Join the Challenge
How can we feel better when we’re anticipating the worst?
Dread… that nagging fear of impending doom. The list of things we dread is almost endless: the ‘Sunday scaries’, climate change, pointless meetings, the holidays, tough conversations, and deadlines, to name a few.
In this five-day podcast challenge launching November 14, we’ll explore the meaning of dread: from big existential dread to everyday stuff, and all the possibilities in between.
And we’ll give you one easy, fun exercise each day to help you navigate dread in your own life.
We’re glad you’re here. Let’s dive in.
Join the Challenge
Challenge Episodes
Each Episode, host Saleem Reshamwala walks us through a different aspect of dread: what it is, why we feel it and what we can do to face it.
Then, Saleem invites you to try a fun exercise to help cope with dread. We tend to avoid examining emotions that are painful and scary, but the experiments in this challenge make dread approachable and even fun, with things like easy writing and drawing prompts and creative mindfulness techniques.
The point isn’t to make yourself into the kind of person who looks forward to a root canal—but we hope you’ll find one or two tools that you can use to feel better, even when you’re dreading something.
In More Than A Feeling, host Saleem Reshamwala goes on a real-life quest to find stories and insights that will help us define our most fundamental relationships: our relationship to our own emotions, and to each other’s.
Ten Percent Happier is an award-winning meditation app, co-founded by former ABC News anchor Dan Harris. The Ten Percent Happier app teaches fidgety skeptics (and everyone else) how to meditate, sharing practices developed over thousands of years of wisdom and backed by science.
Frequently Asked Questions
First, go ahead and sign up for the challenge by entering your email address in the box at the top of the page! For each episode, you’ll receive a challenge exercise and podcast episode in your inbox. Each exercise is an activity that can help you change your relationship with dread - like journaling, drawing, or mindfulness techinques. You’ll get instructions for the exercise in the email and in the podcast episode - complete as many as you can over the five days.
Enter your email address in the box at the top of this page. Open your inbox and look for a message from us, asking you to confirm your subscription to our email newsletter. Once you’ve confirmed your subscription by clicking the button in our message, you’re in! You’ll receive our daily challenge messages, which include the exercises for each day, links to the daily podcast episodes, and more!
You can record a voice memo on your smartphone or computer (a partial list of apps you can use is below). Try to find a quiet place and then just keep it real and raw; share with us whatever comes up for you rather than trying to get it just right. Once you’re happy with your recording, send it to morethanafeeling@tenpercent.com.
- If you use an iPhone, use the Voice Memos app (here’s a guide if you need some help).
- If you use an Android phone, your recording app is probably called Voice Recorder (Samsung), Recorder (Google) or something similar (here’s an example guide).
- If you want to record on a computer and don’t have an audio recording program you like to use, you can make a recording at online-voice-recorder.com. When you click save, the file will download to your computer. If you want to get more into your audio, Audacity is a free and easy to use recording and editing tool but does require a download.
The point of the challenge isn’t to turn you into the kind of person who looks forward to doing your taxes. We hope you’ll find one or two methods during this challenge that help you feel better even when you’re dreading something. And we hope you’ll find a new relationship to dread—maybe instead of fighting it or trying to shut it out, you can learn to let your dread exist alongside you. (That will help you gain power over your dread, so that it doesn’t feel like it’s controlling you.)
Your email address will be used to communicate with you about The Dread Project and our parent company, Ten Percent Happier. We never sell or share your contact information with third parties.
Ten Percent Happier is an award-winning meditation app, co-founded by former ABC News anchor Dan Harris. The Ten Percent Happier app teaches fidgety skeptics (and everyone else) how to meditate, sharing practices developed over thousands of years and backed by science.
More Than A Feeling is the latest podcast from Ten Percent Happier. Host Saleem Reshamwala goes on a real-life quest to find stories and insights that will help us define our most fundamental relationships: our relationship to our own emotions, and to each other’s.