This is the 10% Happier Podcast.

I'm Dan Harris.

Hey, everybody.

Okay, here's the truth. We don't like this, but we know it's true.

Bad shit is going to happen to you, and it's going to happen to the people around you. It's happened to you in the past, and you know it's going to happen again. So the question is, how do you want to handle it?

Today, we've got a survival guide for navigating

adversity. And just to say, if you're not in the middle of adversity right now, this episode

also includes an enormous amount of practical tips for catastrophic thinking and worrying,

which many of us do about potential future bad events. And as many of you know, this type of catastrophizing is a

salient feature of my own inner life with many, many deleterious effects. My guest is Maya Shanker.

She's a cognitive scientist and creator of a podcast called A Slight Change of Plans. She served as

a senior policy advisor in the Obama

White House, where she founded and chaired the social and behavioral sciences team. And she's got a new

book. It's called The Other Side of Change, Who We Become When Life Makes Other Plans. In this conversation,

we talk about the two major life events that caused Maya to study the topic of change, how to build a more expansive sense of self, cognitive biases such as the end of history illusion.

She talks about tools for getting unstuck from rumination, including affect labeling, mental time travel, and awe.

She makes a surprising case for the utility of

distraction and denial, and much more. We got lots of meditations designed to help you navigate

life's inevitable ups and downs and all of the worrying you might do about future ups and downs.

Over on our new app, which is called 10% with Dan Harris.

You can sign up at Dan Harris.com. There's a free 14-day trial. If you want to check it out

before you spend any money, we've got a growing library of meditations over there from the

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