Top 5 Ways to Thrive Not Survive! How Meditation, Somatic Work & Building Interpersonal Trust Can Dramatically Improve How You Feel Each Day w/ Dan Harris

Summary

Mayim Bialik’s Breakdown – Episode Summary

Episode Title:

Top 5 Ways to Thrive Not Survive! How Meditation, Somatic Work & Building Interpersonal Trust Can Dramatically Improve How You Feel Each Day w/ Dan Harris
Date: September 5, 2025
Host: Mayim Bialik (with Jonathan Cohen)
Guest: Dan Harris (author of "10% Happier", journalist, meditation advocate)

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Overview

This episode of Mayim Bialik's Breakdown is an in-depth, audio-only conversation featuring Dan Harris, recorded as a sneak preview for their Substack community. Dan, known for his transparency around anxiety and panic attacks, dives into practical strategies for thriving rather than merely surviving—exploring meditation, trauma healing, somatic tools, and the science of habit formation. The discussion weaves personal stories, cutting-edge therapy techniques, and big-picture reflections about consciousness, self-improvement, and the importance of love and interpersonal relationships.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Reframing “Success” in Meditation and Self-Improvement

• Habits Are Hard for Everyone
  • Dan stresses the universality of struggling with habits:

    “Habit formation is incredibly difficult... Most people struggle. Just knowing that can allow you to navigate the process with a sense of exploration, play, [and] resilience, so that you can start again when you inevitably fail...” (06:21)

• Meditation at Your Own Pace
  • Rejecting rigid dogma, Dan says:

    “This idea that you should do it first thing in the morning, I really question that. I think you should do it when it works for you.” (05:53)

• Letting Go of Self-Judgment
  • Referencing his teacher, Joseph Goldstein:

    “Stop obsessing about your progress. Just sit and walk... Drop the self-assessment.” (10:18)

  • Mayim underscores the challenge:

    “We’ve been encouraged to analyze every feeling... So much of what [my teachers] talk about... is not judging—not having judgment. The third component is being kind.” (11:35)

• Memorable Metaphor:
  Jonathan:

  “You can’t see the label from inside the bottle.” (09:19)
  (Mayim later corrects: “You can read the label from inside the bottle.”) (50:27)

2. Faith, Visualization & the Power of the Mind

• Visualization as a Tool for Change
  • Jonathan shares his sister’s use of visualization to manage chronic pain, highlighting the “need to believe in something that is not our current experience, that it can change.” (17:24)
• Manifestation and Mental Grooves
  • Connections to thinkers like Bruce Lipton and Joe Dispenza about “drawing on another version of us that isn’t stuck as a tool.” (18:44)
  • Dan’s practical use:

    “For me, I have really persistent claustrophobia... I’ll sometimes visualize myself getting on the plane and not freaking out.” (19:09)

3. Trauma, Panic, & the Subconscious: Claustrophobia Unpacked

• How Childhood Imprints Surface
  • Dan details how pandemic-triggered avoidance intensified his claustrophobia, leading to full panic attacks on planes and elevators post-lockdown. (20:57)
• “If It’s Hysterical, It’s Historical”
  • Dan’s exploration via brainspotting therapy uncovers a vivid two-year-old memory—watching his mother leave for work—that ties to deep feelings of powerlessness and aloneness:

    “There’s something about powerlessness and aloneness that is fueling my panic.” (25:30)

• Therapeutic Modalities
  • Brainspotting vs. EMDR:

    “Brainspotting basically asks you to look at a spot and then conjure the thing you’re terrified of and then let the brain wander.” (24:45)

  • Mayim notes:

    “The difference between a memory and a flashback is that... when someone has a flashback... you are [literally] two-year-old Dan.” (27:00)

4. Somatic Experiencing & Healing in the Body

• The Body Remembers
  • Mayim references experts (Peter Levine, Bessel van der Kolk) and the notion of emotional pain surfacing through physical sensations or movement:

    “For some people, pain... comes out of their body. If you’ve ever met someone who can’t do yoga because the emotional pain... when I sit in child’s pose... comes out.” (35:00)

  • Dan’s take:

    “How we can tap into the south of the neckline intelligence of the human animal is very compelling.” (36:06)

5. Redefining Trauma & the Spectrum of Stress

• “Big T” vs. “Little t” Trauma
  • Mayim clarifies clinical definitions and cautions against dilution:

    “Being human is traumatic. Traumatic things happen all the time... And we do get a special designation for capital T trauma because I do think it is treated different clinically and diagnostically.” (37:37)

  • Jonathan reframes trauma as “prolonged stress that doesn’t get shaken out of the system.” (37:21)
  • The group acknowledges that our culture’s overuse of "trauma" dilutes its meaning, much like the word “love.”

6. Relationships, Love & Loneliness: The Relationships “Flywheel”

• Dan’s Upcoming Book on Love
  • Dan shares his years-long effort on a new book:

    “Love, broadly understood not just as romantic love, but as an omnidirectional force... the quality of your relationships... is the most important variable for human flourishing, happiness, and longevity, and nobody is optimizing for that.” (43:02)

  • Jonathan draws links between love and health outcomes (addiction, depression, suicidality):

    “Imagine the health implications of reimagining this word...” (46:34)

  • Dan connects relationship quality to “massive global issues” (climate change, war):

    “At the heart of all of these... Cooperation will be at the heart of all of these issues. If we don’t have loving humans, we’re going to be in the situation which we’re in right now.” (46:50)

• Linguistic Challenges
  • Dan on the poverty of the English language:

    “In English we just have this word love. In other languages there are many words for different types of relationships... we’re abusing the word. Kind of like we abuse the word trauma.” (45:47)

7. Community, Substack & Depth vs. Breadth

• Substack as a Platform for Depth
  • Dan’s advice:

    “My sense... is that substack is about depth, depth of content, longer content, and depth of connection to your audience.” (41:57)

  • Mayim agrees:

    “That’s honestly why we came here.” (42:23)

8. Meditation, Kindness, and Golden Retriever Energy

• Loving Kindness (“Golden Retriever Meditation”)
  • Jonathan, inspired by observing people light up around his dog, wonders:

    “What if we had moments of golden retriever interactions with other human beings throughout our day? How much oxytocin and happiness and enthusiasm would it bring...?” (52:27)

  • Mayim ties this to meditation:

    “That feeling of, you know, goodness and oxytocin—those are things that we can generate. We actually don’t need a dog... one of the things that meditation’s trying to teach you is that you can be the source of joy for yourself.” (53:25)

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• Dan Harris on Habit Formation:

  “You should feel the permission to start again and reassess. Why did it go wrong this time? Was it the wrong day part, the wrong length, the wrong flavor?” (06:21)

• Mayim Bialik on Self-Assessment:

  “For me... I’m just going to be like, I appreciate Jonathan saying he sees a difference. It is not. What I’m doing now is not sufficient.” (12:45)

• Dan Harris on Non-Linear Healing:

  “Persistence leads to the idea of consistency... the goalposts keep moving. As we get a little bit better, we want to get a lot better...” (50:27)

• Jonathan Cohen on Visualization:

  “There is a version even before we’ve experienced it... we start to move toward that.” (18:11)

• Dan Harris on the Roots of Panic:

  “There’s something about powerlessness and aloneness that is fueling my panic... Any safety we’ve ever felt as an animal has been through connection or the opposite of aloneness.” (25:34)

• On Language and Social Meaning:

  “We’re abusing the word [love]. Kind of like we abuse the word trauma.” (45:47)

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Timestamps for Important Segments

| Timestamp | Segment | |---------------|--------------------------------------------------------------------| | 03:02–04:34 | Dan’s background; importance of meditation post panic attack | | 05:45 | When is the “right” time to meditate? | | 06:21–08:45 | Habit formation, success, and the cumulative impact of practice | | 10:18–11:35 | Joseph Goldstein’s advice: “Surrender... Drop the self-assessment”| | 17:24–19:09 | Visualization, mental models, manifesting change | | 19:09–22:02 | Claustrophobia, therapy, and how avoidance rewires the brain | | 24:45–25:30 | Brainspotting, childhood memory, “If it’s hysterical, it’s historical”| | 27:00–30:27 | Mayim explains somatic memory and the science of trauma/EMDR | | 35:00–37:21 | Somatic work and “south of the neckline” intelligence | | 37:37–39:13 | Trauma—clinical reality vs. cultural overuse | | 41:57–42:43 | Substack vs. other platforms: depth over speed | | 43:02–46:34 | Dan’s book on love, the “flywheel” of healthy relationships | | 50:27 | Moving goalposts and the persistence of the healing process | | 52:27–53:25 | “Golden retriever” energy and loving kindness meditation |

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Takeaways & Themes

• Healing is non-linear and multi-pronged (practice, therapy, somatic work)
• True well-being hinges as much on interpersonal relationships as on solo “optimization”
• Our culture’s language for love and trauma needs evolution and nuance
• The “right” way to meditate or heal is the one that works for you, not what tradition dictates
• Being human is inherently stressful—compassion for yourself is essential
• Purposeful visualization and imagination are powerful tools for personal change
• Community, depth, and authentic sharing (as in this episode) make healing sustainable

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Final Reflections

This conversation is a masterclass in mixing vulnerability, science, and practice. Listeners will find encouragement to redefine progress, approach healing as an ongoing, creative process, and pay deeper attention to relationships—as both the source and solution to much of our emotional well-being.

The episode stands out for:

• Dan’s striking honesty about panic and the real roots underneath
• Mayim and Jonathan’s integration of neuroscience, spirituality, and lived experience
• A warm, unscripted tone brimming with curiosity, humor, and practical wisdom

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Suggested Action

• Try adding a brief meditation or visualization to your daily routine—whatever time works for you!
• Notice your relationships and consider how “love”—broadly defined—can be a daily practice, not just a feeling.
• If interested in deeper discussions like this, check out the Mayim Bialik's Breakdown Substack community.

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For more, follow Mayim, Jonathan, and Dan Harris on Substack and other platforms for the latest episodes and their ongoing explorations of what it means to thrive as a human.

Transcript

[Mayim Bialik]

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[Dan Harris]

She's gonna break it down.

[Mayim Bialik]

Hi, I'm Imbialik. I'm Jonathan Cohen and welcome to our Breakdown.

We have a very special audio only episode for you today coming to you from a conversation we had over on our Substack, which is where the Breaker community hangs out and gets exclusive content that's not released anywhere else. This is a little sneak preview of what we've been doing over there.

Yeah, we had this conversation with Dan Harris. He's been on our podcast. I've been on his podcast. He's the 10% happier guy. He's also a journalist and anchor for ABC News, Nightline, Good Morning America. He very, very famously had a panic attack live on the air, which led him to an entire exploration of meditation, trauma and a really fascinating journey that he writes about. But he has an entire kind of universe of educating people about meditation. And in this conversation that we had on Substack, we had just joined Substack and I've been following him on Substack so we thought it would be fun to have a Conversation. It kind of went in a lot of different directions, but we wanted to release it here. He talks about the dangers of overanalyzing progress, especially in meditation. He talks about Joseph Goldstein, who his is his main meditation teacher, who I'm also a huge fan of. He talks about his claustrophobia, which is something that he has continued to experience and explore through all of his different practices. And he's also going to talk about his upcoming book on love.

The really interesting part of his conversation on claustrophobia is he used a term called the sub basement of his mind, going back and finding an early childhood experience which was now manifesting in intense claustrophobia, so much so that he has to drug himself when flying. And he really opens up to us in a way that we had spoken to him before, and we didn't get this level of personal detail and insight. It's a fascinating conversation. Stick around to the end for this one where he dives into this experience that I think so many of us can relate to, having a old childhood imprint that can surface later in life and show up in ways that we wouldn't have associated with what's happening with us now.

The way that he also learns about this is from a trauma technique called brain spotting, a therapeutic technique. Um, so he's gonna talk to us about that, how it differs from emdr, which a lot of people have heard about. So really such a fun conversation, and we're so grateful that we get to share it with you. So make sure to follow us on Substack so you can hear other conversations like this, and there's other awesome bonus content. But really, really happy to share with you this episode of our conversation with Dan Harris. Break it down. Hi, everyone. I'm Mayim Bialik. That's Jonathan Cohen. And we're so excited to get to talk to Dan Harris, someone we consider a friend. He interviewed me. I interviewed him. And then the love affair began. And here we are. Dan, welcome to our live.

[Dan Harris]

The love affair is mutual. Just to say thank you.

[Mayim Bialik]

So Jonathan and I are new to Substack. I've been riding up a storm. Jonathan's been riding up a storm. Yeah, we're just sort of learning the landscape. And one of the first people that I ever knew was on Substack was you, Dan. We figured it would be great to just have a conversation and let our audience see what it's like for us to talk to you and let your audience see what it's like for you to talk to us. So I'll start By saying, I'm very nervous, I'm very anxious. Which, Dan, you know, from the times that we've spoken, I said to Jonathan, I don't excel in, like, this kind of arena. I like.

[Jonathan Cohen]

She likes the script, she likes an outline.

[Mayim Bialik]

I like a script. I like a list. I like a beginning, middle, and end point. But I'm prepared to handle whatever happens. Dan is actually a huge part of my journey into trying to not be anxious. I usually do, like my meditation and my sort of stuff at night, even though everyone says, do it first thing in the morning, and I will do it for a while and then I get out of the practice. But this morning I did. I tried to see what it was like to feel calm in my body right when I woke up.

[Dan Harris]

Can I just jump in on this, everybody?

[Mayim Bialik]

You could run the whole thing. Just run the whole thing.

[Dan Harris]

This idea that you should do it first thing in the morning, I really question that. I think you should do it when it works for you. And if it's working for you to do meditation or whatever it is you're doing to, you know, soothe your anxiety in the evenings, just stay with that.

[Mayim Bialik]

Let's have you define. Because I don't know if it worked for you. You don't know that it works for me, what I'm doing. So that's why I was trying something new. But how do you sort of define, like, if it works for you?

[Dan Harris]

There are two things I think about habit formation. So, like, when is the time you will actually do the damn thing? So that can be. That can be for meditation or exercise or whatever. And so just stepping back, habit formation is incredibly difficult. That sounds pessimistic, but actually it should be soothing to you because then you don't feel like you're uniquely dysfunctional because you're struggling to create a habit. Actually, most people struggle. And just knowing that can allow you to navigate the process with a sense of exploration, play, resilience, so that you can start again when you inevitably fail. That's okay. That you should feel the permission to start again and to reassess. Like, all right, why did it go wrong this time? Because I'm doing it in at the wrong day part, the wrong length, the wrong flavor. So that's one thing I'm thinking about. And the second thing is it could be about it's working for me in terms of, like, I'm just doing the thing, or it could be I'm doing the thing and I'm still anxious. When it comes to meditation specifically, I think there's a little bit of trust or confidence or even, dare I say, faith involved. Not in a metaphysical sense, just that it takes a while. And it is mysterious how and when these practices kick in and what the benefits are for you and your individual mind. People have been doing these practices for millennia, and you're a neuroscientist. There's all of this neuroscience that it's beneficial. So I kind of relax into it, just do the thing, see what happens over time.

[Jonathan Cohen]

Not to quote Dan from the interview that we did with you quite a while ago, but you've always. What you told us then was that just doing it is success, even if it's broken, even if it's just coming back to the practice, and that it is cumulative. And one thing I think I see a lot is that people will do something, get some benefit, but are looking for, like, I don't ever feel anxiety again. And so the goalposts move. So, like, you're doing it, you're actually having success in the practice. You're actually someone else outside of you will notice. Hey, wait, there. There are incremental changes, but the person is like, but I'm not 100% better yet. Or I still have an experience of being human and I have emotions. Wait, it's not working. And so the, you know, we don't have a sense of what working actually means for anyone.

[Dan Harris]

I mean, I obviously totally agree with that, since you're quoting me back to me. But let me ask you then, Jonathan, are you seeing anxiety reduction?

[Jonathan Cohen]

100%. I see a massive, massive change. And from her perspective, she's like, I feel anxious.

[Mayim Bialik]

Hold on, Dan, are you asking Jonathan if he can see a change in me?

[Dan Harris]

Yes.

[Jonathan Cohen]

Yeah.

[Mayim Bialik]

Just because this is how my brain works. Hold on, you said 100%. Are you using that colloquially, like 100%? Yes. Or you see 100% difference in who I am.

[Jonathan Cohen]

Math is not my specialty, so I can't say, you know, plot you on a graph. But I, I see significant change that, if we use the metaphor, you can't see the label in the bottle. Like, I. I just think it's very, very hard because there's a certain amount of anxiety that just exists in the human condition. And you are someone who's aware of it. And your experience of a range of emotion is what makes you an amazing human being on both ends. And so you experience things very intensely. And so I think just that is a unique part of you. So it would be hard to say, oh, I don't have any anxiety, so Meditation is working, but I've seen a massive change in you through your meditation practice.

[Mayim Bialik]

Is this live really an intervention that you intend are doing to try and keep me meditating?

[Dan Harris]

The conclusion I'm drawing from this live thus far is you've chosen a really good partner. Mime.

[Mayim Bialik]

Success.

[Jonathan Cohen]

Success.

[Mayim Bialik]

This is not going the way I

[Jonathan Cohen]

thought it was going, not how it was scripted.

[Dan Harris]

I do want to jump in. I just think this, this expression you're using, you can't judge the label from the bottle. I'm gonna steal that. I just think you can't judge the label from inside the bottle. This is such a huge issue in meditation, but also in self improvement generally. Am I doing it right? Are there benefits? You know, you get into this paralytic doubt around self assessment. And I get it, you know, I've done it. I've had huge periods of, of doubt. And I think that's part of the process and can be healthy, but it can also be really unhealthy to a certain extent. You need to surrender into, especially with meditation practice. My teacher, Joseph Goldstein, who I love and has said so many transformative things to me, one of the things he said to me on many an occasion in the midst of a, like a 10 day meditation retreat where I'm complaining about my progress or lack thereof, he'll say, surrender. Surrender to this process. This has been going, this practice has been done for 2600 years. Stop obsessing about your progress. Just sit and walk, Sit in meditation, do walking meditation, eat your meals just to the best of your ability. Drop the self assessment. And I have found that to be hugely useful. So does that land for you mime as we're talking about this?

[Mayim Bialik]

Yeah, I mean, yes. I think that part of what's hard for many of us is shutting off that analytical mind that is constantly not only assessing the process. Right. Like, is it working? Will it work? Am I doing it right? Am I doing it wrong? But, you know, we've been encouraged to analyze every feeling, every emotion, every, you know, so it's kind of like so much of what he talks about. When we had Sharon Salzberg on our podcast, like, it is about the slowing down and not judging, not having judgment. And then I'd say the kind of third component is being kind. Right? That loving kindness notion. So, yeah, those are things. It's very hard for a lot of people to slow down. My therapist yesterday was like, what if you also did a meditation midday? I was like, what? What do you mean midday? She's like, well, we're and it's not like I haven't been told this before. So then I feel like there's like a glitch in the Matrix. Like, how many times am I going to hear the same thing and keep forgetting it and keep being reminded that we need to train our bodies throughout the day, all day, to feel that centeredness, that calmness, that kindness, that lack of judgment. It's. For me, I'm just going to be like, I appreciate Jonathan saying he sees a difference. It is not. What I'm doing now is not sufficient. Like the right before bed. Because what I'm saying when I'm meditating before bed is. Is the only time I will allow myself to pin myself down and to know where I'm going to be is when I literally am in my PJs under the covers because I'm about to fall asleep. That doesn't feel mindful to me. It feels like I'm slipping on the banana peel of meditation. And I would like to step over the banana peel of meditation.

[Dan Harris]

Okay. I want to respond to a bunch of things in there. Directionally, I think you're correct that you can increase your practice. I would add a few flags. One is, I don't think you're giving yourself enough credit for the practice before bed.

[Mayim Bialik]

Okay.

[Jonathan Cohen]

She's very consistent. And it's not easy to implement that consistently.

[Dan Harris]

Yes. So I would give yourself credit for that. And I would play with adding in another session, but I would start very small. Like one, two, five minutes. You know, whatever works for you. Really. What we know from the research around habit formation is small is really effective to get it up and running. And then the third thing, just from way back at the beginning of your last set of words, we're not shutting anything down in meditation. We're just seeing it. You can make a little mental note in your mind, right? Oh, that's judgment. That's self judgment. Joseph does this little thing, he calls it Cowboy Dharma. Where as you're watching the doubt or the self judgment, you've got these little Nerf guns you're pulling out of your play holsters. And gently, playfully, without aggression, shooting at the thoughts as they come. Oh, that's judgment. That's doubt. And when you do that, it kind of has the function of helping you not take these habitual, neurotic thoughts so seriously.

[Mayim Bialik]

Maybe we're popping bubbles just like with our finger. But yes.

This episode is sponsored by Wandering Jews,

[Jonathan Cohen]

an Open Door media brand.

[Mayim Bialik]

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[Jonathan Cohen]

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[Mayim Bialik]

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[Jonathan Cohen]

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[Mayim Bialik]

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[Mayim Bialik]

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[Jonathan Cohen]

I want to touch on something Dan said many chunks of words ago, which is he. He brought up the idea of faith. And I was just speaking about this. I just released a live about this the other day, which is my sister had chronic, chronic pain for a decade of her life. And she talked about the need to believe in something that is not our current experience, that it can change, and how dangerous that can be for some people, but how powerful it is as a first step to create a version of ourselves, a sense that something can be different before we've actually moved in that direction. And I think you were speaking to something similar.

[Dan Harris]

So you're saying your sister dealt with chronic pain for a long time, and to conjure an image of a life where that pain was not so salient was powerful for her.

[Jonathan Cohen]

It was almost the very first step in sort of how she imagines any sort of intense disease is that this is not all that there is. That there is a version even before we've experienced it or integrated it as a. As a. As a tool for habit formation. And almost, if we go a little bit more metaphysical, as a version of ourselves that exists outside of our current condition, we know that physiologically building the mental model will create the physiological change that we start to move towards that.

[Mayim Bialik]

We had Bruce Lipton on who talked about this. Joe Dispenza obviously talks about this. And, yeah, I mean, this is even a conversation of, like, do other versions of us already exist in a consciousness plane and we just need to kind of slice into it and, you know, grab them when we imagine it? It's, you know, what a lot of people call manifesting. Right. I don't necessarily choose to call it that, but drawing on another version of us that isn't stuck as a tool.

[Dan Harris]

You know, I mean, on a very simple, secular level, visualization. Athletes do it. You know, you're the night before the game, you're visualizing yourself dunking or whatever it is that, you know, for me, I have really persistent claustrophobia that has cropped up over the recent years. And I'll sometimes visualize myself getting on the plane and not freaking out, you know, and that can be very helpful.

[Mayim Bialik]

Is it. Sorry, now I need to ask. Claustrophobia just on planes, or do you mean also in elevators and other spaces?

[Dan Harris]

Yeah, it's elevators, MRIs, planes.

[Mayim Bialik]

Yeah, but the plane. You're like there for hours in that.

[Dan Harris]

Yeah, it's not great.

[Jonathan Cohen]

Well, that rehearsal has been shown that you're building that mental model. You're rehearsing in that way. And it also is helping your body be like, oh, I can know that I can feel okay in the rehearsal. So that when you're in that space, you can. You're not sort of left to figure it out in that moment.

[Dan Harris]

Yes, exactly. Right. So I work with an exposure therapist and he will have me imagine claustrophobia inducing situations and get the physiological response and see that I can survive it. And then he and I also, like, will ride elevators together or fly in airplanes together. And it's.

[Mayim Bialik]

I've seen some of your elevator videos. It's pretty amazing.

[Dan Harris]

I do fly all the time, but for the last couple of years I've been medicated.

[Mayim Bialik]

When I fly with, say we just knock you out and just drag you on the plane.

[Dan Harris]

My family is getting really tired of it because I'm very annoying when I'm medicating. So I'm really going hard at dealing with the claustrophobia now because my family's like, running out of patience not to

[Jonathan Cohen]

turn this into Dan's therapy as we explore this. But I'm kind of fascinated. Did this just come on in later?

[Dan Harris]

I had had little bits of it early on in my life, but during COVID when I was not on elevators or airplanes for a while, then I got back on a plane to. For a big speech. I was flying out to where you guys live in LA from New York, and I was like, I'm panicking. And I got off the flight and that's. I mean, the brain is kind of dumb in. In some ways. So if you teach the brain that a situation is unsafe, it will really get good at associating that situation with danger. You're laughing. Mime. I don't know.

[Mayim Bialik]

No, I'm thinking about how good my brain is at associating things with danger.

[Jonathan Cohen]

I could tell she's scanning. She's like, oh, I've made this association. This association.

[Dan Harris]

Yeah. So hopefully after today's unscripted fiesta bonanza, Ruff Springer with me and Jonathan, you be less scared of substack lives.

[Mayim Bialik]

Yeah, maybe. I mean, I still. I'm always gonna like structure. That's not gonna change.

[Jonathan Cohen]

I mean, I'm still sort of fascinated by something not our younger years coming on like this. That is so intense.

[Mayim Bialik]

That actually was the most interesting thing that Dan said to me. Because this is like the whack a mole of being a human.

[Jonathan Cohen]

Yeah, that's where I go too. I'm like, what is this? And not that we have to intellectualize it and say, oh, this is where it's coming from. But the sort of investigator in me is like, where does something like, is it something from somewhere else that's manifesting here? It's like this, you know, this unprocessed anxiety of something that like, is under the curtain on that side that is now claustrophobia. And I was just looking before this live at your YouTube page, which is awesome. And you had an episode that's titled if it's hysterical, it's historical. Where does that come from? From you, if or do you not know?

[Dan Harris]

No, I actually, I can answer this again, I'm not speaking as an expert in panic. I'm just speaking as somebody who's an expert in his own panic. Just to step back. My family and I took a trip in February or March to Florida and Costa Rica. So there were a lot of plane rides and therefore a non trivial amount of Klonopin to get me on. By the end of this trip, my wife was like, yo, you need to deal with this. This is unacceptable. So I have gotten very, very aggressive in the last couple of months in dealing with it. And I see it as at least two tracks. There's the dumb brain track, exposure therapy, brute force of exposing yourself to the thing that you're terrified of so that the brain learns this is totally fine. And then there's the other creeping around subcortically into your subconscious to figure out, like, what could be the cause of this. So for that I've been working with something and I'd be curious, Maya, if you've ever heard of this. It's called brain spotting and it is kind of a successor to emdr. EMDR I think stands for like eye movement desensitization. Yeah, that basic idea, and I'm definitely not an expert in this, is that there's something about the movement of the eyes associated with the right kind of therapy that can kind of rummage around in the sub basement of your mind and figure out, like, where is all of your current anxiety coming from. Brainspotting basically asks you to look at a spot and then conjure the thing you're terrified of and then let the brain wander. I did a bunch of sessions speaking of faith. Like, I just. Nothing happened in the first couple of sessions. A couple of sessions in though I had this memory and I'd had this memory before, but it really came up in relation. I was imagining being in an elevator. My friend Zev, one of my best friends, has an elevator, a coffin like elevator in his New York City brownstone where his apartment is on the fifth floor of this brownstone. And this elevator is like diabolical. And I was imagining getting on this elevator and pounding and it getting stuck and I was having to pound at the door. And I got this memory of my mom's first day back to work when I was two years old. I could remember I was standing at the front door watching her go to her car, screaming, and looking back into the kitchen where our new nanny was moving around in the kitchen with my little brother in a bassinet on the kitchen table.

[Mayim Bialik]

That's insane.

[Dan Harris]

Yes.

[Mayim Bialik]

I mean, that's a very specific articulated memory.

[Dan Harris]

Yes. And apparently two years old is a little early. Very early.

[Mayim Bialik]

You're very, very precocious remembering your trauma, Dan.

[Dan Harris]

Yeah, so. And I talked to my mom about it and she didn't remember it. So it's not like she said things that reconstructed the memory for me anyway. So there's some connection between where I've gone with this is there's something about powerlessness and aloneness that is fueling my panic. I can conjure an image of early humans, naked apes, shivering, huddled together on the savannah, terrified because we weren't at the top of the food chain at that time. We were a prey animal. And like we've all. Any safety we've ever felt as an animal has been through connection or the opposite of aloneness. And so to me, I think that's what's coursing through my panic.

[Jonathan Cohen]

That's just a profound memory and I very much appreciate you sharing that with us because it's interesting to hear you doing the top down and the bottom up at the same time, dealing with the symptom while also really doing the work of exploring where that's coming from. I mean, em, it kind of makes me want you to explain a little bit about that stored memory that we know in the body like that, because trying to understand where this is coming from for most people is. Is just a very difficult and time consuming, often process to, you know, as you said, it does, it's kind of buried often, you know, you're not getting it in the first session potentially.

[Mayim Bialik]

There's many aspects of this that also. We are particularly interested in, Jonathan, as we talk a lot about consciousness. Right. On our podcast. And it's been kind of a hot topic separating mind from brain from body from Kind of like, what is consciousness separate from those things? The brain encodes memory. It literally, that's what it's doing. Memories that are emotionally complicated tend to get encoded differently and in some cases differentially. But it also doesn't mean that we can access them when we want to, because the brain has a whole other set of mechanisms that seek to protect us from having to plot, process the terror of being a lonely, scared human, which we're all experiencing. The thing about EMDR is they don't really know why it works. And EMDR is not. Even though it's called emdr, you don't always just use eye movements. People do it with paddles that vibrate and you get this bilateral kind of sensory, you know, experience. And there is something about, and even the lady who came up with emdr, there's something about this kind of bilateral either distraction or, you know, kind of set of stimulation that seems to allow us to go into a state which is not different from a meditative state. You know, certain aspects of a meditative state where you're having access to different parts of yourself. Right. The thing that's interesting is a lot of people with emdr, and I'm wondering if this happens with brain spotting as well. They're not simply having memories, they're having felt experiences of being in that timeline. So the difference between a memory and a flashback is that a memory is a conscious. I'm today years old and I'm remembering something, I'm thinking about something. And when someone has a flashback, which is usually a very terrifying experience, the timeline is completely contorted, as Jonathan would say, a hundred percent. It's 100% contorted. And you are two year old Dan, you are having the physiological and emotional experience. So when I think of you and when I think of claustrophobia and how you describe it in some ways, like is that a return to a physiological state that's not just a memory, it is a body memory that is essentially placing you in a different timeline. The consciousness of Dan is saying, I'm two, right? I'm two. And the brain is, it's not that big, of course, there's, you know, connections aplenty. But it's a redundant, you know, it's a redundant organ. It's going to keep following the grooves that you follow the most. Right. We talk about a deep record groove. And what EMDR is doing, it's trying to kind of lift you out of that. And it sounds like what brain spotting, you know, can do as well. If it's hysterical. It's historical. Which was, you know, this episode that Jonathan's talking about that you did with Dr. Orna. Like that's literally it. Historical things will become ingrained like that and entrained like that. Positive things as well. Right. But the brain is not preferential for like, what good happened yesterday. The brain is preferential for like, am I gonna survive today? We don't know that we're sitting at on a phone with satellites beaming. We don't know that our bodies are exactly what Dan said. We are programmed to think about belonging, connectedness, but really as a mechanism for survival.

[Jonathan Cohen]

She's the best summarizer that you can possibly get.

[Dan Harris]

That was phenomenal. And can I call you M too? Because that's awesome.

[Mayim Bialik]

Yes, yes.

[Jonathan Cohen]

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[Mayim Bialik]

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[Jonathan Cohen]

Make 2026, the year you finally start sleeping again. Dan, I want to hear, you know, not to orchestrate. I want to hear if anything came up. And what your note was there that you were making. Because I'm curious what stuck out from M's summary, but maybe it was about

[Mayim Bialik]

that he forgot that he needs mango.

[Dan Harris]

Actually the note was. I was writing, I was making notes myself because I was just remembering that I'm going to be out your way in June and I wanted to see if we could all get together. That was, that was literally what the note was.

[Jonathan Cohen]

That's exciting.

[Mayim Bialik]

He's like, I want more of this in June.

[Dan Harris]

Yeah, that is literally what I was thinking. My brain entrained a memory of hanging out with you a couple of weeks ago, Maya, when I was out there. And so yes, the brain wants more of that.

[Jonathan Cohen]

I tend to take some of this stuff and go theoretical. Mine goes very practical, which is helpful for helping us understand sort of our actual experience. And then when I go theoretical, I think about the non linear nature of time. This as the example of that. So you know, Marvel movies and I think movies in general are a great reflection of partial truths or aspects of our collective consciousness. What we're thinking about, but I think, you know, if we ground that into an actual reality is that we have all this stored memory and there are parts of ourselves that are living different timelines in the present. So for the claustrophobia, there's like that experience of the two year old and potentially other memories that could be similar to that where these grooves are made and the emo.

[Mayim Bialik]

All.

[Jonathan Cohen]

All we know is the emotional experience that is then going to resurface and come out in these strange ways in the present, which is not really this current timeline. There's probably nothing about Dan in this moment that is like I can't go in an elevator. Like it's kind of this weird expression of this stuff that we've encoded. And then if we take it one more theoretical and esoteric level beyond that, if we consider consciousness as a non local entity and all the experiences that consciousness we have either tapped into or been given to us through our ancestry, there are those two that then express themselves. And those memories may be even harder to discern because we may not have the physical embodied experience of them. They're slightly more ephemeral in, in a way that you know, are not grounded in. I was 2 years old versus I have this emotional resonance of some experience that was passed down.

[Mayim Bialik]

I take issue with some of where Jonathan likes to go with this. Not because I'm trying to be contrary, but I think that there's a theoretical physics level, there's this notion of is everything we think a potential, you know, consciousness thread that you can pull. But I don't know, for me, like scientifically speaking, I have a harder time, you know, pulling all those threads. I don't know that I believe that like that two year old me is existing. But I know that there are aspects of that experience that clearly are being stored. And as we know they're, you know, often stored in the body. You know, there's certain kinds of somatic work, somatic experiencing, which is like the Peter Levine world. Bessel van der Kolk obviously wrote a book, Body Keeps the Score. Many people cannot get what you're getting, let's say from brain spotting or from emdr. It literally needs to come out of their body. And if you've ever met someone who's like, I can't do yoga because the, the emotional pain I feel when I sit in child pose and I, I remember the first time I heard that I was like, how could a yoga pose make you cry? What's wrong with you? I was in college. This was many, many years ago. For some people, pain, emotional pain comes out of certain joints that get rotated, certain energy centers, right. That get tapped into. Have you ever done any kind of somatic work that way, Dan, to try and see if you can get at

[Dan Harris]

it also that way, just to give Jonathan his flowers? I definitely, I love tripping out on that stuff too. I don't know as much about it, but I love thinking about it and wondering about it. It feels much more like terra firma to talk about super practical things you can do in this timeline. And so just to pick up on what you just said, em, this somatic work is very interesting to me, like you, I've interviewed Peter Levine and other folks who are interested in the, how we can tap into the south of the neckline intelligence of the human animal is very compelling. Dr. Mark Epstein, who, who I, you guys may know of, he's a Buddhist psychiatrist. A whole series of beautiful books about the overlap between psychology and Buddhism. And he has a book called the Trauma of Everyday Life. Just being alive is a kind of trauma because we, we get the things we don't want and we don't get the things we do want. And that's just in the course of a normal day. And, and so I, and, and as you said it, we're storing a lot of this stuff in our, either our subconscious or our body or both. And so going below the level of the intellect seems very compelling to me.

[Jonathan Cohen]

I want to just reframe the trauma word because I, I think what I hear when you're talking is that it's been so overused that it has lost a. And where I take it is like it's just cumulative stress that doesn't get shaken out of the system.

[Mayim Bialik]

First of all, I appreciate also the distinction that Dan is making between lowercase T trauma and uppercase T trauma. And in the world of social media and outside of kind of like scientific academia, I get it. Like, it's a useful word. It's easy. It's easier than being like, I grew up in an alcoholic family where there was emotional abuse and you know, like, it's a word, it's trauma. But I also do just want to reserve for people who are in medical fields and scientific fields and research fields. We have distinctions around physiological processes that we can study that we call trauma and we call post traumatic stress disorder. And there's clinical diagnostic criteria and all these things. And I do get, get nervous and Dan, what you're describing is a very stressful and significant, you know, thing. I do get nervous when. And I have young people who live in my house. I have a 16 and 19 year old. The supermarket being out of like your favorite beverage is not traumatizing. There's also a range of emotional experiences that many people have that are often interpersonal, that can feel traumatizing and that places this kind of like scepter over it that many people argue is making us feel that we are too delicate. And in particular, I do think it impacts women in particular, you know, to have this kind of like shroud of delicacy potentially hovering. But I do think it's important for what we're talking about to acknowledge being human is traumatic. Traumatic things happen all the time. And we do get a special designation for people who have capital T trauma because I do think it, it is treated different clinically and diagnostically. It's kind of like with autism spectrum disorder. It's like if everybody's autistic, no one's autistic.

[Jonathan Cohen]

So I was right. I knew exactly where you were going. And I agree with everything you just said and actually reinforces my point. But it's important, it's a very important clarification between someone said something that I dislike or the grocery store makes me uncomfortable. We're going to change or separate discomfort from ongoing prolonged stress as a lowercase trauma. And I kind of reframe it and don't use the word trauma because of the association or the over association that people have. Kind of ruined the word a little bit because They've overused it. And, you know, when we think about an animal who, like, I have a dog, he's 16 months, best dog in the world. And when he goes to the park and he's interacting with all these other dogs, you'll get an aggressive dog who, like, plays too rough with him, and then he'll, like, move away from that dog and he'll shake it off. And then he's not re exposed to that dog. He kind of avoids it. But if he's constantly being re exposed to that dog who's playing too rough and causing him physiological stress. And in a business negotiation, especially with ongoing protracted negotiations, they come back with something, you have a physiological reaction over many. Again, it's the prolonged exposure, repeated exposure, that we can't shake off. Because as humans, we're like, we got to figure this out, and I got to stay in the dynamic. Can be the same in relationship dynamics. Can be.

[Mayim Bialik]

Or as someone. Someone mentioned complex ptsd. What if your home is the traumatizing environment that you cannot escape from? Right.

[Jonathan Cohen]

So in that regard, you know, it's. It may not be that capital T trauma, but it's this ongoing, prolonged stress that then we can't actually exercise out of the body, no matter what we're doing. And so we're. We're holding it. And sort of similar to the brain spotting, exercise and somatic work, a practitioner can sort of get you reconnected. It could be in a shoulder. Could be. And it can move around a lot. Kind of like, where is that being held and how do we start to move it through? It can be very powerful and. And something that a lot of people don't really understand because we live so much from our neck up, we'll just stop using the. The part that is not feeling good.

[Mayim Bialik]

I will say this was positive in ways that make me less anxious to do this again, or I will never do a live with anyone except Dan Harris. And then I now have a groove. I see what he looks like. I'm remembering what all the things. And his voice is coming because I listen to it a lot. And so, yeah, I have a question

[Jonathan Cohen]

for Dan, which is you're on all the different platforms. Have you found it different here? Are you doing different types of content? What has your experience been? You obviously have an amazing, thriving community. Give us a little bit of advice about what's working for you here.

[Dan Harris]

My sense, and I'm still learning and experimenting, is that substack is about depth, depth of content, longer content, and depth of connection. To your audience. So getting in there and interacting with folks through live things or chats, and you can do that on other platforms, but it seems more substantive here.

[Mayim Bialik]

That's honestly why we came here. So, yeah, that's good to hear.

[Dan Harris]

And people are coming to substack for depth. It's a different use case, I think, for an individual than Instagram or TikTok, both of which I use, but I'm going there for snacks as opposed to a full meal.

[Jonathan Cohen]

That makes. Makes a lot of sense in terms of depth. Obviously, you've. You shared a lot with us, and we're extremely appreciative of the amount that you've opened up here. I. I've been touched. Are there any other sort of big, juicy topics that you're thinking about that are either on your nightstand or in your notepad that you're contemplating?

[Dan Harris]

You know, I've been working on a book for seven and a half years about love. Love, broadly understood not just as romantic love, but as an omnidirectional force that includes how you are with yourself, how you are with your colleagues, your friends, your kid, your spouse. It's basically relationships or connections. But I'm using the word love because it is. I think if you use that word in a capacious way, captures all of it. And it kind of goes back to the shivering humans, early humans on the savannah. You know, there's some real pathos to that, and it's very much operating in our modern lives. But what's interesting is we're in this era of optimization, where people are tracking their sleep and their calories and their steps. But the data is quite clear that the most important variable for human flourishing, happiness and longevity, is the quality of your relationships. That's not to say sleep and diet don't matter, they do. But what matters the most is the quality of your relationships, and nobody is optimizing for that. So I've been thinking about this a lot, and I'm trying to weave it into a memoir. For me, the marrying, rollicking narrative to a pedagogical progression is incredibly hard. And. And I don't even know if it's gonna be any good. But I'm just kind of making this big investment, and we'll see what happens.

[Jonathan Cohen]

I like the marrying of the two worlds, too. The psychosocial and the optimizing, which I think you're. You're great at, because the love and the relationships actually optimize the things that we're trying to optimize anyway.

[Dan Harris]

Yeah, right.

[Jonathan Cohen]

Like it's a flywheel effect where if we're trying to only sleep or eat, but our relationships are in the toilet, it's going to be very hard to get the motivation to do that correct.

[Dan Harris]

And, and, and just like we're talking about habit formation for M, you know, with, around meditate, the other M word meditation, doing it with you or with your kids or like any, any activity that you're trying to incorporate into your life, it will be easier to do it with other people. Relationships snake into everything. It, it is the core of the human condition and we are as a culture overlooking it.

[Jonathan Cohen]

I like the idea of expanding love as a concept and an energy and an approach to interaction outside of romantic love because so much of our non romantic relationships are not categorized as loving. So you know, you could be like, oh, I'm kind of nice to this person, but like what would it be to understand sharing love in a non romantic way? Just in, in all of our relationships.

[Dan Harris]

I mean it's a linguistic problem. You know, in, in English we just have this word love. But in other languages there are many words for different types of relationships. There's a scientist who has taxonomized all of the different types of relationships that we have. But again, we use this word love for. I said this in my, I gave a TED talk about this. We use the word love to apply to our spouse or gluten free snickerdoodles or whatever. It's just like, you know, we are, we're abusing the word. Kind of like we abuse the word trauma. And so when I wrote 10% Happier Now 11 years ago, it was a very different time where meditation was not a word that was socially acceptable. And one of my goals was to save that word. So one of my goals with this next book is to rescue the word love.

[Jonathan Cohen]

Imagine the health implications of, of reimagining this word. Think about the impact on addiction, on depression, on loneliness, on potential suicidality, on so many of the conditions that are spiking and plaguing us.

[Dan Harris]

That and massive global issues like climate change and war and economic inequality. Because at the heart of all of the these are problems that need to be worked out by human beings with a non zero sum mentality. Cooperation will be at the heart of all of these issues. And if we don't have loving humans, we're going to be in the situation which we're in right now.

[Jonathan Cohen]

I mean, not to put global salvation on your shoulders, but you should maybe get the book out.

[Dan Harris]

Thanks buddy. Appreciate that. That was very helpful.

[Mayim Bialik]

Dan we really, really appreciate getting to talk to you and getting to interact with some of your community, and we just really appreciate the love that you have shown us. And, yeah, we look forward to so many more conversations and ways to connect. And we just love learning from you and just are so appreciative.

[Dan Harris]

Everything you said, I could have said to you, so.

[Mayim Bialik]

Oh, thank you. Yes, Dan, thank you so much. And we hope to see you in June.

[Dan Harris]

Yeah, you will see me in June. And my pleasure. And welcome.

[Mayim Bialik]

Because you wrote it down.

[Dan Harris]

Welcome to Substack.

[Mayim Bialik]

Thank you. Talk to y' all later. Bye, everybody.

[Dan Harris]

Bye, everybody.

[Mayim Bialik]

Break it down. One of the things that I got from this conversation was really in just learning about, honestly, this brain spotting technique, obviously it's super interesting how it helped him, you know, kind of have a deeper understanding of some of this trauma that had imprinted, you know, on him and on his psyche. I was kind of wondering, like, what else is in there? What if everyone, you know, is brain spotting using this technique? Like, do we all have things like this? Do some people just get over them better? What is it about certain brains? Right. I guess I should be thinking about answering this, but that's the question I'm thinking about. What is it about certain brains that are more susceptible to having this kind of imprint left on them that can stay with you for 50 years?

I think it's fascinating to think about our early imprints and then how they resurface, how they almost morph and change. I don't think they go away. But sometimes, whether it's stress related, like he says, it worsened during COVID so he was already under a level of stress. Things have changed, his coping mechanisms changed. And all of a sudden, it's like a whack. A mole. Where once it was either lying dormant or expressing itself in a different mannerism, now all of a sudden, it sort of rears its head and needs to be looked at. I also think there's a level of timing for these things in our life where we may have had these early experiences, but. But we're not ready to address them yet. Maybe we're in survival mode. Maybe we don't have the space. Maybe there's some force in the universe that knows it will break us if we try and tackle too much at once. And so I like this idea that, you know, there's also a timing to when these healing opportunities present themselves for us.

I was also struck by ongoing morphing he does in how he approaches different aspects of his healing. Meaning, if you follow his journey he's tried so many different things, and he's added so many different tools to his toolbox, but he really is in this position where he's got such a learning mindset around all of these things. And I think meditation teaches you to be really in tune with so many different aspects of what you're going through. And many of us just sort of like, numb around it or push through it or it's not a big deal, or it'll go away. I learn a lot from seeing his persistence, you know, and I find that really inspiring.

Persistence leads to the idea of consistency. I want to adjust a phrase that I said at the interview. I said, you can't see the label from inside the bottle. That was inaccurate. It's. You can't read the label from inside the bottle. If you're in the bottle, you can see that the label exists. You just can't read the information on the other side, which is about having a detailed understanding and the objectivity to see ourselves. And so when the goalposts keep moving, as we get a little bit better, we want to get a lot better. As we get one day of feeling less anxious, we want to get two, three, four, five days. If we feel less depressed, we want to feel amazing. And as those goal posts keep moving, we lose that objectivity. So the notion of just keep showing up, up, it's not about an end result. It's about the process of continuing to do the work, I think is really so important. And I was also touched by this notion of optimizing, where so many of us are thinking about, how do we improve our lives? We eat better, but we don't consider one of the most important factors, which is, you know, the tension in our relationships, the tension in our work relationships, showing up and being happy and being grateful and sharing that with other people. I had an experience the other day where I was out sitting on a patio. I just was grabbing a quick bite to eat while running errands, and Archie was with me. And two different people came up to Archie, and within three seconds of seeing him, they say, oh, my gosh, I love you so much. And their heart opened for this animal. And he just filled their life with such joy and such pleasure. And I thought, number one, it's just beautiful to see him bringing joy to people. And what's ridiculous, you're only hearing this in audio right now. But if you could watch the video, Archie has jumped up onto the table for this part of the conversation. You may even be able to hear him panting and licking in the background. But what struck me was how often do we just look at someone and say, oh, my gosh, you're an amazing human being, or I'm so struck by you, I'm just, like, wondering, what is the way that we could connect with other people? What would it do to the loneliness epidemic? What if we had moments of golden retriever interactions with other human beings throughout our day? How much oxytocin and happiness and just enthusiasm would it bring to our lives if we could sprinkle some golden retriever energy amongst human to human interaction?

The answer to that is one that, you know, Dan talks about the purpose of loving kindness meditation, which was brought over from India by Sharon Salzberg, by Joseph Goldstein. All these thinkers brought this information that has been practiced for thousands of years.

Loving kindness meditation. It's golden retriever meditation.

That feeling of, you know, goodness and oxytocin, like, those are things that we can generate. We actually don't need a dog, you know, to generate that. And that's, you know, one of the things that meditation's trying to teach you is that you can be the source of joy for yourself.

You can try to be the source of joy for yourself, or you could just get a golden retriever.

We hope you enjoyed this conversation we had with Dan Harris. We certainly enjoyed speaking with him again and hope to talk with him again.

If you aren't already a subscriber on our substack, please head over there. Join the breakdown community. We have so much exclusive content that we're releasing and amazing conversations and connection with the community.

So follow us at myambialics Breakdown over on substack. And from our breakdown to the one we hope you never have. We'll see you next time.

[Dan Harris]

It's Mayim Bialik's breakdown. She's gonna break it down for you. She's got a neuroscience PhD or two, non fiction. And now she's gonna break down. To break down. She's gonna break it down.