How To Work With Insomnia, Pain, and Your Mom's Voice in Your Head | Jeff Warren

This is the 10% happier podcast. I'm Dan Harris. Hello, my fellow suffering beings. How are we doing? We've got a conversation today with one of my best friends and favorite meditation teachers, Jeff Warren. We talk about insomnia, chronic pain, how to turn down the volume on your inner critic, how to handle the existential fears that many of us feel for our loved ones, especially our kids, what to do when you feel stuck in your meditation practice, and the difficulty that many of us face when we're caring for our aging parents. What you're about to hear is me and Jeff taking questions live from subscribers to my new app, which is called 10% with Dan Harris. We do these live sessions every week on video where we meditate and then take your questions. If you sign up for the app, you can join us in real time. To get the app, go over to DanHarris.com. There's a free 14 day trial if you want to try it before you buy. All right, here's my conversation with Jeff Warren. 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You've heard me say before I wear quince all the time from the pants I wore to a dinner party last night to the socks I'm wearing right now and on and on. Right now go to quince.com slash happier for free shipping and 365 day returns. That's a full year to build your wardrobe and love it and you will. Now available in Canada too. Don't keep settling for clothes that don't last. Go to q-i-n-c-e.com slash happier for free shipping and 365 day returns. Let's do some questions, Jeff. Yes. This one's from Rebecca. Meditation is very helpful in managing my anxiety about life and well-being. Acceptance works. When anxious about the well-being of my child, however, it is actually triggering. Acceptance that is, I think. How do we get equanimity around existential fears for our kids? Jeff, just a broadening question for those who don't have kids around anybody that you love and feel responsible for. Yeah, I mean, it's the hardest thing. I would say it's the single hardest thing in human life. That question. Thanks for asking the single hardest thing in human life. It's a practice. It's an endless life practice. Every parent, every human with any relationship will know that. However old you are. Sometimes people get hung up on the word acceptance. It's not the best word to use. It's why I prefer to use something like equanimity or think of it as this is the situation. Being able to truly recognize that this is what's happening. That's what the acceptance means. It's like, this is a real struggle. This struggle is actually happening. This is actually here. I'm not going to try to avoid it. Also, I'm not going to endlessly feed on it and obsess over it. It's more like, can I just be present with this exact clear seeing of how this suffering is and from that place of just like accepting that this is what's happening because it is what's happening. Then what is the response? It's like, you can hear that a million times, but then you have to try to put it into practice. That's where that lives. I have a regular practice outside of my seated practice for that reason. I can come into the practice of going, okay, this is my experience. This is the breaths. These are the sensations. This is what's here. Can I really let myself be with what's here? Can I not fight against what's uncomfortable? Can I not try to grab onto some way to secure myself? Can I really be there? From that training when I'm in front of my kid and they're having a hard time, that's the thing I'm trying to implement. I wish my kid had an easier time in life. I wish my six-year-old had less suffering, but he has suffering. This is how it is for him. I have to accept that's the case. When I'm really present with him, I find I have better responses around what I can do and I can begin to implement some of what I'm learning in this life. I'm just trying to be dead honest because I feel like I'm right in the middle of that too. I'd be interested in hearing what the wisdom of the group says, but that's what I do. This really is not easy. It's where the rubber hits the road in many ways in practice. It's easy to practice with joy. It's relatively easy to be mindful of an itch in meditation, but when it's worrying about somebody you love and you can't really control how things are going to go, that is hard. That's the reason why we keep coming back to do this practice. What I have noticed is that I can get into these real doomsday spirals about things that are based on what I see happening. I'm like, I project into what it looked like for his future. I project what his experience is. Those are mind states. There's passing convictions that you live inside and they have to be a feel so authoritative. If I can back out of the story of that and just come into being, well, what's actually here? That is the practice. Again and again and again. It is why we meditate and interestingly, if I'm less infected, I guess, with my own convictions about how things are, then I have a cleaner way of responding to my little guy and actually often it creates better patterns of relationship and even helps him feel better. I think being able to approach as much as possible these people in our lives with more of a sense of kind of presence and spaciousness, that also is a normally supportive. It shouldn't say that there are endless other resources and perspectives around this, but then we can be more available for those from that place. Very helpful, Jeff. Marie writes that she's got a nightly struggle with insomnia and chronic pain. Anything to say on that, Gorgia? Yeah. There are so many different ways to work with pain and it's one of those things where you have to kind of do a little bit of experimenting. I'm actually going to be writing a post about this. Some people find to what we're just talking about that. There is the physical pain and then there's the kind of stories. This is definitely a true insomnia that happens. You're not getting enough sleep. The story is about, oh, you're not getting enough sleep and how it's screwed. You're going to be the next day and all of that, the way they chain out and get bigger and bigger and bigger, then create more cascading stress hormones, which prevent you to sleep less and increase the pain. To be able to notice all of that happening and back down into the actual experience can be helpful. Then it's like, well, what can you do around the actual pain? Some people find going right into it, but very center of it and trying to stay with the part of it can actually begin to. They start to notice that a lot of the discomfort happens in the radiation. The radiating around it and that bringing it down is more helpful. Other people find that that creates too much intensity so that they need a really good distraction. They can find that they have a natural interest in doodling or in this, that they can pour their attention in that and that helps. Then doing self-compassion practices can really help. That's around the pain. Even if you Google different meditations, response to pain, like my teacher Shinsen had a great book called Breakthrough Pain with all of these really good pain strategies. Just to say for you, and tell me a tip, I think I mentioned this last time, but having a framework that my objective at night is not to get eight hours of solid unconscious sleep, but instead to get eight hours of rest or whatever it is. I don't have to be asleep for all of it, but if I wake up in the night, if I can let myself settle and find some just almost like meditate in the night, then you can still get a lot of the restorative benefits of kind of that nighttime rest period without being unconscious. That's been helpful for me too. Jeff, just on audio tip, is there somebody clanking or is there some sort of, I'm not going to pan on the table or something? Oh, this chair, Mikey. Okay. This chair is kind of loud and hold on. Not a huge deal, but thank you for doing that. Just one thing on the, and I think I said this last time I have pretty bad insomnia. I have to get up super early tomorrow at 5.45 and I know what I'm going to do to manage that is tell myself whatever sleep I get is fine. I've been through many, many days of zero sleep. I have always been fine. And just calming my nervous system by reassuring myself that my amount of sleep tonight, even though I've got something important to do tomorrow is not a referendum on my overall fitness and health or on how I will do tomorrow. I'll do fine because I've done fine before with little to no sleep. Just saying the thing to myself that I would say to my kid or any of you if you were in that situation is massively helpful. And on pain, I don't want to pretend to be an expert on this. One little thing that I picked up from Joseph Goldstein is just, and I'd be curious, Jeff, what you think of this, zeroing in on being mindful of the unpleasant feeling tone of the situation. So just to step back and Buddhism, everything that arises has a feeling tone associated with it. Any sensation, mental or physical is either pleasant or unpleasant or it's neutral. And so if it's pleasant, we want more of it's unpleasant. We don't want it. And if it's neutral, we zone out. And so just noticing, oh, unpleasant. Just tuning in just to the unpleasant instead of just labeling it as unpleasant instead of proliferating out on the stories about how this pain is just going to get worse. And I'm always the guy who's pain. How am I going to deal with this? Does that make sense, Jeff? Oh, yeah. It's hugely helpful. It's all part of the same move, which is to disinbed from the inevitability of things. Because so much of the suffering comes from the sense of inevitability. It will always be this way. Just any way to kind of pop out of that. And so whether you're noticing quality of the sensation with the noticing whether it's pleasant or unpleasant with the notice in your story, all of that has the same effect, which is to give us a little bit more space and to realize that we're not as subject to what's happening in the moment as we had previously imagined. And that's the freedom of practice. A pretty submitted question here from Louis or Louis. I can never decide how to pronounce that. Can you comment, Jeff, on the link between focus in meditation and focus in peak performance in sports or other activities? Yeah, I think they're the same skill. I mean, meditation is a bunch of skills gathered together. So you have to get it more clear. You have the accepting what's happening in the moment. You have the quality of kind of appreciation, but primarily what you have is concentration. We have a capacity to choose what we want to pay attention to. It's the most important human capacity. What you pay attention to becomes your life. And so meditation is the practice of choosing what you want to pay attention to and then committing to that. So there's this first, you select out of the many things you could be paying attention to. You select something and then you, you, you, you kind of commit to it and you let your focus pour into it in sports and all the stuff when people talk about flow or people talk about being in the zone, it has to do with there's our high states of concentration where you're paying attention to something that's not your worries. And the more you, and what's really interesting here is the more you gather or you recollect the pieces of your attention, the waving strands, the more you bring them into one direction, the more inherently fulfilling it gets. And conversely, the more time's attention splits, the less inherently fulfilling anyone's strand. So the reason it's so fulfilling to get absorbed in music and art and sports and your work is because of that, that concentrated quality. So in all that, as to say, when you're meditating and you're practicing concentration, that capacity to concentrate gets bigger in other areas of your life as well. So there's a direct correlation there. It's also a recipe for happiness. There's so many ways that meditation is a training around happiness. One of the ways is this concentration piece like, what are you doing where you're losing track of time? That's something you should do more. No matter whatever the circumstances are on the rest of your life, find ways to like drop your attention and lose track of time. And that's just a medicine for the nervous system. Yes. Yes. Another question from online here. This is from Mary. I started meditating as relief for depression a couple of years ago. It's been tremendously helpful. But I feel like I'm stuck in my meditation practice just going through the motions, any tips on moving forward. Yeah. Well, I mean, the first tip is noticing that's happening and normalizing the plateau. It's always like that. You start with the, it's a new skill. It's kind of novel. There's this contrast between before and after. It's exciting. You have momentum and meditation practice can be really, there's an upslope sometimes, but there can be this real period of like, kind of honeymoon period. And then it's like, all right. Now I'm used to it. And the contrast is less huge. And so much to this part when you're in the plateau is about just that kind of confidence of like coming back to the cushion again and again. Like, you know, that statue of the Buddha, whether it's rain, snow, leaves, sunshine, still you sit. So I would say like staying with the practice despite the plateau is part of it, it will change. And this is a good time to consult with someone who maybe knows your practice or get a little bit of extra advice because it can happen that we do get kind of in cul-de-sacs. You know, I would want to get a little more information about your practice, like what you're paying attention to, the way you're paying attention. Because there may be ways to just shift up either the object or the way you're meditating that can create, that can unblock something. And that's also true. And that's why, you know, I know you can get insights that way also from just reading Dharma books or doing things like this or hearing other people report on their practice. I wish I could give something more conclusive, but that would be what I would say about that. That's great. Makes me think that one service that this nascent operation could eventually provide is the opportunity to speak one on one to to a teacher occasionally. It's good, per valuable. Or be listening to other people speaking one on one. Yeah, or not one on one or speaking in a group because then you're like, oh, yeah, that happened to me. And that's why I think also trying different techniques a little bit. That's like why trying different kinds of meditations can be helpful. Like notice when you're doing different ones, you're going doing a bunch of guided practices. Well, which are the ones that I've seen to click or working more on? What is it about that? And then do them a little bit more and you can get into a good stream that way. Yeah, I mean, I think even for these sessions, the live guided meditation and Q and A sessions, we haven't figured out, yeah, but we're going to start bringing people on from the audience and letting them talk to the teacher directly because I think there's an enormous value not only for the person as you just indicated, the value is not just for the person asking the question, but as for everybody else who gets to listen in because even though you might not think it, actually, there's going to be something useful in there for you. Yeah, and actually, can I say one more thing too? Something about the inner teacher. The most important teacher in all of this is the quiet. It's in you. And that sometimes just spawns in easily through the act of getting settled. You can get insights about, oh, where there's an impasse or there's something blocked. And you can also do this more explicitly by at the beginning of your meditation. Ask, you know, drop in a question like, you know, I'd like to understand more about where I'm blocked in practice or what is it that I need to know about my meditation? And you kind of just drop it in and let it go. And it's like you kind of planted the seed in your subconscious. And you said you get quiet. You'd be amazed like the amount of insights to things that just come up spontaneously through you without needing to talk to anybody else. I mean, if you haven't tried that in a practice, I would recommend everybody try that in some way or another and just see what happens. Yeah, Joseph has recommended that very thing to me. Specifically, as it relates to creative blocks, you know, you're in the middle of writing. You don't know how do you end chapter two? I'm saying that because I had that very question today. How do I end chapter two? And you know, you seed the question in your mind, sit for a while. I mean, it's kind of like you may not get the meal you ordered. Is that something? Something will come. Another question here that was pre-submitted, Leonee, how can I turn down the volume on the constant narrative in my head? Sometimes it's evaluating often. It's just commentary, but it feels increasingly intrusive. It seems to take up so much space and get in the way of just experiencing what is. Yeah, well, it does because you're doing your meditating, you're meditating on your constant stream in your head. You've chosen the terrible meditation object as we all do. We are all meditating all day long on. We're just choosing to meditate on all this agonizing stuff in our head. So you're in really good company. And I have found the single, you know, the two primary, three primary strategies, three primary meditation strategies. You can choose what works best for you. They all work to some degree or another. One is replace the inner talk, the agonizing inner talk with more friendly messaging. You know, you do a loving kindness practice. May I be well? May you be well? You just start to like, you substitute different phrases in. That's a legit way to go. The second is you choose to pay attention to something else. That stuff's happening. You, but, you know, there's only so much real estate in consciousness. So instead of putting all of your attention in that real estate, you put your attention on the real estate of the breath, the real estate of that sound of the home and the heat meant. And the more you bring to it, the more you find those other strands cool out. They may still be there in the background, but they don't have this much robustness. And maybe the one I'd most recommend based on the vibe of the person who asked the question, I would say go directly into the thinking and get really curious about what those thoughts are made of. When you are listening to the narrator, first of all, where are you hearing it? Get more by wrong. You're right here. You're left here, more down below. Where is it happening spatially? If that makes sense. What is the tone? Is it urgent? Is it frenetic? Whose voice is it? Is it your voice? Or does it kind of sound like your mom's voice? Whatever. You're a grade three teacher. Just get curious about it. It's just a sensory object. Our thoughts are like inversions of our sensory experience. Thoughts happen. There's visual components. There's auditory components. There's somatic components. So kind of go into the thinking and get really, really curious about it. And I have practices like that on my substack, and we have one in our book where you just basically deconstruct the thoughts. And I'm telling you, for some people, it's a revelation. Because even just the act of turning towards them and getting curious about them, it often actually just cools out a lot of the thinking. So not only are you able to deconstruct the narrator or the problem or whatever it is, sometimes now it doesn't even show up at all. And so now you have this tool of just like turning with curiosity towards your thoughts can be one of the things that cools out. Now not always, but there are many, many things that can emerge from turning towards your thoughts that are very unexpected and quite liberating. So that's what I'd say about that. Yeah, I mean, Joseph often recommends that you just ask the question, what is a thought? Yeah. Because investigating that gets you right at this whole and often confusing idea of non-self, the self-indulgent or what the thoughts feel so real and so authoritative. But if I look for where is this thinking, who's doing it, who's receiving it, there's some fruitful not finding there. Profoundly. And what I'd be only think I would add to that is thoughts you're noticing the thought, they're not just happening. They seem to be happening for someone to someone. So you can look and go, well, where is this person, who are they happening to? You know, and you kind of like do this 180 and you look back and go, where are they happening to? And you realize there's nothing you can find in there that they're happening to. It's like the thought is happening and then there's a feeling of you behind your eyes. A bunch of visual stuff is happening to the bunch of sensations of your eyeballs. There's no you in it. Some people love that and find that deeply liberating. It's like, oh my god, there's nothing to take personally in here. The part that's most intimate with you is just all that's happening kind of in space. So if you look at like Zogchen teachings into Ben Buddhism around the space of mine, those kinds of teachings can be really helpful around like not taking thoughts personally. And then they just become this hilarious thing happening as part of the creativity of nature. Just to say, I find everything you just said, Jeff, super helpful. And I know there are some people listening who are like, what the fuck is he talking about? That's also fine. Like you're not a bad meditator if this is confusing to you. I would recommend to people is to play with this very lightly. And don't worry about any result or insight. It just just knock on the door every once in a while. And don't worry about any specific outcome. Let's see if I can sneak one more question in. This is from Thomas. I'm struggling now and have been for months with one parent who is sliding into dementia and his anxiety written. And the other who's trying to valiantly hold things together but lacks empathy and often loses it and speaks in a demanding fashion to their partner. How could I better deal with this very difficult situation, providing enough support to the one parent, but not get too exhausted because I get sucked into their world and then calling the other parent on their abominable behavior well, also acknowledging all the shit they're going through. Does that make sense the way I read it, Jeff? Absolutely. And just, there's a Thomas? Thomas, yeah. Oh man, just that is such a hard situation. And so first, just my feeling is self-compassion to start. Like this is a very, very hard situation to be in. Of course, compassion for the people you're caring for. And there is no perfect way through this situation. At least from what I can tell, and to my friends who are doing with similar kinds of things, it's like it's about doing the best you can and the best you can do will get better if you're able to pull back and take care of yourself to whatever degree you can take care of yourself. And by that, I mean, some activity where you can settle the intensity of the situation and let it settle inside you and underneath you and you can kind of come to center. And then you can come back into that situation with a little bit more presence. From that place, there'll be more clarity around the right time to have the right conversation with the right parent. If indeed that time ever comes. I've noticed that with family members, if I go in with an agenda around talking about something then or at a right time or whatever, it almost always goes pear-shaped. It has to be more like, for me, it's been like, drop the agenda. Just be a kind of compassionate presence. And often from that space, opportunities emerge to be able to mediate more skillfully. But the more you can do the self-care for yourself to settle and just to come in there and be in a place of kind of greater ground and availability, I think the better it goes. But it's just a really, really, really hard situation. And I was just talking to a friend who's got a young autistic son and they're just, it's a really hard situation. It's going to be a really hard situation for a long time. So he's a meditator. He knows that what he has to do and what his partner has to do is just, they got to take time for themselves to build a capacity because it's going to be a long haul. On this situation with the parent, I relate to it. I had this moment, as you've actually seen, that I'm including in my next book, five years ago, where I had to drive my parents. One of my parents, not my mother, has dementia. So I had to drive my mom and dad from their apartment and Boston to this assisted living facility that I had my brother and I had chosen for them near me in the suburbs of New York. And it was just this like head splitting role reversal. Here I am, like at the wheel, literally and figuratively uprooting them from their lives after having been, you know, in the reverse situation where they're in the front seat and I'm in the back seat and I'm in this situation where they're in the back seat, bickering a little bit. I've got their cat in a cat carrier strapped into the in to the front seat. She's screaming the whole ride. There's a four hour ride. She's screaming. This is like cabin is filled with feline, you elations and like my mom and dad kind of complaining about what's on the radio and when's lunch and this guy's making a mess. And it was just like this total role reversal from when I was seven and in the back seat. And I just had this moment of like I'm going to send everybody including the cat and myself. Meta. Yes. I'm just going to go through. Maybe happy. Maybe free from suffering, which is a real cousin of Meta or loving kindness. It's compassion or corona. That practice helped me stop trying to control the situation. Jard me out of my profound self pity and just gave me the golden fruit of patience. It was very, very helpful. Didn't fix anything. It just kind of helped me get right inside so that I could just manage the ups and downs of the moment. Does that make sense what I'm saying, Jeff? Oh my god. It's beautifully said. It's beautifully said, brother. The sacredness of this light. These are the people. These are the challenges. This is the reality. Can I lean into it? Can I embrace it and not have this? It's kind of a broken heart in nature of reality. It's so much bittersweetness and you need both ends to feel the full. Is what it is? Yes. The poignancy of the whole thing. That's why we show up and do this practice so that we can train for those moments and for all moments, frankly. The good ones, you want to be more there for them to save for them. Make them last a little bit longer and the shitty ones, you want them to last a little bit less long and you want to be as nimble and supple as possible. So that's the point of this practice we all do and then supercharge it all by practicing together, which Buddha had this insight 2600 years ago, validated by modern science that as I often say, life is better and easier in the carpool lane. So Jeff, thank you for being so awesome generally and in response to these questions. Thank you immensely. And thank you all for being here. It's enormously meaningful to me to see all of your faces. So thank you. I love you guys. Me too. Friends, you don't have to do it alone. Come to these. Yes. Well, that's all about. Yes. Well said. Stan, thanks buddy. Peace. Big thanks to Jeff. Don't forget to check out my new app where you can hear lots of guided meditations from Jeff and many other amazing teachers. You can get the app if you go to Dan Harris.com. There's a free 14 day trial. Finally, thank you very much to everybody who works so hard on the show. Our producers are Tara Anderson and Eleanor Vasilie are recording and engineering is handled by the great folks over at Pod people. Lauren Smith is our managing producer Marissa Schneider Min is our senior producer, DJ Kashmir is our executive producer and Nick Thorburn of the band Islands wrote our theme.