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 10 The Self-Interested Case for Not Being a Dick

The international avatar of compassion marched briskly into the room and declared that he had to relieve himself.

“First duty!” said His Holiness the Dalai Lama, as he bustled off toward the bathroom. He seemed sprightly, but certainly not, as decades of relentlessly positive publicity might have led one to believe, trailing pixie dust. Moreover, the members of his entourage—often a reflection of the person they serve—were uniformly stern and unsmiling.

I came into this interview with a bad attitude. Most of my friends in the meditation world revered the Dalai Lama, but to me he represented the part of Buddhism with which I was least comfortable. What I liked about the dharma was its rigorous empiricism and unyielding embrace of hard truths. Here, though, was a guy in robes, anointed at the age of two because some government monks claimed to have seen special signs, like a rainbow in the sky near his childhood home. Fast-forward a few decades and he was buddies with the Beastie Boys and Richard Gere, invited to guest edit Vogue, featured in Apple ads, and the subject of adoring movies by the likes of Martin Scorsese (who reportedly said he could feel his heart beat more keenly in the Dalai Lama’s presence).

My contrarian impulses were heightened by the fact that I’d just watched a bunch of scientists here at Emory University fawn all over the Dalai Lama. As the academics presented the results of their research on the effects of meditation, they leaned forward, literally on the edge of their seats, while obsequiously calling him “Your Holiness.” Meanwhile, he sat there wearing an oddly inappropriate sun visor (presumably to protect his eyes from the overhead lights).

Once His Holiness had emptied his bladder, he was back in character, the smiley guy we know from gauzy hagiographies. The Emory conference had just wrapped up, and we were going to do the interview backstage. I started by asking about his long-standing support for scientific research into meditation. “There’s a risk,” I said. “What if scientists discover something that contradicts your faith?”

“No—no risk. If a scientist confirm nonexistence of something we believe, then we have to accept that.”

“So if scientists come up with something that contradicts your beliefs, you will change your beliefs?”

“Oh yes. Yes.”

Reassuring answer. I wondered to myself, though, whether this policy applied to the issue of rebirth. If scientists could prove that he wasn’t the reincarnation of the previous Dalai Lama, it would erase all his religious and political power, leaving him just one more old man in a visor.

Next litmus test: “Is your mind always calm?” I asked.

“No, no, no. Occasionally lose my temper.”

“You do?”

“Oh yes. If someone is never lose temper then perhaps they may come from another space,” he said, pointing toward the sky and laughing from the belly, his eyes twinkling beneath his thick glasses.

“So if somebody says to you, ‘I never lose my temper,’ you don’t believe them?”

“No. And some people say this is some miracle power—I don’t believe.”

Within minutes, he had already proven himself more reasonable than either Eckhart Tolle or Deepak Chopra.

As I sat there, surrounded by cameras, my crew, the Emory PR people, and His Holiness’s Tibetan retinue, it dawned on me that the Dalai Lama was yet another person I’d prematurely misjudged. After all, even if he subscribed to a metaphysical program I didn’t share, he had actually played a key role in jump-starting the scientific research into meditation, providing both inspiration and funding. What’s more, I realized, one should probably not overlook that whole thing where he responded to the Chinese invasion of Tibet—from which he barely escaped with his life—with repeated requests for forgiveness and nonviolence.

As the interview progressed, my posture—both internally and externally—changed. It’s not that I was feeling my heart beat more keenly, à la Scorsese, but, like the academics I’d scorned at the conference, I, too, was now leaning forward in my chair, with the closest my face can come to a beatific expression. Meanwhile, I was relieved to find the Dalai Lama seemed to be pretty engaged himself. I’d read that if he leaned back in his chair, that meant he’d lost interest. But he was still inclined toward me, eyes bright.

Toward the end of our twenty-minute interview (the Tibetans, like Tolle’s people, were very strict about time) came an exchange that fundamentally changed my view on compassion. I brought up something he’d posted on Twitter. (The fact that he had a Twitter feed was another reason to like the man—although I was pretty sure his staff managed the account.) “You have a quote that I love. You say, ‘Most of one’s own troubles, worries, and sadness come from self-cherishing, self-centeredness.’ But don’t we need to be somewhat self-centered in order to succeed in life?”

“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.

I instituted a make-eye-contact-and-smile policy that turned out to be genuinely enjoyable. It was like I was running for mayor. The fact that my days now included long strings of positive interactions made me feel good (not to mention popular). Acknowledging other people’s basic humanity is a remarkably effective way of shooing away the swarm of self-referential thoughts that buzz like gnats around our heads.

At work, I got better at abstaining from gripe and gossip sessions. Complaint is the background noise of news, as well as the secret handshake, like fax machines beeping at one another, or dogs sniffing each other’s rear ends. While I didn’t entirely swear off this kind of chatter—some discussions were too delicious—I did my best to avoid it, knowing that I’d probably want to bathe in Purell afterward.

I would see people losing their tempers—like fellow passengers at the airport going apeshit on TSA employees—and I would empathize. True, I might experience a brief burst of superiority and an urge to recommend meditation to them, but I could also, in the style of Bill Clinton, feel their pain, the toxins running through their veins. The Buddha captured it well when he said that anger, which can be so seductive at first, has “a honeyed tip” but a “poisoned root.”

It’s not that I never got annoyed anymore. In fact, when you’re mindful, you actually feel irritation more keenly. However, once you unburden yourself from the delusion that people are deliberately trying to screw you, it’s easier to stop getting carried away. As the Buddhists liked to point out, everyone wants the same thing—happiness—but we all go about it with varying levels of skill. If you spend a half hour on the cushion every day contending with your own ego, it’s hard not to be more tolerant of others.

I had to swallow hard and admit that perhaps the concept of karma did, in fact, have some validity. Not the stuff about how the decisions we make now play out in future lifetimes. In my emerging understanding, there was nothing mechanistic or metaphysical about karma. Robbing a bank or cheating at Scrabble would not automatically earn you jail time or rebirth as a Gila monster. Rather, it was simply that actions have immediate consequences in your mind—which cannot be fooled. Behave poorly, and whether you’re fully conscious of it or not, your mind contracts. The great blessing—and, frankly, the great inconvenience—of becoming more mindful and compassionate was that I was infinitely more sensitive to the mental ramifications of even the smallest transgressions, from killing a bug to dropping trash on the street.

I recalled how my dad once described undergoing a shift in his professional life where the achievements of his mentees began to mean more to him than his own. I wasn’t quite there yet, but I did feel an increasingly strong urge to provide for younger ABC News staffers the kind of advice and counsel that Peter Jennings and now Diane Sawyer had provided for me. I found that applying the “price of security” maxim by proxy—worrying about other people’s professional challenges—was much more easeful than applying it on myself. It dawned on me that much of what had been driving me since the beginning of my “spiritual” adventure had been a not-quite-fullyconscious desire to live up to my parents and my wife, all three of whom had, for years, been putting on a clinic in metta, even without a formal practice.

Admittedly, there was a large amount of self-interest at play here. Not letting my mind get locked in negativity made space for something else to emerge. I experienced a phenomenon I had heard Joseph once describe: a virtuous cycle, in which lower levels of anger and paranoia helped you make better decisions which, in turn, meant more happiness, and so on.

There were also benefits that might have been a little too selfish for the Dalai Lama’s taste. For example, being nice was a great manipulation tool. Turns out, it’s pretty simple to win people over, especially in tense situations, if you’re able to take their perspective and validate their feelings. And once they like you, they’re much more likely to do you favors. (For example, going into script meetings with a less adversarial stance meant that my coworkers might feel comfortable enough to volunteer ideas that would ultimately make me look smarter on television.) It was weird to hear colleagues refer to me as one of the “easy” correspondents, or make offhand comments about how relatively mellow I was. It was as if my bad old days as an intramural warrior had been erased, as if the anchor who’d been reprimanded for throwing his papers on the news desk in Boston had been forgotten.

I thought it an auspicious sign that not long after I started doing compassion meditation, the pro–basketball player Ron Artest, infamous for jumping into the stands during a game and throwing punches at opposing fans, changed his name to Metta World Peace. (Less auspicious: seven months later, Mr. World Peace was suspended for elbowing an opponent in the head, giving him a concussion.)

My new compassion policy ran into a major challenge in the person of Paris Hilton. This was not the type of assignment that usually came my way, but for reasons I still don’t fully understand, GMA asked me to fly to Los Angeles to interview Hilton about her new reality show and the recent arrest of her stalker. I barely knew anything about her, other than the obvious: the family hotel fortune, the baby voice, the sex tape. So the night before the interview, I turned to my wife—who aside from being a brilliant doctor had a near-encyclopedic memory for anything having to do with pop culture—for guidance. I asked her to do some pro-bono research for me, and she forwarded some articles she found online about the low ratings for Hilton’s new reality show. Some entertainment reporters were openly opining that Hilton was in the twilight of her celebrity, having been eclipsed by her former friend Kim Kardashian. So, I figured: Why not ask her about it? I had an inkling that it could cause some fireworks, but that struck me as a good thing.

The next day, when I arrived at Hilton’s mansion in a gated community built into a hillside, the crew was all set up, Hilton’s assistants were buzzing around, and the star was up in her room, primping. The house seemed barely lived-in, less a home than a product showroom. Nearly every inch of wall space was covered in glossy pictures and oil portraits of Paris. There were even throw pillows that bore her image. I did appreciate that she was an animal lover. The place was crawling with pets—seventeen of them. Out back, there was a doghouse that was a replica of the main house, complete with moldings, a chandelier, furniture, light, heat, and air-conditioning.

Soon enough, Hilton came sauntering in, wearing dressy black shorts and a sheer black top with some elaborate stitching. There was something about her that made me ill at ease. Maybe it was just that I wasn’t used to interviewing celebrities. Maybe it was that she looked right through me. Maybe it was that we kept getting interrupted by various cats skulking into the camera frame.

The interview started well enough. We talked about her TV show and her stalker, as previously agreed upon. I learned that, despite her ditzy persona, she actually ran a genuinely impressive and profitable retail business with stores in thirty-one countries, selling everything from handbags to perfumes. She admitted that when she wasn’t on camera, her voice dropped an octave.

The requisite topics covered, I decided it was time to trot out the tough questions. “Do you worry sometimes,” I asked, “that the people who followed in your footsteps, like Kim Kardashian, are overshadowing you?”

As I posed the question, a look came over her face that said, Where is this going? By the time I’d finished talking, though, and it was time for her to answer, she confidently said, “No, not at all.”

“There’s been some talk about the ratings on the show being low. Has that upset you?”

Still holding it together: “No.”

Then came the doozy: “Do you ever worry about your moment having passed?”

She paused, looked over at her publicist, and then issued a delicate snort—a sharp out-breath accompanied by a slight curling of the upper lip. Then she got up and simply walked away. The camera lingered on me, repositioning myself in my chair, my face colonized by an involuntary smirk.

In television news, the storm-off is a coveted thing. This, however, was an unusual specimen. Hilton hadn’t ripped off her mic while shrieking obscenities; she’d just kind of wandered over to the safety of her publicist. Still, I knew, for better or worse, I had captured a memorable moment.

Hilton and her team knew it, too. What followed was a long, strange, and often tense negotiation. We shut off the cameras, as the celebutante, her publicist, and her manager laid into us. At one point, Hilton turned to me and said, “You’re treating me like I’m Tara Reid.”

Her manager tried to surreptitiously strong-arm the cameraman into handing over the tapes, but he refused. Paris herself outright demanded that we not use the material. She didn’t seem to understand that I didn’t work for her, that I was a reporter, not a staffer on her reality show. I stood my ground, although I was at times slightly overwhelmed by the sheer absurdity of the fact that I was having a fight with a household name.

In fact, the decision about whether to use the material was not in my hands. It was up to my bosses. As I boarded a red-eye back to New York, where I’d be live on the GMA set first thing in the morning, the producers asked me to write two versions of the story, which I referred to as “The Safe Version” and “The Nuclear Option.”

When I landed and checked my BlackBerry, I learned we were indeed going nuclear. Right at the top of the show, in the Open, they ran the video of Hilton walking away—and then they “teased” it going into every commercial break, right up until it was time for my story to run. After it aired, the producers and anchors expressed enthusiasm. I left the studio feeling reasonably good.

I went home to crash for a few hours. When I woke up, the story had gone viral. Every entertainment outlet on earth had picked it up. I clicked on The View and saw Joy Behar calling me “rude.” My heart sank.

While ridiculous on a thousand levels, this incident did raise some serious questions about my compassion policy. Had I just committed an egregious violation? After all, I knew there was a possibility my preplanned question would provoke Hilton to walk off. I was even kind of hoping that it would happen. But was I, in fact, rude to her? I tried to reassure myself with the notion that she was, after all, a public figure, and that the chatter about whether her time had passed was all over the blogs. All I did was ask her about an issue that was already in the media bloodstream. I didn’t manage to entirely convince myself.

There was a larger issue at play here: Was journalism—or any high-stakes, competitive profession, really—incompatible with metta? My job required me to ask provocative questions, to “go in for the kill,” as we say—and, often, that wasn’t so nice.

This question of incompatibility was about to come blazing to the fore. After all my nattering on about how Buddhism didn’t make you lose your edge, how meditation was a superpower, and blah blah, I would be hoisted on my own petard.