So, the full title of this book by Dan Harris is: 10% Happier: How I Tamed the Voice in My Head, Reduced Stress Without Losing My Edge, and Found Self-Help That Actually Works. My review is long, too, so bear with me here....
Dan Harris is a news anchor on ABC. Now he anchors Nightline and weekend GMA, but he's been in lots of places around ABC. In 2004, he was reading a segment with 4 stories for a news bit. He started having a panic attack on national television. He could only make it through 2 stories and had to stop. He had only just began his journey with anxiety and panic. I remember hearing about his live-air panic attack but not much else about him.
I have listened to this book on my way to and from work for the past couple of weeks and finished it on the way home tonight. It was an Audible book, intrigued me a while back and was on a special sale, so I bought it. I struggle with anxiety and worry, not to mention I have had a panic attack or two in my day. The title was catchy, the author was the narrator, the content was relevant, so I thought I'd give it a go.
Talk about challenging preconceived notions of mine. A timeline of my listening to the book:
- After the intro to the book: "Meditation? Mindfulness? Breathing? That's bull crap. I've tried breathing through panic and it totally doesn't work." (Even though a therapist has assured me it does and can and that practicing mindfulness would be excellent for me. She a Christian counselor, so I know it won't conflict there with my faith, but still...I poo-pooed the idea. Have you every tried to turn off a brain that doesn't shut up? I have dabbled in yoga, but not noticed anything.)
- A bit into the book (minus the drug addiction): "Seriously? Is this guy inside my head? I do that, too. And that...and that. Whoa - he really hit the nail on the head there."
- Further yet: "HA! He's a huge skeptic about all this mindfulness stuff. Even the big guys who write books about it don't have answers for his questions! Especially his "most important" question. He's skeptical of everyone" (He's a reporter, and was a religion-esque reporter for a while so he could interview the people that wrote these books he read.)
- Over halfway done: "Ok, this stuff is really interesting. It really seems to work for him. I had no idea that mindfulness and meditation were also this. I thought it was hippie-"enlightened"-Buddists sitting in fields and combines doing this stuff. He really makes a lot of good points as to why this stuff works. It wasn't easy for him to do this all, but he gave it a shot and wow!"
- Right before the epilogue: "Well, balls. Everything I thought about meditation and mindfulness was totally wrong. He had so many parallels to things my mind struggles with that if it can help him maybe it can help me."
- After the book was done but before writing this: I now have 2 meditation apps on my phone. I'm trying to cut out 5-10 minutes a day to do them. I have an understand of what it is and what the struggles are. I've read/skimmed/perused a lot of "the key to anxiety" books in a multitude of genres. They were all telling me what to do. Dan's book was autobiographical (loosely, since it wasn't really all about his life), so it was "Hey, here's what I did. It worked for me. Maybe give it a shot, but if you don't, you still got an entertaining story out of the deal."
Also, I don't think people who meditate/practice mindfulness/etc are crazy anymore. The ironic thing about this book is Dan talks about all the judgements he made on people before he really knew them. We all do this, but he reconciles it a lot and says, "xyz was proving my initial judgement wrong, just like everyone else."
Dan Harris's review of his book on Goodreads is "A heartbreaking work of staggering genius."
It's an easy read/listen, has a lot of extremely interesting information in it without being cram-down-your-throat-y. Definitely a book I'll be recommending.
256 pages/7 hours 50 minutes
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