Welcome to a little happier. I'm Gretchen Rubin. This week we're brought to you by audible.com

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happier. I've been traveling a lot lately and I have more travel coming up and this is stressful

both because I have to get organized for whatever it is that I'm doing on my trip and I also have to get everything at home

organized for me to be away and so having a bunch of travel all at once was really kind of adding to my inner burden and I

I thought to myself okay, I need to what can I do to calm myself down? How can I how can I make myself feel better and

there's something that I often do to make myself feel better

perhaps counterintuitive but not when you think about it

which is I will look for a messy place in my apartment and I will just clean up that one thing and

unfortunately there's always some place to turn to and this time I went to the kitchen and there was this one drawer in

our kind of you know cabinet of drawers where we just been dumping a lot of stuff kind of low-use

items that didn't often get pulled out and we were just stuffing more and more things in there and stuff was on its side and there was

you know stuff that was probably had gone stale and I just took 10 minutes and just went through it and put everything in order and

you know organized it by size so more things fit in and then because I made room then things from other

crowded places could fit in and I just looked at this

drawer and I felt such enormous

satisfaction with completely disproportionate to what I had done and

this would seem odd to me except that over and over when I've talked to people they say

they feel exactly the same way that there's something about getting control over the stuff of life that makes us feel more

in control of our lives generally and there's something about creating order getting rid of things that you don't use

getting rid of things that don't work

putting things in their proper places that's just

...