Dan Harris
Appearances
Infamous
From Panic to Peace: Ten Percent Happier’s Dan Harris
Paris Hilton has said that she's changed. She's grown into a woman in her words, and she says she wants people to see that. We saw many different sides of Hilton in this wide-ranging interview, including a little bit of a touchy side. There's been some talk about the ratings in the show being low. Has that upset you?
Infamous
From Panic to Peace: Ten Percent Happier’s Dan Harris
Do you ever worry about your moment having passed? You want to wrap up?
Infamous
From Panic to Peace: Ten Percent Happier’s Dan Harris
What followed was a long heated conversation with Hilton and her publicist.
Infamous
From Panic to Peace: Ten Percent Happier’s Dan Harris
Yeah. So I think I got in trouble with Paris Hilton because in some ways I approached it like a real interview.
Infamous
From Panic to Peace: Ten Percent Happier’s Dan Harris
Instead of a celebrity. Investigative. You know, this is a problem you have had, you know, like you've had many celebrities get mad at you because you ask actual questions. So, yeah, I was sitting with Paris Hilton. I didn't know much about her, honestly, because I missed so much culture stuff. living overseas for months and months and months at a time.
Infamous
From Panic to Peace: Ten Percent Happier’s Dan Harris
There are whole swaths of American culture that I just never got because I was not in the country. And I remember asking my wife, who, aside from being a brilliant doctor, is also very read in on celebrity culture. I was like, what should I ask her? And she was like, well, ask her about the fact that the Kardashians seem to be kind of, you know, kicking her ass. And is she still relevant?
Infamous
From Panic to Peace: Ten Percent Happier’s Dan Harris
And I did. I asked her that. I asked her, you know, do you think your time has passed? And she got up and walked away in the middle of the interview. So yeah, like all that could happen. I could do that thing with Paris Hilton, but then also spend a lot of time covering faith and spirituality or covering war zones. And it was just a total mix.
Infamous
From Panic to Peace: Ten Percent Happier’s Dan Harris
Not when I don't have a teleprompter in front of me. Around the same time, the aforementioned Peter Jennings, gave me this very strange assignment, which was that he wanted me to start covering faith and spirituality for ABC News, which I did not want to do because I had no interest in this shit at all. And as I have sometimes joked, I did have a bar mitzvah, but only for money.
Infamous
From Panic to Peace: Ten Percent Happier’s Dan Harris
Okay, so here's the order of operations. In my late 30s, several years into therapy. I'm now sober. I'm still doing the job as a network news anchor and loving it and doing all the things that you referenced, a mixture of still covering war zones and also meeting all sorts of celebrities and having strange experiences with them and then also covering faith and spirituality.
Infamous
From Panic to Peace: Ten Percent Happier’s Dan Harris
And because I'm covering faith and spirituality, I end up reading a book by a self-help guru that one of my producers recommended to me because she thought this guy would be a good story. So the book was by this guy Eckhart Tolle, himself beloved by many celebrities like Paris Hilton, for example, who was seen carrying a copy of his book when she went into jail to do time for DUI.
Infamous
From Panic to Peace: Ten Percent Happier’s Dan Harris
His book sales have, I think, stayed strong. I coded him as very weird. I think now, given all of my experience in the meditation realm, I think I would view him differently.
Infamous
From Panic to Peace: Ten Percent Happier’s Dan Harris
Yes. He's a small Elfin German man who speaks very slowly and very deliberately. And in his book talked about how he had a spiritual awakening and then lived on a park bench for a couple of years in the city of London, which made no sense to me because they have winter there. And then he makes all these grandiose claims.
Infamous
From Panic to Peace: Ten Percent Happier’s Dan Harris
So at first I'm reading this book thinking, OK, maybe this guy will be a good story because the celebrities like him and I'll do it like an expose on him. And then he says some things that blew my mind.
Infamous
From Panic to Peace: Ten Percent Happier’s Dan Harris
He pointed out something that is so obvious but so overlooked, which is that we all have a voice in our heads, that we have this little inner narrator who chases you out of bed in the morning and is yammering at you all day long and has you constantly wanting stuff, not wanting stuff, judging people, comparing yourself to other people, thinking about the past or thinking about the future instead of focusing on what's happening right now.
Infamous
From Panic to Peace: Ten Percent Happier’s Dan Harris
If you're unaware of this nonstop chaos and cacophony in your mind, it all owns you. You act out every little neurotic obsession that flits through your mind as if it's – in the words of my meditation teacher, Joseph Goldstein, as if that thought is a tiny dictator. And I was reading the book and I was thinking, oh, shit. This is the smartest thing I've ever heard about the human animal.
Infamous
From Panic to Peace: Ten Percent Happier’s Dan Harris
I can't believe I'm hearing it from this dude.
Infamous
From Panic to Peace: Ten Percent Happier’s Dan Harris
And it also explains why I had a panic attack on national television, because the voice in my head told me to go off to war zones without thinking about the consequences, and then I came home, got depressed, was insufficiently self-aware to know I was depressed, and then blindly, per the voice in my head, self-medicated with recreational drugs, including cocaine.
Infamous
From Panic to Peace: Ten Percent Happier’s Dan Harris
And so it was a massive aha moment for me. How did that lead me to meditation? I went and interviewed Eckhart Tolle. I asked him, OK, dude, this is the smartest diagnosis I've ever heard of the human condition. What do I do about it? And he had no coherent answer whatsoever. And that left me in a state of confusion. And it was in that confusion that I started doing more research.
Infamous
From Panic to Peace: Ten Percent Happier’s Dan Harris
And my wife, who keeps coming up, gave me a book by a guy named Dr. Mark Epstein, who is an actual trained psychiatrist, Harvard trained psychiatrist, lives and works in the New York City. And this guy Epstein is a Buddhist. And in reading his book, he talked about the fact that meditation is a great way to work with this voice in your head. And that's what got me onto meditation.
Infamous
From Panic to Peace: Ten Percent Happier’s Dan Harris
The voice in your head stays. There's no eradicating it. There's just skillful working with it.
Infamous
From Panic to Peace: Ten Percent Happier’s Dan Harris
So there are two levels to this. One, at the beginning, you don't have to change anything about the way you talk to yourself or the way you're constantly narrating the world. The first move is just to become aware of it. And this is what meditation or mindfulness meditation specifically is. is incredibly good at. It goes at self-awareness with extreme prejudice. How?
Infamous
From Panic to Peace: Ten Percent Happier’s Dan Harris
You sit, you try to focus on your breath coming in and going out, and then inevitably you're distracted a million times. And this is the point when most people tell themselves a story that I can't meditate. But actually, that moment when you think you failed is proof of success. Why? Because you're getting familiar with the voice in your head.
Infamous
From Panic to Peace: Ten Percent Happier’s Dan Harris
And over time, you have this kind of self-awareness, otherwise known as mindfulness, that allows you to view your thoughts and urges and emotions with some nonjudgmental remove. So like, for example, if I have a thought of, oh, I should say something that will ruin the next 48 hours of my marriage, I can notice the thought come and go without acting on it. So that's the first level.
Infamous
From Panic to Peace: Ten Percent Happier’s Dan Harris
Well, I graduated college in the middle of an ancient recession in 1993. And there were not that many jobs. And I kind of had the sense that I wanted to do something cool. I had gone to film school for a little while at NYU. That's cool.
Infamous
From Panic to Peace: Ten Percent Happier’s Dan Harris
The second level is and this is less about meditation and more about sort of modern psychological tools such as self-compassion, of which I'm a big fan. You can also counter program against your inner critic. You can learn to talk to yourself in a different way, to talk to yourself like the way a good coach would talk to
Infamous
From Panic to Peace: Ten Percent Happier’s Dan Harris
They're players as opposed to a drill sergeant, which is the move that most of us make. And I think these two techniques in combination, one, the brute power of just being self-aware, and two, this evidence-based ability we all have to change or counter-program our inner chatter, these two techniques are incredibly powerful in combination.
Infamous
From Panic to Peace: Ten Percent Happier’s Dan Harris
I'm going to answer two, because I hear two questions in there. First thing I want to say is, Habits are very hard to change. The whole 10% thing is kind of a joke. But the serious part of it is going right to that point. There are no miracle cures. There are no silver bullets. None of this is going to happen overnight.
Infamous
From Panic to Peace: Ten Percent Happier’s Dan Harris
But what the science around meditation and other modalities, I'm not like a meditation fundamentalist. I think there are lots of ways to learn to do life better, including therapy and nature and relationships and sleep and exercise. But what the science is showing us around all of these things is that happiness is not an unalterable factory setting. It's a skill. I'm not saying it's easy.
Infamous
From Panic to Peace: Ten Percent Happier’s Dan Harris
Habits are hard to change, but you can change them. And while perfection is not on offer, messy, marginal change is. And I have seen this play out in my own life in a huge way. I've been meditating for 15 years. And again, for me, my emphasis has pivoted a little bit. I no longer just talk about meditation. I really talk about all of the practices and exercises we can do to improve our lives.
Infamous
From Panic to Peace: Ten Percent Happier’s Dan Harris
And I have found that the compounding effect of 15 years of taking this stuff seriously is really, really huge. Now, do I have bad days? A hundred percent. Toward the end of the summer, I was in the middle of like a really gnarly business dispute and it was putting me in a really foul mood. But the difference between
Infamous
From Panic to Peace: Ten Percent Happier’s Dan Harris
yeah well that was pretty cool but I what was not so cool is that I was not very good at making films but I did take a documentary class that I really liked and then I started doing some internships in TV news and I thought it was really cool it wasn't as glamorous as I thought especially in local news where I started but after having done some internships I graduated from college and then I took a part-time job at a local news station in Bangor Maine and
Infamous
From Panic to Peace: Ten Percent Happier’s Dan Harris
Between the two minutes or 20 minutes of anger that I was experiencing and what would have been two days, two weeks, two months of anger, the difference is incalculable. And that's really where the money is.
Infamous
From Panic to Peace: Ten Percent Happier’s Dan Harris
I like to answer two questions at once. Yeah, that's good.
Infamous
From Panic to Peace: Ten Percent Happier’s Dan Harris
For the most part, I don't miss being a TV news anchor anymore. There are some little things that I miss. Well, I'll tell you what I don't miss. I don't miss getting up at 3.45 to go to work. I don't miss every time some asshole with an AK-47 walks into a supermarket, I have to go cover it. The extent to which my life wasn't my own because I was constantly on call, I really started to resent that.
Infamous
From Panic to Peace: Ten Percent Happier’s Dan Harris
What I do miss is... There are aspects of morning television in particular where you're in this camaraderie with the other people on the set, and it requires you to be really spontaneous. If you're thinking about the past or the future in those moments, you're going to screw it up. You have to be really right there and awake.
Infamous
From Panic to Peace: Ten Percent Happier’s Dan Harris
And I love that, and I'm still really close to a lot of my friends from ABC News. That little part I miss. And so I've actually been experimenting with doing some more television recently where I've been going on ABC and CNN and some other places and talking about mental health and how to survive the news and things like that. And I do enjoy that. And I probably will keep doing more of that.
Infamous
From Panic to Peace: Ten Percent Happier’s Dan Harris
I just don't want to do it full time. To the other part of your question, which is how do you survive the news? This is an individual question because
Infamous
From Panic to Peace: Ten Percent Happier’s Dan Harris
it's really like what your nervous system can handle and i this is where i think mindfulness meditation can help like the self-awareness to know or how much can vanessa take you know because we all want to walk the line between being an informed citizen on the one hand and a crazy person on the other hand and so you know you to have the self-awareness of like oh yeah i'm on hour eight of twitter and i'm posting in all caps
Infamous
From Panic to Peace: Ten Percent Happier’s Dan Harris
All right. Put the phone down. And so for me, I do consume a non-trivial amount of news. But like I also know sometimes I need animal videos or sometimes I need to take a walk or sometimes I need to lock the phone in another room and play catch with my son. I'm much better at balancing it than I used to be. And I think that's available to all of us.
Infamous
From Panic to Peace: Ten Percent Happier’s Dan Harris
It's a huge pleasure. Thanks for having me on.
Infamous
From Panic to Peace: Ten Percent Happier’s Dan Harris
I did hear that in your questions, like a real sort of resistance on your end. Like, I got the sense that you were thinking, OK, I get it. It can help people. I see the data. But like, I'm not doing this.
Infamous
From Panic to Peace: Ten Percent Happier’s Dan Harris
And then ultimately they let me go on the air, even though, I mean, there's video of it. I just looked so young and inexperienced wearing my dad's blazers. And then I kind of worked my way south from Maine, from Bangor to Portland. And then I was in Boston for a while. And then when I was 28, I got this huge break, a call from the network, ABC News, and they said, come work for us.
Infamous
From Panic to Peace: Ten Percent Happier’s Dan Harris
A million percent. That's absolutely right. I try to keep the word should out of my mouth because I recognize everybody's going to go at their own pace. And bullying people into doing stuff is not going to work. I tried this with my wife when I first got interested in meditation. I was so annoying.
Infamous
From Panic to Peace: Ten Percent Happier’s Dan Harris
And she is still a little – although she and I are actually doing our first meditation retreat together in a couple weeks.
Infamous
From Panic to Peace: Ten Percent Happier’s Dan Harris
So it's taken her 15 years to like really embrace it because I was so pushy. And so whatever works for you is what I recommend. And if you're getting a lot out of yoga and these little moments of mindfulness, that's great. I don't think you need to put pressure on yourself to do any more. All the stuff I'm talking about is a menu, not a to do list.
Infamous
From Panic to Peace: Ten Percent Happier’s Dan Harris
I don't know about that. I kind of describe what we do as self-help for smart people. I'm really trying to curate it down to what is based in evidence. And then the other thing I talk about, to the extent that I'm a guru, is this little thing I say about how some people teach from the mountaintop and I teach from the fetal position. Like I'm not perfect. I'm a schmuck just like I've always been.
Infamous
From Panic to Peace: Ten Percent Happier’s Dan Harris
And I'm screwing it up. I'm right there alongside you. I make mistakes all the time. And I'm just trying to bake, talk about co-opting. I just like bake that into my message. Like if it can work for me, it can work for you.
Infamous
From Panic to Peace: Ten Percent Happier’s Dan Harris
Yeah. I'm embarrassed to admit, although I admit it freely, but it is embarrassing the extent to which A desire to be seen, a desire for notoriety really fueled many aspects of my ambition. I will say that there were other things in there, too. But there's no question that there's a thrill, especially back then when there wasn't social media, there was no real digital media.
Infamous
From Panic to Peace: Ten Percent Happier’s Dan Harris
Getting on TV was like a huge deal. And that was important to me.
Infamous
From Panic to Peace: Ten Percent Happier’s Dan Harris
Not at all. He absolutely did take me under his wing.
Infamous
From Panic to Peace: Ten Percent Happier’s Dan Harris
Maybe I was closer to like Inspector Gadget. He did once say to my mom that he saw in me a younger version of himself. That's nice. I think that was the kind of thing you say to somebody's mother because I was... a foot shorter than him and not nearly as handsome and dashing and urbane as he was. But I definitely, I really looked up to him and he really did take me under his wing.
Infamous
From Panic to Peace: Ten Percent Happier’s Dan Harris
And I mean, without him, my career probably would have been a lot less interesting.
Infamous
From Panic to Peace: Ten Percent Happier’s Dan Harris
I was in Pakistan and then from Pakistan made some trips into Afghanistan, which was my first experience in a war zone. The first time I went into Afghanistan was actually embedded with the Taliban, which seems like a supremely dumb idea. It probably was. It was this wild experience and really unsafe and totally addictive.
Infamous
From Panic to Peace: Ten Percent Happier’s Dan Harris
So in Pakistan, which is where most of the media was based for the Afghan war, there wasn't a ton of violence. There were some isolated incidents. Danny Pearl, if anybody remembers him, the Wall Street Journal reporter who was kidnapped and brutally murdered. Pakistan itself was not a raging war zone, although the hotel where we stayed, the Islamabad Marriott Hotel,
Infamous
From Panic to Peace: Ten Percent Happier’s Dan Harris
did later get blown up by al-Qaeda or some affiliate. There was this cognitive dissonance of being in the presidential suite at the Islamabad Marriott with, like, nice food delivered to the room and then occasionally crossing the border, which wasn't that far away, to go cover actual combat. The absurdity of that experience was... kind of amazing, you know, and I savored it.
Infamous
From Panic to Peace: Ten Percent Happier’s Dan Harris
This is not to say I enjoyed combat. I didn't. I don't like violence. And as I've sometimes joked, I didn't even play contact sports when I was a kid. But I am a junkie for experience. And this was an incredible experience to be so young and to be
Infamous
From Panic to Peace: Ten Percent Happier’s Dan Harris
part of this network news apparatus, which at that time, remember this before there was much digital news, this was the main game to be witnessing what's happening at the tip of the spear. With our tax dollars, that was just incredibly powerful.
Infamous
From Panic to Peace: Ten Percent Happier’s Dan Harris
Yeah, my meditation teacher, Joseph Goldstein, talks a lot about how motivation, which most of us don't really look at unless you're an actor and you're asking the director, like, what's my character's motivation? But I don't think most of us think a lot about, like, what is our motivation? What drives us? Which is a very useful question to ask yourself.
Infamous
From Panic to Peace: Ten Percent Happier’s Dan Harris
And if you look at your own motivation with some forensic detail— Most of us will see a range. So for sure, at the craven end of the range for me was what we discussed earlier, the ambition, the ego, the excitement, the adrenaline. I would say in the middle of the range was ambition. curiosity, real journalistic curiosity about what is life on this planet? How much of it can I consume?
Infamous
From Panic to Peace: Ten Percent Happier’s Dan Harris
And then I would say at the stuff that's less embarrassing to talk about, the nobler end of the motivation was I believed and still believe, and I think you do too, in the importance and power of journalism and the value of having people who are willing to risk their lives to show The rest of us, what's happening on the ground? And so that was all there for me.
Infamous
From Panic to Peace: Ten Percent Happier’s Dan Harris
My brother once said at my wedding, joked that I made Woody Allen look like a Buddhist monk. And so this was before I got interested in Buddhism was a particularly prescient comment.
Infamous
From Panic to Peace: Ten Percent Happier’s Dan Harris
Yes. You know, I don't think I was messed up the way a lot of people get messed up in these situations, which is the term that often gets used, I think, accurately is PTSD. And so you see that especially among the people who are actually fighting the wars. I was not a warfighter. I was just a journalist. And there were many journalists who had way more experience than I did in war zones.
Infamous
From Panic to Peace: Ten Percent Happier’s Dan Harris
And so some of them also had PTSD. I think what messed me up was that I got addicted to the thrill of it. And when I came home, even though my job at home was pretty exciting, I was a network news correspondent and sometimes a fill-in anchor on our major broadcasts. And I had a pretty glamorous life, I guess, but nothing compares to being in a war zone.
Infamous
From Panic to Peace: Ten Percent Happier’s Dan Harris
There's a Winston Churchill quote, like, there's nothing more thrilling than the bullet that misses you. And in my case, they all missed. That wasn't true for a lot of my friends. You know, I had friends who died or got grievously wounded.
Infamous
From Panic to Peace: Ten Percent Happier’s Dan Harris
But for me, there was a real addiction to first Pakistan, Afghanistan, and then the second Intifada in Gaza and the West Bank and Israel, and then six or seven long, long tours of duty in Iraq. Yeah, there was a real addiction that when I came home, I would get depressed because it felt like all the energy had been sapped from my body and had trouble getting out of bed.
Infamous
From Panic to Peace: Ten Percent Happier’s Dan Harris
And I felt like I had a low-grade fever all the time. And that was a real problem. That led to some disastrous, infamous behavior.
Infamous
From Panic to Peace: Ten Percent Happier’s Dan Harris
Well, I don't know. You were there. Did it seem like I was enjoying it?
Infamous
From Panic to Peace: Ten Percent Happier’s Dan Harris
I enjoyed it immensely. I know I'm not going to sugarcoat this. I had a great time and I am not here to say that people should do drugs. Having said that, this was an exciting period of my life. The drugs did two things. One, immediately they made me feel better.
Infamous
From Panic to Peace: Ten Percent Happier’s Dan Harris
And the other was that it gave me what I had been craving all along, which was these new experiences and this kind of bright lights, big city stage of my life in New York City. Of course, the downsides are tremendous. They include horrible hangovers, a worsening of any underlying depression or anxiety that might have been driving you to do the drugs in the first place, the potential for addiction.
Infamous
From Panic to Peace: Ten Percent Happier’s Dan Harris
which I really skirted, but we both know people who've gotten addicted, and that's a horrible and really ugly place to be. And then finally, and I know we'll get to this, it produced a panic attack for me on live television.
Infamous
From Panic to Peace: Ten Percent Happier’s Dan Harris
Yeah, I was filling in as the newsreader on Good Morning America. This is a job that actually no longer exists. At the time, that job was filled by Robin Roberts, who's now the main host of Good Morning America. But I would sometimes fill in for her, which was really cool. I always wanted to be... a network news anchor. This was just such a cool thing.
Infamous
From Panic to Peace: Ten Percent Happier’s Dan Harris
And so I was getting my first entree into this position. And I had done this before, before June 7th, 2004. This was not my first time doing it. But on this morning, just a few seconds into my little shtick, and you can Google this. If you Google panic attack on television, it's the number one result, which is great. You can see if you watch it that like I just, I kind of melt down.
Infamous
From Panic to Peace: Ten Percent Happier’s Dan Harris
Health news now, one of the world's most commonly prescribed medications may be providing a big bonus. Researchers report people who take cholesterol-lowering drugs called statins for at least five years may also lower their risk for cancer, but it's too early to prescribe statins slowly for cancer production.
Infamous
From Panic to Peace: Ten Percent Happier’s Dan Harris
And I'm pretty good because I've had spent my entire adult life on camera and because I'm not at baseline very emotionally expressive. I kind of hold it together reasonably well, but you can see that I'm having trouble breathing. And what's happening for me internally is my heart's racing. My palms are sweaty. My mouth is drying up. My lungs have seized up.
Infamous
From Panic to Peace: Ten Percent Happier’s Dan Harris
And I really can't speak, which is deeply inconvenient if you're trying to anchor the news. And then at one point I just squeak out like a back to you to the main hosts of the show, which Charlie Gibson and Diane Soar. That does it for news. We're going to go back now to Robin and Charlie. All right. Thanks very much, Dan.
Infamous
From Panic to Peace: Ten Percent Happier’s Dan Harris
Okay, so you can see in the clip, Diane and Charlie both look a little concerned when I toss it back to them because I did it minutes before I was supposed to. And Charlie then sends it over to the weatherman. And then he, when the camera is off of him, bolts out of his seat and runs over to me to see like, what's wrong with you?
Infamous
From Panic to Peace: Ten Percent Happier’s Dan Harris
And the producers in the control room are getting in my ear like, are you okay? Well, what happened? And I lied. I totally lied.
Infamous
From Panic to Peace: Ten Percent Happier’s Dan Harris
Pretty much. Pretty much. I knew I had had a panic attack because I had had little versions of this before. First of all, the first panic attacks I ever had were when I was smoking weed for the first time in my early teens. So I kind of knew what panic tastes like. And when your brain learns how to panic, it can get pretty good at it.
Infamous
From Panic to Peace: Ten Percent Happier’s Dan Harris
And then I had had a few little moments of panic on the air, but I'd always been able to cover them up. This was the first time where the train just like left the station and I couldn't
Infamous
From Panic to Peace: Ten Percent Happier’s Dan Harris
control it so i was not in any doubt about what had happened but i was also not in any doubt that if i admitted this again this is 2004 20 years ago much less enlightened time when it comes to mental health if i had admitted this i was really sure that my career would have ended so i lied to everybody and i kind of got away with it in part because if you look at the video it didn't look
Infamous
From Panic to Peace: Ten Percent Happier’s Dan Harris
It looked bad, but not catastrophic. And I was able an hour later to come on and do my next news hit without any incident. So I kind of got away with it.
Lost Boys
How to be happier with Dan Harris.
This is massively exacerbated by COVID, but but in part because we as grownups didn't really understand that we we needed we started helicopter parenting and we needed to create a world for you where you're out there. bumping up against other kids and getting scrapes and getting insults and learning how to build up your psychological immunity. And that's on us.
Lost Boys
How to be happier with Dan Harris.
And so what I want to first remove, hopefully, is the shame. And then second, and this goes to masculinity, and I know this is something you think about a lot, Scott. It's like rethinking what is masculinity? Strength is part of it, but what is real strength?
Lost Boys
How to be happier with Dan Harris.
Real strength, I like in Buddhism, and I try to practice Buddhism, that one of the ancient symbols is a lion, which is a great symbol of ferocity, but it has nothing to do with dominance. It has to do with the courage to face your own shit.
Lost Boys
How to be happier with Dan Harris.
to face your own mind and that is what is required in order to do the work to take the risk to go out into social situations which is going to make you uncomfortable to make you gulp for air possibly to provoke a starburst of self-critical thoughts in your mind but that is courage And how do you overcome fear? You face it in manageable little steps. So take a little risk.
Lost Boys
How to be happier with Dan Harris.
divulge something personal to somebody you trust at work and see what happens. Go to the party that you otherwise wouldn't go to, but tell yourself you only have to go for five minutes. Baby steps of facing what scares you, and over time, it won't scare you as much. That is real baller courage.
Lost Boys
How to be happier with Dan Harris.
Well, I still have panic attacks. Um, um, right now, the big place of panic for me is claustrophobia. So I've had a lot of trouble over the last couple of years on elevators and airplanes. I, to a certain extent, blame COVID for this because when COVID hit, we, I, I moved to the suburbs. I wasn't in the city. I wasn't on elevators anymore and I wasn't flying.
Lost Boys
How to be happier with Dan Harris.
And then when I went back to all of that, um, uh, I really started to struggle and panic feeds on itself. And so the only remedy is to face it, to actually put yourself in the situation that scares you. So I would literally ride elevators at the Westchester Mall with my shrink.
Lost Boys
How to be happier with Dan Harris.
uh who would help me you know see to work with cognitive behavioral therapy which is a psychological term of art to face what was scaring me to learn how to engage in supportive self-talk to talk myself through it and uh it really helped and and by the way if you We can go wherever you want here.
Lost Boys
How to be happier with Dan Harris.
But if you want a very specific answer to Scott's question earlier about cognitive behavioral therapy techniques to work yourself through the shit that scares you, whether it's social or anything else, I'm happy to talk about that because there's a lot to say there.
Lost Boys
How to be happier with Dan Harris.
We many of us believe that we have to have an inner drill sergeant in order to succeed. If somebody else talked to us the way we talk to ourselves, we would punch that other person in the face. And we believe, consciously or subconsciously, that we need this inner drill sergeant in order to get anything done. In fact, all the data show that an inner coach
Lost Boys
How to be happier with Dan Harris.
is much more likely to get you to your goals. And this is referred to in the psychological literature as self compassion. So learning to talk to yourself the way you would talk to a good friend, or to your kid or a mentee, There's a ton of data that shows that this is extremely helpful, especially in situations where you're scared.
Lost Boys
How to be happier with Dan Harris.
So you don't, I mean, it's very helpful to go into situations that scare you with a friend. And by the way, I would recommend that. But you can be your own friend in this regard. And it's slightly cheesy, but just learning to talk to yourself this way. And it just as a little technical tip here to use your own name when you're talking to yourself.
Lost Boys
How to be happier with Dan Harris.
So I just say, dude, like, dude, I'm getting on a plane. I'm worried about panicking in front of a bunch of strangers. Dude, like you can. This is just going to be a bunch of physical sensations. Breathlessness. pounding in the chest that you have experienced a million times and you're still alive, you can deal with this.
Lost Boys
How to be happier with Dan Harris.
That ability to talk to yourself that way is a trainable skill for anyone and extremely helpful.
Lost Boys
How to be happier with Dan Harris.
Well, first of all, adolescence scared the shit out of me. Really rattling. It's one of the most, just on a level of craft, it's just one of the most, in terms of the acting and the filmmaking and the writing, it's just one of the most extraordinary pieces of art I have personally consumed in a long time. And absolutely, you know, with a 10-year-old boy, like...
Lost Boys
How to be happier with Dan Harris.
yeah i couldn't get him out of my head my son out of my head throughout the whole thing and and so how does it approach uh impact my approach first of all i think a lot about making sure he has healthy relationships and we think he's an only child and so we think a lot about making sure he sees his cousins a lot and making sure that he has really good friendships uh that we are helping to nurture and that our house is a comfortable place for him and his friends to hang out um
Lost Boys
How to be happier with Dan Harris.
So I think about that a lot. And then second, and again, I know this is something that you've spoken about a lot and you've been an inspiration for me in this regard, Scott, is trying to both model and preach a little bit to the extent that preaching is ever successful with a child, a different concept of masculinity.
Lost Boys
How to be happier with Dan Harris.
That strength does not come from denying my emotions, from compartmentalizing, from self-medicating with alcohol. And I'm not saying that all drinking is bad, but if you're doing it Not to feel your feelings. I worry about that. From showing respect to my wife in front of my son.
Lost Boys
How to be happier with Dan Harris.
I really think about trying to model a kind of fierce masculinity that is the ferocity that we referred to earlier in Buddhism of the ferocity that says, yeah, I have panic attacks. And I can admit that to the world. I can talk to you, my son, about this. That hopefully normalizes it for you. So, yeah, to me, that's all part of raising a healthy boy slash man now. Anthony?
Lost Boys
How to be happier with Dan Harris.
Well, uh, I think, I think it's totally fine not to watch adolescents. Um, and, Uh, I get it. It's incredibly stressful. It's also extraordinarily beautiful. Um, but the larger thing is what you said there at the end, Anthony, about breathing through what's going on, not only with, um, men and boys right now, but also in the whole world. This is a destabilizing time.
Lost Boys
How to be happier with Dan Harris.
So I'll leave you with one little axiom that's very helpful for me. And I think I spoke about this a little bit with Scott on Pivot a couple of months ago. Action absorbs anxiety. I love that. It can feel so powerless to sit and watch adolescence or to watch the fucking news these days. For many of us, we feel totally powerless and helpless and then we get into a toilet vortex of anxiety.
Lost Boys
How to be happier with Dan Harris.
You have more power than you think you can take action in your sphere locally. It doesn't even have to have anything to do with the issue you're worried about. You can just be marginally more helpful to the people in your environment. As I often say, like, what's it like when you hold the door open for somebody? If you're paying attention in that moment, it feels good.
Lost Boys
How to be happier with Dan Harris.
That feeling is infinitely scalable. The world is filled with opportunities to be helpful.
Lost Boys
How to be happier with Dan Harris.
dan harris seriously man no doubt seriously so fucking dreamy literally listen to that voice yeah it's funny my wife doesn't feel that way she somehow my voice they never do for her harris they never do but thank you thank you mr dan harris thanks dan on lost boys it's total pleasure big fan of both of you really appreciate you including me in this thank you bye
Lost Boys
How to be happier with Dan Harris.
I do. I do have thoughts. This is just a huge topic, so I'm trying to figure out where to start. I do want to just double-click on what... That's such a douchey expression, but I'll use it anyway. On the point you just made, Scott, about... you know, the, the need to rethink masculinity.
Lost Boys
How to be happier with Dan Harris.
And I know you've been working on a book along those lines and, and, um, cause I, cause I listened to you a lot and, um, I think it's incredibly important and I think you're right. We're at a moment where it is. It's feeling more and more urgent.
Lost Boys
How to be happier with Dan Harris.
You may have already addressed this, but, you know, the Netflix show Adolescence, which is just incredibly powerful and really goes right at these issues. So, yeah, I spent a lot of time thinking about this. And in terms of both men and boys and women and girls and everything in between. We we do have anxiety rising globally. And what can be done about it?
Lost Boys
How to be happier with Dan Harris.
Well, there are many, many things to say about this. But I would say the number one thing and this is relevant to masculinity as well, is that we are isolated.
Lost Boys
How to be happier with Dan Harris.
lonely disconnected stuck in our own little worlds on our phones and that is i believe one of the major contributors to this spike in anxiety we're seeing all over the place we as a species did not get to the top of the food chain because we're the strongest we have no talons no wings uh don't have sharp teeth we're not particularly big when compared to other
Lost Boys
How to be happier with Dan Harris.
charismatic megafauna, we got to the top of the food chain because of our ability to cooperate, collaborate and communicate. All of that is militated against by most aspects of our modern culture, which emphasizes tech driven isolation, individualism, And this if we don't have this social connection, if we don't have positive relationships, we wither.
Lost Boys
How to be happier with Dan Harris.
And to me, it just seems very clear that if we can get people to get more intentional about having positive relationships in their lives, it will go a long way toward addressing anxiety.
Lost Boys
How to be happier with Dan Harris.
That's an incredible statistic and it's incredibly disturbing. I am not, just to be clear, much of a policy thinker, a systems thinker. I'm much more about what can you as an individual do? So I'll just put that out there as a caveat before I answer your question. I think for a parent, it's about thinking this through.
Lost Boys
How to be happier with Dan Harris.
very clearly and understanding that if you're not helping your kid get FaceTime with other kids, you're hurting your child, not deliberately, but once you know, you know, and you can take better steps to make sure that your kids are getting that face-to-face interaction.
Lost Boys
How to be happier with Dan Harris.
Now, if I'm directing my comments to somebody slightly older, a young man, or actually this could go for anybody who's feeling disconnected or lonely, The number one piece of advice is to volunteer. Get out there, do something useful for somebody else. This is the most empowering and ennobling thing you can. It reminds you of your own innate worthiness. It puts you in contact with other people.
Lost Boys
How to be happier with Dan Harris.
I worry about that. You know, it's interesting. My own life, you know, I look at the culture and I see many examples of toxic masculinity. I don't love that phrase because I do feel like it has been weaponized a little bit to... make men feel bad about being men. So I think it's accurate. There is for sure a version of masculinity that is quite toxic.
Lost Boys
How to be happier with Dan Harris.
So it's technically an accurate term, but sometimes there's something about the dialogue that has, I think, made it harder to reach men because we've somehow sent the signal either explicitly or implicitly that you're wrong or bad for just having a penis. And so I do want to just...
Lost Boys
How to be happier with Dan Harris.
signal that I'm not trying to be overly, and this is another word that I worry about using, but overly woke here when I talk about toxic masculinity. I do see many, many avatars of unhealthy masculinity in the culture, the Tates, for example. But in my own life, I don't know if you guys know Strauss Zelnick, the very successful businessman. Sorry, were you going to say something?
Lost Boys
How to be happier with Dan Harris.
OK, so you and I are connected by one degree of separation. Strauss is a very good friend of mine for about a decade. And I've been recently doing his work. He work out. He's the guy's almost 68. He's in incredible shape for any age. And he works out every day. He's got this thing called the program. And a lot of young men are in the program. And I go once in a while. And. meeting young men.
Lost Boys
How to be happier with Dan Harris.
You know, Strauss is not overly like a finger wagging about like eating cookies. He eats cookies. He eats more just like get get active, which I think is another, you know, get physically active. I think this is another great piece of advice for young men because it does put you in contact with other other people if you're doing it, you know, in a in a group setting.
Lost Boys
How to be happier with Dan Harris.
And it also is great for your mental health. But having said that, through the program, I've met a lot of young finance bros, guys who, when I was growing up, would have had a massive amount of casual misogyny just baked into their everyday conversation. And the young men I'm meeting are much more sensitive. And that may... you know, sensitive in a good way.
Lost Boys
How to be happier with Dan Harris.
They're just they're really earnest and and interested in talking about improving their own mental health. And and that may just be speak to the type of people that Strauss attracts. But it's interesting to me because I do look at the culture and I see to your question, Anthony, that that there are these great examples of how to do masculinity poorly.
Lost Boys
How to be happier with Dan Harris.
And then just in moving through the world, I see young men who are much less casually misogynistic than the world that I grew up in. And frankly, I hate to say this, that I participated in.
Lost Boys
How to be happier with Dan Harris.
Well, one thing to say is if you're freaking out about exposing yourself to social situations and you're you're young um recognize that this is not your fault you're not first of all you're not alone you're not like uniquely dysfunctional this is very very common and it's my generation our generation that created a world for you where you got insufficient training in how to do this in part