On the Happier with Gretchen Rubin podcast, Elizabeth and I often talk about reframing.

For instance, one effective way for me to reframe is to consider the reminder, “Don’t treat a gift like a burden.”

I think back on a time when this idea helped me, when my daughter Eliza was a newborn. When you have a baby that young, you have to take them to the pediatrician very frequently, and Eliza’s birth had been complicated, so we had to go even more often than most people. I was complaining about this chore to my husband Jamie, and he said, “Why don’t you ask my mother if she’d do it? I bet she’d be happy to do it.”

And I immediately thought, “No way! Nobody else gets to take Eliza to the pediatrician, I want to do it!”

In a flash, I went from “I have to do it” to “I get to do it.”

Here’s another example of reframing—a very striking example that I learned when I was writing my book Life in Five Senses.

One counter-intuitive fact that I learned is that while we humans are born with innate reactions to tastes, we don’t have the same kind of strong inborn responses to smell. This makes sense: when we eat something, it can hurt us, so it’s important that even a newborn can reject the bitter taste that often signals poison, and favor the sweet taste that often accompanies nourishment.

But nature doesn’t threaten us with killer smells, and whether we think the smell of hyacinth, skunk, or spoiled milk is “good” or “bad” depends on our genes, what our mother ate before we were born, our culture, our personal history, our health conditions, and changing fashions.

Also, context matters, framing matters, because our expectations shape our experience. It turns out that if we’re exposed to a scent and told that it’s “Parmesan cheese,” we think it’s an agreeable smell, but if we’re exposed to the very same scent and told that it’s “vomit,” we think it’s a disagreeable scent. I can imagine that the same difference would emerge if we were exposed to a scent and told that it’s “needles from a pine tree” vs. “disinfectant cleaner.” Same smell, different reactions!

Framing matters, context matters. Our experience is very much shaped by our expectations.