In 10% Happier, Dan Harris asserts that anyone can benefit from a mindfulness practice. He uses his own experience of overcoming his skepticism about self-help programs as evidence, and he argues that meditation is a simple way to improve your life—no start-up fees or large time commitments necessary. Harris—a retired American journalist, former ABC News correspondent, and writer—writes that meditation can help you change your relationship with your ego, become more compassionate, and confidently navigate your career.
Published in 2014, 10% Happier aims to demystify meditation and motivate you to be more mindful. His advice is helpful for people who are skeptical about self-help, beginners to Buddhist concepts, and anyone looking to balance mindfulness with their career.
Harris breaks down his understanding of mindfulness, meditation, and Buddhism. First, we’ll discuss what factors caused him to seek help, such as work stress and problems with his ego. Then, we’ll explore Harris's understanding of mindfulness. We’ll also explain meditation, its benefits, and how you can get started. Finally, we’ll debunk some common misconceptions about mindfulness by explaining why it won’t make you less successful at work or turn you into a pushover.
Harris’s career in news brought him both success and stress. The news environment was competitive and fast-paced. Harris was ambitious, working hard to cover important stories. He worried excessively, letting his mind run through worst-case scenarios and potential outcomes. At the time, he believed this kind of worrying helped him in his career by predicting outcomes so that he could make the best moves professionally.
(Shortform note: According to a 2002 study, there’s a name for the worry Harris experienced: career anxiety. This is the worry that you feel at the start of a new job, when learning a new skill, or when thinking about your long-term career success.)
His work also brought him into contact with traumatic events (such as 9/11 and the wreckage of bombed cities), which affected him psychologically. After he started experiencing unexplained health problems, a doctor prescribed antidepressants—but instead, Harris self-medicated with illegal drugs.
(Shortform note: In The Body Keeps Score, Bessel van der Kolk explores the negative effects of trauma. Van der Kolk describes how even small triggers can cause a fight-or-flight response in trauma victims. This constant hypervigilance can manifest in the body and hinder the victim’s social and emotional health. Additionally, trauma is often misdiagnosed as mental illnesses like depression and anxiety—and the misdiagnosis can worsen negative effects. Treatment for trauma includes therapy, support groups, and physical experiences like yoga.)
All of these factors—Harris’s career anxiety, traumatic news coverage, and drug use—culminated in a panic attack on a nationally televised news program. Harris felt ashamed about the incident and worried that it would negatively impact his career. Soon after, he consulted a psychiatrist, who confirmed the earlier diagnosis of depression and prescribed anti-anxiety medication to prevent more panic attacks. Harris started taking the medication but also continued partying and using illegal drugs. A year later, Harris had a second on-air panic attack that mirrored the first one. He realized that if he couldn’t control his panic, even while on prescription medication, something needed to change or his career was in jeopardy.
Crises and the Search for Meaning
Harris's on-air meltdown served as a catalyst for him to change his behavior. Many other self-help books and fables explore this theme of crises and the search for meaning. It often takes a sudden, unexpected emergency for people to seek change and meaning in their lives.
In The Monk Who Sold His Ferrari, Robin Sharma tells a parable about Julian, a once successful lawyer, and the lessons he learned from his spiritual journey. During a trial, Julian suffered from a heart attack, sparking his self-improvement journey.
In When Breath Becomes Air, Paul Kalanithi’s lung cancer diagnosis sparked his journey of self-discovery as he struggled to understand the meaning of life and death.
In The Miracle Morning, Hal Elrod discusses how a devastating car accident—that stopped his heart for six minutes—changed his life. He realized the only thing to do when encountering adversity is to focus on having a fulfilling life going forward. He chose to be grateful for what he had and to take responsibility for creating the life he wanted.
Harris explains that not long after his battle with career anxiety, trauma from journalism, drug use, and on-air panic attacks, he came across philosophies outlining people’s relationship with their own egos—a line of thinking that helped him recognize what was holding him back from psychological healing.
At the recommendation of his coworker, Harris bought a copy of A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life’s Purpose by Eckhart Tolle. Tolle’s thoughts on what our ego is and how it affects our behavior helped Harris see how he could move beyond his problems.
Tolle defines our ego as our internal voice or narrator. Tolle’s definition of ego differs from many people’s typical understanding of ego, as he doesn’t define it as pride or arrogance. Nor does he define it in the way that Freudian psychiatrists do, as the part of our psyche that regulates our emotions. Instead, Tolle defines ego as our use of “I”: It’s how we talk to ourselves about ourselves, others, and the world around us.
Tolle notes that, often, this inner voice is negative, causing us to be judgmental and insensitive. Unless we are mindful and aware of our egos, our thoughts and actions are driven by this negative internal voice, which is the source of much of our unhappiness and stress.
Insights From Ego Is the Enemy
In Ego Is the Enemy, Ryan Holiday discusses additional ways that our egos can prevent us from finding success. Unlike Tolle’s idea of ego, Holiday’s definition includes both our inner voice and the traditional idea of ego as arrogance or pride. Holiday contends that our ego can actually get in the way before, during, and after our success. He believes this is due to the ego’s interference with how we think, act, and react.
Thoughts: Holiday contends that our egos lie to us through our thoughts, creating a false sense of what we’ve accomplished. Having inflated self-esteem without anything to back it up can hinder us from actually achieving something great. To conquer your egotistical thoughts, Holiday advises that you should stop being prideful, stop thinking about yourself, and stop talking about yourself. These habits drain your energy and waste your time.
Actions: Our ego can prevent us from doing the right things, leading us to choose recognition over accomplishment. Recognition will get you external approval, while accomplishment will satisfy your own sense of success. Holiday recommends that you be logical and purposeful when pursuing your passion, and that you commit to constantly learning.
Reactions: According to Holiday, our ego distorts how we see ourselves and other people, causing a sense of superiority (in a similar way to how Harris says ego compels us to compare ourselves to others). This can interfere with our interactions with people, preventing us from developing meaningful relationships that can help us in our personal and professional lives. To counter this tendency, Holiday advises that you find a mentor, a mentee, and a collaborator or competitor to help you commit to being a lifelong student. These people will aid you in different ways as you learn, which can help keep your ego in check.
After discovering Tolle’s ideas on egos, Harris explored the philosophies of other self-help experts, who led him to the discovery that the antidote to the ego—which focuses on the past or future—is mindfulness, which focuses on the present. He explains that mindfulness occurs when you are aware of the present moment and the feelings or sensations that you’re experiencing. Additionally, he notes that an important aspect of mindfulness is not just awareness, but an emotional detachment. You aren’t attached to your feelings or sensations, so that they don’t affect you.
According to Harris, many self-help gurus advocate for mindfulness because it will prevent you from passively floating through life. Mindfulness will make you thoughtful and intentional in your approach to everyday life, especially in the face of impermanence, or the knowledge that your life is finite. Harris believes mindfulness allows us to embrace the limited time we have by teaching us that the only time we actually have is the present moment.
Insight From Mindfulness in Plain English
Harris describes mindfulness as being fully in the present moment. If that seems vague, the Buddhist monk Bhante Gunaratana explains why. In Mindfulness in Plain English, Gunaratana describes mindfulness as “presymbolic,” meaning it’s a concept that exists beyond the language or symbols used to represent it. He describes a few characteristics of mindfulness:
Mindfulness is non-conceptual awareness. This is awareness of concepts before you turn them into concrete thoughts.
Mindfulness is non-judgmental awareness. You can’t be aware if you’re judging all of the stimuli around you.
Mindfulness is awareness of change. However, while it watches this change, it doesn’t comment on the change.
Gunaratana argues that mindfulness is not the same as concentration. Unlike mindfulness, which should have an element of ease, concentration requires effort and force.
As Harris tried to implement mindfulness into his life, he came across the ideas of Mark Epstein, a psychiatrist who took a practical approach to Buddhism. Epstein became a mentor to Harris and recommended he try meditating.
After initially resisting this advice, Harris tried meditation and discovered that it was the actionable advice he was looking for. Meditation gave Harris the tools he needed to address his ego and ease his excessive worrying at work. After fully committing to practicing meditation, Harris became a more mindful and compassionate person.
If mindfulness is the goal, meditation is the tool needed to create it. Harris explains that meditation is a technique that helps you be mindful and focused on the present. The most common type of meditation teaches you to return your focus to your breath when your mind wanders, just as mindfulness teaches you to come back to the present moment when your ego and emotions try to distract you. By dedicating time to practicing mindfulness through meditation, you’ll eventually become more present in your everyday life.
According to Harris, meditation also teaches you to recognize when your ego—your internal voice—is talking. It allows you to step back and identify your thoughts as just thoughts. However, meditation isn’t about not thinking or completely clearing your head—it’s about realizing that you’re thinking. Harris explains that distractions are inevitable during meditation, even for experienced meditators, so don’t let this discourage you from practicing.
Counterarguments to Meditation
Harris’s goal of the book is to show the benefits of meditation from the perspective of a skeptic. However, unlike Harris, some people question the purported benefits of meditation. Skeptics list a few reasons for their resistance to meditating:
Meditation increases cortisol. One study found that participants who meditated produced increased levels of cortisol, a stress hormone. (However, the participants also reported feeling less stress, leading researchers to conclude that meditation might serve as a coping mechanism by teaching meditators how to handle increased levels of stress, even if the source of that stress is the meditation itself.)
Researchers are subject to confirmation bias in meditation studies. Many of the researchers who study the effects of meditation are meditators themselves, making them more inclined to favor positive results. In a Johns Hopkins University Evidence-Based Practice Center review, investigators examined almost 18,000 studies on meditation. Of these, only 41 were high-quality studies. Of these 41 studies, only 10 had a “low risk of bias.”
Meditation isn’t a one-size-fits-all cure. While some studies show the benefits of meditation in trauma survivors and people with depression, skeptics are wary of the claims that everyone can benefit from meditation in the same ways.
One of the biggest improvements Harris notices after meditating is his ability to respond—instead of react—to situations. He contends that our default mode is to go through life on autopilot, letting our emotions and ego dictate our actions, which leads us to react to situations impulsively and make rash decisions. Meditation disrupts this cycle.
Harris presents a principle of Buddhist teaching that says we have one of three reactions to a situation:
Harris asserts that meditation offers another option: to notice it without judgment. Meditation allows us to identify our emotions without attaching to them. Then we can decide how we want to respond. Harris argues that this doesn’t mean you won’t feel anger, sadness, or frustration, but that you’ll begin to stop acting on those emotions.
For example, imagine that after a stressful day at work, someone cuts you off in traffic on your way home. Instead of reacting (getting angry, yelling, and honking), you could identify that you feel stressed and irritated and continue without acting out of anger.
(Shortform note: Harris notes that meditation will help you stop acting on your emotions by placing distance between you and a stimulus. This may explain why a 2016 study showed that meditation helps people stop acting based on their unconscious racial and age biases. Another study found that compassion meditation decreased participants’ biases toward homeless people. Because meditation fosters a focus on the present, rather than on memory or the past, we’re able to respond and make decisions based on our current thoughtful reflection instead of automatic biased reaction.)
Harris says that because meditation allowed him to identify when his thoughts were running out of control, Harris was able to consciously notice how much he worried. He explains that he began to approach his worrying habit differently. He realized that worry is natural, and it can help you prepare both mentally and physically for situations.
According to Harris, you shouldn’t ignore your worry, as your concern about a situation may be warranted and worrying may alert you to something you need to address. However, after a certain point, worrying is no longer helpful to you. If you’re running through the same mental scenario over and over again, you’re wasting mental energy and indulging your ego by obsessing about future possibilities. Whenever you notice yourself falling down a rabbit hole of worry, Harris recommends asking yourself, “Is this helpful?” If you’re not using that worry to prepare yourself for something, let it go.
(Shortform note: While Harris found that meditating helped his worrying problem, other experts offer different solutions. Many advise that since it’s unlikely you’ll be able to stop worrying completely, you should plan how you’ll react to your worry when it happens. This might look like writing down counter-arguments on a notepad. Or take Jordan Peterson’s advice in 12 Rules for Life: schedule when you can worry. He recommends only worrying about a problem at a specific time of day, thus conserving your mental strength and letting you focus on other things.)
Compassion—feeling concern or empathy for others—is a frequent topic among self-help experts, but Harris avoided it for most of his mindfulness journey. He explains that he didn’t think of himself as an emotional or compassionate person, and that his profession predispositioned him from displays of emotion. He also didn’t believe he was capable of deep levels of compassion.
(Shortform note: Brené Brown goes into deeper detail on compassion in her book The Gifts of Imperfection. She defines compassion as being kind to yourself and others. Self-compassion isn’t about condemning the cause of your pain or trying to make it immediately go away. It’s about empathizing and allowing yourself to feel the emotions. Brown describes self-compassion as the antidote to the self-criticizing tendencies of perfectionism. She believes that, to overcome perfectionism with compassion, you should be kind to yourself, remember you’re not alone, and stay present.)
However, Harris started to reconsider the importance of compassion during a 10-day meditation retreat when he was introduced to metta, or compassion meditation. Metta centers around mentally sending love to people you like, people you don’t like, and people who’ve helped you. This kind of meditation allows you to practice compassion. Harris describes the practice as emotionally moving for him. He discovered that he was capable of deep feelings of compassion, finding intense feelings of joy and sympathy for small moments and people he’d never met. This experience made him realize that the benefits of meditation extended beyond managing his ego and easing his stress at work—meditation could also be a tool for personal improvement.
Eventually, he realized that compassion was like mindfulness—it can be learned through meditation. In other words, by practicing compassion, you can actually become a more compassionate, nicer, and more understanding person.
(Shortform note: Research confirms Harris’s claim that you can learn compassion through practicing it. Studies show that compassion meditation can change our brains, just like learning a musical instrument or sport. Researchers were encouraged by these findings for the benefits to both individuals and society as a whole.)
After seeing how meditation changed his own life, Harris now firmly believes in the benefits of practicing mindfulness and making meditation accessible to people who don’t know how to get started. He thinks anyone can improve their well-being by using meditation, which is free and doesn’t require anything to get started.
So how do you meditate? Harris recommends these basics:
Harris notes that, just like any kind of practice or exercise, you should start meditating in small increments and work your way up. He cautions that it probably won’t be easy at first, and your mind will frequently wander. As with any exercise, you’ll notice results when you practice meditation regularly. Harris started with just a few minutes every day, and, after months of practice, he slowly progressed to half an hour or more. He believes meditating five minutes every day is better than 30 minutes once a week.
Harris further recommends that you focus on small wins, not on immediate and total transformation. He believes that meditation won’t fix all of your problems, but it will teach you how to deal with them better. This is why Harris claims meditation will make your life 10% happier, not 100%—it might not improve your entire life, but it will provide small benefits.
(Shortform note: Starting a meditation practice doesn’t have to be a big time commitment—Harris recommends starting with just five minutes a day. James Clear echoes this advice in Atomic Habits and offers ideas on how to make that happen. He explains that to build daily habits that last, you should start with small, achievable habits. For example, rather than having a goal of meditating for an hour every day, start with just one mindful breath or five minutes of meditation.)
Harris describes overcoming many obstacles on his journey to mindfulness. Once he tackled the hurdle of building a consistent meditation habit, he faced another challenge: How do you apply mindfulness to everyday life, including at work and in other situations where you need to act and respond? Eventually, he found a solution from a speaker at a Buddhist conference. This solution is the RAIN technique:
STOP Technique
Another way to incorporate meditation into your day-to-day life is to use psychologist Elisha Goldstein’s STOP technique, another method of refocusing on the present.
Stop what you’re doing.
Take a breath.
Observe thoughts, feelings, and emotions.
Proceed with something that will help you in the moment (relax your shoulders or go for a walk).
Neither technique is better than the other, but both are helpful tools to use in different situations. The RAIN technique focuses on acceptance and non-identification with your emotions—it doesn’t ask you to change anything about the situation, just accept it. The STOP technique adds a physical element to the RAIN technique by asking you to stop what you’re doing, take a breath, and do something that will help you distance yourself from the stimulant.
The steps of the STOP technique can correspond to or assist those of the RAIN technique:
When you stop what you’re doing (STOP technique), that is when you should recognize, or consciously become aware, of your emotions (RAIN technique).
When you take a breath (STOP), you can allow your emotions to exist and stop fighting them (RAIN).
When you observe your thoughts, feelings, and emotions (STOP), you are investigating them (RAIN).
When you engage with something physically that will help you get over your emotions (STOP), you are separating yourself from that emotion (RAIN) in a way that can help you remove it from your self-identity.
During his journey to learn Buddhist principles of mindfulness, Harris overcame many misconceptions he had as a self-help skeptic. He wants you to learn from his mistakes in his mindfulness journey, so he debunks a few common myths about meditation:
In 10% Happier, former ABC News anchor Dan Harris discusses how he was able to get control of his anxiety and calm the negative voice in his head through meditation, despite his skepticism of self-help programs.
Harris describes the events that led him to start practicing meditation, including a meltdown on live television, and he explores a number of self-help ideas from popular gurus. He explains principles of Buddhism, the concepts of mindfulness, and meditation for skeptics.
Along the way, Harris debunks a few common misconceptions about meditation: that mindfulness makes you a pushover, makes you less successful, inhibits creativity, or requires perfection in order to be effective.
Harris is a retired American journalist, former ABC News correspondent, and writer. He appeared on “Nightline,” “World News Tonight,” “20/20,” and “Good Morning America.” He covered stories on a wide range of topics, from evangelical culture wars to the attack on 9/11. Harris has written reports from all over the world, including Afghanistan, Haiti, and Cambodia. He won an Edward R. Murrow Award for a report about a young Iraqi man moving to America and an Emmy Award for his “Nightline” report on child trafficking. In 2021, he retired from journalism to focus on promoting the benefits of meditation.
Harris published two more books on meditation, and he now has a podcast where he continues to explore the topic of mindfulness.
Connect with Dan Harris:
10% Happier was published by HarperCollins in 2014. It was Harris’s first book on meditation. In 2015, he published Hoist On My Own Petard, which discusses his experience after writing 10% Happier. In 2017, he published another meditation guide, Meditation for Fidgety Skeptics.
According to some archaeologists, meditation dates back to 5,000 B.C., although scholars debate the exact origins. The first mention of meditation is found in Hindu texts. The practice gradually spread throughout Asia along the Silk Road, which was a network of trade routes that connected the East and West.
By the 18th century, meditation became a topic for philosophers, such as Voltaire. But it wasn’t until the 20th century that it caught on in mainstream Western cultures. In the 1960s, researchers began studying the effects of meditation. Western meditation focused on relaxation and self-improvement instead of spiritual development. The practice found popularity with celebrities like The Beatles. In the 1990s, Oprah endorsed Deepak Chopra’s book Ageless Body, Timeless Mind, which advocated that people meditate to combat the aging process. As more celebrities praised meditation and more research reported benefits, Westerners embraced meditation.
More recently, meditation has continued to enter the mainstream, and its reach has grown in the digital age, with websites and apps devoted to it and major corporations incorporating it into their employee benefits packages. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has reported that meditation was the fastest-growing health trend in recent years.
Harris narrates his journey through the world of self-help in the 2000s. Self-help aims to guide people to emotional, financial, and intellectual improvement through books, speeches, and courses. As traditional organized religion became less popular in the 21st century, self-help gained traction as people found fulfillment in the genre’s ideas. However, some people have called self-help (an over-$11 billion industry) a “religion for capitalists.”
There have been countless books published on many different aspects of self-help, from decluttering your home to developing financial freedom. Harris's book lies within the niche of those trying to help you find meaning in everyday life (such as Minimalism), harness your thoughts (like The Secret), and change your daily habits (like Atomic Habits). His tone also mirrors other self-help books that aim to be accessible and practical, in order to appeal to career-minded people looking for productivity boosts (like The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck).
Despite the popularity of the self-help industry, there is an equal amount of skepticism and aversion to it. Many people are wary of pseudoscientific claims, as well as the hypocrisy of gurus who don’t follow their own advice or have made millions of dollars from their ideas. Other critics have noted that most self-help isn’t actually original, as many gurus get their ideas from Buddhism, Greek Stoicism, and classic philosophy.
Harris, a self-help skeptic, came to this realization about meditation and Buddhism. As he made his way through self-help ideas, he discovered that the parts of self-help philosophy that resonated with him were actually principles of Buddhism.
10% Happier became a New York Times bestseller, and it won the 2014 Living Now Book Award for Inspirational Memoir. The book established Harris’s position as a meditation advocate, and he has shifted his focus from journalism to promoting mindfulness through his meditation books and app.
Many readers liked Harris’s practical and honest approach to meditation, particularly since Harris was a self-help skeptic and successful journalist. Most readers appreciated that he answered common questions about meditation and Buddhism in a way that wasn’t overly scientific. However, some critics wanted more information and self-help guidance from the book, while others thought it could be condensed.
The book takes an autobiographical approach to explaining meditation concepts. Harris narrates his journey through the world of self-help. He doesn’t bombard the reader with statistics, instead describing the benefits of meditation, principles of Buddhism, and common self-help philosophies in a colloquial way. As a result, the book acts as a layperson’s guide to self-help or advice from a friend.
The book is organized chronologically, detailing Harris’s life and the events that resulted in him starting to meditate. At the end of the book, Harris includes a “how-to” section on different kinds of meditation, how to get started with your meditation practice, and answers to common questions about meditation.
In this guide, we’ll follow Harris’s journey through self-help and the lessons he learns from his journey. First, we’ll present the initial context on what led Harris to start meditating. Then, we’ll talk about the concept of mindfulness and some of the popular self-help figures that shaped his understanding of it. We’ll also provide additional information about these gurus in our commentary. Next, we’ll discuss principles of meditation and actionable tips you can use to start your own meditation habit. Finally, we’ll debunk the common misconceptions surrounding self-help.
Dan Harris believes anyone can benefit from a mindfulness practice. Most self-help gurus offer quick fixes, but Harris argues that it's small, consistent mindfulness practices that will make the most difference in your life. He also notes that many gurus make grandiose promises of life-changing results. Harris contends that a more realistic promise is that while meditation may not completely change your life, it will make you 10% happier.
Harris notes that meditation is a simple way to improve your life—no start-up fees or large time commitments necessary. Meditation can help you change your relationship with your ego, become more compassionate, and confidently navigate your career.
Harris is an American journalist and author. He was an anchor for ABC News, and he appeared on “Good Morning America,” “Nightline,” and “World News Tonight.” Following an on-air panic attack and a battle with drug use, Harris reluctantly turned to meditation to handle his ego and stress from work. As a self-help skeptic, Harris details his path through the world of gurus, Buddhism, and mindfulness, and he explains why anyone can benefit from mindfulness.
Harris describes the moments in his life that led him to start practicing mindfulness and meditation. As he navigated the world of self-help, he encountered notable gurus, learned lessons, and debunked common misconceptions about spiritualism.
10% Happier begins by detailing Harris’s journey through the world of mindfulness and self-help. To get a better understanding of Harris’s experience, we’ll talk about what caused Harris to seek out answers: his career in news, an on-air panic attack, and his relationship with his ego.
Harris began his career at a local station in Bangor, Maine. He worked his way up the ranks, eventually landing at ABC News. He describes the news environment as competitive and fast-paced: Journalists compete with each other for air time, and they work on tight deadlines to quickly deliver trending news to the audience. Bosses and producers are often critical and difficult to please.
Harris’s career took off following his coverage of the 9/11 attacks. Soon afterward, he was sent to report from Afghanistan. While he was there, he went behind enemy lines and interviewed Taliban leaders. He became an international correspondent and was repeatedly put into stressful situations, where he saw dead bodies, witnessed the wreckage of bombed cities, and dodged gunfire.
(Shortform note: Harris doesn’t discuss it in the book, but he also covered stories on Hurricane Katrina in 2005. The hurricane devastated the southeastern part of the United States, causing over 1,800 fatalities and billions of dollars in damages. This is yet another major event Harris covered that propelled his career, while also subjecting him to witness hardship.)
Harris was ambitious, working hard to cover important stories. He thought if he began to feel comfortable in his job, he wouldn’t keep pushing himself to succeed. He also worried excessively, letting his mind run through worst-case scenarios and potential outcomes. At the time, he believed this kind of worrying helped him in his career by predicting outcomes so that he could make strategic professional moves and achieve his ultimate goal, which was to transition from working as a correspondent—where journalists compete for air time with individual news stories—to becoming a successful news anchor, where journalists have guaranteed air time. However, his competitiveness made him quick to anger, and he developed a reputation for having outbursts on set.
(Shortform note: According to a 2002 study, there’s a name for the worry Harris experienced: career anxiety. It can be broken down into two components: learning anxiety and survival anxiety. Learning anxiety occurs at the start of a new job or when learning a new skill—it’s the anxiety of trying something new and potentially failing in the process. Survival anxiety occurs when you’re settled in your job and worry about your long-term career success. Generally, when your survival anxiety outweighs your learning anxiety, experts advise that it’s time to look for a new, better job.)
Harris explains that his work exposed him to traumatic events, but he didn’t consider the psychological impact of covering these traumatic events. He convinced himself that he experienced these events with psychological distance that was appropriate and normal, but in truth, the things he witnessed affected him deeply. After returning home to the US, he started experiencing unexplained health problems, which a doctor finally diagnosed as depression. The doctor prescribed antidepressants, but instead, Harris self-medicated with illegal drugs.
Harris later discovered research that found a correlation between war correspondents and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), which he realized was part of what was troubling him during this period.
Effects of Trauma
Harris’s news coverage of traumatic events had psychological consequences without him realizing it. We often equate PTSD and trauma with war veterans, abuse survivors, and victims of violent accidents, but trauma is more common than we realize. One study found that almost 70% of young people have experienced some kind of trauma. As we see in Harris’s case, trauma can stem from a range of experiences, and it impacts the mind, brain, and body.
In The Body Keeps the Score, Bessel van der Kolk explores the physical effects of trauma. Van der Kolk describes how even small triggers can cause a fight-or-flight response in trauma victims. This constant hypervigilance can manifest in the body and hinders the victim’s social and emotional health. Additionally, trauma is often misdiagnosed as mental illnesses like depression and anxiety—and that misdiagnosis can worsen negative effects. Treatment for trauma includes therapy, support groups, medication, and physical experiences like yoga and eye movement desensitization and reprocessing (EMDR).
Because of the stress of his work, Harris started partying and using hard drugs to cope. He describes how he juggled both of his addictions: drugs and journalism. He notes that his drug usage added to his stress at work: He worried that if people found out about his problem, he’d be fired. This caused him to obsess over when he could and couldn’t use drugs, making him more stressed, which resulted in more drug usage. After years of drug use, he developed frequent chest pain and fatigue.
All of these factors—his career anxiety, traumatic news coverage, and drug use—culminated in a panic attack on a nationally televised news program. He was filling in for a news reader on “Good Morning America,” an assignment he hoped would be a step toward his goal of becoming a news anchor. But midway through his report, he felt his lungs tighten, he had difficulty speaking, and he felt panicked. He was unable to get through his delivery and had to turn the story over to his co-hosts.
Harris felt ashamed about the incident and worried that it would negatively impact his career. Soon after, he consulted a psychiatrist, who confirmed the earlier diagnosis of depression and prescribed anti-anxiety medication to prevent more panic attacks. Harris started taking the medication but also continued partying and using drugs. A year later, Harris had a second on-air panic attack that mirrored the first one. He realized that if he couldn’t control his panic, even while on prescription medication, something needed to change or his career was in jeopardy.
Harris then sought the advice of a second therapist, who helped him quit his drug problem and recognize that he needed to change his habits and take care of both his body and his mind.
Crises and the Search for Meaning
Harris's on-air meltdown served as a catalyst for him to change his behavior. Many other self-help books and fables explore this theme of crises and the search for meaning. It often takes a sudden, unexpected emergency for people to seek change and meaning in their lives.
In The Monk Who Sold His Ferrari, Robin Sharma tells a parable about Julian, a once successful lawyer, and the lessons he learned from his spiritual journey. During a trial, Julian suffered from a heart attack, sparking his self-improvement journey.
In When Breath Becomes Air, Paul Kalanithi’s lung cancer diagnosis sparked his journey of self-discovery as he struggled to understand the meaning of life and death.
In The Miracle Morning, Hal Elrod discusses how a devastating car accident—that stopped his heart for six minutes—changed his life. He realized the only thing to do when encountering adversity is to focus on having a fulfilling life going forward. He chose to be grateful for what he had and take responsibility for creating the life he wanted.
After battling with career anxiety, trauma from journalism, drug use, and on-air panic attacks, Harris continued to go to therapy and eventually found himself in a more stable position in his career. However, while he felt he had managed to get his troubles somewhat under control, he didn’t yet feel truly secure at work or comfortable in his mentality. Harris explains that it was at this time that he came across philosophies outlining people’s relationship with their own egos, a line of thinking that helped him recognize what was holding him back from psychological healing.
At his coworker’s recommendation, Harris bought a copy of A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life’s Purpose by Eckhart Tolle. Tolle’s thoughts on what our ego is and how it affects our behavior had a big impact on Harris’s thinking, helping him to see how he could move beyond the various problems he had accumulated.
Tolle defines our ego as our internal voice or narrator. Tolle’s definition of ego differs from many people’s typical understanding of ego, as he doesn’t define it as pride or arrogance. Nor does he define it in the way that Freudian psychiatrists do, as the part of our psyche that regulates our emotions. Instead, Tolle defines ego as our use of “I”: It’s how we talk to ourselves about ourselves, others, and the world around us.
Tolle notes that, often, this inner voice is negative, causing us to be judgmental and insensitive. Unless we are mindful and aware of our egos, our thoughts and actions are driven by this negative internal voice, which is the source of much of our unhappiness and stress in our lives.
(Shortform note: In The Inner Game of Tennis, Timothy Gallwey expands on an idea similar to Tolle’s definition of ego. Gallwey writes that when people talk to themselves, there is a disconnect between the “I” talking and the “self” listening. He distinguishes between two selves: Self 1 and Self 2. Self 1 is our ego-driven mind that chastises or praises Self 2, which is our physical self that acts intuitively. We succeed when we can quiet Self 1 and allow Self 2 to act.)
Harris suspected many of his problems stemmed from his ego, as Tolle defines it. He discusses four truths about egos that cause problems for people.
Our egos are never satisfied. Harris asserts that nothing we do is enough to please our inner voice. This is the feeling of “If I just get this promotion, I’ll be happy” or “If I just lose 15 pounds, I’ll feel good about myself.” Even if you get that promotion or lose 15 pounds, your inner voice won’t be satisfied or happy, and you’ll find something else that you “need” to be happy.
Harris explains that his ego pushed him to work hard in his career, causing him to put other parts of his life on hold, like building relationships and taking time to unwind at home. He constantly tried to satisfy his ego with accomplishments at work and even his drug use. Harris claims that whenever he did these things, his ego would inevitably want more.
(Shortform note: Our egos can also be self-limiting, which perpetuates our feelings of never being satisfied. In Can’t Hurt Me, David Goggins calls this internal voice or regulator a “governor.” He believes our governor gives us feedback about the world and what we’re feeling, often holding us back from reaching our full potential. When we tell ourselves, “This is too hard” or “I’m too tired,” that’s your governor holding you back. Goggins asserts that once you learn to master your governor, you’ll stop limiting yourself.)
Harris explains that our egos compare ourselves to others, causing us to constantly look at other people’s successes and failures and see how we measure up. For example, when you look at someone’s pictures on Instagram and feel bad that your life doesn’t look as good or fun as theirs, this is your ego comparing yourself to them.
Harris describes how he was caught up in this mentality, critical of others and constantly evaluating his and his colleagues’ work performance. He would then mentally stack up how they compared and if he was “winning” (getting more air time, producing a high number of stories, getting more praise from bosses, and so on). Harris believed that this kind of mental tallying helped his career and gave him his edge.
(Shortform note: In Daring Greatly, Brené Brown discusses another reason we are drawn to compare ourselves to others: scarcity culture, or our societal belief that we never have enough. Our scarcity culture exacerbates our tendency to compare ourselves with one another, seeing how we “measure up” in value. This causes us to feel like we are never enough, leading to unhappiness.)
Harris notes that egos can make us fixate on drama and conflict, which can make it difficult for us to separate our minds from our troubles. When we get into a fight with a friend or are snubbed for a promotion at work, we usually have trouble letting go of it. When a stranger gives us a funny look, we create a narrative for it. We ruminate in the drama, worrying about what we did wrong or blaming the other person. Harris argues that this is because our inner monologue (our ego) constantly revisits these experiences.
Harris describes bringing workplace drama home with him, and he found it hard to let issues go. For example, despite people telling him otherwise, he says he convinced himself that he was losing his hair, which he thought would result in the end of his career.
(Shortform note: In Little Red Book of Selling, Jeffrey Gitomer discusses specific ways in which fixating on drama at work can disrupt your career. By dwelling on drama, you waste your own time, energy, and potential for success. He also believes that you’re more likely to develop a bad attitude, give bad advice, and make people angry by taking sides or perpetuating the drama.)
Harris says that our egos obsess over the past and future, making it difficult to appreciate the present and how we feel in each moment. We focus on what has happened to us in the past, like making an awkward comment at a party last month. Or we focus on what could happen in our future, such as what to wear and say on a date next week. This distracts us from the present—what is currently happening around us.
Harris describes experiencing this with his career anxiety because he always focused on the outcome of his work, not the process. He would envision the finished news story or the promotion without enjoying the process of getting there.
Insights From Ego Is the Enemy
In Ego Is the Enemy, Ryan Holiday discusses additional ways that our egos can prevent us from finding success. Unlike Tolle’s idea of ego, Holiday’s definition includes both our inner voice and the traditional idea of ego as arrogance or pride. Holiday contends that our ego can actually get in the way before, during, and after our success. He believes this is due to the ego’s interference with how we think, act, and react.
Thoughts: Holiday contends that our egos lie to us through our thoughts, creating a false sense of what we’ve accomplished. Having an inflated self-esteem without anything to back it up can hinder us from actually achieving something great. To conquer your egotistical thoughts, Holiday advises that you should stop being prideful, stop thinking about yourself, and stop talking about yourself. These habits drain your energy and waste your time.
Actions: Our ego can prevent us from doing the right things, leading us to choose recognition over accomplishment. Recognition will get you external approval, while accomplishment will satisfy your own sense of success. Holiday recommends being logical and purposeful when pursuing your passion and committing to constantly learning.
Reactions: According to Holiday, our ego distorts how we see ourselves and other people, causing a sense of superiority (in a similar way to how Harris says ego compels us to compare ourselves to others). This can interfere with our interactions with people, preventing us from developing meaningful relationships that can help us in our personal and professional lives. To counter this tendency, Holiday advises that you find a mentor, a mentee, and a collaborator or competitor to help you commit to being a lifelong student. These people will aid you in different ways as you learn, which can help keep your ego in check.
Harris identified that his ego was one source of his problems, leading him to seek answers.
Describe a recent situation you couldn’t get out of your head. It could be about a fight with a friend or a comment from a stranger that rubbed you the wrong way.
What bothered you about the incident? Why did you find it hard to let go of it?
How did you talk to yourself when thinking about the scenario? Were you particularly hard on yourself, or did you blame the other person?
How do you wish you’d handled the situation and your thoughts about it afterwards? What might you be able to do differently next time?
Now that we understand what caused Harris to seek help and how his ego affected him, let’s explore his introduction to understanding mindfulness. As he developed his understanding, he encountered many different self-help figures who shaped his ideas of mindfulness. As a self-proclaimed skeptic, Harris discusses his reluctance to fully embrace certain philosophies, and he struggled to find his place in the self-help community. First, we’ll discuss mindfulness and the popular self-help gurus who didn’t fully resonate with Harris; then, we’ll discuss the ones who did.
Harris discovered that the antidote to the ego—which focuses on the past or future—is mindfulness, which focuses on the present. He explains that mindfulness occurs when you are aware of the present moment and the feelings or sensations that you’re experiencing. Additionally, he notes that an important aspect of mindfulness is not just awareness, but an emotional detachment. You aren’t attached to these feelings or sensations—they don’t affect you.
For example, you may notice that you’re hungry at work, but your break isn’t for another hour. Mindfulness would teach you to be aware of your hunger without it evolving into you being irritable because of it.
According to Harris, many self-help gurus advocate for living in the present moment. They believe mindfulness is important because it prevents you from passively floating through life. Mindfulness makes you thoughtful and intentional in your approach to everyday life, especially in the face of impermanence, or the knowledge that your life is finite. Mindfulness allows you to embrace the limited time you have by teaching you that the only time you actually have is the present moment.
Insight From Mindfulness in Plain English
Harris describes mindfulness as being fully in the present moment. If that seems vague, the Buddhist monk Bhante Gunaratana explains why. In Mindfulness in Plain English, Gunaratana describes mindfulness as “presymbolic,” meaning it’s a concept that exists beyond the language or symbols used to represent it. He describes a few characteristics of mindfulness:
Mindfulness is non-conceptual awareness. This is the awareness before you turn concepts into concrete thoughts.
Mindfulness is non-judgmental awareness. You can’t be aware if you’re judging all of the stimuli around you.
Mindfulness is awareness of change. However, while it watches this change, it doesn’t comment on it.
Gunaratana argues that mindfulness is not the same as concentration. Unlike mindfulness, which should have an element of ease, concentration requires effort and force.
As Harris navigated the world of self-help, he encountered a few popular self-help gurus. Given his unique position as a journalist, he was often able to interview them. He admits that some of their ideas resonated with him and his understanding of mindfulness, but he found it difficult to fully embrace each guru’s ideology. We’ll talk about three of these gurus: Eckhart Tolle, Deepak Chopra, and Tara Brach.
As we discussed earlier, Tolle was Harris’s introduction to the world of self-help. After reading one of Tolle’s books, Harris discovered the concepts of the ego and mindfully living in the present moment, ideas that resonated with him.
However, Harris says that due to the lack of practical application in Tolle’s writing, Harris struggled to use these ideas in his everyday life and career. For example, he disagreed with Tolle's assertion that a person should never get angry and that everyone should learn to emotionally accept events that happen to them. Harris still saw the benefit of being attached to some thoughts that were based in reality, rather than passively accepting every moment. Harris also couldn’t reconcile Tolle’s insights on mindfulness with his pseudoscientific claims on energy fields and his grandiose promises of transformation.
Ego, Emotions, and Eckhart Tolle
Harris explains that while some elements of Tolle’s philosophy (in regards to mindfulness and ego) were helpful, he was skeptical of what he describes as Tolle’s pseudoscientific claims. He doesn’t expand on the details of these pseudoscientific claims, but other readers have echoed Harris’s criticism of these claims and have gone into further detail.
For example, Tolle’s views on emotions and pain-bodies have been criticized for their lack of scientific evidence. According to Tolle, emotions are your body’s physical reactions to thoughts. He believes that emotions—not just thoughts—are the products of our ego and that negative emotions interrupt the flow of energy through the body, causing ailments like heart and digestive problems. This disruption of someone’s “energy field” forms what he calls a pain-body. He also states that individual pain-bodies can group together into a bigger pain-body. So nations, races, and cultures can all develop their own collective pain-bodies, which he says you can feel as soon as you step foot in a given country. Therefore, he believes that fixing our inner worlds and pain-bodies will solve the systemic problems the world faces.
Harris describes how not long after his conversation with Tolle, he interviewed Deepak Chopra, a celebrity guru and author of numerous self-help books. Harris recognized that Chopra had similar views on mindfulness as Tolle. Harris wanted to fill the gaps he’d found in Tolle’s philosophy, and he thought Chopra might be able to answer the questions he had, particularly about living a life with passion and ambition while also quieting his ego. Harris wondered if it was possible to have both.
Chopra’s version of mindfulness looked very different from Tolle’s calm, stoic demeanor. Harris explains that Chopra was loud, energetic, and focused on his public image, which Harris thought was contradictory to Chopra’s claims of mindfulness and separation from feeling. Chopra claimed that his boisterous nature wasn’t in conflict with mindfulness since he could separate himself from these feelings. In fact, he believed engagement and energy were necessary for a good life. This encouraged Harris, but he also questioned how genuine Chopra was, since he didn’t ever seem to be mindfully present.
Harris was wary of Chopra’s pop-culture style of self-help and million-dollar business, which seemed to Harris like something that would feed an ego. Harris was also put off by Chopra’s ideas about transcendental experiences and his lack of actionable advice on achieving balance between passion and mindfulness.
Context on Deepak Chopra
Chopra is an alternative medicine advocate and popular figure in the New Age movement, which was a spiritual movement in the 1970s and ‘80s that sought to align the mind, body, and soul.
Chopra’s most popular book is The Seven Spiritual Laws of Success, which describes how we can succeed when we understand the essence of being human and the laws of nature. He advises people to meditate twice a day, to give gifts to others, and to practice detachment and acceptance. He also believes in karma, or that the energy of your actions will generate a response with the same energy. So by doing something kind for someone, you will be met with kindness in return.
Additionally, Chopra believes in “quantum healing,” or the idea that foundations of physics govern our health. He believes we can reach “perfect health,” where we don’t feel pain and never fall ill, by harnessing the energy of the world around us. This idea is controversial for its misinterpretations of modern physics, and it has elicited criticism from the scientific community for its pseudoscientific claims.
At a Buddhist conference (that he felt embarrassed to attend—a symptom of his continued cynicism of self-help programs), Harris describes hearing Tara Brach speak about loving and accepting yourself as you are. He found her speech off-putting because he didn’t like her appeals to emotions or her overly-poetic language. He also disagreed with her ideas of accepting yourself—even your flaws—completely.
Despite the fact that Harris didn’t find much useful insight in Brach’s discussions, he did find one of her ideas helpful. She presented a technique that he found helpful in applying mindfulness in everyday situations (this is the RAIN technique, which we’ll discuss in more detail later in the guide).
Context on Tara Brach
While Harris eventually agreed with versions of Brach’s principles, he may have been hearing her message too early in his journey. The content of her message (about mindfulness) may actually have appealed to Harris, but the way she presented this information or his biases about her may have been why her philosophy didn’t resonate with him. Her message focuses on compassion for ourselves, a concept that Harris doesn’t embrace until the end of his journey (as we’ll discuss later).
Brach is an author, psychologist, and Buddhist. In Radical Acceptance, Brach argues that we get trapped in our narratives, feel unworthy, and strive for unreasonable ideals of perfection. To combat this, Brach describes radical acceptance as a type of meditation that focuses on acknowledging and accepting what we experience—both positive and negative. Radical acceptance can lead to emotional healing and feeling compassion for ourselves and others.
Radical acceptance has two components: mindfulness and compassion. Mindfulness allows us to realize what’s going on around us and how we feel about it, and compassion lets us respond to it with care. For example, using mindfulness, we understand that we’re irritable from hunger. Using compassion, we accept our irritability and hunger without judgment.
Despite finding a few pieces of helpful advice from Tolle, Chopra, and Brach, Harris still had many questions about mindfulness. He eventually found mentors who introduced him to meditation and Buddhism and who helped shape his appreciation of mindfulness. Three of these gurus were Mark Epstein, Joseph Goldstein, and Spring Washam.
After Harris spent months wrestling with ideas from the previously mentioned self-help gurus, his wife Bianca recommended that he read Mark Epstein’s books. Harris describes feeling skeptical until he saw that Epstein is a trained psychiatrist. As he read Epstein’s work, some ideas reminded him of Tolle’s points. He realized that the ideas from Tolle that most resonated with him were actually rooted in Buddhism.
As Harris describes it, Epstein takes a laid-back, practical approach to Buddhism. Epstein practices meditation and aims to be mindful. He admits that 1) he’s human, 2) he has flaws, and 3) he’s prone to failure, anger, and self-doubt. Harris found Epstein’s approach both encouraging and refreshing, since other gurus exude perfection.
Epstein explains that you should observe your mind and the parts you don’t like about yourself, without trying to change them or accept them—just understand them. If you ignore these negative parts of yourself and your mind, you just give them more power and liberty over your actions.
After reading Epstein’s books, Harris called Epstein to ask if he’d be willing to meet and discuss his ideas. Epstein became a mentor to Harris, and they eventually developed a friendship, meeting regularly. During these meetings, Epstein answered Harris’s questions and helped him through new situations that required mindfulness.
Harris explains that Epstein helped him relax his perfectionist approach to mindfulness. Whenever Harris had a realization, Epstein encouraged his small insights. He also learned that you’re not a failure if you don’t reach enlightenment or don’t always stay in the present moment.
Most importantly, Epstein introduced Harris to meditation. Epstein believes that meditation is the key to developing mindfulness, and he recommended that Harris try it. Harris initially resisted this advice, because he thought meditation was for yogis and spiritualists, not successful journalists.
But eventually, Harris decided to try meditation. He quickly discovered that it was more difficult than he expected—he describes it as mental exercise. Harris stuck with it, though, practicing just a few minutes every day. He started seeing benefits, such as feeling calmer and taking time to appreciate moments as they happened. He kept practicing for several months, gradually increasing his practice to 30 minutes a day. Seeing this progress, Epstein suggested that Harris attend Joseph Goldstein’s meditation retreat to deepen his understanding of meditation, Buddhism, and mindfulness.
The Importance of a Mentor
Epstein mentored Harris on meditation and mindfulness, becoming a resource for Harris to ask for help. With Epstein’s guidance, Harris was able to find answers that worked for his own life. Many experts agree on the importance of having a mentor, because there are numerous benefits of having one. Mentors guide your improvement, share knowledge, and expand your network. They also give advice and encouragement. Mentors don’t cost anything, instead focusing on the value of the relationship, not on a transactional exchange of money.
To find a mentor, try looking on social media (like LinkedIn), in professional networks, school clubs, or your HR department. In Never Eat Alone, Keith Ferrazzi offers a few other solutions: Ask your parents or older relatives for connections, or approach a local business owner or professional you admire.
Joseph Goldstein is a meditation teacher, author, and a co-founder of the Insight Meditation Society, a meditation retreat center. He was one of Epstein’s Buddhist teachers.
Because of Epstein’s recommendation to go on the retreat, Harris read Goldstein’s books on mindfulness to get a sense of his philosophy. Harris explains that Goldstein believes mindfulness allows you to put space between a stimulant and your emotional reaction. Goldstein’s ideas resonated with Harris, so he took Epstein’s advice to attend the meditation retreat.
The 10-day retreat pushed Harris out of his comfort zone—cell phones and talking were prohibited (except in emergencies), eye contact was discouraged (to avoid interrupting others’ meditative concentration), and snacks weren’t allowed in bedrooms. Harris explains that there were two reasons for these rules: 1) They were intended to strip participants from all of the distractions of daily life, forcing them to truly examine their minds, and 2) they taught attendees that you don’t need cell phones, snacks, or stimulants to feel good—you should create your own inner sense of happiness.
(Shortform note: The renunciation of material items is a common idea in self-help. Minimalism and The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up explore this theme, and they led to the mainstream popularity of minimalism as both a philosophy and an aesthetic. Minimalism is the idea of reducing the number of items around you in order to gain mental clarity and simplicity.)
Harris considers the retreat to be one of the most important experiences of his life. During it, he learned about different kinds of meditation and elements of Buddhism. Participants spent almost 10 hours a day meditating. Harris found that challenging at first, but after a few days and some one-on-one meetings with teachers (including Goldstein), Harris noticed improvements in his ability to meditate. The retreat introduced him to new meditation techniques and showed him that meditation in the extreme could enable him to experience euphoria, feel sympathy, and improve his ability to notice his thoughts. Harris says the experience reaffirmed his belief that he was on the right path and that he had found a viable solution to tame his ego: meditation.
Eat, Pray, Love and the Glamorization of Meditation Retreats
Meditation retreats are often associated with insight and personal growth. In Eat, Pray, Love, Elizabeth Gilbert illustrates her transcendental experience learning how to meditate at an Ashram in India. Like Harris, Gilbert describes experiencing discomfort as she changed her relationship with her mind. By persevering through this discomfort, both Harris and Gilbert ultimately benefited from the experience.
However, experts warn that accounts of these retreats can lead to glamorization of them, so that people focus on the profound insight a retreat can lead to but ignore the intense process required to get there. They caution that meditation retreats are often uncomfortable for a few reasons:
You’re alone. While there will be other people with you on the retreat, the retreat is designed to isolate you from everything and everyone so you can focus on your thoughts. Meditators sometimes feel lonely on retreat.
A meditation retreat may be the first time you sit with your thoughts, free from distractions of day-to-day life. The retreat is designed for you to confront the chaos of your mind so that you can tame it. This can make you feel crazy.
Sitting all day can quickly get uncomfortable, particularly for those who are older, are less flexible, or have chronic pain. By mid-day, meditators report feeling stiffness and sometimes pain.
Meal time can be uncomfortable. Meditators note that there’s a tendency to obsess over meal time as a reprieve from sitting or walking. But meal time, which is typically a social event for people, can be awkward, as you sit silently, avoid eye contact, and listen to the sounds of other people eating.
Leaving the retreat can be overwhelming. After spending so much time away from noise, distraction, and human interaction, meditators caution that being thrust back into a busy, loud world is a jarring experience.
The intense deprivation and isolation have led some experts to note that meditation retreats have the potential to do more harm than good. Meditators have reported negative side-effects of retreats, such as perceptual changes, increased anxiety, paranoia, and impaired social skills. Additionally, when participants express concerns about problems they’re experiencing, retreat leaders often dismiss these concerns, instead telling them to push through pain to reach insight.
One Buddhist monk also noted another reason these dangers aren’t widely discussed: Retreats are profitable. Meditation retreats can cost thousands of dollars to attend, and on a smaller scale, subscription-based meditation apps have grown in popularity. In April 2020 alone, the top three meditation apps had 6.8 million downloads. As more companies profit off meditation, there’s less incentive to discuss the potential negative effects and more financial incentive to present meditation as a no-risk benefit.
Spring Washam was an apprentice teacher at Goldstein’s mindfulness retreat. She led the group through metta, or loving-kindness meditation (we’ll talk more about this later). At first, Harris didn’t like Spring or the meditation she led. He saw her as a stereotypical meditator who hugged trees and ate granola.
But soon, he came to appreciate her messages. While meeting with her, he expressed frustration: He was trying hard to be mindful throughout the meditation sessions, but it wasn’t working. She told him that he was trying too hard and encouraged him to let go of his need for control and perfection in his practice. He realized that it was difficult to be present if you were worrying about being present. Harris explains how after taking Washam’s advice to relax his approach, he reached “choiceless awareness.” This happens when you can release your focus from your breath and simply notice stimuli around you without attaching to it. When he experienced this, he felt like he finally understood that living in the moment is about accepting that each moment is fleeting and coming to terms with impermanence. He felt it was an eye-opening experience.
Later, during another meditation led by Washam, Harris became emotional due to the strong feelings of compassion he felt. Harris describes feeling elated (and also slightly embarrassed), and this feeling continued for the next few days. Harris discovered that he was capable of deep feelings of compassion, finding intense feelings of joy and sympathy for small moments and people he’d never met. This experience made him realize that the benefits of meditation extended beyond managing his ego and easing his stress at work—meditation could also be a tool for personal improvement.
Harris also acknowledges that he was too judgmental of Washam, and he notes at the end of the book that they’re now friends.
Get Out of Your Comfort Zone
Harris initially resisted Washam’s compassion meditation because of his assumptions about her and his discomfort about seeming emotional or compassionate. However, growth often occurs when we can work through our discomfort and get out of our comfort zone. We benefit when we are challenged, by either an idea, person, or situation.
Researchers note that by leaving your comfort zone, you can reach your growth zone. You enter your growth zone after overcoming discomfort, fear, and the obstacles of learning new things. Once you reach your growth zone, you’ll be able to meet challenges and problems with confidence and find new goals and purpose.
In Can’t Hurt Me, David Goggins echoes this idea that you must get out of your comfort zone to achieve your goals. To do this, try writing down things that you think would make you uncomfortable. Then pick one and try it. If you can do this every day, you’ll build your resilience against discomfort. Another great way to get out of your comfort zone is to challenge your beliefs. Try reading something in a new genre or diversifying who you talk to.
During his journey to understand and apply principles of mindfulness, Harris realized that meditation was the actionable advice he was looking for. After overcoming his biases about meditation being only for yogis, Harris discovered that meditation was actually an advanced mental exercise with many benefits. Meditation gave Harris the tools he needed to address his ego and ease his excessive worrying at work. After fully committing to practicing meditation, Harris became a more mindful and compassionate person.
We’ve already explored mindfulness and how it can help a person control their emotional response to triggers. In this section, we'll explore meditation as a form of mindfulness, as well as several lessons Harris learned from meditation, including how to respond well to stressors, how to worry productively, and how to be compassionate. Then, we’ll discuss Harris’s insights on how you can incorporate meditation into your own life.
If mindfulness is the goal, meditation is the tool needed to create it. Harris explains that meditation is a technique that helps you be mindful and focused on the present. The most common type of meditation teaches you to return your focus to your breath when your mind wanders, just as mindfulness teaches you to come back to the present moment when your ego and emotions try to distract you. By dedicating time to practicing mindfulness through meditation, you’ll eventually become more present in your everyday life. Harris relates it to exercising—by doing squats, you’ll gradually build your leg muscles. He believes that by meditating, you can slowly strengthen your “mindfulness muscles.”
According to Harris, meditation also teaches you to recognize when your ego—your internal voice—is talking. It allows you to step back and identify your thoughts as just thoughts. However, meditation isn’t about not thinking or completely clearing your head—it’s about realizing that you’re thinking. Harris explains that distractions are inevitable during meditation, even for experienced meditators, so don’t let this discourage you in your practice.
Your Mind and Meditation
At the time of the book’s publication, the scientific community was in the early stages of advanced research on meditation’s effects on the human brain. Now, there is much more scientific evidence of the cognitive changes that occur when you meditate.
Because of the brain’s neuroplasticity (its ability to change or adapt), the more you practice or do something, the more you strengthen the pathways in your brain that allow you to do that action. This means that as you practice meditation, these neural pathways modify to make meditation easier. And according to a 2011 study, researchers found that regular meditation led to an increase in gray matter in the left hippocampus of the brain, which led to better learning, cognition, and memory.
More recently, a 2018 study found that meditation stimulated changes in the amygdala of the brain, which regulates emotions and motivation. This may be why researchers found meditation to be beneficial for clinically depressed patients.
Harris briefly mentions some of the scientific research and long-term benefits of meditation, such as increased ability to focus, reduced risk of heart disease, and improved aging. He also notes that the benefits of meditation are becoming more widely accepted, as evidenced by the fact that it's been embraced by corporations and the military.
However, his main goal is to show how meditation can help you in your life right now, particularly if you’re skeptical about meditation or self-help. To Harris, the most valuable lessons from meditation are learning how to respond instead of react, how to worry productively, and how to be compassionate.
Counterarguments to Meditation
Harris’s goal of the book is to show the benefits of meditation from the perspective of a skeptic. However, unlike Harris, some people remain unconvinced, questioning the purported benefits of meditation. Skeptics list a few reasons for their resistance to meditating:
Meditation increases cortisol. One study found that participants who meditated produced increased levels of cortisol, a stress hormone. (However, the participants also reported feeling less stress, leading researchers to conclude that meditation might serve as a coping mechanism by teaching meditators how to handle increased levels of stress, even if that stress is caused by the meditation itself.)
Researchers are subject to confirmation bias in meditation studies. Many of the researchers who study the effects of meditation are meditators themselves, making them more inclined to favor positive results. In a Johns Hopkins University Evidence-Based Practice Center review, investigators examined almost 18,000 studies on meditation. Of these, only 41 were high-quality studies. Of these 41 studies, only 10 had a “low risk of bias.”
Meditation isn’t a one-size-fits-all cure. While some studies show the benefits of meditation in trauma survivors and people with depression, skeptics are wary of the claims that everyone can benefit in the same ways from meditation.
One of the biggest improvements Harris notices after meditating is his ability to respond—instead of react—to situations. He contends that our default mode is to go through life on autopilot, letting our emotions and ego dictate our actions, which leads us to react to situations impulsively and make rash decisions. Meditation disrupts this cycle.
Harris presents a principle of Buddhist teaching that says we have one of three reactions to a situation:
Harris asserts that meditation offers another option: to notice without judgment. Meditation allows us to identify our emotions without attaching to them. Then we can decide how we want to respond. Harris argues that this doesn’t mean you won’t feel anger, sadness, or frustration, but that you’ll begin to stop acting on those emotions.
For example, imagine that after a stressful day at work, someone cuts you off in traffic on your way home. Instead of reacting (getting angry, yelling, and honking), you could identify that you feel stressed and irritated and continue without acting out of anger.
Harris provides evidence of the change in his behavior. After practicing meditation, Harris’s reputation in the newsroom changed. Rather than yelling at a producer or slamming his script down, Harris approached tense situations more mindfully. Eventually, he gained the reputation from his coworkers of being a laid-back, enjoyable, and easy person to work with.
Meditation May Reduce Reactions That Are Based on Unconscious Biases
Harris notes that meditation will help you stop acting out on your emotions by placing distance between you and a stimulus. This may explain why a 2016 study showed that meditation helps people stop acting based on their unconscious racial and age biases. Another study found that compassion meditation decreased participants’ biases toward homeless people. Because meditation fosters a focus on the present, rather than on memory or the past, we’re able to respond and make decisions based on our current thoughtful reflection instead of automatic biased reaction.
Experts contend that these findings may be particularly beneficial to law enforcement officers, who serve diverse communities. Police officers are beginning to embrace mindfulness and compassion training as a method to make less biased and more ethical decisions under stress.
Harris says he learned that the intense worrying he used to engage in, particularly about how well he was doing in his career, is a recognized form of worry, one that Buddhists call "prapañca" or “monkey mind.” Harris defines prapañca as our tendency to worry excessively, when our negative thoughts multiply uncontrollably.
(Shortform note: Another name for prapañca (sometimes spelled “papañca” or “papancha”) is “conceptual proliferation.” In Buddhist tradition, conceptual proliferation doesn’t just apply to worrying. It refers to our ability to conceptualize the world through words and language. It’s our tendency to make judgments about and label everything we see or interact with. Because we interact with so many things on a daily basis, this constant stream of labels, thoughts, and judgments can be overwhelming for our minds, often resulting in suffering.)
Because meditation allowed him to identify when his thoughts were running out of control, Harris was able to consciously notice how much he worried. He explains that he began to approach his worrying habit (or prapañca) differently. He realized that worry is natural, and it can help you prepare both mentally and physically for situations.
According to Harris, you shouldn’t ignore your worry, as your concern about a situation may be warranted and worrying may alert you to something you need to address. However, after a certain point, worrying is no longer helpful to you. If you’re running through the same mental scenario over and over again but are no longer using that worry to prepare yourself for something, you’re wasting mental energy and indulging your ego by obsessing about future possibilities. Whenever you notice yourself falling down a rabbit hole of worry, Harris recommends asking yourself, “Is this helpful?” If it’s not, let it go.
For example, say three people are interviewing for the same job. Candidate 1 worries about the interview and imagines all the ways it could go wrong (like spilling coffee on herself, forgetting the interviewer’s name, answering a question wrong, and showing up late). She spends all of her time worrying about these scenarios. Candidate 2 worries about the interview, but he ignores his worry and tries to let it go. Candidate 3 worries about the interview but uses this worry to create a plan: printing out the route to the interview location, brainstorming answers to potential interview questions, and prepping resume documents the night before. Once she’s gone through potential scenarios, Candidate 3 lets go of her worry. Candidate 3 is in the best position to do well in the interview, because she has used her worry to prepare for it. She also let go of her worry once it stopped being useful, allowing her to go into the interview with a clearer head.
Other Ways to Manage Worry
While Harris found that meditating helped his worrying problem, other experts offer different solutions. Many advise that since it’s unlikely you’ll be able to stop worrying completely, you should plan how you’ll react to your worry when it happens. This might entail writing down counterarguments on a notepad. For example, if you find yourself frequently worrying that your coworker doesn’t like you, you could write down, “If my coworker actually doesn’t like me, they wouldn’t sit next to me at the meeting table,” or, “What my coworker thinks of me is none of my business, and it doesn’t need to affect me.”
Similarly, in 12 Rules for Life, Jordan Peterson provides a different solution to worrying. Peterson recommends only worrying about a problem at a specific time of day. Scheduling when you can worry conserves your mental strength and lets you focus on other things.
Compassion—feeling concern or empathy for others—is a frequent topic among self-help experts, but Harris avoided it for most of his mindfulness journey. He explains that he didn’t think of himself as an emotional or compassionate person, and that his profession predispositioned him from displays of emotion. He also didn’t believe he was capable of deep levels of compassion.
As we mentioned earlier, during Joseph Goldstein’s 10-day meditation retreat, Harris was introduced to metta, or compassion meditation, which centers around mentally sending love to people you like, people you don’t like, and people who’ve helped you. This kind of meditation allows you to practice compassion. Harris describes the practice as emotionally moving for him, but he disregarded it after the retreat.
Defining Compassion
Harris’s focus in the book is mainly on meditation and mindfulness—compassion is an unintended bonus he finds on his journey. As a result, he doesn’t spend much time breaking down what compassion is.
Brené Brown goes into deeper detail on compassion in her book The Gifts of Imperfection. She defines compassion as being kind to yourself and others. Self-compassion isn’t about condemning the cause of your pain or trying to make it immediately go away. It’s about empathizing and allowing yourself to feel the emotions. Brown describes self-compassion as the antidote to the self-criticizing tendencies of perfectionism. She believes that, to overcome perfectionism with compassion, you should be kind to yourself, remember you’re not alone, and stay present.
Compassion for others is similar to Brown’s ideas on self-compassion. Researchers have defined compassion as a deep and intuitive connection to someone else’s suffering or pain. They also identified key elements of compassion for others: recognition of suffering, emotional resonance, and an effort to remedy the suffering.
Harris’s attitude toward metta meditation changed when he later interviewed the Dalai Lama, who told him that there is a self-interested reason to be compassionate: It benefits you. As Harris began to realize the benefits of compassion, he incorporated metta into his daily meditation time.
Some of the benefits Harris describes include:
Additional Benefits of Compassion
While Harris focuses on the self-interested benefits of compassion, studies have shown that there are other benefits, including ones for business and society as a whole:
Research confirms Harris’s claim that you can learn compassion through practicing it. Studies show that compassion meditation can change our brains, just like learning a musical instrument or sport. Researchers were encouraged by these findings for the benefits to both individuals and society as a whole.
Compassion is a component of ethical living and social order. When we can appreciate each other without judgment, we can coexist and cooperate, even when we disagree.
In the workplace, compassion and emotional intelligence are crucial for CEOs, contrary to popular belief. When leaders manage teams without compassion, the team is more likely to make mistakes, experience stress, have lower productivity, and miss more deadlines.
Nonviolent communication is rooted in compassion. When we can focus on our shared humanity—rather than a heated argument or a mistake—we have better, more productive conversations.
After seeing how meditation changed his own life, Harris now firmly believes in the benefits of practicing mindfulness and making meditation accessible to people who don’t know how to get started. He thinks anyone can improve their well-being by using meditation, which is free and doesn’t require anything to get started. We’ll discuss a few of his recommendations on how to start meditating and how to apply meditation to your life outside of your dedicated practice time.
So how do you meditate? Harris recommends these basics:
Harris emphasizes that it’s important not to criticize yourself when your mind wanders. The goal isn’t to have a completely clear head. The goal is to be able to quickly and calmly identify thoughts and feelings as they pop up and then come back to your breath. When stronger urges like itches or pain come up, Harris advises to take a mental note of it and let it go.
(Shortform note: Experienced meditators also advise beginners against this kind of self-criticism, noting that your mind is supposed to wander—that’s what your mind does. If you try to tell yourself to clear your head, this often has the opposite effect. For example, if we say, “Don’t think of a purple hippopotamus,” you’re probably thinking of a purple hippopotamus—the same is true of telling yourself to clear your mind. This means there will inevitably be days when your mind wanders more than others. Even if you think a particular meditation session didn’t go well, meditators advise against labeling it as bad. Instead, consider every meditation session as a good one, simply because you took the time to be present.)
There are other types of meditation, too. During Goldstein’s 10-day mindfulness retreat, Harris learned how to practice walking meditation. Walking meditation looks like this:
Harris notes that walking meditation isn’t the same as mindlessly pacing. You’re still focusing and refocusing your attention when it wanders.
(Shortform note: In Deep Work, Cal Newport suggests that you try productive meditation as a method to think of new solutions. This is when you work through a problem while doing a low-intensity activity like walking. But productive meditation differs slightly from walking meditation. Instead of focusing on the process of walking, as you do in walking meditation, productive meditation asks you to return your focus to the problem whenever your mind wanders.)
Harris notes that, just like any kind of practice or exercise, you should start meditating in small increments and work your way up. Harris cautions that it probably won’t be easy at first, and your mind will frequently wander. As with any kind of exercise, you’ll notice results when you practice meditation regularly. Harris started with just a few minutes every day, and after months of practice, he slowly progressed to half an hour or more of meditation. Harris believes meditating five minutes every day is better than 30 minutes once a week.
Harris further recommends that you focus on small wins, not on immediate and total transformations. He believes that meditation won’t fix all of your problems, but it will teach you how to deal with them better. This is why Harris claims meditation will make your life 10% happier, not 100%—it might not improve your entire life, but it will provide small benefits.
For example, Emma and Charlie hear their friend describing the life-changing benefits of waking up at 5 a.m. Emma tries it, but after one week of waking up early, she sleeps through her alarm. She gives up, deciding that waking up early doesn’t change anything and that she failed. Charlie also begins waking up early. He starts gradually, setting his alarm 30 minutes earlier each week. Eventually, he starts waking up at 5 a.m. If he misses a morning, he resumes his habit the next day. After a few months, he notices a difference in his productivity, and he likes having the extra time in the morning to complete his workout.
Build Your Meditation Practice
Starting a meditation practice doesn’t have to be a big time commitment—Harris recommends starting with just five minutes a day. James Clear echoes this advice in Atomic Habits, and he offers ideas on how to make that happen. He explains that to build daily habits that last, you should start with small, achievable habits. For example, rather than having a goal of meditating for an hour every day, start with just one mindful breath or five minutes of meditation.
Building a meditation practice shouldn’t be unenjoyable. You can explore other kinds of meditation, and find one that works for you.
Candle meditation: Light a candle, and turn off the lights in the room. Sit comfortably, and focus on the candle flame. This is similar to breath meditation, but rather than focusing on your breath, you’re focusing on a candle flame.
Mantra meditation: Sit comfortably, and focus your attention on a word or phrase. You can say this word or phrase out loud or silently to yourself. Many meditators use the word “Om,” but you could also try something simple like, “calm.”
Progressive muscle relaxation: This method is often used to help with sleep. Lay down and slowly begin tensing parts of your body. After tensing for up to 10 seconds, relax the tension. Then move on to another part of your body.
Harris describes overcoming many obstacles on his journey to mindfulness. Once he tackled the hurdle of building a consistent meditation habit, he faced another challenge: How do you apply mindfulness to everyday life, including work and other situations where you need to act and respond? Eventually, he found a solution. To put his meditation practice into real-life application, he used Tara Brach’s RAIN technique that we alluded to in Part 2:
STOP Technique
Another way to incorporate meditation into your day-to-day life is to use psychologist Elisha Goldstein’s STOP technique. It’s another method of refocusing on the present.
Stop what you’re doing.
Take a breath.
Observe thoughts, feelings, and emotions.
Proceed with something that will help you in the moment (relax your shoulders or go for a walk).
Neither technique is better than the other, but both are helpful tools to use in different situations. The RAIN technique focuses on acceptance and non-identification with your emotions—it doesn’t ask you to change anything about the situation, just accept it. The STOP technique adds a physical element to the RAIN technique by asking you to stop what you’re doing, take a breath, and do something that will help you distance yourself from a stimulant. The STOP technique does allow you to make small, immediate changes that will help you in the moment, such as unfurrowing your brow.
The RAIN technique is helpful in situations where there are external stimulants, such as a stressful meeting or an argument with your spouse. These situations require more exploring and stepping back from emotional responses that surface. Conversely, the STOP technique is helpful for adding small moments of mindfulness throughout your regular day.
The steps of the STOP technique can correspond to or assist those of the RAIN technique:
When you stop what you’re doing (STOP technique), that is when you should recognize, or consciously become aware, of your emotions (RAIN technique).
When you take a breath (STOP), you can allow your emotions to exist and stop fighting them (RAIN).
When you observe your thoughts, feelings, and emotions (STOP), you are investigating them (RAIN).
When you engage with something physically that will help you get over your emotions (STOP), you are separating yourself from that emotion (RAIN) in a way that can help you remove it from your self-identity.
The RAIN technique helps you to incorporate meditation into your everyday life by recognizing, allowing, investigating, and separating yourself from your emotions.
Take a moment right now to try the RAIN technique. The first step is to recognize. What do you feel right now?
Next, allow your emotions to be what they are. For example, if you’re tired, try accepting this as a fact about the present moment, rather than judging yourself for not getting enough sleep last night. Describe what you’re feeling or thinking.
Third, investigate how this feeling is manifesting in your body. How is this emotion affecting you physically? Perhaps feeling tired has caused your eyelids to droop or your shoulders to hunch forward.
Finally, practice non-identification. List some ways to reframe any judgment you have over this emotion. For example, if you’re tired, try saying “I feel tired” instead of “I am tired.”
During his journey to learn Buddhist principles of mindfulness, Harris overcame many misconceptions he had as a self-help skeptic. He wants you to learn from his mistakes in his mindfulness journey. This chapter will give you Harris’s answers and tangible solutions to your questions about self-help. We’ll talk about how you shouldn’t expect perfection from self-help and how mindfulness can actually help your career, won’t make you less creative, and won’t make you a pushover.
Harris points out that we sometimes think meditation has to be perfect in order to be beneficial. We think we have to have a perfectly clear head when meditating or sit completely still in a cross-legged position. Or we think we have to be in the moment all the time, never getting mad at our friends and always being compassionate toward the person who cut you off in line.
In reality, self-help is about the journey. Harris believes mindfulness and compassion are skills you have to practice. Just like you have to exercise your body, you must exercise your mind to strengthen your ability to be mindful and compassionate. You’ll encounter obstacles along the way, just like Harris did. As you consistently implement practices that improve your well-being, you’ll gradually notice benefits.
Practice Make Progress
Harris explains that the important part of meditation is the practice of it—the process of consistently coming back to your thoughts. In Grit, Angela Duckworth echoes this idea, arguing that consistent, deliberate practice is the key to success in any endeavor. She offers recommendations on how to practice deliberately:
Set a stretch goal. This is a small, specific goal that will act as a building block to your larger goal. For example, “I will meditate for five minutes after eating breakfast.”
Focus your full attention on that goal. Limit distractions so that you can concentrate on the task at hand. Thus, you might decide to meditate in your bedroom, away from family members and noise.
Seek feedback from someone more experienced. Like Harris did with Epstein, find a mentor or someone with experience. Perhaps your friend has been meditating for a few months, and you can ask them about what to do when you have the urge to, for example, scratch an itch.
Reflect on that feedback. What are you doing right and wrong? What can you do to implement that feedback? Reflect on their advice to mentally note the itch without doing anything about it.
Continue practicing until you’ve met your stretch goal. Implement your friend’s feedback. It’s difficult at first, but you’ll find that you’re eventually able to meditate with ease in those five minutes.
Set a new stretch goal, and repeat the process. Set a new goal of meditating for 10 minutes after breakfast.
Duckworth notes that it’s important to aim to improve your techniques every time you practice—if you continually repeat wrong techniques or habits, you’ll strengthen those incorrect associations, thus hindering your success. So if you’re starting a meditation practice and you’re just sitting in silence and letting your mind wander, your meditating won’t improve.
Early in his career, Harris was proud of his ambition and found meaning in his work performance. However, he was unable to balance his ambition with mindfulness. Eventually, he was able to find that balance and use mindfulness as a tool in his career. We’ll explain how to find a balance between mindfulness and ambition, accept failure that’s out of your control, and change what you can control.
As part of his mindfulness journey, Harris strived to find a balance between wanting to be more mindful while still keeping his edge in his career. He describes having difficulty reconciling his new mindful approach with his career aspirations. Harris realized that while he’d focused on being more mindful, he’d become comfortable in his position at work, settling into a role as a co-host on “Good Morning America.” But he’d let the quality of his work suffer. Initially, he didn’t address the decline in his work performance and air time, choosing to accept it under the guise of mindfulness. But he couldn’t ignore his dissatisfaction.
Harris decided to talk to Epstein about his issues at work, and Epstein taught Harris three common mistakes of mindfulness:
Harris realized he’d succumbed to these three mistakes, and he needed to balance mindfulness and ambition. If you had too much mindfulness, you’d never accomplish anything, leading you to perpetual feelings of dissatisfaction. If you had too much ambition, you’d turn into an egotistical jerk. Harris suggests portraying a tough exterior and to use it as armor against your competition, while actually being mindful and calm underneath it.
After scheduling a meeting with his boss to discuss his work performance, Harris decided to revamp his efforts, taking any story assignment he could and working on his on-screen charisma. He quickly noticed improvements and got positive feedback from his boss.
Mindfulness and Career
Like Harris did before he started meditating, we often think of career success and mindfulness as mutually exclusive, and that one kills the other. Sometimes we assume that mindfulness might prevent the kind of competitive behavior that underpins success in the workplace. However, many experts agree that meditation can actually be a major benefit to your career.
Many prominent CEOs and celebrities are advocates of meditation and its benefits. Bill Gates, Oprah Winfrey, Joe Rogan, Arianna Huffington, Jeff Weiner, and Jerry Seinfeld all practice meditation as a way to be less stressed, more creative, and more productive.
Research supports these celebrities’ instincts. Studies have found that meditating can lead to a 30% decrease in stress-related symptoms that can result in serious illness, making meditation an attractive solution for the 83% of American professionals who report being stressed at work. Also, by developing a coping mechanism that better regulates stress and emotions, meditation helps people make better decisions.
Harris began to think about success at work—or acceptance of failure—like meditation: a process of refocusing on what’s important. Just like it’s unreasonable to expect yourself to have a completely clear mind while you meditate, it’s unrealistic for you to expect perfection at work. In your career, your goal is to focus on the quality of your work or a project. But inevitably, a project will fail.
Harris believes that some things, including some reasons for failure, are out of your control. For example, imagine you’re a therapist and you have a potential client. You offer him a free phone consultation and give a great explanation of your services and techniques. But he winds up choosing a different therapist. This may seem like a failure, but his decision was out of your control.
Therefore he advises that if you’re unhappy about things you can’t change, accept them—otherwise you’re wasting mental energy. At work, this means that you should focus on all of the parts of the project you can control, do those things to the best of your ability, and accept whatever the outcome is.
Harris realized that despite his renewed efforts at work, he couldn’t control whether some stories were assigned to him or not, even if he felt like he deserved them. Instead of becoming bitter or resigned, Harris decided to accept that this was something beyond his control and that he should still keep trying his best.
(Shortform note: Similarly, mindful detachment can improve your performance by bringing you peace of mind. In this context, detachment doesn’t mean not trying—it means not fixating on any particular outcome. Sports psychologist Jerry Lynch explains that when you’re attached to outcomes, you can tense up and doubt your efforts. He argues that if you let go of your need to win, you’ll relax and your performance will naturally improve.)
But mindfully accepting the outcomes doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be passionate about a project. Instead of being passionate about the results, Harris encouraged you to be passionate about the process and unattached to the results. When you “fail” on a project or career skill, the key is to come back to your goals and focus on the things you can control, just like when you return to your breath when your mind wanders while meditating.
For example, Patricia is a musician and a composer. She arranges an original piece of classical music for an orchestra. Using Harris’s ideas on failure and mindfulness, Patricia focuses all of her energy on the things she can control: composing her music and working with a local orchestra that will perform her piece. However, the piece doesn’t gain much attention or renown. Although this may seem like failure, it might have “failed” because there isn’t much of a market or interest in classical music at the moment. In reality, her music might be a masterpiece, but due to factors beyond Patricia’s control, her piece didn’t do well. Patricia should accept this outcome and take solace in the fact that she did everything she could to compose a beautiful piece.
Failure Resilience
In Dare to Lead, Brené Brown echoes Harris’s idea that failure shouldn’t be a setback for future endeavors. She discusses failure resilience, or the ability to recover quickly after failure. She argues this is a critical skill to have, because it will prevent both individuals and teams from fearing failure, blaming others, or striving for unrealistic ideals of perfection.
To develop failure resilience, Brown says the first step is to recognize your emotional response. (Harris does this by using mindfulness and the RAIN technique.) Recognizing your emotional response allows you to think logically, rather than reacting emotionally or according to your ego.
Once you’ve identified that you’re having an emotional response, the next step is to understand the story that you’ve built around the failure or setback. Brown explains that this is the narrative you’ve told yourself about what happened and why it went wrong. Ask yourself if the elements of your story are actually true. What do you actually know about the situation? Describe this story out loud to yourself. Often, this is a quick way to notice where your mind and tendency to worry has leapt to conclusions.
However, Harris advises that if you’re unhappy about things you can change, don’t accept them—change them. Harris says that by using mindfulness to discern what you can and can’t control, you’ll develop the ability to determine what you should focus on.
For example, by taking a more mindful approach to his career, Harris was able to re-evaluate his work and set goals for himself to take on more assignments and work on his on-screen charisma. Harris notes that he quickly saw results from his efforts, receiving positive feedback from his boss. Eventually, he was offered a position as a co-anchor on “Nightline.”
Like Harris, rather than criticizing yourself for failure, you’ll actually become more resilient and productive when you can use mindfulness to examine your setbacks without harsh self-criticism. You’ll also be more accepting of feedback from others, because you won’t take comments personally.
Harris explains that once you take an honest look at the quality of your work, you can create goals and actionables that will address any problems you found with the project, instead of wasting time and energy worrying about the fact it has problems to begin with.
For example, John wants to be a successful lawyer, and he also practices mindfulness. He uses his improved focus (thanks to meditation) to work on lawsuits and build strong cases for his clients. However, one of his arguments fails in court, and he loses the case. He acknowledges that his witness was tired and didn’t do a good job of recounting what happened. John accepts that this was out of his control. But he also realizes he skipped over an important detail when presenting his case to the judge. Instead of criticizing himself for missing an important point in his argument, John decides to color code his notes and dedicate extra time to practicing his presentation before his next case. With these actionables in mind, he can approach his next case with confidence and a plan to do better.
Embrace Uncertainty on Your Journey to Change
In The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck, Mark Manson encourages us to find our mistakes to help us grow, as Harris did. He advises us to look for ways we’re wrong, instead of trying to prove that we’re right.
Manson believes you’re already making choices about what to give a fck about. Change is a matter of choosing to give a fck about something different. Although it sounds simple, there are temporarily uncomfortable side-effects to change:
Feeling uncertain: Changing long-held values is disorienting. You’ll question whether you’re doing the right thing.
Feeling like a failure: When you try to apply new values and standards, the old ones will keep coming to mind in each situation. You’ll feel like a failure for discarding them.
Facing objections: Your relationships are built on your values, so when you change your values your relationships change. You’ll get pushback.
Feeling uncertain is the most prevalent reaction when you decide to stop giving a f*ck about certain things, and to care about other things instead. Manson encourages us to embrace uncertainty as a way to accept that both good and bad things will happen. Either way, you’ll deal with each situation as it comes, which can be liberating when deciding to make a change.
When Harris suggested to his artistic friends to try meditation, they expressed concerns that it would make them less creative. This is a common misconception among artists—that suffering, judging others, or dwelling on negative emotions will cause them to create better art, and that if they come to peace with their suffering through mindfulness, their creativity will decrease.
However, Harris argues that you can still be creative while also being mindful. Mindfulness helps you examine your insecurities, negative feelings, and self-disgust. By realizing what you’re feeling, you’ll become more insightful, not less.
For example, Martin is a painter, and his father recently passed away. Martin uses mindfulness to identify his sadness and explore how it affects him. Does it make him more tired? Does it make his face tense? Does he find himself wanting to be alone more? Martin is able to use mindfulness to understand the feeling, and he’s able to translate it into his next painting.
Suffering, Creativity, and Mindfulness
The idea that artists must suffer in order to create good art is a common misconception, spurred on by the famously tortured mental states of many artists like Sylvia Plath, Vincent Van Gogh, Virginia Woolf, and Kurt Cobain.
Some studies have found correlations between mental illness and creativity. A Swedish study found higher percentages of mood disorders like anxiety and bipolar disorder in artists. Another study showed links between schizophrenia and creativity, and yet another found a correlation between psychosis and creativity. With so much research pointing to a relationship between suffering and the artistic process, does this mean pain is necessary for art?
One theory proposes that mental illnesses like schizophrenia make artists more creative because of a process called “cognitive disinhibition.” This occurs when we fail to ignore all of the irrelevant information we encounter in the world. Researchers believe this overwhelming amount of information can cause artists to turn their attention inward, reflecting on their inner world instead of dealing with the outside world.
However, if being more aware of external stimuli and reflecting on your inner world are beneficial to the creative process, mindfulness could actually help artists. In Mindfulness for a More Creative Life, Dr. Danny Penman argues that mindfulness boosts creativity due to three essential elements: receptivity to new ideas, better attention and understanding of useful ideas, and resilience in the face of setbacks. By being mindful and present, our ability to notice and take in new ideas improves, which seems to be beneficial to the creative process, as illustrated by cognitive disinhibition. Mindfulness can also make us more resilient after failure, which is inevitable in the creative process.
There’s a common misconception about being mindful and living in the present—that people will take advantage of your laid-back approach and walk all over you because you’ll simply accept the moment as it is. However, Harris believes that you can be mindful without being a pushover.
Harris argues that you can still respectfully stand up for yourself, even if you’re now more mindfully living in the present. The key is to calmly address problems without letting the issue get personal. Being mindful means you stop reacting and start responding to things that do matter, while accepting the things that don’t.
For example, Jennifer is swamped at work with tasks and projects. One day, her boss approaches her and asks her to take on another project. Using principles of mindfulness, Jennifer recognizes that she feels frustrated, stressed, and overwhelmed by both her workload and her boss’s request. Because she’s able to evaluate the situation and her feelings calmly in the moment, Jennifer can respectfully tell her boss that she can’t take on this extra project without missing deadlines or jeopardizing the quality of the other tasks she’s working on. This way, she maintains a professional relationship with her boss, while also standing up for herself.
Confidence and Mindfulness
Other experts agree that mindfulness doesn't necessarily lead to weakness, and they offer insights as to why this is true. One study found that mindfulness may actually increase self-esteem. Because mindfulness helps tame our ego’s tendency to compare ourselves to others, we gain confidence in ourselves. So instead of getting confidence externally (from ranking ourselves as better than someone else), mindful confidence is internal and self-generated. Rather than brushing off mistakes as inherent personality traits or character flaws, mindful people can question themselves in the moment, leading to deeper levels of insight and understanding.
Mindfulness can help you succeed by becoming more insightful about what you can and can’t control.
Think of a situation where you failed. Describe the situation or source of failure. (For example, you had coffee with a friend and made an awkward comment, and you’re worried that you offended her.)
Did you criticize yourself for the failure? In what way? What aspects of the situation were you unhappy about?
Were any of the aspects you were unhappy about within your control? If yes, what steps can you take to change them from now on? If no, describe how the aspects were out of your control.