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Podcast 292: Create a Hidden Delight, a Hack to Encourage Exercising, and Accepting Something as a Gift vs. Paying for It.

Happier with Gretchen Rubin
Ep. 292: Create a Hidden Delight, a Hack to Encourage Exercising, and a Discussion about Accepting Something as a Gift vs. Paying for It.
byGretchen Rubin / The Onward Project

We talk about why you might want to create a hidden delight, a listener suggests a hack for using clothes as a way to stick to an exercise habit, and we discuss a challenging question related to gift-giving and gift-receiving.

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Happier with Gretchen Rubin is part of ‘The Onward Project,’ a family of podcasts brought together by Gretchen Rubin—all about how to make your life better. Check out the other Onward Project podcasts—Do The Thing, Side Hustle School, Happier in Hollywood and Everything Happens with Kate Bowler. If you liked this episode, please subscribe, leave a review, and tell your friends!

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Ep. 292: Create a Hidden Delight, a Hack to Encourage Exercising, and a Discussion about Accepting Something as a Gift vs. Paying for It.

Update

We’ve announced our next book club choice: Yaa Gyasi’s unforgettable novel, Transcendent Kingdom (Amazon, Bookshop). Start reading, and post your questions and comments on social media using #happierpodcastbookclub.

Try This at Home

Create a hidden delight.

I quote from one of my favorite books, Christopher Alexander’s odd, brilliant A Pattern Language. (Amazon, Bookshop)

Here’s the “Drunk Monkeys” wallpaper from Astek Home. 

Happiness Hack

A listener suggests that on the days when you enjoy the comfort of wearing workout clothes, you have to exercise. On the days when you enjoy skipping the workout, you have to wear “real” clothes.

This is a brilliant application of the Strategy of Pairing from Better Than Before, my book about how to change habits.

Know Yourself Better Question/Listener Question

How do you respond when someone offers to pay for something? When should we repay, and when should we accept a gift?

Elizabeth Demerit: Elizabeth put a moratorium on buying books, then she bought James Michener’s 1,124-page tome Alaska. (Amazon, Bookshop)

I mention Andrew Roberts’s biography Napoleon: A Life (Amazon, Bookshop).

Gretchen Gold Star: I give a gold star to the Netflix TV show Dark, a German science-fiction thriller. Complex, interesting, absorbing.

If, like me, you love the short-story collection Exhalation by Ted Chiang, Dark reminded me of the story “Anxiety is the Dizziness of Freedom.” (Amazon, Bookshop)

 Resources

  • My book The Four Tendencies: The Indispensable Personality Profiles That Reveal How to Make Your Life Better (and Other People’s Lives Better, Too) (Amazon, Bookshop) turned three years old this month. If you’d like to read a sample chapter, click here and scroll down to “The Four Tendencies” to download it for free.

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