People often ask, do you want to save money or do you want to enjoy your life?
And what's weird about that construct is that these two concepts are pitted as opposites.
Spending money is seen as a proxy for enjoyment,
while saving money is often used as shorthand for deprivation.
But on a Ford anything, we're not going to conflate, spending with enjoyment.
Welcome to the A Ford Anything podcast.
The show that understands you can afford anything but not everything.
Each choice that you make carries a trade-off.
And that applies not just to your money, but also to your time, your focus, your energy, your attention.
So, what matters most?
How do you figure that out and how do you live your life accordingly?
That's what this podcast is here to explore.
I'm your host, Paula Pant.
And in order to facilitate this discussion around
how to maximize enjoyment from free or low-cost experiences,
not in one of those clickbait-y listicle, like,
ten free things that you can do in New York City.
I hate those lists. I hate them.
Because they missed the point.
Like, yes, I get that I can go to Central Park, like, duh.
I don't need some listicle telling me to plan a potluck instead of going to a restaurant.
Like, that's the frugality information on the internet.
It's just absolute garbage.
I steer clear of that.
But what I appreciate are people who are engaged in a nuanced study
of how to live in the moment, increase vitality,
improve your innate intelligence, and increase happiness.
And one of the foremost observers of happiness in human nature is Gretchen Rubin.
Gretchen Rubin is a multiple New York Times bestselling author
who has written absolute blockbuster bestsellers,
such as the Happiness Project and the Fortendencies.
She has two degrees from Yale and worked as an attorney
before she decided to leave the legal profession,
but apply that same level of rigorous research
to the pursuit of living in the moment.
She joins us now to talk about her most recent project,
which is tuning into the five senses as a path
to a happier and more mindful life.
In her latest book, which just yesterday she announced
that it hit the New York Times bestseller list,
the book is called Life in Five Censes,
she draws on cutting-edge science, philosophy, literature,
and on her own efforts to investigate the profound power
of tuning in to the physical world.
And in our upcoming interview, she shows us how to experience each day
with greater depth, greater delight, and stronger connection.
How can we, despite the rush of daily life,
find a sense of immediacy and engagement?
And in doing so, perhaps find some of that satisfaction
that too many people otherwise try to spend their way into.
So, for this discussion, here is Gretchen Rubin.
Gretchen, thank you so much for coming on the show.
Now, you became interested in a structured methodical study
of immediacy and sensory experience
after you went to the doctor,
and your doctor told you that you're very nearsighted,
you have a greater risk for having an attached retina,
and if that happens, you could lose your vision.
I'm interested in knowing what you did
when you left that doctor's appointment.
How did that inflection point change?
No pun intended, your perspective.
I live in New York City, so I walked out of the street
to walk home from the doctor's office, and it just shocked me.
And of course, intellectually, I knew that at any moment,
I could lose some of my senses, and I knew that I could
live a rich, meaningful life, even if I did lose some of my senses.
But for some reason, this just penetrated,
and I realized how much I was taking my sense of sight for granted.
I looked around the street that I was walking on,
and I realized I hadn't noticed a single thing on my walk there.
I was just in this fog of preoccupation.
I wasn't noticing anything.
And as I had that realization, suddenly it was as if every knob
in my brain just jammed up to maximum setting,
and I could see everything with crystal clarity,
and I could hear every sound on a separate track,
and I could smell every single smell, you know,
and I live in New York City, so it's a lot of smells.
And it was just this psychedelic experience
where I was just perceiving everything with such startling clarity.
That walk home just showed me that I had been missing something.
I had been studying happiness for so long,
but I had been missing something.
I didn't know what, and this walk showed me that what I was missing
was this direct contact with my senses,
and this appreciation for the physical world all around me.
And, you know, it only lasted a short time,
but it just was transcendent,
and it showed me that I really needed to focus on the experience of my five senses.
I've heard many stories of people who will have a meaningful inflection point,
such as what you are describing,
but 24 hours later, 36 hours later, the chaos of life has led them to forget that inflection point.
Why was it that this one stuck with you?
It's a lot easier to feel transformed than to get transformed,
and I'm kind of a street scientist who likes to use myself as a guinea pig,
and I do turn personal challenges into professional projects,
and I just decided, okay, I need to do this.
I need to do this systematically. I don't know much about the five senses,
and the more you know, the more you notice.
So I thought I need to learn, so I ran to the library and started researching,
and the more I learned, the more I wanted to try things out for myself.
I wanted to put things into use, and that's kind of my way.
I love studying information and gaining knowledge,
and studying transcendent ideas, abstract ideas,
but I'm always looking for ways to make things concrete.
It's like, if this is true, what could I do with my conscious thoughts and actions to put it into use?
And so the minute I had this revelation for myself,
I instantly was like hot in pursuit of researching and experimenting with the five senses.
But of course, it took me a long time to figure out how to do that.
It's funny you think, oh, you're just studying the five senses,
but it's like, oh, but they're far more than five senses.
They're like up to 33, 35 senses.
Do I limit myself to the five?
What about the salsorium, which is all the senses working together?
It was not nearly as straightforward as it sounds in hindsight.
It was a much more tangled process.
Right, exactly.
As you delve into studying the senses, one of the things that you approach right away is,
there's an element that involves studying the brain.
Like I was struck when you reported that the brain is only 2% of your body weight.
I just assumed it was going to be more than that.
I don't know.
Every time I step on the scale, I'm like, well, it must be my brain.
Yeah, I have my big brain.
There's the element where you're studying the physicality of senses,
and then there's the element where you're studying the subjective experiential level.
And then there's that element where you're trying to make it systematic, as you say.
So even just thinking about how to approach a thing like that,
right from the outside, it does seem a little complex.
It is. And whenever I write a book, I have the same process,
which I'll just start by just reading and reading and reading as much as I can.
And I just take notes on anything that seems important or striking.
And then it's months and months and sometimes years before I start to think,
oh, okay, now I have a point of view.
Now I sort of see what a structure would be.
And then I start to pull from all these notes that I've taken.
But a lot of it ends up being kind of a red herring, things that don't end up
being important, but are just part of my background understanding of a subject.
Right.
Huge volumes are written about any one of these senses or an aspect of these senses.
Part of it is distilling it and figuring out how to talk about them in a way that's cogent,
but also limited.
Right.
How do you organize? This is a bit of a tangent, but how do you organize your notes?
Are you still using Scribner?
You know, I don't use Scribner anymore.
I really liked Scribner, but I'm not very tech savvy.
And it made me very uneasy to have something between me and my notes,
because it would like ask me to update and like, yeah, but what if something goes wrong and
this whole thing crashes? It just made me very uneasy.
But I have a very unsophisticated way of taking notes.
I'll just write down anything that I think is important,
whether something that's occurred to me or a note from another book,
you know, with citations.
And then I'll often put tags next to it.
So if I'm searching for something, I can find it.
And then after a while, I'll start making like huge buckets,
something like site.
But then when I'm actually searching for things, I will search
by like a search term.
And what I like about this is it's kind of an imperfect system,
but that is almost better because it will kick up a lot of things that it's not really meant to
kick up. And those sort of accidental associations are often very helpful for me,
like things that I wouldn't necessarily have considered together.
They sort of appear together.
And I'm lucky because I do have a really good memory of kind of like,
what's an unusual word that appeared in that quotation that I can search for?
Like, oh, that quotation had the word husbandry in it.
It's like, okay, let me just search by husbandry.
So it's not a very sophisticated way to do it, but it works really well for me.
No, interesting.
Yeah.
All right. So tell us about how you approached this deeper sense of the senses.
One of the decisions that you made very early on was that you would visit the same place daily.
Why did you make that choice?
I have always been fascinated by repetition.
Like I'm very interested in the work of Andy Warhol,
partly as because Andy Warhol is very interested in repetition.
Like how things change over time, watching things gradually change,
or how an experience changes as it becomes more and more familiar.
And it's interesting, like when I started that, I thought that was a pretty idiosyncratic thing
to be interested in, but I've since learned that many people have this impulse to visit the same
place every day.
Like in forest bathing, there's something called the sit spa,
where people will return to the same place and sit.
Sometimes, you know, every single day, the way I visited the Metropolitan Museum every day,
people will often do the exact same walk through their neighborhood or the walk to the same tree,
or somebody said he went to his chain drug store every day, and I thought,
I get it. That would be fascinating.
There's a lot going on in like one of these giant drug stores,
and it changes over time, and you'd get to know the people, and it would just be interesting.
So I think for some people, they have sort of an attraction to that kind of exercise.
And I was just so lucky.
I live within walking the sense of the meds, and I have the time and the freedom to go.
So, you know, I'm so, so lucky.
And so I thought, well, I'll just go to the Metropolitan Museum every day and see how it changes over time.
Right? So tell us about that experience.
How was it different after having gone there many times versus what the experience in the beginning?
Because in a sense, it's almost like a novice eyes through a more curated set of eyes.
Yeah, it's changed tremendously. Partly, it's just the knowing the space because the
Met, well, I think part of what's fun about the Met is it's very maze-like.
And I remember if you go to the Met, one of the most wonderful things to go to is the Chinese
Garden Court, the Scholars Garden. There is like a garden with plants and a pond with
coifish swimming in it and a big skylight like on the second floor of the Met.
It's amazing. But before, I was always like, is it there? Is it not there? Who can know?
Like I just, I would either stumble across it or it was like Brigadim.
Who knows? And now I know exactly how to get there, you know?
So, so I think part of what I loved was this feeling of it.
It was sort of mysterious and maze-like. I didn't know my way around. It felt endless.
And now I know my way around very, very well, not 100%, but I know where to go to find what I'm
looking for. And so part of it is just mastering the space, which is fun. It was fun not to know
and it's fun to know. It's different. And the first thing I did is I did go gallery by gallery
through the whole Met just so I sort of knew every room. And now I go much more, you know,
I'll just go for different reasons to different places. So I move through the space very differently.
But it's funny, like, it's not for me so much about the art as art as it is about the space,
as a certain kind of space. Of course, the art is incredibly important to making it a
particular kind of space. But it's not like I run home and then read several volumes on,
you know, Jotto to understand Jotto better. I'm very interested in just the experience of being
in the museum. I had this really strange experience just the other day where
the entrance that I go in, if I'm walking from the first floor to the second floor,
there are two staircases that strangely are very close to each other. They're separated by like
one gallery and they go from the first floor to the second floor. But I had noticed over time
that one staircase was much easier to climb than the other. And finally, I was like, wait a minute,
that's kind of odd. Like, why would that be? So I go to the one staircase that I'm looking around
and I'm like, it's made of stone and it's four flights with three landings and it's going from
the first floor to the second floor. And I go to the other one and yeah, it's stone and it's
four flights and three, and I couldn't figure that and I walked up in the other staircase. I'm like,
no, it's definitely easier on this one staircase than the other. What could be the difference?
And then finally, I brought a ruler and I measured the height of the steps on the harder staircase.
Just for the first two of the four flights, the step was slightly higher than it was in the top
half of it or in the other staircase. And that dramatically affected my experience of climbing
the stairs. That's the kind of thing that you don't notice right away. You know, that's the kind
of thing you notice if you've been someplace many, many, many, many times. And of course,
it's a profound truth that we all know, which is the design of an experience. You may be going
from the first floor to the second floor, but the design of that experience can make the journey
very different. And I thought, well, this is just a very, very subtle change. And yet it had this
dramatic impact on how I experience the effort of locking the stairs. So slowly, I'm starting to
notice things like that as I go back as well as noticing things about the artworks.
Right. A more nuanced look, more detailed look at your environment.
Well, I mean, when things are new, they're exciting, but it's maybe you don't notice
subtleties as much because you're taking in so much information. I mean, one thing that surprised
me is that the bet is it changes all the time. I knew the exhibits changed, but they'll just be
paintings that move around or vanish. Like with no fanfare, there's no, there's no reason for it.
I mean, they just are swapping things around. And at first, I was like, is my memory playing tricks?
I mean, because I could swear there was a big painting of a guy dancing a jig on that wall.
And where is that guy dancing a jig? And it's like, well, yeah, that stuff just changes all the time.
Oh, there was this statue of a girl chasing a duck. I don't know where that statue is now. It's gone.
I've learned to appreciate things because they can just disappear.
Right.
Do you love something? Take advantage of it now. You can't count on the fact that it will be there
forever. Right. I want to ask you about the sense of smell. We'll jump past hearing and go to smell.
Oh, love the sense of smell.
Before we do, I want to just establish for the audience what, and I know many, when you were
writing about happiness, a lot of people would ask kind of the obvious question, what is the
point of happiness or, you know, why is it important to study? So I'll ask the same question when it
comes to the senses. Why should the average listener who is balancing work with taking care of family
and balancing all of their daily concerns? Why should the average listener care about being
more in tune with their senses? Well, one thing is this is something that you could do without
spending a lot of time, energy or money. So it's definitely something that the ordinary person can
tap into. And I think people want to tap into it. I feel like I almost don't even need to make
the case for it because people go on and on about the metaverse. But really people are more interested
in the universe. That's why so many experiences these days are billed as immersive because they
know that is so compelling to people. And I think it's because there's sort of two things going on
at the same time. One is that experience feels sort of drained and flattened because it's coming
to us through screens. It's kind of drained of its life. But then on the other hand, things almost
feel like hyper processed. Like this food has been engineered to hit every bliss point. And yet,
you got it as takeout. So there aren't the smells of grilling and baking and roasting that would
have tantalized your sense of smell. Or you go to a movie and you see more images than you would ever
normally see. And there's a soundtrack that's like, you know, full of music and emotion. And yet,
you don't have any smells coming to you. There's no air wind in your face. So things feel both
too flat and too saturated. And so I think people are very hungry to have this sense of direct
contact with the world. And when I started this, of course, my assumption was that it would make
me happier to connect with my five senses because that was the point of doing all of these exercises.
But I have to say, I was astonished by how much more effective it was than I imagined,
and in a lot of unexpected ways. Tapping into the five senses, just like really being more
attentive to the five senses, it does a lot to evoke memories, like memories you forgot you had,
or to like create new memories to make them really solid and vivid so that you'll remember
things in the future. It's a great way to connect with other people. Sharing sensory experiences is
something that is a very easy way to connect. It's a great way to spark your creativity.
It's a great way to help yourself become more calm and also more energized. It's like, again,
it's working in both directions. It helps to give you calm and feel less stressed out, but it also
helps you to like pump up through the five senses. So just depending on what aim you're seeking in
your life, there is probably a way to tap into the power of the five senses to help you achieve that
aim. It sounds as though it is a low cost or free and low time input way of improving your life,
which ultimately is the point of all of this. Right, exactly. And of course, I should say,
I studied my five senses. Everybody has their own complement of senses, so they may have five,
or they may not. People have sensory differences. One of the things that I learned was that we each
live in our own sensory world to a very kind of startling degree, how individual our sensory
experiences are. But I think whatever your particular experience is, there's probably ways for you to
tune into your senses in a way that's going to boost your happiness.
We'll come back to this episode after this word from our sponsors.
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On the topic of how each individual sensory experiences are different and going to smell,
one of the challenges with tuning into a sense of smell is, well, two of them. One is that there's
a very thin line between smell and taste. To an extent smell actually comes from not just the
nose, but the mouth, as you mentioned. The other is that you become so normalized to smells in your
environment that you can no longer perceive them. Sometimes even if you try, how do you approach
a deeper sense of smell? Well, you're exactly right on both counts and it's fascinating. I think
for many people surprising how much the sense of smell affects the sense of taste. So flavor is
what you experience when you're smelling and tasting together. A really fun way to experiment
with this is just take something that has a strong complex flavor, like a jelly belly or
something like that. Plug your nose, put it in your mouth and you will taste sweet. It will taste
very strongly of sweet and then release your nose and then all of a sudden it'll be cherry or root
beer or pita colada or whatever kind of bonkers jelly belly flavor you're tasting. And you realize
it's because your sense of smell is giving you everything that's beyond a sweet salty sour umami
or bitter. And very sadly, I think many people realize this during COVID where they would feel
like they had lost their sense of taste where it was really that it was their sense of smell that
was affected. And so that connection I think for many people became much more aware of it.
And you're talking about odor fatigue. Oder fatigue is fascinating. So we I think we're all aware of
the fact that if you try to keep smelling a flower or keep smelling a pizza or whatever,
it kind of fades out pretty quickly after a few minutes, you can keep sniffing and sniffing but
you will not be able to perceive that smell anymore. And that is because the brain and with the
the sense of smell, it's a difference detector. It's telling you when things change because change
can mean danger or opportunity. And this is why if you put on a t-shirt, you feel it against your
skin but then that fades out. It's not important for you to know. So your sense of smell fades out
so that if a new smell comes in, you'll be aware of it. It's not blocked out by you just keeping
smelling the smell of the chocolate chip cookies baking for two hours. But it can happen sort of
in a minute, you know, as you're smelling something like the pizza. But if you are around a very
strong smell just habitually, that also will fade out as you mentioned. So this is why we can't smell
our home the way a guest smells it. If you've ever visited somebody who's home had a very, very
distinct smell that the people who live there don't seem to be aware of it. It's because they're
not aware of it. Or if you work in a coffee shop every day that really, really strongly smells of
coffee, that will fade out almost instantly as you walk in because your brain is like,
oh, yeah, we've seen this before. No, we're just going to bring this down. Now, of course,
if you traveled away from your home for a month and then you returned, then you could smell it.
But it's just this very interesting thing where you think, well, as smell as a smell and if there's a
strong smell in here, of course, if somebody has an active sense of smell, how could they miss it?
But they just simply do not smell it. Throughout my childhood, I'm Nepalese. I would bring friends
over and they would all tell me that my home had the smell of spices and incense. And I can't smell
it at all. To me, I smell absolutely nothing. There you go. I mean, that's a perfect example,
right? Because it's always there. And so it's not flagged for you as important information.
Right. Yeah. No, I hope my apartment doesn't smell like dog food or something.
Right. I think that's why sometimes people use way too much perfume or use too much air
freshener or whatever, because they might think it's not working anymore because they don't smell
it. And it's just because they've become habituated to it. Right. One thing that you mentioned earlier
about how more of our experience takes place through screens and screens are, by definition,
they're visual, they're audio, but we don't engage with the sense of smell, the sense other than
tapping a screen, the sense of touch. These are our senses that we're not engaging with during
screen time. Are we getting worse at those senses? Like, how does that impact us when we habitually
face stimuli that ignores a few of the senses while heavily appealing to a few others like
sight and hearing? Well, you know, that's fascinating. I have to say I never thought about that. But
are we out of balance? Is that part of why people want immersive is because sort of certain aspects
of our sensory or our sensory more overstimulated and then others are understimulated. So it kind
of creates this craving. I never thought about that specific thing, kind of the balance question.
Now, it is true that we are wired for sight. I mean, sight has the most real estate in the brain,
and we are just hardwired for sight as human beings. And so it's natural that we would gravitate
toward a tool that is a very sight-based tool. Of course, people have been reading for a very
long time, but that is interesting. And it's funny because there have been sporadic efforts over time
to have a technology that would allow us to incorporate smell and it never has worked. You know, people
write about them as kind of these oddities that they've never taken hold. But then with touch,
you think of how many people back in the day, when there used to be devices that had actual buttons
that you pushed, many people resisted giving up those devices specifically because they wanted
to be able to push the button. They didn't like a flat screen. They wanted the sensation.
And then you have things that incorporate haptics, which are very, very important in technology now.
So, but yeah, you're never going to be licking your cell phone. We hope.
Right. Again, it's like overstimulation and understimulation together. So it's not just like Las Vegas,
where everything, you're smelling, you're tasting, you're touching, you're seeing,
you're hearing, and everything's kind of being stimulated. This, there's over and under simultaneously.
That is really fascinating. I want to think about that. It seems likely to be true. We do have this
kind of hunger for that direct contact and for that intensity of sensory stimulation.
Right. Right. You mentioned that there are, depending on how you frame it, more than five
senses, there could even be up to 33 senses. What are some of the other senses beyond the big five?
Oh, yeah. There are senses like inner reception and proprioception. And so these are, these
are senses that help us do things like stay in balance or notice the experience of our own body.
Like I'm hungry or I butterflies in my stomach or things like that. And these are all extremely
important, very fascinating in their own right. And they contribute very greatly to our sense of
well-being. But they're kind of like the heartbeat where they're operating outside of our conscious
control. They're running in the background. You're very aware of them if something goes wrong,
but you're not very aware of them if they're operating as they should. And so they don't have
the glamour of the big five because the big five, we study, we seek experiences, we talk about them
all the time. They're very much in the forefront of our attention. And so I'm going to stick to the
big five. That's the one where there's a lot of low hanging fruit for things that we can reach out
to do. Do most cultures around the world share in the agreement that there are the big five senses
or are there certain cultures that emphasize a sixth or seventh sense or some different senses?
How is that understanding? There are cultural differences and different cultures will sort of
have a more sophisticated language or framework of understanding something like smell. There's a
culture where they know the direction like North Southeast West. They're very oriented towards
kind of North Southeast West in a way that we in the West, we are not. There are different ways
to approach the senses depending on your cultural upbringing. And I mean, even with things like color,
I mean, there are wide ranges of difference of how many sort of basic colors a culture will refer
to. Sort of in English, we talk about we have 11, but there are cultures that have three and
different cultures break it up differently. For instance, in the Russian language, there's a word
for light blue and dark blue that are different words. And like, there was no word in the West for
orange until literally the fruit, the orange appeared on the scene. And then they're like,
we need a word for that. And the word was orange. It was just considered to be kind of a shade of
yellow or red. So it's very interesting how every culture, every human culture sees the same
visible spectrum, but how you slice that up and how you refer to it is very different.
And then it's interesting if you have a word for something, you identify it more quickly.
You're able to see distinctions more quickly because you have a word for it. So it's really
very fascinating. As you went about experiencing the five senses in a more intentional way,
at the end of this, in retrospect, did it positively impact your happiness and your subjective sense
of well-being? Oh, absolutely. I mean, far more than I expected in so many ways. It gave me all
these sort of new tools and new approaches to calm myself down and to get energized and give
myself a boost when I needed to and to connect with other people. And also it just had fun.
It's interesting because with the five senses, there's a certain kind of approach that's very
disciplined. Like a lot of people, I myself do not meditate. I've tried it a couple of times.
It's just not a tool that works for me. But a lot of people do the 5, 4, 3, 2, 1 meditation.
Some people will do the thing where they like sit and enjoy one sip of coffee for 20 minutes and
like really, really analyze it. That is not my approach. My approach is much more like the playful.
Let's have fun with this. Let's get out in the world. Let's get our hands dirty. Let's just
do whatever we want. Recess. Really tapping into the five senses for a sense of vitality.
So I think you could tap into the five senses to achieve many different aims, not necessarily
what I was going for. But it absolutely did. It made my life so much richer. When you tune into
your five senses, you notice more beauty and fragrance, but you also notice more racket and
stink because you're just more aware. But even that, I'm glad. I welcome that because it just
makes an eye range of experience feel so much richer. Now, of course, I am the kind of person
that was walking around in a fog all the time. I'd be walking. There'd be a beautiful sunset and I
don't even see it because I'm busy editing a paragraph in my head. So I'm exactly the kind of
person who needed this book, which is why I wrote it. Research is me search. So I think some people
are more tapped into their five senses just naturally or maybe they've already disciplined
themselves to do it. But I think that for people who do feel like maybe they've become disconnected
from the world or from other people or from themselves, the five senses is a great concrete way
that can help you shine a spotlight on that aspect of your life in a way that feels very,
very manageable and very exciting, very fun, very playful.
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in a house. And then meanwhile, you're using the computer that the company gave you to use,
but it's a million years old. And you're like, why are you hounding me for more productivity when
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like, man, there's got to be something better than this. But where do I find it? How do I start?
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Your daughters were with you throughout a lot of this experience. First, how old are they?
Well, one now is 24 and one is 18. The big one kind of came in and out, but whenever she was
around, I would snag her from my experiments. And then my younger one, she told them all the
time. So she definitely got conscripted. But they loved it. I mean, after a few, they saw how
fun they always were. So they were very enthusiastic. Do you think that the experiences are different
at different ages? Do 18 year olds or 24 year olds have a different sensory experience of the world
than someone of your age? And would someone in their 70s have a different experience?
Well, it's definitely true that you, as we age, then our senses become less acute. So often,
when people age, they think things don't taste as good or they don't taste as much. And that's
often because the sense of smell has been affected. Definitely the sense of hearing is
something that's affected with age. Loss of hearing is highly, as people age, that's highly
correlated. So absolutely. I mean, they probably just had more vivid experiences just because
they're younger. Yeah. Well, here's something interesting though too that I learned, which is
you should try by 25. That research shows that if you have not tried and enjoyed a food by the age
of 25, or you have not listened to a genre of music by the age of 25, it is unlikely, or I should
say less likely, that you will go on to enjoy it in the future. And there's something called
the reminiscence bump, which is from ages 15 to 25. We have a particularly vivid memory for the
rest of our lives. Most adults will remember that period most vividly. Maybe this is the time when
we're sort of forming our tastes. But so if you're under 25, it's like, try as many things as you
can because you're setting yourself up for future enjoyment. And if you're over 25 and you sort of
are like, oh, I don't understand like why I never feel like listening to this kind of music, it's
like, well, maybe you need to make a special effort if you want to bring that into your frame of
reference because it's not something that you experienced when you were younger. So that's
something to think about just how our tastes are formed throughout our lives.
That's interesting. It's interesting actually that that starts at 15. I would have expected the
lower bound to be quite a bit lower, the foods that you eat when you're five.
Yeah, maybe it has to do with the kind of sophistication of sort of memory that you do.
I don't know. It is very interesting. Do you remember 10th grade better than second grade?
Yeah, it's interesting. So for the listeners, what recommendations would you give them is to
the person who's listening to this as they're commuting down the highway on their way to work
right now. And they're about to go into one of those really ugly offices with fluorescent lights
and terrible office carpet and drink like cheap watered down coffee and you single-ply toilet paper,
right? That's the morning that they're about to have. They might be like, I don't think I want
to be more in touch with my senses. It might just be depressing. What recommendations would you give
to them? Well, one thing you can do, don't do this on the highway obviously, but you can do it when
you get to the offices. I have a neglected sense quiz. So you can just go to GretchenRibbe.com
slash quiz and take this. It's like nine questions. It's free. It's very fast. And it will tell you
your neglected sense. And so this is the sense that you least often turn to sort of for comfort
or pleasure. You probably spend the least time exploring it or learning about it. This is a
really helpful thing to know because this is low hanging fruit because if you don't tap into that
sense very often, well, maybe you can find some kind of quick, easy ways to tap into it and this
will bring something new into your life because this is something that you tend to overlook. So,
for instance, my neglected sense is taste. And so I thought, well, what are some ways that I could
have fun with taste given that I tend to not tap into it this much? So I had a taste party with a
bunch of friends where we compared varieties of apples and potato chips and chocolate and I had
them guess a surprise taste. And we reminisced about the junk food we loved as children and things
like that. So it was a very, very fun thing to do, but I would never have occurred to me to do it
unless I sort of explicitly said, okay, what can I do with a sense of taste given that I tend not
to look there for enjoyment? So that's one thing you can do. Another thing is to look for maybe one
thing that you can do that will help you connect with other people using the senses. A very fun
thing to do is like a taste timeline where you write down, you know, make a timeline of your life.
Like I divided my life into four periods and then you can reminisce with people from those periods.
So I did it and then I called my sister to reminisce about the taste that I remembered from
childhood because of course she shared my childhood taste or her childhood taste. And like, we spent
a lot of time talking about cinnamon pop tarts. And then you can call your college roommate and
talk about, oh, well, what were all those things that we ate and drank in college? Like, did you have
a like a drink that everybody drank in college? Like we always drank sangria because we could
get it really, really cheap at this restaurant and then we got free chips if we ordered sangria. So
that was like loomed a lot. I've never had sangria since. I don't think so. But you know, it instantly
takes me back to that feeling of college. And so this is a way that you can sort of get in touch
with your own memories and then also use it as a prompt to connect with other people by reminiscing.
And you don't even have to go experience it again. Like, I don't even feel like I have to go get
sangria. I can just remember it and all those memories come flooding back. So that can be a very
fun, easy, creative way to connect with yourself and your memories and then also connect with
other people who would share those memories with you. Excellent. Well, we are coming to the end
of our time. Are there any final thoughts, tips, advice that you'd like to share with the listeners?
Well, I will share one hack that it seems like, as I've been talking about the five sets, this is
one that people seem to find particularly useful. Well, there's two. One is if you're trying to
quiet people down, just blow on a harmonica. That's instantly quiet people down. It's magic.
And then another thing is a lot of people, when they're kind of bored or restless or listless,
like say it's the middle of the afternoon of a workday, they'll try to do something to simulate
their sense of taste. Like they walk into the kitchen, they're opening up the fridge, the cabinets,
going to the vending machine. They want to give themselves a little lift. And so they reach for
the sense of taste. And sometimes this is fine, but for some people, this is kind of like an
unhealthy treat. And this is a, because I write my book better than before I read a lot about habits.
I know that's a habit a lot of people want to tackle. So if you experience that, try stimulating
a different sense. Instead of saying, I'm going to reach for something through taste,
say I'm going to reach for something through a different sense. So if you like hearing,
maybe you're like, I'm going to listen to my favorite upbeat song, or I'm going to listen to new music.
I'm going to save it for these like mid afternoon. And that's when I get to like,
listen to that new music I'm excited about. If you love the sense of touch, maybe you get some
therapy dough or you squeak some cornstarch between your fingers or you play with tin foil. Like,
you know, you try to give yourself some kind of stimulation through a different sense. Take a big
whiff of something, whether that's a jar of pickles or a bottle of almond extract or whatever. It might
fresh towels, a grapefruit, whatever would give you a big hit of smell. And this seems to work
really well. And I don't know if it's because it's sort of distracting because you have to like go
off and pull up your new music and listen to it. And so that kind of distracts you from the fact
that you were wandering towards the unhealthy snack. Or if it's really the fact that what you're
seeking is some kind of sensory stimulation to give yourself energy. And so by stimulating a
different sense, it just scratches the same itch. I'm not sure maybe both. But for whatever reason,
this is something that people are like, you know what, that really works. So I offer that up as a
way to tap into the senses to solve a common problem that I hear from people. There are so many,
many more transcendent aims that we can achieve through our five senses. But that's a very concrete
little one that many people talk about. Oh, that's a very good one. Because I find myself doing that
all the time when it's two or three p.m. I'm really tired and I but I still have like another seven
hours of work ahead of me. You know, that's exactly when I hit the vending machine.
Right. And I think people don't think of it as like, oh, I'm tapping into my sense of taste.
Right. Yeah. But it's just like, okay, just sub something in and see if that works.
Right. Yeah. Well, thank you, Gretchen. Thank you for spending this time with us.
Well, thank you. I so enjoyed the conversation.
Thank you, Gretchen. What are three key takeaways that we got from this conversation?
Number one, we innately crave fuller, more sensory experiences.
So much of our lives are processed through screens that we often miss out on the sensory
experience of the 3D world. Experiencing something through a screen has a flattening effect.
I mean, that's why you don't go on dates on zoom, right? It's just not the same.
So many experiences these days are billed as immersive because they know that is so compelling
to people. And I think it's because there's sort of two things going on at the same time.
One is that experience feels sort of drained and flattened because it's coming to us through
screens. It's kind of drained of its life. But then on the other hand, things almost feel like
hyper processed. Like this food has been engineered to hit every bliss point. And yet,
you got it as takeout. So there aren't the smells of grilling and baking and roasting that would
have tantalized your sense of smell. So that's the first key takeaway. Key takeaway, number two,
we have additional senses beyond the big five and being aware of those might help us tune into them.
Oh, yeah, there are senses like interception and proprioception. And so these are these
are senses that help us do things like stay in balance or notice the experience of our own body.
Like I'm hungry or I butterflies in my stomach or things like that. And these are all extremely
important, very fascinating in their own right. And they contribute very greatly to our sense of
well-being. But they're kind of like the heartbeat where they're operating outside of our conscious
control. They're running in the background. You're very aware of them. If something goes wrong,
you're not very aware of them if they're operating as they should. And so they don't have the glamour
of the big five because the big five we study, we seek experiences, we talk about them all the
time. They're very much in the forefront of our attention. So think beyond the big five. That is
the second key takeaway. Finally, key takeaway number three, your sensory experiences can change
by culture and essentially by need. The more you encounter something, the more of a nuanced lens
through which you see it. There are cultural differences and different cultures will sort of
have a more sophisticated language or framework of understanding something like smell. There's a
culture where they know the direction like North Southeast West. They're very oriented towards
kind of North Southeast West in a way that we in the West, we are not. There are different ways
to approach the senses depending on your cultural upbringing. And I mean, even with things like
color, I mean, there are wide ranges of difference of how many sort of basic colors a culture will
refer to. Sort of in English, we talk about we have 11, but there are cultures that have three
and different cultures break it up differently. For instance, in the Russian language, there's a
word for light blue and dark blue that are different words. And like, there was no word in the West
for orange until literally the fruit, the orange appeared on the scene. And then they're like,
we need a word for that. And the word, you know, was orange. It was just considered to be
kind of a shade of yellow or red. Those are three key takeaways from this conversation
with New York Times best-selling author Gretchen Rubin. Thank you for tuning in.
This is the Afford Anything podcast. My name is Paula Pant. I hope you enjoyed today's episode.
If you did, please share it with a friend or family member. That's the most important way that
you can spread these ideas. You can subscribe to our show notes for free by going to affordanything.com
slash show notes. That's affordanything.com slash show notes. I am currently in my last three weeks
doing my fellowship at Columbia University. So I'm in crunch time right now, final papers,
final exams. So things are a little nutty, but I'm really excited for what's ahead. I've got
some big plans for Afford Anything. I have learned a ton. Once this chapter at Columbia is closed,
which will be in less than a month, which is kind of crazy, I will be coming back to Afford Anything
full time, which means that I have the time to implement all of these ideas. In the meantime,
you can follow me on Instagram. I'm there every day in posts and stories. Feel free to DM me just
to say hello. So Instagram at pawlopant, P-A-U-L-A-P-A-N-T. You can also chat with other members of
the community at Affordanything.com slash community. Thank you so much for tuning in. I'm pawlopant.
This is the Afford Anything podcast and I will catch you in the next episode.