Afford Anything - Life in Five Senses, with Gretchen Rubin

Episode Date: April 27, 2023

#438: “Do you want to save money? Or do you want to enjoy your life?” That’s a common question, but it’s strange. It assumes these ideas are opposites: frugality is synonymous with deprivation; spending is a proxy for enjoyment.  That premise is wrong.  Let’s stop conflating spending with happiness. Let’s stop using “savings” or “free” as a euphemism for second-tier or sucky. Most online articles that discuss free or frugal enjoyment are poorly-thought-through listicles that offer half-baked ideas, like “go to the park” or “host a potluck.” Not only are these insufferable, they also miss the point. Behavioral change doesn’t come from a laundry list. It comes from cognitive reframing. To facilitate this reframe, we’ve invited Yale-educated former attorney and world-renowned happiness expert Gretchen Rubin to return to our show.  Gretchen was a guest on Episode 40, when she cited research about effective habit formation. She returns with a methodical, structured look at how to derive more joy from daily experiences through heightened sensory awareness. She draws from science, philosophy, medicine, literature and psychology to tell a layered story about how to find simple pleasures in everyday things. Her latest book, Life in Five Senses, came out on April 18 and immediately hit the New York Times bestseller list. Enjoy! Timestamps as of April 2023: 10:44: Why you should visit the same place everyday 11:55: How going to the same place can change over time 16:40: Advantages of being in tune with our senses 24:07: How to deepen your sense of smell 31:00: How culture impacts senses 37:19: How does your age impact your sensory experience? For show notes, go to https://affordanything.com/episode438 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

People often ask, do you want to save money or do you want to enjoy your life? And what's weird about that construct is that these two concepts are pitted as opposites. Spending money is seen as a proxy for enjoyment, while saving money is often used as shorthand for deprivation. But on Afford Anything, we're not going to conflate spending with enjoyment. Welcome to the Afford Anything podcast, the show that understands you can afford anything, but not everything. Each choice that you make carries a trade-off. And that applies not just to your money, but also to your time, your focus, your energy, your attention. So what matters most?

How do you figure that out? And how do you live your life accordingly? That's what this podcast is here to explore. I'm your host, Paula Pant. And in order to facilitate this discussion around how to maximize enjoyment from free or low-cost experiences, Not in one of those clickbaity listical, like 10 free things that you can do in New York City. I hate those lists. I hate them because they miss the point.

Like, yes, I get that I can go to Central Park. Duh. I don't need some listical telling me to plan a potluck instead of going to a restaurant. Like, the frugality information on the internet is just absolute garbage. I steer clear of that. But what I appreciate are people who are engaged in a nuanced study of how to live in the moment, increase vitality, improve your innate intelligence, and increase happiness. And one of the foremost observers of happiness in human nature is Gretchen

Rubin. Gretchen Rubin is a multiple New York Times bestselling author who has written absolute blockbuster bestsellers, such as the Happiness Project and the Four Tendencies. She has two degrees from Yale and worked as an attorney before she decided to leave the legal profession, but apply that same level of rigorous research to the pursuit of living in the moment. She joins us now to talk about her most recent project, which is tuning into the five senses as a path to a happier and more mindful life. In her latest book, which just yesterday, she announced that it hit the New York Times bestseller list, the book is called Life in Five Senses, she draws on cutting edge science, philosophy, literature, and on her own efforts

to investigate the profound power of tuning in to the physical world. And in our upcoming interview, she shows us how to experience each day with greater depth, greater delight, and stronger connection. How can we, despite the rush of daily life, find a sense of immediacy and engagement? And in doing so, perhaps find some of that satisfaction that too many people otherwise try to spend their way into. So, for this discussion, Here is Gretchen Rubin. Gretchen, thank you so much for coming on the show. Now, you became interested in a structured methodical study of immediacy and sensory experience

after you went to the doctor and your doctor told you that you're very near-sided, you have a greater risk for having a detached retina, and if that happens, you could lose your vision. I'm interested in knowing what you did. when you left that doctor's appointment, how did that inflection point change? No pun intended, your perspective. I live in New York City, so I walked out under the street to walk home from the doctor's office, and it just shocked me. And of course, intellectually, I knew that at any moment, I could lose some of my senses. And I knew that I could live a rich, meaningful life,

even if I did lose some of my senses. But for some reason, this just penetrates. But for some reason, this just penetrates. traded. And I realized how much I was taking my sense of sight for granted. I looked around the street that I was walking on and I realized I hadn't noticed a single thing on my walk there. I was just in this fog of preoccupation. I wasn't noticing anything. And as I had that realization, suddenly it was as if every knob in my brain just jammed up to maximum setting and I could see everything with crystal clarity and I can hear every sound on a separate track. And I can hear every sound on a separate track. And I can smell every single smell, you know, and I live in New York City, so it's a lot of smells. And it was just this sort of psychedelic experience where I was just perceiving everything with such

startling clarity that walk home just showed me that I had been missing something. I'd been studying happiness for so long, but I had been missing something. I didn't know what. And this walk showed me that what I was missing was this direct contact with my senses and this appreciation for the physical world all around me. And, you know, it only lasted a short time, but it just was transcendent. And it showed me that I really needed to focus on the experience of my five senses. I've heard many stories of people who will have a meaningful inflection point, such as what you're describing, but 24 hours later, 36 hours later, the chaos of life has led them to forget that inflection point. Why was it that this one stuck with you? It's a lot easier to feel transformed than

to get transformed. And I'm kind of a street scientist who likes to use myself as a guinea pig, and I do turn personal challenges into professional projects. And I just decided, okay, I need to do this. I need to do this systematically. I don't know. know much about the five senses. And the more you know, the more you notice. So I thought I need to learn. So I ran to the library and started researching. And the more I learned, the more I wanted to try things out for myself. I wanted to put things into use. And that's kind of my way. I love studying information and gaining knowledge and studying transcendent ideas, abstract ideas, but I'm always looking for ways to make things concrete. It's like, if this is true, what could I do

with my conscious thoughts and actions to put it into use. And so the minute I had this revelation for myself, I instantly was like hot in pursuit of researching and experimenting with the five senses. But of course, it took me a long time to figure out how to do that. It's funny you think, oh, you're just studying the five senses, but it's like, oh, but there are far more than five senses. They're like up to 33, 35 senses. Do I limit myself to the five? What about the censorium, which is all the senses working together? It was not nearly as straightforward as it sounds in hindsight. It was a much more tangled process. Right. Exactly. As you delve into studying the senses, one of the things that you approach right

away is there's an element that involves studying the brain. Like I was struck when you reported that the brain is only 2% of your body weight. I just assumed it was going to be more than that. I don't Yeah. Every time I step on the scale, I'm like, well, it must be my brain. Yeah, yeah, my big brain. There's the element where you're studying the physicality of senses. And then there's the element where you're studying the subjective experiential level. And then there's that element where you're trying to make it systematic, as you say. So even just thinking about how to approach a thing like that, right from the outset, it does seem a little complex.

It is. And whenever I write a book, I have the same process, which I'll just start by just reading and reading and reading as much as I can. And I just take notes on anything that seems important or striking. And then it's, you know, months and months and sometimes years before I start to think, oh, okay, now I have a point of view. Now I sort of see what a structure would be. And then I start to pull from all these notes that I've taken. But a lot of it ends up being kind of a red herring, you know, things that don't end up being important. but are just part of my background understanding of a subject. Right. Huge volumes are written about any one of these senses or an aspect of these senses. Part of it is distilling it and figuring out how to talk about them in a way that's cogent, but also limited. Right. How do you organize – this is a bit of a tangent, but how do you organize your notes?

Are you still using Scribner? You know, I don't use Scribner anymore. I really liked Scribner, but I'm not very tech-savvy, and it made me very uneasy to have – something between me and my notes because it would like ask me to update and I'm like yeah but what if something goes wrong and this whole thing crashes it just made me very uneasy but I have a very unsophisticated way of taking notes I'll just write down anything that I think is important whether something that's occurred to me or a note from another book you know with citations and then I'll often put tags next to it so if I'm searching for something I can find it and then after a while I'll start making like huge buckets something

like site, but then when I'm actually searching for things, I will search by like a search term. And what I like about this is it's kind of an imperfect system, but that is almost better because it will kick up a lot of things that it's not really meant to kick up. And those sort of accidental associations are often very helpful for me, like things that I wouldn't necessarily have considered together. They sort of appear together. And I'm lucky because I do have a really good memory of kind of like what's an unusual word that appeared in that quotation that I can search for? Like, oh, that quotation had the word husbandry in it. It's like, okay, let me just search by husbandry. So it's not a very sophisticated way to do it, but it works really well for me.

Oh, interesting. Yeah. All right. So tell us about how you approached this deeper sense of the senses. One of the decisions that you made very early on was that you would visit the same place daily. Why did you make that choice. I have always been fascinated by repetition. Like, I'm very interested in the work of Andy Warhol, partly it's because Andy Warhol is very interested in repetition. Like how things change over time, watching things gradually change, or how an experience changes as it becomes more and more familiar. And it's interesting, like when I started that, I thought that was a pretty idiosyncratic thing to be interested in. But I've since learned that many people have this impulse to visit the same place every day. Like, in,

forest bathing, there's something called the sit spot where people will return to the same place and sit. Sometimes, you know, every single day, the way I visited the Metropolitan Museum every day, people will often do the exact same walk through their neighborhood or they'll walk to the same tree or somebody said he went to his chain drugstore every day. And I thought, I get it. That would be fascinating. There's a lot going on in like one of these giant drugstores and it changes over time and you'd get to know the people and it would just be interesting. So I think for some people, they have sort of an attraction to that kind of exercise. And I was just so lucky.

I live with him walking distance of the Met. And I have the time and the freedom to go. So, you know, I'm so, so lucky. And so I thought, well, I'll just go to the Metropolitan Museum every day and see how it changes over time. Right. So tell us about that experience. How was it different after having gone there many times versus what the experience in the beginning? Because in a sense, it's almost like a novice eyes.

through a more curated set of eyes. Yeah, it's changed tremendously. Partly, it's just the knowing the space because the Met, I think part of what's fun about the Met is it's very maze-like. And I remember, if you go to the Met, one of the most wonderful things to go to is the Chinese Garden Court,

the Scholar's Garden. There is like a garden with plants and a pond with coyfish swimming in it and a big skylight, like on the second floor of the Met. It's amazing. But before, I was always like, is it there? Is it not there? Who can know? Like I just, I would either stumble across it or it was like Brigadim. Who knows? Now I know exactly how to get there. You know, so I think part of what I loved was

this feeling of it. It was sort of mysterious and maze like I didn't know my way around. It felt endless. And now I know my way around very, very well. Not 100%, but I know where to go to find what I'm looking for. And so part of it is just mastering the space, which is fun. It was fun not to know and it's fun to know. It's different. And the first thing I did is I did go gallery by gallery through the whole met, just so I sort of knew every room. And now I go much more, you know, I'll just go for different reasons to different places. So I move through the space very differently. But it's funny, like, it's not for me so much about the art as art as it is about the space, as a certain kind of space. Of course, the art is incredibly important to making it a particular kind of space.

But it's not like I run home and then read several volumes on, you know, Jotto to understand Jotto better. I'm very interested in just the experience of being in the museum. I had this really strange experience just the other day where the entrance that I go in, if I'm walking from the first floor to the second floor, there are two staircases that strangely are very close to each other. They're separated by like one gallery and they go from the first floor to the second floor. But I had noticed over time that one staircase was much easier to climb than the, other. And finally, I was like, wait a minute, that's kind of odd. Like, why would that be? So I go to the one

staircase and I'm looking around and I'm like, it's made of stone and it's four flights with three landings and it's going from the first floor to the second floor. And I go to the other one and yeah, it's stone and it's four flights and three late. And I couldn't figure that. And I walked up and down the staircase. I'm like, no, it's definitely easier on this one staircase than the other. What can be the difference? And then finally, I brought a ruler and I measured the height of the steps on the harder staircase, just for the first two of the four flights, the step was slightly higher than it was in the top half of it or in the other staircase. And that dramatically affected my experience of climbing the stairs. That's the kind of thing that you don't notice right away.

You know, that's the kind of thing you notice if you've been someplace many, many, many, many times. I mean, of course, it's a profound truth that we all know, which is the design of an experience. You may be going from the first floor to the second floor, but the design of that experience can make the journey very different. And I thought, well, this is just a very, very subtle change. And yet it had this dramatic impact on how I experienced the effort of walking the stairs. So slowly I'm starting to notice things like that as I go back, as well as noticing things about the artworks. Right. A more nuanced look, more detailed look at your environment.

Well, I mean, when things are new, they're exciting, but it's maybe you don't notice subtleties as much because you're taking in so much information. I mean, one thing that surprised me about the bet is it changes all the time. I knew the exhibits changed, but they'll just be paintings that move around or vanish. Like, with no fanfare, there's no, there's no reason for it. I mean, they just are swapping things around. And at first, I was like, is my memory playing tricks? I mean, because I could swear there was a big painting of a guy dancing a jig on. that wall. And where is that guy dancing a jig? And it's like, well, yeah, that stuff just

changes all the time. Or, oh, there was this statue of a girl chasing a duck. I don't know where that statue is now. It's gone. I've learned to appreciate things because they can just disappear. Right. If you love something, take advantage of it now. You can't count on the fact that it will be there forever. Right. I want to ask you about the sense of smell. We'll jump past hearing and go to smell. Oh, love the sense of smell. Before we do, I want to just. establish for the for the audience what and I know many when you were writing about happiness a lot of people would ask kind of the obvious question but what is the point of happiness or you know why is it important to study so I'll ask the same

question when it comes to the senses why should the average listener who is balancing work with taking care of family and balancing all of their daily concerns why should the average listener care about being more in tune with their senses. Well, one thing is this is something that you could do without spending a lot of time, energy or money. So it's definitely something that the ordinary person can tap into. And I think people want to tap into it. I feel like I almost don't even need to make the case for it because people go on and on about the metaverse, but really people are more interested in the universe. That's why so many experiences these days are billed as immersive because they know that is so

compelling to people. And I think it's because there's sort of two things going on at the same time. One is that experience feels sort of drained and flattened because it's coming to us through screens. It's kind of drained of its life. But then on the other hand, things almost feel like hyper processed. Like this food has been engineered to hit every bliss point. And yet you got it as takeout. So there aren't the smells of grilling and baking and roasting that would have tantalized your sense of smell. Or you go to a movie and you see more images than you would ever normally see.

and there's a soundtrack that's like, you know, full of music and emotion. And yet you don't have any smells coming to you. There's no air, wind in your face. So things feel both too flat and too saturated. And so I think people are very hungry to have this sense of direct contact with the world. And when I started this, of course, my assumption was that it would make me happier to connect with my five senses, because that was the point of doing all of these exercises. But I have to say, I was astonished by how much more effective it was than I imagined

and in a lot of unexpected ways. Tapping into the five senses, just like really being more attentive to the five senses, it does a lot to evoke memories, like memories you forgot you had, or to like create new memories to make them really solid and vivid so that you'll remember things in the future. It's a great way to connect with other people. sharing sensory experiences is something that is a very easy way to connect. It's a great way to spark your creativity. It's a great way to help yourself become more calm and also more energized. It's like, again, it's working in both directions. It helps to give you calm and feel less stressed out, but it also helps you to pump up through the five senses. So just depending on what aim you're seeking in your life, there is probably a way to tap into the power of the five senses to help you achieve that aim. Right. It sounds as though it is a, low cost or free and low time input way of improving your life, which ultimately is the point of all of this.

Right, exactly. And of course, I should say, like, I studied my five senses. Everybody has their own complement of senses, so they may have five or they may not. And people have sensory differences. People really, I mean, one of the things that I learned was that people, we each live in our own sensory world to a very kind of startling degree, how individual are sensory, experiences are. But I think whatever your particular experience is, there's probably ways for you to tune into your senses in a way that's going to boost your happiness. We'll come back to this episode after this word from our sponsors. The holidays are right around the corner and if you're hosting, you're going to need to get

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It's about not being just one thing, but many things for our customers. Big Bank Muscle, FinTech Hustle. That's your commercial payments of fifth third best. better. On the topic of how each individual sensory experiences are different and going to smell, one of the challenges with tuning into a sense of smell is, well, two of them. One is that there's a very thin line between smell and taste. To an extent, smell actually comes from not just the nose, but the mouth, as you mentioned. The other is that you become so normalized to smells in your environment that you can no longer perceive them sometimes even if you try. How do you approach a deeper

sense of smell? Well, you're exactly right on both counts. And it's fascinating. And I think for many people surprising how much the sense of smell affects the sense of taste. So flavor is what you experience when you're smelling and tasting together. And a really fun way to experiment with this is just take something that has a strong complex flavor, like a jelly belly or something like that. plug your nose, put it in your mouth, and you will taste sweet. It will taste very strongly of sweet. And then release your nose. And then all of a sudden it'll be cherry or root beer or pita collata or whatever kind of bonkers, jelly belly flavor you're tasting. And you realize it's because your sense of smell is giving you everything that's beyond just sweet, salty, sour, umami, or bitter.

And very sadly, I think many people realize this during COVID, where they would feel like they had lost their sense of taste, where it was really that it was their sense of smell that was a affected. And so that connection, I think, for many people, became much more aware of it. And you're talking about odor fatigue. Odor fatigue is fascinating. So I think we're all aware of the fact that if you try to keep smelling a flower or keep smelling a pizza or whatever, it kind of fades out pretty quickly after a few minutes. You can keep sniffing and sniffing, but you will not be able to perceive that smell anymore. And that is because the brain and with the sense of smell, it's a difference detector. It's telling you when things change because change can mean danger or opportunity.

And this is why if you put on a t-shirt, you feel it against your skin, but then that fades out. It's not important for you to know. So your sense of smell fades out so that if a new smell comes in, you'll be aware of it. It's not blocked out by you just keeping smelling the smell of the chocolate chip cookies baking for two hours. But it can happen sort of in a minute, you know, as you're smelling something like the pizza, but if you are around a very strong smell just habitually, that also will fade out, as you mentioned. So this is why we can't smell our home the way a guest smells it. If you've ever visited somebody whose home had a very, very distinct smell, but the people who live there don't seem to be aware of it, it's because they're not aware of it. Or if you

work in a coffee shop every day that really, really strongly smells of coffee, that will fade out almost instantly as you walk in because your brain is like, oh, yeah, we've seen this before. Nope, we're just going to bring this down. Now, of course, if you traveled away from your home for a month and then you returned, then you could smell it. But it's just this very interesting thing where you think, well, a smell is a smell. And if there's a strong smell in here, of course, if somebody has an active sense of smell, how could they miss it?

But they just simply do not smell it. Right. Throughout my childhood, I'm Nepalese. I would bring friends over and they would all tell me that my home had the smell of spices and incense and I can't smell it at all. To me, it's, I smell absolutely nothing. There you go. I mean, that's a perfect example, right? Because it's always there and so it's not flagged for you as important information. Right. Yeah. No, I hope my apartment doesn't smell like dog food or something, you know. Right. I think that's why sometimes people use way too much perfume or,

use too much air freshener or whatever, because they might think it's not working anymore because they don't smell it. And it's just because they've become habituated to it. Right. One thing that you mentioned earlier about how more of our experience takes place through screens. And screens are, by definition, they're visual, their audio, but we don't engage with the sense of smell, the sense other than tapping a screen, the sense of touch. These are our senses that we're not engaging with during screen time, are we getting worse at those senses? Like, how does that impact us when we habitually face stimuli that ignores a few of the senses while heavily appealing to a few others, like sight and hearing? Well, you know, that's fascinating. I have to say, I never thought about

that. But are we out of balance? Is that part of why people want immersive is because sort of certain aspects of our sensory more overstimulated and then others are understimulated. So it kind of creates this craving. I never thought about that specific thing, kind of the balance question. Now, it is true that we are wired for sight. I mean, site has the most real estate in the brain and we are just hardwired for sight as human beings. And so it's natural that we would gravitate toward a tool that is a very site-based tool. Of course, people have been reading for a very long time. But that is interesting. And it's funny because there have been sporadic efforts over time to have a technology

that would allow us to incorporate smell and it never has worked. You know, people write about them as kind of these oddities, but they've never taken hold. But then with touch, you think of how many people back in the day, when they used to be devices that had actual buttons that you pushed, many people resisted giving up those devices specifically because they wanted to be able to push the button. They didn't like a flat screen. They wanted the sensational. And then you have things that incorporate haptics, which are very, very important in technology now.

So, but yeah, you're never going to be licking your cell phone, we hope. Right. Again, it's like over-stimulation and under-stimulation together. So it's not just like Las Vegas where everything, you're smelling, you're tasting, you're touching, you're seeing, you're hearing, and everything's kind of being stimulated. This, there's over and under-simultaneously. That is really fascinating. I want to think about that. It seems likely to be true.

We do have this kind of hunger for that direct contact and for that intensity of sensory stimulation. Right. Right. You mentioned that there are, depending on how you frame it, more than five senses, there could even be up to 33 senses. What are some of the other senses beyond the big five? Oh, yeah. There are senses like interception and proprioception. And so these are senses that help us do things like,

stay in balance or notice the experience of our own body, like I'm hungry or I have butterflies in my stomach or things like that. And these are all extremely important, very fascinating in their own right. And they contribute very greatly to our sense of well-being. But they're kind of like the heartbeat where they're operating outside of our conscious control. They're running in the background. You're very aware of them if something goes wrong. But you're not very aware of them if they're operating as they should. And so they don't have the glamour of the big five. Because the big five, we study, we seek experiences, we talk about them all the time. They're very much in the forefront of our attention. And so, you know, I'm going to stick to the big five. That's, that's the one where

there's, you know, a lot of low hanging fruit for things that we can reach out to do. Do most cultures around the world share in the agreement that there are the big five senses or are there certain cultures that emphasize a sixth or seventh sense or some different senses? How is that understanding? There are cultural differences and different cultures will sort of have a more sophisticated language or framework of understanding, something like smell. There's a culture where they know the direction like north-south, east-west. They're very oriented towards kind of north-south-east-west in a way that we, in the west, we are not there are different ways to approach the senses, depending on your cultural upbringing.

And I mean, even with things like color, I mean, there are wide ranges of difference of how many sort of basic colors a culture will refer to. Sort of in English we talk about, we have 11, but there are cultures that have three and different cultures break it up differently. For instance, in the Russian language, there's a word for light blue and dark blue that are different words. And like there was no word in the West for orange until literally the fruit, the orange, appeared on the scene. And then they're like, we need a word for that. And the word, you know, was orange. It was just considered to be kind of a shade of yellow or red. So it's very interesting how every culture, every human culture sees the same visible spectrum. But how you slice that up and how you refer to it is very different. And then it's interesting, if you have a word for something,

you identify it more quickly. You're able to see. distinctions more quickly because you have a word for it. So it's really very fascinating. As you went about experiencing the five senses in a more intentional way, at the end of this, in retrospect, did it positively impact your happiness and your subjective sense of well-being? Oh, absolutely. I mean, far more than I expected. In so many ways, it gave me all these sort of new tools and new approaches to calm myself down and to get energized and give myself a boost when I needed to and to connect with other people. And also, it just had fun. It's interesting because with the five senses, there's a certain kind of approach that's very disciplined. Like a lot of people, I myself do

not meditate. I've tried it a couple of times. It's just not a tool that works for me. But a lot of people do the five, four, three, two, one meditation. Some people will do the thing where they, like, sit and, like, enjoy one sip of coffee for 20 minutes and, like, really, really analyze it. That is not my approach. My approach is much more like the playful, let's have fun with this. Like, let's get out in the world. Let's get our hands dirty. Like, let's just do whatever we want. Recess, like really tapping into the five senses for like a sense of vitality. So I think you could tap into the five senses to achieve many different aims, not necessarily what I was going for. But it absolutely did. It made my life so much richer. When you tune into your five senses, you notice more kind of beauty and fragrance,

but you also notice more kind of racket and stink because you're just more aware. But even that, I'm glad. I welcome that because it just makes my range of experience feel so much richer. Now, of course, I am the kind of person that was walking around in a fog all the time. You know, I'd be walking, there'd be a beautiful sunset and I don't even see it because I'm busy editing a paragraph in my head. So I'm exactly the kind of person who needed this book, which is why I wrote it. Research is research. So I think some people are more tapped into their five senses just naturally or maybe they've already disciplined themselves to do it. But I think that for people who do feel like maybe they've become disconnected from the world or from other people or from themselves, the five senses is a great concrete way that can help you shine a spotlight on that aspect of your life in a way that feels very, very manageable and very exciting, you know, very fun, very playful. We'll return to the show in just a moment.

Your daughters were with you throughout a lot of this experience. First, how old are they? Well, one now is 24 and one is 18. The big one kind of came in and out, but whenever she was around, I would snag her for my experiments. And then my younger one, she's home all the time. So she definitely got conscripted. But they loved it. I mean, after a few, they saw how fun they always were.

So they were very enthusiastic. Do you think that the experiences are different at different ages? Do 18-year-olds or 24-year-olds have a different sensory experience of the world than someone of your age? And would someone in their 70s have a different experience? Well, it's definitely true that you, as we age, then our senses become less acute. So often when people age, they think things don't taste as good or they don't taste as much. that's often because the sense of smell has been affected. Definitely the sense of hearing is something that's affected with age. Loss of hearing is highly, you know, as people age, that's highly

correlated. So absolutely. I mean, they probably just had more vivid experiences just because they're younger. Yeah. Oh, here's something interesting, though, too, that I learned, which is you should try by 25. That research shows that if you have not tried and enjoyed a food by the age of 25 or you have not listen to a genre of music by the age of 25, it is unlikely, or I should say less likely, that you will go on to enjoy it in the future. And there's something called the Reminiscence bump, which is from ages 15 to 25, we have a particularly vivid memory for the rest of our lives. Most adults will remember that period most vividly. Maybe this is the time when we're sort of forming our tastes. But so if you're under 25, it's like try as many things as you can

because you're setting yourself up for future enjoyment. And if you're over 25 and you sort of are like, I don't understand why I never feel like listening to this kind of music. It's like, well, maybe you need to make a special effort if you want to bring that into your frame of reference because, you know, it's not something that you experienced when you were younger. So that's something to think about just how our tastes are formed throughout our lives. That's interesting. It's interesting, actually, that that starts at 15. I would have expected the lower bound to be quite a bit lower, you know, the foods that you eat when

you're five. Yeah, maybe it has to do with the kind of. sophistication of sort of memory that you do. I don't know. It is very interesting. Like, do you remember 10th grade better than second grade? Yeah, it's interesting. Interesting. So for the listeners, what recommendations would you give them to the person who's listening to this as they're commuting down the highway on their way to work right now? And they're about to go into one of those really ugly offices with fluorescent lights and terrible office carpet and drink like cheap watered down coffee and you single ply toilet paper, right? That's,

that's the morning that they're about to have. You know, they might be like, I don't think I want to be more in touch with my senses. I think it might just be depressing. What recommendations would you give to them? Well, one thing you can do, don't do this on the highway, obviously, but you can do it when you get to the office is I have a neglected sense quiz. So you can just go to Gretchenrupein.com slash quiz and take this. It's like nine questions. it's free, it's very fast, and it will tell you your neglected sense. And so this is the sense that you least often turn to sort of for comfort or pleasure. You probably spend the least time exploring it or learning about it. This is a really helpful thing to know because this is low hanging

fruit. Because if you don't tap into that sense very often, well, maybe you can find some kind of quick, easy ways to tap into it. And this will bring something new into your life because this is something that you tend to overlook. So for instance, my neglect, sense is taste. And so I thought, well, what are some ways that I could have fun with taste, given that I tend to not tap into it this much. So like I had a taste party with a bunch of friends where we compared varieties of apples and potato chips and chocolate and I had them guess a surprise taste. And we reminisced about like the junk food we loved as children and things like that. So it was a very, very fun thing to do. But it would never have occurred to me to do it unless I

sort of explicitly said, okay, what can I do with a sense of taste, given that I tend to not to look there for enjoyment. So that's one thing you can do. Another thing is to, you know, look for maybe one thing that you can do that will help you connect with other people using the senses. A very fun thing to do is like a taste timeline where you write down, you know,

you make a timeline of your life. Like I divided my life into four periods. And then you can reminisce with people, from those periods. So I did it. And then I called my sister to reminisce about the taste that I remembered from childhood because, of course, she shared my childhood taste or her childhood taste. And like, we spent a lot of time talking about cinnamon pop tarts. And then you could call your college roommate and talk about, oh, well, what were all those things that we ate and drank in college? Like, did you have a, like a drink that everybody drank in college? Like, we always drank

sangria because we could get it really, really cheap at this restaurant. And then we got free chips if we ordered sangria. So that was like loomed. I've never had sangria since. I don't think so. But it instantly takes me back to that feeling of college. And so this is a way that you can sort of get in touch with your own memories and then also use it as a prompt to connect with other people by reminiscing. And you don't even have to go experience it again. Like I don't even feel like I have to go get sangria. I can just remember it and all those memories come flooding back. So that can be a very fun, easy, creative way to connect with yourself and your memories and then also connect with other people who would share.

those memories with you. Excellent. Well, we are coming to the end of our time. Are there any final thoughts, tips, advice that you'd like to share with the listeners? Well, I will share one hack that it seems like, as I've been talking about the five sentences, this is one that people seem to find particularly useful. Well, there's two. One is if you're trying to quiet people down, just blow on a harmonica.

That will instantly quiet people down. It's magic. And then another thing is a lot of people, when they're kind of bored or restless or listless, like say it's the middle of the afternoon of a workday, they'll try to do something to simulate their sense of taste. Like they walk into the kitchen, they're opening up the fridge of the cabinets, going to the vending machine. They want to give themselves a little lift, and so they reach for the sense of taste. And sometimes this is fine, but for some people, this is kind of like an unhealthy treat. And this is a, because I write my book better than before. I wrote a lot about habits.

I know that's a habit. A lot of people want to tackle. Right. So if you experience that, try stimulating a different sense. Instead of saying, I'm going to reach for something through taste, say I'm going to reach for something through a different sense. So if you like hearing, maybe you're like, I'm going to listen to my favorite upbeat song or I'm going to listen to new music. I'm going to save it for these like mid-afternoon and that's when I get to like listen to that new music I'm excited about. If you love the sense of touch, maybe you get some therapy dough or you squeak some cornstarch between your fingers or you play with tinfoil. You try to give yourself some kind of stimulation through a different sense. Take a big whiff of something, whether that's a jar of pickles or a bottle of almond extract or whatever it might.

Fresh towels, a grapefruit, whatever would give you a big hit of smell. And this seems to work really well. And I don't know if it's because it's sort of distracting because you have to like go off and pull up your new music and listen to it. And so that kind of distracts you from the fact that you were wandering towards the unhealthy snack. or if it's really the fact that what you're seeking is some kind of sensory stimulation to give yourself energy. And so by stimulating a different sense, it just scratches the same itch. I'm not sure, maybe both. But for whatever reason, this is something that people are like, you know what?

That really works. So I offer that up as a way to tap into the senses to solve a common problem that I hear from people. There are so many, many more transcendent aims that we can achieve through our five senses. but that's a very concrete little one that many people talk about. Oh, that's a very good one because I find myself doing that all the time when it's 2 or 3 p.m. I'm really tired, but I still have like another seven hours of work ahead of me. You know, that's exactly when I hit the vending machine. Right.

And I think people don't think of it as like, oh, I'm tapping into my sense of taste. Right. Yeah, but it's just like, okay, just sub something in and see if that works. Right. Yeah. Oh, great. Well, thank you, Graeme. Gretchen, thank you for spending this time with us.

Well, thank you. I so enjoyed the conversation. Thank you, Gretchen. What are three key takeaways that we got from this conversation? Number one, we innately crave fuller, more sensory experiences. So much of our lives are processed through screens that we often miss out on the sensory experience of the 3D world. experiencing something through a screen has a flattening effect. I mean, that's why you don't go on dates on Zoom, right?

It's just not the same. So many experiences these days are billed as immersive because they know that is so compelling to people. And I think it's because there's sort of two things going on at the same time. One is that experience feels sort of drained and flattened because it's coming to us through screens. It's kind of drained of its life. But then on the other hand, things almost feel like hyper processed.

Like this food has been engineered to hit every bliss point. And yet, you got it as takeout. So there aren't the smells of grilling and baking and roasting that would have tantalized your sense of smell. So that's the first key takeaway. Key takeaway number two, we have additional senses beyond the big five. And being aware of those might help us tune into them. Oh, yeah, there are senses like interocessibility. and proprioception. And so these are, these are senses that help us do things like stay in balance or

notice the like the experience of our own body, like I'm hungry or I have butterflies in my stomach or things like that. And these are all extremely important, very fascinating in their own right. And they contribute very greatly to our sense of well-being. But they're kind of like the heartbeat, where they're operating outside of our conscious control. They're running in the background, you're very aware of them if something goes wrong, but you're not very aware of them if they're operating as they should. And so they don't have the glamour of the big five. Because the big five, we study, we seek experiences, we talk about them all the time. They're very much in the forefront of our attention. So think beyond the big five. That is the second key takeaway.

Finally, key takeaway number three, your sensory experiences can change by culture, and essentially by need, the more you encounter something, the more of a nuanced lens through which you see it. There are cultural differences and different cultures will sort of have a more sophisticated language or framework of understanding, something like smell. There's a culture where they know the direction like north-south-east-west. They're very oriented towards kind of north-southeast-west in a way that we, in the west, we are not. there are different ways to approach the senses, depending on your cultural upbringing. And I mean, even with things like color, I mean, there are wide ranges of difference of how many sort of basic colors a culture will refer to. Sort of in English we talk about, we have 11, but there are cultures that have three.

And different cultures break it up differently. For instance, in the Russian language, there's a word for light blue and dark blue that are different words. And like there was no word in the West for orange until literally the fruit, the orange, appeared on the scene. And then they're like, we need a word for that. And the word, you know, was orange. It was just considered to be kind of a shade of yellow or red. Those are three key takeaways from this conversation with New York Times bestselling author, Gretchen Rubin. Thank you for tuning in.

This is the Afford Anything podcast. My name is Paula Pant. I hope you enjoyed today's episode. If you did, please share it with a friend or thank you. family member, that's the most important way that you can spread these ideas. You can subscribe to our show notes for free by going to afford anything.com slash show notes. That's afford anything.com slash show notes. I am currently in my last three weeks doing my fellowship at Columbia University. So I'm in crunch time right now, final papers, final exams. So things are a little nutty.

but I'm really excited for what's ahead. I've got some big plans for Afford Anything. I have learned a ton once this chapter at Columbia is closed, which will be in less than a month, which is kind of crazy, I will be coming back to afford anything full-time, which means that I have the time to implement all of these ideas. In the meantime, you can follow me on Instagram. I'm there every day in posts and stories.

Feel free to DM me just to say hello. So Instagram at Paula Pant, P-A-U-L-A, P-A-N-T. You can also chat with other members of the community at afford-anything.com slash community. Thank you so much for tuning in. I'm Paula Pant. This is the Afford- Anything podcast, and I will catch you in the next episode.