10% Happier

Dan Harris

• Publisher: Dey Street Books
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9780062265449
• Topic: Personal Development
• Subtopic: Mental Health & Wellbeing

Chapter 1

Air Hunger

According to the Nielsen ratings data, 5.019 million people saw me lose my mind.

It happened on June 7, 2004, on the set of Good Morning America. I was wearing my favorite new tie and a thick coating of makeup. My hair was overly coiffed and puffy. The bosses had asked me to fill in for my colleague Robin Roberts as the News Reader. The job basically entailed coming on and anchoring brief news updates at the top of each hour.

I was sitting in Robin’s spot, at a small, satellite anchor desk inside the second story of ABC’s glass-encased studio in New York’s Times Square. On the other side of the room was the main anchor desk, home to the show’s cohosts, the avuncular Charles Gibson and the elegant Diane Sawyer.

Charlie tossed it over to me: “We’re gonna go now to Dan Harris, who’s at the news desk. Dan?” At this point, I was supposed to read a series of six “voice-overs”—short news items, about twenty seconds apiece, over which the control room would roll video clips.

It started out fine. “Good morning, Charlie and Diane. Thank you,” I said in my best morning-anchor voice, chipper, yet authoritative.

But then, right in the middle of the second voice-over, it hit. Out of nowhere, I felt like I was being stabbed in the brain with raw animal fear. A paralytic wave of panic rolled up through my shoulders, over the top of my head, then melted down the front of my face. The universe was collapsing in on me. My heart started to gallop. My mouth dried up. My palms oozed sweat.

I knew I had four more stories to read, an eternity, with no break and no place to hide—no sound bites or pretaped stories or field correspondents to toss to, which would have allowed me to regroup and catch my breath.

As I began the third story, about cholesterol drugs, I was starting to lose my ability to speak, gasping as I waged an internal battle against the wave of howling terror, all of it compounded by the knowledge that the whole debacle was being beamed out live.

You’re on national television.

This is happening now. Right now.

Everyone is seeing this, dude.

Do something. DO something.

I tried to fight through it, with mixed results. The official transcript of the broadcast reflects my descent into incoherence:

“Researchers report people who take cholesterol-lowering drugs called statins for at least five years may also lower their risk for cancer, but it’s too early to . . . to prescribe statins slowly for cancer production.”

It was at this point, shortly after my reference to “cancer production,” with my face drained of blood and contorted with tics, that I knew I had to come up with something drastic to get myself out of the situation.

My on-air meltdown was the direct result of an extended run of mindlessness, a period of time during which I was focused on advancement and adventure, to the detriment of pretty much everything else in my life. It began on March 13, 2000: my first day at ABC News.

I was twenty-eight years old, terrified, and wearing an unfortunate double-breasted suit as I walked through the high-ceilinged entryway lined with pictures of such luminaries as Peter Jennings, Diane Sawyer, and Barbara Walters (all now my colleagues, apparently), then took the steep, stately escalator up into the mouth of the building on Manhattan’s Upper West Side.

They made me go to the basement that day, to some fluorescent-lit security office to have my picture taken for my new identification card. In the photo, I looked so young that a colleague would later joke that a wider shot might reveal me to be holding a balloon.

That I had made it to ABC at all seemed like a big misunderstanding, or maybe a cruel joke. During the preceding seven years, as I toiled in local news, my dream had always been to “get to the network”—which was how people in the farm leagues referred to it—but I had assumed it wouldn’t happen until I was maybe forty and looked old enough to operate a motor vehicle.

I had started in TV news straight out of college, with the vague goal of pursuing a career that had a modicum of glitz and also did not require me to do any math. My parents were doctors, but I didn’t have the aptitude or the attention span for med school. So, despite some initial misgivings on the part of my folks, I took a job at an NBC station in Bangor, Maine (one of the smallest television markets in the country—number 154 out of 210). The gig was part-time, paid $5.50 an hour, and involved writing scripts for the anchorwoman, then operating the studio camera during a broadcast called Alive at 5:30. On my first day, the producer who was assigned to train me wheeled around from his electric typewriter and matter-of-factly announced, “This is not a glamorous job.” He was right. Covering tire fires and snowstorms in rural Maine—not to mention living in a tiny apartment on the first floor of an elderly woman’s house and eating mac and cheese nearly every night—was profoundly unsexy. Nevertheless, I loved it immediately.

After a few months of badgering my bosses to put me on camera, they relented, and I became a reporter and an anchor, even though I was barely twenty-two and only had one blue blazer, a hand-me-down from my dad. It didn’t take long for me to know that this job was what I would be doing for the rest of my life. I found the craft itself fascinating—especially the challenge of writing stories that were meant to be spoken aloud and matched to pictures. I delighted in the opportunity to get intrigued by an obscure but important subject, and then devise ways to teach viewers something that might be useful or illuminating. Most of all, I took enormous pleasure in the fact that my new position gave me license to march up to important people and ask impertinent questions.

Broadcast news is a tricky beast, though. Aside from the high-minded stuff about holding powerful interests accountable and using the power of the medium for good, there is also something deeply and irrationally affirming about getting your mug on TV. Watch how excited people get at baseball games when their faces flash on the JumboTron. Now imagine doing that for a living.

My colleague in Bangor was correct that much of the actual work of being a TV reporter—sitting through interminable news conferences, spending hours in a news van with an irascible cameraman, chasing down cops for sound bites—was not glamorous, but as I moved to larger markets, first to Portland, Maine, and then to Boston, the pay got better and the stories bigger, and the visceral thrill of being recognized in bars and on line at the bank never got old.

I remember my mother, a repository of wisdom, once telling me offhandedly at some point during my youth that she thought anyone who would run for president must have a hole on their inside that was so big it could never be filled. To the extent that I ever allowed myself to reflect on my drive to be on TV, I always found her comment haunting.

Seven years after that first job in Bangor, I was working at a twenty-four-hour cable news channel in the Boston area when I got a call, seemingly out of nowhere, indicating that I might be on the cusp of landing the big fish. My agent told me that executives at ABC News had seen my tapes and wanted to talk.

They hired me as the co-anchor of ABC’s loose and scrappy overnight newscast, World News Now, which airs from two to four in the morning, to an audience consisting primarily of insomniacs, nursing mothers, and college students hopped up on ADD drugs. By the time I reported for duty, though, on that day in March of 2000, the guy I was supposed to replace, Anderson Cooper, had decided he didn’t want to leave just yet. Not knowing what else to do with me, the bosses gave me a chance to file some stories for the weekend edition of our evening newscast, World News Tonight. As far as I was concerned, this was the coolest thing that had ever happened to me. Just a few weeks prior, I’d been reporting for an audience of tens of thousands of New Englanders; now I was broadcasting to millions of people all over the country. Then it got even better: I was asked to file my first story for the weekday edition of the evening news, anchored by Peter Jennings himself.

I idolized Jennings. My whole on-air style was a straight-to-video version of his. I had studied his intricate anchor desk ballet—the masterful mix of slow leans, head nods, and arched eyebrows. I admired his ability to be smooth, and yet emote without being mawkish. He was the epitome of the voice-of-God anchorman, with a personal mystique to boot: the 007 looks, the four wives, the rumored celebrity trysts.

He was the colossus who sat astride ABC News. Internally, his broadcast was referred to simply as “The Show,” almost as if we didn’t have other major broadcasts like 20/20, GMA, and Nightline. He was also the object of bottomless fear. I hadn’t met him yet, but I’d already heard the stories about his volcanic temper. Because of his reputation for eating his young, the executives deliberately scheduled my first appearance on his show for July 4, a day they knew he would be on vacation.

I did a feature story about baby boomers going back to work as lifeguards because all the young people were taking jobs with dotcom companies. When it aired, the show’s producers seemed satisfied with the piece, but I never heard from Jennings himself. I didn’t know if he’d been watching, or if he even knew who I was.

A few weeks later, I was at the apartment I shared with my younger brother, Matt, riding the exercise bike we’d set up in the living room, when my landline, cell phone, and pager went off in rapid succession. I got off the bike and checked the pager. It read, “4040.” This was the extension for the World News Tonight “rim,” the area where Peter and his senior producers spent the day putting together the show. I called in, and the young assistant who answered the phone put me on hold. Then a man picked up and said, “I think we need to start covering Ralph Nader. His campaign is picking up speed. Can you do it?” I looked over at Matt and mouthed, “I think this is Peter Jennings.”

The next day, I was on a plane to Madison, Wisconsin, to interview Nader and file a piece for that night’s broadcast. It was a hectic, harrowing process, exacerbated by the fact that, late in the day, Peter requested a series of significant changes to the script I had written. We managed to “make air,” but just barely. When I got back to my hotel room and dialed into the Internet, I saw that I had a two-word email from Peter: “Call me.” So I did. Immediately. I was expecting him to ream me out for writing a subpar script, but the first thing he said was, “Wear lighter-colored shirts.” He then proceeded to inform me that he’d been named to People’s Best Dressed list based entirely on clothes he ordered from catalogues.

That sealed it. For the next five years, Peter was my mentor and, sometimes, tormentor. Anchoring the overnight show was now off the table. I had, improbably, become a network news correspondent. They gave me a set of business cards and my very first office, on the fourth floor of the building, alongside five other correspondents, all men several decades older than I was. Our offices were arrayed along a catwalk that overlooked the set from which Peter anchored his show. One morning, shortly after I moved in, I got off the elevator and the other reporters were huddled together, chatting. None of them would speak to me. It was awkward and a little bit intimidating, but if this was the price I had to pay for scoring this job a full decade before I thought it could happen, it was totally worth it.

Working for Peter was like sticking your head in a lion’s mouth: thrilling, but not particularly safe. He was frightening for a lot of reasons: he was about a foot taller than me, he was subject to sudden and unpredictable mood swings, and—even though he was originally from Canada—he was a bona fide American icon, which made it surreally mortifying when he yelled at you. He seemed to take pleasure in embarrassing me, preferably in front of as many people as possible. Once, his assistant called me down to the rim, saying Peter needed to discuss something. When I arrived, Peter looked up, did a double take, and eyeing my plaid jacket, said, “You’re not going to wear that on television, are you?” Everyone laughed uncomfortably. I turned fuchsia, and muttered something about how of course I wasn’t. I may have subsequently burned it.

But the real flash point—as with every correspondent—was the script-writing process. Peter was an exacting and irascible editor, and he often made changes at the last minute, sending producers and correspondents into frenzied scrambles minutes before airtime. Even when he affected a more-in-sadness-than-in-anger tone to his revisions, I strongly suspected that he actually enjoyed the power play. He had a set of semi-rational writing rules that every correspondent learned to obey over the course of a particularly rigorous hazing period: don’t start a sentence with “but”; don’t say “like” when you can say “such as”; never, ever use the word “meanwhile.”

By no means were all of Peter’s standards arbitrary, though. After observing and interacting with him for a while, it became clear that he cared deeply about this work. He saw his job as a privilege—a sacred trust with the audience, and a vital part of a functioning democracy. He was a congenital contrarian who expected his staff to aggressively question authority (including our own bosses—except, of course, him). Early in my tenure, I pitched him a story about the treatment of mentally ill inmates in prison, which Peter personally helped me produce and gave prominent play on his broadcast. Then he had me launch more investigations, one on the issue of rape in prison, and another into the silencing of conservative voices on American college campuses. It was a journalistic apprenticeship par excellence.

Very often, though, Peter’s inspirational qualities were obscured by his mercurial behavior—and the primary venue for this was at the rim in those frenetic late afternoon hours before airtime, as reporters and producers were desperately vying for him to approve their scripts—which he insisted on doing personally. Some of his signature moves included reordering all of the ideas in a story for no discernible reason, and poaching the best lines from our pieces and using them himself. We correspondents (the older guys on my hall eventually deigned to communicate with me) often commiserated about getting “Petered,” inevitably concluding that the level of criticism we received was directly correlated to Peter’s mood or his personal feelings about you at that moment. He was, we all agreed, a man fueled by a combustible mix of preternatural talent and crushing insecurity. The first—and only—time I was handed back a script with no marks from his red pen, I saved it.

While I may have been initially stunned by my ascent at ABC News, I was not about to let the opportunity go to waste. I quickly got over my I-can’t-believe-they’re-letting-me-through-security phase and started focusing on how to navigate what could be a Hobbesian environment where the various broadcasts, anchors, and executives competed fiercely against one another, and where aligning yourself too closely with any particular clique carried risks.

My modus operandi was inherited from my father, whose motto was: “The price of security is insecurity.” Dr. Jay Harris, a gifted wringer of hands and gnasher of teeth, used his security/insecurity maxim to advance through the world of cutthroat nebbishes in academic medicine. My mom, a reserved Massachusetts Yankee, was slightly mellower about her equally demanding medical career. The joke around the house was that this was because my dad is Jewish and my mom is not. The other running joke was that I had inherited all of my dad’s worrier genes, and my brother had been spared. As Matt once quipped, “Dan makes Woody Allen look like a Buddhist monk.”

Kidding—and ethnic stereotypes—aside, I took my dad’s maxim very much to heart. Straight from childhood, I was a frequent mental inventory taker, scanning my consciousness for objects of concern, kind of like pressing a bruise to see if it still hurts. In my view, the balance between stress and contentment was life’s biggest riddle. On the one hand, I was utterly convinced that the continuation of any success I had achieved was contingent upon persistent hypervigilance. I figured this kind of behavior must be adaptive from an evolutionary standpoint—cavemen who worried about possible threats, real or imagined, probably survived longer. On the other hand, I was keenly aware that while this kind of insecurity might prolong life, it also made it less enjoyable.

Once at ABC, though, any attempts at balan...