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

Chapter 9 “The New Caffeine”

“Retarded.”

That was how Private First Class Jason Lindemann, a twenty-something with a high-and-tight haircut and a permanently amused look on his face, described his first impression of meditation. “The first time they had us do it,” he told me, “I thought, ‘Oh man, here we go.’ ”

PFC Lindemann and I were talking in a dusty corner of the sprawling Camp Pendleton marine base in Southern California. “So no part of you thought this could in any way be useful?” I asked.

With zero hesitation, he said, “No.”

Lindemann was an involuntary subject in a multimillion-dollar scientific study, requested by the marine corps brass. The military’s interest in a practice that was seemingly anathema to the world of warfare was fueled by an explosion of science. Forget the blood pressure study that had made me willing to try meditation in the first place; this new research was on the next level. It was creating some surprising converts—previously hardened skeptics who were now employing mindfulness in ways that would revolutionize my approach to work, and drive a stake through the heart of the assumption that meditation made you, “like, totally ineffective.”

On my travels to various Buddhist seminars, I had started to hear mentions of scientific research into meditation. It sounded promising, so I checked it out. What I found blew my mind. Meditation, once part of the counterculture, had now fully entered the scientific mainstream. It had been subjected to thousands of studies, suggesting an almost laughably long list of health benefits, including salutary effects on the following:

• major depression

• drug addiction

• binge eating

• smoking cessation

• stress among cancer patients

• loneliness among senior citizens

• ADHD

• asthma

• psoriasis

• irritable bowel syndrome

Studies also indicated that meditation reduced levels of stress hormones, boosted the immune system, made office workers more focused, and improved test scores on the GRE. Apparently mindfulness did everything short of making you able to talk to animals and bend spoons with your mind.

This research boom got its start with a Jew-Bu named Jon Kabat-Zinn, a Manhattan-raised, MIT-trained microbiologist who claimed to have had an elaborate epiphany—a “vision,” he called it—while on a retreat in 1979. The substance of the vision was that he could bring meditation to a much broader audience by stripping it of Buddhist metaphysics. Kabat-Zinn designed something called Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction (MBSR), an eight-week course that taught secularized meditation to tens of thousands of people around America and the world. Having a simple, replicable meditation protocol made it easy to test the effects on patients.

Things truly got sci-fi when researchers started peering directly into the brains of meditators. A blockbuster MRI study from Harvard found that people who took the eight-week MBSR course had thicker gray matter in the areas of the brain associated with selfawareness and compassion, while the regions associated with stress actually shrank. This study appeared to confirm the whole respond-not-react superpower. The regions where the gray matter shriveled were, evolutionarily speaking, the oldest parts of the human brain, which sit right atop the spinal column, and are home to our most basic instincts. (As one person has called it, these are the “want-it don’t-want-it, have-sex-with-it-or-kill-it” zones.) Conversely, the areas that grew were the newer parts of the brain, the prefrontal cortices, which evolved to help us regulate our primal urges.

Another study, out of Yale, looked at the part of the brain known as the default mode network (DMN), which is active when we’re lost in thought—ruminating about the past, projecting into the future, obsessing about ourselves. The researchers found meditators were not only deactivating this region while they were practicing, but also when they were not meditating. In other words, meditation created a new default mode. I could actually feel this happening with me. I noticed myself cultivating a sort of nostalgia for the present, developing the reflex to squelch pointless self-talk and simply notice whatever was going on around me: a blast of hot halitosis from a subway vent as I walked to work, the carpet of suburban lights seen from a landing airplane, rippling water reflecting sine waves of light onto the side of a boat while I was shooting a story in Virginia Beach. In moments where I was temporarily able to suspend my monkey mind and simply experience whatever was going on, I got just the smallest taste of the happiness I’d achieved while on retreat.

Even though scientists were quick to point out that the research was still in its embryonic stage, these studies had helped demolish neuroscientific dogma that had prevailed for generations. The old conventional wisdom was that once we reached adulthood, our brain stopped changing. This orthodoxy was now replaced with a new paradigm, called neuroplasticity. The brain, it turns out, is constantly changing in response to experience. It’s possible to sculpt your brain through meditation just as you build and tone your body through exercise—to grow your gray matter the way doing curls grows your bicep.

This idea contradicted widespread cultural assumptions about happiness that are reflected in the etymology of the word itself. The root hap means “luck,” as in hapless or haphazard. What the science was showing was that our levels of well-being, resilience, and impulse control were not simply God-given traits, our portion of which we had to accept as a fait accompli. The brain, the organ of experience, through which our entire lives are led, can be trained. Happiness is a skill.

Among the unlikely people for whom the science was creating some open-mindedness about meditation were two hard-driving and successful women who both loomed large in my psyche.

My mother—the original skeptic in my life, the debunker of God and Santa Claus—was very impressed by the Harvard study showing gray matter thickening in meditators. After reading about it online, she asked me to give her a meditation guidebook for Christmas. A few weeks later, she sent me an excited email saying that she had read the book and had decided, during a taxi ride to the airport, to give it a try. She was able to follow her breath all the way to the terminal without breaking her concentration. She then started sitting for thirty minutes a day, something that had taken me a year to achieve. The rough breakdown of my emotional response to this information was: 80% validated, 17% humbled, 3% resentful.

A few months later, on a visit to New York, both my parents spoke enthusiastically about how meditation had stopped my mom’s snoring. (When I asked by what mechanism this possibly could have been achieved, no thesis was proffered.) Despite the ebullience, my dad was still not meditating—and, like with my wife, I knew better than to push.

I was also sensing new openness to meditation from another unexpected source: the woman who, for me, represented the gold standard in professional diligence, Diane Sawyer. She was one of the most fiercely intelligent and insatiably curious human beings I’d ever met. She read every newspaper and magazine known to man. She wrote and rewrote her own stories right up until airtime. She studied for interviews or major news events for weeks, memorizing obscure yet illuminating details.

Diane was inspiring to me in many of the same ways that Peter Jennings had been. She had a deep sense of responsibility to the audience. She insisted on providing viewers with useful information and practical insights rather than just doing the same old lazy story that everybody else was doing. She had a dizzying knack for identifying the key question at the heart of every story. Unlike with Peter, though, there were no temper tantrums. I had built up a reservoir of affection for Diane ever since she visited the ABC News bureau in Baghdad when I was stationed there before the war. Shortly after anchoring GMA live from the roof of the Information Ministry, she came to our office and spent several hours just hanging out. Here was a woman who had worked in the White House, become the first female correspondent for 60 Minutes, and had more journalism awards than I have teeth, casually eating bad Iraqi pizza with us.

That’s not to say I didn’t find her a little bit intimidating. When we went over scripts, she inevitably asked me an unanticipated and incisive question for which I had no answer.

At first, my meditation habit was a source of gentle ribbing. Diane had long teased me for being “pure.” She joked about my healthful diet, frequent exercise, and abstinence from booze and caffeine. (I had recently quit both—not because I had become a straight-edge yogi or whatever, but because, as I got older, my body simply couldn’t tolerate them.) I would try to defend myself, pointing to my dessert habit and taste for cheeseburgers. I did not, however, have the nerve to tell her I used to do enough drugs that it apparently contributed to my having a panic attack not ten yards away from her.

I fought through the fear that pitching Diane a story on meditation would only provoke an eye roll. I sent her an email, suggesting we do a piece about how the scientific research was inspiring people in unusual places to embrace mindfulness. To my delight, she bit.

When the PR woman in the leopard-print blouse started dropping phrases like “letting go,” and “turning in to your emotions,” I really knew meditation was breaking out of the Buddhist ghetto.

After Diane gave me the green light to go do some mindfulness stories, my first stop was Minneapolis, and the headquarters of General Mills, the corporate behemoth behind such brands as Cheerios, Betty Crocker, and Hamburger Helper. Everyone here was so earnest and hail-fellow-well-met, with crisp demeanors and twangy Midwest accents. Which made it all the more remarkable that there were now meditation rooms, complete with zafus and yoga mats, in every building in the complex.

The person responsible for this was a hard-charging, no-nonsense, sensible-haircut corporate attorney named Janice Marturano. She’d discovered meditation a few years prior, found it to be a massive value-add, both personally and professionally, and started spreading it virally through the executive ranks. She’d trained scores of her colleagues, including the PR woman whose job it was to shepherd us briskly through this hive of corporate busyness all day long.

A big part of Marturano’s success in bringing mindfulness to this unlikely venue was that she talked about it not as a “spiritual” exercise but instead as something that made you a “better leader” and “more focused,” and that enhanced your “creativity and innovation.” She didn’t even like the term “stress reduction.” “For a lot of us,” she said, “we think that having stress in our lives isn’t a bad thing. It gives us an edge.” I liked this—a meditation philosophy that left room for the “price of security.”

Marturano had a whole slew of practical tips that extended well beyond the meditation cushion. One of her main pieces of advice was a direct challenge to me, an assault on a central pillar of my work life.

“So you’re telling me that I can’t multitask?” I asked as we sat down for an interview.

“It’s not me telling you,” she said. “It’s neuroscience that would say that our capacity to multitask is virtually nonexistent. Multitasking is a computer-derived term. We have one processor. We can’t do it.”

“I think that when I’m sitting at my desk feverishly doing seventeen things at once that I’m being clever and efficient, but you’re saying I’m actually wasting my time?”

“Yes, because when you’re moving from this project to this project, your mind flits back to the original project, and it can’t pick it up where it left off. So it has to take a few steps back and then ramp up again, and that’s where the productivity loss is.” This problem was, of course, exacerbated in the age of what had been dubbed the “infoblitzkrieg,” where it took superhuman strength to ignore the siren call of the latest tweet, or the blinking red light on the BlackBerry. Scientists had even come up with a term for this condition: “continuous partial attention.” It was a syndrome with which I was intimately familiar, even after all my meditating.

Marturano recommended something radical: do only one thing at a time. When you’re on the phone, be on the phone. When you’re in a meeting, be there. Set aside an hour to check your email, and then shut off your computer monitor and focus on the task at hand.

Another tip: take short mindfulness breaks throughout the day. She called them “purposeful pauses.” So, for example, instead of fidgeting or tapping your fingers while your computer boots up, try to watch your breath for a few minutes. When driving, turn off the radio and feel your hands on the wheel. Or when walking between meetings, leave your phone in your pocket and just notice the sensations of your legs moving.

“If I’m a corporate samurai,” I said, “I’d be a little worried about taking all these pauses that you recommend because I’d be thinking, ‘Well, my rivals aren’t pausing. They’re working all the time.’ ”

“Yeah, but that assumes that those pauses aren’t helping you. Those pauses are the ways to make you a more clear thinker and for you to be more focused on what’s important.”

This was another attack on my work style. I had long assumed that ceaseless planning was the recipe for effectiveness, but Marturano’s point was that too much mental churning was counterproductive. When you lurch from one thing to the next, constantly scheming, or reacting to incoming fire, the mind gets exhausted. You get sloppy and make bad decisions. I could see how the counterintuitive act of stopping, even for a few seconds, could be a source of strength, not weakness. This was a practical complement to Joseph’s “is this useful?” mantra. It was the opposite of zoning out, it was zoning in.

In fact, I looked into it and found there was science to suggest that pausing could be a key ingredient in creativity and innovation. Studies showed that the best way to engineer an epiphany was to work hard, focus, research, and think about a problem—and then let go. Do something else. That didn’t necessarily mean meditate, but do something that relaxes and distracts you; let your unconscious mind go to work, making connections from disparate parts of the brain. This, too, was massively counterintuitive for me. My impulse when presented with a thorny problem was to bulldoze my way through it, to swarm it with thought. But the best solutions often come when you allow yourself to get comfortable with ambiguity. This is why people have aha moments in the shower. It was why Kabat-Zinn had a vision while on retreat. It was why Don Draper from Mad Men, when asked how he comes up with his great slogans, said he spends all day thinking and then goes to the movies.

Janice Marturano was on the bleeding edge of what had become an improbable corporate trend. Meditation classes had infiltrated not only General Mills but also Aetna, Procter & Gamble, and Target, where, as part of my Diane-approved field trip, I sat in on a weekly session at the corporate headquarters called “Meditating Merchants.” Mindfulness was also being taught in business schools and written about without derision in the Wall Street Journal and the Harvard Business Review. An article on Financial-Planning.com featured “meditation tips for advisors.” High-powered executives were using mindfulness to make sure that every confrontation didn’t escalate into a fight-or-flight event, and that every email, phone call, and breaking news alert didn’t derail their focus. This trend had become particularly hot in Silicon Valley, where meditation was now increasingly being viewed as a software upgrade for the brain. At Google, engineers were offered a class called “Neural Self-Hacking.” An article in Wired magazine referred to meditation as the tech world’s “new caffeine.”

It wasn’t just corporations hopping on this bandwagon, but also schools, prisons, the U.S. Forest Service, and, of course, the marines, who were actively eyeing meditation as a way to effect a sort of psychological “regime change” among their own troops. The final stop in my field trip was Camp Pendleton, where I met the reluctant meditator, Private First Class Lindemann.

The marines were initially interested in mindfulness because they thought it might help them deal with an epidemic of PTSD, but there was also hope that meditation could produce more effective warriors. The theory was that the practice would make troops less reactive, and therefore less vulnerable to the classic insurgent tactic of provoking the types of disproportionate responses that alienate the civilian population. What a counterintuitive notion: meditation as a way to deal with asymmetric warfare. As the woman who’d convinced the marines to conduct this experiment—Georgetown professor Liz Stanley—told me, “There is nothing incense-y about that. There just isn’t.”

While there was resistance at first, many of the marines ended up liking meditation. Even PFC Lindemann grudgingly came around. He told me he now found it easier to calm down after stressful situations. “At first, I was kind of skeptical,” he said, “but then you kinda start noticing a little bit of change. As you go further into it, you start understanding it.”

After shooting all of these stories, I, too, experienced a sudden “vision.” It wasn’t as dramatic as Jon Kabat-Zinn’s, but it did come at an unusual moment.

The producers of weekend GMA had decided to wire up a rental car with cameras, pack the anchors inside, punch in some GPS coordinates, and call it “America’s Cheapest Road Trip.” The conceit: have the cosseted on-air types drive themselves hundreds of miles to a seaside campground, pitch their own tents, and cook their own food; hilarity ensues. There was even a patina of news-you-can-use value to this ratings stunt because the economy was still in the tank, and the piece would contain a few useful nuggets of advice about how to do family vacations on a budget.

Somewhere between New York City and our final destination in Maryland, we stopped at one of those roadside plazas that have gas, greasy food, and bathrooms with fossilized filth dating back to the Mesozoic era. While I was waiting outside for Ron and Bianna to finish up inside, I decided to do a little walking meditation. About three steps into it, a family passed by and stared at me. I clammed up and pretended to check my BlackBerry.

That’s when I had my vision. Nothing too elaborate; I simply flashed on a world in which doing a zombie walk in public wouldn’t be slightly mortifying—where meditation would be universally socially acceptable. I felt nearly certain that this world was actually not too far off. Mind you, I wasn’t predicting a Tolle-esque “shift in planetary consciousness.” Nor was I forecasting that society would be overrun by “stream-entrants” and “non-returners” of the Joseph Goldstein variety. Instead, I pictured a world in which significant numbers of people were 10% happier and less reactive. I imagined what this could do for marriage, parenting, road rage, politics—even television news.

Public health revolutions can happen quite rapidly. Most Americans didn’t brush their teeth, for example, until after World War II, when soldiers were ordered to maintain dental hygiene. Exercise didn’t become popular until the latter half of the twentieth century, after science had clearly showed its benefits. In the 1950s, if you had told people you were going running, they would have asked who was chasing you. The difference with meditation was that if it actually took hold, the impact would go far beyond improving muscle tone or fighting tooth decay. Mindfulness, I had come to believe, could, in fact, change the world.

Of course, I hadn’t gotten into the whole meditation thing to have a global impact. My interests were parochial; I wanted relief from the ego. Now, though, I found myself in the funny position of believing deeply in a cause. I began attending conferences with names like Wisdom 2.0, Creating a Mindful Society, and Buddhist Geeks. I made new friends, like the beer-drinking, backslapping congressman from Ohio who wrote a book about mindfulness, and the former JPMorgan banker (a guy so successful even my brother was impressed) who started a new venture capital fund specifically designed to “bring mindfulness to scale.” I experienced a surge of excitement as I strategized with my new friends about how to expose meditation to a wider audience. We had conspiratorial meetings and meals; we exchanged emails; we hugged a lot.

In my view, the biggest impediment to Kabat-Zinn’s—and now my—vision becoming a reality was meditation’s massive PR problem. It was still mildly embarrassing to admit to most people that I meditated. This was largely because the practice was popularized in this country by Beat poets, robed gurus, and hippies—and that cultural hangover persisted. Stylistically, the presentation of the average meditation teacher struck me as a bizarre cousin of the stentorian monotone that TV reporters employ—an affectation to which I had sadly not been immune. Just as we in the news business too often relied on shopworn language—“Shock and disbelief in [fill in the blank] tonight . . .”—Buddhist teachers had their own set of hackneyed phrases. Stories were “shared”; emotions were “held in love and tenderness.” While the secular mindfulness people had dropped some of this lingo, they had replaced it with a jargon of their own, replete with homogenized, Hallmark-ized, irony-free terms like “purposeful pauses,” “meditating merchants,” and “interiority.” These people needed a Frank Luntz, that pollster who’d helped the Republicans rebrand the “estate tax” into the “death tax” and recast loosened pollution laws as “the Clear Skies Act.”

I wasn’t sure that I was the right Luntz for this job, but I figured it couldn’t hurt to pitch in. Ever since Bangor, I’d been obsessed with finding stories I liked and figuring out how to make them interesting to other people. Mindfulness, I now realized, was the best and potentially most impactful story I’d ever covered. In many ways, it was my craziest act of gonzo journalism. If it could help a monumental skeptic like me, I could only imagine what it could do for others, and I thought that if I could find a way to make it more broadly appealing, that would be a real service.

One-on-one preaching to my friends and family was still definitely a bad idea, but finding new ways to get the word out to a wider audience somehow seemed less obnoxious. To succeed, though, would require finding fresh ways to discuss the subject. It brought to mind a former colleague of mine from local news in Portland, Maine. He was a reporter named Bob Elliot, who used to post lists on the wall of the newsroom of what he called “lose ’ems,” clichéd words or phrases that were showing up too often in our newscasts. If any of the rest of us used a “lose ’em,” Bob would shoot us with a rubber band.

I took my first little stab at addressing meditation’s PR problem when World News aired my story on the increasing embrace of mindfulness in counterintuitive locales. We showed a graphic of a brain, illuminating the regions that, to use Diane’s words, got “plumped up” as a result of meditation. We used a sound bite from Rivers Cuomo, the lead singer of Weezer, who credited the practice with curing his stage fright. I explained how simple meditation was—and that there was no need for robes, chanting, incense, or joining a religious group.

When I walked off the set after my live shot, members of Diane’s team were abuzz. Was it really that simple? How many minutes a day did they need to do to change their brains?

The next morning I got an email from Diane herself, who expressed an interest in learning more about meditation. If I could hook someone like her, it felt like a pretty good start.

As excited as I was about the notion of popularizing the practice, the concerns of some of my old-school Buddhist friends, including Mark Epstein, did give me pause. The traditionalists did not appreciate the irony of capitalists and marines embracing a practice with a history of disdaining violence and accumulation of wealth. They worried that mindfulness would simply create better baby killers and robber barons. They pointed derisively to the proliferation of books such as Mindfulness for Dummies, The Mindful Investor, and The Joy of Mindful Sex. Critics had a term for this phenomenon: “McMindfulness.” There was something important being overlooked, they argued, in the mainstreaming of meditation—a central plank in the Buddhist platform: compassion.

While I’d digested enough dharma books and lectures to know that Buddhists were always going on about compassion, I had long figured I could ignore the issue, the same way I did with karma or reincarnation. It was true that mindfulness had made me calmer and less reactive, and that I now felt the urge to spread the word as far as I possibly could, but still, my goal was not to be Mother Teresa.

Despite my powerful experience of being snot-soaked and supine while doing compassion meditation on retreat, I had not subsequently pursued metta in my daily practice. My resistance was based, in part, on the fact that compassion meditation was a little annoying—but more significantly, it stemmed from a deep-seated suspicion: that we each have a sort of kindness set point, the result of factory settings that could not be altered, and that mine may not be dialed particularly high. I was a good enough guy, yes. I loved children and animals, etc. If no one was looking, I might even get misty during a rom-com. But the Buddhist concept of boundless compassion seemed out of reach.

Once again, science—and a well-timed personal encounter—would shatter my assumptions.