Habits for Happiness
Gretchen Rubin

We all have habits we want to break or build.

With so much advice out there, it's easy to feel overwhelmed. What’s the best, most efficient way to change a habit? The truth is, there's no one-size-fits-all solution.

Imagine a solution that works for you. This course promises to support you in working on 1-3 specific habits throughout the year so that by the end of 2025, you have successfully built these positive changes into your life.

This course isn't about magic bullets or thirty-day streaks.

Instead, it's about helping you:

01
Identify

Identify 1-3 habits you're truly committed to changing.

02
Unpack

Unpack the why and how behind those habits.

03
Personalize

Identify the personalized strategies that will make them stick.

04
Maintain

Receive tailored support and feedback throughout 2025 to keep you on track.

A Proven Approach to Habit Change

Created by six-time New York Times bestselling author Gretchen Rubin, this course is based on her blockbuster book about habit change, Better Than Before. It’s packed with new insights and tools.

The Habits for Happiness course is customized for you. Through personalized engagement with Gretchen and her team, you’ll learn how to build the habits that are most important to you.

Paperback book of Better then Before by Gretchen Rubin

What is the Habits for Happiness course?

This course is a personalized way to work on 1-3 habits in 2025 and make them stick! The course includes:

Interactive support to help you tackle your aims throughout the year

  • Seven hour-long live workshops with Gretchen where the content is tailored to address your questions.

  • Monthly progress reports, where you share what is working and what isn’t. Gretchen and her team will provide feedback and suggestions based on your specific questions.

  • Habits concierge email service. Stuck or having an issue? Write to our dedicated email service and receive support between the monthly progress reports.



A variety of tools that you can use to figure out what works for you, including

  • A Habits for Happiness Library with audio, video, and written content covering the core strategies for habit change, along with practical advice and ideas for articulating the habits you want to build. Explore these resources on-demand and cast votes to shape new content published each month.

  • A Companion Journal to help you monitor your progress and identify what’s working for you.

  • A free premium subscription to the Happier™ app for the year (a $79 value) with exclusive content created just for course-takers, such as monthly challenges and weekly Know Yourself Better prompts.

How is the course set up?

We will start in January with a deep dive into how to articulate your habit in a way that’s concrete and measurable, so you set yourself up for success in 2025.

We will then spend the next several months identifying ways to strengthen your habit and support your progress. In the spring, we’ll help you keep up steam and truly turn these aims into ongoing habits. Through the summer, we explore common roadblocks and pitfalls, as well as how to overcome them. We’ll also check in on your progress and offer longer-term strategies to help you keep going. We will round out the fall by helping you think through how you might evolve your strategies or maintain momentum as you approach year two of your new habit.

Common Questions

This course is designed to help you build the habits that are most important to you. Whether you want to be more consistent with your creative pursuits, deepen existing relationships, or increase your energy during the day, Gretchen Rubin and her team will help you identify 1-3 specific, manageable, and measurable habits that will add more happiness to your life. 

If you need some inspiration, consider these eight habit categories that tend to make the biggest impact:

  1. Energy: exercise, sleep, recharge

  2. Productivity: focus, work, progress

  3. Relationships: connect and deepen

  4. Order: clear and organize

  5. Purpose: reflect, identify, engage

  6. Mindful Consumption: eat, drink, spend, scroll

  7. Mindful Investment: save, support, experience

  8. Creativity: learn, practice, play


Remember, there’s no one-size-fits-all solution when it comes to happiness, so it’s important to choose the habits that reflect your natural tendencies, values, and interests.

The aim of this course is to help you develop a personalized toolkit to integrate positive habit change into your life by the end of 2025. We encourage you to focus on 1-3 habits so that you can focus more deeply on the habits you’re truly committed to changing. By focusing on fewer habits, you can intentionally experiment, receive tailored feedback on your progress, and apply insights as you go. Fewer habits also means you’re more likely to not just get them started, but also to make them stick.

Nope! This course is self-guided and self-paced. The tools and resources—such as call-in episodes and articles on different habit strategies—are accessible at any time through the Habits for Happiness Library. You choose how much time you spend exploring them. Each month, you’ll send in feedback via a monthly progress report and receive personalized input from Gretchen and her team. These progress reports should take about 30 minutes. Throughout the year, you’ll be invited to join seven hour-long live workshops. These workshops are tailored to respond to participant questions and inputs. If you can’t attend live, workshops will be available on-demand afterwards.

You set the pace. There is no “syllabus” you need to catch up on, and through your monthly progress reports, we’ll offer suggestions to help you stay on track or figure out adjustments to maintain momentum.

This course is designed around Gretchen’s research and the framework outlined in her bestselling book Better than Before

“The Happiness Project lays out life’s essential goals… her new book, Better Than Before: Mastering the Habits of Our Everyday Lives, serves as a kind of detailed instruction manual on how to achieve them.”

New York Times

“A wealth of insight from psychology, sociology, and anthropology in an illuminating field guide to harnessing the transformative power of habit in modern life”

Brain Pickings

“[Gretchen Rubin] delivers this immensely helpful guide to improving our lives through building good habits… full of insights that sound familiar and advice that sounds less what you should do and more like what you want to do.”

AudioFile Magazine

About Gretchen Rubin

Gretchen Rubin

Author

Gretchen Rubin is one of today’s most influential and thought-provoking observers of happiness and human nature. She’s known for her ability to convey complex ideas—from science to literature to stories from her own life—with levity and clarity. She’s the author of many bestselling books, such as The Happiness Project, Better Than Before, and The Four Tendencies, which have sold millions of copies in more than thirty languages. Her most recent book is Life in Five Senses. She’s also host of the popular podcast, Happier with Gretchen Rubin, and founder of the award-winning Happier app, which helps people track their happiness-boosting habits.