10% Happier: How I Tamed the Voice in My Head, Reduced Stress Without Losing My Edge, and Found Self-Help That Actually Works

“Straight from childhood, I was a frequent mental inventory taker, scanning my consciousness for objects of concern, kind of like pressing a bruise to see if it still hurts. In my view, the balance between stress and contentment was life’s biggest riddle.”

Not only does this show Harris’s proclivity to worry, but it also shows that he likes to be aware of his internal state at all times. Wanting to pause his overactive mind is what leads Harris to begin his meditation journey.

“I found a degree of comfort in the fact that my case was not an aberration […] while the psychological impacts on veterans were well-documented, an underreported study on war correspondents found high rates of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), major depression, and alcohol abuse.”

Harris's PTSD diagnosis helps him realize that his traumatic experiences overseas impacted his inner life, providing a psychological impulse to self-medicate. His reference to studies here shows that Harris finds comfort in the experience of others as well as in scientific reasoning.

“Sometimes before I’d even thought it through, I’d find myself on the phone with an executive producer […] saying impolitic things. I would occasionally complain about all of this to Dr. Brotman […] his theory was that, just as I had used drugs to replace the thrill of combat, I was now inflating the drama of the office war zone to replace drugs.”

This shows how, even while Harris did realize drugs were harmful and stopped doing them, his problems weren’t entirely solved. He was still looking for a distraction from his uncomfortable feelings, and this behavior was beginning to have personal and professional consequences.

“Not only had I been unfair to people of faith by prematurely reaching sweeping, uninformed conclusions, but I’d also done myself a disservice. This beat could be more than just a chance to notch more airtime. Most people in American—and on the planet for that matter—saw their entire lives through the lens of faith. I didn’t have to agree, but here was my chance to get under the hood and understand what was going on.”

Shortly after his interview with Haggard, Harris reevaluates his feelings about religion. His willingness to change his mindset later opens him up to understand Buddhist meditation. He also pinpoints in this passage a recurrent personal weakness, his penchant for “reaching sweeping, uniformed conclusions,” which he does try to correct on his meditation journey.

“It would have been enormously helpful to have had a sense that my troubles had a larger purpose or fit into some overarching plan. I had read the research showing that regular churchgoers tended to be happier, in part because having a sense that the world is infused with meaning and that suffering happens for a reason helped them deal more successfully with life’s inevitable humiliations.”

Here, Harris pinpoints his longing for something to help him find meaning and purpose. Again, he is drawn to this theory because it is backed by research, which is a system in which he does have faith.

“Per Tolle, even though the voice is the ridgepole of our interior lives most of us take it completely for granted. He argued that the failure to recognize thoughts for what they are—quantum bursts of psychic energy that exist solely in your head—is the primordial human error. When we are unaware of the ‘egoic mind’ […] we blindly act out our thoughts and often the results are not pretty.”

This is one of Tolle's ideas from A New Earth that resonates with Harris; the idea that the voice in his head is driven by ego helps Harris put his insecurities and difficulties in perspective. This is the idea that spurs Harris to meet with Tolle.

“Tolle had opened something up for me—a window into the enfeebling clamor of the ego. But he had not answered my most pressing questions. How do you tame the voice in your head? How do you stay in the Now?”

This quote shows that while Harris is open to new ideas, he is looking for practical advice to connect those ideas to his lived experience. If the voice in the head can be damaging, how might it be stopped or altered? This question will drive most of Harris’s quest toward Buddhist meditation.

“My next move was motivated by sheer desperation. It was mercifully brief, but unrelentingly absurd. [My producer] and I decided to launch a whole series of stories on self-help for Sunday World News. We called it ‘Happiness, Inc.’ The idea was to delve into an unregulated $11 billion industry that had attracted a growing number of followers as Americans moved away from organized religion.”

As a way to find answers, Harris uses his role as a journalist to engage deeply with the self-help community. He is wary of the profit-driven nature of the industry but hopes he can find wisdom there, despite his skepticism.

“To my surprise, Epstein seemed to be arguing that Buddhism was better than seeing a shrink. Therapy, he said, often leads to ‘understanding without relief.’ Even Freud himself had conceded that the best therapy could do was bring us from ‘hysteric misery’ to ‘common unhappiness.’”

When reading the work of Mark Epstein, a psychologist who blends Buddhist dharma with Freud's psychoanalytic approach to trauma, Harris is impressed by Epstein’s knowledge and understanding of Buddhism. It is through Epstein that Harris realizes the ideas of the mind he liked in Tolle’s work are aspects of Buddhism.

“One Friday evening, I looked up at the TV […] and saw David Muir anchoring World News—the weekday version, the Big Show. He was doing a fantastic job, which threw me into a Triple Lindy of ‘comparing mind,’ ‘monkey mind,’ and prapañca. Muir kicking ass right now. I am going down.”

As Harris reads about Buddhism, he becomes more aware of his own negative thought patterns, exhibited here as he compares himself to his friend and colleague David Muir and becomes agitated. This shows the beginning of Harris’s self-awareness but also shows that meditation is a practice, not a cure-all.

“This is where the Buddhists diverged quite dramatically from self-help: They had an actual, practical program. It wasn’t expensive gimcrackery. No spendy seminars, no credit cards required. It was totally free. It was a radical internal jujitsu move that was supposed to allow you to face the asshole in your head directly, and peacefully disarm him.”

Harris learns that practical answer to finding the balance between stress and contentment is contained within Buddhism and its methods are practical, inexpensive, and accessible, unlike the self-help industry he’d previously investigated. The “radical internal jujitsu” to which he refers here is meditation.

“Life became a little bit like walking into a familiar room where all the furniture had been rearranged […] Every moment was an opportunity for a do-over. A million mulligans.”

Harris experiences a shifting of consciousness after trying meditation. One of the directives of meditation is that if one stops following the breath, one must simply begin again. Harris’s metaphor of looking at life as a room rearranged gives a clear picture of how perspective changing his experience was of having a constant new beginning.

“The Buddhists had a helpful analogy here. Picture the mind like a waterfall they said; the water is the torrent of thoughts and emotions; mindfulness is the space behind the waterfall. Again, elegant theory—but, easier said than done.”

This passage shows how Buddhist instruction often simplifies difficult concepts with metaphor to make them easier to understand. However, though the concept is easy to understand, it remains difficult to put into practice, especially at the beginning of Harris's journey. Throughout 10% Happier, Harris refers to this metaphor when trying to achieve mindfulness.

“‘Sitting with your feelings won’t always solve your problems or make your feelings go away,’ he said, ‘but it can make you stop acting blindly. Maybe you won’t be sullen with your boss, for example.’”

This passage is from a conversation Harris has with Epstein about his frustrations at work. Again, meditation is shown to not be a cure-all, but it gives one the space to make more intentional, less reactive choices.

Bird.

Feet numb.

Images of all those creepy baby faces in Renaissance art.

Heart pounding.

Back. Bird. Hands. Feet. Heart. Back, back, bird, feet, bird, bird, bird. Feet, hands, feet, feet, feet.

Hands. Hands. Back, back, back. Heart, bird, feet. Feet. Bird. Feetbirdfeetbirdbackfeetfeetfeetheart.

Bird.

These are Harris’s “noticings per minute” during his breakthrough meditation at the Spirit Rock retreat. This increased awareness makes the present world so lovely Harris winds up breaking into tears.

“Even if we were handed everything we wanted would it really make us sustainably happy? How many times have we heard from people who got rich or famous and it wasn’t enough […] There’s actually a term for this—‘hedonic adaptation.’ When good things happen, we bake them very quickly into our baseline expectations, and yet the primordial void goes unfilled.”

This is part of Goldstein’s dharma talk and shows that the answer for balancing stress and contentment is not greed but a deeper attention to wholeness and well-being. Goldstein suggests the “void” one might have can’t be filled with material items but must be soothed by spiritual understanding. Harris heard dharma talks, like this one, nightly at the Spirit Rock retreat.

“[T]he true goal of Buddhist meditation [is] to see that the ‘self’ we take to be the ridgepole of our lives is actually an illusion. The real superpower of meditation is not just to manage your ego more mindfully but see that the ego itself has no actual substance.”

This dharma talk by Goldstein shows that the path to enlightenment treasured by Buddhists requires a letting go of the ego, which is a transitory thing rather than a solid, unchanging part of the human being. Mindful meditation brings one closer to this transformation, but Harris remains unsure of enlightenment until the epilogue.

“The more I meditated, the more I looked around and appreciated that we all have monkey minds—that everyone has their own Weirs and Muirs they’re competing against, their own manufactured balding crises (and of course, the kinds of more serious collisions with impermanence from which I had mercifully been spared thus far). […] I felt compelled to share what I had learned. I just couldn’t figure out how to do this effectively.”

Although he doesn’t frame it as such, Harris seems to be using compassion here to “appreciate that we all have monkey minds.” Essentially, each person has their own battles. Since meditation lessened his feelings of comparison and self-judgement, Harris feels a call to share his story with others and help them navigate the egoic struggles everyone faces on some level. This leads to him writing 10% Happier.

“[W]hen people make the leap and attend the retreat, they get the first glimpse of what the mind is actually doing. You know, we’re getting a real close, intimate look at what our lives are about.”

In an interview with Harris, Goldstein good-naturedly acknowledges that while a 10-day silent retreat might sound daunting, it offers an opportunity to understand what is important to the voice in one's head. Once one becomes aware of the mind's activity, it becomes easier to change.

“What the science was showing was that our levels of well-being, resilience and impulse control were not simply God-given traits, our portion of what we had to accept as fait accompli. The brain, the organ of experience, through which our entire lives are led, can be trained. Happiness is a skill.”

After visiting with various scientists, Harris learns that brain scans show meditation helps reduce stress and heightens centers of happiness. With this knowledge, he realizes that some people aren’t born happier than others. There isn’t a finite supply of happiness: If the brain can be strengthened, happiness can grow. This research adds to the validity of Harris’s claims about meditation.

“There was a larger issue at play here: Was journalism or any high-stakes competitive profession really—incompatible with metta? My job required me to ask provocative questions, to ‘go in for the kill,’ as we say—and often, that wasn’t so nice.”

Up to this point, Harris has been relishing his ability to practice loving-kindness meditation (metta) and acknowledges that he’s becoming nicer. However, an interview with Paris Hilton makes Harris realize he hasn’t been particularly compassionate to her. He then wonders if what he does for a living is incompatible with loving-kindness. This precipitates a major crisis for Harris regarding what kind of person he wants to be.

“Behind the fig leaf of being a new yogi, I had gone so far down the path of resignation and passivity that I had compromised the career I had worked for decades to build. […] What I should have done when faced with this adversity was buckle down and work harder. Instead, I had confused ‘letting go’ with going soft.”

Between the Hilton interview and changes in the administration of ABC News, Harris feels a certain level of depression, as he uses his meditation practice as excuse to avoid striving at his job, becoming increasingly passive. His self-awareness kicks in, and he realizes he’s gone too far in the other direction and once again has lost his ability to maintain balance.

“‘You need to stop trying so hard,’ said Bianca. ‘Just let go.’ It was delicious to have my wife thrown. Buddhist terminology back in my face. Especially since, in this case, she couldn’t have been more spot-on. I needed to approach anchoring more like meditation. If I could relax and be present enough to listen to what people were saying. It would enhance our natural camaraderie on air.”

Harris’s renewed striving causes him to become tense at work, worrying over every detail, which shows in his on-air performance. His wife is able to break down his performance and, now familiar with Buddhist terms because of him, gives him clear advice. Realizing that he was once again trying too hard to control outcomes, he lets go, which improves his work.