The Dharma of Anxiety and Depression | Leslie Booker

This is the 10% Happier Podcast. I'm Dan Harris. Hey everybody, today we've got a fun little episode about anxiety and depression. And yes, I know that sounds pretty counterintuitive. And yet, it can be genuinely enjoyable to have a candid conversation about these common and often life-degrading conditions.

Enjoyable not only because talking about this shit serves to normalize and aerate it, but also because, especially in this conversation you're about to hear, there are lots of really practical ways to handle anxiety and depression, evidence-based techniques grounded in both modern science and ancient Buddhism, and it is enjoyable to hear that you can work with this stuff. So what you're about to hear is a conversation between me and my friend, the great Dharma teacher Leslie Booker, which was recorded in front of a live audience at the New York Insight Meditation Center, a great place. Booker, and that's what she prefers to be called, Booker, Booker and I in this conversation get pretty candid. We talk about our own mental health struggles, and then we talk about how to deal with them.

We also talk about how anxiety and perfectionism show up differently across gender and race, what it means to mask your suffering, and how the cultural conversation around mental health has changed, both for better and for worse. A quick reminder before we dive in to go sign up over at danharris.com. If you're a member, you get custom guided meditations that come with our full-length Monday-Wednesday episodes, and you get weekly live meditation and Q<unk>A sessions every Tuesday at 4 Eastern. Also, one last very quick plug here. If you want to meditate with me in person, I'm doing an intimate little event at a hotel called Troutbeck, which is in the Hudson Valley north of New York City.

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