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

This week we'll talk about why you should avoid collecting excessive amounts of anything and why it's tough when worlds collide.

I'm Gretchen Reuben, a writer whose studies happiness, good habits, and human nature. I'm in New York City and with me is my sister Elizabeth Kraft.

That's me Elizabeth Kraft, a TV writer and producer living in LA in Gretchen. I don't think I've said it lately but I feel very happy that I've got you as my own personal happiness bully.

Thank you for an ongoing basis for that.

Thank you for allowing me to experiment on you from time to time.

Gretchen, a while back we talked about the fact that you wanted to have a good summer. You wanted your summer to feel different from the rest of the year and you were not prone to do that.

I said at the time, well I'm going to check in with you closer to summer and see what you've got cooking for summer.

That time has come. We're past spring break, everyone's thinking about summer. I know I have enormous anxiety about what camps and activities to side jack up for. I've done nothing by the way because I'm frozen.

What have you done to plan your summer?

I've worked, speaking of like kid summer versus adult summer. I've worked on a lot of work on my kid summers but I have not done enough about my own summer.

You're right to call me on it because I want to be thinking about it now when summer is coming up and I don't want to wait until I'm halfway through the summer to start pondering it.

I mean I was thinking what do I want my summer. I really envy people where their summers are very different from their winters and because it just feels like it's more life. You have a whole different experience.

Since I'm a writer who works for myself, I really do have a lot of flexibility. I could set up my daily routine in a very different way in the summer and I just never do.

Like you say, I just always have it be exactly like the rest of my year and then I regret it later because I'm like I should have done something cool with my summer.

But I have to say I'm kind of stalled out about what it would be. I don't really want to like move to a different place for a month or two.

But maybe it's a different way of structuring my days. Maybe I want to like shake it up differently or just I don't know if anybody has any ideas about how to approach a summer or how to think about changing a routine just so you feel like you have a different life for a while.

I would love to hear it because I feel like this is something. I'm glad you reminded me because this is something that I need to think through more.

Yeah, you know, it's interesting when you were doing the happiness project. You had all these distinctive sets of time where like this month I'm, you know, taking a drawing class and this month I'm doing yoga or whatever it was. I don't think that was one of them.

But now you don't have that. So it's, you know, it's like because I would you've kind of tried a bunch of stuff you wanted to try and because trying something would be an obvious thing to do during the summer.

But I don't feel like you have anything outstanding that you're dying to do.

No, but you know, but you're right though. I did have like the month of, you know, marriage and the month of reading and all that. Maybe maybe I should think of like, well, what like I kind of like I could have a month of lunch dates right just like because I have this whole group of people that I'm like, I would love to see them for lunch.

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