Welcome to the 1000 Hours Outside podcast. My name is Ginny Urge. I'm the founder of 1000 Hours

Outside. And I've been so looking forward to this and I'm thrilled to be on thrilled that Gretchen Rubin is back. Welcome, Gretchen. Thank you. I'm so glad to have the chance to talk to you again. It's great. So it's been a little bit. Last time we talked about Life and Five Senses, the book was just coming out, how exploring the senses got me out of my head and into the world.

And I told you that my mom is a huge fan. So my mom never knows really who's coming on the podcast. And like who the people are. I'll tell her who's coming on most of the time she's never heard of them. But when it was you, it was such a big deal. We were constantly texting back and forth. Did it happen yet? Have you talked to Gretchen? So they did the Happiness Project for one of their book club. She's been in a book club for a really long time. And it's just such a huge fan. You've written so many fantastic books. We're going to be talking about happiness today. You have your own podcast, happier with Gretchen Rubin, and also a newsletter. People can sign up called Five Things, Five Things Making You Happy, and I'll make sure I'll put those links in the show notes and written so many books. But of course, it's like, we want to be happier. And so you dive into this happiness project, even though you say in the book, most people actually are pretty happy, the statistics show, but you're like, I want to to be happier and this leads to you writing this

incredible book where you go from January to December working at you know this goal of of just

being happier of appreciating today more yesterday you know things are going pretty good so

how if you could kick it off with talking about how I thought, you see your husband,

Jamie, was like, people aren't going to be really super interested in reading your personal

journey.

Yes.

But I did find it, I'm sure you've gotten so much feedback that by reading about your own,

you use the word idiosyncratic, reading about what you chose and why you chose it, it really does help the reader to think what,

and so many people have done their own happiness project, what would it look like for me?

Right, and you put your finger right on it. I think that for a lot of people, they might

know something abstractly like exercise is good or we should connect more with other people,

but they don't really have a vision for how they would make that practical in their own life.

And it's not that they would necessarily, sorry, I have the hiccups, so you may hear some hiccuping.

It's not that they would necessarily do exactly what I did, but it's more the idea that seeing

an example of how somebody took sort

of a research finding or a principle of human nature and how they made that real in their

own life. I think a lot of times it did give people an idea either they would try what I tried,

like, you know, kiss in the morning, kiss at night, which is something very easy that a lot of people

have started to doing are like follow the one-minute rule, which is anything that you can do

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