A Radical, Counterintuitive Stress Reliever with Alua Arthur | Staff Picks

Summary

Podcast Summary: 10% Happier with Dan Harris Episode: A Radical, Counterintuitive Stress Reliever with Alua Arthur | Staff Picks
Release Date: July 25, 2025

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Introduction and Context

In this special staff pick episode of the 10% Happier podcast, host Dan Harris delves into a profound conversation with Alua Arthur, an author and death doula. This episode is part of a series highlighting standout moments from past episodes, curated by the 10% Happier team. Dan introduces the theme by acknowledging the common struggle with stress and neuroses in daily life and hints at a "radical, deeply counterintuitive stress reliever" that Alua Arthur advocates.

Lauren Smith’s Highlight

Before the main interview, Lauren Smith, the Managing Producer of the podcast, shares her personal connection to Alua Arthur’s teachings. She emphasizes a particular exercise from Alua’s interview focused on imagining one’s own death in granular detail. Lauren describes this method as an "exposure therapy" that helps individuals confront and lessen their fears surrounding death, fostering a sense of peace both for themselves and their loved ones.

Lauren Smith [04:01]: "It's almost like an exposure therapy. So if we start to think about our deaths in this granular way, it could start to feel less scary and possibly serve as a helpful tool not only for ourselves, but for the people around us at the time of our deaths."

In-Depth Interview with Alua Arthur

Understanding the Role of a Death Doula

Alua Arthur explains her role as a death doula, highlighting her mission to assist individuals in preparing for the end of life. She emphasizes that her work is not about eliminating fear but about sitting with individuals where they are in their emotional and psychological journey towards death.

Alua Arthur [10:03]: "I'm just being with them where they are."

Practices for Preparing for Death

Alua shares several practices she employs to help individuals reconcile with their mortality:

1. Deathbed Visualization: Encouraging people to imagine their death with as much sensory detail as possible. This includes the environment, emotions, and presence of loved ones, which helps soothe the nervous system and reduce fear.

   Alua Arthur [13:26]: "Because it creates an ideal that can serve to create peace around it. So much of the fear around death is like, what's gonna happen? What's it gonna feel like? What's it gonna be like? ... Make it really tangible, because I think once we can land it in the sensory experience, then we can ground it in the body, and then it doesn't feel so scary."

2. Mindful Decision-Making: Using the perspective of their mortality to evaluate daily decisions, thereby minimizing stress over trivial matters and focusing on what truly matters.

   Alua Arthur [06:42]: "But I use it sometimes for silly things like trying to figure out whether or not I want to take a nap. And the answer is always, yes, take a nap."

3. Eye Gazing: Looking deeply into one’s own eyes in the mirror while affirming the reality of death to confront and diminish underlying fears.

Confronting the Fear of Death

The conversation delves into why these practices serve as effective stress relievers. Alua articulates that acknowledging mortality diminishes the significance of everyday worries and provides a broader perspective on life’s challenges.

Alua Arthur [08:39]: "Both. Both. I think in the immediate, it makes microscopic the thing that you're worrying about, but in the longer picture, it gives greater perspective on life itself and has you look at the things that scare you and then be with the things that scare you and then take the sting out of them."

Dan Harris relates this to his own experiences, noting reduced fear after volunteering in a hospice, underscoring the natural human capacity to find peace when confronting death.

Vision of an Ideal Death

Alua paints a vivid picture of her ideal death scenario to illustrate how detailed visualization fosters comfort and reduces fear:

Alua Arthur [14:34]: "Sunset, sun's going down, the sky's changing. The colors are really vivid. ... Ideally I'm outside on a deck or something like that in my own bed or a bed that can be wheeled outside."

She envisions a peaceful environment surrounded by loved ones without the discomfort of being the center of attention, emphasizing the importance of feeling safe and cared for in one’s final moments.

Alua Arthur [15:17]: "I want to feel cozy and warm and safe and like people care. But I'm not going to totally fuck up their lives by the fact that I'm dying."

Managing Pain and Consciousness

Alua discusses her preferences regarding pain management, advocating for a balanced approach that ensures comfort without complete sedation, allowing for maximum conscious awareness during the final moments.

Alua Arthur [15:48]: "Yes, I would like to be as conscious as possible, but with my pain managed."

Conclusion

Dan Harris wraps up the episode by thanking Alua Arthur and Lauren Smith for their contributions, and encourages listeners to explore Alua’s work further through her book, Briefly Perfectly Human, and her website. He also reminds listeners of the benefits of becoming a paid subscriber to access exclusive meditations and other perks.

Dan Harris [16:21]: "Thank you to Alua Arthur. She's amazing. And thank you to Lauren Smith for honing in on said amazingness."

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Key Takeaways:

• Facing Mortality Reduces Stress: By contemplating death in a detailed and controlled manner, individuals can diminish fear and stress about both death and daily anxieties.

• Sensory Visualization Promotes Peace: Creating a vivid, sensory-rich image of one's ideal death can ground individuals emotionally and physically, leading to greater acceptance and tranquility.

• Balanced Pain Management: Managing pain effectively allows for conscious awareness during the end-of-life process, enhancing the quality of one’s final experiences.

Alua Arthur’s insights offer a unique and profound approach to stress relief by encouraging a deep and honest engagement with the concept of mortality, ultimately fostering a more peaceful and intentional life.

Transcript

[Unknown Speaker]

Foreign.

[Dan Harris]

This is the 10% Happier podcast. I'm Dan Harris. Hey, hey, Happy Friday everybody. Many of us, myself included, spend a lot of time caught up in our neuroses and hang ups and work a day problems. So today going to talk about a radical, deeply counterintuitive stress reliever. I'll tell you what it is in a moment, but first let me give you some context. All this month on Fridays, we're highlighting some of our favorite moments from past episodes. Golden nuggets from our vast archive actually is pretty vast at this point and these nuggets are selected by members of the team right here at 10% happier. So over the past few weeks we've played you key moments from my interview with the comedian Bill Hader and also the Buddhist scholar Biku Bod. And this week you're going to hear from Aua Arthur, who's an author and a death doula, which means that her job is to help people as they're dying. And it is Aua who has the aforementioned radical and counterintuitive anti stress advice. It was actually several years ago right here on the show that Aua gave this advice, but over time it has really stuck in the mind of our managing producer, Lauren Smith. So you will hear briefly from Lauren and then we will play the key moment from A Lua. But first, just to quickly remind you of this cool new thing we're doing [e-mail] if you become a paid subscriber, you'll get a companion bespoke meditation to go along with every full length Monday Wednesday episode. Today's a Friday, so there's no meditation today. But if you sign up today, you'll be ready for Monday's new companion meditation led by our amazing teacher of the month, Don Mauricio. Okay, right after the break you'll hear from Lauren and then a Lua Arthur.

[Unknown Speaker]

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[Dan Harris]

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[Unknown Speaker]

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[Dan Harris]

In a sturdy, reliable vehicle like the Defender. And it looks really, really cool. It's just a great looking car. It really suits my wife better than.

[Unknown Speaker]

It does me given that she's just.

[Dan Harris]

Cooler than I am.

[Unknown Speaker]

And one of the things that the.

[Dan Harris]

Folks who make the Defender want you to know it's really about the spirit of adventure and healthy risk taking. There's a meetup of people who are in this category. It's called Destination Defender. It's an incredible weekend festival in Port Jervis, New York and it was created for people who embrace the impossible and includes a lot of outdoor activities, live music, chef tastings and more. Sounds really fun. Join the adventure at Destination Defender May 16th through 18th to learn more, please visit DestinationDefenderUSA.com.

[Unknown Speaker]

Hey everybody, my name is Lauren Smith and I am the Managing producer here at the 10% Happier podcast. The episode that I'm highlighting today is with Alua Arthur, who is a death doula, and I worked on this episode back in 2023 and just found it incredibly moving on many, many levels. As a death Doula, Elua helps individuals who are dying plan for their deaths and approach and face their mortality in a way that we don't usually see or experience in our culture. Her interview is just so wonderful and chock full of tools and meaningful insights. But there was one part of her interview in particular that really struck me and stuck with me. It's an exercise where she encourages people to imagine their own death on a very granular level. The rationale behind this is to help folks look at their deaths in a very specific and ideal way in order to elicit a sense of peace around their deaths. It's almost like an exposure therapy. So if we start to think about our deaths in this granular way, it could start to feel less scary and possibly serve as a helpful tool not only for ourselves, but for the people around us at the time of our deaths. So thank you to Alua for this tool, and I hope it serves you all today.

[Dan Harris]

Thank you, Lauren. That advice stuck in my head as well. So now let's hear the key part of the interview with Ailua Arthur. Just for context. Ailua and I spoke right after she was on stage delivering her bravura TED Talk at a TED conference in Vancouver, Canada. So here we go.

[Unknown Speaker]

So you're living your life now, employing and deploying a bunch of practices to prepare you.

[Alua Arthur]

Yes.

[Unknown Speaker]

So what are the practices you personally engage in and that you would recommend to us in terms of getting ready for this, which I'm deeply in support of this because I think not only will it prepare you for the inevitable, but it will revivify your life right now.

[Alua Arthur]

That's a great word, revivify.

[Unknown Speaker]

I like to show off.

[Alua Arthur]

It's like an SAT word.

[Dan Harris]

Yeah.

[Alua Arthur]

Yeah, I'm gonna look that up.

[Unknown Speaker]

Thank you for accentuating what an asshole I am.

[Alua Arthur]

You got it. I don't know how many of the practices are conscious, but I will tell you some of the ones that sometimes I use occasionally when trying to make a decision in my life, I'll look at it from my deathbed with this decision that I have to make right now. Looking forward to my deathbed. Will I be happy I did it? Will I be sad I didn't do it, or will it matter at all? Most of them fall in the it won't matter then. It doesn't matter what I do. I can just figure out how I'm feeling that day and decide what direction I want to take it in. But if it has some other, bigger implication, like moving or breaking up with somebody, then looking at it through the perspective of my death, I can see a little bit more clearly who I want to be and, like, how I want to show up for my life. So that's one that I use. But I use it sometimes for silly things like trying to figure out whether or not I want to take a nap. And the answer is always, yes, take a nap. I'm always going to take the nap. When I think about it from the perspective of my death, which I think some people would think that you'd rather not nap and just do the thing. Because there's that old adage, you can sleep when you're dead, but that's not sleep at all. It's dead. But I like rest. I want to feel rested in my life. And so when I'm looking at it from the perspective of my death, I'LL take a nap. Another thing that people can do that sometimes I suggest is to look in the mirror, in the eyeballs, in your own eyeballs. Like deep. Not searching your face, but looking in the eyeballs and repeating, I'm going to die a couple times and see what it brings up and be present with whatever it brings up. It could be scary, but I find that people often feel a little bit more peace. It's a little bit of a stress reliever to be aware of the fact that you're gonna die consistently.

[Unknown Speaker]

Is it a stress reliever because it gets you out of worrying about demonstrably stupid shit? Or is it a stress reliever because you're taking this fear that's lurking in the corners of your consciousness and dealing with it forthrightly or both?

[Alua Arthur]

Both. Both. I think in the immediate, it makes microscopic the thing that you're worrying about, but in the longer picture, it gives greater perspective on life itself and has you look at the things that scare you and then be with the things that scare you and then take the sting out of them. Tiny. Tiny.

[Dan Harris]

Hmm.

[Unknown Speaker]

I have more questions about these practices, and I've got a list of some of them I want to ask you about. But just on this question of fear at the end, I have, you know, no experience compared to you. But I did volunteer in a hospice for a few years.

[Alua Arthur]

Wow.

[Unknown Speaker]

And made a lot of really good friends there and had some powerful experiences. And I, with one exception, didn't see a lot of fear toward the end.

[Dan Harris]

Did I just get lucky?

[Unknown Speaker]

Or is there something about the human organism that, I don't know, some sort of equanimity kicks in around the end.

[Alua Arthur]

I think the latter. I think that folks at some point start to reconcile their lives with their deaths and say, all right, we're here. It's part of why, as a death doula, it's really important for me to work with somebody who's already come into some recognition of the fact that they're going to die, because otherwise I am just working with their fear. Not to say that there isn't any when the reconciliation is being made, but it's a much more pliable, fertile ground to work with.

[Unknown Speaker]

As a death doula, you don't necessarily want to come in and work with somebody who's still, quote, unquote, fighting.

[Alua Arthur]

Right. Unless they can also hold that they're dying. People often think that my work is about helping people get over their fear of death, but it's not. I mean, have you ever tried to have, like, a friend Break up with a bad boyfriend or something like that. It's so hard. People just have to be ready to step into it when they're ready. So I don't do that necessarily. I can just sit with people in their fear and their discomfort. But I'm not trying to get them from point A to point B. I'm just being with them where they are.

[Unknown Speaker]

So when people say to you, I'm terrified, I'm terrified. I'm just freaking out. You don't have something you say that's comforting. You just sit in the dark with them?

[Alua Arthur]

Yeah. What are you scared of? You know, we start there. What is the fear? What's the root of it? Help them tease it out. And often, like we were saying before, when we're looking at it directly, it starts to numb it. It's like exposure therapy in a weird way. Like, you just start slowly numbing it. You take the sting out of the scary thing. And oftentimes it's things that we can do something about. Like, if one of the big fears is the process of the body, which is a big one, what happens when we're dying? What does that feel like? We can start making plans to make sure that your pain is well managed, that you can have clues for thirst. We can talk about how thirst is actually supportive at the end of life. Because it acts as an analgesic, it will numb the pain. There's things we can discuss to take a little bit of the fear away.

[Unknown Speaker]

Thirst acts as a pain reliever or getting your thirst quenched.

[Alua Arthur]

Dehydration. So dehydration is good at the end of life? Yeah, it serves as an analgesic effect.

[Unknown Speaker]

Interesting.

[Alua Arthur]

Yeah.

[Unknown Speaker]

Do you have any? Having been around the end of so many lives, have you developed some sort of suspicion about what's on the other side?

[Alua Arthur]

No. I know. I wish I did. What I notice is how often it looks like peace on people's faces as they're dying, even if the mouth is open. Because people do often die with their mouths open. It doesn't look scary.

[Unknown Speaker]

That's what I walked away with, oddly, was, you know, I haven't done it in a couple years. This was pre pandemic. But I walked away from my time in the hospice feeling much less scared. It's come back because I haven't been exposed recently, but it was not a scary place and people weren't screaming in pain. Modern medicine is quite powerful, and as we established, there's something about the human organism that seems to ease into this transition. But I remember Quite powerfully feeling like it was a relief to have that experience.

[Alua Arthur]

Sounds like it's time for you to go back to the hospice.

[Unknown Speaker]

Yeah.

[Alua Arthur]

And, yes, absolutely. I find that people are more peaceful and they're ready on some level to die, because likely, particularly in a hospice or so, it's coming at the end of a disease process. Probably just tired of being sick.

[Unknown Speaker]

Yeah, that's true.

[Alua Arthur]

Like, I get the flu, and after three days, I'm ready to be over it, you know? Particularly when you are in a disease process that's likely gonna kill you, man. At some point, you're just like, all right, enough already.

[Unknown Speaker]

My father used to have this joke about but when you get the stomach flu, that you switch back and forth between thinking you're going to die and fearing that you won't.

[Alua Arthur]

Oh, that's good. Yeah, it's good.

[Unknown Speaker]

So one of the other practices, if memory serves, that you recommend for people is to really get pretty granular in thinking about how you want to die.

[Alua Arthur]

I love that one.

[Unknown Speaker]

Why? Why do you love that one?

[Alua Arthur]

Because it creates an ideal that can serve to create peace around it. So much of the fear around death is like, what's gonna happen? What's it gonna feel like? What's it gonna be like? This is scary thing. I can't even think about it. So if I can think about it in a way that feels peaceful to me, my nervous system will be soothed by the idea. And so I suggest that people fill it with as much sensory detail as possible. What does it feel like? What does it smell like? Who's there? Who's not there? What are you wearing? What are you seeing? What are you smelling? What time of day is it? Where are you? What's the lighting like? Make it really tangible, because I think once we can land it in the sensory experience, then we can ground it in the body, and then it doesn't feel so scary. Because this is my ideal death. This is something that feels comfortable or comforting to me. And oftentimes what I hear is, it's like people Sunday afternoon, or when they're with the people that they love or when they're in their comfortable clothes or a place that they're already familiar with. So if I think, well, if I can die in a way that I'm comfortable living, then maybe the process of dying won't be so bad.

[Unknown Speaker]

Maybe you do this in your talk, but can you paint a picture of what your vision is?

[Alua Arthur]

Yeah. Sunset, sun's going down, the sky's changing. The colors are really vivid. That Day. It's not one of these days with all the clouds so I can't see the sky. But everything's changing. It's really pretty. I can see it. Ideally I'm outside on a deck or something like that in my own bed or a bed that can be wheeled outside. There's no machine. I can hear the wind and the leaves. I can smell some nag. Champa Amber. My people are around but they're not just like hovering over me, looking at me. Because I don't like being the center of attention. It would make me really uncomfortable.

[Unknown Speaker]

You don't like being the center of attention? You just came off stage in front.

[Alua Arthur]

Of 2,000 people and they're wearing bright orange and I don't like it.

[Unknown Speaker]

She's wearing bright orange and it's pretty fetching.

[Alua Arthur]

Thank you. But I want them to be like over there talking amongst themselves and comforting you each other. I want soft things. I want to feel soft things. I would love it if there were sunflowers nearby. I want like a mustard yellow blanket or something. I just want to feel cozy and warm and safe and like people care. But I'm not going to totally fuck up their lives by the fact that I'm dying.

[Unknown Speaker]

What about pain relief? Do you have some desire to avoid that so you can be maximally conscious?

[Alua Arthur]

Yes, I would like to be as conscious as possible, but with my pain managed.

[Unknown Speaker]

So middle path between obliteration through morphine and being as awake as you can tolerate.

[Alua Arthur]

Absolutely. Although I know some people that want to be as awake as they can. One guy who I supported doing his end of life plan didn't want any pain medication at all. That's what he said.

[Unknown Speaker]

Did he change his mind?

[Alua Arthur]

I don't know. He's still living.

[Unknown Speaker]

Oh great.

[Alua Arthur]

Yeah.

[Dan Harris]

Thank you to a Lua Arthur. She's amazing. And thank you to Lauren Smith for honing in on said amazingness. We'll put a link to the full episode in the show notes if you want to go check it out. Also, a Lua wrote a beautiful book called Briefly Perfectly Human and you can learn more about [e-mail] another quick reminder before you go. Scoot on over to danharris.com to become a paying subscriber and you'll get access to a bunch of perks including bespoke companion meditations that come with every full length episode, plus live video guided meditation sessions, ad free versions of this podcast and much more. Check it out. Dan harris.com finally, thank you to everybody who worked so hard to make this show. Our producers are Tara Anderson, Caroline Keenan and Eleanor Vasily. Our recording and engineering is handled by the great folks over at Pod People. Lauren Smith is our managing producer, Marissa Schneiderman is our senior producer, DJ Kashmir is our executive producer, and Nick Thorburn of the band Islands wrote our theme.