10% Happier: How I Tamed the Voice in My Head, Reduced Stress Without Losing My Edge, and Found Self-Help That Actually Works

After returning from the retreat, Harris quickly fell back into his everyday habits. Moreover, he was beset with a new set of problems at work, including a contract negotiation at ABC that stalled. Further, most people met his new devotion to meditation with skepticism, where “[t]he subtext always seemed to be, ‘So you’ve pretty much joined a cult, haven’t you?’” (153). After several conversations in which he felt his practice was misunderstood, he responded to one query with “‘I do it because it makes me 10% happier’…[which] had the dual benefit of being catchy and true” (154). When people started to respond positively to this summation, Harris started to seriously think about writing a book about his experience.

He met with Goldstein for an interview, and after learning how Goldstein himself got into meditation, asked him to justify the intense retreats, like those at Spirit Rock, about which many people remained skeptical. Goldstein argued that being in the environment of a retreat allows participants to become familiar with their thought patterns and, thus, achieve greater understanding of what is important to them. Harris, while a proponent of the positive effects of meditation, did press Goldstein on the idea that