Welcome to Episode 225 of Live Happy Now.

I'm your host, Paula Phelps, thanking you for joining us.

If you've been listening to Live Happy Now for the past couple of years, you're probably already familiar with today's guests.

Tiffany Schlain founded Character Day in 2013 as a way to recognize the importance of character strengths

and to take a day to observe and celebrate them. This year, she's combining the celebration of

Character Day on September 27th and 28th with the release of her new book, 246, The Power of

Unplugging One Day a Week. For Character Day, she's encouraging everyone to take the day off

from their screens following the Jewish tradition of Shabbat and using it to find more time,

connection, and well-being. She sat down with me to explain more about how we can all unplug

and what it can do for us. Well, Tiffany, it is great to have you back on Live Happy Now.

It is so great to be back. It's an evolving conversation, which is always fun. It is. And you have something very new to add to it

this year. Yes. I'm pretty excited about this because it's something that all of us deal with

and we're all trying to figure out how to make this work because you look

at how we can unplug and you talk about unplugging a whole day a week from technology, which a lot

of people think can't be done. So I think to start, can you tell us what made you decide to start

unplugging? Sure. It was about 10 years ago and I was like everyone else online

all the time with that smartphone glued to me. And my father, who I was really close to,

died of brain cancer and my daughter was born within days of each other. And those two moments

just kind of shook me by the shoulders and made me think, like, what are you doing?

We only have a short amount of time on this earth and how do you want to live? And it was really clear to me.

And again, this was before everyone, I mean, it's gotten so much crazier with people just staring at their phones all the time.

This was 10 years ago. But I knew it didn't feel good how distracted I was feeling.

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