Thank you for joining us for episode 499 of Live Happy Now.

If you're feeling stressed or overwhelmed by holiday demands and obligations right now, you aren't alone.

But this week's guest is going to tell you how to snap out of it.

I'm your host, Paula Phelps, and today I'm joined by Julie Pottaker, a mindfulness

expert and author whose Mindful Methods for Life program offers easy to learn practices to create

more calm in your life. She's here to explain her snap method of mindfulness and walk us

through how to use it to get through the rest of the season and into the new year

with less stress and a greater sense of well-being. Let's have a listen. Julie, thank you for joining me

on Live Happy Now. I'm so happy. I try to live happy now. And you do a great job of it. And of course,

you do it in the present moment, as you mentioned, because you're all about mindfulness.

And I wanted to have you on the show this week to talk about holidays and mindfulness.

You know, there's one study that showed what a big challenge stress is during the holidays for people that said nine out of ten adults are suffering from stress because of either finances, you have family conflicts,

and work, things like that. So why is mindfulness such a great approach for managing or

countering this stress? Well, mindfulness is sort of a catch-all. I've never actually said this

before, but you know how when you're stuffy, you've got a stuffy nose and a sore throat and your head hurts and people say you have a cold, but it could be one of 200 different viruses.

Never mind. Never mind COVID, okay? That's the one we can actually test for, but all the other ones. So mindfulness is, I think of it like my toolbox. And my toolbox

is really mindful self-compassion. So it's all the different ways that I can manage my nervous

system. And that's how I teach people. So when they feel activated, it gives you the ability

to slow down and see what's up and not resist what's up and calm down

and feel better and choose a different channel for your mind to focus on because we have control

over that. Right. And we don't always know that we do until someone like you teaches us that.

Exactly. So how did you discover mindfulness? So my origin story, it was so long ago,

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