10% Happier with Dan Harris

How To Work With Insomnia, Pain, and Your Mom's Voice in Your Head | Jeff Warren

February 13, 2026

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  • Equanimity, rather than 'acceptance,' is the preferred approach for dealing with existential fears for loved ones, requiring recognizing the reality of the situation without endlessly feeding the obsession. 
  • For insomnia and chronic pain, a key strategy is shifting the goal from achieving perfect sleep or avoiding pain to accepting the current experience and noticing the secondary suffering caused by stories about the pain or lack of sleep. 
  • Concentration developed through meditation is the same skill required for peak performance in sports and other activities, and increasing focus inherently leads to more fulfilling experiences. 

Segments

Existential Fears for Loved Ones
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(00:03:35)
  • Key Takeaway: Equanimity is superior to acceptance when managing existential fears for children or loved ones, requiring recognizing the reality of suffering without obsessing over it.
  • Summary: Existential fears for loved ones are described as the single hardest thing in human life, requiring an endless life practice. The term ‘acceptance’ is often replaced by ’equanimity,’ meaning recognizing the situation is happening without endlessly feeding the obsession. From this clear seeing, one can determine a better, more present response to the loved one’s difficulty.
Strategies for Insomnia and Pain
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(00:07:45)
  • Key Takeaway: For insomnia, the objective should be eight hours of rest, not necessarily eight hours of unconscious sleep, allowing for meditation during nighttime awakenings.
  • Summary: Working with pain requires experimenting with approaches, such as focusing on the center of the pain or using distraction, alongside self-compassion practices. For insomnia, reframing the goal to eight hours of rest allows for restorative benefits even when fully asleep. Dan Harris adds that reassuring the nervous system that limited sleep is not a referendum on overall health is also highly effective.
Focus and Peak Performance Link
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(00:12:25)
  • Key Takeaway: Meditation concentration is the same skill used in flow states, and gathering scattered attention into one direction inherently increases fulfillment.
  • Summary: Meditation is a collection of skills, primarily concentration, which is the capacity to choose what to pay attention to. When attention is highly concentrated on something other than worries, people experience flow or being ‘in the zone’ in sports or art. The more attention is unified, the more fulfilling the activity becomes, showing a direct correlation between meditation practice and life performance.
Moving Past Meditation Plateaus
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(00:14:36)
  • Key Takeaway: Feeling stuck in meditation is a normal plateau following the initial honeymoon period, requiring persistence or consulting a teacher to shift the object or method of meditation.
  • Summary: The plateau phase in meditation often follows an initial exciting upslope when the contrast between before and after practice is novel. Staying with the practice despite the plateau is crucial, as the experience will change over time. Consulting a teacher or trying different techniques can help unblock progress, as insights can emerge from hearing others’ experiences.
Seeding Questions in Meditation
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(00:17:23)
  • Key Takeaway: Explicitly seeding a question in the mind at the start of meditation can unlock subconscious insights for creative blocks or practice impasses.
  • Summary: The quiet within is the most important teacher, and spontaneous insights can arise simply from settling the mind. One can explicitly plant a question at the beginning of practice, allowing the subconscious to work on it while sitting quietly. This technique is surprisingly effective for creative blocks, as the mind will offer something, even if it is not the expected answer.
Quieting the Inner Narrator
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(00:18:48)
  • Key Takeaway: Turning curiosity directly toward the sensory qualities of the constant internal narrator—its location, tone, and perceived voice—can deconstruct and cool out the thinking.
  • Summary: The constant narrative is the object of meditation when one is not choosing a different focus like the breath. One strategy is replacing the talk with friendly messaging, but a powerful alternative is investigating the narrator directly as a sensory object. By getting curious about where the thought is spatially, its tone, and whose voice it sounds like, one treats it as data, which often liberates the practitioner.
Dealing with Parental Decline
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(00:23:38)
  • Key Takeaway: Self-compassion and building personal capacity are essential when caring for aging parents, as skillful responses emerge from a grounded, non-agenda-driven presence.
  • Summary: Caring for parents sliding into dementia and dealing with a difficult spouse requires immense self-compassion because it is an inherently hard situation with no perfect solution. The best approach involves taking time for self-care to settle the internal intensity and build capacity for the long haul. From this grounded availability, clarity emerges for skillful conversation, often by dropping agendas and offering compassionate presence.