Ten Percent Happier with Dan Harris - 588: Gretchen Rubin on: How To Use Your Five Senses To Reduce Anxiety, Increase Creativity, and Improve Your Relationships

Episode Date: April 24, 2023

Today’s guest is a happiness expert and devout non-meditator. In her latest book Life in Five Senses: How Exploring the Senses Got Me Out of My Head and Into the World, she describes how a routine visit to her eye doctor made her realize she’d been overlooking a key element of happiness: her five senses. Gretchen Rubin is the author of many books, including the New York Times bestsellers Outer Order, Inner Calm; The Four Tendencies; Better Than Before; and The Happiness Project. Her books have sold more than 3.5 million copies worldwide, and have been translated in more than thirty languages. She also hosts the top-ranking, award-winning podcast Happier with Gretchen Rubin. In this episode we talk about:What led Gretchen to explore the five sensesHow we often take our senses for grantedHow our senses work with the brain to impact our perception The relationship between the senses and nostalgia The surprising power of ketchup and vanilla when it comes to the sense of tasteThe sense of hearing and what she calls her “Audio Apothecary” How to be a better listenerThe interplay between the senses of taste and smellThe sense of touch and the use of comfort objects   Why she decided to visit The Metropolitan Museum of Art everyday to explore the five sensesAnd how she uses the five senses to boost creativity  Full Shownotes: https://www.tenpercent.com/podcast-episode/gretchen-rubin-588 See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

This is the 10% Happier Podcast. I'm Dan Harris. Hello people, I've had a long-running conversation, or maybe you could call it a good, natured debate, much of which has actually played out on this very show, with my friend Gretchen Ruben. Gretchen, as you may know, is a mega-best-selling happiness expert who claims that she cannot meditate. And unlike most people who claim they cannot meditate, Gretchen has actually tried it many times. What's fascinating to me is that she has now written a whole book that is essentially in my opinion about mindfulness, although I'm not sure she would use that exact term. Anyway, the book is called Life in Five Senses.

How exploring the senses got me out of my head and into the world. If you haven't read Gretschent's stuff or heard her on this show or on her own podcast, she is incredibly interesting. I've often called her the Swiss Army Knife of Happiness because she has so many techniques both small and large for improving your daily life and she has spent years researching this stuff. In this conversation, we talk about what provoked Gretchen to explore her senses, how we often take our senses for granted,

how our senses work with the brain to impact our perception, the relationship between the senses and nostalgia, the surprising power of ketchup and vanilla, when it comes to the sense of taste, the sense of hearing, and what Gretchen calls her audio apothecary, the interplay between the senses of taste and smell, the sense of touch,

and the use of comfort objects, why she decided to visit the Met, the famous museum in New York City, every day, and how she uses the five senses to boost her own creativity. A little bit more about Cretchens, she's the author of many, many books, including New York Times bestsellers with names such as Outer Order in her comm, the four tendencies, better than before, and her first huge book, The Happiness Project. Her books have sold more than 3.5 million copies around the world in more than 30 languages. She also hosts the Top Ranking Award-winning podcast, Happier, with Gretchen Ruben. I personally consider Gretchen to be both a friend and a mentor.

She's helped me in countless ways since I started the precarious branching out from being an anchor man to an author. She's also been on this show many, many times, and we've posted those prior episodes in the show notes. Before we jump into today's show, many of us want to live healthier lives, but keep bumping our heads up against the same obstacles over and over again.

But what if there was a different way to relate to this gap between what you want to do and what you actually do? What if you could find intrinsic motivation for habit change that will make you happier instead of sending you into a shame spiral? Learn how to form healthy habits without kicking your own ass unnecessarily by taking our healthy habits course over on the 10% happier app. It's taught by the Stanford psychologist Kelly McGonical and the great meditation teacher Alexis Santos to access the course. Just download the 10% happier app

wherever you get your apps or by visiting 10% calm com. All one word spelled out. Okay, on with the show. come from. And where's Tom from my space? Listen to Baby, this is Kiki Palmer on Amazon Music, or wherever you get your podcast. Gratitude Rubin, welcome back to the show. I'm so happy to be talking to you, Dan. I love any chance to have a conversation with you. Likewise, congratulations on your new book. Thank you. As you know, it's been a long time coming, so it's very exciting to have it going out in the world. I know.

I feel like I can recall several lunches or dinners or walks that we've taken in which we've discussed this book. So I'm happy to see it out in the world as well. I would love if we could start with you telling me a story or the story of why the five senses. Well, one of my favorite things about myself is I'm sort of subject to epiphanies. And I had kind of a shock of an epiphany. I woke up one morning with pink eye as one does and it was pretty bad.

So I did end up going to the eye doctor and he checked me out. He's like, yeah, you've got pink eye. And then on my way out, very casually like, hey, remember to wear your seatbelt. He said, hey, remember to come in for your checkup because as you know, you're at much greater risk of losing your sight. No, I did not know that. What are you talking about?

And he said, well, you're very, very nearsighted and that means that you're more at risk of having a detached retina. And if that happens, we want to find out right away. And I had a friend who just had lost a lot of his vision from a detached retina and if that happens, we want to find out right away. And I had a friend who just had lost a lot of his vision from a detached retina. So this was very real to me. So I walk out and you know, this is not that unusual, you know, like a doctor gives you a warning based on some particularity of your makeup, your physical condition.

But for some reason, it just hit me. And of course, intellectually, I always knew that at at any point I could lose one of my senses and of course I could have a rich meaningful happy life if I did lose one of my senses, but It just made me realize I was taking it all for granted I was walking home and it was like everything in my brain turned up to 11 and I just could see and hear and experience Everything so vividly and I thought, I have just been checked out. I've just been absent-minded. I haven't been taking it in and I realized

that I'd been feeling that for a while that something was missing and that realization and that walk home made me realize that what was missing was just this intense engagement with my five senses. And so that's what led me to want to write the book. what was missing was just this intense engagement with my five senses. And so that's what led me to want to write the book. I'm gonna ask the least surprising question ever. I mean, you're gonna be zero percent surprised to buy this question. In your bio, your official author bio,

one of the things you can say about yourself is, I can't meditate. Yeah. And we've talked about that many times on this show. Yes, Dan, you've worked with me. You've tried, you've coached me, you've encouraged me. You got me to try it again when I swore I never would. You actually were so persuasive that I tried it again.

And it just, yeah, didn't work for me. And I'm not here to relitigate that. And yet, one of the major emphasis of meditation, in particular, the notion of mindfulness, is to drop out of the spinning stories in your head and into the raw data of your senses. And I, as I was preparing for this interview, I was like, well, I mean, it seems like in some ways we're saying the same thing. Well, you know, I thought a lot about that. And certainly there's like the 5, 4, 3, 2, 1, which is a thing that people do. And I don't know if it's officially a form of meditation, but it certainly meditation

adjacent. And right, and that the mindfulness and really focusing on the breath. And I guess the way I did it was much more playful and loose and unstructured, kind of more like letting myself out for recess, rather than kind of a focused, deliberate, disciplining of the mind. So I think that we have the same aim, but we're taking different paths to it. Yeah, I mean, it's interesting when you talk about recess

because yes, the way meditation is often taught, often but not always taught is pick something and focus on it like your breath. A flame. A flame, yes, you're picking something and focus on it, like your breath, a flame, a flame. Yes, you're picking something and focusing on it. And the reason, I believe why that's often the first step is that our minds are showing really. And if you want to tame the monkey mind, it helps to increase the muscle of focus, concentration,

attention, et cetera, et cetera. You know, there's a great Burmese master named Saida Utasiania who doesn't do any of that really. et cetera, et cetera. You know, there's a great Burmese master named Saida Ut et cetera, et cetera. You know, there's a great Burmese master named Saida Ut et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. You know, there's a great Burmese master named Saida Ut et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. You know, it's just, I'm not trying to do that. I'm not reminding myself to like, you know, keep doing a thing or do it a particular way. And Dan, it's actually talking to you that got me to explore this aspect, sort of of of my own nature and what I was trying to get at

because I think if anything, I'm too disciplined. I go rigid, I get overly focused. Like, I'll be walking by the beach, but I can't look at the water because I'm rewriting a paragraph in my head or I'm thinking so deeply that I don't even see what's happening. And so I wanted to shake things up and get off the path and get out of discipline.

And so the idea that you would sort of keep coming back to the sense of smell, I didn't try to do that. Like I didn't do the kind of thing where you have a sip of coffee and experience deeply. I was just more splashing in the baby pool of senses. This is just like playing in the sandbox and letting it be fun and not really trying to discipline the experience. To my mind, meditation is a form of disciplining the mind.

If you're just thinking about whatever you want to think about, it might be useful the way I find it useful, but it's not really what is meant by meditation, which is a discipline of the mind. This is a whole long discussion. And if there's time, we can come back to it. But I don't want to go down. I'm near territory Dan. I don't know. I maybe we want to go back. Because this is where I come to you as the person who's thought so much more deeply about meditation. And it comes in so many forms. There is no one form of meditation, obviously. So I know it's hard to make generalizations. Indeed, indeed. And yet, I bring that up in no way to diminish the power of what you're about to teach us because I think it's incredibly powerful. I just think that there's a

pretty massive overlap in the Venn diagram. So yeah, moving along here, in the book, you go through the five senses in a deliberate order and we'll do that here. But I'm just curious, why did you pick the order of seeing hearing, smelling, tasting, touching? Well, you know, that's sort of the traditional order. Like, if I went to the bookstore and got a board book for a three-year-old, that would be the order, but it really makes sense because sight, you know, we're wired for sight. Sight has the most real estate in the brain, the most complex system, so we really are wired, sight first, then is hearing. That smell and taste, well, I think most people know that our sense of taste really is very

dependent on our sense of smell. Sadly, people who lost their sense of smell from COVID certainly experience that. So, smell comes before taste because smell plays such an important role in taste, experiencing flavor. And then touch, I feel like this is kind of the odd one out. Everything else is sort of located on the head. Touch, we have all over our body. I feel like skin feels like packaging,

more than like an ascense organ. And it's also like how a far-rated distance, so sight and hearing allow us to experience things at a distance. Smell has to be closer in taste. That's right on the body touch. That's right on the body. So it's also like from far to near in the way that we experienced them. So that felt like the intuitive way and also the intellectual way to order them as well.

So let's start with seeing what did you learn about sight? I love the sense of sight. And I had taken it for granted. One of the things that really surprised me is how much our brains tinker with the view, this is true of all the senses. You know objectively, yes, we are not experiencing the reality of the world,

that it's all being very processed, but realizing how much it is processed or how Different everyone can experience the world really surprised me over and over and the most famous example of this is the dress Do you remember the dress standard? You see it as white and gold or black and blue? Yes, I saw it as black and blue see I saw it as white and gold This is the kind of thing where you think oh well to the lay person This was really surprising, but experts would say, of course, everyone would expect this.

No, their minds were blown by this. There could be just the circumsplet in how people perceived it. So that was one of the things that was really interesting to me about sight is how, you know, differently we're all experiencing the world. My father, he was starting to get cataracts and he got them removed and he said, everything looked so blue. And that's true because cataracts make your vision kind of go slightly yellow. And so when he had the cataracts removed, his sense of color changed.

It was so fascinating to realize. On page 26, you write, it's crucial to remember that our sensory world isn't everyone's sensory world. Yes, yes. I think that recently, people have become much more aware of this, that people have sensory processing differences, that people might be very highly sensitive to something that you're like, this is totally fine. And someone else, it's really rubbing them the wrong way, or something that you're doing, it barely registers with someone else. And I think we all really do need to keep in mind that we want to create environments where everyone can thrive.

And we have to remember that people really are just picking up on different aspects of the environment, the sensory environment. We need to keep that in mind. So what does that mean? Like how would we tweak our environments to make allowances for this? Well, say like I'm a person who loves perfume, but I know now that a lot of people don't really want perfume.

They don't want a lot of scent in their environment for one reason or another. So I wear perfume to bed at night now, but if I were going to a restaurant or something, I wouldn't wear perfume. Whereas I think 10 years ago I would have, because I wasn't aware of that fact. You know, I think clothing now,

I have a brand of clothing where the labels are printed right on the fabric instead of having a tag. And I think that's because many people are very bothered by tags. It's like, I am. Okay, right. So it's like a good manufacturer will say, like, okay, well, can we just get rid of the tag then?

Why would we have this group of people who are really uncomfortable wearing this garment? It's like, okay, well, can we just get rid of the tag then? Why would we have this group of people who are really uncomfortable wearing the skirmament? It's like people have different preferences. They're coming from different places. We all live in different sensory worlds. So how can we work this out so we can all feel comfortable? I've mentioned this before on the show,

but there's one sense that one auditory issue that drives me nuts, which is the sound of other people chewing. I don't mind like cats or dogs chewing, but other humans chewing drives me nuts. Yeah, I mean, that's hard because you can't say to them, like, please go into another room while you chew because, like, no, it's hard. Yeah, no, that is hard. I, for some reason, I hate the sound of liquid pouring. So, let's say someone's pouring, and it's even worse if it's a recording. If it's television commercial of coffee being poured into a cup, I have to run to the next

room. I really don't like that sound. Yeah. Yeah. I once spent some time in a Mexican city that named the city is escaping me, it's a port city, and they're famous for the way their waiters pour coffee. They'd like lift the pot all the way up

with arms like over their head. That would drive you nuts. Oh, it's giving me chills. But again, it's kind of fun to talk about these things. Just these little particularities, it's the same thing there's polarizing taste. Like how do you feel about sort of the anus black licorice family?

Are you pro or con? I'm mildly pro. Okay, see, I don't like those. But then I like candy corn. Do you like candy corn? Yes. Okay, see, it turns out many people really do not like candy corn. Anything with the word candy in it, I like.

Okay. Well, there you go. Sometimes it's just fun to realize that we just have these quirks. And maybe if I know that you really just can't stand the sound of chewing, I will just try to be aware of that. You want to let me know that in a nice way, but I can try to be mindful of that in our daily life. So let's get back to seeing what is the McGurk effect?

Okay, so the McGurk effect, I mentioned earlier that sight sort of has the most real estate in the brain. And one consequence of that or one associated fact is that sight usually trumps another sense. So if there's a conflict, sight will win. So the Mugurk effect is this absolutely fascinating effect. I encourage anybody to go look it up online because you have to see it to see how powerful it is, which is that if you're hearing something, like someone saying something that conflicts with the way

they're mouth or moving, your brain will adjust what you hear to match what you see rather than let your sight be out of sync with what you're hearing. And so if it's V-V-V-V-V-V-V-V-V-V-V-V-V-V-V-V-V-V-V-V-V-V-V-V-V-V-V-V-V-V-V-V-V-V-V-V-V-V-V-V-V-V-V-V-V-V-V-V-V-V-V-V-V-V-V-V-V-V-V-V-V-V-V-V-V-V-V-V-V-V-V-V-V-V-V-V-V-V-V-V-V-V-V-V-V-V-V-V-V-V-V-V-V-V-V-V-V-V-V-V-V-V-V-V-V-V-V-V-V-V-V-V-V-V-V-V-V-V-V-V-V-V-V-V-V-V-V-V-V-V-V-V-V-V-V-V-V-V-V-V-V-V-V-V-V-V-V-V-V-V-V-V-V-V-V-V-V-V-V-V-V-V-V-V-V-V-V-V-V-V-V-V-V- so if it's V-V-V-V, versus B-B-B-B, if you were looking at my mouth making those sounds, you would see they're very different shapes of what my mouth is doing. But you can just watch the video and the sound doesn't change. You know that the sound's not changing, but your brain will correct. And even if you know that what you're hearing is wrong, your brain will still tell you this incorrect information. It's absolutely fascinating. And you see this in other ways too, where I see this with flowers

because I love the smell of flowers, but in a lot of flowers, the smell has been bred out because most people pay more attention to how flowers look. And so they will choose flowers that look better over flowers that smell better and creating a beautiful fragrance is costly for plants. And so to get a more beautiful blossom,

they'll breed out some of the fragrance just because people tend to choose by their eyes rather than by their nose, even though I personally would go more for the strong smell. And same thing kind of with tomatoes. A lot of times people say, well, tomatoes don't taste that good, they look good, but they don't taste as good.

That is true. I hadn't thought about that before. We will choose things based on how they, how they look. Yeah. One of the points you make and you've, you've already kind of referenced this is how many modulations the brain is making that impact our perception just to quote you here. I was surprised to learn that although we think we're gazing clear-eyed on the world. In fact, our brains are always tinkering with the view. Well, here's an example. You used to live in New York City, so I'm sure you'll identify with us. So I was doing an interview with someone in my apartment, and she's recording it.

And then all of a sudden, she stops and she says, okay, let's wait. I was like, why? Like, why were we stopping? And she said, don't you hear it? Don't you hear the siren? And then all of a sudden, I was just very loud siren like going down my street. And I just hadn't noticed it.

And she said, oh yeah, in New York City, they don't hear the sirens. In Los Angeles, they don't hear the helicopters. Because the brain just doesn't think that's important information to you, it doesn't bring it to your attention. So once I consciously paid attention to it, I could hear it. But as I was thinking about our conversation, I had no awareness of this very loud sensory experience that, you know, somehow I was picking up. My brain was just being like, yeah, yeah,

we don't need to pay attention to that. We'll just let that go. So it was surprising. Yeah, yeah, we don't need to pay attention to that. We'll just let that go. So it was surprising. Another insight you arrive at pretty early in the book is, and I'm going to quote you again, the more I learned, the more I realized how much our brain, our sight, and all five senses are particularly attuned to one category, other people. Yes. Yes. The brain has special areas dedicated to the human voice, the human touch, the sight of faces. I mean, just thinking about faces. This is just fascinating because if you think about it, faces are pretty much the same. We know so many faces and not just, you know, a mug shot, like straight on face, side faces, part of a face. People that we've met, people that we haven't seen for years, celebrities that we've never seen in person.

And we see faces even where there aren't even really faces. Like, my favorite is the electric socket, you know, the little faces that are like going, oh, every time. In trees, man on the moon, people see faces everywhere because part of our brain is just searching, searching, searching for faces. As humans, we depend on each other. We're one of the most social creatures on the planet. And so our brain is always looking for information that can tell us what's going on with all the humans that are around us? What are they looking at? What are they saying? Trying to get as much information at all times as we can get? It's a really illustrative factoid. Let's move on to hearing. I have a bunch of questions in this

category, but what's the headline from your point of view when it comes to hearing? Well, the thing that I learned about hearing is for many people, hearing is one of their most appreciated sense. Music. Music is universal human cultural phenomenon. Every human culture has music, but I realized, like, for me, I did not spend time listening to music, I didn't read music reviews, I didn't get a concert, I didn't play an instrument, but as part of the experiment of this book, because of course, I always use myself as a guinea pig. I thought, I need to try to tap into this,

the power of the sense of hearing through music. And I realized something really important about myself, because one of the things that surprised me was how little I knew about my own preferences when I started this. I realized most people are music lovers. So they love music or they love a genre of music or they love an artist and they will listen and they enjoy learning and experiencing music that way. And I realized that I'm a song lover. And I've talked to other people now who are also song lovers, which is like, I like the one song. I won't listen to an album because I just like the one song. And I will love a song by one artist, but that doesn't make me want to go listen to more songs

by that artist. I just want to listen to the one song. And I used to think that that was kind of the wrong way to appreciate music. I was felt like it wasn't legitimate and that I should push myself. But now I realize this is the way that I love music. I should just celebrate the songs that I love,

try to identify more songs that I love, but not feel bad about the fact that I'm not listening to album after album, from a different artist or in a different genre. Well, I totally agree with you. I've been a model long time music head personally, but there are albums I love start to finish, but generally I pick a few songs and put them on a

heavy rotation, and I don't think there's a wrong way to do this. Well, see, that's a thing. There is no wrong way. And why was I castigating myself or feeling like somehow my way wasn't the right way? But we, Dan, do I remember that you were somebody who, once a week, you would treat yourself to listening to new music? Yes, I think when we had this conversation Tuesday was new music release day, that has switched to Friday, but Friday mornings are always a delight for me because I wake up and the first thing I do is see what new records have come up. I've cited that example before because I think one of the ways we can tune into our five senses to be happier is to find healthy treats for ourselves.

And often when we want to treat, we reach for something unhealthy, like an impulse purchase, or some kind of junk food, or binge scrolling. And so it's really good to have healthy treats. And I think if you love music, a great healthy treat is like, let me listen to some new music,

because it's something that would not be a treat for me, because that's not the way I like to experience music, but for someone who likes to explore and really wants to cultivate that sense, that's a great treat. And so you can add that to your list of healthy treats through your five senses. Because I think many people might not think,

like, oh, I should just make a little ritual out of it. And every Friday, like something that I can anticipate and know that I can plug into that when I need a little bit of extra energy or cheer, but it's not for everyone because not everybody would find that to be a treat. Because people always talk about self-care, you know, what do we do for self-care? It's like one of the things you can do is you can turn to your five senses. Coming up Gretchen talks about the sense of hearing and what she calls her audio apathacary. She'll also talk about

her manifesto for listening, how to be a better listener, and the interplay between your sense of taste and your sense of smell. Hey, I'm Aresha, and I'm Brooke. And we're the hosts of Wundery's podcast, Even the Rich, where we bring you absolutely true and absolutely shocking stories about the most famous families and biggest celebrities the world has ever seen. Our newest series is all about drag icon RuPaul Charles. After a childhood of being ignored by his absentee father, Ru goes out searching for love and acceptance. But the road to success

is a rocky one. Substance abuse and mental health struggles threaten to veer Ru off course. In our series Ru Paul Bornnaked, we'll show you how Rue Paul overcame his demons and carved out a place for himself as one of the world's top entertainers, opening the doors for aspiring queens everywhere. Follow even the rich wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen ad-free on Amazon Music or the Wondery app.

What is an audio apothecary? Oh, that's exactly what I'm talking about. Because, you know, songs put you in a mood. If you want to, like, give yourself a quick lift, put yourself in, like, a meditative, thoughtful mood. One of the easiest ways to intervene in your mood is to listen to music. And so I thought a lot of the songs,

because I'm a song lover. The songs that I love are kind of melancholy, contemplative songs, which I love, but they definitely put me in that mood. And sometimes I don't wanna be in that mood. Maybe I'm feeling a little melancholy already. I wanna counter program. So I created the audio pot to carry.

So this was like something that I could use to give myself a lift. So these are all really happy, upbeat, high energy songs. So that if I feel like I'm dragging, I can listen to one of the songs. I try not to wear them out because you can wear out a song. If you listen to Mule Skinner Blues by Dolly Parton, you will just be so happy.

It will change your mood. And it's not Spotify if anybody wants to listen to it, they can. But I think it's a really fun, creative thing to do to have playlists by mood that you're trying to invoke. Yeah, I do that too. And we'll put links to Gretchen's audio apothecary in the show notes here. You also have something called your manifesto for listening. What's that? Well, one of the things that I realized was that I needed to work on my listening, especially with my husband, Jamie. I wanted to do a better job of listening,

because one of the most important things that we do with our sense of hearing is to listen to other people. And I love a manifesto. Anything that's important to me, I make a manifesto or I make my true rules or my personal commandments. I like that process of synthesizing things and trying to crystallize them. So I made this manifesto so I could print it out,

put it on my cork board, see it every day to remind me of things. Like one of the most important ones is when someone's ready to talk, I'm ready to listen. And not just by sort of being like looking at them while they talk, but really like putting down my book, putting down the newspaper, putting down my phone, turning my body to them, giving them my full attention, not interrupting.

One of the things that I realize I do when I'm listening is a good question with books that somebody should read. Like somebody's giving me a really vulnerable conversation about something really big that's happening. Like they're gonna get a divorce or something. I immediately am like, here's the five books you need to read. It's like, okay, just be quiet. They have an ask you for a reading list. Just listen. So it's me going

through and identifying all the things that will help me to be a more effective listener with my sense of hearing. Tick-knut on the Great Zen Master has said that another word for love would be understanding. Right. And how do you understand if you don't listen? Yeah, exactly. And how do you listen if you don't get out of your head? Right. Well, and it's funny because first I thought I was the first person to notice this, which of course I was not, but the word listen is just silent rearranged, which seems very meaningful. Yeah.

How do you understand if you don't listen? But you can be silent and not really listening because you're just stuck in your own stories and this gets to the idea of training the attention Absolutely to really really listen and to really hear what some of these trying to say Well part of listening is hearing what somebody's not saying and to me that is very difficult I think some people are very gifted this way, where it's like, what is the person not saying? Or what are they skipping? Or how are they redirecting a conversation?

One of the things I realized about myself is that it's hard for me to be in a painful conversation. And sometimes, even before I've realized it, I have started to steer the conversation onto safer territory. And so one thing I've really been working on is, if somebody's bringing up something like to just allow myself to be uncomfortable and uneasy,

and if I don't know what to say to just stay silent and just listen and just try to stay with the conversation, because looking back, I realized that I would often just quickly get us somewhere where I felt on more solid ground, and that's not good. I wanted to be a good listener for people who are trying to confide in me instead of making it harder for them

by trying to change the conversation. So that's a big thing I've been working on. A very normal, you said it's not good, but I think it's not unusual either. I'm about to say something that I'm a sensitive to the fact that long-time listeners to this show will have heard me talk about this before, but I think it bears repeating, very much bears repeating. Have you heard of, and I'm saying this because you're talking about listening and also

training the attention, have you heard of something called reflective listening? Yes, absolutely. And I think that can be very, very helpful. And I try to do that too. I feel like sometimes it can seem a little forced or maybe kind of in the hands of an amateur like me, but I think it's very helpful to think about it. Yeah. You're absolutely right. Any tool can come across as, you know, programmed if you do it unskilledfully, for sure, especially at the beginning. But what I like about it, and just to say what it is for people who might not know,

it's somebody saying something to you and you just repeat back the nut, the nugget, the core of what they just told you in your own words, which demonstrates to them that you understood, which again is deep human need. And one of the things that's really powerful is if you get it wrong, then they can correct you, which actually people don't mind.

They like, they want to correct you. That's one of the things that I did realize after trying it is that it's okay to get it wrong. Like if you say, oh, you must have been really frustrated. And they're like, no, I was disappointed. Then they actually like that because now you've reached better understanding. Yes, 100% of where I was going with this was that forcing myself to prepare to reflect forced me to

listen. Then I also really am keyed in on not doing it in a way that seems overly programmed, so getting creative about not having a T.F. phrase like what I heard you say there was or so that people don't feel like they're being you know Technique that's not a word, but you somebody's using a technique on them and I really like a one little game I play is how many times in the course of a conversation can I provoke the other person to say the word exactly? Oh, yeah, exactly. But I'm glad to hear that you worry about sounding kind of program too, because I thought that maybe that was just sort of my hesitation about it, but maybe it's good to know that this is just something that you have to think, well, this is a creative process. That's one of the challenges of doing it effectively is making sure that the person is that you're authentically hearing them. It's not some just kind of mad lips that you're playing in your head.

Absolutely. It's so important. You really have to practice and then so for a while, you're not going to be good at it. And sometimes I'm not good at it. But the delight, even if it's subconscious among other human beings who you might talk to, when they're seen and heard and understood in this way, is just that in and of itself becomes addictive. And, you know, I could really see, you know, I was a bad listener for much of my life and got a lot of negative feedback around that. And when I got my second 360 review, or asked people in my life to give me feedback, the second one, after a really bad one, the second one was very positive. And one of the things people cited over and over and over again, my wife talks about this

is the reflective listening. I'm not trying to fix anything. I'm just reflecting back to you what you said. Can you give an example? Because it's very hard to change. It's such a deeply rooted pattern of behavior. Yeah. So my wife was bringing me a concern of her.

Today actually this happened over text. She was worried about something. She's writing a book and she read something recently that made her feel like she didn't have anything original to say or she didn't have the style to say it well. And instead of rushing right to, oh, you're gonna be fine, you're gonna be fine, you're gonna be fine.

I was like, oh, I get it. That's totally destabilizing for you because it makes you think you can't live up to it. And she felt like, yeah, this guy is validating my feelings. It's like that great scene in Parks and Rec, one of my favorite TV shows, Rob Lowe's character is a very genial, overly genial character, and at one point he impregnates his girlfriend,

who's played by Rashida Jones. She's complaining about pregnancy, which is a very legitimate thing to do. And he keeps trying to fix all the problems, and she just hates him for it. And finally, somebody takes Rob Lowe aside and says, all you need to do is say that sucks. Right.

Yes. That's not quite reflective listening, but it is giving people permission to feel the way they feel, to feel understood in the way they feel. Yeah. Well, one of my very favorite parenting books of all time is how to talk to kids will listen and listen

so kids will talk. And everything in it is just, I mean, it's true for talking to a three-year-old and it's true for talking to an 80-year-old because they're just human truths. And one of them is don't deny the reality of other people's feelings. And I think that's related to this,

which is if somebody's saying to you, I'm feeling really discouraged and really threatened because now I feel like how can I possibly write this book? Don't deny the reality of that feeling and say, wow. And it's funny how I think our instinct is like, the glasses have full or you're amazing and thinking that that would be really comforting, but it just isn't. There is a thing that Brunei Brown said on the show that I've quoted many times,

subsequently right here on the show. So I'm sorry for being repetitive, but she was talking about when her kids came to her with a problem, she would often say, well, I can't fix the problem, but I can sit in the dark with you. And that really resonated with me that we have this impulse to fix, but that's not actually what people want often. Yeah, I mean, and now, like my reading recommendations, now I've learned to say to somebody, like,

well, you know, I'm thinking of some books that I've read that I think you might find really useful. So if you want me to send you some titles, I will, or if you're interested, I'm thinking of some books that I've read that I think you might find really useful. So if you want me to send you some titles I will or if you're interested, I'll follow up. And often people do, but I think they feel better when I asked if they want it rather than me using it as a dodge, again, to get unsafe for territory of something that feels very sensitive or feeling like they have to listen to me go through a bibliography when they're not ready for it and letting somebody

to stay where they are. Yes. Okay, next sense is smelling. There's a connection between smell and a sense that we're going to talk about soon, which is tasting. What is that interplay? Arguably there are five basic tastes, though now scientists are thinking maybe there are more taste, but you know, sweet salty, sour, bitter, umami.

And with taste, that's pretty much what you taste, but what smell does, a smell gives you flavor. And a really fun way to try this is if you taste something like a jelly belly, plug your nose, put a jelly belly in your mouth, and you will taste sweet. It will taste very, very sweet. And then when you unplug your nose, all of a sudden it will sort of burst into a distinctive flavor. So you'll taste cherry or you'll taste coconut or you'll taste blueberry or whatever it is. But without the sense of smell, you just get that like very, very basic. And this of course, you know, in the West, smell

was often seen as kind of like an add-on since it didn't really matter. Even though research shows that people who lose their sense of smell are very, very affected by it, but sadly because of COVID, this was something where many, many people became much more aware of the power of their sense of smell. How it affected their flavor, yeah, and their experience of food, but even just their experience of life. I mean, I have a friend who lost your sense of smell. Fortunately, it wasn't for very long, and she said how she felt very claustrophobic. She felt like she couldn't get fresh air in her face. And it felt stale because there was no change in smell.

I know somebody who still hasn't recovered her sense of smell. She has like 24% now, but she says she can't smell people. She can't smell any human smells. And she said, it's just you feel like you're not connected because it's very easy to take it for smells. And she said, it's just, you feel like you're not connected because it's very easy to take it for granted. And yet it adds so much to our experience of everyday life. I've become much, much more attuned to just the subtle variations and smell as I move through my day. That's one of my favorite consequences of having worked on life in five senses is that there are times as the father of a very sweaty eight-year-old boy where I wish I didn't smell him that much, but I do hear you.

But you know, I have to say I enjoy even bad smells more and now because they kind of give depth to experience, you know? Yeah, I have a much bigger tolerance for like garbage day. You know. So, one of the things you talk about in the book is that smell, and I think we all know this, but I'm curious what the mechanism here is, smell can often produce nostalgia or even make us sad. Well, it's interesting because some people sort of give special power to smell, to bring

back memories, which really all of the senses bring back memories. I mean, seeing the wallpaper from your childhood kitchen, listen to your favorite song from high school, eating your grandmother's, you know, turkey tepazzini, whatever, all these all bring back memories. And so I was trying to think, well, why do people feel like smell has a special power given that they all are very powerful nostalgia inducers? And maybe it's because with smell, we don't always expect it.

With smell, it's sort of, you don't see it coming. It's invisible. And so all of a sudden, the breeze wafes over you and you're transported to summer camp. I had an experience where I walked into an office building and they had a water feature in the lobby, which instantly took me to my childhood library, which had a like a water feature in the lobby, which instantly took me to my childhood library, which had sort of a similar water feature, and it has a very distinctive smell.

So, maybe it's because it's unexpected. That's why it seems very, very powerful, because we're not aware of it. And it is evanescent. You know, that's one of the things that is very precious about the sense of smell is, you know, you can only experience it right here right now, unless it's the scratch and stuff. And you can't keep smelling it because, you know, you'll get odor fatigue and you won't smell it again unless you go away and come back. So I think that's part of why it does feel like it taps into some very primal body of memories. Andy Worrell had this thing where he would tie a particular perfume to a time of his life

so that he could use it as a way to bring back a particular time through Svall. Food is often talked about something that can evoke the past. I mean, Proust wrote about Madelands, those little cookies, bringing him back to his childhood. That's one of the, I think one of the great joys of the senses is how we can use them to tap into our memories. Is there a way to be very deliberate about that? Yeah, I think so. My sister listed as the co-host of the Happier With Gresham Reuben podcast. Great show, by the way, just to say. We worked together to make a taste timeline of our childhood. I did a taste timeline of every era of my life and just thought about, well, what were the, either what were my favorite tastes

at that time or what did I eat at that time that I didn't eat at any other time? Like, I drank diet, peach snappled during law school. That was the only, they just had, it was like the only thing they had. So I drank so much of it. So for me, that's very bound up in law school. Not because I loved it so much,

but because it's very distinctive. So you can do a taste timeline and that will help bring back memories to you. And you can talk about it with other people. So my sister and I had the most fun, think about like, oh, when we went on our long car trips to go visit our grandparents, what have we taken the car? And what did we eat for lunch?

What did my mother cook when we were little and what did we have on our birthdays? There was this one particular bakery where we would get cakes. It was a fun exercise. It brought us together our shared history. We have all these memories that they're right there, but we just don't have any reason to call for them. So it's an index card. You know, you never flip open to it. So you don't know it's there. So this is a really fun way to provoke memories,

deliberately. That makes you feel more in touch with your past. I feel like I remember nothing. That's one of the things about myself. So I'm always doing things to try to help myself hang onto memories or evoke memories. And I really found that that was the superpower of the five senses. We're now firmly into the fourth sense tasting. In this section of the book, you have a whole thing about ketchup and vanilla.

Oh, yeah. Why ketchup and vanilla? I mean, there are just these incredible. We take them for granted. I mean, how many people listening right now have both of these in their kitchen? I bet a lot. And they kind of stand for blah. You know, like, I catch up. It's very dismissed because it's just seen as something that you've got it onto every food, but it hits all five tastes, which is amazing. It's very hard to think of things

that hit all five tastes. This is not even that many that hit all four. So I did a taste party with some friends where we did all these taste tests. So I had everybody taste ketchup just to try to experience all the five tastes of it. And a friend of mine said, you know, if I didn't know this was ketchup,

I would think it was very expensive and like very, very sophisticated. Go taste a drop of ketchup and you will be amazed by the complexity of it. And yeah, we sort of dismiss it and think nothing of it. And then vanilla, vanilla is amazing. In the West, we associate vanilla with things

that are sweet, that association is so strong that you can make things seem sweeter by adding vanilla. Even though it doesn't actually make it sweet. And in Asian cuisine, vanilla is associated with savory. So they don't experience that effect. It's purely associational. We can take a lot of vanilla. Just taste good.

Well, actually though, taste is not a taste. It's a smell. So cheated a little bit by putting it is not a taste, it's a smell. So I cheated a little bit by putting it with ketchup, but yeah it's a smell. So it's an example of how taste and smell work together to create flavor. What do you mean what's the difference between a taste and a flavor? Oh right, a flavor is taste plus smell. Okay. Taste is just like you plugged your nose and you stuck out your tongue, that's the taste of something. Got it. Flavors when you have both. One of the things you're saying in the book is that this in some ways is the most culturally frayed of the senses in that we rarely feel bad about our music preferences or the perfume we like, but we can feel really bad about the fact that we might like fatty foods.

Well, are we feel like we're kind of out of control of it, like that we might indulge in more taste and flavors than we wish we did? I mean, this is just such a super to use a loaded word sensitive issue, how we feel about what we like in this particular zone. Our taste is very tied into our identity. What we eat when we eat, how we eat

is very much part of who we are. And it's filled with emotion. And again, memory, there's a lot of emotion to it. I would say the taste is one of my most neglected senses. I'm not a foodie, I'm not a person who's very interested in taste. And I was always kind of puzzled by why other people care so much about it. I was just like, every day, you know, they talk about restaurants all the time and they're

so happy about their farmers markets and they even watch TV shows. So it was interesting like working on this project made me much more aware of why people were finding this to be such a rich subject and so fun to explore and so engaging. And it helped me to engage in it, too, though I would say that I still don't have the appreciation for it that a lot of people do. Coming up, Gretchen talks about the sense of touch and the use of comfort objects, why she decided to visit the Met, the famous museum, every day, and the link between the senses and creativity. The fifth sense, and we should say, in the East, they believe there are six senses,

we can talk about that in a second. Yeah, and scientists say, oh, maybe there's 33, maybe there's 35. Absolutely, there's all kinds of sense. I respect those senses, they're fascinating, they're vital to our functioning. But they kind of lack the glamour of the big five and we're not as consciously aware of them.

So that's why I picked the big five. But yes, you could say there are many different numbers of senses. Although in the East, the sixth sense is the mind, which is, I would say, not unglamorous. Mm-hmm. Right. But talking about the mind is different than talking about the nose.

Yes, that's true. It's harder to pin down. So the fifth sense is in this schema is touching. Is it true that you kind of came to the conclusion that this would be the sense that would be the hardest to live without? There are people who do not experience pain, but it is something where you just feel like what would that even be like not to experience touch because it just feels like it's the way of experiencing reality. It feels very different from the other four senses to me. One of the things you talk about is that the sense of touch can help us manage anxiety. How so?

Well, I think a lot of people have started using this with things like fidget spinners, pop toys where you put something in your hands and that helps calm you. The activity where your hands help to calm you. I certainly found that myself. One thing that I also found was that I read a celebrity memoir of Andrew McCarthy, who's one of the brat packs. He was talking about how when he was doing a scene for a movie, he used to pair a bongo. He just sort of brought that in as a prop and it really helped him with a very challenging

performance. Then I was starting to talk to people and I realized a lot of people do this. They will hold a prop as a way to kind of ground themselves and comfort themselves when they're feeling stressed, especially if it's kind of performance related. So teachers would talk about holding a mug of coffee or someone said that she would hold a clipboard. And I realized in my own life, you have these things that you don't notice that you do. I just will hold a pen even like at a cocktail party or a situation where I don't even have any paper.

Why do I have a pen in my hand? And yet I realize I just feel better when I have a pen in my hand. It's something about, it just makes me feel comforted. And so now I can do that deliberately because I've noticed that about myself. I used to hold a pen when I was anchoring the news. Did you, and do you think for the same reason?

Yeah. I wonder if it's the same impulse with, you know, children with teddy bears and blankies. I think it is. And maybe because for us, that is our comfort object. We feel like in the end, what we want to be able to do is write something down. Just so we know we just have that to grab onto.

But now I will definitely, if I'm in a situation where I feel like I'm going to be a little uneasy or a little uncomfortable, I'll have a pen in my hand. Then I slip it into my pocket if I find that it's getting in my way, but I do find that that's really helpful. I remember somebody saying to me that she thought that if they'd had phones when she was in high school, she would never have started smoking. She smoked for like 20 years, very, very hard for her to quit.

She said she didn't even want to start smoking. It was just that she was socially awkward in high school and it was something to do with her hands and so she didn't look like she was standing there by herself. It kind of gave her something to do. And so she did it and then she got hooked and she said, oh, if I could have just been like fusing with my phone, I would never have reached for cigarettes. So I mean, we don't necessarily want everybody to be on their phones more, but I thought that was a good example of how it sort of satisfied that need that people have, sometimes which is just to have something to fuss with. What are the situations that make you uncomfortable?

I was very proud of myself. I went to a party, a holiday party where I literally knew no one. I knew one person who was not there. So here I am, I'm there. And there's no one that I know. And so I did the thing that they always say that you do, which is I walked up to a group of people who look nice. And I said, I know no one at this party, can I join your conversation? And they were very nice. But I had a pen in my hand for that. And

because it was sort of work related, I felt like, oh, yeah, for sure, I'll have a pen in my hand. So for something like that, or if I was going to have a difficult conversation with one of my daughters maybe where I felt like it might be really emotional and I want to stay calm and that really helps me is holding a pen. I really like and admire that move of walking up to the group of people and saying, I don't know anybody here who can join your conversation. I'm going to use that next time and then what are those situations because they make me nervous too. Here's another tip in a situation like that where you're talking to somebody that you don't know while and you sort of don't know what to say. One thing to do is to always comment on a sensory experience that both of you are experiencing at the same time. So, are any of the

or derives particularly good? Oh, the art in here is very interesting. This is why people reach for the weather as kind of a default conversation because it's something that we've both experienced. Just a very straightforward, platitudinous observation will often kind of get the wheels turning of a conversation. Indeed. Let me just go back to touch being useful and managing anxiety. There's this pretty interesting body of research that shows that in a lab setting, if somebody's about to be delivered some sort of mildly painful shock, if they're holding hands with some a loved one, they report a decreased experience of pain. There's also a bunch of work that's been done around sports teams that touch each other more often, like basketball teams, and they perform better.

So is that something you've looked at or have thoughts about? Yes, and that's definitely true, especially for newborn babies, touched as essential, and appropriate touch helps people manage pain, anxiety, makes people feel closer together. Yeah, the sports research is very, very interesting. In her memoir, everything happens, Kate Bollard, which is a wonderful memoir. Kate Bollard describes describes it was like four in the morning, if she was in the hospital with a cancer treatment, the doctor came in to give her some really bad news. And she said she could just see he didn't want to be the guy that had to be the one to deliver this news.

But there he was saying it to her. And she said, try again. If you're going to say something like that, you need to be holding my hand. And I just thought that was so beautiful. You know what I mean? Sometimes you just need someone to be holding your hand. And just in every day life, I find that if I'm starting to fight with my husband, I will reach out and hold his hand. It's just much harder to yell at somebody when you're holding their hand or with my daughters. If I'm like, can we just hug for a minute and then we'll pick up the conversation. That will often bring you back into your feelings of tenderness and wanting to connect. I can be really snappish.

I can get very frustrated, sort of fly off the handle pretty easily. And so this is something that I found is really good for just like keeping me, you know, constructive and keeping the tone of something lighthearted. There's a lot of research about touch where I'm sort of like, I don't know how they talk about cultural differences because I grew up in the Midwest

and like I almost never touched my parents or my sister and I have the most loving family but we just don't. It doesn't even occur to me in my own family with my husband and my daughters. It's just like a hug fest all day long. I feel comfortable in both of those places. So I do think that there would be interesting research and like, you know, and different times and different cultures. There's very different

customs and how this feeds into that other research about the benefits of touch. I think would be really interesting. And I'm talking about appropriate touch, of course. Well, even that is to be a little cute touchy because, you know, when is it appropriate for me as an older man to hug a junior staffer or to put my hand on somebody's shoulder, where are the lines given that we know that this is a powerful way to put people at ease? Right. Well, it's powerful and because it's powerful, it can be very threatening as well, and uncomfortable. And, you know, even things like how close do you stand to somebody when you're talking to them? Like, all of these things, they're very culturally

fraud and they're individually fraud. So they're complicated because they are powerful. I mean, in the same way that gaze is powerful, like how long you make eye contact, there's very different rules for that in different places. I once did a thing where you hold eye contact for a long time and it gets very intense because it's so powerful. So it goes back to this idea of people,

people, the senses, the brain, it's a very powerful combination. And so yeah, it's complex. One of my least favorite things that people do, it often in meditative or contemplative settings is diads where they sit you across from somebody and you have to hold eye contact, unbreaking, it's terrible. The first time I did it, the guy I was doing it with just started crying and not like in

a cathartic way. He was just unhappy, which I took somewhat personally. But I was unhappy too. It's just a horrible thing to, I think. There are people who love it, so I apologize to those of you, but it feels to me like an unnatural exercise. Well, there are many people for whom eye contact generally is very, very uncomfortable. And again, it's something we want to be aware of that for some people,

what to you seems like perfectly ordinary eye contact might feel very uncomfortable for someone else and just to be aware that people are experiencing these things differently. And just to keep that in mind, that one person's perspective is one person's perspective. It's not like everybody's sharing the same experience. Yeah, that's important. Speaking of experiences, one of the experiences you had in the reporting of this book was ayahuasca, the plant medicine or psychedelic. How does that fit into the senses?

And if I'm remembering this correctly, I think you've said that it was perhaps the most powerful thing you did. No, it was not. It was not, okay, okay. No, no, okay. So no, I was like, well, I kind of wanted a shortcut. I thought, ooh, I read about these experiences. It seemed like now there was all this research being done

about all the benefits that could come from different kinds of sort of psychedelic medication, got myself, you know, on an ayahuasca journey. Throughout three times, fell asleep, experienced almost nothing. So I got myself so worked up. It was a really great adventure. Like I was scared and I was like,

I'm gonna do something outside my comfort zone. I'm gonna push myself. I really, really wanted to see what would happen and shake myself up. But maybe I really did not experience what I thought I would experience, which was too bad. But I still had a very, very intense, personal experience,

but it was not particularly sensory or second-allick. It was more about pushing yourself outside your comfort zone. It's such an ungrouching thing to do. I was. Well, that's part of what I wanted to do it, right? Because it's good to remember that you can do something that's very out of character. Yeah. So it was very out of character. It's funny. Dan, because you've written books, you'll appreciate this.

This is a book that I wrote where the most material ended up in the cutting room floor. Just so many sections just came out altogether. They just weren't interesting enough to make it in. And I heard this whole giant thing about this experience. But my editor was like, yeah, but in the end, it was like, eh, yeah, it was really interesting for me, but there's nothing in it for somebody else other than it's good to do something out of character. Yeah, so it was pretty funny. I know the feeling of the darlings being killed for sure. Oh, you got to do it. You got to do it. killed for sure. Oh, you got to do it. You got to do it. One of the other things you did and this does make it into the book is daily visits to the Met, the museum. Why was that important?

I've always been really interested in repetition and how repetition changes experience, how familiarity changes experience, how things change over time. I mentioned Andy Warhol before. This was one of the reasons I'm very interested in Andy Warhol. He was very interested in that subject. And I just thought, I live within walking distance to the Met. And always stood in my mind as like this wonderful treasure trove, this resource of New York City, that I just wasn't taking advantage of. So in a way, it was just like my senses.

It was like all my senses. I had them. Sometimes I would sort of tune into them, but I wasn't appreciating them or making the most of them. And I knew if I ever moved away from this neighborhood, I would think, why didn't I go to the Met more often when I could walk there easily? So I decided I would go every day and see how the experience of going to the Met changed with repetition, how would the Met change for me and how would I change? And of everything that I did, this was absolutely one of the most transformative and delightful and thought provoking.

I mean, I said I would do it for a year. I've been doing it for so much longer than a year. I probably do it for the rest of my life. And it's funny because I thought when I did, I thought, oh, this is very idiosyncratic. Nobody would want to do something like this. But I've talked to a lot of people who do things like this, I mean, mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, literally every day, you know, when you go on vacation, you can't go. No, if I'm in New York City and it's open, so like it's closed on Wednesday, so I don't go on Wednesday.

For how long? Sometimes I go, if it's like, I don't have much time, I just go there, kind of go in, walk through the Grand Hall and walk out. And even that is interesting. Like, what is it like to visit a place like that so briefly? Usually I go for at least a half an hour. Why is it that it was so transformative? And maybe this is how you feel about meditation, Dan.

I feel like the minute I walk through the doors, my mind just opens up and just kind of spreads out. I just feel like all my usual daily cares are kind of left behind. I don't make myself leave them behind. If I want to think about them, I do. I don't try to direct my thoughts. And I just have this kind of like rambling,

associational frame of mind. And a lot of times I'll give myself a funny little assignment. Like if I'm reading a book and they mention something that's at the metal, go look for it. Or they mention a historical figure. I'll go see if there's a representation of it in the metal. Like when I read Cersei, Madeline Miller's book,

I was like, I'll go look for representation, or memories of Hadrian, I was like, I'll go look for representation or memories of Hadrian. I'm like, I'll go look for representations of Hadrian or for President's Day. I'm like, how many presidents are in the Met? You know, funny little things like that, or I'll just, they'll be a new exhibit. I'll go look at that, or I'll go back to some of my favorite things,

and I'll just wander around. And so I just feel like I was able to drop into that frame of mind by physically doing it. And of course, I'm walking. There's all kinds of beneficial things that happen to us when we're walking. I'm spending time outside while I'm walking to the Met and home to the Met. That's good for me too. The Met is full of all of these artifacts of culture and history. So it's full of ideas.

So it's sort of the perfect environment for me to just get out of my head and into the world. How many years has it been since the fateful doctors appointment? That's a great question. I should look it up. You know, because of COVID, there's been so much time collabs. I'll have to like go back and figure that out. Is that funny? That's such an obvious question. I don't know. I didn't mean it for it to be a quiz. I was just trying to get a sense of what has the cumulative impact over these several years, X number of years, been for you of tuning

into the senses instead of being stuck in the head. It has really changed the quality of my life. I mean, I have been studying happiness for more than a decade. So I have dozens and dozens of happiness project resolutions that I follow, but I realized that something was missing, and this really was what was missing was the sense of like deep engagement with just the physical world and like the elevation of the ordinary experience. And so now I feel like I just am so much more tapped into the world and other people and myself because I'm just so much more aware of the particularities of it.

For example, one of my exercises for sight was to look for what's overlooked. And I noticed with Jamie, you know, you see somebody in what's ordinary is what is the most easy to ignore. And I thought, oh, you know, let me really look at him. And oh, it's interesting. He's got a bunch of new shirts and they're sort of more fitted and they have more pattern. And like he's shaking it up a little bit, you know. So part of it is noticing that just letting my eyes and all my senses just slide over the surface of life, but to really experience it and to really let it penetrate. In the promotional materials for the book,

there's some pretty powerful language around this. Just to quote one line, being in touch with your senses can help you cheer up, calm down and engage with the world around us as well as a way to glimpse the soul and touch the transcendent. Yes, well, it's one of the things that's fascinating about the Met is all of the artifacts meant to help people touch the transcendent. So there's so many shrines and icons and

reliquaries with relics of saints, you know, because people want to touch these things. And they want to bring something home with them. And there's just a very physical element to wanting to engage with the transcendent, but having a physical representation of it really helps us feel like we're in touch with that. What's your advice? I mean, how do the rest of us tune in to our senses aside from meditation, which I would say is a good way to do that, but what are the other ways? Oh, there's so many ways. And you can do it. You can go in two directions.

You could pick your most appreciated senses and celebrate them, or you could go for a neglected sense and try to lean into that to see if you can get more. And I think that's more low hanging fruit there. So maybe pick it like I felt like, oh, other people are far more tapped into the sense of hearing that I am. So I'm like, let me spend some time really thinking about what's true for me. How can I enjoy this sense? How can I make the most of it?

Maybe I'm going to learn about it. So like I said, I'm not really a foodie. So I took a cheese tasting class and I went to flavor university because I was like, the more you know, the more you notice. And so by learning more, I kind of amplified my appreciation for it, just taking time for it, paying attention to it. You can just can dramatically improve your enjoyment of the world. Just experience more. It's really delightful. Where are you on devices? Do you think that our phone gets in the way of this? Or can we co-opt it to boost our sensory connectivity? Both. I think both are true. I think what we need to do is to remember that to the degree that we can be in control of our sensory environment, we should try to do that. So turn off your notifications

if you feel like you're distracted by the pings. You're the boss of that. If you feel like you're very distracted by looking at your phone, you can change your phone to grayscale. So it's black, white, and gray instead of in color, and you will find that it is much less fun and much more arduous to use your phone. It's like looking at your grandparents, black and white TV set. So you can change the way that you are engaging with your phone that way, especially people who are like in open offices, they'll listen to white noise or pink noise or ocean sounds or coffee shop sounds while they're working because that helps them to concentrate. You know, looking at the sight of people that we love or places that we love can give

us a lift. So, you know, a lot of people will put on their home screen a picture of someone they love so that every time they glance at their phone, they're using their sense of sight to remind them of their relationships. And so I think part of it is their tools. And so we should think about, well, how can I use it in the way that is going to support me and not in a way that's going to distract me or drain me or bring me down? How can you use it to your advantage and not let it get in the way?

Is there a question or are there questions that I should have asked or that you wish I had asked? Oh, that's a great question. Oh, well, one of the things maybe is how can you use your senses to spark your creativity? Because I think this is one of the most powerful things that I found by tapping into my five senses. And part of this is through touch.

It's like just put yourself in a place where there's materials. And it doesn't even have to be the kind of material that you use. You and I use words, but if you just went into a hardware store or a craft store or a kitchen supply store or a farmer's market, there's something I think about just having supplies, materials,

like things that you can have in your hands. Our hands are very much tied to, our desire to create. And so that's something to do, is if you're like, I need to get creative, just put yourself in a place where there's a lot of possibilities and somehow it unlocks something in your mind, I find.

You use the term muse machine? Mm-hmm, yes. Okay, so this was such a fun project that I find. You use the term muse machine. Yes. Okay. So this was such a fun project that I did. So I love an old rola decks. You know, they're really, really, really old fashioned rola decks. I just think there's something so satisfying about that form. And I also had all these sort of very short creative prompts that I have been collecting

that from myself and also from great creative minds. And I just collected them. And then I thought, okay, well, I'll make this rolodex. I'll put all these ideas on this rolodex. And then when I need inspiration, I'll just pick one at random. And that'll be sort of my way to get myself a creative prompt. I'll just pick something at random. And I have to make sense of it. And I have to think about what it means. And I find that that kind of approach often unlocks creativity and solves problems. But I couldn't think of a good name for it. I would call it the Rolladex of Ideas. So bad. So I thought, okay, here's the perfect example of me having a creative challenge that I can't solve.

Let me use my Rolladex of Ideas and flip through it, picked one at random, and the direction, I was also calling this the indirect directions project, the direction was to find a fresh metaphor. So I was like, okay, I need to find a fresh metaphor for my indirect directions or my roll of ducks, so I didn't think of anything. But I put it up on my cork board and you know, every day or so I would think, okay, what is my metaphor? And then I was at the Met wandering around and there's this ceramic ink stand, it's big. It's not a little ink stand, it's a big ink stand. It's covered with muses and poets, all these ceramic figures, these little drawers.

Very cunning, I love that kind of thing. So I was gazing at it and I thought, well, that's the perfect thing for a writer because if you're a writer, you just like want all these muses sitting on your ink stand. And then I thought, you need a musemachine. And I thought, that's my metaphor for my Rolladex of Ideas. It's the musemachine, because it helps me to generate ideas.

There it is. It's all working. So that is my musemachine. So I have a Rolladex of Ideas that I use. And maybe I'll make it into like an actual product That would be really fun But that's something for another day. But yeah, I'm using machine. Got that idea from the Met Before I let you go can you just please remind everybody of the name of the book and also

Your other books and other resources you've put out into the universe? Yeah, so the book is called Life in Five Senses. Have exploring the senses, got me out of my head and into the world. I've written other books, Happiness Project, which is all about happiness, better than before, which is all about habit formation, the foretendencies, which is about a personality framework

that I discovered. And I have a podcast called Happier with Gretchen Rubin where my sister, Elizabeth Kraft, who's a Hollywood showrunner, and I talk about how to be happier, healthier, more productive, more creative each week. I have a website GretchenRubin.com where all these materials are gathered and I have all kinds of free resources and articles. And I'm all over social media at Gretchen Rubin. And I have to say I love hearing from people. I love insights, observations, questions, resources. So hit me up in all the places. We can all learn from each other. And just to say about Gretchen's past books, she's been on the show to discuss many of them.

We'll put links in the show notes so you can hear more Gretchen. Congratulations again, my friend on your new book. Oh, well, thank you. What a joy it was to write this book. new book. Oh well thank you. What a joy it was to write this book. Thanks again to Gretchen. You may have heard me reference this but Gretchen and I are going to do an event together. That's coming up on May 18th, 2023 at the JCC in Manhattan. We'll put a link in the show notes. Come on by. Thank you for listening. Really appreciated. Thank you as well to everybody who worked so hard on this show. 10% happier is produced by Justin Davie Gabriel Zuckerman, DJ Cashmere, Lauren Smith, and Tara Anderson. Our senior editor is Merissa Schneiderben and Kimmy Regler is our managing producer. Scoring and mixing by Peter Bonnaventure of Ultraviolet Audio and Nick Thorburn of the great Rock Band Islands,

wrote our theme. We'll see you all on Wednesday for a brand new episode with the great Rock Band Islands, wrote our theme. We'll see you all on Wednesday for a brand new episode with the great George Mumford meditation teacher, performance coach, guy who taught Michael Jordan and Kobe how to meditate, love having George John, he's got a new book out, we'll talk about that on Wednesday.

Hey, hey, prime members. You can listen to 10% happier early and ad-free on Amazon Music. Download the Amazon Music app today, or you can listen early and ad-free with Wondery Plus in Apple Podcasts. Before you go, do us a solid and tell us all about yourself by completing a short survey at Wondery.com slash survey.