Lee Camp
[00:00:00] I'm Lee C Camp and this is No Small Endeavor, exploring what it means to live a good life.
Gretchen Rubin
I realized that, and I'd been studying happiness for all these years, and that-- I, I could feel that there was a missing piece.
Lee Camp
That's Gretchen Rubin, author of the New York Times bestseller, The Happiness Project, where she embarked on a year-long journey to increase her happiness. But, years later...
Gretchen Rubin
I knew there was something that was, like, eluding my understanding and, and then when I realized, okay, it's the five senses, then it all clicked into place and I realized that that's exactly what I was hungry for.
Lee Camp
Today, an interview filled with so much actionable, practical advice on how to be happier that you just might want to take notes. All coming right up.[00:01:00]
I'm Lee C. Camp, and this is No Small Endeavor, exploring what it means to live a good life.
So I wanna start right out the gate today with a curious fact. Our guest today has spent many, many years researching happiness, thinking about it, and applying what she found, but she flat out refuses to define the word happiness. There's an academic egghead piece of me that just can't hardly stand that fact.
And yet another part of this I find, well, delightful.
[Laughs]
As a professor of ethics, I can assure you many philosophers have spent their whole careers pursuing such questions, and many of them disagree with one another. And there are some with whom I agree more than others. And these are important questions, no doubt.
But I kind of grew to love how my guest today just takes a practical approach. So practical that you might want to take notes. [00:02:00] We cover how perfectionism might be different than you thought, the beautiful experience of our five main senses, how to reframe a situation to be happier, and why you should eat every flavor of ice cream.
Today, my conversation with Gretchen Rubin on happiness.
Gretchen Rubin is the author of numerous best-selling books, such as The Happiness Project, Better Than Before, and The Four Tendencies. And her most recent book is Life in Five Senses. She's also host of the popular podcast, 'Happier with Gretchen Rubin,' and founder of award-winning 'Happier' app, which helps people track their happiness-boosting habits.
Having trained for a career in law at Yale Law School, she realized she wanted to be a writer while she was clerking for Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, and pursued that with great vigor. Raised in Kansas City, she lives in New York City with her family, and her sister lovingly calls her a happiness bully.
Welcome, Gretchen.
Gretchen Rubin
Oh, [00:03:00] well, thank you so much. I'm so happy to get the chance to talk to you.
Lee Camp
I'm happy to have you with us today.
[Gretchen laughs]
What, what, what does a happiness bully look like?
Gretchen Rubin
Well, if I think there's a way for you to get happier, I can get kind of insistent about trying to suggest things that you might try, so I can be a little relentless.
[Lee laughs]
It's, it's true.
Lee Camp
So that, that goes back to your happiness project.
Gretchen Rubin
Lee Camp
Uh, you wanna kind of describe for folks what that project entailed?
Gretchen Rubin
Yeah, I wrote a book called The Happiness Project, and it was about a year long experiment that I did to see if I could make myself happier. I realized I thought I wanted to be happy, but I didn't spend any time thinking about whether I was happier or if I could be happier or if it was even possible to make yourself happier.
So I decided that I would do a happiness project and I, uh, for a year I did a-- I divided the year into twelve themes, one theme per month, and then I would tackle some, some aspect of my life that I thought might make me happier. Whether that was like, marriage or friendship or [00:04:00] eternity or whatever, and come up with a ki-- a handful of concrete manageable resolutions to see if I could make myself happier.
Lee Camp
Gretchen Rubin
And, uh, spoiler alert, I did. It did make me happier.
[Lee laughs]
Um, and so ever since I wrote that book, I've kind of been going deeper and deeper and deeper into the just vast subject of happiness ever since.
Lee Camp
Yeah. Yes. Before we talk about some of those practices that you talk about in that book, I want to note your line from the book about, "The days are long, but the years are short. Time is passing and I'm not focusing enough on the things that really matter."
And it seems to me that, that this is a recurring theme I keep hearing from so many guests when they're thinking about trying to live a good life, is that the incessant distraction of life keeps us, or we allow to keep us, however we might phrase that, from focusing on the things that we really think matter.
So what kind of triggered you to begin to pay attention to the fact that, maybe I can live life better [00:05:00] than I am?
Gretchen Rubin
It was a very ordinary moment in my life. I was in a crowded city bus in the pouring rain, and I had one of those opportunities for reflection that you don't often get in the tumult of everyday life.
And I thought, well, what do I want from life anyway? And I thought, well, I want to be happy. And I realized I didn't spend any time thinking about whether I was happy or how I could be happier. And I also realized that I had all the elements of a happy life already, and a lot of it was that I just wasn't appreciating it enough.
So I wanted to see if I could make myself happier. And I also wanted to have more appreciation for everything that I already had.
Lee Camp
Gretchen Rubin
You know, so often, we only appreciate something once it's lost or we fear that we might lose it, and I didn't want to have to wait for that in order to appreciate everything I had.
Lee Camp
Yeah. I appreciate, of course, that you point to the fact that you, you decide you're not going to think in terms of some grand gesture or grand endeavor, like a world-- around the world trip, but, kind of, daily [00:06:00] practices.
Gretchen Rubin
Lee Camp
So you, you point to a whole lot of those in, in the book. And looking back, I've got four or five here that if, as we have time, I'd love to discuss some, but as you look back on that particular book writing project and the experiential nature of your year, what are, what are one or two of those that you explore that really stand out to you, that have been of most importance to you in your life since the writing of that book?
Gretchen Rubin
Well, probably most of the ones that had to do with relationships, because you know, ancient philosophers and contemporary scientists agree that to have a happy life we need to have strong relationships.
And I have to confess, I've worked on them so long, I can't even remember, like which one was from the Happi-- like join a, start a book club. Did I do that for the Happiness Project?
Lee Camp
Gretchen Rubin
It's lost in the sands of time for me. But of course, like, I'm now in three book clubs and there's such an engine of happiness for me.
Lee Camp
Gretchen Rubin
Or something that I, I wrote about in The Happiness Project and then I returned to, in my most recent book, Life in [00:07:00] Five Senses, which is just to like, hug more, touch more, connect more physically.
One of the things I did in the Happiness Project was to give a warm hello and goodbye. Because I realized that, you know, people were coming and going from our apartment-- and, and without people really... just sort of grunting out a hello or goodbye, and you think, you know, you don't want your dog to give people a bigger welcome than you do.
[Lee laughs]
And so I really, like, I, as part of the Happiness Project, I really started the habit of, you know, really acknowledging when someone's coming or going. Giving them a hug, giving them a kiss, saying, you know, "have a great day," or whatever. Because it really just, dramatically increased the sort of tenderness and attentiveness, uh, of the, the atmosphere of my home.
But then in Life in Five Senses I came back to this idea of hugging more because I was so focused on the sense of touch. It made me realize, like, it's not just saying, "I'm happy to see you." It's like, it's like trying to have that, you know, appropriate, but physical connection.
Lee Camp
Huh. Yeah.[00:08:00]
We'll come back to your-- what you're learning from the Life in Five Senses book here in, in a moment, hopefully. But let me ask you about some of these others that you explore in The Happiness Project.
One, on boosting mental and physical energy. Uh, sleep and exercise, reducing physical and mental clutter.
Of course, as a college professor, I'm always telling my students, who are undergrads especially, who are notoriously bad at getting sleep--
Gretchen Rubin
Lee Camp
--how indispensable sleep is to living a decent life. But, uh, any commentary you want to give on physical and mental energy and mental clutter, reducing physical and mental clutter?
Gretchen Rubin
Well, one thing I would say, one thing I've really learned in my long study of happiness is, you know, there's no one right way. There's no-- there's, there's only what's right for you. And one of the things that I see a lot of people getting wrong, especially when it comes to things like, like sleep and energy, is [00:09:00] their chronotype.
And research shows that they real-- there really are morning people and night people. About 30% of people are night people. About 40% of people are morning people. And then everybody else is somewhere in between. It's largely a factor of genetics and age. So young adults are very night people. And they just are wired that way.
And I think a lot of times we're told, this is what you should do. You should go to bed by 11:00, you should wake up at 7:00. If something's important to you, you should do it first thing in the day. But the fact is, if you're a night person, that's not good advice for you, because you're at your most creative and productive and energetic later in the day.
And so I think a really valuable thing to do is to say, like, yes, I need to get enough sleep. Yes, I need to do my work as much as I can when I'm at, like, my most energetic and productive. But really, what's true for me? And just because other people tell me that I should do it at 7 o'clock in the morning, that just may not, that just may not be true.
Lee Camp
Gretchen Rubin
Um, I know somebody who exercises at midnight.
I have a friend who's a writer who does her best work [00:10:00] between 10:00 PM and 2:00 AM.
Lee Camp
Gretchen Rubin
Which is bonkers to me, because I am such a morning person. I get up at 5:00, you know. And I think sometimes though, especially young adults or children, the people around them are sort of like, well, this is what you should do.
In fact, it's like, you should think about, well, what works for me and how, as best I can, can I shape my surroundings to suit myself? Now, you don't have total control, of course, over your time and your, and your energy. But I think that to begin by saying, what would be, what would be the best case scenario for me?
Lee Camp
Gretchen Rubin
And work from there, rather than have other people tell you, this is the way your life should look, because there's no one right way.
Lee Camp
Yeah. What have you learned about reducing clutter, physically and or mentally?
Gretchen Rubin
Well, I ended up writing a book called Outer Order, Inner Calm because I just love-- I, to me, clearing clutter is so energizing.
It just, you know, a friend of mine said, "I finally cleaned out my fridge and now I know I can switch careers."
[Lee laughs]
And I'm like, I know how that feels. Um, [00:11:00] so I love, just, like, as a way of bringing down mental clutter is this bringing down visual clutter.
And you can do that on your phone, you know, by like organizing your apps better. You can do that with noise. I think just as we clear clutter, we need to clear clatter. So turning off notification sounds or making your alarm tone less, uh, grating and more melodious.
Lee Camp
Gretchen Rubin
There's a lot of things that we can do to just make our, our sensory surroundings more congenial.
Lee Camp
Gretchen Rubin
There's-- it's very easy to fall into just the habit of passively accepting things instead of-- or, you know, letting things pi-- especially with clutter.
Lee Camp
Gretchen Rubin
Letting things pile up, pile up, pile up. But we all know that feeling of like, when you get rid of everything you don't need, don't use, don't love, it just feels so-- so energizing and so freeing and so, it's so much easier to focus.
Lee Camp
Yes.
Yeah. The, The Magic Art of Tidying Up, I guess is one of the books that, that taught me a lot about that. And, um, that, that was just revolutionary for me of really letting go of a lot of stuff. I will say for that book, [00:12:00] that as a academic, the only regret I had with that was I gave away some books that I wish I hadn't-- [laughs]
Gretchen Rubin
Lee Camp
--gotten rid of. But, but that being said, you know, it was a great experiment of actually learning that this really does change my life in helpful ways, if I declutter and get rid of a lot of stuff that doesn't mean anything to me.
Gretchen Rubin
But I will say this: there are-- because like, like no one rule fits everybody, no tool fits every hand, there are some people who are truly clutter-blind. And my sister Elizabeth, who's the co-host of the 'Happier with Gretchen Rubin' podcast is like this. And with clutter-blind people, like, they truly do not see it.
My sister would not close a cabinet door for the rest of her life if she lived by herself. The piles of junk mail, the stuff by the front door, they just don't see it. And so for those people, like, yeah, on balance, they might like to have everything cleaned up, but it doesn't really back up on them. And I think sometimes, like if you're dealing with somebody who's clutter-blind, it's very puzzling 'cause you're like, isn't this just making you bonkers? But it [00:13:00] really isn't.
Lee Camp
Gretchen Rubin
And when they're thinking like, oh, you wanna spend all this time and energy getting everything organized? Well, I don't really see the benefit of that.
And so again, it's understanding, people really come from different places. A lot of times when we express a preference, we say like, I'm right, you're wrong. Marie Kondo is very much like, I'm right, you're wrong, there's one way - my way. And it's like, mm, there's really a lot of ways.
Lee Camp
Gretchen Rubin
She's got a good way, and it's a thought-provoking way. It's not the only way.
Lee Camp
Gretchen Rubin
And maybe not everybody cares.
So I think, I just think people do sometimes blame themselves when things don't work or when they're not doing things the way they think they should, instead of saying like, well, given who I am, what do I want and what's the best way to get there?
Lee Camp
Yeah.
Clutter-blind is a great phrase. I've not heard that before. That's very helpful.
So, you just talked a moment ago about relationships, but let me come back to that and, uh, raise a few things that you discussed in your Happiness Project book.
'Stop nagging,' you say. Uh, give us a little more commentary about that and, and just how to think about framing relationships.
Gretchen Rubin
Well, [00:14:00] nagging is no fun, either for the person who's doing the nagging or the person being nagged.
Now, if you're the person being nagged, uh, the question you have to ask yourself is, am I not following through on something that I said I would do? Because if so, like, that's within my power to control, which is just like, go ahead and do it.
But the problem with nagging is you can't control someone else, you can only control yourself. This is one of the great, the one of the-- unfortunate things about life in general. There's only one person we can control, and that's ourselves.
So if you don't like nagging, the question is how do you stop nagging? Only changing yourself, not the person being nagged.
Lee Camp
Gretchen Rubin
So one thing you can do is just use a word instead of talk, talk, talk, talk, talk. Say you would say something like, "raincoat!" instead of, "if I've told you once, I've told you a thousand times, like, did you bring your rain--" You know. It's just like, say it in one word.
Another thing is to use a note, because it's like, it's a lot less... it just feels a lot calmer and a lot less, there's a lot less personal friction if you just write a note, put a note--
Lee Camp
Gretchen Rubin
--on the medicine cabinet, or put a note on the fridge [00:15:00] reminding somebody of something.
And then often, you know, it's just like, let it go. Does-- is this something, especially if you're dealing with another adult, is this something that matters? Because a lot of times you're nagging people to do things where-- look, you can tell somebody to bring an umbrella, but like, in the end, they're a grownup. If they bring an umbrella or not, that's on them. Like you do not need to weigh in on that.
A lot of times just saying to yourself, what if I mind my own business? Like, a lot of times things fall away. Now, sometimes there are responsibilities that you share or sometimes there's a responsibility that one person has to do and then you have to work it out.
But it's very helpful to think about, well, how, how could we do it without the nagging?
Lee Camp
Yeah. Yeah, yeah.
In your chapter on work, you talk about learning to embrace failure.
Gretchen Rubin
Lee Camp
Any other commentary on that for us?
Gretchen Rubin
Well, one of the things is, you know, I realize if I'm not failing, I'm not trying hard enough.
Lee Camp
Gretchen Rubin
And so failure is part of the process.
And it's interesting because after The Happiness Project came out, I heard from a few people who are like, 'No, no, [00:16:00] no. You should reframe failure. It's not failure. It's this, it's that...' And at first I thought, well, that sounds sensible. And then I'm like, no. I don't wanna have to twist myself into a knot to pretend that something didn't fail.
I wanna embrace failure. I wanna say--
Lee Camp
Gretchen Rubin
--sometimes things just don't work. And, and move on. And just let that be part of the process instead of pretending like what I need to do is to avoid the idea of failure.
Lee Camp
Gretchen Rubin
I wanna embrace the willingness to fail. And one of, one of the things that research shows is that when you look at people who, who accomplish a lot, they take a lot of shots.
Lee Camp
Gretchen Rubin
You know, it's that whole thing. It's like, the more you try, the more you put out there, you're gonna get more successes, but you're naturally gonna get more, more failures. And I think it's very easy, at least for someone like me, to be overly conservative and be like, well, if I don't know it's gonna-- if it's not a sure thing, I don't wanna, I don't wanna waste my time and my money and my energy on it. Where in fact, like, that's gonna keep me from trying a lot of things that might-- I might really learn from or benefit from.
Lee Camp
Yeah.
I know for me, that was a major turning point in [00:17:00] my adult life as a kind of recovering perfectionist, where I, where I started seeing... embracing failure as a fundamental practice I had to learn to lean into--
Gretchen Rubin
Lee Camp
--if I was gonna live the kind of life I wanted to live.
Gretchen Rubin
Lee Camp
And it-- you know, and I, it certainly has allowed me to try things and to do things that I just would not have done a-- apart from that fundamental shift in my attitude of, of seeing failure as a mark of overall progress and where I wanted to go.
Gretchen Rubin
Yeah. I remind myself to enjoy the fun of failure. That, you know, sort of try to put it in a positive light and see this-- part of this outgrowth of creativity and experimentation instead of something that you have to hide or avoid.
Lee Camp
Yeah.
You're listening to No Small Endeavor and our conversation with Gretchen Rubin.
I love hearing from you. [00:18:00] Tell us what you're reading, who you're paying attention to, or send us feedback about today's episode. You can reach me at lee@nosmallendeavor.com.
You can get show notes for this episode in your podcast app or wherever you listen. These notes include links to resources mentioned in this episode and a PDF of my complete interview notes, including material not found in this episode, as well as a transcript.
Also, if you're interested, we are regularly releasing unabridged versions of our interviews that are not so highly produced as this podcast or our radio broadcasts.
Coming up, Gretchen and I continue to discuss the makings of a happy life.[00:19:00]
So in the virtue traditions, you know, there's this virtue of magnanimity, which one way some people define magnanimity is this sort of incessant pursuit of growing in every area of your life to be kind of your best possible self, and-- which I find to be very helpful, unless I then take a perfectionistic approach to magnanimity, because magnanimity can quickly become perfectionism and then it just becomes an oppressive sort of practice.
But if I'll see magnanimity as this invitation to look at all areas of my life, to be intentional about all possible areas of my life and do the best I can, at this point in my life with the kind of person I am, and growing in whatever area seems to make sense at that time, it works really well for me that way.
But I don't know, any, any thoughts on that sort of potential inclination for some to fall prey to sort of debilitating perfectionism in the pursuit of [00:20:00] happiness?
Gretchen Rubin
Well, I think I often, perfectionism isn't tied to standards, it's tied to anxiety, and so I think sometimes people come at it the wrong way.
They think, well, what I need to do is lower my standards. Whereas really, in fact, what, your experience is anxiety. So, I'm anxious that this isn't gonna work. I'm anxious if I put this out into the world, I'm gonna get criticized or I'm gonna get rejected. And so I, I perceive what I'm doing is like perfecting, perfecting, perfecting, whereas in fact, I am, I am delaying through anxiety.
So I think for sometimes, sometimes it's helpful to sort of think, well, is there a different-- maybe, maybe perfectionism is raising associations that might be distracting or muddying because it isn't really related to standards often.
Lee Camp
That's a very help-- I've not heard that distinction before. I find that very helpful, that to think of perfectionism not related to standards, but related to anxiety.
Yeah, thanks. That's very helpful.
And in your chapter on attitude, I think it's that chapter, where you talk about [00:21:00] do-try reframing. Talk about the reframing piece in the attitude chapter.
Gretchen Rubin
Well, reframing is sort of this superpower, because--
Lee Camp
Gretchen Rubin
I mean, when I started thinking about this, I was like, well, you know, you can re-- you can talk about reframing, but a situation is the situation and there's just not that much you can do about it.
And that is just a hundred percent not the case.
Lee Camp
Gretchen Rubin
Reframing is so powerful.
So one is, a very common one that works, is have-to, get-to reframing. So I remember this because when my daughter was, was little-- you know, when you have little kids, they go to the pediatrician all the time, it seems like. And, um, I was complaining to my husband like, "Oh my gosh, I'm taking my daughter to the-- we're taking our daughter to the pediatrician all the time, such a nuisance."
And we live right around the corner from my in-laws. And my husband, Jamie, he said, "Oh, you know, if you, if you want it, I bet my mother would take Eliza to the pediatrician." And I was like, "Oh no, no, no, no. I wanna take Eliza to the pediatrician."
[Lee laughs]
And I realized I was thinking of something as I had to [00:22:00] do something, but really I got to do it.
And when I was, when I had the opportunity to give it up, I realized, no, no, no, I really, I really want that responsibility. I really want to do that.
Lee Camp
Gretchen Rubin
And very often, you reframe, and then how do you choose to frame it can make a very, a very big difference. And so reframing is just this sort of superpower.
Not everything can be reframed away of course, and of course we wouldn't want to or choose to do that. But it is striking how often you can imagine how someone else could perceive a situation, and it, and it can give you a kind of relief.
Lee Camp
Yeah. Yeah, um, several things with that. One is that I, I tell my students a lot of times that, how we make up stories in our head all the time to explain--
Gretchen Rubin
Lee Camp
--some sort of thing that happens.
Gretchen Rubin
Lee Camp
And we, we have no idea if the story is true or not.
Gretchen Rubin
Lee Camp
And so, that being the case, why don't we at least make up a story that's helpful to us?
Gretchen Rubin
Lee Camp
And you know, it may be that someone fills us in and tells us what a truer story might be about a circumstance, but if we don't [00:23:00] know, then we might as well reframe it in a way that's helpful.
I just found myself, after reading that section of your book, this week, reframing in terms of some things that I were finding very annoying about my work, and the simple reframe of, isn't it great that this, this thing that I have on my plate represents that I get to do a lot of work that I really love and have resources to do the work that I love?
Gretchen Rubin
Lee Camp
So I think, I do think it's a, it's a really great superpower that allows us to really take a very different approach to life.
Gretchen Rubin
Well, along those lines, one of the most useful ways, and I guess this is... this is a kind of reframing, which is, if you're feeling very resentful or angry towards someone, to try to think of why you're grateful for them.
Lee Camp
Gretchen Rubin
Um, so you're really annoyed by your boss. And then you think, okay, but why am I grateful for my boss? I mean, that's not exactly reframing, but it's just-- again, it's like turning the spotlight of your attention--
Lee Camp
Gretchen Rubin
--to a different aspect of a, uh, of an experience. What you find is that it's very hard to stay mad at somebody while you're also feeling grateful to them.
Lee Camp
Gretchen Rubin
Just [00:24:00] like you were like, oh, parts of my job are annoying, but these are the parts of the job that actually allow me to do all the parts that I love.
Lee Camp
Gretchen Rubin
And so it, it is a way of, kind of, taking a wider lens on our experience so that we can, we can see--
And again, it's not about being inauthentic, it's not about denying the truth. It's about shining a spotlight on the part that you want to see. Um--
Lee Camp
Gretchen Rubin
Or that you wanna focus your attention on, or you know, you know, because all of it-- there's many ways that we could think about things, but we can direct our attention.
Lee Camp
Yeah. Yeah, I remember when I, when I first learned about the, the practice that some folks do in recovery, uh, of writing gratitude lists, and, and then I kind of adopted that for a long while, and then I heard someone say that one twist on the gratitude list is to write down things that you're grateful for that come out of the things that you've been resentful about, which is kind of a, a another angle of what you just said.
Gretchen Rubin
Lee Camp
Gretchen Rubin
Lee Camp
Yes. But, so it's a-- what, what gifts come to me--
Gretchen Rubin
Lee Camp
--through the really hard stuff that I've been mad about or angry about or resentful. Again, super [00:25:00] powerful.
Gretchen Rubin
Lee Camp
Gretchen Rubin
Lee Camp
So, in your own work in thinking about this, what, what's kinda your working definition of happiness?
Gretchen Rubin
So, I started my career in law, and I mean, I, I spent an entire semester arguing about the definition of contract. And as you know, happiness is an even more elusive concept to define.
Lee Camp
Gretchen Rubin
I think there are like 15 or 17 academic definitions of happiness, and of course philosophy and, you know, it, it's, it has so many definitions and I feel like that's not that helpful to me, finding the final definition.
And I kind of like the fact that happiness can be very loose and people can talk about it's peace or contentment or satisfaction or bliss or, or serenity [00:26:00] or you know, whatever. I think what's actually more helpful is to think about, okay, well, whatever happiness is to you, whatever you think that would be, what can you do with your conscious thoughts and actions that would make you happier?
For me, I'm much more interested in the process of like aiming towards, like, a life that would be happier, rather than finding a final analysis of what happiness is, 'cause we can do that all day long. And then also it's like, well, what is it on a 1 to 10 scale? Are you happy now? Are you happy now?
[Lee laughs]
I'm like, my mind just melts at like-- I don't even know. I can be happy and unhappy at the same time.
Lee Camp
Gretchen Rubin
What do I do? What is, what is 10? What is 1? How do you measure it? So I'm just like, I, I'm like whatever it is is what it is. I think we all know when our life is happier or less happy, and how can we make it happier? So I absolutely evade that whole question, [Lee laughs] which is a whole career for some people.
Lee Camp
Gretchen Rubin
Which is arguing about what is happiness, and what is right happiness.
Lee Camp
Yeah.
I mean, I, I think that the, [00:27:00] the, the thing that I really resonate with in what you just said is that, to ask these sorts of questions invites us into a sort of iterative--
Gretchen Rubin
Lee Camp
--endeavor, that as I, I have a sense of what happiness might mean or entail, and sometimes when I step towards that or take some action towards that, I find out, yeah, I thi this actually does lead to certain aspects of my life flourishing in a greater, more significant way. And then sometimes things I think are gonna make me happy actually don't pay off and, and don't give what I think they're gonna.
So I'm thinking, for example, Daniel Gilbert at, at, at Harvard, who talks a lot about miswanting and that we can't trust our brains--
Gretchen Rubin
Lee Camp
--a lot of times about what's gonna make us happen in the future.
Gretchen Rubin
Hedonic forecasting. Yeah.
Lee Camp
Right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so, so it is true that, you know, I can, I can take a step towards something that I think will make me happy, and I find, oh, that, that was a-- I cheated myself there.
Um, and-- but, you know, sometimes I might not have ever known if I hadn't have had the intentionality about trying certain things in an iterative sort of way.
Gretchen Rubin
But, and, and then people say things to me like, "well, I don't care about [00:28:00] happiness. I, I care about having a, a well-intentioned life where I have deep connections with other people and working towards purpose."
And I'm like, that's what a happy life is. Like, what? You're just, you're just subbing in or, you know, or sort of-- I, I feel like it's, the more you, the more you scratch, the more you itch, with definitions, often.
Lee Camp
Gretchen Rubin
And, and, and some people find that to be intensely fascinating, obviously.
Lee Camp
Gretchen Rubin
But I feel like you can think about it without having a perfect definition, if--
Lee Camp
Gretchen Rubin
--If you're not interested in that. Yeah.
Lee Camp
Yeah.
One-- uh, I, I was reading some reviews of, of your work and, you know, Amazon's not a particularly great place to get helpful reviews, but I saw that several people critiqued you for what they saw as doing a project that they saw as one of privilege.
Gretchen Rubin
Lee Camp
Or a sort of elitism to it, so--
Gretchen Rubin
Lee Camp
And, and, and I've, I've had people ask me about certain questions on episodes we've done and saying, well, you know, having the opportunity to ask those sorts of questions is an exercise in privilege.
Gretchen Rubin
Lee Camp
[00:29:00] Um, so thoughts on that? What do you think about that?
Gretchen Rubin
Hmm.
Well, I am who I am. I always write through the lens of my own experience. That's my approach, is to sort of use myself as a guinea pig. And so, you know, I am who I am and some people find that interesting and some people don't.
I-- the things that I try are the kind of things anybody could try. You don't need a lot of time, energy, or money. I mean, though, of course I am-- you know, it's like, if you're in a place of deep despair or extreme, you know--
Lee Camp
Gretchen Rubin
Yeah. I mean, no, you're not doing that. But you know. Yeah. So I just... yeah. I am who I am.
Lee Camp
Yeah.
Yeah, that makes me think of that-- my, my, my question to you there and what you said there just reminds me of, you know, I guess, I think it was, maybe it was Mortimer Adler in his book, book on Aristotle, talked about how, you know, Aristotle has a presumption that you're gonna have some measure of good luck and that, uh, you know, a happy life, a good life does depend upon at least not [00:30:00] abject poverty, uh, and that there's a sort of window of resources, wealths within which one can pursue a good sort of life. And you know, you've got political philosophers who will talk about freedom as, you've got freedom from and freedom to. And freedom from political oppression--
Gretchen Rubin
Lee Camp
That's not gonna give you happiness in and of itself, but it's a sort of precondition of certain forms of happiness or certain forms, forms of flourishing, that if you're under political oppression, uh, and you lack freedom from a constraint or restraint, then you have to kind of reframe in more narrow ways what a meaningful or, or happy life might look like.
Um, so yeah--
Gretchen Rubin
Well, Viktor Frankl writes about this beautifully--
Lee Camp
Gretchen Rubin
--when he talks about, at a certain point, it's only-- perhaps your only possibility is to suffer in the right way.
Lee Camp
Gretchen Rubin
And that's the only measure of your freedom. So...
Lee Camp
Gretchen Rubin
And I don't talk about that, you know? I mean, I'm this, it's a very ordinary person and living an ordinary life. So I don't try to stretch my, my [00:31:00] perspective to encompass every possible circumstance that humanity could face. Not that those aren't important and worth thinking about.
Lee Camp
Gretchen Rubin
But that's not my subject.
Lee Camp
Yeah. Yeah.
Your, your podcast, 'Happier with Gretchen Rubin.' You've been doing that quite some time now. What, what are some of the things that you've learned from, from guests?
Gretchen Rubin
Mm. Well, we learn so much because we really, like, we throw out questions all the time and really, we really incorporate that. I feel like the world is my research assistant because whatever I'm interested in and talking about, people will just give me observations and examples and resources. So I feel so fortunate.
So what have been some of the most remarkable things? I mean, part of it is just people's imagination.
Lee Camp
Gretchen Rubin
Like, they just, you throw out an idea-- like, just to give you an example, there's an idea like, oh, it's fun to do taste tests with people.
Like, oh, I had my friends over and we did all-- we tasted varieties of apples and we tasted varieties of [00:32:00] chocolate and, oh, that was so fun.
And somebody said to me, oh, a great thing that we do for Thanksgiving is we buy all those, you know those bonkers flavors of ice cream that you're like, well, I don't wanna commit to a whole container of creamed corn ice cream, but I, I'm just very curious?
[Lee laughs]
They buy all those and then they all just pass 'em around and take a couple spoonfuls of each and it's just like-- and then they all just compare and contrast. And I thought, well that's so fun 'cause like, a two-year-old could do that and a, and a, and a hundred-year-old could do that.
Lee Camp
Gretchen Rubin
And we could all enjoy it and talk about it. And it's a way to connect with our senses in a way that brings everybody in, it's very kind of energetic and joyful. I would never have thought of that.
Lee Camp
Gretchen Rubin
And then I was like, oh my gosh, now I have an excuse to buy that ice cream. All that, that, those bonkers flavors.
And so part of it is just, like, seeing how an idea can-- people can run with ideas like that.
Lee Camp
Gretchen Rubin
I think people often have-- they, they kind of need an example of like, oh, you could do this to be happier, you could do this to connect with people more easily. But then once you say, once you say, oh, [00:33:00] joining a group makes you happier, okay, you could have a book group, but maybe you have a TV watching group. Or maybe you have a group where you read famous profiles from The New Yorker, because that's short and you know that the people in your group aren't gonna read anything long. Or maybe you're gonna have a fly fishing group, like my father-in-law's in a fly-- they don't even go fly fishing together, they just talk about fly fishing. [Lee laughs]
You know, like, so you're sort of like, oh, I can take this idea and I can, I can use it myself. And so that's one of the things that I see from listeners is like, they-- all the, all these things-- I think people just need to kind of be reminded to think about it and then their own creativity and their own context then will allow them to take an idea, you know, in a wildly imaginative--
Lee Camp
Gretchen Rubin
Lee Camp
That's great. That's great.
We're going to take a short break, but coming right up, how [00:34:00] engaging our five senses can contribute to a happy life.
Since you brought it up, let's go ahead and talk a little bit about your, your most recent book, The Five Senses book. Give a-- share with us, kind of, the overarching premise of why a book on the, the five senses.
Gretchen Rubin
You know, I, I certainly had experienced this and I think it's, it's very common, is that I felt like I was just stuck in my head, that I was feeling kind of out of touch with myself and with my body and with other people and the world.
And I was experiencing sort of two extremes. On the one hand, the world felt sort of drained and flat 'cause I was like, behind a screen.
Lee Camp
Gretchen Rubin
Everything was sort of abstract.
But on the other hand, everything was kind of hyper-processed, right? So--
Lee Camp
Gretchen Rubin
--you eat food that's like, engineered to hit every bliss point, but it's takeout food so you don't have this delicious smells of like baking and [00:35:00] grilling and--
Lee Camp
Gretchen Rubin
--that would really, like, whet your appetite. You see a movie and there's more images than you could ever possibly take in in nature, and there's a soundtrack that like, amplifies sound and emotion, but at the same time, like, there's no smells coming from that, there's no air in your face. There's like--
So everything was kind of, like, too much and too little. And I, and I think that's-- you know, people keep talking about the metaverse, but, but people really wanna connect with the universe. I think--
Lee Camp
Gretchen Rubin
People want things to be immersive. People wanna reach out, they want direct contact.
I just see such a hunger for that, and I think it's because we really just do want to feel like we are really present and really engaging with the world. I certainly felt that way myself. I realized that, you know, I'd been studying happiness for all these years and I, I could feel that there was a missing piece.
I knew there was something that was, like, eluding my understanding and, and then when I realized, okay, it's the five senses, then it all clicked into place and I realized that that's exactly [00:36:00] what I was hungry for.
Lee Camp
Hmm.
Yeah, you know, the, the conversations that are increasingly pressing on us with regard to artificial intelligence, they can pretty, be pretty distressing sometimes.
But one of the things that gives me hope for embodied human existence and the indispensable importance of embodied human existence is, is the fact that we, we know things through our bodies--
Gretchen Rubin
Lee Camp
--um, that I don't know that artificial intelligence can ever know, right?
Gretchen Rubin
Lee Camp
And it, it, it is things as simple as, I would imagine, compassion, empathy, certain notions of beauty, experiences of beauty. So, yeah, I, I, I really appreciate you pointing us back to embodied reality and how that's indispensable from what it means--
Gretchen Rubin
Lee Camp
Gretchen Rubin
Lee Camp
So, so with, with that, what are some, you already pointed to a few of those, but what are some other sorts of prescriptive practices that you suggest we might take seriously in this regard?
Gretchen Rubin
Hmm. Oh, there's so many. Um, well, [00:37:00] one thing that's really helpful to know is what's your neglected sense, because for a lot of us, you know, we, the--
Lee Camp
Gretchen Rubin
There are senses that we tend to love. Now, sight, we are hardwired for sight, like sight takes up the most real estate in the brain and-- so that's, that's kind of a, that's a big one. But different people have different neglected sense.
So I actually have a quiz, 'cause this can be very hard to know about yourself, strangely.
Lee Camp
Gretchen Rubin
So there's a quiz that you can take if you could just go to gretchenrubin.com/quiz. It's this free quiz and it will tell you your neglected sense. And that's a really helpful thing to know about yourself because now you sort of, you know this low hanging fruit. You're like, okay, I don't dial into this this much, very much.
So what might I do to bring this into an element of my life? Maybe I could study it, or I could find ways to find comfort or pleasure from it because I'm sort of not tapped into it.
So for me, my most neglected sense is taste. Taste is a very popular sense. They're all popular, actually. But, so I thought, well, you know, given who I am and the fact that I neglect sense, uh, the sense of [00:38:00] taste, what might I do to amplify the pleasure that I get from it?
Lee Camp
Gretchen Rubin
And so I was able to like, look for-- like, I went to Flavor University, you know, because the more you know, the more you notice. And I thought, you know, the-- if I, if I appreciate it more, I'll, I'll get more pleasure from it.
Lee Camp
Gretchen Rubin
And so-- or like, I remember talking to somebody who found out that his sense, his neglected sense was hearing, and so he was like, oh, a friend asked me to go to a sound bath.
And I thought, well, usually I would say, no, doesn't sound that interesting to me, but actually maybe I should go because this is my neglected sense, so maybe I'd actually enjoy it more than I think. And then he really did. And so--
Lee Camp
Gretchen Rubin
--um, that's a, that's a fun thing to do because it's, it can kind of offer you, uh, an opportunity--
I mean, one of the things in writing the book that surprised me was, when I started, I thought my foreground senses, my most appreciated senses were sight and smell. I loved, I loved smell, and I thought, taste and, and hearing and touch were neglected. What I found out is I'm extremely focused on touch.
How did I not know that about myself? I don't know. I just assumed that [00:39:00] about myself and the minute I started thinking about it, like I'm extremely touch focused.
And, and you could see-- it was, the evidence was everywhere around me, and yet I didn't know that about myself.
Lee Camp
Gretchen Rubin
So I think it's-- you might think like, well, of course I know, kind of, my, my ways. I just hang out with myself all day long. How could I not notice?
But I, at least for me, and I mean obviously I'm the kind of person who felt the need to write this kind of book, so maybe I'm more, I have a bigger problem than, than this, than the, you know, the average bear, but. It's very easy just not even to notice your own preferences.
You know, you just, you're just not paying attention, you know?
Lee Camp
Gretchen Rubin
I didn't notice that I liked English Breakfast tea and I didn't like Earl Gray tea. I was like, sometimes tea is good, sometimes it's not as good. Who, who can know?
Lee Camp
Gretchen Rubin
It's random. I would just order them at random, buy them at random, and just be like, okay, well what are you gonna do?
And then I was like, wait a minute. There's a pattern here, when I really think about it.
Lee Camp
Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, for, for me, it's, it's been learning different tastes of different kinds of beer. And, you know, you learn the different brews [00:40:00] and so forth, and--
Gretchen Rubin
Lee Camp
--learned a lot about that, and it's, it's fascinating, yeah.
Gretchen Rubin
Lee Camp
It really is. And to get to try different ones and little tastes here and there.
Gretchen Rubin
Well, what you realize is that often you have to do comparisons, because if you just have like one and then the next day you have another, it's like, it's hard to, if you're not an expert, it's hard to keep that in mind.
Lee Camp
Gretchen Rubin
But if you try them one after another after another, you can really see the difference. And that's very-- there's just sort of like an atmosphere of growth in that. You're like, oh, wow, I, I can really detect the honey note. And then you're like, wow, look at that.
Lee Camp
Gretchen Rubin
Yeah. No, it's really fun to do that.
Lee Camp
Yeah. Yeah, yeah.
So I want to go back to another, uh, earlier book of yours on habit, because I think that the whole notion of habit is indispensable to your, your overarching project and thinking about happiness.
Gretchen Rubin
Lee Camp
You, you, you say at one point, "when we change our habits, we change our lives."
Gretchen Rubin
Lee Camp
Which I, I very much agree with, but first, larger commentary just on the notion of habit?
Gretchen Rubin
Yeah, so sometimes-- I mean, a habit is something that we do on automatic, and that's why it's freeing and energizing, because we don't have to make a decision, we [00:41:00] don't have to use willpower. We don't have to think about something, it just happens.
We just, the minute we get into a car, we put on our seatbelt. The minute we get into the bathroom in the morning, we brush our teeth. And so, um, the more of, like, healthy habits that we have that are on that kind of automatic path, then the easier it is gonna be for us to do the things that are gonna make us happier.
Because you're exactly right. When I was studying happiness, one of the things that surprised me after the Happiness Project was, sort of out in the world, was people would say to me, "Well, how did you get yourself to do all those things that you write about?"
And I said, "Well, you know, I thought about what I thought would make me happy, and then I decided to do them. And if they made me happy, I just kept doing them."
And they said, "Well, but how did you get yourself to do them?"
Lee Camp
Gretchen Rubin
And I was like, well, I don't understand. And what I realized is that a lot of times people know perfectly well what would make them happier. They know they'd be happier if they got more sleep or saw more of their friends or stopped yelling at their kids or got more exercise or, you know, practice the guitar.
And the reason they're not is because they're having trouble making it into a [00:42:00] habit. And that's why, if you want-- if you're thinking about how to be happier, healthier, more productive, and more creative, it's very, very helpful to think about habits, because that's just a very, that's a, that's a way to achieve those aims.
Lee Camp
Yeah. So give, give a kind of a, uh, cliffsnotes version of things you've learned, then, about changing habits.
Gretchen Rubin
Again, the, the most important thing I would say is you have to understand yourself, because how people successfully make or break habits depends very, very much on their own nature.
Um, one of the things I found in writing the book is there's this framework that I, I can't even say I created it. I feel like I discovered it, like the periodic table of the elements.
[Lee laughs]
There's this aspect of human nature, which I call the four tendencies, which divides people into four categories of upholders, questioners, obligers, and rebels. And the way that you will successfully make or break a habit is extremely influenced by which of these categories that you're in, and a strategy that might--
So in Better Than Before, I talk about the 21 strategies you can use to make or break your [00:43:00] habits. And some of these work for some people and not for other people. Some of them are available to us at some times and not at others. So this is not like, they don't all work for everybody. Some of them are actually counterproductive.
Lee Camp
Gretchen Rubin
A strategy that works really well for somebody might actually be counterproductive for someone else. So you really have to know yourself. And the four tendencies helps you to understand what approach is more likely to be effective for you. So you're not just throwing spaghetti against the wall and hoping something works, or, oh, it works for my brother-in-law, it'll work for me.
This really helps you understand how to choose the strategies that are more likely to work for you. And then some strategies work basically for everybody, um, but some are very, very specific.
Lee Camp
Yeah. It, it sounded like you focus on, at least for a lot of work on habits, on scheduling?
Gretchen Rubin
For some people, not for everybody.
Lee Camp
Gretchen Rubin
Rebels don't like scheduling. I will throw that out there.
Lee Camp
Gretchen Rubin
If you're a rebel, you won't like scheduling.
Lee Camp
Gretchen Rubin
Lee Camp
For those, for those for whom it might make sense, talk to us a little bit more about how one might try that or how one might [00:44:00] think about that.
Gretchen Rubin
If you're the kind of person who finds that if something's on the calendar, you do it, put it on the calendar. Don't wait, and then say like, oh, I should read more. I'll read when I feel like it. Because you will never feel like it. If something's important to you, put it on the calendar, just like a dentist appointment, you know?
Lee Camp
Gretchen Rubin
I have on my calendar, take a nap. On the 'Happier' podcast, every year we have a challenge. So there was like walk 20 and 20, read 21 and 21. And then it was rest 22 and 22.
So my, my thing was to take a, a nap every day, which I now love, but--
Lee Camp
Gretchen Rubin
Huge nap fan. And there's so much research behind napping. If you have the time and the, and the freedom to take a nap, it's huge. But I put it on the calendar because I found if I don't put it on the calendar, I just don't do it.
Lee Camp
Gretchen Rubin
I just, I'm so focused on everything else that's on the calendar.
Lee Camp
Gretchen Rubin
I don't do it. And so...
But if you are the kind of person - and this is the rebel - who if something's on the calendar, you resist it--
Lee Camp
Gretchen Rubin
--If you find that you don't [00:45:00] wanna do something, if it makes you feel trapped, if it makes you feel controlled, if it makes you feel like, oh, I wanna do this even less, then what you would wanna do is lean into things like, this is the kind of person I am, this is what I want.
I love to take naps. I love to sneak away from my work day--
Lee Camp
Gretchen Rubin
--and take some time for myself. I'm the kind of person who, I'm so active and energetic, I need to take that break in the middle of the day to feed my energy. A rebel can take, can achieve aims just like others, but they, they, the kind of strategies that might work for them might, might not work for them that work for others.
Lee Camp
Gretchen Rubin
Like the strategy of scheduling.
Lee Camp
Another, another thing that I've learned, just about myself, is that learning to try to change many fewer habits at one time has been important for me, because I, I would, I would try to do too many projects or too many habits changes at one time.
And, um, I, I've discovered, again, as, as is so often true in life, that doing less actually helps me to do more. If I slow down and say, well, let, let me, let me work on these one or two or three things this [00:46:00] quarter...
Gretchen Rubin
Lee Camp
...and then next quarter I can f-- figure out what might be next.
Gretchen Rubin
And that's a great example of everybody has to figure it out for themselves, because absolutely many people say start small, make incremental process or stay focused, don't take on too much, you'll get frustrated. But I will say, there are people who are like, go big or go home.
Lee Camp
Gretchen Rubin
I want radical big change. I wanna do something hugely ambitious or I'm not interested. That's what captures my imagination.
Lee Camp
Gretchen Rubin
Is transformation. And that's what's gonna make them wanna do it.
Lee Camp
Gretchen Rubin
And again, what I worry about is like, you're saying, this is what I found works for me. And that's great, because you're saying that's what works for you. The problem is, is when people say, you're doing too much, you're setting yourself up for failure.
Lee Camp
Gretchen Rubin
You shouldn't give yourself twenty, twenty aims. You should pick just one or two. Okay, maybe that's good advice for me, the person saying it, but I don't know about the person who's hearing it. You, we can't assume that just because something works for us, it's gonna work for everybody universally.
And so it's really a-- like you're saying, you've said, I have [00:47:00] found that I do better when. This is the be-- this is the thing. When have you succeeded in the past? What do you know about yourself? What appeals to you? What feels like too much? What feels like not enough?
I-- because I think sometimes people sort of feel like, well, an expert will tell me the right way, and then if it doesn't work, there's something wrong with me. There's nothing wrong with you. There's so many ways to set these-- set ourselves up, and there's a lot of ways-- you don't need to change yourself. You can change your schedule, you can change your surroundings. There's, you know.
But I do think sometimes people get discouraged when something doesn't work, because they're told they've done it the wrong way.
It's like, well, tru it a different-- if something doesn't work, try it a different way.
Lee Camp
We've been talking with Gretchen Rubin, author of numerous bestsellers, including The Happiness Project. Check out our most recent book, Life in Five Senses. Also, Gretchen's the host of the podcast, 'Happier with Gretchen Rubin.'
Gretchen, thanks so much for your time. It's been a delight.
Gretchen Rubin
Lee Camp
I feel happy having talked to you today.
Gretchen Rubin
Good, me too. I so enjoyed our conversation. Thank you so much. [00:48:00]
Lee Camp
Thank you so much.
You've been listening to No Small Endeavor and our interview with Gretchen Rubin.
We gratefully acknowledged the support of Lilly Endowment Incorporated, a private philanthropic foundation supporting the causes of community development, education, and religion, and the support of the John Templeton Foundation, whose vision is to become a global catalyst for discoveries that contribute to human flourishing.[00:49:00]
Our thanks to all the stellar team that makes this show possible. Christie Bragg, Jakob Lewis, Sophie Byard, Tom Anderson, Kate Hays, Mary Eveleen Brown, Jason Sheesley, Ellis Osburn, and Tim Lauer.
Thanks for listening, and let's keep exploring what it means to live a good life together.
No Small Endeavor is a production of Tokens Media, LLC and Great Feeling Studios.