Dan Harris - 10% Happier - How I Tamed the Voice in My Head, Reduced Stress Without Losing My Edge, and Found Self-Help That Actually Works—A True Story

“Self-cherishing, that’s by nature,” he said (by which I assumed he meant it’s “natural”). “Without that, we human beings become like robots, no feeling. But now, practice for development of concern for well-being of others, that actually is immense benefit to oneself.”

A light went off in my head. “It seems like you’re saying that there is a self-interested, or selfish, case for being compassionate?”

“Yes. Practice of compassion is ultimately benefit to you. So I usually describe: we are selfish, but be wise selfish rather than foolish selfish.”

This was an entirely new spin for me. Don’t be nice for the sake of it, he was saying. Do it because it would redound to your own benefit, that it would make you feel good by eroding the edges of the ego. Yoked to self-interest, the compassion thing suddenly became something I could relate to—maybe even something I could do.

After the interview, the Dalai Lama placed a white satin scarf around my neck and gave me a blessing. As our crew was packing up to leave, he called me back over one more time and said that if I was really interested in Buddhism, I should read his favorite book, by an ancient sage named Shantideva. The PR people from Emory breathlessly told me this must mean he really liked me.

Ultimately, I couldn’t get through the book—but that notion about being nice for selfish reasons, that I kept.

There was cutting-edge science to back up the Dalai Lama’s advice about the self-interested case for not being a dick. Right there on the Emory campus, in fact, scientists had been studying regular people who were given a brief course in compassion meditation. The subjects were then placed in stressful situations in the lab, including having a TV camera pointed at them (a detail which, for me, was particularly rich). The scientists found that the meditators released significantly lower doses of a stress hormone called cortisol. In other words, practicing compassion appeared to be helping their bodies handle stress in a better way. This was consequential because frequent or persistent release of cortisol can lead to heart disease, diabetes, dementia, cancer, and depression.

You didn’t even have to meditate to derive benefits from compassion. Brain scans showed that acts of kindness registered more like eating chocolate than, say, fulfilling an obligation. The same pleasure centers lit up when we received a gift as when we donated to charity. Neuroscientists referred to it as “the warm glow” effect. Research also showed that everyone from the elderly to alcoholics to people living with AIDS patients saw their health improve if they did volunteer work. Overall, compassionate people tended to be healthier, happier, more popular, and more successful at work.

Most compelling for people like me who were not naturally overflowing with loving-kindness, there was evidence that compassion meditation can actually make you nicer. The leading scientist in this area was a Jew-Bu named Richie Davidson (Harvard via Brooklyn) who now ran a large lab at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, called the Center for Investigating Healthy Minds. His team had done studies showing that people who were taught compassion meditation displayed increased brain activity in regions associated with empathy and understanding. They also found that preschoolers became more willing to give their stickers away to strangers. My favorite study, done at Emory, asked subjects to wear tape recorders for days at a time, which captured their conversations. The meditators were more empathic, spent more time with other people, laughed more, and used the word “I” less.

Compassion research was part of a larger shift in emphasis for modern psychology. For decades, scientists had focused mainly on cataloguing human pathology and cruelty, but now the positive emotions such as happiness, kindness, and generosity were getting their due. This research helped give rise to a new view of human nature itself, a move away from the prevailing paradigm that focused on the dark side of Darwin—in other words, the survival of the fittest. In the old view, man was thoroughly selfish, and morality but a thin veneer over a bottomless well of turpitude. The new view took into account a long-overlooked branch of Darwinian thinking, namely the observation that tribes who cooperated and sacrificed for one another were more likely to “be victorious over other tribes.” Apparently nature rewarded both the fittest—and the kindest.

I had my qualms. I worried that in competitive career fields like TV news, compassion was not adaptive. Also, I still wasn’t a huge fan of doing metta, which felt forced and artificial to me. But I wanted the aforementioned benefits. So, with some trepidation, I added a parallel track to the ongoing science experiment I’d been conducting on myself.

From a traditionalist standpoint, my approach to meditation—and that of most Western practitioners—was backward. In the Buddha’s day, he first taught generosity and morality before he gave his followers meditation instructions. The logic was self-interested: it’s hard to concentrate if your mind is humming with remorse over having been a shithead, or if you’re constantly scrambling to try to keep various lies straight. In his typical OCD fashion, the Buddha even compiled a list of the eleven benefits to practicing metta, which promised that you’d sleep better, your face would be radiant, people and animals would love you, celestial beings would protect you, and you’d be reborn in a happy realm. As usual, the list lost impact for me as it edged toward the supernatural.

The intellectual underpinnings of the practice were compelling. We all have an innate feeling of being separate from the world, peering out at life from behind our own little self, and vying against other isolated selves. But how can we truly be separate from the same world that created us? “Dust to dust” isn’t just something they say at funerals, it’s the truth. You can no more disconnect from the universe and its inhabitants than a wave can extricate itself from the ocean. I couldn’t imagine myself conquering these bedrock feelings of separation, but the effort seemed worthwhile.

A couple of times a week, I began adding metta into the mix of my daily meditation. Per Spring’s instruction from the retreat, I’d spend the first five or ten minutes of my sessions picturing and sending good vibes out to: myself, a “benefactor” (either Matt, Mark, or my parents), a “dear friend” (my favorite cat, Steve), a “neutral person” (our overnight doorman), a “difficult person” (not a hard category to fill), and then “all living beings” (usually a National Geographic –style tour of the planet). On retreat, Spring had advised us not to include anyone we were attracted to, but at home I decided to add Bianca to the mix, in her own special category.

Suffice it to say, I did not enjoy the process of systematically trying to cultivate sap. I was never able to get anywhere close to the weepy catharsis of the retreat, but as the Buddhist books I read assured me, the point wasn’t to make specific feelings happen on command, it was simply to try. The attempt itself was a way to build the compassion muscle the same way that regular meditation built the mindfulness muscle.

I’m not going to claim that what happened next was purely the result of doing metta. There may have been other factors, like the inevitable effects of maturation, or subtle peer pressure from my new friends in the mindfulness subculture. Whatever the cause, in the months after I started adding compassion into my meditation practice, things started to change. It’s not that I was suddenly a saint or that I began to exhibit extra-virgin extroversion, just that being nice—always important to me in the abstract, at least—now became a conscious, daily priority.