How to Work with Worry | Christiane Wolf

10% Happier with Dan Harris

10% Media, LLC

Health & Fitness, Mental Health

4.6 • 12.2K Ratings

🗓️ 26 December 2025

⏱️ 23 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Worry has a way of sneaking into everything—even gratitude, loving-kindness, and joy.

In this episode, Dan Harris sits down with meditation teacher and psychologist Christiane Wolf to explore how to work skillfully with worry without suppressing it, indulging it, or turning meditation into yet another way to beat yourself up.

Together, they unpack some of the most common pain points meditators face:

Why trying to force certain feelings (gratitude, calm, compassion) often backfires
Whether worry is ever actually helpful—and how to tell when it's not
How to work with fear while waiting for a health diagnosis
What to do when gratitude or loving-kindness practice triggers sadness or anxiety
How consumerism (hello, holiday season) fuels craving and unease
When mindfulness is enough—and when psychological work is needed to avoid spiritual bypassing

Christiane offers practical tools for meeting worry with kindness, curiosity, and clarity—including how to "name it to tame it," how to gently redirect attention without suppression, and how to relate to anxious or critical thoughts as parts rather than as who you are.

This conversation is honest, grounded, and deeply humane—especially for anyone who worries that they're "doing meditation wrong" or feels guilty for not feeling better fast enough.

Recorded live during a subscriber Q&A session – join us at DanHarris.com to be part of these sessions as they happen!

Related Episodes:

How to Outsmart Your Pain | Christiane Wolf
Is Your Ambition Rooted in Trauma? | Christiane Wolf

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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	Hey, hey, everybody. Today we're going to talk about how to work with worry, especially if you're in the middle of that special hell of waiting for a medical diagnosis, what to do when gratitude doesn't work or when it backfires or makes you feel worse, how to deal with that jangly, never enough feeling of wanting that can come over you,
0:40.1	especially during the holidays, how to disentangle from your inner critic, and much more.
0:45.6	My guest today is Dr. Cristiana Wolfe, who is a physician, a longtime Dharma teacher, and an
0:53.5	ultramarathoner. So she's got a varied resume.
0:56.7	What you're about to hear is a recording of one of our weekly live sessions that we do over on
1:01.8	Dan Harris.com. These sessions are normally for our paying subscribers, but we're dropping this one for
1:06.5	free. The session you're about to hear was the first time we ever did this on Zoom after many months on substack.
1:13.3	So you'll hear us figuring out some things on the fly.
1:15.8	Thank you for your patience on that score.
1:18.0	We always start these things with a short guided meditation, but we clip that out so you can just get right to the Q&A with me and Kristiana.
1:25.7	Just to say before we dive in, you can come to all of our weekly
1:28.2	live meditation and Q&A sessions if you sign up for my new app, which is called 10% with Dan
1:34.8	Harris. You can sign up at Dan Harris.com. We do these sessions every Tuesday at 4 Eastern.
1:40.1	We won't be doing our normal 4 o'clock Tuesday session on Tuesday, December 30th because of the holidays, but I'll be doing three of them the following week when we launch our New Year's meditation challenge with Joseph Goldstein.
1:54.6	Those will be available for anybody.
1:57.3	That meditation challenge, by the way, is free.
1:59.3	If you sign up now over at Danharris.com,
2:02.6	you can get a free 30-day trial, which will include the New Year's meditation challenge.
2:07.4	So you should go sign up. All right. We'll dive in with Cristiano Wolf right after this.
2:14.1	When we're practicing something like gratitude, and it can also come up when we're practicing loving kindness or when we're practicing something like gratitude. And it can also come up when we're practicing loving kindness or when we're practicing joy
2:22.4	or when we're practicing compassion is to remember that we cannot make ourselves feel that.
	...

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