Hello fellow students, professor, anyone who stumbles upon this. My name is Grace Posso and I am a week away from turning 23, getting ready to celebrate 1 year married, and my baby boy will be 3 months. I am newly transplanted to the west coast, as I spent all my life in New Jersey, or as it’s nicknamed “dirty jerz”. I have had the busiest yet most fulfilling year of my life. I flew out to California May 18th of last year and was married the next day to my wonderful fiancee of three years, just one month later we were blessed with my pregnancy, and now beautiful infant son.

This year has shown me an abundance of good faith and prosperity, but it is in the quiet moments I felt myself overwhelmed with anxiety, stress, and responsibility (my husband was recently deployed and won’t return for 6 months). I felt my happiness fading during what should be the happiest time in my life. While in the process of transferring to a university in California, when I had been attending a four-year university in NJ, I decided to take online courses at Saddleback while managing my high risk pregnancy. I chose this class to develop my minor in Psychology.

While taking this course I also took several other including Psychology of adjustment in which I read The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truths in Ancient Wisdom by Jonathan Haidt, and this really sparked my interest in what it means to be happy and how to cultivate happiness, since I was struggling with my own happiness I felt this book by 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, would be a great addition to my studies on the subject of cultivating happiness and looking a the tangible results of meditation on cognition and physical and mental well-being.

Dan Harris is a self made guru in all things meditation, life-coach and public speaker. He is a news anchor who survived drug abuse, mental health problems, and a public mental breakdown. He spent the young years of his career looking to be the best anchor possible and worked towards that with intense enthusiasm. Having anchored for several different specials and even traveling to the heart of the war in Iraq during the early 2000s, Dan was quickly progressing through his career when suddenly he was slammed by a crippling depression. This need for mental stability led him to drug use and eventually a total mental break on live national television, during one of the biggest moments of his career, covering for an important anchor.

Dan didn’t just have one mental break before change was imminent, he had several panic attacks and spiraling episodes of depression and anxiety. Eventually his life bottomed out and there was no where to go but up. This is how Dan began a journey towards seeking answers about how to improve his life and discovered that he was leading a mindless life. This understanding of his mindlessness led him to psychotherapy, but more importantly meditation. Being such an influential figure in psychology came from his ability to bring complex concepts to the general public through his cynical self-deprecating humor, and simplistic explanations of scientific research. Dan is praised by the public and the psychological collegiate community for his relateable material which reflects a deep understanding of cognitive nuero-psychology.

Through a series of encounters and interviews and researching scientific studies, Dan became an expert in meditation and mindfulness, declaring himself an Evangelist of meditation.

In Dan Harris’ “10% Happier” he examines the positive effects of meditation and steps to leading a mindful life through a stark insight into the darkest corners of his life and mind. This relatable self help book examines his life through his career as a news anchor for some of the most watched national news broadcasters. His book takes us on a journey from this early career struggles to his experimentation with different drugs, his psychotherapy appointments, to the front lines of the war in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as his work in religious broadcasting… which all eventually led to his gathering of a a large collective of self-help knowledge.

Dan’s struggle with self-confidence, depression, anxiety, and post-traumatic stress from witnessing the war led to his drug abuse which suppressed his nervous system and overworked his brain, leading to a mindlessness which ultimately caused his panic attack on national television while talking about a simple coverage of the effects of a new pharmaceutical drug. Dan very candidly exposes the trauma and mental battles which led to his desire to explore a more meaningful life. During Dan’s time as a religious broadcaster he spent time with born-again Christians, to Wiccans, and Islamic preachers, from these encounters he gathered knowledge and information which bolstered his understanding of meditation.

Harris initiates by making the claim that meditation will make you 10% happier. He sets the var incredibly low, again in his plow to make things relatable. Dan refutes or rather dismisses the long standing notion that mediation has to be some profound experience but rather can be simply a tool for a slightly better existence. Dan suggests that instead of monumental change and an easy fix-all mindfulness takes part in the small everyday changes we make, that we can produce results even if they are small. He suggests that practicing consistency and continual change will show desired results. When most people are searching for improvement in life they often feel stagnant by long held beliefs about themselves or what it takes to maintain their character; the things you believe you can not change about yourself are in fact changeable and the things you don’t want to lose like your edge don’t have to be changed.

The most captivating portion of this book is all the advise on the practice of meditation itself. From clear cut instructions like maintaining a straight spine, focusing and refocusing on breath… to the quirky insights like how medation is shutting down one’s monkey brain and how the game of mediation is to keep circling back your thoughts and focus when you lose it. Dan goes on to explain that mindfulness is the fourth human response to an experience and helps for one to lead a non-reactive life. He claims that we can’t run from our problems we must be mindful of them and acknowledge them along with our feelings, and emotions. But that meditation will help us accept our feelings without becoming consumed by them, as if viewing them from afar. This is a means for creating a dialogue with ourselves about how we are feeling without reacting.

Dan backs up his theories by stating how meditation will help for reflection but does not solve problems, one must still take action and make change. Meditation simply allows for a chance to respond to stress and life without reacting in a harmful or preemptive manner. He notes a Harvard study in Neuroplasticity which improves in persons who meditate, and how the training of the mind in exercises of mindfulness and meditation can effect cognitive functioning positively. The brain he says is a muscle and must be continually flexed in order to be healthy, simple exercises like being cognizant of ones breath and practicing generosity, forgiveness, compassion, etc. are methods of focused meditation. 

This book seeks to bridge a gap between the science behind happiness and meditation by focusing on the physical and cognitive benefits of this practice of mindfulness. Leading research in this area seeks to focus on how happiness affects the physical mind and how it is estimated. From what I understand in the field of neuroscience and cognitive psychology there is not one solution to happiness, as happiness is a subjective experience, but we are beginning to comprehend how being in a state of happiness or at least working towards it can produce a more meaningful life. Some studies are focusing on the link between pleasure and happiness, and others are focusing on how happy experiences can elicit the pleasure centers in the brain to react. Other studies like Harris mentioned are looking in to see how meditation increases gray matter in the brain known as nueroplasticity. Other studies illustrate how meditation can decrease blood pressure and improve the effects of heart disease while simultaneously lowering the incidence of depression.

Most preconceived notions of meditation connect the concept with religion or hippies and yoga, or extreme practitioners like the Dali lama or Buddhist monks, however Dan changed the practice in a big way with his book. His book helped shift the perspective to making meditation a simple practice of mindfulness that anyone can do without all the fluff and elaboration it normally holds in context. The text serves to act as a memoir to his old life, a highly critical biography that is relatable to many, while also functioning as a modern day self-help manual and guide to meditation. While Dan forthcomingly admits the 10% happier claim is not at all scientific, his books contains a lot of relevant research on the topics of happiness, meditation, mindfulness and more. The book addresses the concepts plainly without dumbing them down or glossing over the reality of what meditation is. He makes no claims ascertaining meditation is a cure all, but instead shows how one can reap the benefits of a life lived more mindfully.

In our course we looked at the ways in which our physical experiences connect to our emotional ones. How our senses are both a manifestation of our experiences and how our experiences manifest in our senses. Dan talks about feeling like hes in a daze, an alternate state during his panic attacks; persons in panic attacks often experience a distortion of all the senses. This book addresses the strain stress and panic place on the nervous system, and in our course we evaluated the way in which external signals are processed to provide us with information. The practice of meditation links directly to what we learned in this course over how we can control these sensory experiences by obtaining information and responding to it in a controlled and rational way instead of reacting. Meditation lets us flex the muscles of our cognition which affect our perceptions. 

I mentioned in my introduction that I recently read The Happiness Hypothesis, by Jonathan Haidt… and I felt as though they covered similar topics into the misconceptions about happiness and cultivating happiness in our lives. Both books focused on the nature in which one searches for a cure-all without realizing that mindfulness is a practice that must be met with consistent effort and enthusiasm. I believe this book reinforced the concept of mindful change for me, and changed my perception of how to lead a happier life. When I began reading this book I felt comforted knowing the author was just an average person struggling with demons himself, this made the content much more relatable.

I felt as though this book provided valuable insight into the author’s tumultous past without being so far out there that it was not relevant to the story. While I myself am not a news anchor or a prior drug addict, every detail of his story felt relevant and purposeful. From my time spent in this class and in Psychology of Adjustment with professor Anne Cox, I can say I have absorbed several bits of useful infromation involving healthy coping and adjustment. I feel as though after reading this book I feel more confident in my practice of meditation and less anxious about whether I’m doing it wrong. I think if you’re looking for a great audiobook or self help text, this book is an essential read for the working class to the struggling millennial, to the successful entrepreneur CEO. This book is simple yet relatable and evaluates some very real topics without being righteous or mystical. It brings the practice of meditation to the real world.  I look forward to reading his other books and utilizing his meditation app, as well as listening to his podcasts.

Here is a link to the paper I wrote on the Happiness Hypothesis…

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1s1XYSfJEKP1g7Z9QPva7dZofTl93e6Fw8tTT4ddoDDc/edit?usp=sharing

Harris, D. (2017). 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. London, England: Yellow Kite.