Hello and welcome to Happier, a podcast that gives you strategies and ideas for how to build happier habits into daily life.

This week is episode 110, which means it's a very special episode.

Because every tenth episode is a special episode.

This week we'll talk about one of the biggest and most challenging happiness stumbling blocks.

Lonely.

I'm Gretchen Murebin, a writer whose studies happiness, good habits and human nature.

I'm a New York City and with me is my sister Elizabeth Kraft and Elizabeth I feel less lonely just knowing that you're out there somewhere.

Thank you, Gretchen.

That's me, Elizabeth Kraft, a TV writer and producer in LA.

And yeah, I've called you many times in a lonely state.

Nice to have a big sister.

Nice to have a little sister.

Now, before we dive into our main subject for the very special episode, we wanted to let everybody know about these two excellent podcasts.

This is the month of tripod where everybody is meant to help new people discover podcasts and also help people find cool podcasts that maybe they don't know about.

And Elizabeth, we are so lucky because our former producer and our current producer are both involved in super cool podcasts right now.

Yes, we're so excited for Kristen and Henry.

Yes, so for Kristen, Kristen Mindsor, our own Kristen Mindsor, is working on a cool podcast called By the Book.

She and comedian Julente Greenberg are doing a great experiment where they are living intensively by the rules of a self-help book and reporting what they learn what they do, how it goes.

The first episode is, of course, the secret and the two of them are going to report on just how do those self-help books work out?

Yeah, and Gretchen, there are so many self-help books out there to try.

Well, you know, it's funny because my books are sometimes described as self-help, but I always say that they are just self-helpful.

I like that. Well, maybe they'll do the happiness project one day.

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