It's the 10% Happier Podcast. I'm Dan Harris.

Hey, everybody. As many of you know, I've been deeply interested in recent years by the practice of self-compassion, which sounds a little treakly, but actually, in my experience, is life-changing. There's a ton of scientific research to back this up. And one of the principal practices of self-compassion developed by the great Kristen Neff, the researcher who

pioneered the concept of self-compassion and then led much of the research into it. One of the

primary practices is called the mindful self-compassion break. And the first step is to just

wake up to the fact that you're suffering in some way or kicking your own ass.

So the first step is mindfulness.

The second step I'm going to hold for a second because it relates to everything else I'm going to say.

The third step is to talk to yourself the way you would talk to a good friend, which is incredibly impactful.

But back to the second step.

The second step is something called common humanity. Just bringing to mind that whatever you're dealing with right now, no matter how bespoke or odd or idiosyncratic your issue is right now, there are millions of other people, odds are, who are dealing with the same thing at this very moment. So it's that second piece of the mindful self-compassion, break, this thing that

Kristen Neff calls common humanity that is at the heart of a new podcast that I want to introduce you to today.

Here's the concept.

If you've ever been in a situation where you have a problem and you have this feeling that you're alone in the problem that nobody else can relate and that you wish you could talk to one person who really, really understands it from the inside.

So what if in that situation you had your own personal investigative journalist who would scour the world for the perfect

stranger with just the right experience for you to talk to. I would have loved it back in 2004

if there was somebody else who could have talked to me about what it was like to have a Coke-fueled

panic attack on national television. But anyway, back to this podcast, I want to introduce you

to. It's called proxy and it provides exactly the service I was just describing.

It's hosted by Yo-Wei Shah, who you may remember as one of the hosts of the NPR podcast Invisibilia, which was super, super popular, but sadly went away.

Yo-Wei is back, and on this new show show, proxy, Yo-A investigates your niche emotional

conundrums and puts you into conversation with a proxy, a stranger who's been in nearly the

exact same situation or has some expertise and can hopefully help you get unstuck. Yo-Wei calls it

...