51 pages • 1 hour read
Dan Harris10% Happier: How I Tamed the Voice in My Head, Reduced Stress Without Losing My Edge, and Found Self-Help That Actually Works
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 2014A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 8-9Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 8 Summary: “10% Happier”
After returning from the retreat, Harris quickly fell back into his everyday habits. Moreover, he was beset with a new set of problems at work, including a contract negotiation at ABC that stalled. Further, most people met his new devotion to meditation with skepticism, where “[t]he subtext always seemed to be, ‘So you’ve pretty much joined a cult, haven’t you?’” (153). After several conversations in which he felt his practice was misunderstood, he responded to one query with “‘I do it because it makes me 10% happier’…[which] had the dual benefit of being catchy and true” (154). When people started to respond positively to this summation, Harris started to seriously think about writing a book about his experience.
He met with Goldstein for an interview, and after learning how Goldstein himself got into meditation, asked him to justify the intense retreats, like those at Spirit Rock, about which many people remained skeptical. Goldstein argued that being in the environment of a retreat allows participants to become familiar with their thought patterns and, thus, achieve greater understanding of what is important to them. Harris, while a proponent of the positive effects of meditation, did press Goldstein on the idea that enlightenment ends a person’s dukkha and leads them to Nirvana, or enlightenment. Earlier, Harris conveyed that English has no direct translation for the term dukkha, which is mostly translated as “life’s suffering” but Buddhists say is closer to the concept of life being “unsatisfying” or “stressful” (142). Goldstein noted its four stages in which one becomes a stream-enterer, once-returner, non-returner, and then an enlightened being, or arhant. While Harris was open to Goldstein’s concepts regarding enlightenment, they did not quite gel (157). Harris wasn’t sure how dukkha could end.
Even so, mindfulness was useful for Harris. He was happier at home and nicer to his co-workers. He signed his contract and began work on Good Morning America as a weekend anchor. This change in position was difficult for Harris, as he had less control over the on-air content now that he was part of a team. He also had to face increasingly public criticisms via social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter. However, these blows to his self-esteem and his need for control were mitigated by his ability to confide in Bianca, his meditation practice, and his use of RAIN. Goldstein’s question of usefulness also helped to put crises in perspective: Although mindfulness didn’t completely eliminate Harris’s problems, it did help them ease faster.
Chapter 9 Summary: “The New Caffeine”
While personally acknowledging that meditation was something of a superpower, Harris felt his belief supported when growing reports suggested meditation’s effects can be proved by science. This, Harris believed, could change the mind of even die-hard skeptics. Doctors were discovering how meditation could help with “major depression, drug addiction, binge eating, smoking cessation, stress among cancer patients, loneliness among senior citizens, ADHD, asthma, psoriasis, irritable bowel syndromes” (168). In fact, while studying those who took an eight-week course of mindfulness-based stress reduction, Harvard scientists found “thicker gray matter in the areas of the brain associated with self-awareness and compassion, while the regions associated with stress actually shrank” (169). In other words, meditation had both psychological and physiological effects.
Harris was delighted to find that he could relay to people the idea that happiness could be actually enhanced by the Buddhist practice. He discovered that a person was not limited by genetics; one could really train one’s mind to become happier. With his new knowledge of scientific studies, Harris pitched a series of stories on meditation to ABC’s head anchor, Diane Sawyer, whom he deeply admired, and was excited when she said yes. His first story was about how meditation was being used in the corporate offices of the food producer General Mills. Its vice-president had brought mindfulness to the company’s campus in Minneapolis with positive results.
Harris was impressed by Janice Maturano’s ability to get others to embrace meditation not as a Buddhist technique for stress reduction but as a way to make a person a more powerful leader. Additionally, she stressed getting rid of multitasking and the necessity of taking breaks throughout the day to pause and reflect. These, she found, made people more productive, not less. Reading additional studies, Harris found that “[s]tudies showed that the best way to engineer an epiphany was to work hard, focus, research, and think about a problem—and then let it go. Do something else” (174). In the space of rest, an answer, solution, or breakthrough would occur. General Mills wasn’t the only corporation employing such techniques. Meditation was also being used in schools, prisons, government agencies, and the military.
While working on these stories, Harris solidified his goal as he “pictured a world in which significant numbers of people were 10% happier and less reactive” (176). He decided it would be necessary to help the public relations reputation of meditation and decided to follow Maturano’s example. His story about meditation aired on World News. Using all the scientific research he’d learned, along with a testimonial from a popular singer, Harris explained how simple and beneficial meditation was as a technique to ease anxiety. The story proved popular, and Harris’s devotion to his cause increased; however, one aspect of the practice seemed out of reach. Despite his belief in meditation overall, Harris was hesitant to embrace the practice of loving-kindness that had reduced him to tears on his retreat.
Chapters 8-9 Analysis
The purpose of these chapters is to show that once one has a life-altering experience, they might have difficulty explaining it to others, especially those who prove resistant. A preconceived notion Harris’s audience might have is the ease with which the transformed newscaster went back to his life and created 10% Happier. While his day-to-day habits resumed, Harris faced the challenge of being recognized as a meditator. This news was met with confusion, lack of enthusiasm, and sometimes derision by family and friends, co-workers, and strangers. As Harris deeply desired to share his experience, he discovered he has to come up with a way to talk about what he went through without alienating others.
Here, Harris shows that the techniques he has explained to us definitely work to mitigate his anxiety over these and other issues. They make him more understanding of others, as he uses equanimity to observe that everyone is going through their own challenges. While, later in the book, Harris doubts his ability to be compassionate, he already exhibits it when he notes, “[E]veryone has their own Weirs and Muirs they’re competing against” (153). While many people might give up when they find people don’t understand them, Harris keeps trying to communicate—and then hits on the phrase “10% happier,” a low number that is in tune with Harris’s skeptical nature.
Like Epstein, Goldstein emerges in this chapter as another positive mentor for Harris. When Harris test drives his idea that he should term his experience with meditation as making him “10% happier,” Goldstein agrees that it’s a good return that will grow. Yet, once again, Harris is somewhat doubtful: While 10% seems like a good return, could it really grow? As he established early in the Preface, Dan Harris respects scientific study. So, when he discovers scientists are studying meditation and confirming its benefits, he gains even more enthusiasm. Since the case for spirituality often rests on the unknown, in finding out that MRIs and other tests can measure meditation’s ability to grow the empathy centers of the brain, Harris can ground the benefits of meditation in the physical world. This discovery allows Harris to let some of his doubt go as he learns that the brain can be trained to embrace happiness.
Receiving this new knowledge allows Harris to advance his position that meditation can work. Here, he uses some of the techniques that led him astray in his early career to beneficial ends. His passion and enthusiasm win him converts, including his skeptical mother. He finally has a new language—with obsessive proof to back it up. This leads Harris, like most returning heroes in quest narratives, to a vision for change. In this new world of Harris’s creation, “meditation would be universally socially acceptable” (178). Harris clearly doesn’t want to be followed like a Chopra or a Vitale; instead, he wants people to benefit from the same practices that helped him.
