PDF Summary:10% Happier, by Dan Harris

Former ABC News anchor Dan Harris believes anyone can benefit from meditation. In 10% Happier, he offers a skeptic’s journey through the world of self-help following his meltdown on live television. Harris explains how meditation allowed him to get control of his anxiety, manage his ego, and become a more compassionate person. This book explores how mindfulness and meditation can improve your life and career—even by just 10%.

In this guide, we’ll explore Harris’s understanding of mindfulness, meditation, and Buddhist principles. We’ll also discuss the lessons meditation can teach you, explain how to start meditating, and debunk some common misconceptions about mindfulness. Along the way, we’ll provide research on meditation and other actionable tips from experts.

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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.

Learn to Respond, Not React

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:

1. We like it. Think about meeting your friend’s new puppy.
2. We don’t like it. Think about the traffic on your way home from work.
3. We ignore it. Think about walking down a busy street and passing dozens of people.

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.)

Learn to Worry Productively

Harris says that because meditation allowed him to identify when his thoughts were running out of control, he 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.)

Learn to Be Compassionate

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.)

How to Start Meditating

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:

• Sit comfortably.
• Focus on your breath. Pay attention to the act and sensation of breathing.
• When your mind wanders (and it will), calmly refocus your attention on your breath.

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.)

How to Be Mindful in Everyday Life

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:

1. Recognize: Become aware of what you’re feeling.
   • For example, after snapping at a coworker, you might recognize that you’re feeling stressed, frustrated, and overwhelmed by your workload.
2. Allow: Let the emotion be what it is. Don’t feel guilty about your negative feelings, and don’t try to push them away.
   • Acknowledge that you’re stressed, and don’t tell yourself to “just get over it.”
3. Investigate: Figure out how the feeling is manifesting in your body. Your shoulders may be tense or your brow might be furrowed as a result of stress.
   • Take a mental note of your body, noticing that your jaw is clenched and your breathing is shallow.
4. Non-identification: Understand that this emotion doesn’t define you. Just because you’re angry or sad now doesn’t mean you will be forever.
   • Don’t attach to the fact you’re stressed about work and don’t jump to the conclusion that you’re a workaholic. Consider the difference between telling yourself, “I am stressed” versus “I feel stressed”: It’s the difference between identifying as a stressed person and identifying as a calm person who feels temporarily stressed.

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.

Debunking Mindfulness Misconceptions

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:

• Mindfulness is about practice, not perfection. Harris points out that sometimes we think meditation has to be perfect (like having a completely clear head while meditating) in order to be beneficial. 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. (Shortform note: In Grit, Angela Duckworth echoes this idea, arguing that consistent, deliberate practice is the key to success in any endeavor. She outlines a process for practicing deliberately: set a small, specific goal; focus your full attention on that goal; seek feedback from someone experienced; reflect on the feedback; keep practicing until you’ve reached your goal; repeat the process with a new goal.)
• Mindfulness won’t make you less successful. Harris notes that, at one time, he believed that the calmness that comes from mindfulness might temper the ambition he needed to strive for success. However, he learned that the opposite is true: Mindfulness can assist your success because it can help you understand what is and isn’t in your control—what you can and can’t change—so that you can direct your efforts toward productive activities instead of activities that won’t benefit you. (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.)
• Mindfulness won’t make you less creative. While some people might fear that overcoming their mental stress will decrease their creativity (believing that creativity is sparked by struggle), Harris argues that mindfulness helps you examine your insecurities, negative feelings, and self-disgust, which makes you more insightful, not less. (Shortform note: In Mindfulness for a More Creative Life, Danny Penman argues that mindfulness boosts creativity due to three essential elements: receptivity to new ideas, better attention to 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. Mindfulness can also make us more resilient after failure, which is inevitable in the creative process.)
• Mindfulness won’t make you a pushover. Harris argues that you can still respectfully stand up for yourself, even if you’re now less emotionally charged by events. 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. (Shortform note: 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 your levels of 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.)