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What it argues
10% Happier is Dan Harris's account of discovering meditation after a panic attack live on Good Morning America in 2004 forced him to confront an anxiety problem he'd been managing with cocaine and a punishing work schedule. Harris is a television journalist and ABC News anchor, and the book is written in his voice — skeptical, competitive, self-deprecating, and suspicious of anything that smells like self-help. The result is the most effective gateway to meditation for people who consider themselves too hard-edged or rational for it.
The book tracks Harris's path from panic attack to reluctant meditator across encounters with figures from evangelical Christians and new-age gurus to the Dalai Lama, Eckhart Tolle, and eventually Bhante Gunaratana and Mark Epstein. His reporting instinct serves him well: he approaches every teacher as a story, interrogating their claims, looking for the gap between their message and their behavior, and eventually identifying the claims that survive scrutiny. The eventual teacher who cracks him is the psychotherapist and Buddhist practitioner Mark Epstein, who explains meditation in psychological and scientific terms that Harris can engage with without feeling credulous.
What it gets right
- 1.
Meditation is not a mystical or New Age practice but a trainable cognitive skill with real effects on the relationship between awareness and the automatic thoughts and impulses that drive behavior.
- 2.
The inner narrator — the voice that commentates, criticizes, and plans — is not 'you' but a mental pattern you can observe; that observation, practiced regularly, reduces its automatic power over mood and behavior.
- 3.
The 'price of security' theory Harris develops with his therapist: anxiety that served him well as a driven journalist was the same mechanism that was also making him miserable, and managing it required neither eliminating ambition nor ignoring anxiety.
What it covers
Who wrote it
Dan Harris is an anchor for ABC News and co-anchor of Nightline, where he has covered wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, and elsewhere, and reported on religion and spirituality for Good Morning America and ABC News. He received a journalism degree from St. Lawrence University and began his career at local television stations. His public panic attack in 2004, broadcast nationally on Good Morning America, became the catalyst for the journey described in 10% Happier. He subsequently founded the 10% Happier app and podcast, which bring secular meditation and mindfulness content to a wide audience, particularly skeptics. His other books include Meditation for Fidgety Skeptics.
