The Reset for Anxiety, Overthinking, and Losing Yourself in the Wrong Story | Diana Winston

September 16, 2026

AI Summary

5 min read

Diana Winston, director of UCLA Mindful, spent a year as a Buddhist nun in Burma and has been meditating for decades. She still makes the same mistakes. “I’ve been meditating decades and decades, and I still do stuff like that too,” she says on this episode of 10% Happier. “And then I beat myself, why did I do that? I can’t believe I said that. That was so stupid.” The point is not to stop messing up. The point is to wake up—to the present moment, to your own patterns, to your judgments of others, and to the possibility of something beyond the self. Winston lays out four distinct flavors of awakening, each with a practical reset.

Waking Up to the Present Moment

The first and most accessible form of awakening is simply noticing that you are lost—lost in rumination, worry, or forward-planning—and coming back to what is happening right now. Winston calls this a “reset into the present moment,” and it can be done a hundred times a day. The baseline tool is formal meditation, which trains the mind to recognize when it has wandered. But the informal practice is just as important: when you notice you are suffering, you pause and ask, “What is my right now?” That might mean feeling your clenched jaw, noticing the sound of birds, or taking a mindful walk.

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What you'll learn

1 (00:03) **Episode Introduction & Guest Setup** - Dan Harris frames the episode around the frustration of repeating the same mistakes despite having tools, and introduces Diana Winston, director of UCLA Mindful and author of *The Little Book of Being*.
2 (03:29) **Awakening to the Present Moment** - Winston explains the first flavor of awakening: waking up to what is happening right now, a practice that counters being lost in thought or drama.
3 (16:36) **The Three Center Check-In Practice** - Winston introduces a specific meditation called the "three center check-in" for resetting into the present moment.
4 (22:54) **Awakening Through Healing: Breaking Old Patterns** - The second flavor of awakening involves healing ourselves by recognizing and breaking free from repetitive, harmful patterns.
5 (28:31) **Four-Part Reset for Difficult Emotions** - Winston outlines a meditation for when you are in the midst of a difficult emotion, designed to help break patterns.
6 (40:11) **Relational Awakening: Working with Judgments** - The third flavor of awakening is relational, specifically using judgments as a portal to self-understanding and compassion.
7 (49:01) **Awakening as Transcendence** - The fourth flavor of awakening is transcendence, which can range from small everyday experiences of connection to profound states of oneness or "no-self."

+ Full timestamped outline available in the app

Show Notes

A simple daily check-in you can do anywhere, a four-part practice for handling hard emotions, and a new way to relate to negative judgments. Plus, why transcendence is more accessible than you think.

Diana Winston is the Director of UCLA Mindful, with three decades of experience teaching mindfulness for health and well-being. She has authored three books, including The Little Book of Being, and has taught at Spirit Rock Meditation Center for 25 years. A founder of the International Mindfulness Teachers Association, she continues to guide individuals and organizations in cultivating awareness and presence.

In this episode we talk about:

Why we keep making the same mistakes even after years of practice and therapy
Four different ways to understand what "awakening" actually means
A three-part check-in for resetting into the present moment
A four-step practice for working with a difficult emotion in real time
How judgment can become a doorway to deeper self-understanding
Why self-compassion is the foundation of loving anyone else well
How to access little tastes of transcendence in ordinary daily life

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