Longtime ABC News anchor Dan Harris gave the keynote speech at Syracuse University’s Be Well Expo in the Carrier Dome on Sunday, sharing the benefits of mindfulness and meditation with a crowd of thousands of students, nearly 15 years after he experienced a panic attack on air.

The first-ever expo was part of a series of events scheduled for SU’s Mental Health Awareness Week. Harris told audience members about how the panic attack impacted his nearly 20-year career at ABC, both professionally and personally.

Within the first few minutes of his talk, his 2004 newscast was played in front of the entire Dome crowd. Attendees watched the panic attack — one Harris said he’s watched and rewatched numerous times.

“I’ve seen that clip a thousand times, and it sucks every time,” Harris said once the clip ended.

He said he was so entrenched in a workaholic mindset that he never saw an issue with his increased anxiety and stress at that point in his life and for several years after.

“I firmly believed that every success I was achieving was directly correlated to the intensity of my anxiety,” he said.

Harris had previously volunteered to go overseas and cover the aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Coming back home after the adrenaline rush of war reporting, he said, is part of what caused him to fall into a depression.

He began to self-medicate with drugs like ecstasy and cocaine, he said. Eventually, Harris began seeking help from a psychiatrist, but he wouldn’t call his story “neat and tidy” from that point on, he said.

He started covering faith and spirituality under direction from his mentor, Peter Jennings. Harris said religion was not a large part of his upbringing, so he didn’t immediately warm up to the idea of covering faith and spirituality.

But doing so taught him the value of having a worldview that transcended his own narrow interests, he said.

He eventually interviewed spiritual teacher Eckhart Tolle. Harris read Tolle’s book “A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life’s Purpose,” in which Tolle gives his thesis about the human condition, and said that Tolle’s words helped explain his own insufficient self-awareness and his blind self-medication.

While the book helped him understand himself on a deeper level, it didn’t solve all of his problems, he said. He still needed a way to deal with what Tolle referred to in his book as the “voice” in Harris’ head.

Harris eventually discovered meditation, a practice that dominates the narrative of his 2014 self-help book. What started as an exercise that he attempted with skepticism a few minutes a day is now a practice that Harris said has helped him learn to respond wisely to things in life rather than reacting blindly.

While it isn’t a cure-all, he encouraged students to meditate.

“I think in the not too distant figure, we will be thinking about mental exercise the way we do about physical exercise,” he said.

He encouraged SU community members to utilize the resources available to them on campus and to seek out therapy and medication if necessary.

Happiness doesn’t have to depend on people’s situations or environments, he added. He said people can train themselves to find happiness.

“I think many of us think that happiness is something that kind of, you know happens to us, that it’s dependent upon external forces,” he said. “The truly radical and empowering notion here is that actually, what science is showing us, is that happiness is a skill.”

Harris’ talk lasted about half an hour and included a Q&A with Student Association leaders Ghufran Salih, president, and Kyle Rosenblum, vice president.

Published on September 30, 2018 at 10:10 pm

Contact Colleen: cefergus@syr.edu | @ColleenEFergus2