Drawing on contemporary science, the wisdom of the ages, lessons from pop culture, and her own experiences, Gretchen Rubin reveals unexpected truths about how we can live happier lives—and how to transform abstract ideas into concrete action.
NEW! Gretchen Rubin discovers a surprising path to a life of more energy, creativity, luck, and love: by tuning in to the five senses. Pre-order the paperback.
NEW! Gretchen Rubin discovers a surprising path to a life of more energy, creativity, luck, and love: by tuning in to the five senses. Pre-order the paperback.
A chronicle of the twelve months Gretchen Rubin spent test-driving cutting-edge science, the wisdom of the ages, and lessons from popular culture for her “happiness project” about how to be happier.
A chronicle of the twelve months Gretchen Rubin spent test-driving cutting-edge science, the wisdom of the ages, and lessons from popular culture for her “happiness project” about how to be happier.
Podcast
On the top-ranking, award-winning podcast Happier with Gretchen Rubin, Gretchen discusses happiness and good habits with her sister, Hollywood show-runner Elizabeth Craft.
Gretchen Rubin is one of today’s most influential and thought-provoking observers of happiness and human nature. An acclaimed writer, she’s known for her ability to distill and convey complex ideas with humor and clarity.
An atmosphere of growth is a key to a happier life. Find articles about a range of topics, consider concrete tips and strategies, and download additional resources.
Drawing on contemporary science, the wisdom of the ages, lessons from pop culture, and her own experiences, Gretchen Rubin reveals unexpected truths about how we can live happier lives—and how to transform abstract ideas into concrete action.
NEW! Gretchen Rubin discovers a surprising path to a life of more energy, creativity, luck, and love: by tuning in to the five senses. Pre-order the paperback.
NEW! Gretchen Rubin discovers a surprising path to a life of more energy, creativity, luck, and love: by tuning in to the five senses. Pre-order the paperback.
A chronicle of the twelve months Gretchen Rubin spent test-driving cutting-edge science, the wisdom of the ages, and lessons from popular culture for her “happiness project” about how to be happier.
A chronicle of the twelve months Gretchen Rubin spent test-driving cutting-edge science, the wisdom of the ages, and lessons from popular culture for her “happiness project” about how to be happier.
Podcast
On the top-ranking, award-winning podcast Happier with Gretchen Rubin, Gretchen discusses happiness and good habits with her sister, Hollywood show-runner Elizabeth Craft.
Gretchen Rubin is one of today’s most influential and thought-provoking observers of happiness and human nature. An acclaimed writer, she’s known for her ability to distill and convey complex ideas with humor and clarity.
An atmosphere of growth is a key to a happier life. Find articles about a range of topics, consider concrete tips and strategies, and download additional resources.
Drawing on contemporary science, the wisdom of the ages, lessons from pop culture, and her own experiences, Gretchen Rubin reveals unexpected truths about how we can live happier lives—and how to transform abstract ideas into concrete action.
NEW! Gretchen Rubin discovers a surprising path to a life of more energy, creativity, luck, and love: by tuning in to the five senses. Pre-order the paperback.
NEW! Gretchen Rubin discovers a surprising path to a life of more energy, creativity, luck, and love: by tuning in to the five senses. Pre-order the paperback.
A chronicle of the twelve months Gretchen Rubin spent test-driving cutting-edge science, the wisdom of the ages, and lessons from popular culture for her “happiness project” about how to be happier.
A chronicle of the twelve months Gretchen Rubin spent test-driving cutting-edge science, the wisdom of the ages, and lessons from popular culture for her “happiness project” about how to be happier.
Podcast
On the top-ranking, award-winning podcast Happier with Gretchen Rubin, Gretchen discusses happiness and good habits with her sister, Hollywood show-runner Elizabeth Craft.
Gretchen Rubin is one of today’s most influential and thought-provoking observers of happiness and human nature. An acclaimed writer, she’s known for her ability to distill and convey complex ideas with humor and clarity.
An atmosphere of growth is a key to a happier life. Find articles about a range of topics, consider concrete tips and strategies, and download additional resources.
Over the past five years, my “Four Tendencies Quiz” has been taken by more than 3.2 million people—astonishing! People really love a great self-knowledge quiz; we’re all eager to understand ourselves better.
In researching my book Life in Five Senses, I realized that many of us—and certainly this is true for me—have senses that occupy the foreground of our attention, while others run in the background.
For the senses we appreciate, we tend to embrace new experiences, and enjoy opportunities to explore, learn, and put them to use. For the senses we neglect, we may give them little attention. We may be more concerned with avoiding the negative than reveling in the positive.
By tapping into my own neglected sense, I discovered a new source of comfort, calm, and creativity; I ventured on fresh experiences that delighted me, and perhaps most important, I found opportunities to engage with other people.
It was very useful to get this insight into myself, because I was able to use this self-knowledge as a shortcut to a richer life.
The quiz will identify your most neglected sense and provide a list of concrete ideas for tapping into this sense to have more fun, love, energy, and calm.
Do you already have an idea of what you think yours will be? For me, I wasn’t surprised—and I don’t think my family and friends were surprised—to learn that my most neglected sense was “Taste.”
I worked with a brilliant team to create this quiz. (It’s much harder to write and design a useful quiz than you might think.) I’m very happy to launch it into the world.
Onward,
5 Things Making Me Happy
I was deeply moved by this thought-provoking account in the New York Times by journalist Steven Overly, about his experiences after he lost much of his sense of hearing, overnight.
For one of my daily visits to the Met, I walked around with Patrick Bringley. Patrick worked at the Met as a museum guard for ten years, and he recently wrote a memoir, All the Beauty in the World, about that experience. As we walked, he pointed out “guard marks,” where, over the years, guards have marked the walls as they leaned against them during their long vigils. Do you see the discoloration? In my book Life in Five Senses, I write about my efforts to “look for the overlooked.” In all my daily visits to the Met, I’d never noticed the guard marks, but they were so easy to see once I knew to look!
I love clever signage, and a reader sent me this funny post from a fire department aimed to end the confusion between “Tornado Watch” and “Tornado Warning.” The sign is funny, but it points to a deeper issue: if people regularly confuse important terms, we should probably make the terms themselves clearer. (As someone who grew up in Kansas City, however, I know the difference between a “watch” and a “warning” very well.)
On a recent episode of Happier with Gretchen Rubin we discussed a list of listeners’ hacks of imaginative ways to tap in to our five senses. Gosh, I love a great hack.
A thoughtful listener sent me this short video that shows how sound can be made visible. It’s extraordinary to see patterns emerge as notes play.
Updates
Join me and my sister and co-host Elizabeth Craft for a special IG Live, where we’ll be taking my new Five-Senses Quiz and discussing our results. Tune in today: Friday, 3/17 at 4pm PT / 7pm ET.
This week on Happier with Gretchen Rubin
PODCAST EPISODE: 421
We talk about why it’s useful to find our own way to look around a museum—and we offer some unusual suggestions. We also discuss a useful health hack, and discuss listeners’ thoughtful responses to question from the OBLIGER/Rebel who resists accountability—even though she needs it.
Drawing on a deep well of research in psychology, sociology, law, and medicine, Sorry, Sorry, Sorry: The Case for Good Apologiesexplains why a good apology is hard to find and why it doesn't have to be.
Q: Why are people so obsessed with bad celebrity apologies?
A: Probably because it’s an easy, low-stakes kind of outrage. A treat, like a bonbon. It’s fun to take the powerful down a peg, to bond about how entitled and self-absorbed certain privileged people are. Being furious about James Cordon being a schmuck is less stressful than being furious about a lot of things in the world that we are also furious about, you know? And it’s fun watching the machinery of fame in action, that desperate, flailing, patently see-through damage control. Our book contains Bad Apology Bingo cards for a reason — statements of regret written publicists and crisis management teams all tend to sound amusingly similar. BUT. We’ve been doing our apology watchdog site, SorryWatch.com, since 2012, and while people love to send us terrible apologies by famous people to analyze, we actually parse far fewer celebrity apologies than we used to. We started to worry that while they’re fun to excoriate — and we DO rip into them, and the most trafficked posts on our site are the ones in which we go off on a famous person — we increasingly feel that there isn’t a ton to learn from celebrity apologies. We started pondering how everyone recognizes bad public apologies when they hear them...but when we ourselves need to apologize, we make some of the same mistakes. There’s a fascinating dichotomy at play: We all know how FURIOUS we are when we get a bad apology – sorry if you were offended, sorry but let me tell you about my trauma, sorry you don’t understand JOKES – yet when we know on some level we should apologize, we either convince ourselves that we're actually the wronged party, or we apologize badly. The book explains why a good apology is hard to find, but doesn’t have to be. It looks at research that shows why apologizing well is psychologically difficult, but also why it’s so potent and healing. (Rest assured we also look at when NOT to apologize, when NOT to accept an apology and when NOT to forgive.) Good apologies really are part of a way to build the kind of world we all want to live in.
Q: You’ve done fascinating research. What has surprised or intrigued you—or your readers—the most?
A: We were amazed and delighted to come across the Zeigarnik Effect. Investigated by psychologist Bluma Ziegarnik in the 1930s, it says that “Unfinished tasks are remembered approximately twice as well as completed ones.” The effect was first noted among Berlin waiters, who could always remember what people had ordered – until the bill was paid, at which point they totally forgot. What this means to us, in terms of apology, is that if you’ve messed up with someone — for example, if you’ve said something rude — that’s an unfinished task. It’s likely to bother you, to prey on your mind. “AUGH! I can’t believe I said that, what an idiot I am.” Until you apologize. That turns it into a finished task. It will stop eating at you. You forget the details after apologizing. Because it’s over with.
Q: Have you ever managed to gain a challenging healthy habit—or to break an unhealthy habit? If so, how did you do it?
A: Susan doesn’t find it easy to admit to being mistaken. She decided to work on this issue with the phrase “You were right and I was wrong.” She started with tiny things like “Oh, the salt is already on the table. You were right and I was wrong.” People enjoy hearing that. Sometimes they say, “Wow, I don’t think anyone ever said that to me before.” And using the phrase repeatedly made it easier for her to say. It took the sting out of admitting to imperfection. (And even though many bad apologies contain the phrase “nobody’s perfect,” admitting to our own specific imperfect moments is somehow extraordinarily different. This phrase helps.)
Q: Is there a particular motto or saying that you’ve found very helpful? (e.g., I remind myself to “Be Gretchen.”) Or a quotation that has struck you as particularly insightful?
A: We’re both struck by a remark from a man who spent 17 years in prison for a crime he didn’t commit, largely due to misconduct in the sheriff’s investigation. When he was released, he sued the county, saying, “I will accept twelve million with a public apology, or fourteen million with a private apology to me and my family, or eighteen million with no apology whatsoever.” It stuns us to see how he concretely lays out the value of an apology. It shows just how cherished good apologies and admissions of wrongdoing are. They're literally worth millions, in this case.
Q: In your field, is there a common misconception that you’d like to correct?
A: Apologies are widely considered a sign of weakness. We think they’re a sign of strength. It takes courage to apologize well; there’s a reason we all roll our eyes at “sorry if, sorry but” apologies. Giving a GOOD apology isn’t easy. You have to admit to wrongdoing and put yourself in a one-down, humble position. That’s brave!
It irks us that men are told “real men don’t apologize” and “never apologize; never explain.” Women, on the other hand, are castigated for “apologizing too much.” (Sorry, what does that mean? it means “apologizing more than men”!) The notion that apologies are effete and namby-pamby is chauvinistic…and we mean chauvinistic in both senses of the word: belief in the superiority of the male gender, and biased in favor of one’s own country. There are parts of the world that actually value social and ritual apologies more than we do! Americans love to mock Canadians for their amusingly accented “sorry”s and we love to make ironic tut-tutting Monty Python-y sounds to parrot British people huffing their "pardon me”s, and we often view Japanese apologies as merely ceremonial and performative when in fact they have real meaning.
Finally, Susan and Marjorie get uncomfortable when people police women’s speech. Telling women to say “sorry” less is akin to snarking at women for uptalk; that is, for putting a questioning intonation at the end of a sentence. Women are supposed to monitor their speech to seem authoritative but not ball-bust-y or bitchy. If we don’t sound accommodating and tentative, that can also be held against us! It’s a minefield! Maybe the problem is sexism, not women saying “sorry” too much? (Also, not every strategy works with every audience or for every speaker — race and gender are both factors here. The consequences for seeming “angry” are much harsher for Black women.) So hey, if you want to say “thanks for your patience” instead of “sorry the team hasn’t finished the project,” great. But monitoring your speech for “sorry” shouldn’t be yet another burden women have to take on.
Want to find more ways to explore your senses?
ON SALE APRIL 18, 2023
Life in Five Senses: How Exploring the Senses Got Me Out of My Head and Into the World
Pre-order Life in Five Senses and get access to an exclusive five-video series with quick, easy experiments you can use to explore your own senses.