Welcome to episode 312 of Live Happy Now. May is Mental Health Awareness Month, and since we also just celebrated Mother's Day, it's a great time to look at where those two things intersect.

I'm your host, Paula Phelps, and today I'm talking with Dr. Jill Bolt-Taylor about mom rage.

This condition has become a popular topic as mothers deal with the added stress of parenting during a pandemic.

Dr. Jill, author of Whole Brain Living, is here to talk about the four characters we all have that help manage our emotional reactions.

Then she'll teach us how becoming acquainted with them

can help control how we feel. Jill, welcome to Live Happy Now. Thank you, Paula. I'm so excited to be

with you. Well, we could not have picked a better time to talk because not only is today the day

that your book launches, but it's also right after

Mother's Day and it's Mental Health Awareness Month. So first of all, do you think it's a

coincidence that Mental Health Awareness and Mother's Day fall in the same month?

No, you know, there you go. I wonder who put that together. And they were very clever.

Yeah.

Yeah, that's kind of, I was thinking about that this morning as, you know, I was reviewing some of the materials for the show.

And I was thinking like, what a coincidence that is, if it's a coincidence at all.

Well, you know, it's a time when we really need to love the one who runs our lives because, oh my gosh, running the life is an enormous task.

Yeah. And the more lives you have to run, the bigger the task. So. Exactly. And it's messy.

Yeah. Yeah. It is. Because, you know, our hallmark version of Mother's Day is all like, oh, you know, mom did this for you. And it's like, we have all the cards and flowers and hearts. And that's not our day to day living most of the time for many of us.

Yeah. And, you know, everyone needs to be appreciated. So it is nice that moms get a day, but it's also nice that mental health gets a month.

Yeah, we need it. Because you have, you're talking about mom rage. And first of all, this is a phrase, I didn't realize it had been around until I spoke with your people. And then I did

start doing some diving into mom rage. And boy, this is a real thing. So for those who don't know what

mom rage is, can you explain to us what it is? Mom rage is, each of us is wired to alarm, alarm, alert, alert when we don't feel safe.

And we all have this threshold that fluctuates between when we actually, things that we can

...