Thank you for joining us for episode 548 of Live Happy Now.

We have now officially entered the holiday season, which means some of us are already starting to feel a little bit stressed.

I'm your host, Paula Phelps, and this week I'm joined by licensed mental health counselor Travis McNulty,

clinical director and founder of McNulty Counseling and Wellness in Florida. He's here to talk about

how we can de-stress this holiday season and overcome the emotional overwhelm that keeps the season

from being its merriest. Travis shares tips to help us ward off seasonal anxiety before it sets in and tells us how setting

better boundaries can turn holiday chaos into calm. Let's have a listen. Travis, thank you for

joining me on the show this week. Of course. Thanks for having me. I'm excited to connect. Oh, yes,

so am I, because it is the holiday season, which means everybody is

incredibly busy, and that's why I wanted to talk to you. We wanted really talk about how we can

address that emotional overwhelm that accompanies this season. So to start this off, let's start

with a seemingly simple question that is, why do the holidays cause so much

stress for us? Yeah, absolutely. And it's a great question. I think it's so easy for us to get

sidetracked in what the ideal holiday looks like. You know, we watch Hallmark and we see

everybody's opening presents, the family's getting along, snow's falling down,

but I think the holidays can be so much different depending on family dynamics,

but also the weight that we carry from like a performance-based perspective from going in

from our careers into family life and transitioning.

And I think the brain just becomes habituated and desensitized

into perform, perform, perform. And then when it comes to, okay, let's chill and relax,

it's really difficult to downregulate that nervous system. Do we have some culpability in this

stress that we feel like? Do we start dreading it? Do we start going,

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