Pod Insights 10% Happier with Dan Harris Mayim Bialik on: Anxiety, Imagination, Manifestation, Faith, and the Best Time of Day to Meditate About this episode Dan welcomed his friend, the actor, neuroscientist and podcaster Mayim Bialik, and her co-host Jonathan Cohen to Substack with a live conversation. They talked about anxiety – one of many things they have in common – along with faith, imagination, manifestation (not in the way you might think), and what's the best time of day to meditate.
Find Mayim Bialik's Breakdown https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/mayim-bialiks-breakdown/id1546456269 wherever you get your podcasts, and they're also on Substack https://substack.com/@bialikbreakdown.
Related Episodes:
Mayim Bialik On: Anxiety, Anger, Believing in Both Neuroscience and God, and the Pressures of Being a Teen TV Star https://www.danharris.com/p/mayim-bialik-on-anxiety-anger-believing-c58?r=4o5o&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=false
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Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:04 Dan Harris? This is the 10% Happier Podcast. I'm Dan Harris.
0:18 Dan Harris? Happy Sunday, everybody. Dropping into your feed today with a fun little bonus episode with a couple of friends of the show and friends of mine. Just a little background, in April of 2023, we did an episode with the actor, neuroscientist, author, and podcast host, Mayim Bialik. Turns out Mayim and I have a lot in common. Anxiety, for one thing. Also, one-time game show hosts, although she was a much bigger deal. She hosted Jeopardy, and I hosted a short-lived, quickly euthanized primetime game show called 500 Questions. Anyway, since April of 2023, Mayim and I have become friends. Her podcast, just so you know, is called Mayim Bialik's Breakdown. She also focuses quite a bit on mental
0:59 Dan Harris? health issues. And so when Mayim and her podcast co-host, and also life partner, Jonathan Cohen, decided to launch their own Substack, I wanted to welcome them to the platform with a live video conversation. And today, we're going to bring you that chat. It was a wide-ranging conversation, very funny. We talk about anxiety, of course, about creating habits, what's the best time of day to meditate. We even talk a little bit about faith and the power of imagination. I think you're going to enjoy it. And also, just let it be a nice little gentle provocation for you to check out Substack. Also, I have a Substack, danharris.com. Before we get started with the conversation, though, if you haven't already heard me rhapsodize about all the new and exciting offerings in the 10% world, let me
1:42 Dan Harris? just quickly take this opportunity to plug. We're in month two of offering companion meditations for every full-length Monday and Wednesday podcast episode. Each month, we have a new teacher of the month to shepherd us through. And this month, it's meditation teacher extraordinaire Dan Mauricio. These guided meditations are only available for paying subscribers over at danharris.com, my aforementioned Substack. So sign up today, and we'll have fresh meditation in your feed tomorrow morning. Okay, my conversation with Mayim Bialik and Jonathan Cohen, right after this.
2:17 Speaker 01 How do I recover from a friendship breakup? How come there's nowhere to hang out anymore? Why do I feel lonely when I can communicate with anyone and everyone through my phone? These are the questions that you're not alone in asking. And that's where our new podcast, Cornerpiece, comes in to start small on life's biggest questions. I'm Taha and with my friends Sabrina and Melissa, we're going to explore life's ungooglable questions on this new podcast with TED. Come hang out with us on Cornerpiece with new episodes every other Thursday, wherever you get your podcasts.
2:51 Speaker 02 Hi, everyone. I'm Mayim Vialik, that's Jonathan Cohen, and we're so excited to get to talk to Dan Harris, someone we consider a friend. He interviewed me, I interviewed him, and then the love affair began, and here we are.
3:06 Dan Harris? The love affair is mutual, just to say.
3:09 Speaker 02 Thank you. So Jonathan and I are new to Substack. We kind of like announced, had like a soft launch last week, and then we just kind of formally went live. I've been riding up a storm, Jonathan's been riding up a storm. Yeah, we're just sort of learning the landscape. And one of the first people that I ever knew was on Substack was you, Dan. And we figured it would be great to just have a conversation and let our audience see what it's like for us to talk to you and let your audience see what it's like for you to talk to us. I'll start by saying I'm very nervous, I'm very anxious, which, Dan, you know from the times that we've spoken. I said to Jonathan, I don't excel in like this kind of arena.
3:50 Speaker 03 She likes the script. She likes the knowledge.
3:54 Speaker 02 I like a script, I like a list, I like a beginning, middle, and end point. But I'm prepared to handle whatever happens.
4:01 Speaker 03 Should we do a grounding exercise with you?
4:04 Speaker 02 No, I actually, I did. Dan is actually, you know, a huge part of my journey into trying to not be anxious. I usually do like my meditation and my sort of stuff at night, even though everyone says do it first thing in the morning, and I will do it for a while and then I get out of the practice. But this morning, I did. I tried to see what it was like to feel calm in my body right when I woke up.
4:30 Dan Harris? Can I just jump in on this everybody?
4:32 Speaker 02 You could run the whole thing, just run the whole thing.
4:36 Dan Harris? This idea that you should do it first thing in the morning, I really question that. I think you should do it when it works for you. And if it's working for you to do meditation or whatever it is you're doing to soothe your anxiety in the evenings, just stay with that.
4:53 Speaker 02 Let's have you define, I don't know that it works for me, what I'm doing. So that's why I was trying something new. But how do you sort of define like if it works for you?
5:02 Dan Harris? There are two things I think about when you raise this. There's habit formation. So like, when is the time you will actually do the damn thing? So that can be, that can be for meditation or exercise or whatever. And so just stepping back, habit formation is incredibly difficult. And that sounds pessimistic, but actually it should be soothing to you because then you don't feel like you're uniquely dysfunctional because you're struggling to create a habit. Actually, most people struggle and just knowing that can allow you to navigate the process with a sense of exploration, play resilience so that you can start again when you inevitably fail. So that's one thing I'm thinking about. And on the habit.
5:46 Speaker 02 All I heard is you're going to inevitably fail. That's all I heard.
5:49 Dan Harris? Yes, that's okay. That you should feel the permission to start again and to reassess like, all right, why did it go wrong this time? Because, because I'm doing it in, at the wrong day part, the wrong length, the wrong flavor, whatever it is. So that's one thing I'm thinking about. And the second thing is you're asking, and I'm trying to get to the heart of your question. It could be about it's working for me in terms of like, I'm just doing the thing. Or it could be I'm doing the thing and I'm still anxious. Okay, okay. So let me just say to say something on that. When it comes to meditation specifically, I think there's a little bit of trust or confidence, or even dare I say faith involved, not in a metaphysical sense.
6:36 Dan Harris? Just that it takes a while and it is mysterious how and when these practices kick in and what the benefits are for you and your individual mind.
6:46 Speaker 02 Right.
6:46 Dan Harris? You should just trust that people have been doing these practices for millennia. They've stood the test of time and there's all this and you're a neuroscientist. There's all this neuroscience to show.
6:55 Speaker 02 Right.
6:56 Dan Harris? That it's beneficial. So I kind of relax into it, just do the thing, see what happens over time.
7:02 Speaker 02 Okay.
7:02 Speaker 03 Not to quote Dan from the interview that we did with you quite a while ago, but you've always, what you told us then was that just doing it is success, even if it's broken, even if it's just coming back to the practice and that it is cumulative.
7:17 Dan Harris? Yes.
7:17 Speaker 03 And one thing I think I see a lot is that people will do something, get some benefit, but are looking for like, I don't ever feel anxiety again. And so the goalposts move. So like you're doing it, you're actually having success in the practice. You're actually, someone else outside of you will notice, hey, wait, there, there are incremental changes, but the person is like, but I'm not a hundred percent better yet. Or I still have an experience of being human and I have emotions. Wait, it's not working. And so the, we, we don't have a sense of what working actually means for anyone.
7:54 Dan Harris? Yeah. I, I mean, I obviously totally agree with that since you're quoting me back to me. But let me ask you then, Jonathan, are you seeing anxiety reduction?
8:03 Speaker 03 A hundred percent.
8:03 Dan Harris? Okay.
8:04 Speaker 03 A hundred percent. I see a massive, massive change. And from her perspective, I, she's like, I feel anxious and I'm like, but it's not.
8:13 Speaker 02 Wait, wait, wait, hold on.
8:14 Speaker 03 Different examples.
8:15 Speaker 02 Hold on. Dan, are you asking Jonathan if he can see a change in me?
8:19 Dan Harris? Yes.
8:20 Speaker 03 Yeah. Cause you can't see the label from the bottle.
8:23 Speaker 02 So just because this is how my brain works. Hold on. You said a hundred percent. Are you using that colloquially like a hundred percent? Yes, or you see a hundred percent difference in who I am?
8:37 Speaker 03 Math is not my specialty, so I can't say plot you on a graph. But I see significant change that if we use the metaphor, you can't see the label in the bottle. Like, I just think it's very, very hard because there's a certain amount of anxiety that just exists in the human condition. And you are someone who's aware of it and has, and even your, your experience of a range of emotion is what makes you an amazing human being on both ends. And so you experience things very intensely. And so I think just that is a unique part of you. So it would be hard to say, oh, I don't have any anxiety. So meditation is working, but I've seen a massive change in you through your meditation practice.
9:18 Speaker 02 Is this live really an intervention that you've been trying to keep me meditating?
9:24 Dan Harris? The conclusion I'm drawing from this live thus far is you've chosen a really good partner. Mine.
9:31 Speaker 03 Success, success.
9:33 Speaker 02 This is not going the way I thought it was going.
9:36 Speaker 03 Not how it was scripted.
9:39 Speaker 02 No, this was not in the script, Dan.
9:43 Dan Harris? I do want to jump in. I just think this expression you're using, you can't judge the label from the bottle. I'm going to steal that. I just think you can't judge the label from inside the bottle.
9:52 Speaker 03 You can't read the label from inside the bottle.
9:53 Dan Harris? Yes, yes. So it's perfect. This is such a huge issue in meditation, but also in self-improvement generally. Am I doing it right? Are there benefits? You get into this paralytic doubt around self-assessment. And I get it, you know, I've done it. I've had huge periods of doubt and I think that's part of the process and can be healthy, but it can also be really unhealthy to a certain extent. You need to surrender, especially with meditation practice. And my teacher, Joseph Goldstein, who I love and has said so many transformative things to me. One of the things he said to me on many an occasion, in the midst of like a 10 day meditation retreat,
10:36 Dan Harris? where I'm complaining about my progress or lack thereof, he'll say, surrender. Surrender to this process. If this practice has been done for 2,600 years, stop obsessing about your progress. Just sit and walk. Sit in meditation, do walking meditation, eat your meals. Just to the best of your ability, drop the self-assessment. And I have found that to be hugely useful. So does that land for you, Mima, as we're talking about this?
11:04 Speaker 02 Yes, I think that part of what's hard for many of us is shutting off that analytical mind that is constantly not only assessing the process, right? Is it working? Will it work? Am I doing it right? Am I doing it wrong? But, you know, we've been encouraged to analyze every feeling, every emotion, every, you know? So it's kind of like it's this hyper-analysis. And what, what I get, and Joseph Goldstein is through you, one of my favorite people. I mean, like, if I had to choose one person to only listen to about meditation for the rest of my life, it would be Joseph Goldstein. And so so much of what he talks about when we had Sharon Salzberg on our podcast, like, it is about the slowing down, right?
11:49 Speaker 02 Slowing down and not judging, right? Not having judgment. And then I'd say the kind of third component is being kind, right? That loving kindness notion. So, yeah, those are things, it's very hard for a lot of people to slow down. My therapist yesterday was like, what if you also did a meditation midday? And I was like, what? What do you mean midday? It's not like I haven't been told this before. So then I feel like there's like a glitch in the matrix. Like, how many times am I going to hear the same thing and keep forgetting it and keep being reminded? That we need to train our bodies throughout the day, all day, to feel that centeredness, that calmness, that kindness, that lack of judgment.
12:31 Speaker 02 For me, I'm just gonna be like, I appreciate Jonathan saying he sees a difference. What I'm doing now is not sufficient, like the right before bed. Because what I'm saying when I'm meditating before bed is the only time I will allow myself to pin myself down and to know where I'm going to be is when I literally am in my PJs under the covers because I'm about to fall asleep. Yeah. That doesn't feel mindful to me. It feels like I'm slipping on the banana peel of meditation and I would like to step over the banana peel of meditation.
13:05 Dan Harris? Okay, I want to respond to a bunch of things in there. Directionally, I think you're correct that you can increase your practice. I would add a few, from my perspective, a few just flags. One is, I don't think you're giving yourself enough credit for the practice before bed.
13:24 Speaker 02 Okay.
13:25 Speaker 03 She's very consistent and it's not easy to implement that consistently.
13:29 Dan Harris? Yes. So I would give yourself credit for that.
13:33 Speaker 02 Okay.
13:33 Dan Harris? And I would play with adding in another session, but I would start very small. One, two, five minutes, you know, whatever works for you. Really, what we know from the research around habit formation is small is really effective to get it up and running.
13:48 Speaker 02 Mm-hmm.
13:49 Dan Harris? And then the third thing, just from way back at the beginning of your last set of words, you said something about shutting down the analytical function of the mind. I just want to tweak that word. It's not shutting, we're not shutting anything down in meditation. We're just seeing it. So you can make a little mental note in your mind, oh, that's judgment, that's self-judgment.
14:09 Speaker 02 Right.
14:10 Dan Harris? And it's, Joseph does this little thing, he calls it cowboy dharma, where as you're watching the doubt or the self-judgment.
14:18 Dan Harris? You've got these little Nerf guns you're pulling out of your play holsters and gently, playfully, without aggression, shooting at the thoughts as they come. Oh, that's judgment, that's doubt. And when you do that, it has the function of helping you not take these habitual neurotic thoughts so seriously. You've got a skeptical look on your face as I say this, so.
14:42 Speaker 02 No, I was thinking, maybe there, maybe we're popping bubbles, like with our finger.
14:47 Dan Harris? Yes.
14:48 Speaker 02 Holsters, Nerf guns, like it's just got elaborate for me. But yes.
14:52 Speaker 03 I want to touch on something Dan said many chunks of words ago, which is, he brought up the idea of faith. And I was just speaking about this, I just released a live about this the other day, which is, you know, my sister had chronic pain for a decade of her life. And she talked about the need to believe in something that is not our current experience, that it can change, and how dangerous that can be for some people. But how powerful it is as a first step to create a version of ourselves, a sense that something can be different before we've actually moved in that direction. And I think you were speaking to something similar.
15:29 Dan Harris? So you're saying, just to want to make sure I understand that, your sister dealt with chronic pain for a long time, and to conjure an image of a life where that pain was not so salient was powerful for her?
15:42 Speaker 03 It was almost the very first step in sort of how she imagines any sort of intense disease is that this is not all that there is, that there is a version even before we've experienced it or integrated it as a tool for habit formation, and almost if we go a little bit more metaphysical, as a version of ourselves that exists outside of our current condition.
16:05 Dan Harris? Yeah.
16:05 Speaker 03 We know that physiologically, building the mental model will create the physiological change that we start to move towards that.
16:13 Dan Harris? Yeah.
16:13 Speaker 02 This is, yeah. Sorry, I was just gonna say, we had Bruce Lipton on who talked about this. Joe Dispenza obviously talks about this. And yeah, I mean, this is even a conversation of like, do other versions of us already exist in a consciousness plane? And we just need to kind of slice into it and, you know, grab them. When we imagine it, it's, you know, what a lot of people call manifesting, right? I don't necessarily choose to call it that, but drawing on another version of us that isn't stuck, you know, where we are now is a tool.
16:42 Dan Harris? On a very simple secular level visualization, athletes do it. The night before the game, you're visualizing yourself dunking or whatever it is. That, for me, I have, we were talking about anxiety before, I have really persistent claustrophobia that has cropped up over recent years. And I'll sometimes visualize myself getting on the plane and not freaking out, you know? And that can be very helpful.
17:08 Speaker 02 Sorry, now I need to ask, claustrophobia just on planes? Or do you mean also in elevators and other spaces?
17:13 Dan Harris? Yeah, it's elevators, MRIs, planes.
17:16 Speaker 02 But the plane, you're like there for hours in that.
17:20 Dan Harris? Yeah, it's not great.
17:21 Speaker 02 No.
17:23 Speaker 03 Well, that rehearsal has been shown that you're building that mental model. You're rehearsing in that way. And it also is helping your body be like, oh, I can know that I can feel okay in the rehearsals. And that when you're in that space, you're not sort of left to figure it out in that moment.
17:39 Dan Harris? Yes, exactly right. So I work with an exposure therapist, great guy, Paul Green. He will have me imagine claustrophobia inducing situations and get the physiological response and see that I can survive it. And then he and I also like will ride elevators together or fly in airplanes together.
18:00 Speaker 02 I've seen some of your elevator videos. It's pretty amazing.
18:04 Dan Harris? I'm actually, I'm doing a round trip to DC with my wife. I do fly all the time, but for the last couple of years, I've been medicated when I fly with.
18:13 Speaker 02 I was gonna say, we just knock you out and just drag you on the plane.
18:16 Dan Harris? My family is getting really tired of it because I'm very annoying when I'm medicated. So I'm really going hard at dealing with the claustrophobia now because my family's like running out of patience. And so I took a round trip to DC from the airport near my house in White Plains, New York recently. It was literally the hardest thing I've done in my life. And I have covered war. I've been in war zones and I've never been more terrified than on this plane, unmedicated. So I'm doing it again on Saturday and I'm not looking forward to it.
18:49 Speaker 03 Not to turn this into dance therapy as we explore this, but I'm fascinated. Did this just come on in later?
18:58 Dan Harris? Yeah, I had had little bits of it early on in my life, but during COVID, when I was not on elevators or airplanes for a while, then I got back on a plane to, for a big speech, I was flying out to where you guys live in LA from New York and I was wearing a mask and I was just getting over COVID. So I was like run down and, and I was like, I'm panicking. And I got off the flight and that's the work. I understand it's occasionally, occasionally you do have to remove yourself from a situation. But when you do, I mean, the brain is kind of dumb in, in some ways. So if you teach the brain that a situation is unsafe, it will really get good at associating that situation with danger.
19:42 Dan Harris? You're laughing, Mayim. I don't know.
19:44 Speaker 02 No, I'm thinking about how good my brain is at associating things with danger.
19:48 Speaker 03 I could tell. She's scanning. She's like, oh, I've made this association.
19:52 Dan Harris? Yeah. So hopefully after today's unscripted fiesta, bonanza, rumspringa with me and Jonathan, be less scared of substack lives.
20:03 Speaker 02 Yeah, maybe. I mean, I still, I'm always going to like structure. That's not going to change.
20:10 Speaker 03 I mean, I'm still sort of fascinated by something in our, not our younger years, coming on like this that is so intense.
20:19 Speaker 02 Oh, I'm, oh, that, that actually was the most interesting thing that Dan said to me because this is like the whack a mole of being a human.
20:27 Speaker 03 Yeah, that's where I go to. I'm like, what is this? And not that we have to intellectualize it and say, oh, this is where it's coming from. But the sort of investigator in me is like, where does something like, is it something from somewhere else that's manifesting here? It's like this, you know, this unprocessed anxiety of something that like is under the curtain on that side that is now claustrophobia. You know, I was just looking before this live at your YouTube page, which is awesome. And you had an episode that's titled, If It's Hysterical, It's Historical. Now, it may not translate directly to this, but I'm like, where does that come from you? If, or do you not know?
21:07 Dan Harris? No, I actually, I can answer this. So again, I'm not speaking as an expert in panic. I'm just speaking as somebody that expert in his own panic. And so my family and I took a trip in February or March to Florida and Costa Rica. So there were a lot of plane rides and therefore a non trivial amount of Klonopin to get me on. And by the end of the trip-
21:29 Speaker 02 You're an expensive partner from what I'm learning.
21:32 Dan Harris? It's expensive in many ways, psychically, financially. So anyway, by the end of this trip, my, my wife was like, yo, you need to deal with this. This is unacceptable. So I have gotten very aggressive in the last couple of months in dealing with it. I see it as at least two tracks. There's the sort of dumb brain track, exposure therapy, brute force of exposing yourself to the thing that you're terrified of, so that the brain learns, this is totally fine. And then there's the other sort of creeping around subcortically into your subconscious to figure out like, what could be the cause of this? So for that, I've been working with something, and I'd be curious, Maya, if you've ever heard of this, it's called
22:16 Dan Harris? brain spotting. And it is kind of a successor to EMDR.
22:20 Speaker 03 Yeah.
22:21 Speaker 02 Yep.
22:21 Dan Harris? EMDR, I think stands for like eye movement desensitization.
22:25 Speaker 02 Sensitization, yeah.
22:26 Dan Harris? Something. Basic idea, and I'm definitely not an expert in this, is that there's something about the movement of the eyes associated with the right kind of therapy that can rummage around in the sub-basement of your mind and figure out like where is all of your current anxiety coming from?
22:43 Speaker 03 I like the term sub-basement, but keep going.
22:47 Dan Harris? So anyway, brain spotting basically asks you to look at a spot and then conjure the thing you're terrified of and then let the brain wander. And I did this, I did a bunch of sessions, speaking of faith, like I just, nothing happened in the first couple of sessions. A couple of sessions in, though, I had this memory, which is, and I'd had this memory before, but it really came up in relation, I was imagining being in an elevator. My friend Zev, one of my best friends, has an elevator, a coffin-like elevator in his New York City brownstone, where his apartment is on the fifth floor of this brownstone.
23:30 Dan Harris? And this elevator is like diabolical. And I was imagining getting on this elevator and it getting stuck and I was having to pound at the door. And I got this memory of my mom's first day back to work when I was two years old. I was standing at the front door, watching her go to her car and screaming and looking back into the kitchen where our new nanny was moving around in the kitchen with my little brother in a bassinet on the kitchen table.
24:02 Speaker 02 That's insane.
24:04 Dan Harris? Yes.
24:04 Speaker 02 I mean, that's a very specific articulated memory.
24:09 Dan Harris? Apparently, two years old is a little early, very early.
24:12 Speaker 02 You're very, very precocious remembering your trauma, Dan.
24:15 Dan Harris? Yeah. And I talked to my mom about it and she didn't remember it. So it's not like she said things that reconstructed the memory for me. Anyway, so there's some connection between, where I've gone with this is for.
24:30 Dan Harris? There's something about powerlessness and aloneness that is fueling my panic. And I think that is a very human thing. We are, I, you know, I can conjure an image of early humans, naked apes, shivering, huddled together on the savanna, terrified because we weren't at the top of the food chain at that time. We were a prey animal. And like we've all, any safety we've ever felt as a, as an animal has been through connection or the opposite of aloneness. And so to me, I think that's what's coursing through my panic.
25:06 Speaker 03 That's just a profound memory and I very much appreciate you sharing that with us because it's interesting to hear you doing the top down and the bottom up at the same time, dealing with the symptom while also really doing the work of exploring where that's coming from. I mean, Emmett, kind of makes me want you to explain a little bit about that stored memory that we know of in the body like that because so much of, because we can do a lot of the, let's deal with the symptoms, but trying to understand where this is coming from, from, for most people is, is just a very difficult and time-consuming often process to, you know, as you said, it does, it's kind of buried often, you know, you're not getting it in the first session potentially.
25:50 Speaker 02 Yeah, I mean, I think that there's also, I mean, there's, there's many aspects of this that also we are particularly interested in Jonathan as we talk a lot about consciousness, right? On our podcast and it's been kind of a hot topic, like separating mind from brain, from body, from kind of like, what is consciousness separate from those things? So there's, you know, the brain encodes memory. It's literally, that's what it's doing. Memories that are emotionally complicated tend to get encoded differently and in some cases differentially. But it also doesn't mean that we can access them when we want to, because the brain has a whole other set of
26:33 Speaker 02 mechanisms that seek to protect us from having to process.
26:39 Speaker 02 The terror of being a lonely scared human, which we're all experiencing. The thing about EMDR is they don't really know why it works. And EMDR is not, even though it's called EMDR, you don't always just use eye movements. People do it with paddles that vibrate and you get this bilateral kind of sensory experience. And there is something about, and even the lady who came up with EMDR, there's something about this kind of bilateral, either distraction or, you know, set of stimulation that seems to allow us to go into a state, which is not different from a meditative state, certain aspects of a meditative state, where you're having access to different parts of yourself.
27:22 Speaker 02 The thing that's interesting is a lot of people with EMDR, and I'm wondering if this happens with brain spotting as well. They're not simply having memories, they're having felt experiences of being in that timeline, right? So the difference between a memory and a flashback is that a memory is a conscious, I'm today years old and I'm remembering something, I'm thinking about something. And when someone has a flashback, which is usually a very terrifying experience, the timeline is completely contorted, as Jonathan would say, 100%. It's 100% contorted and you are two-year-old Dan. You are having the physiological and emotional experience.
28:06 Speaker 02 So when I think of you and when I think of claustrophobias, how you describe it, in some ways, like, is that, you know, a return to a physiological state that's not just a memory? It is a body memory that is essentially placing you in a different timeline, right? The consciousness of Dan is saying, I'm two, right? I'm two and the brain is, it's not that big. Of course, there's connections aplenty, but it's a redundant, you know, it's a redundant organ. It's going to keep following the grooves that you follow the most, right? We talk about a deep record groove and what EMDR is doing, it's trying to kind of lift you out of that. And it sounds like what brain spotting, you know, can do as well. But if it's hysterical, it's historical, which was.
28:49 Speaker 02 You know, this episode that Jonathan's talking about that you did with Dr. Orna, like, that's literally it. Historical things will become ingrained like that and entrained like that. Positive things as well, but the brain is not preferential for like, what good happened yesterday? The brain is preferential for like, am I gonna survive today? We don't know that we're sitting on a phone with satellites beaming. We don't know that. Our bodies are exactly what Dan said. We're, we are programmed to think about belonging, connectedness, but really as a mechanism for survival.
29:24 Speaker 03 She's the best summarizer that you could possibly get.
29:27 Dan Harris? Right.
29:27 Speaker 03 Better than any AI out there.
29:29 Dan Harris? I was just thinking about that.
29:30 Speaker 03 That was phenomenal.
29:31 Dan Harris? That was phenomenal. And can I call you M too? Cause that's awesome.
29:34 Speaker 02 Yes.
29:36 Speaker 03 Dan, I want to hear, not to orchestrate, I want to hear sort of your, if anything came up and what your note was there that you were making. Cause I'm curious what stuck out from M's summaries, but.
29:48 Speaker 02 Maybe it was about that he forgot that he needs mango market.
29:53 Dan Harris? Actually, the note was, I was writing, I was making notes myself because I was just remembering that I'm gonna be out your way in June. And I wanted to see if we could all get together. That was literally what the note was.
30:04 Speaker 03 That's exciting.
30:07 Speaker 02 He's like, I want more of this in June.
30:09 Dan Harris? Yeah, that is literally what I was thinking. My brain entrained a memory of hanging out with you a couple of weeks ago, my, when I was out there. And so, yes, the brain wants more of that.
30:21 Speaker 03 I tend to take some of this stuff and go theoretical. Mine goes very practical, which is helpful for helping us understand sort of our actual experience. And then when I go theoretical, I think about the nonlinear nature of time. This as the example of that. So, you know, Marvel movies, and I think movies in general are a great reflection of partial truths or aspects of our collective consciousness, what we're thinking about. You know, Marvel movies have utilized this notion of like.
30:52 Speaker 02 Do you mean like sci, hold on, you mean like sci fi movies?
30:55 Speaker 03 Yeah, sci fi movies and, but Marvel specifically and.
30:59 Speaker 02 Parallel universes.
31:00 Speaker 03 Parallel universes and multiple timelines. But I think, you know, if we ground that into an actual reality is that we have all this stored memory. And there are parts of ourselves that are living different timelines. In the present, so for the claustrophobia, there's like that experience of the two-year-old and potentially other memories that could be similar to that, where these grooves are made. And the emo- all we know is the emotional experience that is then going to resurface and come out in these strange ways in the present, which is not really this current timeline. There's probably nothing about Dan in this moment that is, I can't go in an elevator. Like, it's kind of this weird expression of this stuff that, that-
31:43 Speaker 02 Like, we did- In and out of that, yeah.
31:45 Speaker 03 That we've encoded. And then if we take it one more theoretical and esoteric level beyond that, if we consider consciousness as a non-local entity and all the experiences that consciousness we have either tapped into or been given to us through our ancestry, there are those two that then express themselves. And those memories may be even harder to discern because we may not have the physical embodied experience of them. They're slightly more ephemeral in a way that are not grounded in, I was two years old versus I have this emotional resonance of some experience that was passed down. That's all I have to say about this.
32:27 Speaker 02 I take issue with some of where Jonathan likes to go with this, not because I'm trying to be contrary, but I think that there's a theoretical physics level and we, you know-
32:38 Speaker 03 Huge B in my-
32:39 Speaker 02 That was a huge B. That's not acceptable. It was really big. I don't know if it was that big, but there's this notion of, is everything we think a potential consciousness thread that you can pull? And Dan, I really like you, you share with your Substack subscribers just things that you're into. And one of them, we were talking about, you talked about Thunderbolts, which I'm really trying hard not to call Thundercats because that's the first thing I want to say when I think of the movie. But we were talking about that those kinds of movies, right? They're playing with these sort of- More, I don't know, narrative notions of like, what if? And sort of like the multiverse. But I don't know.
33:23 Speaker 02 For me, scientifically speaking, I have a harder time pulling all those threads. I don't know that I believe that like, two-year-old me is existing, but I know that there are aspects of that experience that clearly are being stored. And as we know, they're often stored in the body. Dan, I don't know if you've ever done, I can't remember if we talked about this. You know, there are certain kinds of somatic work, somatic experiencing, which is like the Peter Levine kind of world. Basil Vandercock obviously wrote a book, Body Keeps the Score. Many people cannot get what you're getting, let's say, from brain spotting or from EMDR. It literally needs to come out of their body. And if you've ever met someone who's like, I can't do yoga because the emotional pain I feel when I sit in child pose.
34:08 Speaker 02 And I remember the first time I heard that, I was like, how could a yoga pose make you cry? What's wrong with you? I was in college, this was many years ago. For some people, pain, emotional pain, comes out of certain joints that get rotated, certain energy centers, right, that get tapped into. Have you ever done any kind of somatic work that way, Dan? To try and see if you can get at it also that way?
34:31 Dan Harris? Just to give Jonathan his flowers, I definitely, I love tripping out on that stuff, too. I don't know as much about it, but I love thinking about it and wondering about it. It feels much more like terra firma to talk about super practical things you can do in this timeline. And so just to pick up on what you just said, this somatic work is very interesting to me. Like you, I've interviewed Peter Levine and other folks who are interested in the, how we can tap into the south of the neckline intelligence of the human animal is very compelling. I have not done that much of it. My wife has done a lot of this work and she's done a ton of EMDR. She's the one who got me brain spotting.
35:13 Speaker 02 Right.
35:14 Dan Harris? I went through, as you know, because you and I have talked about it offline, but I went through a a pretty tough corporate disentanglement, corporate divorce, where I used to have a meditation app that I'm now no longer a part of. And that was a three-year-long process and very hard for me. And my wife has been arguing, I need to do some sort of somatic trauma-based. Because I think of myself, you, the three of us were talking before we got on, but like, I have trouble with the word trauma because. I'm just for me, you know, like I have, if you had made a list of all the advantages one can have in life. I got most of them, except for the tall thing.
35:54 Speaker 02 You got a good head of hair, though, Dan.
35:55 Dan Harris? Yeah, I got a good head of hair, you know, white, straight, upper middle-class parents, intact family, all that shit. And so the trauma has never felt right, but for me, it was, this was a trauma to no longer have this thing that I considered my baby for a long time. And I'm sure it was a trauma for my co-founders, too. I'm not trying to make a good and bad guy type of situation here. But Dr. Mark Epstein, who I, you guys may know of, he's a Buddhist psychiatrist. He's written a whole series of beautiful books about the overlap between psychology and Buddhism. And he has a book called The Trauma of Everyday Life. And just being alive is a kind of trauma because we, we get the things we don't want and we don't get the things we do want.
36:40 Dan Harris? And that's just in the course of a normal day. And as you said, it, we're storing a lot of this stuff in our, either our subconscious or our body or both. And so going below the level of the intellect seems very compelling to me.
36:56 Speaker 03 I want to just reframe the trauma word because I, I think what I hear when you're talking is that it's been so overused that it has lost a lot of meaning. And what I, what, where I take it is like, it's just cumulative stress that doesn't get shaken out of the system. And so we're storing it. Okay, I know where you're gonna go, but you say it and then I'll, and then I'll.
37:19 Speaker 02 Well, I was just gonna say that, that I, first of all, I, I appreciate also the distinction that Dan is making between lowercase t-trauma and uppercase T-trauma. And in the world of social media and outside of like scientific academia, I get it. Like, it's a useful word. It's easy. It's easier than being like, I grew up in an alcoholic family where there was emotional abuse. And, you know, like, it's a word, it's trauma. But I also do just want to reserve for people who are in medical fields and scientific fields and research fields. Like academically, we do, we have. Have distinctions around physiological processes that we can study that we call trauma and we call post-traumatic stress disorder and there's clinical diagnostic criteria and all these things.
38:03 Speaker 02 And I do get nervous and Dan, what you're describing is a very stressful and significant thing. I do get nervous when, and I have young people who live in my house. I have a 16 and 19 year old. The supermarket being out of like your favorite beverage is not traumatizing. And you know, there's also a range of emotional experiences that many people have that are often interpersonal that can feel traumatizing and that places this kind of like scepter over it. That many people argue is making us feel that we are too delicate. And in particular, I do think it impacts women in particular, you know, to, to have this kind of like shroud of delicacy potentially hovering. But I do think it's important for what we're talking about to acknowledge being human is traumatic.
38:47 Speaker 02 Traumatic things happen all the time and we do get a special designation for people who have capital T trauma, because I do think it's, it is treated different clinically and diagnostically. Kind of like with autism spectrum disorder. It's like if everybody's autistic, no one's autistic.
39:00 Speaker 03 So I was right. I knew exactly where you were going and I agree with everything you just said. And actually reinforces my point, but it's important. It's a very important clarification between someone said something that I dislike or the grocery store makes me uncomfortable. We're going to change or separate discomfort from ongoing prolonged stress.
39:24 Speaker 02 Correct.
39:24 Speaker 03 As a lowercase trauma, and I kind of reframe it and don't use the word trauma because of the association or the over association that people have ruined the word a little bit because they've overused it. And you know, when we think about an animal who like I have a dog, he's 16 months, best dog in the world. And when he goes to the park and he's interacting with all these other dogs, you'll get an aggressive dog who like plays too rough with him and then he'll like move away from that dog and he'll shake it off. And then he's not re-exposed to that dog. He kind of avoids it. But if he's constantly being re-exposed to that dog who's playing too rough and causing him physiological stress. And in a business negotiation, especially if you're dealing with ongoing protracted negotiations,
40:09 Speaker 03 they come back with something, you have a physiological reaction over many. Again, it's the prolonged exposure, repeated exposure that we can't shake off because as humans, we're like, we got to figure this out and I got to stay in the in the dynamic can be the same in relationship dynamics can be.
40:26 Speaker 02 Or as someone someone mentioned, complex PTSD, what if your home is the traumatizing environment that you cannot escape from, right?
40:33 Speaker 03 So in that regard, it may not be that capital T trauma, but it's this ongoing prolonged stress that then we can't actually exercise out of the body, no matter what we're doing. And so we're holding it and sort of similar to the brain spotting exercise and somatic work practitioner can sort of get you reconnected. It could be in a shoulder could be and it can move around a lot. Kind of like, where is that being held and how do we start to move it through? It can be very powerful. And and something that a lot of people don't really understand because we live so much from our neck up, we'll just stop using the part that is not feeling good.
41:09 Dan Harris? Yes, totally agree.
41:12 Speaker 02 We're going to wrap up soon. This has been very fun. I will say this was positive in ways that make me less anxious to do this again. Or I will never do a live with anyone except Dan Harris. And then I now have a groove. I see what he looks like. I'm remembering all the things and his voice is coming because I listen to it a lot. And so, yeah, we've trained a very safe environment here and I appreciate that.
41:39 Speaker 03 I have a question for Dan, which is you're on all the different platforms. This is obviously Substack. We're new here. How have you found the interaction? Have you found it different here? Are you doing different types of content? What has your experience been? You obviously have an amazing, thriving community. Give us a little bit of advice about what's working for you here.
41:59 Dan Harris? My sense, and I'm still learning and experimenting, is that Substack is about depth, depth of content, longer content and depth of connection to your audience, really.
42:11 Dan Harris? Getting in there and interacting with folks through live things or chats. And you can do that on other platforms, but it seems more substantive here. And I, I think another.
42:25 Speaker 02 I mean, that's why we, that's honestly why we came here. So yeah, that's good to hear.
42:28 Dan Harris? And people are, the people are coming to Substack for depth. I mean, that you come to Substack because initially, you know, the old school Substack users like me came because we wanted to read long newsletters from really smart people. And so it's a different use case, I think, for an individual than Instagram or TikTok, and both of which I use, but I'm going there for snacks as opposed to a full meal.
42:57 Speaker 03 That makes, makes a lot of sense. In terms of depth, obviously you've, you, you shared a lot with us and we're extremely appreciative of the amount that you've opened up here. I, I've been touched. Are there any other sort of big juicy topics that you're thinking about that are either on your nightstand or in your notepad that you're contemplating?
43:16 Dan Harris? You know, I've been working on a book for seven and a half years about love broadly understood, not just as romantic love, but as an omnidirectional force that includes how you are with yourself, how you are with the barista, how you are with your colleagues, your friends, your kid, your spouse. It's basically relationships or connections, but I'm using the word love because it is, I think if you use that word in a capacious way, it, it captures all of it.
43:46 Dan Harris? And it kind of goes back to the shimmering humans, early humans on the savanna, you know, there's some real pathos to that. And it's very much operating in our modern lives. But what's interesting is we're in this era of optimization where people are tracking their sleep and their calories and their steps. But the data is quite clear that the most important variable for human flourishing, you know, human happiness and longevity is the quality of your relationship. That's not to say sleep and diet don't matter. They, they do, but what matters the most is the quality of your relationships and nobody is optimizing for that. And I kind of want to push the culture in that direction. So I've been thinking about this a lot and hopefully the book, which.
44:31 Speaker 02 I was gonna say, how long do we have to wait? Is that leaving this information?
44:36 Dan Harris? Well, I talk about it all the time, you know, so I'm not hiding it. I just, I'm trying to weave it into a memoir, a fun story. And for me, I'm generally a quick writer because I came up in television, so where we had to write things really quickly. But for me, the marrying a rollicking narrative to a pedagogical progression is incredibly hard. And so my first book, 10% happier, took me five years. This book will probably take me seven or eight. And when it's all said and done, and I don't even know if it's gonna be any good, but I'm just kind of making this big investment, and we'll see what happens.
45:13 Speaker 03 I love that. I like the marrying of the two worlds to the psychosocial and the optimizing, which I think you're great at. Because the love and the relationships actually optimize the things that we're trying to optimize anything. Right? Like, it's a flywheel effect where if we're trying to only sleep or eat, but our relationships are in the toilet, it's going to be very hard to get the motivation to do that.
45:39 Dan Harris? Correct. And just like we're talking about habit formation for M, you know, with around the other M word, meditation, actually doing it with you, or with your kids, or like any activity that you're trying to incorporate into your life, it will be easier to do it with other people. So relationships snake into everything. It's the core of the human condition, and we are, as a culture, overlooking it in massive and deleterious ways.
46:08 Speaker 03 I like the idea of expanding love as a concept and an energy and an approach to interaction outside of romantic love.
46:17 Dan Harris? Yes.
46:18 Speaker 03 Because so much of our non-romantic relationships are not categorized as loving, you know, you could be like, oh, I'm kind of nice to this person. But like, what would it be to understand sharing love in a non-romantic way, just in all of our relationships?
46:37 Dan Harris? I mean, it's a linguistic problem, you know, in in in English, we just have this word love. But in other languages, there are many words for different types of relationships. Uh huh. And there's a scientist who has taxonomized all of the different types of relationships that we have. But again, we use this word love for, I said this in my, I gave a TED Talk about this. I, we use the word love to apply to our spouse and our relationship with our cat. And I love this screwdriver. Yes, or gluten free snickerdoodles or whatever. It's just like, you know, we are, we're abusing the word, kind of like we abuse the word trauma.
47:16 Dan Harris? And so when I wrote 10% happier now 11 years ago, it was a very different time where meditation was not a word that was socially acceptable. And one of my goals was to save that word, to rescue that word. And so one of my goals with this next book is to rescue the word love.
47:32 Speaker 03 I think it needs rescuing. Imagine the health implications of reimagining this word. Think about the impact on addiction, on depression, on loneliness, on potential suicidality, on on so many of the conditions that are spiking and plaguing us.
47:50 Dan Harris? That and massive global issues like climate change and war and economic inequality. Because at the heart of all of the, these are problems that need to be worked out by human beings with a non-zero sum mentality. And it's gonna, cooperation will be at the heart of all of these issues. And if we don't have loving humans, we're gonna be in the situation which we're in right now.
48:22 Speaker 03 Not to put global salvation on your shoulders, but you should maybe get the book out.
48:28 Dan Harris? Thanks, buddy. Appreciate that. That was very helpful.
48:31 Speaker 02 Dan, we really, really appreciate getting to talk to you and getting to interact with some of your community. And we just really appreciate the love that you have shown us. And yeah, we look forward to so many more conversations and ways to connect. And we just love learning from you and just are so appreciative.
48:50 Dan Harris? Everything you said, I could have said to you.
48:53 Speaker 02 Oh, thank you.
48:54 Dan Harris? Yes, absolutely, fully reciprocating.
48:57 Speaker 02 Well, thank you. And thank you to everyone who's watching and joining. And please follow us on Substack. I write at MyMBAlexBreakdown. Jonathan is Jonathan Cohen. And yeah, we look forward to highlighting much more of the incredible work that Dan does also on our space. So just really appreciate getting to do this. So Dan, thank you so much. And we hope to see you in June.
49:18 Dan Harris? Yeah, you will see me in June. And my pleasure and welcome.
49:21 Speaker 02 Because you wrote it down.
49:22 Dan Harris? Welcome to Substack.
49:24 Speaker 02 Thank you. Talk to you later. Bye, everybody.
49:26 Dan Harris? Bye, everybody.
49:34 Dan Harris? Thank you to Mayim and Jonathan for having me. Their podcast is MyMBAlexBreakdown, and they have a Substack, mybalecbreakdown.substack.com. I'll put a link in the show notes. They're both amazing. Bianca and I, after this conversation, actually did have a dinner with Mayim and Jonathan, and it was a delight. Don't forget to check out DanHarris.com to become a paid subscriber and reap all the many, many benefits of our new offerings, including a growing collection of bespoke companion meditations that come along with this podcast on our full-length Monday, Wednesday episodes. Check it out, DanHarris.com. Finally, thank you to everybody who worked so hard to make this show. Our producers are Tara Anderson, Caroline Keenan,
50:16 Dan Harris? and Eleanor Vassili. Our recording and engineering is handled by the great folks over at PodPeople. Lauren Smith is our managing producer. Marissa Schneiderman is our senior producer. DJ Cashmere is our executive producer. And Nick Thorburn of the band Islands wrote our theme.
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