Gretchen Rubin: A Fully Sensed Life
Gretchen Rubin is an author, podcast host, and self-improvement expert, who has written many New York Times bestsellers, including one that hit #1: The Happiness Project, where Gretchen performed what she has now perfected—using herself as a lab through which to study how principles from throughout time act on us, and inform our understanding of the world. She extends this point-of-view into her podcast, The Happiness Project with Gretchen Rubin, where she offers actionable daily strategies for cultivating joy and well-being, along with her sister.
Today, we discuss her newest book,Life in Five Senses, which explores the powerful impact of embracing the world through sensing the world, rather than thinking about the world. It’s a book about experiencing: seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, and touching. Through her extensive research and personal insights, Gretchen found that tuning into these senses provides relief from internal chaos while fostering our connection with the external world. Okay, let’s get to our conversation.
MORE FROM GRETCHEN RUBIN:
Life in Five Senses: How Exploring the Senses Got Me Out of My Head and Into the World
Happier with Gretchen Rubin Podcast
Gretchen’s Website & Newsletter
TRANSCRIPT:
(Edited slightly for clarity.)
ELISE LOEHNEN: Like you, I like thinking about systems and bigger containers for our life experiences. And so anything I can do to keep doing that is what I'm interested in.
GRETCHEN RUBIN: Yeah, absolutely.
ELISE: You're paving the way for the rest of us.
GRETCHEN: I do like to experiment with new forms. That's very true. I'm always kind of intrigued.
ELISE: I mean, obviously you love organizational tools, and I know you love your different colored markers, but it seems to be how your brain works as well.
GRETCHEN: I really love to think systematically and to put things into categories and steps and if something's important to me, I'll write a manifesto for it or I'll write my list of personal commandments and when I was studying listening, I wrote a manifesto for listening, because I really do find that helps me think. And it is something that kind of lends itself, I think, to other forms of media because it's trying to be crystallized, so I read all that research and all those big studies and every, and all that philosophy and stuff so you don't have to, I'll crystallize it and give it to you.
ELISE: Collate it. Distill it.
GRETCHEN: Kind of a Ben Franklin, I would say, you know, I'm very practical in my approach.
ELISE: Yes, you're certainly on the practical end of the spectrum. I tend to be more on the spiritual woo-woo side of the spectrum, but together we meet somewhere in the middle. Have you always been like this, like as a child were you trying to understand the world through buckets?
GRETCHEN: Well, one thing I would say is back to, I don't know, being six or seven years old, certainly as soon as I learned to read, I have had this habit of becoming intensely interested in a subject and then doing tremendous amounts of reading and research and, and note taking about it. Like I have this notebook about the Salem Witch Trials that I did when I was really small, because I got very, very interested in that and that is something that's continued through my life.
I don't know that I was systematizing it as much. Maybe law school did that for me, made me wanna get really orderly in my thinking, because it definitely trains you in that way. I never know what I think about something until I write about it. And often when I'm writing about it, I'll have hundreds of pages of notes and then all of a sudden I'll start to think, okay, how can I organize this? Like, to understand it, I kind of have to put it in some order. And a lot of times that's one of the most intellectually demanding things is realizing like, well, how would you organize this? What structure makes sense? And then that's when I feel like I'm really starting to get a grasp of the subject. So I do love that stage, it’s super creative and challenging.
ELISE: Yeah, I'm with you. It’s like holding your hand up to feel the wind and understand the information or parse the information, and then like the really sort of compulsive organizational sorting and filing. I love that stuff, too. I operate on two extremes,
GRETCHEN: Yeah. Well, it's funny because with the structure of my book, I think if you look at the book, you're like, well, this is just the most obvious structure. She spent no time on this at all. But in fact, it was like months of work and with my book Life in Five Senses, you're like, okay, the kindergarten senses: See, hear, smell, taste, touch. And that's her structure. I don't think that took her any time. She could just pick up a board book and do that. No, was it gonna be 9 senses? Was it gonna be 11 senses? I was gonna have my own senses. Then my daughter was like, I think you just need to talk about five senses. Then I wrote a whole hold draft up that was 5 senses plus the sensorium, which is the 5 senses considered together, and that was like a whole thing. And my editor, when I get to the fifth sense, was like I kind of feel like it's ready to be done. I'm like, okay, here we go again. So after months and months and months and like so much on the cutting room floor, I'm left with the literal, like back to Aristotle. Like that was his list. That is my list.
ELISE: Well, what I liked about the book too is it accordions in and out. But, it’s this extreme distillation or exposure through each sense, and then you're pulling out again because the senses mean nothing without context. And I loved that throughout the book, you're underlining that our culture, our personal preferences, our innate biology, our minds give context to these senses. And so it's this in and out and in and out in a way that I also tend to think.
GRETCHEN: Well, one of the things that just astonished me most is, I mean, I think everyone intellectually would agree, yes, we all live in our unique sensory world and you know, yeah, maybe you've lost a little hearing or whatever, and they're all kind of different, but it’s bonkers, how different they are. I mean I am just astonished over and over again because my brain tells me what I need to know. Your brain tells me what it thinks you wanna know, and this could be very different. And the most stark example of this was, you could appreciate this, I was recording a podcast in my apartment for some reason, and all of a sudden the interviewer was like, okay, let's wait. And I was like, wait, why? And she said, don't you hear it? And then I could hear that a siren was going right by my windows. But my brain hadn't told me. And she said, oh yeah, New York City, they never hear the sirens in LA they don't hear the helicopters.
ELISE: Totally. Or the leaf blowers.
GRETCHEN: The brain just says, we don't need this. Let's just fade this into the background.
ELISE: Yeah, I loved that anecdote from the book and I also think, you know, I'm also interested in in some ways what's obvious, but that is so obvious that it becomes imperceptible or invisible to us. I very much feel that way about my book too, that people will read it and be like, oh yeah, of course. It's about the seven deadly sins plus sadness, cause that was on the original list. And then was dropped, but you start actually checking it across your experience and you're like, oh my God, yes. How did I not see this as a system?
GRETCHEN: That’s my most satisfying kind of read. When I feel that shock of recognition and I'm like, this was just on the edge of my understanding. Somebody finally kind of put it into words. I love that as a reader.
ELISE: Yes. Same. And so with your book you write: “I'd been treating my body like the car my brain was driving around town, but my body wasn't some vehicle of my soul to be overlooked when it wasn't breaking down. My body, through my senses, was my essential connection to the world and to other people.” And yes, that's so rudimentary and yet something I think we completely overlook, like our body, I would give this a spiritual sense, it’s our way of understanding and experiencing the world, and yet we're like, Ugh, my body, like I'd much rather live in my brain. Right? Or be somewhere else.
GRETCHEN: Or we just do it without realizing it, which was, because I wasn't paying enough attention to my body, I was just taking it for granted. Yeah, It's very easy to get pulled into your head and get stuck there.
ELISE: Yeah. And the world is so overwhelmingly stimulating that it feels really hard to parse any of these systems. And so I like the idea that you went intensely into each sense one at a time, but all again, through like an organizing principle of going to the Met, are you still going to the Met every day?
GRETCHEN: I do. I just came back from there a few minutes ago. I think I'll do it for the rest of my life, or at least as long as I live. I'm so lucky that I live within walking distance of the Met, so I kind of think that I'll keep doing it until I move because I love it so much.
ELISE: What is your process now? Do you go and just visit one piece, how do you do it?
GRETCHEN: Right. Well, so for Life in Five Senses, I decided that one of my exercises was gonna be to visit the Met every day because I'm very interested in repetition and familiarity. I've always been very drawn to that. Andy Warhol writes a lot about repetition and familiarity. I've always been fascinated by that. So it's like, well, how would the Met change if I went every day? So I really don't have any expectations of myself. I don't have to stay a certain amount of time so I can walk in and walk out if I want to. I've done that a few times when I was like, I have a lot to do. I'm like, okay, I'm gonna go in and then I'm gonna leave right away. I'll see what the flowers are today, but then sometimes I stay a long time. Sometimes I visit my favorites. Sometimes if I'm reading a book, I'll go look up something that was in the book. For President's Day I was like, I wonder what presidents are in the Met. Just today I was like, how many images of pregnant women are in the Met? I was like, I can only think of one off the top of my head. So sometimes I'll give myself like a little mission.
Sometimes I do something called Met Roulette. I bought a big book of about the Mets collection, and I'll open it at random, pick an image, and then the first thing to do is to see, can I remember where it is? Or can I figure out where it should be and then challenge myself to go see it, and then I read up on it first. So that's kind of way to make it fun. When Pantone introduced its its color of the year, I had a swatch of it and then I went around the Met to see where I could find it. That was super fun. So sometimes I'll go with a friend, or sometimes I'll say to a friend, what's your favorite thing? And I'll go look at that. So I have all different kinds of ways to make it fun, but I don't have any rules around it. Part of what I want was this to be recessed for me that it could just be this playful, open time where I could just kind of ramble around and not expect myself to be productive or efficient or accomplish anything or check anything off a list. I did feel a little restless until I had really gone through the whole museum one time until I had really systematically, back to systematically, gone through every gallery, you can't look at every object cause some are in these crowded study rooms. But pretty much looked at every, certainly looked in every gallery at length and, you know, read the signage. And then once I did that, then I was like, okay, now I can just, you know, freestyle.
ELISE: I love that. I find whenever I go to a museum, I'm so immediately overwhelmed that I can't spend that much time. But I like the idea of actually, of course, engaging more fully and not moving so fast is what I find myself doing, in part to be like, I need to see everything.
GRETCHEN: Well, that's why it's so great to go every day because it takes off all that pressure. I know exactly what you mean, where you're like, I'm at the Louvre, I need to see everything. You're like, okay, that's not gonna happen, but there is this pressure not to miss anything. And when you go every day, it's like, I got nothing but time, like I could stand here in front of this porcelain statue all day long and I'm just coming back tomorrow. So I think that is a big part of why it changed the experience because it took off the pressure of needing for it to be kind of a complete experience or you know, kind of sum it up. The expectations are so low for any one day, that I think that's what made it more leisurely and playful as well.
ELISE: Yeah. I love that idea as much as it's not accessible to me, obviously here, but even just walking and paying a little bit more attention like you, it's just hard. It's hard. It's hard to be present.
GRETCHEN: I was surprised. I thought I was the only one that had this impulse to do the same thing every day. But many people, it turns out, share it. A walk is a very common thing, like to walk to one place and back always the same way. So you're seeing that tree come into bloom and then drop its leaves or you're watching a building being built or you know, you're just seeing how the natural world is changing over time. Somebody said they went to their CVS every day and I thought, I could really get into that because, you know, there's a lot happening in drugstores. I think they're fascinating kind of cultural artifacts. They change a lot through the seasons. You could see what the people are doing. I thought that could be really interesting.
Or just walking through your neighborhood, you know, I think things really do reveal themselves differently through repetition. But as you say, what's familiar is so easy to ignore. And so if you do something very purposefully every day, I think it kind of reminds you, okay, pay attention. How is this day different from the day before? It just changes when you do something every day. You notice things in a different way.
ELISE: Yeah. I'm with you in terms of my love for repetition and it's funny people will ask me, cause I used to work more in trend spotting and taste making and novelty. And like writing a column for magazines and covering markets. And now, it's funny, I went shopping for the first time in probably four years, yesterday with a friend, and I was like, what is everyone doing out here and what are the shapes? And, otherwise I'm very restrictive actually about, what I do, and I go to the same places. And I don't know if that's just like the boringness of middle age and on, I always felt like in my twenties I wanted to taste everything, try everything, wear every trend, and now I am in a different phase. But what is there science about that?
GRETCHEN: It's interesting that you mentioned 25 because one of my little hacks for everybody is try by 25. If you are a young person, try it now because research suggests that if you haven't tried a food and enjoyed it or you know, listen to a genre of music by the time you're 25, you probably will not enjoy it. Speaking for myself, growing up in Kansas City, Missouri, back in the day, I didn't try sushi until I was well into my late twenties, and I never really have acquired a taste for sushi, whereas everybody around me loves sushi, and so I think it's actually a really good idea when you're young, if you have that impulse towards novelty because you'll expand your reach and kind of maybe expand the limits of what you will naturally enjoy. I have to say, even as a young person, I was not like that. I've always loved familiarity and repetition. I've always had a fairly narrow band. I really only liked reading and writing and talking to my friends. I don't have many interests and so I think for me, the pull towards familiarity and repetition was especially strong. But I also think it gets a bad rap. It's true that the research shows that people who do new things and challenging things tend to be happier. But I do think there is a special pleasure in things that we repeat that I think shouldn't be dismissed as easily as I feel like some people do.
ELISE: It's true, and I think, I hope, it provides comfort. I think you can also pick a couple of spheres in which to enjoy novelty, and then otherwise the pressure to just change or do something different all the time I think is part of the reason that we all feel like we're being driven insane. Like I think familiarity and routine is grounding and comfortable. Like I think about what I read, I read incredibly widely and let my mind go all over the place following various pursuits and interests. And so I've kind of decided to let myself off the hook that no, I'm not gonna go and stand in line for like the new bread place, or I'm not gonna try a different yoga class.
Like, I just like what I like and I'm accepting that about myself now in my forties in a way that I think I was trying to push myself towards new things and up through my thirties.
GRETCHEN: Like maybe we need a balance in our life. I mean, one thing I noticed is, you know, The Office is so popular and I love The Office. I mean, everything in my life, this is a game I play with my daughters, I'm like, what scene in The Office am I thinking of right now? Oh, it's when Jim covered the desk in wrapping paper, but it actually wasn't there or whatever. But I think it's like comfort watching. I think it's sometimes when people are really stressed out, they wanna go back to something where they kind of already know what's gonna happen. They know the characters and they know the plot, they know the funny lines. I will often reread my favorite books from childhood. I love children's literature and young adult literature, and I read new works in that area all the time because I love it. But I also go back and will reread my favorites when I need just like a little bit of soothing or you know, I don't want the kind of the surprise and the challenge that comes from tackling a contemporary novel that I've never read before.
ELISE: Yeah, I'm with you. It is soothing and it is comforting, and I think we all need those touchstones.
GRETCHEN: A good word I never thought of, I just wrote this whole book, Life in Five Senses, and I've been thinking about all the ways that we invoke them metaphorically in our speech, and I missed touchstone. How did I miss that? Okay. I'm writing a note to myself right now because it's like the touchstone, it's like the thing we come back to like our senses.
ELISE: Yes. So you start with seeing, right, and we talked a little bit about that, but this idea of color, I didn't know you could actually turn your whole screen black and white on your phone. That's a great tip.
GRETCHEN: Did you try it?
ELISE: No. But I need to.
GRETCHEN: When I was recording my audiobook, my engineer did it while like on the break and he was like, this is amazing.
ELISE: Yeah, I wanna do that. I mean, I like the idea of making these things that I find irresistible, less tantalizing, right? And so it's gray scaling your phone, right?
GRETCHEN: You just do it in settings. You go to, you know, color, you just put on the color filter of gray scale and it turns it to black, white, and gray. And you can easily turn it off and on again. And drive by hack, if you have a child who kind of refuses to give up a device, you can change it to gray scale and just tell them that it's broken and you don’t know how to fix it and they will not, probably not wanna use it nearly as much. Partly it's harder to use a phone that's in gray scale. You know, color is very functional for us as well as being enticing. And it's much harder to use all of the, you know, all the apps and everything. And certainly looking at photos if they're in black and white, it's like watching, you know, an old black and white TV. It's just harder to make it out. So that's a very easy way that you can use technology to help yourself master technology.
ELISE: Such a good tip. I loved your exploration of this idea of color too, and, and the way that what it signals to us is universal. And also, you talk about red as the color of love and hell, protection and danger, violence and joy, Black is used for sexy lingerie as well as morning clothes. It's the color of the plain and the luxurious. It's so true. I had never really thought about the way I think we reduce them to one thing often.
GRETCHEN: Well, one thing I've noticed in my general study of human nature is that people love correspondences. They really wanna be told that this is that. If you’re born in September, it means this, if you use blue, it means this. If you use lavender perfume, it means this. And a lot of times these things are just what we bring to them. You know, they don't have a natural association. And then people will suggest a natural association. But what I was trying to say is like, yeah, but you could offer the opposite natural situation. Like we talk about red hot, but actually blue is hotter than red if you look at a flame. So, you know, I'm very cold and because I associate blues and like blue tones with being cold, I've noticed that in my I'm often attracted to like a red room, I have two purple rooms, you know, these warm color because that's what I bring as an association. But one of what I learned is that's just my cultural upbringing and my preferences. There's nothing natural about that or objective about that.
ELISE: Yeah. Speaking of natural, is it natural that we would just inherently project our understanding how we codify the world onto everyone else?
GRETCHEN: Yes. I mean, it's almost impossible not to, and this is something that I'm always catching myself doing like when I was writing my book about habits, it took me a long time to realize like, Hey, GRETCHEN, you're very idiosyncratic. Like what works for you doesn't work for most people. You know what I mean? It’s just so easy to think, well, what I experience is what you experience and if it works for me, it'll work for you. And a lot of these are just preferences. And it's fine to say, well, one thing works for you and one thing works for me. I'm a simplicity lover and you're an abundance lover, if we work together, we have to figure out how to create an environment that suits us both. But that's different from me saying, Hey, I have research showing that a clean desk means a clean mind and like you're gonna be more creative. And you're like, no, no, no, I have research that shows that creativity is created by mess. It's like what? It’s all what works for you—what works for the individual. And so same thing with sensory differences, take work. How do you like to work? If you're working, if you're writing, let's say you're doing like original writing, which, at least to me, is the most demanding. Do you like silence? Do you like music? Do you like music with no lyrics? Do you like a busy hum? Do you like white noise? What's your acoustical environment that's most most conducive to productivity and creativity for you personally? What is it for you?
ELISE: Yeah, so it depends on what I'm writing. If it's busy work or ghoste writing or entering stuff in spreadsheets, I like to do it with the TV on. I know that sounds insane, but I like a little company, a little background noise, like a little bit of distraction actually I think makes me a little bit more focused on what I'm doing. And then if I'm writing for myself, like my own book, or my newsletter, I have very specific playlists, and it's typically music without lyrics. Not silence. And then when I also write, I do walks. I puncture my writing time with walking, listening to music. And then I just again, try to focus on the music so I can let my unconscious brain put things together for me. And then insights will punch through and I text them to myself. What's your process?
GRETCHEN: Silence.
ELISE: Silence. Like vacuum silence?
GRETCHEN: My sister is a writer and we both have to have silence. I can work in like a busy coffee shop if that's just what works. Like if I were working in an airport or something, that's fine with me, but I don't need that noise the way some people do. I would never listen to music, never, never.
ELISE: Interesting. I was just reading Rick Rubin's book, The Creative Act, and he writes about different musicians needing to write in different contexts from the noise canceling vacuum to multiple TVs on. It's really interesting, and I think his point is that you're accessing different parts of your brain, and when you write, are you, is it highly processed? Like when it comes out, have you distilled it and figured it out or are you more, like almost channeling stream of consciousness and then you figure it out on the page?
GRETCHEN: The way it works for me is I take notes, so I will take hundreds of pages of notes. And that is just very much like I open a book to page 116 that I marked with a sticky note, and I'm like copying it in with, you know, a reference or I'm just like writing whatever occurred to me as I was reading it. So I have hundreds of pages of notes. Then as I said, I go and structure it. Then I dump the notes into that structure and then I start to knit it together. And so I'm never starting from zero. It's always like, okay, I need to write an introduction, or these two ideas are connected. So like, okay, this guy says this, this person says that. Like, what do I think? And so it, for me, it's more about like kind of writing through it, kind of kneading it in my mind. My strength as a writer is endings. I think I'm really good at writing endings. I don't know why this is, but like of all my books, like the last page is by far my favorite. In this book. It actually has two endings, both of which I love and it's like the whole book is done cause it's the very last thing I write and it'll all be coming to me and then like I feel all the ideas coming together and then I will just write straight through.
And it was interesting in the audio book, my director didn't even stop me for the last two pages. It just poured out of me, and so then occasionally that happens to me, like in bits and pieces where I'll have a deep insight and I'll be like, okay, here it is. It's all just gonna come right out. But usually it's much more like writing and editing. Also, you know, I was trained as a lawyer, that dies hard. So I usually go through and it's like the first time, what are you even talking about? Like, let’s get clear here. So it takes me many, many, many passes through to get away from the heavy latinate language that comes to me.
ELISE: Yes. That's a hard practice to break. I feel like when I went to magazines after Yale and being an English major, I cannot understand what I was writing about. I can't read it. It's so dense and so academic and full of really expensive words and learning how to write in a way that correlates with how people speak and understand information was a whole new education for me and it was actually much harder.
GRETCHEN: I think when you're clear, it's like your thoughts have to be clear. What you're saying has to be clear. When you're writing in a really fuzzy, fancy way, you can kind of fake it. It covers, it covers fuzziness very easily.
ELISE: Yes, very much so.
GRETCHEN: Like having to really be very clear sometimes exposes that I need to think a little bit harder because what exactly am I trying to say there?
ELISE: Oh, a thousand percent. That was my process with my book too, was writing it, I mean, so much research similar to you like extreme note taking and codifying information and understanding what I was trying to say. Then writing, and then it was a whole year of distillation and editing, clarifying, clarifying, clarifying, to make things simple and seem effortless is very difficult. And that's what I wanted. I wanted it to be a fun read. And so that took a year, definitely.
GRETCHEN: Well, it's funny because in every book I'm like, there's the one section that was like, Oh my gosh, that was the hardest. And this one, so I go to the Met every day and I describe like being in the Moroccan court, which is this lovely little court that has a fountain in it, and just describing the room and the fountain in a succinct but interesting way that didn't reuse the word splash. And it was just like, for some reason this thing, I couldn't crack it. And, you know, in my book, Happier at Home, there was a description of these wooden cogs that my parents gave my husband and me when as a housewarming gift when we bought our apartment and describing these cogs—I guess I have trouble with description, but anyway, it’s just funny how there's certain things, it’s not necessarily what, as a reader you would think would be the most tricky part. Sometimes those things you've thought about so hard they kind of come easily and it's these incidental moments that end up being hard to convey in an elegant way that holds the interest of the reader.
ELISE: Well it comes back to the thesis of the book, which is trying to understand or pay attention to your likes or dislikes or these sensations of how you're experiencing the world and then understanding it, right? And then you're in a more meta way then articulating that. And I was talking to my friend, on the podcast this, she's an artist, Alexandra Grant, and she was talking about as she's making art the museum and her mind, the peace in her mind, and then the way that she's like physically trying to bridge that or bring out what she sees, right? How difficult that is for any of us. And it's true of writing too. Like you have an idea, it's clear to you, but to actually translate any of these things into something that anyone else can understand and come along with is hard. Right?
GRETCHEN: That’s the fun of it, but that's the challenge of it.
ELISE: Yeah. And here you're trying to explain the way that we use our senses to parse. I thought the listening part was really interesting too. I'd never really thought about this, but I think we can all relate to this idea of new genres of music and how discordant and weird they feel to us. And then over time, through familiarity, it starts to feel poppy, and fun. And I listened to back to some music that I loved in my teenage years that at the time felt so edgy and now when I listen I'm like, oh, this is soft. Like this is nothing compared to where we've evolved to now.
GRETCHEN: Well look at the Beatles. I mean, they were considered so outrageous and now a lot of their songs are almost like lullaby music.
ELISE:Yeah, totally.
GRETCHEN: No, it's interesting how our tastes change over time
ELISE: Yeah. I love the section too, where you talk about music and I'd never thought about the ways that background music in particular is used to manipulate us, because now I'm listening much more closely.
GRETCHEN: Yes. Well, one of the themes that the book is like realizing that we can influence our sensory environments. Like I had just never thought about it very much, and so I've become much more interested in trying to get things to suit my taste instead of just letting it all wash over me, whether I like it or not. And one of the things is restaurant music and now I will avoid a noisy restaurant. Like I consider the noise level of a restaurant just as significant as the food quality. You know, it's a very important element to my enjoyment. And part of the reason they make it loud is that there's quicker turnover. People tend to eat, they tend to drink more. They tend to eat and drink faster when there's loud music playing. So they're doing this to turn the tables faster. Conversely, if you're in like a grocery store, they play slow music because that slows people down. And what research shows is the longer that you spend in a store, the more you buy. So they're trying to get you to linger.
You can also use music as kind of a way to force people out. So, you know, there were chain stores that have used either playing classical music or Barry Manilow on a loop to encourage people not to linger in front of the store. Or one of my favorite stories that I heard, while I was working on this book was a friend of mine said that in college he would throw these big parties and then people wouldn't get out of his room. So what he would do is he would play Air Aupply, singing I'm All Out of Love on a loop, and then that would drive people home. So it's funny to think about how it's a method of influencing us. But it's interesting too, I was talking to a musician and he was saying how if there's music playing, it's very hard for him not to listen. And so for him, just as for me, the noise of a restaurant is kind of an element of my enjoyment, he was saying that he is very influenced by what is the specific music. And that some places he liked because he liked their playlist, but then some places he didn’t, but then he often did find it distracting because he was tuning into it while other people in the conversation weren't focused on it, which certainly would've been me. It’s very interesting, different people are picking up different cues from the environment and they are responding to it in different ways, which is one of the reasons that sometimes people will have problems with something that you're like, this is not a big deal. I don't know what you're complaining about. Like you say, this sweater's scratchy. It's not scratchy. You say, it's too hot. It's not too hot. You say, this is too salty. It's not too salty. There's so many things that make our responses different. We really need to remember that and, you know, accommodate other people as much as we can if they're having difficulties in an environment that we think is fine, because just cause I think it's fine, doesn't mean somebody else thinks it’s fine.
ELISE: Totally and our certain preferences, right? I think it was in the chapter about taste when you went to go and you talk about feeling like you don't have particularly evolved taste buds or like, it's just not your sense. I loved how you went to the market downtown and you were like, I bought these, what were they? Like cucumbers and vinegar. And your daughter was like, pickles?
GRETCHEN: Yeah, I know. I was like, so crust fallen. I thought, okay, I'm really gonna push myself outta the comfort zone. I'm gonna pick this thing from a cooler, you know, I'm just gonna read the label and like, go for it. she's like, I think you got pickles. I'm like, I think I did. I think a pickled cucumber. I think I got pickles. I enjoy the food that I enjoy more, but I would not say that I have come out of this experience with a hugely an awakened interest in food. Cause as you say, that's kind of my neglected sense is taste. It's something that has not really interested me and it doesn't captivate me the way a lot of people love new restaurants and new cuisines and new spices and going to farmer's markets and watching shows about people cooking.
ELISE: Yeah, I know you mentioned this cliff that we walk off at 25, but do you feel like people can cultivate their sense? I mean, you certainly are doing it to some extent, at least like trying to taste different ingredients and complicated meals, et cetera. But do you feel like people can cultivate senses that are underdeveloped or do you think we're just innately engineered in one way or another?
GRETCHEN: Oh no. I think we absolutely can. And I think in fact, that's almost like the low-hanging fruit. Like it's almost in a way I would begin with your neglected sense, because that's probably where you have the most room to grow. I love smell. I've always loved smell. I've always like been very tapped into smell. It was super exciting for me to like learn more about it and spend more time on it, but it was like that was more of what I already knew. Whereas with taste, it was like this was all new to me. This was like really exciting and energizing, like at a taste party with my friends and we all like, debated, you know, four varieties of apples. I found this like really exciting. You know, now did I a hundred percent change myself? So I'm like, you know, trying some completely unfamiliar cuisine and loving it the way some people love to do that? No, because I'm still kind of like, I'm still Gretchen, but I definitely found a lot more room within myself to experience it and enjoy it in a way that I hadn't before and I understand my own preferences better.
One of the things I did is I just always ignored it. I never really paid attention, so I like literally was like, what kind of cheese do I like? I didn't even know. I'd never paid attention to the types of cheese. I'm like, sometimes it's kind of like this kind of hard and rubbery. And then sometimes it's a little bit squishy and I remember Brie. Okay, I remember Brie. But other than that, I don't know. And then Olives, I didn't realize that I didn't like Earl Gray Tea. I was like, oh, I like English breakfast. I just would order willy-nilly. And I'm like, sometimes it's good. Sometimes it's not so good. What are you gonna do? It's like, pay attention. So, just training myself to pay attention and I think actually your neglected sense, in a way, is one of the most exciting things to think about and to explore, because that's probably where you have more room to try something fun and exciting and that'll feel like, you know, the atmosphere of growth, that you're really bringing something new to your life.
Though on the other hand, I didn't even realize how much I loved the sense of touch. Again, I was so out of touch with myself, I didn't realize how important it was to me until I started studying it. And then I was like, wait, hang on, I’m really focused on the sense of touch. And then once I realized that, then of course I could incorporate that into my life much more explicitly because I understood what an important element it was to me about even the clothes that I wore or didn't wear, I hadn't really noticed the patterns. One pattern I noticed was that if it's a texture I don't like, I tend not to wear it, even if it looks good. And also, if it's a beautiful color, I tend to buy it because I can't resist the beautiful color. But if it doesn't look good, I tend not to wear it. So I have a lot of like bad textures and beautiful clothes that are unworn. So now I know how to like watch out for those temptations when I'm picking out something new to buy because I know that those are sort of traps that I fall into. I overweigh certain factors and don't consider other factors.
ELISE: One of the other parts that I thought was really interesting was near the end when you're talking about the importance of dissonance, ugliness, bad smells, that the complexity only comes through the integration of those, I’d call them shadow elements or things that we think that we don't want. Can you explain that for people?
GRETCHEN: So one of the things I explored in life in Life in Five Senses was the value of boredom. Because when you're bored and when your mind is just kind of run running free and trying to amuse itself, you'll often have insight. And that's why people have ideas in the shower, when they're walking the dog or something. When there's nothing occupying them, that's when our brain can come up with these new insights. So I was walking through the Met, I was in a very familiar place, so I was a little bored. And that's when I realized, the way I thought of it was the beautiful often requires a little bit of ugly. And being systematic, I’m like, you say that, but how do you back that up? And I could think of one for each sense because it does turn out that often the beautiful does require a little bit of what might be considered ugly. And that is part of, as you say, the complete picture and when I took a perfume class as part of my sense of smell study and our professor had said that like, often a beautiful perfume will have some bad, you'll smell it and you would be like, Ooh, that smells bad. And yet it makes the perfume more beautiful.
Or like Australia tried to come up with like, what is the ugliest color? Which is kind of a hilarious thing to try to come up with. But anyway, they were trying to make cigarette packaging as unappealing as possible, and they came up with this Pantone shade, which you could call baby poop, it's kind of a brownish, but then I read an article saying, oh, but this is in the Mona Lisa. Like, how can you say this is such an ugly color? There it is in the Mona Lisa. So I went around the Met saying like, can I find this color? I found that color because it's a part of what you need that color to make the beauty and dissonance and music often makes things more beautiful and more memorable and more striking. So it was one of the insights that I got through boredom was that the beautiful often requires a bit of ugly.
ELISE: Yeah. I love that sentiment because I think we are engineered to only want pleasure in a very simple contract, right? That it has to be sweet all the time. Like we miss the complexity that's actually more appealing. The other thing that I thought was really interesting undertone, you were talking about it primarily in the chapter on Scent, but that these things are fleeting in ephemeral, right? Like we get that, hit a perfume and then it fades because we're used to it. And it seems that way with all senses, right? Otherwise we'd be overwhelmed. But it's so sad, right?
GRETCHEN: Well, it's interesting because the brain is a difference detector. What it's trying to figure out is what's different, because that's what could be danger and that could be opportunities. So like a rock hurdling toward you is something you need to pay attention to. The rock sitting on the ground is not something that needs to catch your attention. So we pick up things right away, but then they fade out of our awareness. And I think you're right. I think one of the challenges is to awaken our awareness of things that can kind of fade into the background wallpaper. And for me this was particularly important with people like, you know, throughout the book I talk about really how my senses made me closer to people, to memories of people, and to connecting with people in the present and forming memories for the future. And I realized, you know, who do I look at more than my husband? But like, was I really seeing him? Was I really seeing what he looked like? Was I really paying attention? And when I started really paying attention, I noticed all kinds of things. And what I found too is that when I paid attention to the outer Jamie, I got insight into the inner Jamie, because there were all these clues in plain sight, but that I just hadn't been picking up on because I was like, oh, I don't need, I don't need to look at you. I look at you every, so I think that we wanna awaken that appreciation and even that sense of wonder for the things that are the most familiar.
ELISE: Yeah. I love that. I think it's beautiful. It's just like noticing what's in front of us. It's actually not that complex, but for whatever reason, those easy things are always so difficult or those simple things are hard.
GRETCHEN: Well, it's interesting cause I talked about this on my podcast, Happier with Gretchen Rubin, and people put an interesting twist on it. So my idea, which I wrote about in the book, which is I did a Five Senses portrait of Jamie. So for each of the Five Senses I wrote five very strong associations or memories I had, you know, so like for touch, it was like the springy hair on his head or whatever, you know, some from the past, some from the present. This was really creative, really fun, took a while, like some come right away. Some it takes a while to think of them, and it was so fun to do. So I did it, and then when I turned in the book, my editor said to me. Well, I think for your about section, you should write a five portrait, five senses portrait of yourself. And I thought, oh, I just did this whole book about the five senses. But even that was still very challenging for me. I had never thought of myself like in that structure. So that was sort of an interesting creative thing.
Then when we talked about it on the Happier Podcast, one listener said, oh, I'm gonna do this for my grandparents because they've recently died, and I wanna hang on to those very concrete memories of them. And I also want to be able to give it to my children who are so young they won't remember family members and then somebody else did it as a gift wrote it and gave it as a gift because she said, what's gonna make you feel more seen and heard and smelled and tasted in touch than somebody writing a Five Senses portrait of you? So I think that's a lovely idea, it's like they're all different ways that you can play with these things and my hope is that it will get people fired up for their own five senses. It's like, I did this, but you could do that. Like, I'm not that into music, but maybe you're really into music. Like it's so fun and energizing and it's so playful and it's just right there. It's all around us. If we reach out for itI just think, you know, you wanna tap into it if you can't.
ELISE: Totally, beautiful. Gretchen, this was so fun.
GRETCHEN: Thank you.
ELISE:
Gretchen’s latest book, Life in Five Senses, is really about the power, not only of noticing but then appreciating. It’s hard to do when we’re in constant overwhelm and all our senses are indulged, probably too much. And in some ways, I think that overindulgence causes us to detach from all of these pleasure centers. We start to not pay attention any more. She writes: “It was a constant challenge to notice. In artist Scott Polach’s Applause Encouraged #111415, guests watched the sun set over the ocean, then applauded. In my own life, how could I maintain the discipline of noticing? A friend once told me, ‘After my trip to India, I had no doubt that I was going to cook with cumin all the time. But I don’t.’ I knew exactly what he meant. It was easier to feel transformed than to be transformed. I wanted to maintain my focus on my five senses as I moved onward into the future. Before I’d started my investigation, though I hadn’t realized it, I’d been doing a lot of looking and not enough listening; now I was tuning in to each of my five senses. I’d also learned how much power I had to design my environment. To add pleasure, I could wear perfume to bed, visit a museum every day, and pet Barnaby’s sikly ears. When I walked closer to a jasmine vine, the fragrance gave me a hit of pleasure so intense that it seemed to lift me off the ground. To reduce annoyances, I could turn off my phone notifications, give away a scratchy pair of pants, or fix a wobbly chair. Instead of reusing that smelly, worn kitchen sponge one more time, I could replace it with a new one.” That’s what I love about Gretchen, she takes such big ideas and distills them into simple ones, like hey, I should replace my kitchen sponge. On that note, I’ll see you next week.
