The Reset for Anxiety, Overthinking, and Losing Yourself in the Wrong Story | Diana Winston
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Why do we keep making the same mistakes even after years of practice and therapy?
Hello, everybody. Welcome to the 10% Happier Podcast. I'm your host, Dan Harris. Here's something that I find uh frustrating and sometimes humiliating. There are certain mistakes that I just make again and again and again. Even though I've got the tools, even though I've done the therapy, I just keep making the same mistakes again. So that's what we're going to talk about today: why we get stuck in the same old patterns and how to get out of them. My guest today is Diana Winston. Director of UCLA Mindful and UCLA Health, also the author of a book called The Little Book of Being. Not for nothing. She spent uh a year as a Buddhist nun in Burma, which I find endlessly impressive. One other thing to say about Diana before we dive in here: she's leading a meditation challenge over on my app, 10% with Dan Harris.
It's called uh the Reset Meditation Challenge. Uh, it starts next week. It runs From September 21st through the 25th. Uh, the goal is to help you reset in lots of ways, uh, to reboot your meditation practice, uh, to help you reset when you wake up at three in the morning, when you're stuck in a thought spiral, when you're trapped in uh judgments of yourself or other people. Lots of ways to reset with Diana Winston. Diana, welcome back to the show.
Hi Dan. Thanks for inviting me back.
We're gonna go deep on breaking out of old patterns. But I wanna step all the way back here because when uh Marissa Schneiderman, uh uh one of our uh veteran producers reached out to you to to see what you wanted to talk about, you said you wanted to talk about awakening. Again, we will get to breaking out of old patterns because that is how part of how you view awakening. But let me just start there on the word awakening. awakening because um many of us get into meditation or related practices uh to relieve stress, sleep a little better, but the goal of the practice as articulated by a guy known as the Buddha was to awaken. In fact, the word Buddha is the means awake, though the awakened one. So what do you mean when you use that word awakening?
Yeah, it's a it's a pretty broad term, obviously, and it can be used to mean a lot of different things from awakening to more freedom and peace and understanding, awakening from the ways that we're caught in our old habits and that we can find new ways to act and be in the world. Awakening into the here and now, which is a huge part of it, like not being lost in our thoughts and ruminations, but just awakening to the experience of being alive in this moment. And then of course, as you're sort of pointing to, there are these deeper, more profound understandings in the tradition about awakening that sort of have these more esoteric end of things. But I think it can be like really, really specific and useful in daily life.
We don't need to worry uh about nirvana necessarily in this context.
We definitely don't need to worry about it. Um, but we might it we might want to think about it a little bit. I mean we can talk a tiny bit about it, but here I'm mostly interested in ordinary people doing ordinary things and waking up into more peace and freedom and joy.
Okay, we'll we'll we'll get to the deeper end of the pool because I love thinking about uh nirvana. I don't I tend not to worry about it. You're right. Um but it is interesting to think about um enlightenment, et cetera, et cetera. But let's let's let's start with the the more um easier to grasp aspects of awakening. You've got these four ways in which you think about the word. The first is to uh wake up to like What's happening right now? This is one of the one of the principal spiritual cliches, the present moment. Uh, but cliches get to be cliches because they point to something deep. Um so s say a little bit about what you have in mind when you talk about waking up to the present moment.
Right. So this, you're right. It it is a little cliched and it is um but it's real. Right. It's when we're in the midst of whatever it is that's causing us to be lost, to be out of touch with ourselves, to be lost in ruminations and worry and fear and you know, and then suddenly there's this moment where we realize we're lost and we just go, oh.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
Why do we keep making the same mistakes even after years of practice and therapy?
0:04–7:42
2
What are the four different ways to understand “awakening” in everyday life?
7:42–15:17
3
How can a simple three‑part check‑in help us reset into the present moment?
15:17–23:01
4
What is the four‑step practice for working with a difficult emotion in real time?
23:01–30:41
5
How can we turn judgment into a doorway for deeper self‑understanding and compassion?
30:41–39:37
6
Why is self‑compassion the foundation for loving others well?
39:37–46:03
7
How can we access little tastes of transcendence in ordinary daily life?
46:03–55:56
8
What is the Reset Meditation Challenge and how can it help break old patterns?
55:56–1:03:15
Speakers
1 identifiedMore from 10% Happier with Dan Harris
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The Science Of Building The Life You Want | Arthur Brooks
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The Science of Habit Change, Why GLP-1s are Disrupting It, and How To Use It To Have Better Conversations | Charles Duhigg