We’ve had many beautiful summer days here in New York City, and I keep thinking of Henry James’s famous remark to Edith Wharton, recorded in her excellent autobiography, A Backward Glance: “Summer afternoon—summer afternoon; to me those have always been the two most beautiful words in the English language.”
Onward,
5 Things Making Me Happy
Each month, on social media, I post a photo of the books I’ve finished that month, and I’ve decided to start including it here, too. I make a big effort to stop reading a book if I don’t enjoy it, so if it’s pictured, I liked it. Note: I lent my copy of Sophie Mackintosh’s Permanence to my daughter, so it’s not pictured. I highly recommend it. It’s a novel about infidelity, loyalty, love, pleasure, and self-knowledge, in a fantastical but also realistic setting…think The Picture of Dorian Gray+Piranesi+The End of the Affair+Blindness. My reading of the five volumes of Virginia Woolf’s Diaries—my summer project—continues. What a delight.
I was pleased to see my idea that we should reframe the “empty nest” as the “open door” was featured in Shannon Watt’s thoughtful article “You don’t HAVE to be miserable when your kids leave for college.” No surprise, I agree.
As a student of happiness, I was intrigued by the New York Times’s list of “The Happiest Cities of 2026” in the United States. I know Overland Park, Kansas, very well; it’s part of my beloved hometown Kansas City’s metropolitan area. I was also intrigued by the comments on the post—about why many people disagreed with the list.
I enjoy Melissa Kirsch’s weekly newsletter, “The Good List”—“a weekly inventory of ideas, rituals, and cultural artifacts to add joy to your days”—and I also enjoyed her recent piece “Making Rounds: Errands get us out of our homes and into the world.” One thing I love about living in New York City is that so often, I can accomplish an errand on foot on my way somewhere else. Reading the piece reminded me how much I like doing an “errand date,” when a friend and I run errands together, and how long it has been since I’ve done that—I want to do it again.
I’m always pondering the Four Tendencies—my personality framework that divides people into Upholders, Questioners, Obligers, and Rebels. (Take my free quiz if you don’t know your Tendency—more than 3.2 million people have taken it.) One of the questions I’m most often asked is “How do you use the Tendencies to build a strong team?” So I wrote down my answer here: “The right mix of the Four Tendencies on a team.”
This week on Happier with Gretchen Rubin
PODCAST EPISODE: 598
“Treat yourself like…a person of interest” and try a month-long “self-stakeout” to track your habits. We also share an easy way to convert Celsius to Fahrenheit in your head. Plus we discuss three broad categories of empty nesters.
INTERVIEW
Leslie John
Leslie John is a behavioral scientist and professor at the Harvard Business School who studies and teaches the art of saying what matters. Her new book, Revealing: The Underrated Power of Oversharing, is available now.
Q: Can you suggest something we might try to help ourselves to become happier, healthier, more productive, or more creative?
Share the good stuff.
So often, we have a warm, admiring, delighted thought about someone. And then we just…keep it to ourselves. A friend texts, “How are you?” and we send back “Great!” or a funny emoji, but what we’re actually thinking is, “Wow, this text just gave me the jolt of joy I didn’t know I needed this morning.”
My suggestion is: when the lovely thought crosses your mind, say it. Text it. Tell the person. It doesn’t have to be a grand declaration. Less is more; perfection is the enemy. Maybe you’re at the grocery store and spot the ridiculous snack a friend once introduced you to. Instead of just smiling to yourself and moving on, dash off a text: “Your influence lives on. I am now a person who buys these.” Or even better, send a quick voice note. There’s something especially lovely about hearing someone’s voice say, “This made me think of you.”
Obviously, I mean sincere praise and appreciation—not flattery, not forced positivity. But when you genuinely appreciate someone, admire something they did, feel grateful for their presence, or simply think, “I really like this person,” don’t let the thought evaporate.
Recently, I was on a double date and didn’t know the other wife very well. Over dinner, we really hit it off. At the end of the night, I almost defaulted to the usual pleasant goodbye. But then I thought, “Why not just tell her?” So I said, “I really like you!” She looked a little startled at first, because people don’t usually say things like that so directly. But then she beamed. Since then, we’ve started a lovely little friendship.
One thing I’ve noticed from practicing this is that it doesn’t just make me happier in the moment—though it does. It has also made me much more aware of positive things as they’re happening. I notice more flashes of affection, admiration, gratitude, amusement, and delight. And because I’m watching for them, I savor them more.
That’s the magic of the practice: seeing, savoring, and sharing life’s delights. It gives someone else a lift, but it also trains us to pay closer attention to the good that’s already there. So when you notice the good stuff, don’t just notice it. Share it.
Q: Do you have a Secret of Adulthood? A lesson you’ve learned from life the hard way; something you’d tell your younger self?
My father has always said, “Regret is a terrible thing.”
I’m a decision scientist, and much of my work is about the choices we make around what to share and what not to share. In the moment, we tend to be exquisitely sensitive to the regret of saying too much. We make a comment that feels a little too revealing, a little too emotional, a little too awkward, and we immediately think: TMI. Too much information. Why did I say that?
That sting is real. But it also tends to fade. The so-called “disclosure hangover” passes, and often, with time, we can see the upside: the connection created, the truth clarified, the relief of not having to keep something hidden.
The bigger risk I’ve found, both in my research and in my own life, is often the opposite problem: TLI—too little information. Over time, it’s often the regrets of not sharing enough that eat away at us. The “I love you.” The “I’m sorry.” The “I miss you.” The “This hurt me.” The “You matter to me.” The questions we were afraid to ask. The truths we kept postponing for some imaginary, safer time. And in fact, studies of people undergoing palliative care have shown that one of the most common regrets people have as they reflect on their lives is: “I wish I had shared my feelings more.”
This lesson feels especially vivid to me now because my father has Alzheimer’s, a horrible disease of slow goodbye. His words—“regret is a terrible thing”—have become both a memory and an instruction.
That’s also why I created a short quiz called “Are You Holding Back?” So many of us feel alone with the things we carry—worry, shame, longing, resentment, insecurity—when in fact, many of our private thoughts are far more common than we think. If you’re curious what you tend to hold back, and why, you can take the quiz here.
Q: What simple habit boosts your happiness or energy?
Gardening.
I spend so much of my life in my head… thinking, writing, teaching, making decisions, studying decisions. Gardening is one of the fastest ways I know to get back into my body. It’s grounding, pun fully intended.
There’s something wonderfully clarifying about pulling weeds, touching dirt, noticing what’s blooming, and seeing what needs care. Unlike so many parts of life, the feedback is immediate: this plant is thirsty, this bed’s overgrown, wow despite my neglect this little plant is still alive!
It also gives me a kind of happiness that feels different from achievement. I’m not optimizing or performing or trying to be impressive. I’m just outside, getting into the weeds, and making one small corner of the world a little more alive. Yay!
Q: Is there a particular motto that you’ve found very helpful?
A motto I’ve come to love is: “Doing is believing.”
I’m a decision scientist, so my instinct is to analyze things to death before I act. But when it comes to decisions to open up, analysis only gets you so far. You have to try it to appreciate its power.
I’ve come to believe that most of us would benefit from being a little more open, a lot of the time. Not wildly open. Not indiscriminately open. Just a little more open than our fear would prefer.
It’s a bit like exercise. Beforehand, you may not want to do it. You resist it. But afterward, you feel the benefit. You feel how good it is. Revealing can work the same way. We’re so afraid of the disclosure hangover—the sting of “Why did I say that?”—that we forget how often opening up leaves us feeling clearer, lighter, closer, and more alive.
So how do we start? My suggestion: Go one layer deeper than you ordinarily would.
Suppose you’re standing on the sideline at your kid’s soccer game, and another parent says, “The kids are having such a great time.” The default response is, “Totally, they are.” Nothing wrong with that. But one layer deeper might be: “They are. And watching them belly laugh like that makes me realize I can’t remember the last time I laughed that hard.” That’s what I mean by a small reveal. And these are the things that turn boring interactions into fulfilling ones.
Q: Has a book ever changed your life? If so, which one and why?
That’s a high bar! I absolutely love reading, though I don’t read nearly as much as I’d like to these days (demanding job and tiny children say hi!).
But two books really have changed my life, and I don’t say that lightly.
The first is Difficult Conversations by Douglas Stone, Bruce Patton, and Sheila Heen. It’s basically a playbook for how to say hard things with clarity, kindness, and courage. I use ideas from that book constantly… in my work, in my relationships, and in my own thinking about what it means to reveal wisely.
The second is Chatter by Ethan Kross. That book was profoundly eye-opening for me. It made me realize how harsh and repetitive my own self-talk could be, and how powerful it is to reframe that inner voice as if I were talking to a friend. That sounds simple, but for me it was a total game-changer.
And a more recent one I love is Alison Fragale’s Likeable Badass. As an agreeable Canadian, I sometimes find it hard to be assertive. Alison’s book offers such a smart, practical way to think about being both kind and strong. It helped me see that warmth and assertiveness don’t have to be opposites.
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