Meet Gretchen Rubin, the happiness bully

Jones founded a happiness group which meets in the Baltic Ray Café in Dartford. “Gretchen sent me a lot of resources that I needed to set up the group,” she says.

Rubin did not halt at one bestselling book on how to be happy, of course. Within two years she had published another, on how to be even happier. All the while, followers like Jones received a continuing series of homilies and parables on Rubin’s blog and sometimes in personal emails. Rubin sent out monthly reading lists; she told them to get enough sleep; she offered guidance on how to organise their households and avoid the evils of sugar.

Jones, 53, grew happier. Eventually, she went into the happiness business, too, offering consultancy services in contentment to local companies. She now spends two days a week teaching happiness. The other three days, she teaches accountancy.

Look, I say to her over the phone. Has this Gretchen woman really made you happier?

“She has, seriously,” she replies. “The last five years have been really hard for me. I was made redundant. I got into debt. They were going to repossess the house. In the middle of that I was still doing the happiness stuff.”

While her own life was in turmoil, Jones was busy forcing miserable office workers to sing and dance in her happiness workshops. People wondered if she was on drugs. Rubin “helped me to develop strategies” to cope with unhappiness, Jones says.

The ecstatic disciples of Rubin now await a third book, Better Than Before, which is published this month. It is based on a revelation that came to Rubin after lunch with one of her New York friends, who was trying to take up jogging. The friend had been a high-school runner; now she could not re-acquire the habit. Rubin describes mentally flipping through “my index cards of happiness research” and pondering the strange fact that even now, some people seemed incapable of following her advice on sleep, exercise and making one’s bed. Then, “I felt the sense of joyous anticipation and relief that I feel every time I get an idea for a new book,” she writes. “It was obvious. Habits.”

By forming good habits, we would no longer struggle to eat healthily or read great works of literature. Like Albert Einstein putting on the same grey blazer and shirt each day, we would no longer waste time thinking about these things; we would simply do them.

Rubin argues that whether or not we are able to develop a habit depends on how we respond to expectations, our own and other people’s. On this basis, she divides the human race into four groups. There are “upholders”, who meet both their own expectations and those of others. These are the star pupils, who push themselves relentlessly, both on their own behalf and for the gold star that society will award them. Rubin, of course, is an upholder. “I’m actually an extreme and rare type of personality,” she writes.

Then there are “questioners”, who query society’s expectations but meet their own; “obligers”, who meet everyone else’s expectations but fail themselves, and “rebels”, who do neither.

Once it is explained to them, Rubin says, people tend to feel happy about their “tendency”, with the exception of “obligers”. “They’re vexed by the fact that they can meet others’ expectations, but not their expectations for themselves,” she says.

I think about this while out drinking with my football team, nearly all of whom are called Matt. Matt the captain was recently sent off in a match for calling a referee the “c” word. “It’s the little things that rile me up,” he says. “Those people who have to enforce even the tiniest rule.”

Matt, I say, I think you are a questioner.

The Matts all look at me, and I explain about Rubin, who could make all their lives happier. Then I say: I’m afraid I’m an obliger.

“You’re a questioner,” says Matt. “You’re always asking questions.” The other Matts all nod over their pints. It’s nice of them, but in my obliger’s heart I know they are wrong.

Rubin writes that once she grasped these ideas, she “felt the same excitement that Archimedes must have felt when he stepped into his bath”. Having separated humanity into what she calls “the Four Tendencies”, “I truly felt as if I were discovering the periodic table of the elements,” she writes.

I rather like Rubin’s habit of comparing her own insights to some of the greatest achievements in the history of mankind. I start doing it myself around the house. I feel exactly the way Abraham Lincoln must have felt after he won the Civil War, I would say, after cleaning the kitchen.

Having sorted us all into four pigeonholes, Rubin tailors her advice to suit our tendencies. Questioners, for instance, need to be told why they ought to be adopting a habit; obligers need a deadline or some sort of external moderator – a personal trainer, for instance – who would be disappointed if they didn’t stick with the programme.

Reading her advice on how to become happier and more productive, I begin to wonder if Rubin really exists or if she has been invented by a shadowy cabal of businessmen to stimulate the world economy.

“What do you think Gretchen is like?” I ask Genny Jones, the Kent accountant and happiness coach.

“I think she must be someone like me,” she replies. “Nice, bubbly, getting on with life. She must be a warm person you can relate to.”

I go to meet Rubin on a snowy Friday afternoon. Her apartment building is a grand, Georgian-style affair in the fanciest part of the Upper East Side, in New York. She sends me very specific instructions on how to get up to her floor via the service lift and repeats them over the intercom while I stand among the white pillars that hold up her porch.

In her book, Rubin quotes a writer called Gretchen Reynolds, who adopted the habit of standing on one foot while brushing her teeth. “My balance and confidence improved noticeably,” this other Gretchen writes. The true Gretchen, our Gretchen, tells us that she now does this too while riding up to her apartment in the lift. The thought of her standing on one leg in the lift every day really does make me happier.

She is having her portrait taken when I arrive, standing by a mahogany dining table. Rubin is a thin, almost brittle-looking woman with sharp grey-blue eyes and the expression of someone who has already tolerated quite enough nonsense for one day. Through a doorway I glimpse a library of leather-bound books. I am struck by the idea that even if money does not buy happiness, happiness might be quite profitable. I wait in a spotless sitting room, as she fetches coffee.

“Where do you keep the index cards of happiness?” I ask. I’d imagined a large filing cabinet, reaching up one wall, akin to the one in which Joan Rivers kept her jokes.

“Oh, no, they weren’t literally indexed,” she says.

What about the Secrets of Adulthood? (These are the commandments and truisms that govern her existence. First and foremost: “Be Gretchen.” Also: “Just because something is fun for someone else doesn’t mean it’s fun for me.”)

“Well, I do have a list, but it’s just like a list on a computer,” she says.

I must admit I had been hoping for a stone tablet of some sort. I suppose this is because I have come to think of Rubin as the leader of a new religion.

“Oh!” she says, carefully. “Interesting.”

With all these followers setting up groups, I say, it sounds like the formation of the church. Rubin, by this analogy, would be the pope of happiness, presiding from her splendid apartment.

“Hmm,” she says. She mentions Oprah Winfrey – a woman who certainly does inspire religious fervour. “But I don’t think I inspire that kind of feeling, and I don’t want to.”

She will acknowledge that people are slightly fascinated by her, partly because she serves as the guinea pig for all her happiness projects. On the other hand, “When I’m writing I’m so interested in the ideas and trying to convey the ideas, I don’t sit around pondering what’s going to happen to every individual person.”

But she does sit around pondering. She writes of seeking to solve “the riddles of how to change ourselves and how to change our habits [that] have vexed mankind throughout the ages”.

I’m not trying to compare you to the Buddha, I say. But didn’t he sit around meditating and striving for happiness and perfection, without setting himself up as an object of worship?

She nods. “He really resisted that. Everyone is at the centre of their own life, so it’s hard for me to know how I come across to other people.”

Rubin, 49, would like to have been a monk. They get into all kinds of habits, of course, though the main attraction for her would be “the regimentation”. Rubin loves a schedule. She is like all those strivers who conquer the world, but would be so much happier if it could be run along the same lines as their secondary school, with a rigid timetable. Her life seems planned to the millisecond: she even schedules time in which to “goof off”.

She grew up in Kansas City. Her father was a lawyer; her mother stayed at home but “was very civically engaged”. Her younger sister, Elizabeth, is now a TV writer in Los Angeles and bears the brunt of many of Rubin’s theories.

When I suggest that she is a hard taskmaster, Rubin demurs, and then says, “OK, I do sometimes get in there and try to nudge people around, but I try not to too much, because I could become unbearable.”

Occasionally, she is seized by a desire to intervene in the lives of people she sees eating sugar. “I just want to constantly say, ‘Oh my goodness, you’d be so much happier! Why are you eating this fruit smoothie?’”

She worries about this tendency, particularly when it comes to her sister. “She does call me a happiness bully,” she says.

Rubin studied English at Yale, where she met her husband, Jamie.

“I saw him in the library and I was like, ‘Oh, my God, who is he?’ And then we started going out and it was very romantic.”

Jamie is now the senior partner of a large private equity firm. They have two daughters, Eliza, 15, and Eleanor, 10. His father, referred to in the books as “Bob”, served as secretary of the treasury during the Clinton administration.

Rubin initially pursued a career in law and won a clerkship with the Supreme Court judge Sandra Day O’Connor. Then she switched to writing. Her early non-fiction books were high-minded but also played to her tendency to order the world into lists. Forty Ways to Look at Winston Churchill worked on the idea that one person could be described in a multitude of contradictory ways that were all historically accurate.

While Rubin was busy dissecting Churchill, a happiness movement was gathering strength in academia. Two American professors had pioneered a new field of “positive psychology”, focusing not on the disorders that rack the human brain, but on ways to make people happier. Economists began to fret about happiness too. David Cameron, newly installed in Downing Street, ordered the Office of National Statistics to start measuring the national level of happiness. At the United Nations, there was a happiness conference, and March 20 was designated the International Day of Happiness. The date “was to do with the spring equinox”, says Mark Williamson, 41, director of the British charity Action For Happiness.

“It has gone from being the territory of grandmotherly wisdom and religion to having a lot of science behind it; science that to some extent does really tell us what makes us happy,” he says. “What Gretchen does quite nicely, and what we try to do, is combine the science with your own lived experience … She is an example of someone who is experimenting with their own life, with what works and what doesn’t work. She does particularly deal with middle-class American mums of a certain age, but I think the principle is good.”

I’d wondered about this: how the life choices of a wealthy Manhattanite could seem germane in Arkansas, or Kent. Rubin hails from a world where people have nutritionists and personal trainers and seem to live like Edwardian aristocrats – the staff just have different names and no longer live downstairs.

Then another Gretchenite explained it to me. “I have a history of enjoying my life,” says Bea Strickland, 76, who runs two happiness groups in San Jose. Self-help literature is filled with people overcoming the most appalling circumstances to achieve happiness. “Gretchen seems like a person who was pretty happy in her life,” says Strickland. “She just wanted to improve things. I can identify with that.”

Strickland’s most recent happiness meeting was attended by couples, a teacher, a few retired tech workers and a woman who had become dissatisfied with her knitting group. “We talked about living in the moment,” she says. “We examined a raisin.”

A what?

“A raisin. We looked at the raisin; we smelt it, touched it and talked about it. We came to the present moment, what we are doing right now.”

You discovered your raisin d’être, I say. Strickland laughs, either because she genuinely thinks it is funny, or because her life is devoted to making people happier. She doesn’t charge for these group happiness sessions. Neither does Genny Jones, the accountant in Kent, though Jones makes £250 an hour for her corporate happiness work and she is creating a line of products to offer her happier customers. “The happiness tool box, for instance,” she says. (It contains happiness cards and funny glasses.) “That will set you back £9.99,” says Jones.

This makes me wonder about Rubin. If happiness is an industry, then she is its first tycoon. Is she the first happiness millionaire?

“No,” she replies. And then: “Define your terms.”

Well, could you estimate your earnings from happiness?

“Well, I could,” she says. I ask her to and Rubin gets rather exasperated. “People don’t usually talk about what they earn,” she says. “It’s my work. I don’t think of it as a business. I don’t have employees. I would say my profession is as a writer.”

It’s probably unfair to accuse her of being a happiness profiteer, because she is genuinely, almost terrifyingly, interested in improving the lives of others. Rubin’s book is full of stories about her sweeping in joyfully to rearrange someone’s cupboards. I think she must be exaggerating, until I ask her for help improving my own life.

“What needs fixing?” she says, lurching upright and clapping her hands, suddenly coming alive. I ask her if I need to take up yoga. With every year I live in New York, this thought nags at me with greater force. “I think you need clarity,” she says. “Do you think you sufficiently want the habit of doing yoga?”

Not really.

“Then I don’t think you want the habit of yoga.”

We move on, with great clarity, to an issue raised by my wife. She says I never put things back in the same place. The epicentre of this dispute, the Balkan conflict that triggers a larger conflagration, is the cupboard above the sink. Sometimes I put the glasses to the left of the cups, sometimes I do the opposite. I point out that it can’t be a habit if I’m doing a different thing each time.

“It’s a habit,” says Rubin. “Do you care about the cups and the glasses?”

Of course not.

“Does she?”

She sees it as a symptom of a broader problem. She says I carry out sudden, snap purges in which I stuff everything into the nearest drawer. This makes her worry about losing things, so she leaves things out, and so on, in a vicious cycle of tidying. Rubin appears absolutely fascinated.

“I have something that is going to be so satisfying to you,” she says. “You would think it is easier to put things away generally. But it’s actually far more satisfying to put things away very specifically.” She points to her own kitchen, with its clean, empty sideboards. “We have five kitchen drawers,” she says. “You don’t just put the corkscrew in a kitchen drawer. You put it in a specific place in the kitchen.”

She says my wife and I need to spend a weekend deciding where everything goes. She threatens to come over and supervise this process personally. “Then it’s like: ‘Here’s the flashlight! The flashlight goes here!’” she says. “And it’s like an archer hitting the mark. It feels very satisfying.” Rubin says her parents recently came to stay and asked her for some AA batteries. “I was like, ‘I can tell you exactly where to go. Go back there to the second shelf on the right hand side. You will see a basket. In that basket are batteries.’”

Rubin asks more questions about our untidy apartment. “Oh, my God, I want to come over and help. That sounds like so much fun, I can’t tell you,” she says. “To me, ‘Where do the flashlights go?’ is, like, so fun.”

When I get home and tell my wife what we must do, she says: “I don’t think Gretchen has grasped the profundity of your problem.” A friend, whom I advise to read Rubin’s work, declares: “She’s a monomaniacal busybody.” But after an hour and a half in her company, I find I really like Gretchen; she is alarmingly efficient, but self-aware and quite funny, too. I think a lot of us would like a Rubin in our lives. Just as men once made supplications to a deity who told them how to establish their households and muzzle their oxen, now there is a quieter, but equally insistent voice, telling us where to put our flashlights and saying: “I just think you need clarity on the yoga.”

What sort of person are you?
Gretchen Rubin believes we all fall into one of four distinct groups or “tendencies”.

Upholders
• You respond readily to both other people’s expectations and your own.
• You wake up and think, “What’s on the schedule and the To-do list for today?”
• You want to know what’s expected of you and meet those expectations. You avoid making mistakes or letting people down.
• You have little trouble meeting commitments, keeping resolutions or meeting deadlines (you often finish tasks early).
Negatives
You may struggle in situations where expectations aren’t clear or the rules aren’t established. You may feel compelled to meet expectations, even ones that seem pointless, and also feel uneasy when you know you’re breaking the rules, even unnecessary rules, unless you work out a powerful justification to do so.

Questioners
• You question all expectations, and will meet an expectation only if you believe it’s justified. • You’re motivated by reason, logic and fairness. You wake up and think, “What needs to get done today, and why?”
• You decide whether a course of action is a good idea and resist doing anything that seems to lack purpose.
• You make well-considered decisions.
• You are intellectually engaged and often willing to do exhaustive research.
Negatives
Your appetite for information and justification can be overwhelming.

Obligers
• You respond readily to other people’s expectations, but struggle to meet your own.
• You wake up and think, “What must I do today?”
• You make terrific colleagues, family members and friends as you excel at meeting other people’s demands and deadlines.
Negatives
It’s difficult for you to be a self-motivator. You depend on external accountability, with consequences such as deadlines, or the fear of letting people down. The weight of other people’s expectations can make you susceptible to burnout, because you find it difficult to say, “No.”

Rebels
• You resist all expectations – other people’s and your own – acting from a sense of choice, of freedom.
• You wake up and think, “What do I want to do today?”
• You resist control, even self-control, and enjoy flouting rules and expectations. You work towards your own goals in your own way, and while you refuse to do what you’re “supposed” to do, you can accomplish your own aims.
Negatives
You often frustrate others, because you can’t be asked or told to do anything. You don’t care if “people are counting on you”, “you said you’d do it”, “it’s against the rules,” or “it’s rude”. In fact, asking or telling you something often makes you do the opposite.

Better Than Before: Mastering the Habits of Our Everyday Lives by Gretchen Rubin is published by Two Roads on Tuesday and is available from the Times Bookshop for £13.49 (RRP £16.99), free p&p, on 0845 2712134; timesbooks.co.uk