him. And he was like, yeah, well, I did the same to my teachers. And he said, we're, we're part of a lineage of thieves.

• 1:13:27Speaker 05

  That's cool. Yeah. Yeah. It gives some permission to appropriately so, to, you know, respect where you've learned. At the same time, know that like reinventing something with a small t or big T for truth is not the game.

• 1:13:43Dan Harris?

  No.

• 1:13:43Speaker 05

  But it's trying to figure out how to say it in a way that feels like you can connect to it and maybe help somebody else connect to it. You and I are not alone in this thing. Like, do I have an original idea? I'm not sure. You know, but I have a way that makes sense to me. And I'm trying to kind of work from that place.

• 1:13:59Dan Harris?

  Yeah. I just do Dharma and add the word fuck a lot.

• 1:14:06Speaker 05

  So where can folks find you now that you're not at 10% happier?

• 1:14:10Dan Harris?

  Yeah. Oh, so I started this thing. I was just when I, when the divorce was, was finalized.

• 1:14:16Speaker 05

  Divorce business.

• 1:14:16Dan Harris?

  Yes, and I'm not, I'm not getting, I'm not getting divorced from my wife, but although actually in the early days when this business divorce was happening, my wife and I would use the shorthand of talking about the divorce and our son would occasionally be like, wait a minute, are you?

• 1:14:31Dan Harris?

  So when the divorce was finalized, I launched, I just as an experiment, launched a Substack where if you subscribe, I give guided meditations that come along with all of my podcast episodes and I also do a weekly live guided meditation where you can meditate with me or with one of my teacher friends. And so it's really, it's kind of, I'm kind of thinking about like a next generation meditation app. You know, I, I was in the meditation app game for a long time and they're kind of static things. But what I think is missing and, and, and I think there's a human thirst for this, especially as we get more and more saturated by technology, including now we're on the cusp of something big and dizzying with AI, we, we need each other. And so I've been adding in like a real community element,

• 1:15:16Dan Harris?

  which I'm interested in, that is exciting and that's continuing to evolve. And I can't say it yet, but I think we have a next stage that we're going to go into. Yeah. My podcast, 10% happier. I got a new book coming out in 18 months about love, which is a whole embarrassing story that I can tell you another time. Could you do the same thing? Could you just tell everybody like what you're up to and where they can find you?

• 1:15:38Speaker 05

  The easiest place would be findingmastery.com and that's kind of where the whole housing of everything is. That being said, the podcast is a, you know, also an important way for us to communicate and be connected with our community. So that's also finding mastery. And so social media is fun. We're having a good time on LinkedIn and trying to find the, the most simple and clever way to share ideas that help move people in the business world. And then Instagram, you know, at Michael Gervais is the place where I'm having more fun with sharing ideas.

• 1:16:11Dan Harris?

  I gotta go make sure I follow you.

• 1:16:13Speaker 05

  Yeah, about that.

• 1:16:14Dan Harris?

  Awesome to talk to you, man.

• 1:16:15Speaker 05

  Dude, this is really fun. I, I absolutely appreciate all the time that we get to spend together. Thank you for sharing what you've come to learn and doing it in an honest way.

• 1:16:24Dan Harris?

  Thanks, brother. Appreciate you.

• 1:16:27Speaker 06

  OnDeck is built to back small businesses like yours. Whether you're buying equipment, expanding your team, or bridging cash flow gaps, OnDeck's loans up to $400,000 make it happen fast. Rated A+ by the Better Business Bureau and earning thousands of five-star TrustPilot reviews, OnDeck delivers funding you can count on. Apply in minutes at ondeck.com. Depending on certain loan attributes, your business loan may be issued by OnDeck or Celtic Bank. OnDeck does not lend in North Dakota. All loans and amounts subject to lender approval.

• 1:16:55Speaker 07

  We have the tech to get food delivered in 15 minutes, but we all have horror stories about buying tickets. The Game Time app gives fans the advantage. Get amazing tickets in just a few taps. Fees are included, so what you see is what you pay. And the Game Time guarantee means authentic tickets at the best price every time. Take the guesswork out of buying tickets to concerts, sports, comedy, and more with Game Time. Download the Game Time app and create an account for $20 off your first purchase. Terms apply.