[00:14] Rachel: Hey, writers, welcome back to Story Magic, the podcast that will help you write a book you're damn proud of.
[00:18] Emily: I'm Emily.
[00:19] Rachel: And I'm Rachel.
[00:21] Emily: And today we are talking with creative coach Gal Yardi about creative burnout. And this is a topic I am so excited. I've talked to Gary about this a couple of times on Instagram Lives and just personally because it's a topic that we're both very passionate about. And I'm just so excited to talk to you all to just have this discussion with Rachel and it's going to be great. So welcome, Gary. And so we're so excited to have you.
[00:51] Gauri Yardi: Oh, thank you so much for having me. It's great to be here.
[00:55] Emily: Of course. Would you mind introducing yourself to folks? Just kind of introduce who you are and what you do and where you are because you have a fantastic accent.
[01:07] Rachel: Cheers.
[01:08] Gauri Yardi: Yeah. So I'm in Melbourne, Australia, and I'm a writer and multi passionate creative. The multi passionate creative part is new and I'm also a Naturopath and creative well being coach, which I know is a lot of things. But basically my focus is on helping creatives of all kinds who aren't creating as much as they want to because of fatigue. And I help them build up the energy to return to or focus more on their art. And in my work, as I know we've discussed before, I really focus on the body, especially the nervous system, and how we can engage it as a creative partner, and how connecting with and caring for your nervous system and your body can help you establish like, a really fulfilling, sustainable creative practice. That's me in a nutshell.
[01:57] Emily: I love it.
[01:58] Rachel: I'm so excited for this. Yeah, we talked on a couple you said it's important work and I just want to call out before we jump in how important it is because we were talking on an episode, it's not going to be out, but we recorded it already about how coming out of burnout can save your life. It completely impacts the way you do creative work. It is your body taking care of it and that allows you to be creative. It's important work. People often brush off of like, I'm fine, I'll just go to sleep early tonight. And you're like, it's not quite like that.
[02:41] Gauri Yardi: Yeah, and I've noticed that beautiful writers, especially, we're very cerebral, right? And we just float around as though we're just a brain, when actually the brain is literally housed in your physical body. And taking care of the body takes care of the brain, which takes care of you as a writer.
[02:59] Emily: Yeah, absolutely. And the brain, I feel like we put this pressure on our brain to not get like the brain isn't a thing that can get tired, right? It doesn't feel like your body. This happened to me yesterday because I started working really early because I was just like, woke up and I was motivated. So I started working at like seven, and then at 03:00, I was like, I have so many more hours. I was like, but my brain, it's not going to happen. And my husband was like, you've worked a full day, maybe that's why. But it's crazy. I've done all this work on burnout and I recognized it, but it still catches that narrative of your brain is not a thing that tired. You should be able to push it.
[03:44] Gauri Yardi: To the end of the Earth.
[03:46] Emily: It's just ridiculous.
[03:49] Gauri Yardi: Yeah. And I think that's a lesson that many of us have to just learn over and over again, because we're taught that your brain should just always function and it should always function perfectly. And it's somehow like a moral feeling if it can't. Yeah, it's a machine, right?
[04:03] Emily: Exactly.
[04:03] Gauri Yardi: And it's just not a machine, it's part of nature.
[04:07] Emily: Yeah, I love that. Can you break down for us? Because I like how you described what you do as like, helping tired and fatigued creatives. What is the difference? And I think we can kind of define burnout through this, but what is the difference between fatigue and just being tired and actual burnout?
[04:27] Gauri Yardi: Yeah, so there's a couple of things. So the first thing is degree of severity. So tired is kind of just like, oh, I'm a bit tired, I've done a bit too much today. I'll have a sleep and I'll feel better. Or I'll have the weekend off.
[04:40] Emily: Exactly.
[04:41] Gauri Yardi: I'll have the weekend off, I'll feel better. Fatigue is deeper. So it's kind of like, now I'm really exhausted and it's taking me a while to get back to full capacity. And that can take a varying amount of time, depending on who you are. Burnout hangs around for weeks, if not months or years. So it's a level of severity and it's a level of time. So I guess the best definition or the simplest definition of burnout that I can give is that it's a state of physical, mental and emotional exhaustion. And exhaustion means nothing left in the tank versus tired. It's like, I don't feel so great, but I'll be okay. Yeah, I guess it's important to understand that there is a spectrum within burnout itself as well. So at one end of the spectrum, you can be perfectly functional in pretty much every aspect of your life and then just not have anything left in the tank for your creative work. So that's one end. And then on the other end of the spectrum, you can be suffering from sort of a broader burnout that's affecting your function in several aspects of your life and then there's everything in between. So I guess the take home point here is that you can be burnt out without being, say, unable to get out of bed or unable to function generally. So a lot of people think burnt out, well, I'm still functioning, I'm still able to work, I can't be burnt out, but you actually can. Yeah.
[06:16] Rachel: I've mentioned this on the podcast.
[06:18] Emily: I think, once or twice before.
[06:19] Rachel: But before the call, I was telling about a client that I was working through this with. And from almost the moment we jumped on our first coaching call, it was like very clear that she was experiencing burnout and didn't know because she was able to show up in all other aspects of her life except for her creative life. And I'm sure we'll get to this, but I feel like I'm kind of driving us there right now. But she constantly called it procrastination, of like, I can't be burnout, I'm just procrastinating, I'm just lazy, I'm just tired night, I'll just do this thing tomorrow. And then weeks of persistent pushing off. How often do you see procrastination as like a symptom of burnout?
[07:11] Gauri Yardi: Yeah, so it's fairly often, definitely. But it's not the only reason that people procrastinate. So you can't kind of go, I'm procrastinating, I must be burnt out. You could sort of say, I'm procrastinating and I'm exhausted, I might be burnt out. But there is sort of like a constellation of other symptoms or experiences that we can look out for to help assess the likelihood that a person's burnt out. And so these include things like procrastination, but also irritability or self doubt or extreme self criticism or cynicism. And the more of these types of experiences or symptoms or thought patterns that you have alongside exhaustion, the more likely it is that you're burnt out. So for anyone who's listening, who's like, oh, this is ringing bells for me, I don't know if I'm burnt out. I actually have a quiz on my website that kind of goes through all of the different symptoms that can be associated with burnout. And you can just sort of see how many you tick off. And that can be really helpful to figure out, is this burnout or is this something else?
[08:16] Emily: Yeah, that's so good. Yeah, because I feel like that's the hardest part of burnout is realizing you're burnt out. I really think that's the hardest piece is because A, it shows up in so many different symptoms, like you just said, and B, it's basically in terms of hustle culture language. I'm going to say something I don't believe, but right in terms of hustle culture, would tell us, if you admit that you are exhausted to the point of being burnt out, then you have failed in some way. Right? That's what culture tells us. And so it's this thing of like, well, I have all these symptoms, but I can blame them on all these other things. That was my experience. I was like, well, I'm tired because of this thing. I'm irritable because of this thing. I'm procrastinating because of this other reason. And blaming all the individual symptoms for all kinds of other things. And then the mask of, well, if I actually look at this and admit that all of these are tied to the deeper problem of me being burnt out, then I'm admitting that I have failed the capitalistic machine in some way. And so it's really hard to personally see it. But also when I work with clients and stuff, sometimes clients are really resistant to acknowledging and friends.
[09:46] Gauri Yardi: Right?
[09:46] Emily: We can see our friends and be like, you are so clearly burnt out and they will reject that idea. And it's like until they're willing to look at it and accept it and acknowledge it, it's so hard to move forward and heal from it.
[09:59] Gauri Yardi: Absolutely. Should we talk about what's at the core of burnout? Because that might help people sort of understand.
[10:03] Emily: Let's do it.
[10:05] Gauri Yardi: Yeah, absolutely. So the crazy thing about burnout is that every single case is caused by one thing and one thing only. So each person, like you sort of touched on Emily, each person has a unique set of circumstances, like life circumstances that contribute to burnout. But these things, they don't really cause burnout except insofar as they cause the one thing that is at the center of burnout. And that thing is chronic stress. So chronic stress puts pressure on your nervous system. So anyone who's listening, who doesn't really understand what the nervous system is, it's just a system within your body that's made up of your brain, your spinal cord, and all of the nerves that run throughout the whole of your body. And stress puts your nervous system into fight, flight or freeze mode. And the thing to understand about that is it's a very energy hungry process. So if you're chronically stressed, your nervous system is constantly or repeatedly pouring your energy into that stress response. And a key thing here, and this connects up to hustle culture, is that your body and nervous system, they require time to rest and recover that energy that's used up by the stress response in order for you to be able to continue doing what you want to do in life, which includes creating. But we've all been kind of steeped in hustle culture. And hustle culture says that we can only take the time to rest once we earn it right? And the way that we earn it is by grinding and by producing. And the unfortunate thing is that the goalposts keep moving so you never really do enough to earn rest. And hustle culture also says that our productivity determines our worth. So if we're not productive, then we're less than. And I always think about that phrase, productive member of society, which is such.
[12:02] Emily: A gross phrase, but it just really.
[12:04] Gauri Yardi: Tells you about hustle culture and what we believe is a worthwhile member of society. So in a society where productivity determines worth, what does that mean about resting? It means that it's discouraged. Right? So when rest is discouraged so deeply, we don't fully allow ourselves to rest, which means our nervous systems never really get the chance to build up that energy. And then we hustle and we grind until we can't anymore. Until we burnt out. We're burnt out. And a lot of burnt out creatives really struggle, like you said, to identify as burnt out, because if they're not able to produce and they have to take a break, they feel worthless. And that's really heartbreaking.
[12:55] Emily: Yeah. It's like admitting that you're burnt out means you're admitting that you need to recover. And that's admitting that there's a certain amount of unknown amount of time in which you're not going to be as productive in quotes as the world wants you to be and as you might want yourself to be. Right. I remember that exactly being frustrated at how long it took me to recover because it was like, I want to get back to my stories. And obviously there are ways to get around that, but it is it's acknowledging that you have to take time off from producing. And in the creative space, it's producing something you very passionately want to produce. Exactly.
[13:45] Gauri Yardi: And you probably have cases. Yeah. And you probably have big goals and dreams for. And it could be something that you've wanted your whole life. And now you're like, I'm doing it. And then suddenly your body's like, no, you're not. You can't right now. And it's one of the most frustrating experiences.
[14:00] Rachel: Yeah, that's such an interesting way that you just said your body says no, because as much as you want to fight against being burnt out and push through it, you will reach a point where your body's like, done.
[14:15] Gauri Yardi: You cannot.
[14:16] Rachel: There's no energy left. And then you're just stuck. You're in that place of exhaustion. You're in that place of, why can't I do anything right now? Why do I feel so unmotivated? Or why do I feel so with everything creative? Because your body just hits that wall.
[14:37] Gauri Yardi: 100% and society will tell you to keep pushing, push through. Pain is gain all of those sorts of messages, but that's pretty much the worst thing that you can do if you're burnt out. The worst thing is to just keep hammering yourself because eventually your body will be like, I have to send stronger signals to shut this down. And so the symptoms will become stronger. And from personal experience, there was one year that I burnt out and I spent nearly nine months only able to really watch television and work a couple of days a week. That was a whole year when I could have been creating if I had not burnt out.
[15:12] Rachel: Yeah. I feel like I'm just in my head is that phrase like, you'll rest when you're dead? You're like, well, you keep pushing against this bird.
[15:26] Emily: My dad says that all the time I'll sleep when I'm dead.
[15:32] Rachel: Man, it's going to catch up. It does, 100%.
[15:37] Gauri Yardi: And in the meantime, you just get less and less functional and you're less and less able to do the things that you yeah, that attitude, it's not.
[15:46] Rachel: My um in our community tenacious writing we do periodically like live coaching calls where Emily or I will host a call and our members can come and ask us questions. And last night on the call it seemed like every single person was just hitting a wall of I can't finish my scene, I don't know what's going on. And one person in particular, we were diving into it and she said I think I need to set some sort of a timeline to motivate myself there. I was like do you think that would help? Why would you want to do that? And she was like no, I don't really think it would help. But I've heard this writing advice that you have to treat writing like your job and I just was like oh, my heart felt like it was breaking. Because that's like the creative killer. I think that you can treat your writing as fun, as hobby, as love, as whatever it is that you want it to be. But as soon as you start thinking about it as like you have to produce x amount of things in X amount of time like you would a job, it just kills everything about your job.
[16:54] Emily: It's like a factory. Because I feel like that's really what they're saying is if you treat writing like it's a factory then because factory and job are so linked in our brains and work and job and all of those words fit into this linear factory line type of productivity.
[17:23] Gauri Yardi: It's so true and it's just another kind of branch of hustle culture. And the funniest thing about it is we think that we need to treat ourselves like factories to be able to produce consistently. But actually hustle culture is the enemy of consistency. It is very hard to create consistently if you feel like you have to show up to your art, say every day and do the absolute most and you maybe haven't done enough if you don't leave a writing session like broken or exhausted. And if you set expectations that are too high. And so many creatives do this because Hustle culture tells you to, right? Like hustle creativity culture is like you have to grind, you have to produce. You can only really show up for a very small amount of time relatively maybe a couple of days to weeks before your nervous system in your body start to pull you away. And your nervous system, its one job is to keep you safe. And if you make your creative practice feel draining, exhausting, like you're leaving your sessions broken, your nervous system is going to start to say creating is not safe. So I need to pull her away or pull him away from creating. And you'll start to procrastinate.
[18:47] Emily: That's so good. I have a client and listening to you say that this is entirely what happened to her is she'd been trying to produce in that factory mindset. When she came to me, she hadn't been writing for probably nine months. She hadn't written a word because nine months ago she'd done a word count challenge that just broke her. We had a lot of conversations about how she had to rebuild trust with herself, that sitting down to write could be enjoyable, it could be safe, right, that it didn't have to be this, like and so part of it was about saying, I give you permission to not finish your assignments, right? I give you permission, like, permission giving that she's learning how to give herself now, but also setting different boundaries around what her goals were. So instead of having word count goals, her goal is to show up and write a paragraph, like, minimum, three times a week. That's her goal. And then she's not allowed to write for more than 90 minutes for the purpose of not overstretching her creativity. And it's taken we are probably a couple of months into it now, and we were just talking last week about how it's so much fun for her now to sit down right, because she has taught herself that it's safe. And I think that that is something that we don't talk about enough, is that safety piece about teaching ourselves that it's safe. And that takes time. It takes consistently showing up when it's uncomfortable, doing something weird, until you've proven to yourself and you have a backlog of writing dates that were fun to prove to yourself that it's. Yeah, I love that.
[20:39] Gauri Yardi: Absolutely. That's so great. And I think this is a really common experience for people who do word count goal challenges because the challenge is usually set by somebody else in the community, right? So it might be what they can do or what they think one should be able to do. And so then often we're contorting ourselves to fit this external thing and they're very motivating, don't get me wrong, you can get quite a lot of words done, but then you can be exhausted afterwards, and then you spend several months not creating at all. Whereas if you were to find what's a good amount of time for me, or what's a good goal for me, and just try and do that as many times as you can, you're probably going to write more overall.
[21:21] Rachel: Yeah. There was a time when doing Nano to call out a writing challenge. Nano. For anyone who doesn't know, national Novel Writing Month is November. The word count goal is to write 50,000 words within the month of November, which is roughly about 1667 words a day. And I would have loved the momentum that it gave me, but I would pretty much only write during the month of November because the rest of the year I would just be like, oh my God, so tired. But then I had a baby and I went through like, oh my God, my body told me, you cannot do this anymore, and had my period of straight burnout, not being able to do anything. All these circumstances piling on and making me so exhausted and tired and healed from that, healing from that. And I did nano this last year, and it was completely different, but my mindset was completely different. I did not go into it feeling like my worth was attached to producing those words and that I also did not believe it was possible for me to fail. What I mean by that was like, any words I wrote were great. So if I hit 50,000, awesome. If I hit 20,000, whatever. If I did one day, okay, cool. It was a much different mental experience and I did not feel the same level of exhaustion that I felt every other time I had done it before.
[22:51] Gauri Yardi: It felt sustainable.
[22:53] Rachel: But my point is that that was a goal I set for me. That was not a goal that I was trying to reach, to have a measurement of external validation, to compare myself to the other writers that were doing the challenge at the same time. And I had done all this work to already unshame my productivity attachment. It was different. I was amazed, I was very nervous going into it that I was going to work myself back into a hole. But I think I had told Emily back then, I need to see what is the limit, or not the limit, but what is comfortable for me. And if it's too much, then I will stop.
[23:32] Gauri Yardi: Yeah. And that's so important. That's so, like, I think sometimes things like Nano can give you an experience of failure over and over and over again. So you feel like, if I don't hit the 1667 words a day or whatever it is, then I've failed in some way. I'm not a real writer, or I don't really want this, or we start thinking other people can do this, why can't I? When if you take that failure piece away and you're like, well, let me just do this as an experiment, and maybe I don't have to reach the 50,000 words, maybe I'll just see, like, where do I get to? And any words is a success. And that just gives you a completely different experience. It's completely different. In your nervous system, one is a threat, really, it's kind of like unsafe, and then one is very safe. It's like, we're just going to see what happens, and everything that happens is okay.
[24:32] Emily: Can we dig into that a little bit deeper? Like the connection between mindset and harmful narratives in our brains and how that contributes to burnout? Because I think that can seem like crazy, like, oh, my thoughts are making my body tired, but it's not. There's science behind that, right?
[24:49] Gauri Yardi: 100%. If you just think about how the brain controls literally everything, right? So something happens in your brain and your foot tingles or something happens in your brain, and there's, like, this weird chemical reaction going on in your liver. Like, anything that goes on in your brain has a flow on effect to your body, but we somehow think of thoughts as separate to that. Thoughts can trigger off a cascade that sets off a stress response in your body, and that uses up energy. Now, I don't want to create any fear around thoughts for anybody. I don't want anybody to be sitting there and going, oh, God, I have to think positive all the time because that's its own form of stress. But yeah, having a mindset that's very critical or your inner critic is really loud, or you count things as failures when maybe they aren't really failures. In the grand scheme of things, that can have an effect on your nervous system in that it activates it, and that uses up your energy, and you need rest and recovery from that.
[25:51] Emily: Yeah, I think that was a big piece of my burnout was the narratives, the lazy. You're lazy. You shouldn't be tired. You have no excuses. All of those voices were making me more exhausted. I think that's really common.
[26:10] Gauri Yardi: Yeah. And that's part of the long term recovery from burnout, because you can focus on the body and the nervous system, and you should. But if you don't do any work on mindset or unlearning any of the patterns that you've inherited from society or your parents or that kind of thing, you can be in a situation where you burn out repeatedly. So both pieces are important. You have to look at mindset, although that can take quite a bit of time to unlearn, because there's lots of things that we've picked up from places.
[26:44] Emily: That are whole while we were children.
[26:46] Rachel: Exactly.
[26:48] Gauri Yardi: So I think the two approaches work really well together. So looking after your body and your nervous system and starting to do some of that mindset yeah.
[26:57] Rachel: I'm reminded of something that we say a lot, and I'm sure you say it too, Gary, of, like, rest with shame is not rest. Like, you can't rest if you're feeling shame about resting. It is not rest 100% if your mindset is telling you that taking a break is bad or trying to shame yourself because you need to rest, and then you go and try to rest in that same mindset, you're not doing yourself any favors.
[27:23] Gauri Yardi: Absolutely. But I want to acknowledge that we're not taught to rest without guilt. So if there's anyone listening who's like, I don't know how to do that, that's fine. Most of us didn't know how to do it until we saw rest modeled for us or we read books or encountered ideas that showed us that, well, actually, rest is important. Rest is our right as people.
[27:46] Emily: Yeah. For me, it was partially I did a lot of learning. Like I engaged with your resources, with Amy McNeese resources, with Devin Price's book the Laziness Lie. That book broke up my whole worldview. Just shattered.
[28:05] Gauri Yardi: Me too.
[28:05] Emily: Because I think you do it's okay to seek external permission, right, to seek those voices that are continually saying, I mean, we do this all the time. There's a reason we have multiple episodes already, right, is that we need to hear constantly that it's okay to take rest. And so I think for me, part of climbing out of burnout was seeking those resources and then also practicing rest, even when I felt guilty or felt ashamed or it felt awful, because resting can feel really terrible if you're not used to doing it. And like I was saying earlier, continuing to show up to rest when it feels awful, because eventually you'll learn to trust that you can rest and the world won't fall apart. You can rest and no one's going to shame you.
[28:57] Rachel: You can rest.
[28:58] Emily: And it might feel good sometimes it just takes time. Time and practice.
[29:03] Gauri Yardi: Yeah, absolutely. Time, practice, and exposure to different ideas and different people embodying those ideas. It's a skill. Rest is a skill. And we're not taught it. Some of us are, but many of us aren't. And it's okay for it to feel weird or wrong at the beginning because it won't always feel weird or wrong.
[29:25] Emily: Yeah, absolutely. I want to touch on sort of just splitting for people, and obviously there's crossover, but can we talk a little bit about the difference between general life burnout and creative burnout? Because I think you can be burnt out in both. Oftentimes if you're burnt out in your life, then you're going to be creatively burnt out, but you can also just be creatively burnt out. So can we kind of pick that apart for people?
[29:54] Gauri Yardi: Yeah, absolutely. So creative burnout is a funny thing because it's a subset of general burnout, but you can, like you said, have it in isolation. And here it's really about what is a particular person experiencing. So is it that they've just got nothing left in the tank for their creativity because they're using it up everywhere else, but actually everywhere else is fine, it's just the creative piece is just getting left behind? Or are they just across the board exhausted and experiencing that general life burnout that you mentioned? And their creative work as a part of their general life is also falling by the wayside. So it's a bit of like an academic distinction rather than anything that we could say, oh, well, creative burnout looks like this in the brain or the body, and general burnout looks like this. It's all filtered through the nervous system and it's all sort of a subset of chronic stress. Yeah, I don't know if that answers your question.
[30:51] Emily: No, it does. I think so. Last fall, I did a push to finish my draft, and this was a time in which I was not burnt out in the rest of my life. I had really done a lot of work to rest and heal and recuperate from the burnout that I had a few years ago. And so when I was working on my draft, I kind of worked towards an intentional creative burnout because I had a goal I wanted to reach and I knew it would be a push, I knew it would be a stretch, and I knew that I would need a month or two off. And I ended up needing and taking and honoring that month or two, several months that I took off afterwards to recuperate from that. And so I think sometimes it's that creative burnout. Think of it as like your creative well, right. You can pull all of it from it and push to a deadline, but you have to know that what's going to happen afterwards, and you have to plan for that and not shame that because you're going to have to refill it. And that's going to take time, and oftentimes it takes more time than you thought it was going to take.
[31:56] Gauri Yardi: Absolutely. And this is a question I get from a lot of people. It's like, what happens if I have a deadline and I just have to work beyond my capacity? And it's like, well, that's fine. Sometimes we have external deadlines that we have to work towards and the consequences of not meeting them are too big or something we're not willing to shoulder. So that's fine. But again, like you said, it's in the planning. It's like acknowledging that this is going to take it out of me and I'm going to have to build in a sustained period of rest, and I have to honor that because otherwise I could carry that burnout for longer than I need to. It's okay to burn yourself out consciously as long as you are thinking through it ahead of time and planning for that rest and recovery and really taking care of your body during that time as well. Yeah.
[32:46] Rachel: Would you say that in order to choose that or to feel really comfortable with that choice, that this person ideally would know how to rest, would know what would revive them or what would help them through recovery?
[33:02] Gauri Yardi: Absolutely. Yeah, definitely. And also I would say that they would be someone who would be willing to at least rest a little bit each day so that they're not emptying the well before they finish what they need to finish. So it is a bit of an advanced move. Yes.
[33:18] Rachel: I was just going to say this is intermediate. I'm a beginner. I love it.
[33:23] Emily: Okay, let's go back to the beginners who are listening to this and like, I would love to be there. How do I get there? How do I get that in control of my own energy? Where do they start? Where do you start in learning how to find that balance?
[33:42] Gauri Yardi: Yeah. So the first thing we kind of touched on it just a little bit, but there's two main approaches to recovering from burnout and I recommend that they're taken at the same time. But for people who are actively burnt out right now, I would look at the second approach a little bit, but I'm getting ahead of myself. So the first approach is to look at your unique set of contributing factors. So everything that's going on in your life right now and even any internal factors that are contributing to your burnout. So that mindset stuff that we talked about, things like perfectionism, an inner critic that's off the rails and see if there's anything that can be modified or changed. So if you've got external responsibilities, if there's anything you can delegate or drop, I would start there. But if there's things that you can't really get around or work through in a short period of time, that's okay. And that's why the second approach is important and this is why my work focuses on it. That and it's a pretty neglected approach, which is to focus on caring for your nervous system and your body in a holistic way so that you learn to create moments of rest and recovery regularly that your body can use to recoup the energy that it's kind of used up during the stress response. And the particular approach that I've created to facilitate this is called the four Pillars of Nervous System Care. And this is just a way of conceptualizing what a really strong foundation for nervous system care might look like. And the four pillars are rest, presence, Nourishment and Movement. And I go into these in a great amount of detail and also practical detail in an on demand masterclass that I have called Recreation. And yeah, we deal with rest first because that's usually the most important part for people because without the rest piece, the other pieces don't have a chance to work as well as they could.
[35:43] Emily: Yeah, it's so good. Do you still have the four pillars guide on your website or is Recreation.
[35:49] Rachel: The best place to find?
[35:51] Gauri Yardi: I would probably start for beginners, I would probably start if you're wondering whether you're burnt out, start with the quiz that I mentioned earlier. If you're thinking, yeah, I reckon I'm burnt out, then I have a free ebook on my website which is called a Creative Guide to Burnout. So I'd probably go there next. That's going to tell you everything you need to know about the nervous system and chronic stress and how burnout works in the body. And it also introduces you to the four pillars in a bit of detail. If you like the sound of that and you want to take that approach, then I would go to Recreation, which will go into great depth on the four pillars.
[36:35] Emily: I can purchase to the ebook. And recreation. They are phenomenal. So if this is something that's of at all of interest to you, we're going to put those I'm asking because I want to want people to know. And we're going to put the links in the notes for the episode.
[36:48] Gauri Yardi: Beautiful.
[36:49] Emily: Yeah. They are really powerful. Even if you're like, I don't know if I'm burnt out or if it's something else. Go check out these resources.
[36:57] Gauri Yardi: Yeah. And I want people to know that I've made the resources with people with low energy in mind. Right, so the guide is going to take you literally half an hour to read. Or there's an audiobook version. You can just close your eyes, lie down, play it. I'm also going to release a free master class at the end of May for people who are just like, I literally cannot read. And if I have to lie down in a dark room with something like an audiobook on, I'm just going to fall asleep. So that's going to be another option for people who just want to dip their toes in and see, am I burnt out? And is this something I need to take further? Love it. Yeah.
[37:36] Rachel: This work is like so we've.
[37:38] Gauri Yardi: Said this so many times, but I.
[37:39] Rachel: Just need to reiterate, this is work that you have to prioritize. This is not work that you should just say, I'll get to that when I have time. Because that's the whole problem, is that you don't have time. You need to do this work. You have to take care of your.
[37:56] Gauri Yardi: Body and it catches up to you 100%. Personally, I waited till it caught up to me before I started doing this. I don't want anyone else to have to do that. So I'm like, just do it now. Do it now while you have a little bit in the tank and then you'll have some tools you can use for your entire creative life.
[38:17] Emily: Yeah, I love it.
[38:22] Rachel: The client that I've been working through this with, very specifically, she had like a major breakthrough that I wanted to share. So movement was one of your four pillars and that has been something that I've been trying to incorporate more in my life. It's spring now. It's a little bit easier. But this specific writer was it kind of came down to what should she choose? She only has so many hours in a day. Does she choose movement or does she choose writing? And so we had spent some time experimenting, seeing what felt best. At what time of day should she move? At what time of day should she write? What is like optimum routine for her with always adaptability in there? But a week or two ago, she had been trying to schedule her life around giving her the most time to write. And just all of a sudden she texted me and she was like, breakthrough moment, mic drop. I have to prioritize my body first because that will open up the avenues to be creative. But if I don't take care of my body, then I won't be able to write. So I can't prioritize writing if I need to take care of my body. And just the way she said it was like such an interesting mental shift, and I even incorporated it and I was like, dang, you're coaching me right now, girl. Because I haven't been wanting to exercise at all. I've just wanted to write.
[39:52] Gauri Yardi: I love that. I mean, she's so right, because your body is the vessel that you live your entire life through, right. You can't be creative without your body being in a relatively decent state. You can't do anything that you love without taking care of your body. So it makes sense to prioritize that over writing when you have limited time, because prioritizing your body is going to grow the amount of energy that you have so then you have more resources to bring to your writing. Writing is amazing and we love it, but it's not going to have that same effect on your body, right. It's not going to increase your energy. It's going to tap into that energy and use some of it up. And that's fine. Except when you've got limited energy, that's not probably the best use of your yeah.
[40:38] Emily: One of the things I love about the way that you present solutions, Gauri, is it's very personalized because and I think that's important because we can oftentimes come at, okay, Emily and Rachel and Gauri are telling me I need to rest more, right. And then taking that on as another hustle perfectionist project of rest in all the right ways and doing movement in all the right ways. Right. Movement is one of those where hustle culture shows up so much in all kinds of other culture that's rooted in hustle culture, but there are so much eating, right? Nourishment has all kinds of hustle baggage attached to it. And so I think it can sound sometimes when we're like, oh, I have to prioritize my body and my food, like everybody else is saying, right, that it's going to be like another set of things that you have to do and another set of expectations that you have to meet and all these things. And the thing that I love about your resources is it doesn't approach these pillars from that angle. It approaches these pillars from like, what can you do? What works for you?
[41:52] Gauri Yardi: Right?
[41:52] Emily: Because rest is one of the things that I've learned over time is that rest and movement and nourishment. And all the things look so different for everybody, like what actually works for and so if you're listening to this and you're like, I don't have time to eat better and move and do all these things.
[42:10] Rachel: Yeah.
[42:11] Emily: Go. Look at Calories resources. Because you don't have to come at it with that stress energy. The point is to not come at.
[42:18] Gauri Yardi: It with that stress energy 100%. And your body, when you're very burnt out and you haven't really been moving much and you haven't been nourishing. Your body, any little thing that you do, your body will soak up because it'll be so happy to have it. So it doesn't have to be, I don't move and tomorrow I'm going to go on a run. It can be tomorrow I'm going to walk down to the mailbox and walk back. Going from nothing to something is just like the best thing for your body. So it does not have to be hustle at all. You don't have to do any particular kind of movement or eat any particular foods. There's nothing prescriptive. It's about having ideas of what you could do and having the tools to understand what works for me and getting on with whatever it is that works for you.
[43:10] Emily: Beautiful. So beautiful. Is there any other wisdom you would like to drop for us at the end of this episode? This has been so amazing.
[43:22] Gauri Yardi: Yeah. I just want to reassure anyone who's listening, who's thinking, oh my God, I'm burnt out and I'm going to have.
[43:28] Emily: To do all this stuff, that it.
[43:30] Gauri Yardi: Is going to be okay. It's possible to get out of burnout. It's possible to stay out of burnout. You only have to learn the tools once and then you just have them in your back pocket forever. And all of the things that we recommend for nervous system care look after your body more holistically. So it's not like you'll just do this and it'll only benefit your nervous system. It's going to benefit your whole body and it's going to just lead to better health overall. And it's just such a good investment of time and energy because it builds it builds you more energy, which means you can kind of have more time because there's less time where you're just sort of staring at the wall or just scrolling through your phone because you're so exhausted. So I just want to offer reassurance. And if I can help in any way, please find me online.
[44:21] Emily: Yeah. And even I just want to encourage folks. Even if you're not if you don't identify as burnt out, maybe you identify we were talking earlier with fatigued, tired, but if you're struggling at all or you just are excited to learn better ways to manage your creative energy, this work is still worth it. You don't have to be like, can't get out of bed burnt out to get so much value from this stuff. And gallery's resources, it's life changing. It's literally magical.
[44:54] Gauri Yardi: Awesome. Yeah. Anyone who's just tired or just feeling a bit blah is also welcome. The tools will work for you as well. And getting to focus on your tiredness early on before it becomes exhaustion, before it becomes burnout, is the best time because then you will prevent yourself from going down the burnout.
[45:17] Emily: Yeah.
[45:17] Gauri Yardi: Yeah.
[45:19] Emily: Awesome. Well, Gary, can you let us know where folks can find you? We'll link those three resources, but where else do you exist in the Internet space?
[45:28] Gauri Yardi: I'm primarily on instagram. Yeah, so I'm mostly on Instagram. It's Gary yardy. I hope you guys will put that in the show notes.
[45:39] Emily: Yeah, for sure.
[45:40] Gauri Yardi: Yeah. Perfect. I'm also newly on TikTok, but I'm a millennial, so don't really get it.
[45:46] Emily: I feel that in my bones.
[45:48] Gauri Yardi: I know. And I also have my website, which is where you can find all of the resources that we've spoken about today.
[45:56] Emily: Wonderful. Well, thank you so much.
[45:59] Gauri Yardi: Thank you for this wonderful conversation.
[46:02] Emily: Absolutely cool.
[46:04] Rachel: All right, well, if you want to build a successful, fulfilling, and sustainable writing life that works for you, you've got to get on our email list.
[46:13] Emily: Sign up now to get our free email course, the Magic of Character Arcs. After seven days of email magic, you'll have the power to keep your readers flipping pages all through the night.
[46:22] Rachel: Link in the show notes. We'll see you there. Bye.
