A Toolkit for a Noisy Mind: How John Green Manages Anxiety, Depression, and Intrusive Thoughts
3/25/20261 hr
Plus, how the bestselling author writes his way out of despair.
John Green is the award-winning, #1 bestselling author of books including Looking for Alaska, The Fault in Our Stars, Turtles All the Way Down, and The Anthropocene Reviewed. With his brother, Hank, John has co-created many online video projects, including Vlogbrothers and the educational channel Crash Course. His most recent book is Everything Is Tuberculosis.
In this episode we talk about:
- John's toolkit for managing thought spirals and dispair
- Why he wrote a whole book about the thing that terrifies him
- How he maintains hope in a chaotic and unfair world
- Finding the "self"
- Shame reduction through naming
- What John learned from his time as a chaplain in a pediatric hospital
- His current view of God
- And the question of how much––or how little––we should be sharing about ourselves with other people
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Transcript preview
First 90 secondsDan Harris· Host0:00
[upbeat music] This is the Ten Percent Happier podcast. I'm Dan Harris. [upbeat music] Hello, my fellow suffering beings. How we doing? Today we've got a wide-ranging, super interesting, and in its own way, very practical conversation with the writer and YouTuber John Green, who has a lot of experience, way too much experience, I think he would say, in managing anxiety, depression, and intrusive thoughts. We're gonna do a deep dive into his toolkit for managing the aforementioned, which includes a lot of effective strategies. We're also gonna talk about his view of God, how he maintains hope in a chaotic and unfair world, and why he wrote a whole book recently about the thing that terrifies him. Many of you know John Green, but for those of you who don't, he's the author of many, many bestselling books, including Looking for Alaska, The Fault in Our Stars, and Turtles All the Way Down. He's not only a writer, he does a ton of stuff on YouTube with his brother Hank. John has created something called Vlogbrothers and also an educational channel called Crash Course. So John's coming up. Before we dive in, though, heads up, we're in the middle of a five-day meditation challenge over on my new meditation app, Ten Percent with Dan Harris, and it's not too late to join. The challenge is called Even You Can Meditate. Every day it features