Ten Percent Happier with Dan Harris
You may have heard about stoicism, in the common parlance, as having a stiff upper lip, sucking it up, grinning and bearing it, suppressing your emotions, etcetera. Or you may have heard of Stoicism, the ancient Greco-Roman philosophy, that has become the de rigeur set of life hacks among millennial self-optimizers.
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Free your creativity with this light meditation and see where the momentum takes you.
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In this episode, we’re going to demystify concepts such as: self actualization, personal growth, authenticity, and bringing your “whole self” to the table.
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Michael Pollan has done more than perhaps anybody else in recent history to change the conversation on the use of psychedelic drugs, or plant medicine. He is author of the best selling book called How to Change Your Mind and he recently followed up with another book called This is Your Mind on Plants. Pollan is also the co-founder of the University of California Berkeley Center for the Science of Psychedelics, along with another recent podcast guest, Dacher Keltner.
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Accepting the unpleasant: easier said than done. Joseph demonstrates how to overcome reactivity and build the skill of acceptance.
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Happiness levels are really high when we’re young. They then steadily dip through our 20s, 30s, and 40s, and bottom out in our early 50s–at which point, they make a sharp and sudden rise. Then, through our 60s, 70s, and 80s, they are way above where we were in our youth.
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Here’s a thought experiment: how would you handle it if you got a terrible diagnosis?
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Today’s meditation is animated by two profound insights. The first is that we don’t just tend to listen to our inner critic–we tend to believe it. And the second is that the path forward requires us to treat our inner critic with compassion and kindness.
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A common problem among type-A people is trying to win at meditation. But the practice doesn’t work like that. If you over-effort, if you try to make something happen, it’s pretty much guaranteed not to happen. What is guaranteed is that you will suffer. Meditation is like a video game where you can’t move forward if you want to move forward too badly.
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In this episode, we’re talking about the difference between kindness and what our guest, La Sarmiento, calls “radical kindness,” how to muster the strength to be kind to annoying people while setting appropriate boundaries, the difference between radical compassion and what the Tibetans call “idiot compassion,” and their experience of learning to accept themselves in a culture that is not always so welcoming.
info_outlineA lot of us right now would probably agree that the technologies meant to make our jobs easier are actually stressing us out. (Think: the email and Slack messages that never stop and with which you can never catch up.) The worst part is the dopamine hit that you can get hooked on that comes with getting new information, causing you to check your messages way too often. And all of this has been exacerbated by working remotely.
In this episode, our guest Cal Newport says that these technologies have created what he calls “the hyperactive hive mind,” and he has a ton of thoughts about how to stop it. He’s a computer science professor at Georgetown University and a New York Times bestselling author of seven books, including A World Without Email, Digital Minimalism, and Deep Work. He’s also the host of the popular Deep Questions podcast.
In this conversation, we talk about how to minimize the impact of the hyperactive hive mind, how the way we work is fundamentally broken, how we ended up in our current work situation where we're checking email and Slack all the time, and what this does to our brain.
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Full Shownotes: https://www.tenpercent.com/podcast-episode/cal-newport-371