Welcome to Episode 198 of Live Happy Now.

This is your host, Paula Phelps, thanking you for joining us today.

This week, we're cutting the clutter with New York Times bestselling author Gretchen Rubin.

For the past decade, Gretchen has been delving into what makes us happy, and spoiler alert, it's not a bunch of stuff.

In fact, her new book, Outer Order

Inner Calm, Declutter and Organized to Make Room for Happiness, shows us how outer order contributes

to our overall well-being. She sat down with me to talk about why organization and happiness

go hand in hand and tell us how we can achieve it. Gretchen, I appreciate you getting into our studio today and

talking to us about this book because this is such an important topic. Oh, I'm so happy to be talking to you.

Well, you know, I know that we have a lot of interest in organization now and that's, you know,

something that's kind of caught my attention. We seem to be more fascinated with organization than ever before. Can you tell

me why that is? Well, you know, I do think it's something that people are always interested in. I think

it's sort of a perennial subject of sort of getting control of our stuff and people recognize that

they feel more focused and calmer and it's easier to find your keys. But I do wonder if right now,

the world feels like a very noisy, overwhelming place. It seems like there's like so much going

on and like so much to deal with. It's very easy to become overwhelmed. And so I wonder if that's

making people think, you know what, I can't control the world, but I can control my coat closet.

And if I can't bring down the level of noise on the

outside, I can at least get everything more orderly within my immediate environment. And that'll

help me cultivate that sense of kind of calm that it's going to make me feel better. That makes

perfect sense because I wondered if it's harder to declutter these days.

It just seems like we have more stuff, but maybe it's just the noise from the outside world that

...