10% Happier With Dan Harris

New episodes come out every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday for free, with 1-week early access for Wondery+ subscribers. --- It’s possible to actually be addicted to self-criticism, especially as a way to keep yourself safe. But evidence shows that’s not true, and today’s episode dives into strategies to deal with your own self-hatred.  This is part two of a series this week on forgiveness. In our last episode, Jack Kornfield focused on forgiving other people and in today’s episode, Tara Brach talks about forgiving yourself.  Tara Brach is a meditation teacher, psychologist and author of several books including Radical Acceptance, Radical Compassion and Trusting the Gold. Her weekly podcast is downloaded 3 million times a month. Tara is also the founder of the Insight Meditation Community of Washington.  In this episode we talk about: Why Tara says self-hatred “divides us from our ourselves” The benefits of learning the habit to stop kicking our own asses Simple meditations to help us with self-forgiveness

New episodes come out every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday for free, with 1-week early access for Wondery+ subscribers. The allure of resentment, of holding a grudge or nursing your rage can be super powerful.  In today’s episode, Jack Kornfield, one of the great western meditation masters, talks about Buddhist strategies for not holding grudges and the self-interested case for forgiveness. This episode is the first of a two-part series this week on forgiveness.  In this conversation we talk about:  What forgiveness is and isn’t  Whether forgiveness is a single act or an ongoing process The cost of not forgiving A forgiveness practice you can try in your meditation Whether it’s possible to respond to the misdeeds and transgressions of others with force and love at the same time Whether there are things that are unforgivable And Jack’s contention that forgiveness involves a shift in identity Full Shownotes: https://www.tenpercent.com/podcast-episode/jack-kornfield-533

New episodes come out every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday for free, with 1-week early access for Wondery+ subscribers. --- Today we’re taking a run at something that is simultaneously a contemplative cliché and also a deeply desired psychological outcome: getting out of your head and into your body. So many of us want an escape route from the spinning, looping, fishing narratives and grudges in our head and our guest today has some very practical suggestions to help us do that.  Kelly Boys is a mindfulness trainer and coach. She has helped design and deliver mindfulness and resilience programs for the UN, Google, and San Quentin State Prison. She is also the author of The Blind Spot Effect: How to Stop Missing What's Right in Front of You  Today we’re going to talk specifically about a type of meditation that Kelly teaches called Yoga Nidra, which has been shown to help you sleep, improve your working memory, and decrease cravings.  In this episode we talk about: The difference between Yoga Nidra and mind

New episodes come out every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday for free, with 1-week early access for Wondery+ subscribers. --- The subject of anxiety never seems to lose its relevance. In this special episode we answer listener voicemails with one of the world’s leading experts on anxiety.  Dr. Jud Brewer is the Chief Medical Officer at Sharecare and the Director of Research and Innovation at Brown University’s Mindfulness Center. He is also the New York Times best-selling author of Unwinding Anxiety: New Science Shows How to Break the Cycles of Worry and Fear to Heal Your Mind and an expert in the field of habit change and the science of self-mastery.  In this episode we talk about:   The current levels of anxiety in our culture Why fear and planning can be helpful, but worrying is not The role of curiosity and kindness in short circuiting anxiety  How to differentiate between anxiety and excitement Whether we can try too hard to treat our anxiety And why as a society we are moving away from distress toleran

New episodes come out every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday for free, with 1-week early access for Wondery+ subscribers. --- We’ve all got parts of our personality or our past that we’re ashamed of. We might refer to these parts of ourselves as our demons, our baggage, or our secrets; no one is immune. So, how do you want to deal with this situation? Stay coiled in shame and denial? That only makes the demons stronger. An alternative, per my guest Koshin Paley Ellison, is to approach your stuff with “healthy embarrassment.” That allows you to work more skillfully with your baggage so that it doesn’t own you. And once you’re cooler with yourself, that can improve your relationships with other people, which is probably the most important variable for your happiness. And healthy embarrassment is just one of many extremely useful things we are going to talk about today. Koshin Paley Ellison is an author, Zen teacher, Jungian psychotherapist, and Certified Chaplaincy Educator. He is the co-founder of the New York

New episodes come out every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday for free, with 1-week early access for Wondery+ subscribers. --- Today we explore the entire dread spectrum with Saleem Reshamwala, who took a deep dive on this very common, very uncomfortable emotion. What is dread, exactly? What evolutionary purpose does it serve? Most importantly, how do we deal with it? What are the antidotes? Reshamwala has worked for The New York Times, PBS, and also TED, where he hosts a podcast called Far Flung. He is also the host of More Than A Feeling, another podcast here at Ten Percent Happier. Saleem and his team recently launched something called The Dread Project - we shared their first episode kicking off the series last week. It’s a five-day series that investigates dread. Each day of the challenge, listeners tackle dread in a different way. You can sign up for The Dread Project at dreadproject.com. In this episode we talk about: Dread-management techniques, including: journaling, drawing, and welcoming your dread

This episode is for anyone who has ever had a tough or tricky moment. In other words, everyone who is currently drawing breath on planet earth right now. Today’s guests are powerhouse duo Tsoknyi Rinpoche and Daniel Goleman. Tsoknyi Rinpoche is one of the greatest living Tibetan masters who has a whole toolbox of techniques for dealing with difficult moments, habitual patterns, and common meditation obstacles. He’ll be in conversation with Daniel Goleman, a trained scientist and science writer best known for his landmark book, Emotional Intelligence: Why It Can Matter More Than IQ. Together, they have just written a book called Why We Meditate: The Science and Practice of Clarity and Compassion.  This is the fourth and final installment of our series called, The Art and Science of Keeping Your Sh*t Together. In each episode we bring together a meditative adept or Buddhist scholar and a respected scientist. The idea is to give you the best of both worlds to arm you with both modern and ancient tools for regu

Is it possible to learn to spot which state your nervous system is in and move from suboptimal states to much better ones? The subject of how to work with your own nervous system is called Polyvagal Theory and today’s guests Deb Dana & Kaira Jewel Lingo will give us a primer on what that exactly means. They will also talk about how our nervous systems are connected to the nervous systems of other people, and how we can learn to co-regulate our systems for the betterment of others.  Deb Dana is a Licensed Clinical Social Worker, who is a clinician, consultant and author specializing in complex trauma.  Her work is focused on using the lens of Polyvagal Theory to understand and resolve the impact of trauma, and creating ways of working that honor the role of the autonomic nervous system. She has written several books, including Anchored: How to Befriend Your Nervous System Using Polyvagal Theory.    Kaira Jewel Lingo is a Dharma teacher with a lifelong interest in spirituality and social justice. After liv

A common idea in the west is that our feelings or emotions should be viewed with suspicion, superseded or overridden by rational thought, and that your mind is a battleground between emotions and rationality. But on the show today, guests Lisa Feldman Barrett and John Dunne are going to offer a very compelling science backed argument that disputes the notion that thinking and feeling are distinct. Furthermore, they argue that understanding how emotions are actually made can be a life or death matter.  Lisa Feldman Barrett is a University Distinguished Professor of Psychology at Northeastern University with appointments at the Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School. Dr. Barrett is among the top 1% most-cited scientists, having published over 270 peer-reviewed scientific papers.  She has written several books, including How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain, and Seven And A Half Lessons About The Brain. Her TED talk has been viewed more than 6.5 million times. John Dunne holds

In western culture, there's been a long held view that our ability to reason should be placed above our emotions. But the hard truth is that our emotions are there and they're non-negotiable— and If you don't know how to work with them, they can own you. The good news is that you can work with them and that there are many systems for doing so. To boot, you can learn a ton by listening to your emotions in the right ways.  Today’s guests, Shinzen Young and James Gross will help us understand how to work with our emotions and offer both techniques in modern science and ancient wisdom in order to do so.  Gross is the Ernest R. Hilgard Professor of Psychology at Stanford University, where he directs the Stanford Psychophysiology Laboratory. Young is an American mindfulness teacher and neuroscience research consultant. He teaches something called Unified Mindfulness, which you will hear him describe in this conversation. This is part one in a series we’re calling The Art and Science of Keeping Your Sh*t Together. I

New episodes come out every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday for free, with early access for Wondery+ subscribers. --- Can gratitude be more than just a platitude? Our guest today argues: yes.  DaRa Williams is a longtime practitioner and teacher of meditation. She is one of the guiding teachers at Insight Meditation Society, a graduate of the Spirit Rock Insight Meditation Society Teacher Training Program, and also has a clinical mental health private practice in Manhattan. DaRa also says, only semi-facetiously, that she believes gratitude can be considered the fifth Brahma Vihara.  In this conversation we talk about: How to start knitting gratitude into your everyday life Whether gratitude is possible when everything sucks How to avoid spiritual bypass The opportunity that suffering brings for happiness How to take our suffering less personally The power of reminding yourself that you are nature And our unconscious fascination with creating difficulty Full Shownotes: https://www.tenpercent.com/podcast-ep

New episodes come out every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday for free, with 1-week early access for Wondery+ subscribers. --- There are all sorts of ways to struggle with getting things done. Maybe you’re a procrastinator, maybe you’re somebody whose energy flags in the middle of a project, maybe you’re too stubborn and don’t know when to quit, or maybe you’re somebody who sets too many goals and gets burned out. Whatever your situation, we all struggle with motivation. The good news is that there’s a whole crew of scientists who study best practices for getting things done, including today’s guest, Ayelet Fishbach, PhD. Fishbach is one of the most eminent players in the field. She is the Jeffrey Breakenridge Keller Professor of Behavioral Science and Marketing at the University of Chicago, Booth School of Business. She is also the author of Get It Done: Surprising Lessons from the Science of Motivation.  In this episode we talk about: The crucial first step of setting goals How to pick the right goals for y

New episodes come out every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday for free, with 1-week early access for Wondery+ subscribers. --- We’re sharing a very special episode from a frequent guest of the show, Esther Perel. In this episode, “Love in War with Esther Perel: Ukraine,” you’ll hear a couples session led by Esther, between a husband and wife whose family has been torn apart by the war in Ukraine. Through the lens of relationship, you experience both the horrors of war and the relatability of intimate relationships. Esther Perel is a psychotherapist and New York Times bestselling author of many books, including Mating In Captivity. She’s also the host of the podcasts Where Should We Begin? and How’s Work?. 

New episodes come out every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday for free, with 1-week early access for Wondery+ subscribers. --- It is so easy to be pessimistic and, in fact, we are evolutionarily wired towards it with a built in negativity bias. This bias can be super useful, because it keeps us on guard for threats. But like all biases, it can warp the way we see the world. This is why optimism can be incredibly helpful. We’re not talking about blind optimism here but more about grounded, realistic and reasonable optimism.  Our guest today, Robin Roberts, has come by this skill the hard way. Not only is she one of the boldest of the boldface names in the news business, where she is forced to confront crime, war, and natural disasters on the regular, but she’s also come through two very serious bouts of cancer. Roberts is the longtime co-anchor of Good Morning America. She has a new book called, Brighter by the Day: Waking Up to New Hopes and Dreams in which she talks about how she has honed her optimism chops,

New episodes come out every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday for free, with 1-week early access for Wondery+ subscribers. --- Friendship might not necessarily be something you’ve considered to be an urgent psychological and physiological issue. One thing we explore a lot on the show is that the quality of your relationships determines the quality of your life, and sadly, in many ways, it’s harder than ever to make and keep friends. With loneliness and disconnection on the rise, our society just wasn’t constructed for social connection, and recent data suggests we’re in a friendship crisis, with many of us reporting that we have fewer close friendships than ever. Our guest today is Robin Dunbar, an Emeritus Professor of Evolutionary Psychology at Oxford University and the author of numerous books on the development of homo sapiens. Dunbar is perhaps best known for formulating “Dunbar's number,” which is a measurement of the number of relationships our brain is capable of maintaining at any one time. He is a worl

New episodes come out every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday for free, with 1-week early access for Wondery+ subscribers. --- Relationships can be tricky. Especially if you find yourself upset with someone, and instead of talking it through, you let it fester until one moment you completely lose it and end up having to apologize. If you’ve ever felt like you had friction with the people in your life, or that you’ve been taken for granted, today’s episode offers you solid strategies to cope.  Sister True Dedication is a Zen Buddhist nun and teacher ordained by the great meditation teacher and author, Thich Nhat Hanh. She edited several of Thich Nhat Hanh’s books, including The Art of Living and Zen and the Art of Saving the Planet. She was born in the United Kingdom, studied history and political thought at Cambridge University, and worked for BBC News before ordaining as a nun at the age of 27. In this episode we talk about:  The six phrases – or mantras – that Thich Nhat Hanh recommended people use in their

New episodes come out every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday for free, with 1-week early access for Wondery+ subscribers. --- You may remember hearing a massively viral story from a few years ago about a school in Baltimore that gave students meditation, instead of detention.  Ali Smith, Atman Smith, and Andres Gonzalez founded the Holistic Life Foundation and are the authors of Let Your Light Shine, which recounts the story of their work helping traumatized children in one of America’s most underserved cities, and how mindfulness tools can help children and communities not only survive, but thrive.  In this episode we talk about:  The story behind their meditation-instead-of-detention initiative Their experience asking principals to give them the most challenging students What it’s like working in one of the most violent cities in the world The results from teaching students yoga and meditation How we can apply the lessons they’ve learned to meditation and life Content Warning: Explicit language. For a cle

New episodes come out every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday for free, with 1-week early access for Wondery+ subscribers. --- One of the great perils and problems of our age is that we sometimes become too entrenched in our views and attached to being right.  According to guest George Saunders, the antidote is something he calls “holy befuddlement.”  George Saunders is the author of eleven books, including Lincoln in the Bardo, which won the 2017 Man Booker Prize for best work of fiction in English. His most recent book, Liberation Day, is a collection of short stories that explore the ideas of power, ethics, and justice, cutting to the heart of what it means to live in community with our fellow humans.  In this episode we talk about: How George Saunders creates “holy befuddlement” in himself and in his readers How shaving down dogmatism can help us be, in his words, less of a “turd” How to deal with heightened expectations we might have of ourselves Healthy ways to enjoy praise What it looks like to cultiv

New episodes come out every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday for free, with 1-week early access for Wondery+ subscribers. --- It might be hard to find a more annoying cliché than self-love; it can seem empty and inactionable. And even if you could make it work, I think many of us suspect it would lead to complacent resignation or unbridled narcissism. But there is an enormous amount of evidence that self-love, or as the scientists call it, self-compassion, can make you more effective in reaching your goals as well as lead to better relationships with everybody around you.  On today’s show, the great meditation teacher Sharon Salzberg will walk us through the idea that love— both self-love and other love— is a skill that can be cultivated with massively positive impacts.  Salzberg is a meditation pioneer, world-renowned teacher, and New York Times bestselling author. She is one of the first to bring mindfulness and lovingkindness meditation to mainstream American culture over 45 years ago, inspiring generations

New episodes come out every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday for free, with 1-week early access for Wondery+ subscribers. --- Are you interested in suffering less? Today's guest, Dharma teacher Pascal Auclair, is going to talk about seven very specific and practical ways to train your mind for reduced suffering by exploring a Buddhist list called the seven factors of awakening, which is a part of the fourth foundation of mindfulness. We’ve talked about a bunch of Buddhist lists on the show before, but this is one of the happiest of all the lists to explore.  Pascal Auclair has been immersed in Buddhist practice and study since 1997, sitting retreats in Asia and America. He has been mentored by Joseph Goldstein and Jack Kornfield, who have both been previous guests on this show. Pascal is now a core teacher at the Insight Meditation Society (IMS) in Massachusetts. He is also a co-founder of True North Insight and one of its guiding teachers.  This episode is the fifth and final installment of a series we've la