10% Happier with Dan Harris

You've got titles like Habits for Happiness, The Seven-Step Mindset Makeover, and Habits for Action.

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Everybody should read "My Body Is Not an Apology", Sonya Renee Taylor.

She is the author of a book called The Eating Instinct Food Culture Body Image and Gilt in America.

The book is called Fearing the Black Body.

She is the bestselling author of Fat Talk: Parenting in the Age of Diet Culture.

So I think what we're really seeing in parenting today is that a lot of us are very aware. We want to do things differently than how we grew up. You know, if you were a kid in the 80s or 90s, you were inducted into Diet Culture at quite a young age. You were given a lot of really strict messages around food in your body and I think there's been a real reckoning where we're recognizing the harm that caused.

I'm doing with this book is helping parents really understand where that bias comes from, how they can start to unlearn it and then really look at how it shows up in all of these arenas of family life where it just has no business.

He's the author of the forthcoming book The Hunger Habit, Why We Eat When We're Not Hungry and How to Stop.

The Hunger Habit is not a weight loss book.

It's to help people change their relationship to eating.

So there's a lot that's been written about in terms of whatever the diet de jour is.

It's really based on our clinical studies with our Eat Right Now program and what are those studies show?

okay we are talking about the book you sent me and I said okay I'm sorry I don't remember what book was it and then they'll start talking to me about Dostoevsky and the brothers' carol on top which is one of my favorite books and I'll just listen to them talk excitedly for 15 minutes and it's just the most extraordinary thing the most beautiful thing the most satisfying thing to have people creating relationships with ideas and values and understandings that are important to you and have them experience that and that's the thing that I do think is essential and it does come from as the Dalai Lama suggests the return on kindness and compassion you begin to see that it can actually achieve things that hopelessness and fear and anger can't achieve and that's a really exciting idea if you're trying to make it through the world in the 21st century at a time of so much violence in war and conflict and animosity and bigotry and all of these things that we see way too much of yeah it's so easy to get whether we're engaged in the sort of cinematic big work that you're I mean literally cinematic work that you're engaged with or we're just trying to get through in a quote unquote normal life it's easy given our media environment and given what's happening on the planet to get sucked into hopelessness but there is the antidote is around us all the time that's right and it's other people yeah yeah I think that's right and I think in many ways it also allows you to push back against you know fear and anger I do think that fear and anger are the essential ingredients of injustice and oppression they lead to depression and you know and despair and all of these terrible things and we're just living at a time when a lot of people are trafficking in the politics of fear and anger and I mean that broadly not just in our political sphere but in our social spheres and our cultural spheres and educational spheres that people seem to be motivated to use fear and anger as a currency to gain more influence and power that worries me because I look through world history and I see the worst and most tragic manifestations of human behavior rooted in these narratives of fear and anger the Holocaust was created by a narrative of fear and anger that were wandered in genocide a hundred days that was facilitated by this powerful a narrative of fear and anger you go any place in the world where people are being abused and mistreated if you talk to the abusers and those who are mistreating them they can give you a narrative of fear and anger to justify and defend what they are doing and I just think that fear and anger causes you to tolerate things you would not otherwise tolerate it causes you to accept things you would not otherwise accept how did we reconcile ourselves to be in slavers in this country to have millions of people violated and abused and say we mob violence throughout the 20th century the first half of the 20th century where black people pulled out of their homes and beaten and drowned and tortured and lynched sometimes on the courthouse lawn and and some of these mob members would bring their children to witness the torture and the violence and how is it that that would be a reasonable or rational thing to do even the architecture of segregation that I grew up with why this intense hatred of people because of their color not wanting them to sit where you sit not wanting them to eat where you eat go through the door where you go through all of that is rooted in these narratives of fear and anger many of which we inherit and if we don't consciously work to overcome they shape our lives and will feel rage in ways that we don't even understand and that's why for me countering that challenging that is so essential it doesn't mean we have to all agree on policies or issues or topics but we do have to understand that we don't make good decisions when those decisions are shaped by our worst fears or by our rage and anger and hope is the most powerful antidote to that and hope rooted in compassion and kindness hope rooted in the belief that we can do more than just rage at one another be afraid of one another hate one another I want to get on the other side of that because I don't want to be burdened by those things either and and in many ways it's a legacy that I feel fortunate to have inherited I mean when I look at American history I think about the four million people who were emancipated after the Civil War it would not have been irrational for them to say we want retribution against those who enslaved us who separated us from our children and our family members but most of them chose citizenship they chose fellowship they chose community was an act of hope that you could argue wasn't rational but it was powerful and all during that time of exclusion in disfavored I feel fortunate that were people in my ear saying don't hate those who exclude you don't hate those who don't want you to go to school with them who don't think you should be in the pool with them who don't want to sit next to you because if you do that you'll be defined by your hatred you'll be burdening yourself more than they could ever burden you and that relationship to a life for me is really essential because there are so many things that are enraging there are so many things that are oppressive there are so many things that are just heartbreaking when you see how humans interact with on another that it's very easy to get pulled into that narrative of fear and anger that can shape your whole life coming up Brian Stevenson talks about what he does when he sees fear and anger coming up in his own mind how he's learned to think about people he encounters along the way who he feels are abusing their power or acting in otherwise ugly ways and why he thinks it's important not just to criticize but also to state out loud your highest aspirations repeatedly

And she's the author of numerous best-selling books, including One Things Fall Apart and How We Live Is How We Die.

I have never met or interviewed Gloria Steinem, won't claim to know much about her, but she has a book title that I really like, which is The Truth Sets You Free, But First It Pisses You Off.

We wrote it meaning this book because it's the book we needed ourselves.

And that was when I was like, oh, yes, so we should write a book about that. So that's what we did.

And yet we are so different in the ways that we have responded to stress in our lives. Emily has always been a feeler who feels and I have always been not. I've always been super great at focusing and getting down to business and repressing anything that's inconvenient in the meantime because this was my natural response to stress was to ignore it and to repress it and to shove it as we have learned into my body to go hide.

It turned out I'm just fundamentally really great at repressing my emotions and I needed to learn the skill of moving through the cycles to allow them to complete so that all of that physiological response that is the nature of emotion did not get stuck in my body and cause inflammation and disease.

So we brought all those far-flung resources together of biology and sociology and psychology and philosophy and music and art and stories and Disney princesses.

Find your focus, own your attention, invest 12 minutes a day.

So it's the ability to have access to all of your mind's resources and you still in the book go to great lengths.

It's not that everything's going to be rosy, rainbows, unicorns, sunshine.

It's that when you cultivate the mind in this way and really it's I'm talking about a whole suite of contemplative practices having to do with mindfulness meditation. You get to befriend your mind and in particular your attention system in a way that gives you useful information about what you might do with your mind in that moment and the next.

I really have wrote it as sort of a gift to take everything we've learned in the lab with all these high stress, high demand populations and just make it available for everybody to benefit from what we've learned and you can check out our research and more about the book at my website amishi.com if you remember my first name AMISHI.com and if you want to check out a cool meditation practice tied to the book 10% happier app we'll have it on it.

A patient of mine gave me a book called Mindful Grieving.

I remember looking at it and thinking, why in the hell do I want to feel my grief? I am a ten of sadness.

I got his book. It's a really, really big book about the stages of meditation, Mahamudra, pointing out the way.

I bought it, put it down.

Five years later, I picked it up and it blew me away.

I realized I had the illusion I was meditating, but I was not meditating properly.

I've got to go meet this guy.

I've got to go train with him.

I've been recommending a lot lately you've all know a Harari's books Sapiens and and homodeous partly because he sees the world through the lens of fiction.

There's a really good book about this is very famous book okay the title makes it seem like it's a classic schlocky dumb self-help book but in fact it's actually a book about empathy it's called How to Win Friends and Influence People.

Oh yeah of course and I've read it I read it it's a great book I read it recently I thought I was gonna hate it and it was going to be the type of thing that I would mock yeah

Then we dive into Paul's previous book to talk about the difference between cognitive empathy and emotional empathy.

my book before here was a critique of empathy and argument at emotional empathy could lead us astray but what we're talking about here is cognitive empathy

my book was interested in emotional empathy feeling what other people feel so you're anxious I get anxious you're happy I get happy and I think this is going to be great could be great source of joy could be great source of personal connection but the problem is from a moral point of view if we let empathy guide us it's too narrow

the subtitle of my book Against Empathy is the case for rational compassion and it's a nice connection with our interests because men it mindfulness meditation argue to be one way to sort of quell empathy

we read the whole Little House on the Prairie book series which is like eight books of 200 pages each. It took a full year and they were so into these books.

He's the author of the best-selling book, Why We Remember, Unlocking Memory's Power to Hold On to What Matters.

So one key point is that when we remember, it's a very, very restricted view of the past.

And what I mean by this is that let's say if somebody walks away from this interview that we're doing right now, they've listened to it fully attentive, they would tell themselves, I've got a great memory.

So memory is more like a painting than a photograph.

My book is called Why We Remember, Unlocking Memory's Power to Hold On to What Matters.

In fact, that's the name of his new book: Finding Meaning: The Sixth Stage of Grief.

I actually use that phrase a lot in one of the books that I wrote because I always tell people, the pain of the loss, I can't take away it belongs to you.

As a reminder, his new book is called Finding Meaning, the sixth stage of grief available wherever you get your books.

She wrote the number one New York Times best-selling book also called Good Inside and she hosts a podcast by the same name.

yes I do believe people are Good Inside that they have inherent good identity and to me what's really exciting about that besides the fact that I believe it is it creates this gap

JVN is just out with a second book called Love That Story, a follow-up to the best seller called Over the Top...