You're listening to Life Kit from NPR.

Hey, everybody, it's Mariel.

Question for you.

How happy are you?

Yeah, I know. I guess I should answer it too.

I don't know.

I mean, what is happiness anyway?

I started my career in law, so I have many memories of spending an entire semester arguing about the definition of contract, and happiness is even more elusive.

This is Gretchen Rubin. She's a writer who studies happiness, good habits, and human nature.

She also has a podcast called Happier with Gretchen Rubin.

She says trying to pin it down exactly, and yes, I did try to do it. and human nature. She also has a podcast called Happier with Gretchen Rubin.

She says trying to pin it down exactly, and yes, I did try to do that in our interview,

isn't all that helpful? There are like 15 academic definitions of happiness. And I think that for the regular person, it's not that useful to argue about joy versus contentment versus

well-being versus life satisfaction.

It's easier to think about moving in the right direction.

Because what is happiness is a very hard question to answer, but will this make you happier?

It's something that usually we have a lot of clarity about. Another thing Gretchen has learned about happiness is that it's not one-size-fits-all.

And to get closer to it, to move in the right direction, we need to understand ourselves, our preferences, our habits, how we tick.

So on this episode of Life Kit, we talk about how to do that and how to move towards happiness.

Gretchen, you write in your book Secrets of Adulthood that happiness doesn't always make us feel happy.

What do you mean by that?

If you're thinking about how to make your life happier, there's four to four pieces that you can think of.

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