Thank you for joining us for episode 454 of Live Happy Now.

It's February, which means the message of love and Valentine's Day is all around us.

But did you know that this is a make or break time for many couples?

I'm your host Paula Phelps, and today I'm talking with Dr. Julia DeGange, a neuropsychologist and author of the new book, Energy Rising, the neuroscience of leading with emotional power.

She's here today to talk about some of the common mistakes we make in our relationships and how we can improve those relationships by learning more about what our brains, not our hearts,

are doing to complicate things. Let's have a listen. Well, Dr. Julia, welcome to live happy now.

I'm so happy to be here, Paula. Thanks for having me. It's February. Love is in the air, but sometimes it's

not. So that's what we want to talk about because we have Valentine's Day coming up.

This is a whole month. I know it's Heart Month. We talk about our hearts. We talk about love.

And that puts a lot of pressure on people. And one reason I wanted to talk to you is your team

had sent me some pretty revealing stats about what this time of year does to couples. And it said that a survey showed

19% of respondents say that Valentine's Day is when their relationships hit the breaking

point. So what's going on with that? You know, I think that one of the hardest things, so I'm a

neuropsychologist, which means I'm a clinical psychologist with

specialized expertise in the brain. And so I'm always thinking about our relationships through the lens

of neurobiology, which sounds not romantic, but I swear God, it's very romantic. So the brain

hates nothing more than dissonance. The brain is a prediction machine. It's a pattern

detector. So your brain is moving you through life going apple, apple, fill in the blank,

should be an apple. Well, on Valentine's Day, what this means, when our brain is quite literally

in the business of predicting things based on context, your brain is going Valentine's Day,

hearts, love, romantic love, super intimate connection, sexual satisfaction, all these

expectations really start to get pretty intense. And for those of us who don't feel like our

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