10% Happier
10% Happier: How I Tamed the Voice in My Head, Reduced Stress Without Losing My Edge, and Found Self-Help That Actually Works by Dan Harris
🚀 The Book in 3 Sentences
This is Dan Harris' journey into mindfulness and the big questions of the world.
Dan explores happiness, the fleeting impermanence of the world and the benefits of mediation and mindfulness whilst still being ambitious and not 'loosing his edge'
Dan's reflections on this experience, touching on his addictions, dissatisfaction and stories as a reporter of war zones and religion.
🎨 Impressions
I thoroughly enjoyed this book. Dan is insightful and reflective in his thoughts and experiences, and tells them in a beautiful way. If you are ambitious, hard-working etc and don't think meditation will work for reducing the voice in your head - this is the book.
How I Discovered It
I always enjoy reading a book about happiness - this is one that is often suggested. Initially I was confused with the name '10% happier' as it's not the biggest percentage. But when you read the book, you understand, that actually being just 10% happier all the time is worth pushing for when it takes a few minutes of mindfulness.
Who Should Read It?
If you want a realistic way of incorporating mediations and mindfulness in your day even if you are a busy person, Dan shares how it is possible and why you should do it. If you want to hear first-hand some of the experiences of an anchor, Dan shares his stories as one.
✍️ My Top 3 Quotes
Buddha embraced an often overlooked truism: nothing lasts – including us. We and everyone we love will die.
To be truly happiness, was to achieve a visceral understanding of the impermanence, which would take you off the emotional rollercoaster and allow you to see your dramas and desires through a wider lens.
Everything in the world is ultimately unsatisfying and unreliable because it won’t last. We don’t live our lives as if we recognise the basic facts.
📒 Summary + Notes
I have shared my favourite quotes from the book below. These summarise the key themes of the book: happiness, mindfulness, the meaning of life.
"I did not have a deep need to answer the big questions; I was comfortable with the mystery of how we got here and what would happen after we died. I might have disagreed with the conclusions reached by people of faith, but at least that part of their brain is functioning. Every week, they had a set time to consider their place in the universe to step out of the matrix and achieve some perspective. If you’re never looking up, I now realised, you’re just looking around. This taught me to see people of faith in a different light, but also taught me something else – the value of the viewpoint that transcended the mundane. Of course, I was unmistakably ambitious – and I wasn’t planning to magically force myself to believe in something for which there was, in my opinion insufficient evidence."
"Now, as a grown-up in the deadline dominated world news, I was always hurtling headlong through the day, checking things off my to-do list, constantly picturing completion and not carefully enjoying the process. The unspoken assumption behind most of my forward momentum was that whatever was coming next would definitely be better. Only when I reached that ineffable would I totally be satisfied. Some of the only times I recall being fully present when I was in a war zone or on drugs. It finally hit me that I’ve been sleepwalking through much of my life – swept along on the tide of automatic, habitual behaviour. All of the things I was most ashamed of in recent years could be explained through my ego: chasing the thrill of a war without contemplating the consequences, replacing the combat high with drugs and to see reflexively and unfairly judging people of faith, getting carried away with anxiety about work, neglecting my wife to work with my blackberry, obsessing about my stupid hair."
"It was in this moment, lying in bed late at night, that I first realised that the voice in my head – the running commentary that had dominated my field of consciousness since I could remember – was kind of an arsehole."
"Tolle open something up for me – a window into the clamour 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? Was it possible to defeat the self-absorption without ending up on a park bench? I was not about to let this drop. It was as if I’d met a man who told me my hair was on fire and then refused to offer me a fire extinguisher."
"Buddha embraced an often overlooked truism: nothing lasts – including us. We and everyone we love will die. Fame fizzles, beauty fades, continents shift. Pharaohs are swallowed by emperors, who fall to sultans, Kings, Kaisers and Presidents – and it all plays out against the backdrop of an infinite universe in which our bodies are made up of atoms from the very first exploding stars. We may know this intellectually, but on an emotional level we seem to be hardwired for denial. We comfort ourselves as if we had solid ground beneath our feet, as if we had control. We quarantine the elderly in nursing homes and pretend ageing will never happen to us. We suffer because we get attached to people and possessions that ultimately evaporate. When we lose our hair when we can no longer score that adrenaline from a war zone we so crave, we grow anxious and make bad decisions."
"Unlike many other faiths I had come across as a religion reporter, Buddhism wasn’t promising salvation in the form of some death-defying dogma, but rather through the embrace of the very stuff that will destroy us. To be truly happiness, was to achieve a visceral understanding of the impermanence, which would take you off the emotional rollercoaster and allow you to see your dramas and desires through a wider lens. Waking up to the reality of our situation allows you to let go and to drop your attachments."
"My issues with meditation was compounded by my resistance with my extremely limited attention span. I assume that there was no way my particular mind – whirring at best, at worst a whirlwind – could ever stop thinking."
"Everything in the world is ultimately unsatisfying and unreliable because it won’t last. We don’t live our lives as if we recognise the basic facts. How often I’ll be waiting for the next pleasant hit of whatever. The next meal at the next relationship or the next latte or the next vacation. We just live in anticipation of the next enjoyable thing that we will experience. I mean we’ve been blessed with a number of pleasant experiences we had in our lives. Yet when we look back, where are they now?"
"In the world characterised by impermanence but all of our pleasures are fleeting, I had subconsciously assumed that if only I could get the weekend Good Morning America gig, I would achieve bullet-proof satisfaction – and I was shocked when it didn’t work out that way. This is a lie we tell ourselves our whole lives: as soon as we get the next meal party vacation, get married, get a promotion, get to the airport check-in, get through security and consume a cinnamon bun, we will really feel good. But as soon as we find ourselves in the airport gate area having ingested 470 calories worth of sugar and fat before dinner, we don’t bother to examine the lie that fuels our lives. We tell ourselves to sleep it off, take a run, eat a healthy breakfast, and then finally, everything will be complete. So much of our life is pushed forward by these if only thoughts, and yet that itch remains. The pursuit of happiness becomes our source of unhappiness."
"The brain is a pleasure-seeking machine. Once your teacher, through meditation, the brain will get used to being in the present moment and over time, the brain will want more and more mindfulness. He compared it to lab rat that learn to avoid an electric shock. When you see that there is something better than what we have it’s just a matter of time before your brain likes it. If you give your brain enough of a taste of mindfulness it will eventually create a self-reinforcing spiral – a retreat from greed and hatred that could potentially lead all the way to a definitive uprooting of negative emotions (enlightenment)."
“Mindfulness now does a pretty good job of tying up the voice and putting duct tape over it now. I’m still a manically hard worker; I make no apologies for that. I still believe firmly that the price of security is insecurity – that a healthy amount of neuroticism is good. Paradoxically, looking inward has made me more outward-facing. And while I still worry about work, learning not to care at least 10% of the time, has freed me up to focus more on the part of the job that matters most."
