Brain Won't Stop? Here's How to Calm Down | Dan Harris
5/22/202632 min
On short-circuiting anxiety, breaking thought loops, and learning how to talk to yourself.
In this live Q&A, Dan covers:
- Why action is the best antidote to AI anxiety — and what's actually in your control
- How to use your meditation practice inside an MRI (and when it's okay to just get sedated)
- Joseph Goldstein's "dead end" technique for breaking out of repetitive thought loops
- Why certainty is not an indicator of truth — and how open-mindedness works in a polarized world
- The Buddhist take on alcohol, and Dan's surprisingly candid answer about his own relationship with substances
- How to stop feeding the need for external approval — without toxic positivity
- Why mindfulness in Pali literally means "remembering" — and why you'll always need to hear this stuff again
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Clips
Transcript preview
First 90 secondsDan Harris· Host0:00
[upbeat music] This is the Ten Percent Happier podcast. I'm Dan Harris. [upbeat music] Hello, everybody. How we doing? Today I'm gonna take your questions on a whole range of juicy subjects: AI anxiety, specifically what to do when you're really worried that AI's gonna take your job. We talk about coping with an impending MRI when you're claustrophobic, and I'm gonna be embarrassingly honest about my own experience with that. We get into a technique from the meditation teacher Joseph Goldstein for breaking out of mental loops that you've been in a thousand times. There's a great question about the need for external approval, which as a former anchorman, I, I have a lot of feelings about. And we wrap up with something I think is actually very profound, which is why we need to hear the same things [laughs] over and over before they sink in. So what you're about to hear is a recording of a live session I did with some subscribers to my new-ish meditation app, which is called Ten Percent with Dan Harris. We do these sessions every Tuesday afternoon. It's a great chance to meditate together, to get your questions answered, and really to experience the power of the carpool lane, which accelerates learning, growth, and happiness. The Buddha knew this, and so do modern psychologists, who call it social support. Speaking of my app,