Habits Of Healthy Relationships: Gretchen Rubin Interview

Ready to learn habits of healthy relationships? What’s the key to finding happiness in healthy couples?

I’m sure you’ve thought about this a lot…maybe even obsessed over it. 

In this episode, we’re talking with author Gretchen Rubin about Happiness.

Her book, The Happiness Project, has picked up a lot of attention and even garnered her a NY Bestseller Award. 

This episode delves into how we can create a relationship happiness project and what that journey was like for Gretchen. 

As you listen in, you’ll get insights from her on how to declutter your home, be a nicer spouse (like how to nag less and appreciate more), create habits that make you happier, and how you, too, can start your happiness project.

Gretchen Rubin, author of New York Times bestsellers, Better than Before, The Happiness Project, and Happier at Home, shares how the small things we do every day can make a difference.

In this interview, she shares tips on how you can create true happiness in all areas of your life, including your relationships.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

• The only person that we can change is ourselves.
• You can change a relationship dynamic even though you can’t change people.
• If something is not on the calendar, it doesn’t get done.
• Creating healthy habits preserves a lot of energy.
• Bad habits tend to deaden feelings.
• Following through on a habit is the hard part.
• Translate your goals into actions that you can measure.
• What we do all the time matters more than what we do once in a while.
• Treat your partner with the same consideration that you would treat someone else.

Habits of healthy relationships:

• Eat well, drink enough water, and don’t let yourself get too hungry
• Getting some exercise
• Getting enough sleep
• Declutter

Transcript: Gretchen Rubin Interview – Habits Of Healthy Relationships

Luis Congdon Today, we’re going to be talking about habits of healthy relationships and how you can have more of them in your life.

And, who else better than several-time New York Times best-selling author Gretchen Rubin, author of The Happiness Project. We’re going to talk about habits of healthy relationships and a happiness project and how can you have one of those in your life so that you have more joy and peace.

Welcome! It’s great to have you here, Gretchen.

Gretchen Rubin I’m very happy to be talking to you.

Luis Congdon I recently read your book, The Happiness Project, and I loved it. I loved your way of describing things like a clear shelf.

First, let’s dive into habits of healthy relationships and what is a happiness project and then, we’ll go into what impact and how people can start their own happiness project.

What are habits of healthy relationships, and what is a happiness project?

Gretchen Rubin I decided that I was going to spend a year thinking about my happiness and habits of healthy relationships.

I had this realization when I thought, “What do I want from life anyway?” I realized I wanted to be happy, but I didn’t spend any time thinking about whether I was happy or if I could be happier.

I decided to take a year because a year felt like long enough to make real change but short enough to be manageable.

I identified 12 elements in my life where I thought I could make improvements for my happiness and habits of healthy relationships.

I wanted a theme for every month. In each month, I found 3-5 concrete, manageable resolutions that I thought would help me make progress in that area, and to see if I made these very small changes, I could actually make myself happier.

Habits Of Healthy Relationships And The Happiness Project

Luis Congdon One of the things I loved about habits of healthy relationships and your happiness project in your book, you put it as “I wanted to change my life without changing my life by finding more happiness in my own kitchen.”

Gretchen Rubin Yeah, I love habits of healthy relationships and radical happiness projects like when Elizabeth Gilbert went to all those foreign countries and the guy who gave up the internet for a year, and Thoreau, moving to Walden Pond.

I love reading about that, but that’s not the kind of happiness project I wanted. I wanted something that was just part of the natural order of my life.

Part of it is I didn’t really want a big adventure, and even if I wanted a big adventure, I really couldn’t take a big adventure.

I had two little kids, my work, my marriage, my responsibilities. I couldn’t really go off and do something drastic. But I didn’t even really want to do something drastic. I really wanted to do something as part of my ordinary routine.

Kamala Chambers I love that your focus was on habits of healthy relationships and happiness, and since our audience is people looking for lasting love and connection, I’m really curious how that affected your relationships or how you feel incorporating a happiness project into your life can help your relationship.

Habits Of Healthy Relationships That You Can Apply

Gretchen Rubin One of the things people often say to me is, “I want to do habits of healthy relationships and a happiness project, but my sweetheart is not interested in doing it.”

And the fact is mine wasn’t either. My husband is a wonderful guy, and I love him with all my heart, but this isn’t the way he goes about his life. It would have been a waste and frustration for me to try to get him on board.

I’ve heard of married couples or couples doing happiness projects together, and I think that would be fantastic.

But the fact that your sweetheart is not interested in doing it with you does not mean you can’t do it or it’s not going to make a difference in your relationship.

What I found is the only person that we can change is ourselves, and that’s frustrating because, at times, you think, “Well, I would be happier if somebody else would behave properly,” and think of a bunch of things for that person to do.

But you can’t make somebody change. You can only change yourself. When I changed, my relationship changed.

And when I changed, the atmosphere of my household changed. I was able to bring about changes in my relationships, my marriage, and my relationships with my children just by working on myself.

Kamala Chambers And that really leads to habits and habits of healthy relationships. I know that’s your new focus right now. You have a new book out on habits. How do you feel habits affect our relationships?

The Impact of Habits Of Healthy Relationships

Gretchen Rubin It’s interesting because one of the habits of healthy relationships that I formed, and I write about this in Better than Before, is the habit of kissing my husband every morning and kissing him every night.

Some people scoff at this, and they’re like “Well, that’s just so fake” and like “Kissing is supposed to be spontaneous and heartfelt, and if you got on the calendar, like that’s just meaningless.”

But what I found in my inexperience is if something is out on the calendar, it doesn’t get done.

If something’s important to me, you have better have your own slot, and by doing something like making a habit of having healthy relationships, I make sure that it gets done.

One of the things that’s freeing and energizing about happy habits for every couple is we don’t have to make decisions.

We don’t have to use our self-control. We just do something automatically. So every morning, I don’t think, “Should I kiss my husband before I get out of bed?” No, I just always kiss him.

That’s just my habit. And the fact is you’re happier in a relationship when there’s more kissing. You find this when you practice happy habits for every couple.

Even if it’s a habit I just feel more tender and affectionate when I’m behaving in a tender and affectionate way, and so, I think there really is room to use happy habits for every couple to make sure the behaviors that help us connect with other people and help us behave in a thoughtful, loving, attentive way, actually happened.

If you wait for the thought to occur to you, you just might not think of it for 2 – 3 months, but if it’s a habit, then it just happens automatically.

Habits Of Healthy Relationships To Feel More Ease

Kamala Chambers I’m a really big believer in the research around reprogramming ourselves and programming ourselves with our habits and our thought processes, and how we can really change our constitution, how we view the world, how our nervous system responds, and all of that.

What are your thoughts on how habits of healthy relationships can help us to feel more relaxed or more at ease or the opposite?

Gretchen Rubin One of the interesting things, and this is a good thing and a bad thing at once, is that habits tend to deaden feelings.

If you feel positive feelings, it’s going to kind of dead on that. Like the first time you have that morning cup of coffee, it’s amazing.

But as it becomes a habit of healthy relationships, you experience it less and less intensely. You get less pleasure from it.

On the other hand, if there’s something upsetting to you or makes you feel anxious or angry, it becomes more of a habit. That’s going to die on your experience.

If there’s something that makes you anxious, by making it into a habit, you’re going to soothe your feelings. You’re going to become more at ease with whatever that habit is.

That’s one-way habits can change our emotional response to something. But also, a lot of times, we want ourselves to do something.

We want to have something incorporated into our lives, and we become very frustrated when we’re not doing it.

One of the ways you can get yourself to do it is to work on making it into habits of healthy relationships. And then, you can wear yourself out every single day.

Happy Habits Even When You Don’t Feel Like It

Gretchen Rubin “Should I go to the gym today? Tomorrow? “It’s my birthday.” “My foot hurts”. “It’s too cold.” “I’m going to go tomorrow.” “The gym is a little bit too far away.” “I’m going to go later in the day.” You can spend hours in that kind of thinking and never get to the gym, or you could just feel like, “It’s Monday. I go to the gym first thing.” and then, you just go.

With habits, there are no decisions and no self-control.  It just happens automatically, and that preserves a lot of your energy that you can direct to other things that are a lot more interesting and more demanding.

That’s where I feel habits of healthy relationships can really help us have the lives we want because they make these behaviors automatic so we don’t have to wear ourselves out and figure out whether or not we’re going to do something.

Luis Congdon As you were talking, I was thinking I’ve used all those excuses for why I haven’t gone to the gym yet.

Gretchen Rubin Of everything I wrote about in Better than Before, my favorite chapter was The Strategy Of Loophole Spotting.

I identified the 21 strategies that we can use to make or break our habits, and we use the same strategies whether we’re making them or breaking them.

But the funniest strategy is the strategy of loophole spotting because I identified 10 categories of loopholes that we use when we’re trying to explain and justify why we’re not keeping habits of healthy relationships.

We’re like cell phones searching for a signal. It’s like, “Oh, there’s got to be a reason why I’m off the hook. Oh, wait! I just spotted one.” “Life’s too short not to do the brownie.

Habits Of Healthy Relationships And Loopholes

Gretchen Rubin Oh, I just thought of that.” That’s the false self-actualization loophole, or there’s the tomorrow loophole.

“It doesn’t matter what I do today because tomorrow I’m going to be so good.” And then, there’s the concerned brother’s loophole, which is, “Oh, I have to eat this because my host will feel bad if I don’t partake.”

There are these 10 categories, and we’re so good that we can think of a loophole for any situation. They’re so imaginative, and they’re so hilarious. I loved cataloging the loopholes.

Luis Congdon So, when we think about some of the loopholes that we’re using, what are some of the ways we can spot those patterns and avoid those loopholes?

In your happiness project, you talked about not nagging your husband and some of the ways we tricked ourselves into why we think nagging or trying to get that gold star is okay when we’re talking about habits.

Because, really, to me, a lot of your work centers around habits, whether it’s through The Happiness Project or your new book. What are some of the ways we can change some of those habits and catch those loopholes that we’re using?

Gretchen Rubin You’ve spotted the pattern before I did because I had the Happiness Project and Happier at Home and before I realized that habits were such a central thing.

That took me a long time to realize. I think a lot of it is sheer mindfulness.

I think a lot of it is just recognizing what we’re doing, and it sounds so obvious, but it’s like if you catch yourself saying, “You know what? I’m at this party right now, and I am invoking the one coin loophole right now.”

Just having a name for it and realizing that it is a loophole.

The one coin loophole is like, does one coin make a man rich? No, but if had one coin and one coin and one coin. At some point, you say a man is rich.

What Are Habits Of Healthy Relationships?

Gretchen Rubin If people said to themselves, “What’s the point of going to the gym? What’s one trip to the gym? What’s one brownie? What’s one glass of wine?

It’s insignificant.” That’s true! It isn’t significant. But the only way you form the habit of doing something is one time plus one time plus one time.

The one coin loophole is to say, “It doesn’t matter what I do this time because it’s just this one time. Why should I wear my helmet today? What are the chances I’m going to get into an accident today?”

Practically not. But it’s only about wearing your helmet every single day that you protect yourself. It’s the same thing with nagging.

Also, it does not work. It isn’t effective, and it’s just a habit that you get in like, “I’m just going to keep repeating myself, and I’m just going to keep insisting that things be done on my schedule.” Is it working? No! It’s not working. So give it up.

Try something else. Figure out ways to work around it. What I’ve found for myself is that when you think about how to get out of the habit of nagging, you really find much better solutions, like writing a note.

Because then, you don’t have somebody’s nagging voice in your ear, but I notice actually a much more effective reminder or saying to yourself, “Things don’t need to be done on my schedule. I want this to be done right away.”

It doesn’t need to be done right away. Somebody else is going to do this. If they’re going to do the work, they can choose how to do it on their own schedule. If I want it to be done now, I have to do it now. That’s a choice.

Habits Of Healthy Relationships Checklist

Luis Congdon When I was reading through your habits of healthy relationships and the Happiness Project, one of the things you talked about is having checklists.

How often were you checking your checklist? That’s one of the hardest things when we’re talking about changing some aspect of our lives.

How are you using your checklist with happy habits for every couple?

Gretchen Rubin I use my checklist quite a lot because I sort of enjoyed it when I was writing The Happiness Project.

One of the things that often happened when I would talk to people about The Happiness Project or Happier at Home, they would ask, “But how did you get yourself to stick to doing all this? How did you actually follow through?

Was it the resolution chart? Was it this checklist? How did you actually make yourself do it?” The fact is, I used this checklist, and I really enjoyed using it, but they weren’t so crucial, and I didn’t have trouble keeping them.

As I was writing about habits of healthy relationships, it became clearer and clearer to me that people have really different aptitudes for forming habits and really different attitudes towards habits.

That fact is, I find it pretty easy to form happy habits for every couple, and I feel very positively towards habits. Neither one of those things is universally true. One of the things I do in Better than Before is identify four tendencies.

I divide all humanity into four tendencies, and while I began writing that book I thought I was pretty typical when it came to habit formation. As I was writing the book and came up with this framework, I realized I’m not typical.

I’m part of the freaky friend, and I really had to rewrite half the book once I understood I am not typical.

I have an extreme personality, which by the way, came as a surprise to knowing to me. But I didn’t understand that about myself.

21 Habits Of Healthy Relationships

Gretchen Rubin One of the things that led me to be interested in habits of healthy relationships was that so many people were curious how to get themselves to do these things, and that wasn’t really the hard part.

I realized for a lot of people, that is the hard part. The follow-through is the hard part. That’s what Better than Before is all about, like what are these 21 strategies depending on who you are and what you’re like.

Different ones will work better for you or will be less effective, and each one of us has to pick and choose the ones that work for us.

Just because something works for you doesn’t mean it’s going to work for me. Or, just because something works for my husband doesn’t mean it’s going to work for me.

Sometimes, that can lead to a lot of conflict because one member of a relationship thinks, “Oh, this is the right way to do it. Let’s do it this way,” and the other person is like, “No! My way is the right way.”

Kamala Chambers I’m really curious. For anyone who hasn’t read your books, what is a checklist, and how do we use it in a relationship?

Gretchen Rubin I call it a Resolution Chart, which is just I wrote down every resolution I wanted to keep, and I check off every night whether I did it or not.

That’s using the strategy of monitoring to see whether you’re keeping a habit, which is just paying attention to whether or not you are keeping a habit.

The fact about monitoring is we all tend to do a better job of something when we monitor it, like making a loving comment to your spouse.

Check that off. Monitor that habit and find habits of healthy relationships. As we monitor something, we tend to do a better job.

Having A Happy And Healthy Relationship And Big Goals

Gretchen Rubin Sometimes people think, “Well, this is too important” or “This is too transcendent to be monitored.” If it counts to you, figure out a way to count it.

I want to have quality time with my daughter. Well, every week I try to spend 2 hours with her by herself doing something fun. I can check that off or not.

That’s a quantifiable thing that I can actually measure. And I think it’s really helpful not to have vague aims like, “I want to be more present in a moment. I want to have more meaningful relationships.”

Translate your goal into actual action that you can measure because then you really know what you’re expecting from yourself. We talk about habits of healthy relationships.

There is a sample of my resolution chart and a blank template for anybody who wants to see how I used it and wants to fill in one for themselves because I do think that this really does help people change behavior.

Kamala Chambers If you have like a relationship goal, you can go there and just fill in the action steps that you want to take every day or weekly for the health of your relationship, right?

Gretchen Rubin Absolutely. You might have many things that you want to do, little actions you want to take every day that you want to stay on top to see if you’re really doing them.

Gretchen Rubin Like a big gift on Valentine’s Day is going to be less important than being loving in a smaller way the other days of the year.

Easy Habits Of Healthy Relationships

Gretchen Rubin I think it’s helpful to think about what you can do will strengthen a habit we have in our house now.

Not just for me and my husband but for my children too. What is probably most important for my husband and I is every time somebody comes and goes from the apartment, they get a big hello and goodbye.

Because I realize we were sort of just vaguely acknowledging each other coming and going, and that was sort of a bad feeling.

Now, it’s like, if my husband walks in at the end of the day, I put down my book, I get up out of my chair, and I go to him.

Give him a hug and say “Hello! How was your day?” Instead of just barely lifting my eyes on the page and grunting out, “Ahhh”, which is what I used to do.

Until I realized that wasn’t the habit I wanted. It makes a big difference. It doesn’t take a lot of time, energy, or money, but this habit of really acknowledging when people come and go.

It just makes you feel like you really matter to people. They really care about seeing you leave and seeing you come back, and they really care about you and your experience and want to connect with you every time they see you.

It is surprising to me what a difference that habit made and the atmosphere of my home. Again, it’s not a big deal. It’s not hard to do.

Luis Congdon We have somebody in our house who is incredible every time we come home.

Showing Love And Relationship Satisfaction

Gretchen Rubin Your dog! Right?

Luis Congdon Exactly.

Gretchen Rubin That’s what everybody said. I get a big greeting from my dog, and then my family members can care less. That’s not good.

You don’t want to get a bigger greeting from your dog than from the love of your life. You want at least this good, if not better.

Luis Congdon It’s hard to compete with him. 

But there is a lot to be said. I’ve watched him and the way that he makes me feel special and thought if I just apply that more often to the people in my life, I could be transferring that same feeling he gives me to other people.

That’s a great little thing, and that’s something we definitely teach in our classes with couples is a hug and a kiss that’s a little longer and more special than the other hugs or kisses when you greet each other or when you say goodbye to each other.

Gretchen Rubin One of the things that struck me was the research that shows married couples treat each other with less consideration than they treat friends or even strangers.

So the person you treat with the least consideration is the person who’s your soulmate. One of the habits of healthy relationships that I try to cultivate is to treat my husband with the same consideration that I would treat somebody else.

An example is I said to my husband, “Oh, I’m going to the drugstore. Do you need anything from the drugstore?”

It’s a tiny thing, and it doesn’t take any extra effort, but it’s just that little bit like, “Hey, I’m just thinking. Is there anything I can do to make your life a little easier?”

Even if you don’t need something from the drugstore, it’s nice to be asked. I really had to cultivate that habit myself. I have to say, I was not in the habit of doing that.

Habits Of Healthy Relationships On A Daily Basis

Gretchen Rubin I’m kind of like, “If you need something from the drugstore, pick it up on your way home. It’s not a big deal.”

Luis Congdon So, Gretchen, one of the things that you did really well in The Happiness Project is you created a theme for the month.

I know when I create my little transformation checklist, I have a checklist of things, errands I need to do, things I need to do for the week, and things I want to change, and before I know it, it’s hard enough for me that even want to go look at those checklists.

Gretchen Rubin Every checklist should include something that could be done in the first five minutes for morale-boosting purposes because they can become quite overwhelming.

Luis Congdon Have you come across when people are designing to change habits, they write this long list, “Be kinder, stop nagging, clean the house,” and next thing you know, there’s like a thousand things, and you’re like, “Oh my God. I’m just so screwed up.”

Gretchen Rubin My habit project was incredibly thorough, and I did a million things, and you don’t have to do all of those.

You could just pick and choose a few. I think it is really helpful to think, “Where do I want to start?” Like, be kinder. That’s a great example.

That is very vague. It’s a great aim, but what does it mean to be more kind? How would that actually translate into action?

Is that like I’m going to say ‘hello’ to every person I know when I drop off my child at school? Does it mean I’m going to yield when people are trying to merge into traffic?

4 Habits Of Healthy Relationships

Gretchen Rubin Does it mean I’m going to exchange a few words with every sales clerk?

What does that actually mean? Because you may come to the end of your day and you’re like, “Was I more kind?” It’s hard to say. Or maybe you remember one kind of thing that you did, and you’re like, “Oh my gosh! I was kind all day.”

It’s better to think of what are the specific actions that you could turn into habits. Start from the beginning.

One of the things I talked about in Better than Before, and I certainly saw this in The Happiness Project and Happier At Home though I hadn’t really analyzed it properly, was that there are certain habits that are foundational to other good habits.

If you’re going to start anywhere, these are really good places to start because they going to make it easier to do everything else.

1. Eating and drinking and not letting yourself get too hungry.

When people are hungry, their self-command drops and that’s when you’re irritable. You lose your sense of perspective and your sense of humor.

And what I found is when I feel bad, I act in a bad way, and then, I feel terrible and guilty about the fact that I just snapped at my children or snapped at my husband.

Then I behave worse because I feel terrible. That’s not a good thing. Drinking lowers inhibitions. That’s part of what’s fun about it, so it’s not good if you want to exercise.

2. Getting some exercise

It boosts energy. It doesn’t deplete energy, so you want to move around. You don’t have to train for the marathon.

3. Getting enough sleep.

You got to get enough sleep. If you don’t get enough sleep, you’re going to be just exhausted and drained.

Inner Calm

Gretchen Rubin For a lot of people, out of order contributes to inner calm.

Cutting a handle on junk, getting rid of stuff you don’t use or you don’t love, or you don’t even know what it is, throwing it away, giving it away, and getting it in its right place is something that often makes people feel more energetic, more creative, and more loving in a weird way.

Over and over, people tell me that when they get control over this stuff in their life, they feel more in control of their life generally, and they just feel more cheerful, more loving, more creative, and more energetic.

Obviously, that can be a big source of conflict within relationships. One person is like, “Hey! Let’s spend the weekend cleaning up the house. That sounds amazing.

I would love to have a clean and orderly house,” and the other person’s like, “Are you insane? I’ve worked all week. I just want to lie around on the couch. I don’t want to clean up the basement.”

I have a lot of suggestions for how you can handle that kind of situation because it’s certainly something where people have different tolerances for disorder and different senses of what’s the right level of order. That can be difficult to manage sometimes within relationships.

Kamala Chambers I really want to reiterate to everyone that this is something you can do right now and make a commitment in your relationship.

Do a relationship happiness project. find habits of healthy relationships. Make this list. Get clear on what it is you feel is going to make your happy relationship go even better. You can listen to past interviews we’ve put out from other experts.

Commit To Habits Of Healthy Relationships

Kamala Chambers What they say about how to make your relationship better. All these things you’re saying, Gretchen, about you don’t want to be hungry because you might get crabby, going to the gym, even that can support your relationship.

So I just invite you as a listener right now to make that commitment to do a relationship happiness project for you and your partner and find habits of healthy relationships.

Kamala Chambers Are there any other closing thoughts you want to leave the listeners with?

There Is No One Size Fits All Habits Of Healthy Relationships

Gretchen Rubin The thing that I’ve come to believe most in all my study of habits of healthy relationships, happiness, and habits is that there is no magic, one-size-fits-all solutions, and we all have to find out what’s true for us.

We can build a happy life only on the foundation of our own nature, our own habits, our own interests, and our own values. Since I’m in a relationship, the better I understand myself, the better I can understand my husband because I see how he’s alike, and I see how he’s different from me.

It’s not that one of us is right and one of us is wrong, but how do we get to a place where we can both thrive and we can have this warm, loving relationship?

And it’s really through self-knowledge that that comes. You think being focused on yourself would take you away, but actually, when you understand yourself, you’re more able to turn outwards.

Kamala Chambers Really powerful. Thank you for sharing habits of healthy relationships.