Buddhist Hacks for Anxiety and Overthinking | Joseph Goldstein

10% Happier with Dan Harris

10% Media, LLC

Health & Fitness, Mental Health

4.6 • 12.2K Ratings

🗓️ 4 January 2026

⏱️ 78 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Today we're gonna talk about some Buddhist hacks for two deeply related and all too common ailments: anxiety and overthinking. Most of us have struggled with one or both of these, and one of the people who has helped Dan the most is Joseph Goldstein.

Regular listeners to this podcast will be familiar with Joseph and his very direct, very down-to-earth style, but if you don't know – let us introduce you. He's one of the foremost Buddhist teachers in the west, he's been Dan's teacher for about 15 years, and Dan's recently convinced him to write a book together, using a collection of these little phrases that he's cooked up over the years. Dan's been keeping a list of around a hundred or so tiny, useful phrases – bite-sized wisdom for meditation practice and for daily life. The book won't be out for a few years, but we're conducting a series of interviews with him, each one covering a few phrases, and we'll be releasing those here on the podcast.

The first installment of these interviews about Joseph's phrases just came out on Thursday, Jan. 1, and you don't have to listen to that episode for this episode to make sense, but they are useful together.

Today, we'll be covering:

The practice assessment tapes
Whatever works
Cowboy Dharma
Dead end
Is this useful
And a quartet about walking meditation: sensations moving through space, walking through space, walking in a dream, walking through the mind

Don't worry if those don't make sense right now – stick with us and you'll get a thorough explanation of where those phrases all come from and how they can help.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	This is the 10% Happier Podcast. I'm Dan Harris.
0:18.4	Hello, everybody. How we doing? So today we're going to talk about some Buddhist strategies for two deeply related and very, very common ailments.
0:28.1	Anxiety and overthinking. I've been struggling with both of these ailments ever since I can remember.
0:34.2	And one of the people who's helped me the most in this regard is Joseph Goldstein.
0:39.6	Regular listeners to this podcast will be familiar with Joseph and his very funny, very wise, down-to-earth style.
0:47.1	But if you don't know him, let me introduce you. He's one of the foremost Buddhist teachers in the West.
0:52.3	He's been my teacher for about 15 years.
0:55.3	And I recently convinced him to write a book with me using a collection of these little
1:00.9	teaching phrases that he's cooked up over the years. These are pithy, often very funny phrases
1:06.3	that Joseph uses while he's teaching people to meditate and to incorporate aspects of the Dharma or Buddhism into their lives.
1:14.6	I have put together a list of about a hundred of these useful phrases,
1:19.6	which are really just bite-sized wisdom for your meditation practice and for your daily life.
1:24.6	The book we're writing won't be coming out for several years, but I'm in
1:28.5	the middle of conducting a series of interviews with Joseph, each one of them covering just a few of the
1:33.4	phrases, and we will be releasing the interviews right here on the podcast in the long run-up to
1:40.3	the eventual who-nose-when publication of the book. The first installment in this series of interviews with Joseph about his phrases came out just a few days ago on Thursday, January 1st.
1:53.2	If you didn't get a chance to listen to that, no big deal.
1:56.2	This episode will still make sense.
1:58.4	But if you're curious, you can definitely go back and listen.
2:02.3	It's worth doing so.
2:04.8	Today we'll be covering the following phrases.
2:11.6	The practice assessment tapes, whatever works, cowboy Dharma, dead end, is this useful?
	...

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