Gretchen Rubin says we often think that we act the way we feel, but we often feel because of the way we act.
Gretchen Rubin became an acclaimed feel-good guru with her 2009 bestseller The Happiness Project. In her latest self-help tome, Better Than Before, she explores the nature of human habits: how we make them, why we break them and what we can do to improve them. Here, Rubin shares some of her most potent pearls of wisdom, including why there's nothing wrong with scheduling your smooches.
Pairing is caring
Pairing is when you take a behaviour that you're not so enthusiastic about and you pair it with something that you're really eager to do. It's not that it's a reward – it's just that the two things always go together, so that both of them get done. I used this technique back in college. I would pair showering with exercising, meaning I could only shower on days that I exercised. You could go a day, maybe two, but then you'd really want that shower. For me the strategy came naturally, so it took me a while to realize that it was even a strategy. But when I started talking about it, a lot of people saw it as an epiphany.
Pencil in your passion
When I was doing my happiness project, I decided that I would be absolutely sure to kiss my husband every morning when I wake up and when I go to bed. People say, 'Well that just seems so inauthentic.' But the fact is, if you're kissing someone every morning and every night, you're going to feel more tender and romantic toward that person. Flannery O'Connor has this great quote about Catholic rituals and whether they become these empty gestures. She says the church is mighty realistic about human nature, and it's better to be held to the church by habit than not at all. We often think that we act the way we feel, but actually we often feel because of the way we act.
The pitfalls of other people's passions
We can only build a happier life and good habits on the foundation of our own nature, our own interests, our own values. You'd think it would be very easy to know yourself – you hang out with yourself all day long. But it's easy to get distracted by the way we wish we were, the way we think we ought to be or the way other people expect us to be. This comes up a lot with morning people and night people. Some people are at their most creative and energetic and productive later in the day, and I've had several friends who are night people look me right in the eye and say, 'I'm going to get up early and work on my PhD thesis.' I'm like, 'Have you met yourself? No, you're not. You can barely get out of bed in time to get to work.'
There's power in an hour
While I was working on my habits book, I spent some time trying to figure out how to make a habit of a bunch of tasks that I only had to do one time. I couldn't make a habit of, say, ordering a new chair for my office, because that was a one-time thing, and yet it was the kind of task that was really draining me – non-urgent, with no specific deadline. I had this vague to-do list that just kept getting longer and longer. I decided that the habit would be having a "power hour." Now, for one hour a week I tackle non-recurrent, non-urgent tasks.
This interview has been condensed and edited by Courtney Shea.