You can control what happens in your life.

"We forget we have the power to control what happens in between stressful times. " -Kristen Brown

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• Do successful people simply handle stress better?
  
• The origins of fight or flight and why that response is still with us today.
  
• What's the best natural anti-depressant and how can you produce it?
  
• What are the earliest signs of stress?
  
• What is Kristen's #1 productivity tip?
  
• And so much more...
  

Stress is something we all have, it's simply part of being alive today. But how we handle the times between stressful moments has a direct impact on how we cope with the actual stressors in life.

Kristen Brown, creator and author of The Happy Hour Effect joins us to talk about how making ourselves happy in between stressful experiences can help us cope with stress easier and lead to healthier, more productive lives. Listen in for all of that and more on episode 395 of The Art of Charm.

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Kristen Brown didn't simply wake up one morning and decide to create and write The Happy Hour Effect. No, life handed her one of the most stressful and heart-wrenching experiences possible: her young, fit and seemingly healthy husband died. He was 31 and had just been given a clean bill of health by his doctor.

Needless to say Kristen's life went into a tailspin. She was being forced to raise their 10-month old baby by herself, in addition to her very stressful corporate job.

Now facing single motherhood, Kristen was adding stress on top of stress. Her corporate job, which she had always loved, soon became a source of frustration rather than the solid rock it had always been for her.

With time she realized she had control of what was going to happen next. And she knew she could either be swallowed up widowhood or she could face life head on. She chose the latter.

Today she shares how handling stress of any kind or magnitude impacts us in every way, and how we live our lives during non-stressful crisis times also impacts our capacity to cope with stress. We also discuss the five elements of the happy hour effect, the two traps we routinely fall into and what GOALSS stands for.

The five elements of the happy hour effect are:

People: surround yourself with the right people who will lift you higher, not people who will bring you down.
Presence: check in with yourself and examine how you are engaging in your own life right now. What is your mood, what are your behaviors and are they helping the situation or environment?
Passion: Routines are good to help us avoid stress but we also need to stretch ourselves and build in passion.
Productivity: This is about making progress on the right goals for the right reasons so you impact others' lives.
Peace: You know stress is inevitable, but you also know you control the times in between the stressful events. This is also about how to you create the right routines and processes to make you feel in control, even when life gets hard.

Another aspect of the happy hour effect we discuss is the acronym goalss. Kristen created this acronym to help people create goals they set and actually achieved, not lofty goals way beyond their current lives. Goalss stands for:

G for gut check. Does it feel right in your gut? If it does, go for it. If not, reconsider and revise your goal.
O for obtainable. Be sure you can obtain your goals with what you're doing right now.
A for actionable. You should be able to take an action on any goal right now.
L for life-oriented. If you want to quit a bad habit but that habit helps you cope with the major stress in your life, deal with the stress first and then quit the bad habit.