Gretchen Rubin The Happiness Project #SANE

Gretchen Rubin

Jonathan: Hey everyone, Jonathan Bailor here and really have a treat for us today. I have not only a New York Times bestselling author but a New York Times bestselling author who has been on that list for two years. For a good reason because our guest today, Gretchen Rubin, who is the author of The Happiness Project, the aforementioned New York Times raging bestseller as well as Happier at Home, as well as the proprietor of Happiness-Project.com, is a fountain of happiness, joy, insight and is here to share some of that with us today. Gretchen, welcome.

Gretchen: Hello Jonathan. I am very happy to be speaking to you.

Jonathan: Gretchen, the reason I wanted to bring you on the show aside from your excellent work in general is here on Living the Smarter Science of Slim, we focus on the science of optimal health. But so often and it’s becoming more and more clear to me the longer I am doing this there is an equally important emotional side and often things that we do for health and fitness are done as a means to an end and that end is happiness.

I found that just exploring the topic of happiness in general can be very helpful and you are an expert. What can we learn about happiness based on you and your life?

Gretchen: That’s a very big question but just to pick up on something that you said that I think is absolutely true. I also sort of feel like it’s more and more true, the more I think about these issues is that when you are happier you’re more able to ask things of yourself and you are more able to do things, you’re more able to stick to your values. I think when people are unhappy when they are stressed out when they are not getting enough sleep, so they are just exhausted.

When they are unhappy about whether it’s their work or the relationship or something, it’s hard then to get yourself to go to the gym if you are not a person who necessarily always wants to exercise. It’s hard to get yourself to eat healthfully if you have impulses that you are trying to resist. It’s funny, sometimes people worry that it’s selfish to want to be happier but in fact when we are happy we’re better able to ask a lot of ourselves, we’re also more interested in the problems of other people and the problems of the world because we have the emotional [indiscernible 02:58] to deal with it.

When you are feeling unhappy, it’s very hard to do anything except to sort of focus on your own problems and that can make you isolated, it can make you defensive and it can make it hard to stick to habits that might over the long-term make you happier, but may be in the short-term mean denying yourself a little bit of instant gratification.

Jonathan: Gretchen, I love what you said there in terms of sometimes the pursuit of “happiness” can be perceived as this selfish effort. I know you mentioned Aristotle in your work and I love the Aristotelian concept of self-love as distinct from being selfish. Where in fact an individual who loves themselves is doing so, so that they may be of service to others and therefore is actually doing a selfless act rather than a selfish act. Have you found that to be true in your life?

Gretchen: Absolutely, absolutely and it’s something that people get very sort of tangled up in. I think one of the best articulations of it as well as Aristotle as you point out is Robert Louis Stevenson who said, “There is no duty we so much underrate as the duty of being happy”. This is so striking me because you don’t think of being happy as a duty but I think we’re exactly the reasons that you say you can characterize it as a duty because if it is selfish to want to be happy, we should be selfish if only for selfless reasons because it’s really then that we are able to turn outward.

Happier people are more creative, they are more resilient, they give away more money, they volunteer more time, they are healthier and they have healthier habits, they make better team members and better leaders. There’s all kinds of reasons why – even if you only – if you wanted to just completely focus on those things it does makes sense to think about your unhappiness. Also what I found just from my own approach is that a lot of people – there is a lot of low hanging group.

It’s not like you got to change your life dramatically or do something huge. For most of us there are a lot of stuff that without a lot of time, energy or money we can do that would actually significantly change the quality of our life. It just seems to be a shame that you don’t take the time to identify what those things are and act on them because without much trouble you could really increase your enjoyment of your life.

Jonathan: Gretchen, I can’t wait to dig into that low hanging fruit because I love to empower our listeners with that, let’s go there next but one thing I want to…

Gretchen: We should have the low hanging fruit, that’s what we all want.

Jonathan: Absolutely. Before we go there I want to dig for a second into this idea of you making yourself happier is one of the most important and in fact selfless acts and if your goal is to help others, potentially one of the most effective ways you can do that by way of an analogy which I am curious to get your thoughts of and I hate to always use sports analogies, but I think it might fit here.

Imagine, let’s think of an individual’s involvement in their family, a bit like an individual’s involvement potentially in a sports team and let’s just use football as an example and let’s imagine that we have a quarterback of a football team. This is the person who gets the ball and throws the ball for those people who are not super familiar with football.

Gretchen: Yeah, including me.

Jonathan: That person spends all of their time helping other members of the team get better at their skills but never actually works on becoming a better quarterback. Then the game comes and they end up fumbling the ball and they end up not knowing what’s going on and in fact if their job is to be a quarterback, improving themselves and spending time becoming a better quarterback is probably the best way they can help the team. Is it not?

Gretchen: Absolutely, absolutely. Now to use sort of another analogy, we all need to fill up our own gas tank because if you want to give everybody a ride to the football game, you got to have gas in your own gas tank. If you spend all your time filling up everybody else’s tank then you’re not going to have what you need when you need to call on. So absolutely and for that quarterback they might pat themselves on the back and think “Oh, this is exactly what I am supposed to do, look at me,” but they are really not serving their team in the best way they can because again it’s that duty to think about yourself as well.

One of the things that I did was to identify these eight splendid truths. I was very inspired by all the numbered lists of Buddhism, which I get a big kick out of. So, I have eight splendid truths and the second one has two parts and I think people, everybody recognizes the first part but a lot of people don’t think about the second part which is just as important. The first part is that “One of the best ways to make yourself happy is to make other people happy” and that’s absolutely true.

It’s one of the very nicest things about human nature and I don’t think anybody would dispute that. What’s also true is that while one of the best ways to make yourself happy is to make other people happy, it’s also true that one of the best ways to make other people happy is to be happy yourself. Happy people make people happy and so again it’s back to this idea that it isn’t selfish, it isn’t a waste of time, it isn’t inappropriate. A lot of people worry that in a world so full of suffering it’s not morally appropriate to want to be happy.

They feel like “How can I work on my own happiness when I see all these people suffering.” But actually by working on your own happiness you really give yourself the [indiscernible 08:58] to try to intervene and to try to take action and try to do things about it. People who are less happy tend not to be as focused on making changes or thinking about how they could make a difference.

Jonathan: I love it, I love it. Speaking of the eight truths and low hanging fruit and things we can start doing today, certainly we don’t want to give away the farm. Individuals should definitely join the hundreds of thousands if not millions of people who have already enjoyed your work in The Happiness Project as well as Happier at Home, but what are some – can you scratch the surface, can you give us just a little hint of some of these low hanging fruit things we can start doing today to be happier?

Gretchen: Okay, the first one I am going to say I know you are going to agree with which is to get enough sleep. I think so many people are just exhausted and they pretend like they only need five hours of sleep at night but they sleep binge on the weekends, they use their snooze alarm, that instrument of torture over and over again. I mean if you want to be happy I think you really need to get enough sleep and it’s so basic it seems silly but I think it’s very hard just to have the basic amount of energy that you need for your life if you are constantly sleep deprived. So that’s the first thing I say to everyone.

Jonathan: I definitely agree with you from a biological perspective as well Gretchen, because in some ways being sleep deprived is just like being food deprived, like your body is starved. Again back to the car and the gas, if you don’t have gas in your tank and do whatever the hell you else want to the car it isn’t going to run as well as it should be running. One of the things that potentially I see and I just shake my head at because it’s so unfortunate and this is pretty common Gretchen.

I imagine you may even have friends or know people who do this and that is not only not getting enough sleep but trading sleep for things that will further deplete your gas tank in a destructive fashion let me give you an example. Waking up at 4 o’clock in the morning so that you can go jog outside in the cold on the road with cars shooting exhaust at you for an hour. That seems to be the double whammy there where you are depriving your body of something it must have and then pounding the pavement and doing something which further increases stress hormone levels. It’s a one-two punch, is it not?

Gretchen: Yeah and you know my next book is going to be about habits. I have been thinking a lot about habits and how you can construct your life to make it easier to have good habits and harder to have bad habits. One of the things that I have been thinking about a lot is this idea of foundation and that if you want to have good habits you need to think about your foundation. These are often habits that you want to get yourselves.

You sort of have to change your habits in order to change your habits which is a little perplexing. These are sort of habits that really should come first because they will make it easier to do everything else and that is sleep and you made the analogy of sleep to food, I completely agree. I think a lot of people have weird eating habits or have trouble with their eating because they are hungry. They let themselves get hungry, they are constantly being whiplashed and they’re exhausted. They’re depleted for whatever reason.

When you are walking through the day and you are depleted whether because you haven’t had enough sleep or you haven’t had enough to eat or you have a headache and you haven’t taken a pain relief or let yourself get too hot or too cold or whatever it is, you are just not going to make good choices. You are always going to feel like you need to fill up that gas tank and you need to give yourself that shot of energy. Usually when people are desperate for a shot of energy they reach for something that is not good for them.

By working on your foundation then you can make good choices and those good choices are the kind of things that over the long-term are going to make you happier. You got to set yourself up so that it’s easy to make good choices because you are right, it’s a biological need and your body is just going to be doing everything that it can to direct you to get the gas tank full again.

Jonathan: Gretchen, and what are some other foundational elements that you would say we need to take care of before we take care of may be some high order bits? Because I often find to that in our culture often times we may lose sight of these basic things. For example, if an individual would just get seven to eight hours of sleep per night, drinks sufficient clean water, and ensure that they are eating nutrient dense foods, I would argue that they would achieve better benefit than any of these top 100 tips and supplements and all these kind of like refinements which seem to only matter once that base is established. It’s a bit like we don’t ever establish the base and then try to do these quick fix approaches on top of it, what do you think?

Gretchen: I think you are exactly right. People forget to do first things first and so do the first things first. Here is a thing that is – I am not sure it’s low hanging fruit aspects that are low hanging fruit and it has been a surprise to me. It’s a surprise to me that I feel like its part of the foundation for most people. It’s not part of the foundation for everyone, but I think for most people it is. That has to do with the weird connection for most people between outer order and inner calm, not for everyone.

For most people there is something about being in a chaotic, messy, cluttered environment that makes them feel weighed down, makes them feel more tired, more overwhelmed and makes it harder to make decisions. You’re not even aware of it. But then over and over people tell me that when they cleaned out a room or cleaned out a closet or they cleaned – a friend of mine said “I cleaned out my fridge and I felt like I could switch careers.”

The number one resolution people specifically mention to me as trivial as it sounds is the resolution to make your bed. There is something about just getting order over the stuff of life that makes you feel more in control of your life generally. That might be the illusion, but it’s a helpful illusion. For most people taking their time to clean out your office every Friday afternoon or to take an hour on a Saturday and go to your closet and get rid of the clothes that nobody wears so you can actually hang something up in there without jamming it in with all your strength.

It’s hard because the clutter is constantly sweeping through and you get things organized and then they kind of fall into chaos again. So it takes constant vigilant. I used to think this was a trivial thing, It just doesn’t matter that much. It does seem that it matters more than you might think. It seems that for many people it’s an important aspect of foundation. When they feel like there’s not a lot of stuff in their house that they don’t actually want or use or love, when they feel like they have clear surfaces, when they feel like they can easily put things away and easily find things, then it’s easier even to eat right or get exercise or to hold your temper or you get yourself to do something that you don’t want to do. That outer order makes you feel calmer and more orderly inside and again it’s easier to ask more of yourself because your environment is helping provide you with that foundation to ask more of yourself.

Jonathan: Gretchen, I think that’s so spot-on and I think it’s a good example of one of the things we talk about on this show with regards to exercise and even eating and that’s controlling what you can. So much of our life is completely out of our control. If we can really take control of these things which are under our control, for example what we eat is under our control. There is no politics involved. It’s just what we choose to eat is under our control.

When we choose to exercise, whether or not we do that in a smart safe way and we really go at it or we just go through the motions that’s up to our control. Whether or not we live in a cluttered space or not that’s up to us. As we start making these private victories as Stephen Covey would say, “These small private victories can help it be easier to make larger pubic victories” because it’s a bit like we start saying yes to ourselves and then saying yes to the world becomes easier, is it not?

Gretchen: Yeah and I think that one of the things is that, like you say control what you can. I think sometimes people focus on what they can’t control and don’t then take their time to control what they easily could control. Or even somebody is saying “When I go out to dinner with a bunch of people it’s a business dinner, I feel uncomfortable if I don’t have a drink and everything like that.” You could say well okay that situation and may be you feel like you are under certain kind of social pressure there. But how many meals is that out of meals in a month?

Think about every day you are eating at home or every situation where you don’t feel that. You can focus on what it is within your control and exactly as you say, when you feel like you are in control of what you can control it also gives you a greater feeling of efficacy as you think about the things that are less within your control. But a lot of times you are more under control than you want to say. I had a friend who said to me “You know I’ve been seeing so many patients this month, I haven’t been able to do any writing.”

I was like “You pose that as those are the two alternatives. You got a million things going on in your life. It’s not like you have a one to one correlation.” He was acting like it’s totally out of my control because this other thing is happening, I am seeing more patients. Instead of sort of saying like “When I see more patients I feel like I don’t want to spend my free time writing because I feel…” – he could have explained it in a way so that it was clear to him the choices that he was making and the control that he was exerting.

Instead he was just describing it for himself in a very passive way and I think that made him feel like he was not in control and not recognized the degree to which he was in control. Sometimes knowing that you are in control is reassuring and sometimes you are just like “Well this is the consequence of my choices so that’s what I want, okay fine I will accept it.” When you pretend like it is not within your control when it is then you’re giving up something, you’re giving up that feeling of power.

Jonathan: Absolutely Gretchen, absolutely. I think one of the things that is somewhat a travesty is when it comes to health and fitness, technically we are almost completely in control. Certainly, there are external factors that influence us but at the end of the day what we are putting in our mouth and whether or not we are physically active and how we are physically active is up to us. However, it is now becoming indisputably clear that the traditional path to healthy is in fact not at all healthy.

In fact doing chronic amounts of high impact cardiovascular exercise, eating an extremely high starch and sugar based diets simply because those are low in fat and avoiding natural foods which may contain some fat in favor of these low fat food like products is not healthy. What worries me about this Gretchen, is we have individuals now who do take control but the instruction they’ve been given as to what to do once you have taken control is incorrect, therefore they do it and they try hard and they get worse. Then they think that they don’t have control when in fact they do but they have just been given incorrect instructions.

Gretchen: No, that’s a very painful thing to see because it’s one thing to just not even worry about it but then it’s even worse to be [indiscernible 21:13] and to be trying and have it not work because you are following a path that is not one that is going to lead you to success. So you are trying just as hard as a person who is succeeding but because you’re pointed in the wrong direction you are not getting to where you want to be.

Jonathan: Gretchen, I would imagine that you have actually seen something like this in the happiness arena because I love positive psychology and it’s another one of my passions that I pursue in my copious free time. The fact that we have individuals who acquire more and more material wealth, more and more status, more and more fame and yet continue to get more and more depressed seems to show that again there is this path we’ve been prescribed. Like get money, become famous, and that will make you happy whereas we actually don’t see that bearing out in real life.

Gretchen: It’s clear to me that we can only have a happy life on the foundation of our own nature, our own interest and our own value. The more closely your life reflects your interest, your nature and your values then the happy you are going to be. When you pursue things because you think that’s what everybody wants or that’s what my parents think would make me happy or that’s what other people expect or that’s what other people want, I can get it, other people want it therefore I must want it too.

That’s not going to make you happy. Just because 99 out of a 100 people would be happy with some opportunity it doesn’t mean that it’s going to make you happy. This going to be very painful because sometimes we have an idea of the way that we wish we were, the way we think we ought to be and so it can be painful to acknowledge what really makes you happy. It was very hard for me to just admit to myself I just don’t like music very much. I get why people like it, I know tons of people who love music, I wish that I like it better because I see all these enjoyment that people get from it.

I like a song here and there whatever, but I am just not been into music or travel. Some people they love to travel, they look forward to, they plan it, they love the adventure, but I am a real homebody. I am happy with this vacation. I travel from time to time and that’s good but I am not a big adventure travel person. That’s painful because I wish I were, I think it’s cool but that’s just not who I am. I think you have to be very honest with yourself about what you like and what’s true about you because that’s the only thing that’s going to make you happy.

Jonathan: Gretchen, this seems to get back to a core truth that we often talk about here on the show and also gets back to our earlier author of Aristotle and that is the subject of the unexamined life not being worth living. I see like what you just described there was we have to look inward and say, like when it comes to happiness, “Is this action actually making me happier or often times is it actually making me sadder?”

I noticed even I have had this experience, a lot of things I do with the belief that it will make me happier actually makes me less happy. The reason I bring this up with reference to on a podcast that pertains to health and fitness is often times we will do things to help make ourselves what we perceive to be healthy or fitter and in reality feel terrible. We keep doing it because we believe externally that’s what we should be doing, but internally we are getting a very clear message that it’s not. What I hear you saying is that we have to let that internal locus of control really be the center not the external.

Gretchen: Yeah and it’s interesting because I think one of the fundamental tension within happiness is on the one hand you want to accept yourself and on the other hand you want to expect more from yourself. Sometimes – and I am sure we have all had experiences like this, sometimes there is a goal or there is a skill or there is something that feels uncomfortable and for me the question is okay is this something that is properly within my reach and I should expect more for myself and reach for it and challenge myself and may be go out of my comfort zone and deal with this?

Or really is this something that is just not true to my own nature and it feels uncomfortable to me because it is not something that has anything to do with me, it’s somebody else’s goal, and it’s what somebody else wants. So I should just leave it alone and not do it. I think that’s something that can sometimes be very hard for people to distinguish, are they accepting themselves and are they expecting more from themselves? Because both things need to be true in a happy life. You shouldn’t kid yourself about whether something is working for you or not, but it could be hard to tell sometimes.

Jonathan: It absolutely can. That reminds me, Gretchen, of the concept of flow, MihalyCsikszentmihalyi over at University of Chicago, who I am sure you are familiar with. Certainly a major player in happiness arena where he talks about the critical and a positive tension between skill and challenge. Certainly a happy life is not one that is devoid of challenge, it’s simply one where the challenges match our skill level.

Gretchen: Exactly, exactly. I think one of the key things about happiness is that one of the things that is most important to happiness is the sense of growth. We are happier when we feel like we are growing, when we’re learning, when we’re helping, when we’re fixing something, when we’re making something better and so a sense of growth is a key engine of happiness. On the other hand growth often comes with a lot of pain.

Like when you are growing it can be inconvenient, it can be frustrating, you can feel stupid and a lot of times you got to put up with that in order to do something that over the long-term is going to make you happier. So learning how to – I just taught myself how to use a new software program and I was dreading it because it always like oh it doesn’t install properly the first time and then you got to go through the manual and then click, click, click, click, click and it feels like oh I am spending all this time learning how to use this software, I am not even doing any work yet.

Then I was like do it, read the manual, go through it and then you will feel great when you know how to use this new software program and then it’s going to make everything easier for you in the long run. You just have to put up with that in order to get this growth that is really going to be something that’s going to work in the long-term and so – but if I have been trying to do something that I had no fundamental actual interest in doing like learning Italian, which I don’t particularly want to learn but it felt very sterile and futile because it would have been all these work and I wouldn’t have even cared.

It is back to what you were saying about the match between what is the goal, what’s the undertaking and what’s the person who is doing the undertaking and is that a good fit.

Jonathan: Bringing that back, Gretchen, because that is so spot-on in terms of focusing on things not only that bring us joy but that we have control over. When we think about that from a health and fitness perspective this is where I get so encouraged by pursuing health rather than pursuing weight loss because objectively like we can take steps and they will make us healthier.

Now we may be in a metabolic state where that may or may not result in weight loss but I can promise you that a healthy body will naturally pursue a healthy weight whereas an unhealthy body will naturally pursue an unhealthy weight. But when we focus on health that is something like we can control and is of universal interest and won’t disappoint us rather than focusing on the number on the scale.

Gretchen: I couldn’t agree more and I think exactly about this idea of control it pains me when I see people setting goals for themselves which they can’t achieve. You can say, “My New Year’s resolution is to lose 20 pounds by July 1st.” You cannot control that. You can control how you eat, you can control how much you move around, you can control how you behave, but you cannot control the outcome. Same thing like a friend of mine was like “My goal is to have a bestseller” and I was like you can’t control that.

You can say “My goal is to write the best book that I possibly can, my goal is to be finished with my novel by the end of the year, my novel is – my goal is to write 15 query letters,” make it about the thing that you can actually make happen. You can’t control the outcomes and then you feel frustrated and it also I think moves your eye away from the thing that’s important to focus on because if you are focused on the way you may not pay as much attention to your behavior.

If you are focused on the bestselling novel, you might not be spending as much time thinking about “Okay what are all the steps that I need to go through that I can control because you just like to sit there fantasizing about how great it is going to be when you hit this goal which you may or may not achieve. In life so often for one reason or another we don’t actually reach our goals. That’s another reason why really doing what you want is important because if you are doing what you want even if in the end you don’t actually succeed, you feel good about it because you have been doing – even if you don’t lose the 20 pounds, if you feel healthier, if you feel better in your body, you feel stronger that’s going to feel good.

I wrote a book that did not succeed in finding its audience, but I loved writing that book, so do I regret it? No because I had a great time even through it didn’t result in the sales that I would have wanted. If I had written a book because somebody said write this book it will be a bestseller and it didn’t I would have felt crushed because I would be like “Oh my gosh, I spent all this time and energy doing something that I didn’t want to do and then ah look at this.”

It would be so upsetting and frustrating. If you do the things that you love to do, if you do the things that fit with your own nature and temperament then although reaching a goal and outcomes are obviously important and add a lot to a happy life, they are not as crucial and it’s not as crushing if things don’t work out exactly the way you planned.

Jonathan: Certainly, Gretchen, I would imagine the fact that that book was on a subject that you loved and that you enjoyed that helped you to be a happier stronger person. In fact in the long run it enables you to write books that were phenomenally successful because you didn’t get burnt out and didn’t have to then moved to an island and resign yourself to life completely because you are like “Well life is just unfair and I give up” because you were focused on doing things that you love.

Gretchen: I think that’s a very good point coming back to that idea of foundation, is the more that you are doing things that you enjoy that itself is energizing. Happening to do a lot of things that you don’t like to do is depleting. The more you can shape your life around the kinds of things that you actually enjoy and either delegate or ignore or throw money at things that you don’t like to do, that’s going to also build your foundation because you just going to have more energies as you go through your day because you are enjoying yourself.

I am also a big fan of treats like picking good treats, healthy treats so that you do give yourself the spikes of energy. Now for me, writing a book about John F. Kennedy that was a treat, like I love, I love doing that and so for me that was very energizing. Then there is little treats like I am really into smells so if I need a little bit of lift I go to my shrine to smell and smell one of my crazy smells that I love. Clearly writing a book about JFK is one kind of treat and sniffing a bottle of vanilla is another kind of treat but there is room for both of them because they help you stay energized and stay feeling like you can face your day and then that’s when you can make those decisions that build long-term happiness.

Jonathan: What I think you touched on are profound truths there, Gretchen, whereas those treats that you identified are treats that empower you to be happier and better in the rest of your life. Rather than treats which – here is a morbid example but like taking crack can make you feel good in the short-term but it certainly doesn’t empower us to then do better in the other areas of our life. What you mentioned smart treats are those that give us a boost right now and enable us to continue, no?

Gretchen: Yes, absolutely. I think something that everyone should spend time thinking about is “What is my very long list of treats?” because I am sure you heard this lot. People are like “I deserve it, I need it.” They feel like they need a treat, they deserve a treat like they are going to get their treat. Great you should have your treats but have a long lists of things that you can have that are going to – like you say are going to be things that over the long-term are going to be like the crack that is really going to bring you down or fill you with remorse or regret.

Somebody suggested this I felt this is like a great treat, she said “I indulge in fur therapy.” I was like “What’s fur therapy?” She is like “I just like to sit down and pet my dog for ten minutes.” That’s a great treat because there is nothing that will cheer you up more than just like spending some time with your dog and it’s nice for dog too. Maybe you really need to make a thing out of it and say I am really going to sit down and do this and make it into a real treat and looking for those opportunities to identify treats. The more that you have at your disposal then the less likely you are to do things that are going to be harmful in the long run.

We all know the difference between the thing that – we do it knowing that we are going to be sorry, the trouble is the reason they are treats, they are treats because we usually try not to have them because we know they are not good for us. You are like “Oh wow, buying this extra pair of jeans is a real treat” because you know that you don’t need another pair of jeans and you know that you shouldn’t be spending the money that way, that’s why it feels like a treat. If you need a pair of jeans, you are like “Oh I need a pair of jeans,” you buy a pair a jeans. It might be fun but it doesn’t feel like “Oh my gosh, I deserve this” same way.

Jonathan: I love it Gretchen. This time has just flow by and we are going to have to have you back on the show because I feel like we are just getting started here and…

Gretchen: [inaudible 36:15]

Jonathan: Folks in the meantime, in the meantime if you can’t wait, which I personally can’t, please do what I am about to do and go online or to go to your local bookstore and pick up a copy of Gretchen’s more than two-year New York Time bestselling book The Happiness Project as well as her work Happier at Home. You can even check her out at Happiness-Project.com where you can get free daily happiness quotes as well as a newsletter so you can get your daily fix, Gretchen, which frankly I think is a treat we would all enjoy Gretchen.

Gretchen: There you go, there you go that’s a good treat.

Jonathan: Gretchen, thank you so much for joining us today I really appreciate it.

Gretchen: That was great to talk to you. Thanks so much for having me on.

Jonathan: Thank you and listeners, this week and every week moving forward remember that a great way to ensure happiness is to eat more and exercise less, but to do that smarter. Talk to you soon.

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