Hello and welcome to Happier, a podcast that gives you strategies and tips for how to build

happier habits into your daily life.

This week we'll talk about how keeping a one-setting journal can make you happier, and whether

you're a marathoner or a sprinter when it comes to how you like to work.

I'm Gretchen Ruben, a writer whose study is happiness, good habits, and the best

of human nature.

I'm a New York City, and with me is my sister-of-the-sage Elizabeth Kraft, who's my happiness

guinea pig and questioner.

That's me, Elizabeth Kraft, a TV writer and producer living in LA, and though Gretchen sometimes

drives me crazy, she will fly 3,000 miles to help me clean out my closets.

Hope I love to do that.

We're going to start with the suggestion you can try at home, something small and manageable

that will actually make a big difference about how you feel each day.

And this week, our Try This At Home tip is to keep a one-setting journal.

A one-setting journal is exactly what it sounds like.

It's a journal where all you do is write one sentence a day.

If you're like me and many people, you periodically have or swept up in this desire to keep a journal,

and you have fantasies about I'm going to sit next to a waterfall and write in a beautiful

book with a quill pen and have all these deep thoughts.

Maybe you buy them in the notebook because we always need an excuse to buy a fabulous

notebook and keep it for like three days and then give it up because it's too much work.

Then you have that bad feeling of like, oh, I was going to do it and I've done this five

...