Hello and welcome to Happier, a podcast that gives you strategies and ideas about how to

build happier habits into your everyday life.

So this week we'll talk about making the positive arguments and are you a simplicity lover

for an abundance lover.

I'm Gretchen Rubin, a writer whose studies happiness, good habits in human nature.

I live in New York City and talking with me is my sister the sage, Elizabeth Kraft.

And I'm going to use my intro to plug Gretchen's new book about habits better than before,

which I guarantee will make you change your life.

Oh, what a nice sister.

Buy it.

Let's have an update on updates.

If you remember in episode two we talk about the idea of updates, which was an idea my mother had,

our mother, and we've been getting a ton of emails about it and tweets about it and voicemails about

it. So you want to discuss?

Yeah, the idea of updates is my mother had this insight that when you know what a lot about what's

going on in someone's life, you have a lot to say. But when you rarely see someone you've just

say, what's going on? Oh, nothing. What's new with you? Oh, nothing. And so we decided that we would

all do these family updates every few days when we would just give each other updates.

And a lot of people have written to ask exactly how do you do it? How exactly do you structure it?

And what exactly do you include and do people answer and what's the exact frequency?

And our only rule is that it's okay to be boring. That's our motto. We do it very loosely,

just kind of every couple days. And you just sort of throw in anything you want. Sometimes it's

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