Top 5 Ways to Thrive Not Survive! How Meditation, Somatic Work & Building Interpersonal Trust Can Dramatically Improve How You Feel Each Day w/ Dan Harris

Mayim Bialik's Breakdown

Mayim Bialik

Comedy, Health & Fitness, Mental Health

4.8 • 5.9K Ratings

🗓️ 5 September 2025

⏱️ 49 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Exclusive Substack Release! We originally posted this episode to our Substack Breakers ONLY and we thought it was time we shared with YOU! Subscribe at bialikbreakdown.substack.com for more exclusive content like this and more! We sat down with our friend Dan Harris (author of 10% Happier, journalist, and meditation teacher) for a raw, unscripted conversation about anxiety, meditation, and what it really means to live with more calm and connection. What began as Mayim confessing her nerves quickly unfolded into an exploration of habit formation, the messy reality of meditation practice, and why "success" doesn’t mean never feeling anxious again. Dan shared personal stories of facing claustrophobia, panic on planes, and the unexpected childhood memories that surfaced through brainspotting and therapy. Jonathan weighed in on consciousness, body memory, and the ways stress embeds itself in us—and how practices like EMDR or somatic work can help release it. The conversation didn’t stop there. We also touched on: Why perfection isn’t the goal of meditation—and why simply "showing up" matters The difference between trauma, stress, and the everyday burdens of being human The role of visualization and faith (secular or otherwise) in rewiring the brain How relationships and connection shape our survival, health, and happiness Dan’s upcoming book about redefining love, not just as romance, but as the essential force behind our well-being and even our survival as a species We hope this live encourages you to judge yourself a little less, and lean on others a little more. Dan Harris' Substack: https://www.danharris.com/ Follow us on Substack for Exclusive Bonus Content: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://bialikbreakdown.substack.com/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠BialikBreakdown.com⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠YouTube.com/mayimbialik⁠⁠ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	She's going to break it down.
0:03.2	Hi, I'm I'm Bialik.
0:04.6	I'm Jonathan Cohen.
0:05.7	And welcome to our breakdown.
0:07.4	We have a very special audio-only episode for you today.
0:11.0	Coming to you from a conversation we had over on our substack, which is where the breaker community hangs out and gets exclusive content that's not released anywhere else. This is a little sneak
0:22.9	preview of what we've been doing over there. Yeah, we had this conversation with Dan Harris.
0:27.7	He's been on our podcast. I've been on his podcast. He's the 10% happier guy. He's also a
0:33.0	journalist, an anchor for ABC News, Nightline, Good Morning America. He very, very famously had a panic attack
0:39.2	live on the air, which led him to an entire exploration of meditation, trauma, and a really
0:46.3	fascinating journey that he writes about. But he has an entire kind of universe of educating
0:52.2	people about meditation. And in this conversation that we had on
0:56.2	Substack, we had just joined Substack and I've been following him on Substack. So we thought it would
1:00.1	be fun to have a conversation. It kind of went in a lot of different directions, but we wanted to
1:03.8	release it here. He talks about the dangers of over-analyzing progress, especially in meditation.
1:09.4	He talks about Joseph Goldstein, who is his main
1:12.1	meditation teacher, who I'm also a huge fan of. He talks about his claustrophobia, which is something
1:16.6	that he has continued to experience and explore through all of his different practices. And he's also
1:21.4	going to talk about his upcoming book on love. The really interesting part of his conversation on
1:27.2	claustrophobia is he used a term called the sub-basement of his mind,
1:31.3	going back and finding an early childhood experience which was now manifesting in intense claustrophobia,
1:38.3	so much so that he has to drug himself when flying, and he really opens up to us in a way that we had spoken to him before and we didn't
	...

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