10% Happier

Harris was an ABC News correspondent who had a panic attack on live television in 2004, traced it to untreated anxiety and to recreational drug use following war reporting, and eventually found meditation through covering religion for the network. The book is his account of a sceptic reaching a practice he had dismissed.

The reporting sections cover his encounters with Deepak Chopra and Eckhart Tolle, whom he treats critically, and with Mark Epstein, Joseph Goldstein and Sharon Salzberg, who provided the version of meditation he adopted. He is direct about the commercial self-help industry and about the difficulty of separating the practice from the claims made around it.

The practical content concerns what meditation actually does, which he presents in deliberately modest terms. It does not eliminate ambition, it does not produce enlightenment on any accessible timescale, and the reasonable claim is a moderate reduction in reactivity, which is where the title comes from. The mechanism he describes is noticing the gap between an event and the response to it, which permits a choice that automatic reaction does not.

He addresses the objection that meditation would remove the drive that produced his career, which he had held strongly, and reports that the effect was on the reactivity rather than on the ambition. The book contains no research beyond passing references. The clinical evidence for meditation is more mixed than popular coverage suggests, with small effect sizes in well-designed trials. Harris's own subsequent commercial interest in a meditation application postdates the book. The modest framing of the claim is its main contribution.