This is the 10% happier podcast. I'm Dan Harris.

Hey, everybody, it's winter. It's dark out. And it's been dark inside my head at many

times over these past few months. I've personally struggled with depression since I was a kid

whose parents sent them to a shrink a bunch of times. And winter can often be tricky

for me. If you've had similar experiences, you're in luck because we've got one of the

world's leading experts in both depression and in how meditation can help.

Sona Demigen is a professor in the Department of Psychology and Neuroscience at the University

of Colorado Boulder. She's a close colleague of Zindel Siegel who was on the show Ways Back.

That was an extremely popular episode. As I suspect this will be. In this conversation,

we cover seasonal impacts on depression, the research on how meditation can help depression

generally and what she calls your behavioral anti-depressants, which is a fascinating subject.

She'll go into that in a pretty deep way as you're about to hear. Sona is low-key in her

presentation, but she is truly an ninja when it comes to the science around this extremely

common mental health challenge. Heads up on a few issues. There are a number of references

to suicide in this conversation just so you know. And on a much lighter note, you're going

to hear Sona make a quick reference to the 30 seconds of silence at the start of the

interview, which is a quick break we take before we start the interview. And in that quick

break, we record what is called room tone. This is a technical thing. I've never understood,

but I do use it as a time to quickly meditate before I start firing questions. And so I

just didn't want you to be confused when you heard her reference to it.

One more thing before we dive in, we are launching a new podcast. We've actually launched

it already. One of the most intense, important and astonishingly difficult things that has

...