Hi and welcome back to the Carol Markowitz show on I Heart Radio. It's a little

over a week into the new year, but I'm still taking stock of the last year and thinking about

what I'll do differently for 2024. Like I said in the last episode, I'm not big on New Year's

resolutions, but I do like to think about how to improve my life and how to move forward and be better.

Just have a better year than I did the last year.

I had a really mixed 202323 like I think a lot of people. My book

Stolen Youth came out in March and honestly it was a hit. My co-author and I made

multiple bestseller lists. We were all over TV and radio.

I toured all over the country for months and I spoke to so many groups, did so many different events.

It really went well. That same month that the book came out, we had

a Bat-Mitzvah for our daughter. A Bat-Mitzvah is a Jewish rite of passage. It's a religious ceremony that commemorates the child becoming a

grown-up and it usually comes with a party about the size of a wedding. Actually it was about

three times the size of my own wedding and it was quite a lot. It was amazing. It all went really great. But the book and the Bat Mitsva, they were beautiful, amazing, but extremely stressful and it was a stressful time in the last year that I still haven't quite gotten over.

Then we launched this podcast in October. I had had offers to do my own show over the years,

but I really never entertained one until this. And look, it's going great. So many of you are out there

listening. I hear from you and I feel so lucky. I'm busy all the time and it's a good busy, but it's still quite a lot. I had eye surgery in May that forced me to take a few weeks off, but otherwise I have never worked

more in my life than I did in 2023. In a lot of ways it was a very very good

year, but the truth is that all of that stressed me out and I didn't sleep

that great for a lot of it. I'm not an anxious person I'm very chill but I'd feel

this anxiety in my sleep about all the things that I needed

to get done and there was no real reason for the stress like I'd wake up in the

morning after a night of stressing about something and think that's a really silly thing to be

...