10% Happier with Dan Harris

It was around the time she decided to go on her second meditation retreat that Sally Kohn, a gay, Jewish, community organizer turned political commentator, took a job as a commentator for Fox News. In her TV career -- she's now a commentator for CNN -- Kohn has experienced hateful personal attacks from online trolls and recently faced some backlash over her first book, "The Opposite of Hate: A Fie...

Comedian Paul Gilmartin was the host of TV's "Dinner and a Movie" for 16 years, but smiling and acting happy on-screen often "felt like lifting 500 pounds," he said, as he struggled behind the scenes with depression and even contemplated suicide. When the show ended, Gilmartin launched "The Mental Illness Happy Hour" podcast, which he said has been a valuable outlet that allowed him to work throug...

Dan Harris leads a conversation with Thupten Jinpa, the Dalai Lama's longtime English-language translator and a monk for over 25 years, about the uses for compassion meditation in today's culture in front of a live audience at the Asia Society in New York City. Their conversation was recorded on Feb. 15, 2018, one day after 17 people were killed when a gunman opened fire at Marjory Stoneman Dougla...

It was an "out of body moment," Catherine Price said, when she realized her newborn daughter had been looking up at her but she had been looking down on her phone, scrolling through antique door knobs on eBay. It led the "How To Break Up With Your Phone" author to redefine her connection to her device and she now offers her advice on how we can go from an "obsessive relationship" to a "friends wit...

George Haas has worked as a filmmaker, an artist, a doorman at "every major nightclub in New York City" in the '80s, and now he's a meditation teacher in Los Angeles, but even his meditation journey has many turns. "What can I tell you, I'm a seeker," Haas said, as he described how a regular practice helped ease the psychological trauma of a "crappy childhood," got him sober and now he guides othe...

Vox's editor-at-large and journalist Ezra Klein, formerly of The Washington Post, has made a name for himself as a political commentator, finding context within the chaos of our political scene and exploring the idea of what a political system would look like if created amidst tribalism. Klein, who hosts the popular podcast, "The Ezra Klein Show," also argues in our interview that it's important t...

Janice Marturano was a vice president at General Mills working on the Pillsbury merger deal in 2000 when she lost both her parents, and began a regular meditation practice as a way to soothe stress at work and in her personal life. Noticing the relief a daily practice brought her, and wanting to lead by example, she sought out a way to introduce mindfulness to her coworkers, and by the time she le...

"All of us in our lives make decisions about when to do things. 'When should I work out? When should I do this kind of work, when should I do that kind of work? When should I start a project, when should I abandon a project?' ... and the best time of day to do something depends on what that something is," said Daniel Pink, a New York Times bestselling author whose new book is called "When: The Sci...

When author and Wall Street Journal reporter Andrea Petersen was diagnosed with an anxiety disorder at age 20, she was relieved to finally have a name for the thing that had controlled most of her life to the point where she feared walking up a flight of stairs or standing in line at the store. But understanding and overcoming her anxieties was a different odyssey, one she describes in "On Edge: A...

As a former pro-football player and two sport All-American, world-record holding athlete, Lewis Howes built his life around being the tough, "get back up and play" jock, and it took him a long time to learn how to shed "The Mask of Masculinity," to realize that stamping out emotion was causing him great suffering. The 34-year-old entrepreneur and best-selling author had a breakthrough a few years...

The WeCroak app, which sends reminders that you're going to die -- five times a day, is not meant to be morbid, founder Hansa Bergwall said, but to make us stop and appreciate the moment we're living in. "Remembering that you're going to die is really important," said Bergwall, a publicist, writer and meditation teacher in Brooklyn, who was 11 years old when his mother died. "Sometimes that's all...

Dr. Jannell MacAulay, a lieutenant colonel and flight instructor in the United States Air Force with over 3,000 flying hours as a combat veteran, sees mindfulness meditation as national security asset. A former commander of the 400-member joint 305th Operations Support Squadron, MacAulay teaches mindfulness to her fellow commanders and other Airmen in order to improve their leadership and mission-...

"Part of what I have decided for myself - it's a decision - I don't want to be part of the pain, creating more pain in the world, for myself or for others," said Rhonda Magee, a law professor at University of San Francisco. "So it's that capacity with mindfulness to get a sense into ... what my own experience of feeling vulnerable, feeling afraid, what it does to me, how I start to look at the wor...

Brad Katsuyama's blood pressure levels were "out of control" and he decided to make a significant change in his life. The Canada native left his job at Royal Bank of Canada, began a regular meditation practice and started IEX, a stock exchange that took on predatory high-speed trading and was the subject of Michael Lewis' best-selling book, "Flash Boys: A Wall Street Revolt."

Oprah Winfrey, Tom Hanks and David Letterman are just some of the dozens of celebrities who sought out Bob Roth to learn Transcendental Meditation (TM), a mantra-focused meditation practice. Roth, who has been a meditation teacher for over 40 years and has a new book out called, "Strength in Stillness," talks about how he found TM and addresses the criticism and suspicions some former members have...

Susan Kaiser Greenland, an author and former corporate attorney, and Annaka Harris, an author and editor, work together to teach mindfulness meditation to children and their families through Greenland's Inner Kids Foundation. They offer advice for parents on introducing meditation to their kids and starting group sessions with other families, but they also share their views on the controversial to...

Tim Ferriss, the host of "The Tim Ferriss Show" podcast and the author of several best-selling books, including "The 4-Hour Workweek" and "Tribe of Mentors," has built an entire empire around offering life-hacking advice, but when someone suggested he try meditation, he resisted for a while. He tried various forms, then eventually dove head first into doing a 10-day silent retreat, where he came f...

Yael Shy, the author of "What Now? Meditation for Your Twenties and Beyond," says she came to meditation from "a lot of suffering" as a student at New York University in 2001 -- the same year the World Trade Center towers fell near her New York City dorm during the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Today, Shy helps college students tackle stress, anger and FOMO (fear of missing out) around academics, relati...

Danica Patrick is one of the most successful female drivers in racing history, having been the first and only woman to win an IndyCar race. Since becoming a staple on the race track, Patrick has expanded her repertoire to include owning a winery, launching a clothing line and writing a new lifestyle book called, "Pretty Intense: The 90-Day Mind, Body and Food Plan," which she developed after chang...

James Altucher, an entrepreneur, writer and host of "The James Altucher Show" podcast, is a master of reinvention, so much in fact that the title of one of his 18 books is "Reinvent Yourself." Altucher has built and sold numerous companies (and made and lost a few fortunes in the process), once gave up all of his possessions and was homeless for a time, dabbles in stand-up comedy, and all the whil...

Manoush Zomorodi, the host of WNYC's "Note to Self" podcast, is an advocate for boredom because allowing our minds to wander, she says, can lead to problem solving and fresh ideas. Her book, "Bored and Brilliant: How Spacing Out Can Unlock Your Most Productive and Creative Self," stems from an experiment in which she convinced more than 20,000 listeners to try to disconnect from their phones, just...

We close out the year by hearing from you, our loyal listeners! We recently set up a voicemail where listeners left questions for our host Dan Harris and he answers a selection of them that range from how to start a practice, how to tell your friends it's not "weird" to meditate and how to afford retreats. Dan's new book, "Meditation for Fidgety Skeptics: A 10% Happier How-To Book," is on sale Dec...

Dan interviews his wife, Bianca Harris, who is a big part of the storyline in his new book, "Meditation for Fidgety Skeptics: A 10% Happier How-to Book." She resisted starting a meditation practice for years, but has recently made a change. The book is on sale Dec. 26 and available for pre-order now.

Meditation teacher and writer Jeff Warren and our host Dan Harris reflect on their January 2017 road trip, in which they traveled from New York City to Los Angeles to talk with people about what keeps them from meditating, and in the process, the two friends discuss how meditation has helped them work through their own personal struggles. Their new book on their journey, written with Carlye Adler,...

There has been an explosion of research in recent years on what meditation does to the brain, but as neuroscientist Dave Vago points out, the science of putting meditation under neuro-imaging is still quite young. Vago, the research director for the Osher Center for Integrative Medicine at Vanderbilt University Medical Center, studies brain scans of meditators to analyze changes in brain activity,...