Follow along with the transcript below for episode: SNAP Out of Holiday Stress with Julie Potiker
[INTRODUCTION]
[00:00:01] PF: 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 Felps, and today, I’m joined by Julie Potiker, 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 great sense of well-being. Let’s have a listen.
[INTERVIEW]
[0:00:43.9] PF: Julie, thank you for joining me on Live Happy Now.
[0:00:45.6] JP: I’m so happy, I try to live happy, now.
[0:00:48.5] PF: 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 10 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?
[0:01:21.7] JP: 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 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 tool box 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.
[0:02:09.5] PF: Right, and we don’t always know that we do until someone like you teaches us that.
[0:02:14.1] JP: Exactly.
[0:02:14.8] PF: And so, how did you discover mindfulness?
[0:02:17.4] JP: So, my origin story, it was so long ago because I’ve been teaching mindful self-compassion for 10 years already but about 15, maybe 18 years ago, I went to a neurologist for a workup because the wrong words were coming out of my mouth. I was so worried that I had a brain tumor. I would see a sign that would advertise cappuccino and I’d say, “Oh, I want a capatino.” I said –
[0:02:44.0] PF: Wow.
[0:02:44.4] JP: “Maginal” instead of magical, I said “Bunky burvy” instead of topsy turvy, and it was worrisome. It was funny with my kids, but it was worrisome, and when I had the complete workup and my brain was cleared from anything scary, he said, “What’s going on actually is too much stress.” And he recommended mindfulness-based stress reduction, and MBSR, which is a super-duper evidence-based old curriculum, created in 1979 by John Kabat-Zinn, 45 years ago for people in the pain clinic, at the hospital at University of Massachusetts.
So, that neurologist recommended I take that course. I took it at UCSD Center for Mindfulness because I live in San Diego. It’s taught at hospitals all over the planet but it was in my backyard at UCSD, and I thought, “Oh, this is fascinating, this is interesting, this is neuroscience.” I’m an attorney by education, I totally loved all the nerdy pieces of this, and so I started taking brain science classes, just online.
There was online back then, and then a few years after that, mindful self-compassion was created by Chris Germer and Kristin Neff, and because I was on the list served at UCSD, I got an email. “We have a new class, it’s called Mindful Self-Compassion.” And I thought, “Oh, it can’t hurt.” And I took that class and that was the class that was like, “Ah, winner-winner, chicken dinner.”
It took everything that I considered personally lacking in the MBSR class, and added to it. So, it was kind of built on the same platform but it was more explicitly being friends to yourself, parenting yourself, and really recognizing the common humanity, so that if you’re feeling depressed or anxious or fearful knowing that of the seven and a half billion of us, a billion people feel the way you do at the second.
It helps stave off depression, and depression was my issue more so than anxiety. I had been clinically depressed. I’m very intimately associated with depression, let me say that.
[0:05:06.1] PF: That’s an amazing way that you discovered it and then after you had entrenched yourself in it, you created your own method called SNAP, and before we get to what it stands for and walk through the steps, how did you discover your own flavor of it?
[0:05:21.4] JP: So, I’m always adapting everything because I’m a lifelong learner, and so even in teaching mindful self-compassion, I was adding in pieces from Dan Seagel or Brene Brown or Rick Hanson or some of the other phenomenal teachers that I had the benefit of learning from because I took the time to do it and I had the money to pay for the classes, just honestly, or I read their books, and then took their classes.
So, I would be teaching and I would say, “This is from this teacher, this is from that teacher, this isn’t in the curriculum but it’s from here.” So, I had to just change the curriculum, I had to make it a different name so that I didn’t mess up their brand, and then I was teaching Tara Brock, it’s not really hers, she took it from another teacher from the 80s. I was teaching her acronym RAIN, recognize, allow, investigate, nourish, that’s in my first book.
But I was adapting it as I was teaching it, and I realized during COVID, “Oh my God, we need an update.” RAINS from the 80s and I came up with SNAP. Actually, Rick Hanson helped me. So –
[0:06:38.0] PF: Boy, that is a great helper to have.
[0:06:39.0] JP: Yeah, he’s my mentor, he’s so generous with his time and his brains. I’m a positive neuroplasticity trainer professional from him but he helped me with SNAP because I had the soothing touch, which is the S, which we’ll – I can unpack the brain science for you, it’s mammalian caregiver but I can explain why.
[0:06:59.8] PF: Yeah, go ahead, yeah, we’ll have you give the acronym and what each one means, and then we’ll walk – let’s walk through each step and work on it.
[0:07:06.4] JP: Okay, so the S is “Soothing touch.” The N is “Name the emotion.” The A is “Act,” which is in two parts and the P is “Praise,” and I teach it with our movements for people so they can – it’s a neurolinguistic thing so that they’ll remember it. So, when I teach it, it’s like these – it’s like these dance moves going on, and I have people turn to the right and turn to the left and stand up and sit down and my husband’s like, “You’re doing the hokey pokey” and I’m like, “Yeah. People remember the hokey pokey.”
Anyway, so mammalian caregiver response, an infant cries out, an adult picks it up and holds it. “Baby, baby.” Oxytocin and endorphins floods that baby and that grown-up. We can do that for ourselves. “Wow, you’re kidding me, that’s huge.” So, when I was first – you can see that my hand’s in my heart but some people – some people, they cradle their face, some people, they hug their arms, some people, it’s hand in hand, some people, it’s rubbing their leg.
So, when I teach soothing touch, which is in the mindful self-compassion curriculum, I go very slowly, and I have people feel each one, and feel their good hands on their worthy body, and then they pick what their go-to is for when they’re feeling activated and it will calm them down. It will calm them down before they get their brain online.
[0:08:31.6] PF: And so, why is that? What is it about that touch that we do to ourselves that helps calm us immediately?
[0:08:39.7] JP: So, when you’re activating, you’re being flooded with cortisol and adrenaline, and when you do soothing touch, endorphins and oxytocin get released and it calms down, it like washes out the cortisol and adrenaline. So, you want to start that process right away. So, that’s the first thing you do, and then name the emotion, I like to think of name the emotion as just another one of those hacks because you’re waiting for your prefrontal cortex to come online.
It takes a dozen, 14 seconds, 12 seconds, it takes some time in there for it to come online, so naming it helps you do that. So, “Oh, this is fear, this is anxiety, this is grief, this is longing, loneliness.” Whatever could feel uncomfortable in your body. So, that’s the name it, name it to tame it, feel it to heal it, and then, the act is, “What do I need to hear right now?” And that’s the penultimate mindful self-compassion question.
“Oh, Julie, sweetheart, you’re actually safe right now. You’re in your office, you’re on a Zoom with Paula, you’re fine. It’s okay. It’s going to be all right.” You take the time to say what you need to hear, and then the part two of act is, “What do I need to do right now to shift my mood?” And that is the juice, that’s your toolbox. So, Paula, I have people free associate a joy list, everything that brings them joy.
[0:10:24.0] PF: Oh, nice.
[0:10:25.3] JP: And they write, you know, they write it down and they put it in different places in their house. Eventually, you internalize what makes you feel better but for a while, it helps to look, “Oh, call a friend, look outside, walk outside, move your body, have some tea, have some coffee.” Listen to that song, you know, plan a trip. You don’t have to go on it. You know, Facetime your grandkids, whatever it is, so that you change the channel because where –
Okay, so where energy goes, attention flows, neural networks grow. You’re creating a new neural network, a new bridge in your brain, I call them happy bridges, Rick does not call them happy bridges.
[0:11:10.5] PF: I like happy bridges.
[0:11:11.9] JP: Okay, that’s what I call them. So, the more happy bridges you have in your brain, the negative ones that you have from being a primate brain get pruned out. So, it’s important to take in the good when you’re finally feeling good so that you create those new bridges, and it takes a couple breaths of enriching and absorbing the good feeling in your body to go from state to trait.
[0:11:42.3] PF: I’m glad you brought that up because I was going to ask you in looking through all your materials, I wanted you to explain why breath is such an important part of this step.
[0:11:52.4] JP: You can use your breath as an anchor and that’s a meditative technique and you can just make sure, “Oh, you’re feeling all that, it was so good to talk to my best friend, and oh my gosh, we just Facetimed and I feel so good in my body.” And then, like, let that fill you up, and boom, you’ve created a happy bridge. So, it was the time that it took to take, I don’t know, three breaths, four breaths, five breaths.
And then, the P is the last step of snap and that’s praise. The praise step is cool because if you’re a secular person, it can be, “Good job, Julie.” And thank all my teachers. If you’re a deity person, you could be thanking God, you know, thanking Jesus, you could be thanking Allah, and that folds you into the gratitude practice, which I teach as a really important necessary component of well-being because the gratitude thing is up, down, and sideways, like, huge for wellness in every area of your life.
[0:13:04.6] PF: And let’s talk about that a minute because I do think that ending, the ending in praise and gratitude is one that gets overlooked, and so I love that that’s how you wrap it up, and can you talk about how your brain changes when you start using praise when you start flowing with gratitude?
[0:13:23.2] JP: It’s unbelievable. Somebody did a graph and he didn’t put his name, it was from HappierHuman.com and it’s the one I use when I teach, and it’s got all these bubbles and it shows that in every single area of your life when you have a gratitude practice all of the positive things go up and all of the negative things go down in your interpersonal relations, in your workplace. I mean, it’s every single area of your life.
So, I think it was James Baraz’s class like maybe 18 years ago that I took Awakening Joy and the practice that he recommended is the one that I teach and it’s every single night before bed, a journal, like pen and paper journal answering two questions, what did I enjoy today and what am I grateful for today, and I have found even in terrible circumstances, where I am caring for a loved one who’s terminal that there was something that I enjoyed that day.
It could have been the hospice nurse’s smile, it could have been somebody asking me really how I’m doing, it could have been anything, and then that flows usually that it ends up that you were grateful for that little tiny glimmer. Even when you’re in a really difficult time, there can be these moments, and when you know that you’re going to have to find one, you’re looking for them.
[0:15:07.4] PF: Yeah, it’s like you’re giving your brain a job to do all day. It’s like, “You have two things to do: You’re going to look for something that goes well and you’re going to look for something to be grateful for.”
[0:15:18.0] JP: Exactly.
[0:15:18.6] PF: And I love the whole idea of just setting it on that hunt and it will come through for you.
[0:15:24.3] JP: It’s so miraculous.
[0:15:27.0] PF: Let’s talk about this from the perspective of the holidays because it’s one thing for you and I to be sitting here and we’re relaxed and that we – it’s all good right now but people aren’t always in that situation during the holidays and a lot of things can go south, and so how do they put these four things together and how do we start practicing this now so we kind of have this plan and this tool kit to know what we’re going to do in these situations?
[0:15:53.6] JP: Well, I would start practicing soothing touch right away, like in the privacy of my own closet, bathroom, bedroom, living room, so that I knew which touch really soothed me and if you were going to be, let’s say, at a holiday dinner, you survived Thanksgiving already. We already had Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year is coming up, and Hanukkah and Kwanzaa, you know?
You might want to pick one, where just holding your own hands in your lap at the dinner table is going to soothe you because, with intention and attention, it will work. So, you already know you have your own back that way, right?
[0:16:41.0] PF: Right.
[0:16:41.4] JP: Which is great and –
[0:16:43.3] PF: And just knowing you have a plan is huge too, that it’s like –
[0:16:47.8] JP: I would actually – I would actually start a meditation practice if you don’t have one just so that you slow your role because meditation really helps you slow your role and it really helps you get in touch with mindfulness and I would just listen to guided meditations because they’re easy. You’re not alone with your, you know, radio station monkey mind going 24/7. You’re just following the prompt that the teacher is saying.
And then, when your mind wanders, “My butt hurts, my ankle hurts, I need to pick up orange juice,” you come back to the prompt, and then your mind leaves, “I forgot to call so and so back,” you come back to the prompt, and I had hundreds of them on my free podcast, Balanced Mind with Julie Potiker but you could use insight timer or calm or headspace. I like the ones that are free. I don’t think you should have to pay for this stuff.
[0:17:47.7] PF: Yeah.
[0:17:48.4] JP: So, anyway, I would do that, I would start that, and then I’m going to –
[0:17:52.2] PF: Let me ask you because I do hear this comment a lot when I am having this discussion with people and you say, “Have you tried a meditation practice? Have you tried just a, you know, 10 minutes of silence?” And they’re like, “Oh, if only I had the time.” So, tell me why investing, carving out that time, and making that investment will absolutely pay off and I understand people have – they’ve got children.
They’ve got parents they’re caring for, they’ve got all these things going on, and how with all those obligations do they carve out that time?
[0:18:25.3] JP: Well, when my kids were school-aged, I mean, they’re all grown up now, I used to meditate in the carpool pickup line.
[0:18:32.8] PF: Oh, nice.
[0:18:34.3] JP: Yeah, and then by the time their frantic little bodies got into the car, I was calm. So, I highly recommend that. When my mom is sick and dying, I would meditate with headphones. I actually got her into meditation very late in her life and she was in and out of the hospital and there was somebody on Insight Timer’s voice that she liked. I actually thought his meditation was annoying, which is another thing. If you find one that’s annoying, there’s hundreds of thousands of them.
[0:19:11.8] PF: Just keep looking.
[0:19:12.8] JP: Just keep looking, choose somebody else. I would just push play, she’d fall right back to sleep on the one that she liked, right? So, I would play around with carving out this time because it’s going to help you, it’s going to help your brain, it’s going to help your body, it’s going to help your wellness, it’s going to help you live happier. It very well might help you live longer and it’s for sure going to help you live better.
So, it’s the biggest self-care thing that you can do, and if you say I just can’t do it, okay, try walking meditation, try Qigong, try Tai Chi, try yoga, try one of those moving thingy do-is that are just as beneficial because they’re a meditation with your body in motion if you think you can’t sit still but I would try the sitting still thing because you’re allowed – as long as you’re not doing zen, you’re allowed to wiggle your body.
[0:20:14.3] PF: You don’t have to sit there with your eyes closed, you can still – I think that’s important. As you just talked about being in the school line.
[0:20:21.0] JP: Yeah.
[0:20:21.7] PF: And there’s other ways to do it.
[0:20:23.5] JP: You just brought up something really smart. So, I’m an advanced trauma-sensitive mindfulness teacher. So, the eyes closed, the eyes open thing that you just mentioned is huge because if you are a trauma survivor, it is more comfortable usually for you to not close your eyes, just a general downward gaze. So, if you hear a teacher say, “Close your eyes” and you close your eyes, and you get these terrible scary images coming up, please, open your eyes.
So, when I guide people, I say or in general downward gaze, and when I’m actually teaching a class we kind of dig into that whole thing so that people feel comfortable in their body, in the space, in the room, like you could stand up, you could leave, stop the practice, get a glass of water, there’s you know, there’s a million ways that the meditation teacher can make sure that you don’t retraumatize yourself.
[0:21:26.3] PF: That’s excellent, I’m really glad you brought that up.
[0:21:29.4] JP: You brought it up.
[0:21:32.6] PF: I didn’t know I was bringing it up. So, back to our people heading into the holidays, so they practice a soothing touch, they start fortifying themselves with the meditation practice, even if it is five, ten minutes a day right now, and so then what can they do next to really plan to evade the stress that’s going on?
[0:21:53.3] JP: I would write a joy list just free associate so that they can actually remember all the things that bring them joy and I think that you can set an intention to not talk about religion or politics if you’re going into a family setting where people might have very different views and I don’t know if all your listeners are all over the world but in a lot of governments right now, not just in America, we’re divided, and in America, we’re shockingly –
[0:22:28.0] PF: Mega-divided.
[0:22:30.1] JP: Shockingly divided, so before I went to my son and daughter-in-law’s for Thanksgiving, I knew that I wasn’t going to talk about politics and if politics came up, I was going to gently redirect with another conversation. I had a plan.
[0:22:49.1] PF: Right.
[0:22:50.0] JP: So, that I didn’t have anxiety about what was going to happen, some of it’s like you get anxious about seeing uncle so and so or aunt whoever, or those people that you know, whatever so, and you don’t need to be right, you just need to get through the holiday with love, and also realize that people really want to feel say and free from suffering, right? And the rest is kind of like noise and you can’t control it and you can’t change their mind.
And it’s not your job to be the professor of women’s rights and you know what I mean? Like the stuff that really upsets me, I am not going to talk about it.
[0:23:33.8] PF: Right, I have other people I can talk to.
[0:23:36.2] JP: Exactly.
[0:23:38.1] PF: It will have a better outcome.
[0:23:40.0] JP: Exactly.
[0:23:41.9] PF: Yeah, and so even if we create these safe places for ourself and these soft landings, it can sometimes in the moment then go off the rail. You know, we have these intentions, like I’m going to do the soothing touch, I’m going to name that emotion, I’m going to act, I’m going to breathe, and then we get into the thick of it, and that goes out the window. So, how do we keep it inside, keep the window closed, keep it, that practice at hand?
[0:24:10.6] JP: I think you have to have a plan. I mean, it doesn’t go out the window for me anymore because I’ve been practicing so much. So, you know I always say that you have to practice when you don’t need it, so you’ll have it when you do because it becomes almost like muscle memory but I would always just have a plan to de-escalate. Just have a plan to de-escalate whatever it is and to just see just like me, this person wants to be free from suffering, and free from pain.
We got through things giving pretty unscathed and I can say that my daughter-in-law’s family did not. They really got into it but we had already left. So, I heard that there was all kinds of fireworks going into the meal and I heard after we left that there were fireworks but we weren’t a part of –
[0:25:02.4] PF: You missed the show.
[0:25:04.5] JP: And I am expecting, I’m expecting to sail through the rest of the holidays that way.
[0:25:10.5] PF: So, as we go into this, we can make our holidays more calm even if the situation around us is not calm.
[0:25:17.6] JP: Exactly.
[0:25:18.2] PF: And then how can we use that as the foundation of moving into a new year? We know 2025 has the potential to be very tumultuous and I know there’s a lot of anxiety about that.
[0:25:30.4] JP: Yeah.
[0:25:30.8] PF: So, how do we use the tools that you’re giving us now to get through the holidays as the foundation to go into the new year?
[0:25:36.6] JP: Keep bringing it back to yourself, back to your own nervous system. You can only do what you can do with what you’ve got at the time, right? Just continue to try to be the light, be the beacon, share your light when other people’s lights dim, get other people’s lights when your light gets dim. You need to keep replenishing yourself.
[0:26:04.1] PF: Right.
[0:26:04.7] JP: So, just marshal your own energy and your resources and continue to love yourself so that you can have an impact on what’s important to you.
[0:26:13.1] PF: That is fantastic advice, I love this. Julie, we’re going to tell our listeners how they can find your books, how they can find your podcast, how they can find everything about you. We will not give your home address out, I promise, but everything else, they’re going to be able to find so that they can follow you and learn more information from you.
[0:26:30.1] JP: Thank you.
[END OF INTERVIEW]
[0:26:35.7] PF: That was Julie Potiker talking about using mindfulness to manage holiday stress. If you’d like to learn more about Julie, all of her on social media, discover her books, or enjoy some of her free meditation downloads, visit us at livehappy.com and click on this podcast episode, and while you’re there, be sure to sign up for our weekly Live Happy Newsletter. Every week, we’ll drop a little bit of joy into your inbox with the latest stories, podcast info, and even a happy song of the week.
That is all we have time for today, we’ll meet you back here again next week for an all-new episode, and until then, this is Paula Felps, reminding you to make every day a happy one.
