Dan Harris's 10% Happier and the Anxiety Facet (N1)

Dan Harris had a panic attack live on Good Morning America, which is a memorable way to learn that the anxious voice in your head can hijack you in front of five million people. 10% Happier is his skeptic's report from the years afterward, when a lifelong cynic about anything woo-ish went looking for something that actually worked and landed, uncomfortably, on meditation. He keeps the definition plain, as he puts it with Peter Attia: "Mindfulness is the ability to know what's happening in your head at any given moment without getting carried away by it." What tends to carry people away is one facet of the Big Five.

The voice that hijacks you is Anxiety

The facet is Anxiety (N1), the part of Neuroticism that measures how readily your mind manufactures worst cases and the low background hum that something is wrong. A high scorer's attention gets grabbed by every possible threat and holds on; a low scorer's mind simply does not generate the same volume of alarms. Harris is a high-N1 person by his own account, and the book is not a promise that meditation deletes the anxiety. The claim is smaller: you can learn to catch the worried thought as a thought, a few seconds before it becomes your whole afternoon.

The phrase he leans on, the voice in your head, is doing double duty. Some of it is N1, the anxious content itself, and some of it is the self-narrating critic that lives closer to Self-Consciousness (N4), the part that runs commentary on how you are coming across. Harris's practice works on your relationship to that voice rather than its volume, which is why the number in the title is 10 and not 100. For a high-N1 reader the honesty is a relief, because the usual self-help promise to make you fearless just reads as a lie you have already tried and failed to believe.

Your N1 tells you how much of this book is aimed at you. Run high and Harris is writing in your language, the argue-with-everything language of a mind that will not accept a platitude, and the modest 10% is the part that makes him credible. Run low and you may find the whole thing slightly puzzling, the way calm people are often baffled that anyone needs a technique for not spiraling at 3 a.m. The score will not tell you whether meditation is for you, but it will tell you how loud the voice was that Harris spent a book learning to sit next to, which is most of why some readers hear this one as gospel and others just shrug.

Read the book: 10% Happier: How I Tamed the Voice in My Head by Dan Harris.

See Where You Fall

Where do you actually fall? The 30-facet OCEAN personality test takes about 15 minutes and scores all five domains and the facets underneath them. Take the test

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