Conversations on Healing

Welcome to the Conversations on Healing podcast, where host Shay Beider speaks with renowned healthcare leaders, practitioners, and thought leaders to explore the world of wellness, the incredible powers of self-care, and what it truly means to heal today. Join us on this journey to become more whole, healed, and connected.

Shay Beider Thanks for tuning into the Conversations on Healing podcast. I’m your host, Shay Beider and I’m excited to share this episode with you. Today I’m speaking with Dr. Claire Plumbly, who is a British clinical psychologist, EMDR consultant, author of the book, The Trauma of Burnout, and founder of Plum Psychology, a team of trauma therapists based in Somerset, UK. Through one-to-one work, intensive EMDR therapy, and her keynote speeches, Dr. Claire helps people to recover from burnout and feel like themselves again. In today’s conversation, we explore key concepts and tools from her book The Trauma of Burnout, starting with what burnout really is, breaking down its three core components, and how it differs from everyday stress. Dr. Claire shares practical, accessible tools for nervous system regulation, including how EMDR and bilateral tapping work, simple muscle contraction and release techniques that you can use throughout your day and how to create personalized grounding kits.

We dive into the tired but wired feeling, discuss why setting proper boundaries to truly turn off at the end of the day is so essential and explore how to recognize the early warning signs of burnout so you can repair and recover before getting stuck. Dr. Claire also introduces us to compassion focused therapy or CFT and explains the three emotion systems diagram and how imbalances in these systems create distress. She shares the concept of embodied affirmations with practical examples you can start using right away. Throughout our conversation, Dr. Claire emphasizes the importance of noticing glimmers, those small moments of safety, connection, and joy that can guide us back to wellness. So sit back, relax, and let’s dive into this healing conversation. Well, Dr. Claire Plumbly, it’s a pleasure to have you on the Conversations on Healing podcast. Thanks so much for joining me today.

Dr. Claire Plumbly Thank you for having me.

Shay I’m excited to talk about your book, The Trauma of Burnout, because so many people are struggling with burnout. I feel that in a post COVID world, it’s even more intense than ever. And so I wanted to just begin to frame our conversation by having you share a little bit about what is burnout and how does it differ from everyday stress or fatigue.

Claire Yes, great. So burnout is a syndrome. It’s not an official psychiatric diagnosis, but it does have a presence in the World Health Organization as a definition, and it’s a syndrome that includes three components and they tend to co-occur in the context of unmanaged occupational stress. And I just want to caveat that last piece of the definition in that we often interpret occupational stress as meaning paid occupation, and I think that’s unhelpful because we actually are often in many types of areas of our life involved in work, especially if you’re a carer or a parent or studying. So I think hold in mind that all the different places in your life where you work when you’re listening to the definition, so the first one is physical and emotional exhaustion. I think that’s probably fairly obvious what that is. But just to say a little bit about emotional exhaustion, I don’t think that’s as clear as physical exhaustion, emotional exhaustion.

If you think about the fact that as humans, we have a lovely rainbow of emotions available to us from feeling content to feeling passionate and excited. And then we’ve also got what we could consider negative, but I’m doing inverted commas around that word. They’re all there for a reason, but feeling anxious, feeling low when we have emotional exhaustion, quite often that rainbow is massively reduced to just the negative ones, feeling overwhelmed and feeling low and cynical. So that’s the first component. The second component is being detached from the things that used to light us up. So often people will describe it as like they’re just going through the motions. You might start to get compassion fatigue in this component, which is when you’re struggling to care as much about what you’re doing, your work and the people around you. And then the third one is reduced personal accomplishment. So perhaps you’re not achieving what you used to at work. You’ve got low self-esteem around your ability to be a good therapist, a good parent, whatever your role is. And because of the first two components, you might start to drop a few balls or a few spinning plates, whatever your phrase is for that, and start cutting corners and things. So all of this occurs in the context of stress. You will be getting stress signs as well in your body, and they’ll be personal to everybody. But for a lot of people there’s overwhelm in the body, and there’s anxiety that goes along with that.

Shay So it’s important to recognize it’s not only physical, it’s also emotional, and so that we’re carrying this at multiple levels within our system.

Claire And then your second part of your question was how do you differentiate between that and stress? Is that right?

Shay Yeah, from everyday stress or fatigue.

Claire So stress is about being over engaged in what you’re doing. So you’re really pushing through, but there’s an end point. So you have stresses coming in, you push yourself a little bit and you get out the other side and then you can rest and kind of wind down your nervous system gears to sleep, to recharge your battery. Whereas with burnout, you’ve been doing that for so long that you’ve tipped into a bit of a closed down reaction. So burnout is more about disengagement. You’re no longer able to feel like you can get recharged very easily. You can’t get back up and going once you’ve had a break and everything feels very closed down cognitively as well. So you might get that decision fatigue, you might get brain fog. These will be the signs that things are much more disengaged now.

Shay Yeah, it was interesting. As I was reading your book, I kept thinking, oh, one of the really clear signs that could be that you’re in an experience of burnout is this loss of joy that you lose this sense of joy because you could just see that a lot of the ways that people numb or close down, then you’re disconnecting also from really positive emotions like joy. I wanted to mention, so the subtitle of your book is How to Manage Your Nervous System Before It Manages You. And a lot of what you teach are tools for regulating the nervous system, and that can be a really key part of the recovery from burnout. And so what I thought was we could start with, and we’ll go through a number of these throughout our conversation today, but some of the practical techniques that our listeners who are tuned in might be able to start thinking about if they’re currently listening and they’re like, “Ooh, I might be burned out. I might be one of these people struggling.” So talk a little bit about the nervous system regulation and the practices that you can keep.

Claire Great. Do you mind if I just do a quick overview of what we mean by the nervous system because –

Shay Absolutely.

Claire I launched in talking about it once, and then the first question was, “But what’s a nervous system?” And I thought, I’ve got to make sure I remember to say that at the start. So we’re talking about the autonomic nervous system, which is the part of the brain and body. It’s the network of nerves that are involved with keeping us safe essentially. And so they are carrying messages between the brainstem and our organs, our internal organs telling each other what to do essentially. So if there’s any whiff or sign of trouble from our environment or from the people around us, because there’s a frowning face or a sudden bang or a noise, then our nervous system or our autonomic nervous system will just jump to it to try and keep us safe. And this all happens at a pre-conscious level. It’s picking up those signs around us from our five senses and responding to keep us safe.

And so what’s helpful to know about the messaging service between the brain and the body is that 80% of the direction of travel of those messages is from the body to the brain. And what that means for us is that if you can get an embodied sense of safety, that will help to shift the cognitive signs of stress and burnout. Whereas there is, what I’ve noticed is people can feel disillusioned sometimes with the more cognitive tools like journaling, managing negative thoughts or mindfulness. Even if they can’t get into them, they might berate themselves for not being very good and think other people can do these things. And I always very strongly say, no, it is not that. It’s a sign of where your nervous system is at and we need to manage some of those physical signs before we can use the cognitive stuff. You need to be in your green mode, your rest and digest mode to access them.

Shay Great. And we might want to talk even a little bit about the vagus nerve because many of the techniques that you use are designed to stimulate the vagus nerve and you give some really good examples of that. So maybe talking a little bit about the vagus nerve and then how we can stimulate it to trigger us into what’s called the ventral vagal state. That might be helpful for our listeners. They’re going to actually want to practice getting themselves into that ventral vagal state.

Claire Lovely. Yeah, exactly. That vagus nerve is really essential to calm and productivity when it’s also known as the wandering nerve because it’s got lots of nerve endings in your gut, your heart, your throat, and up into your mouth and eyes. That means when we stimulate that in a soothing way, it will start to help us regulate and calm down. So essentially when we are in our ventral vagal, I think if you are struggling with all the terms, just think of that as your green mode. So we would ideally spend a lot of time there. It’s where we are when we are calm, able to think clearly, able to access creative thought, playful thought, able to interpret facial expressions well and communicate eloquently and comprehend what’s being said to us. So it’s a really important bit of the body to be in that part of our nervous system as often as we can for a lot of our daily lives, ideally.

But the problem is with all the stresses coming in, quite often we get pushed out of the ventral vagal green part of our nervous system into the sympathetic, and that’s what you’re saying, how do we bring ourselves back down? So one of the quickest ways is through breathing, slow measured, rhythmic breathing. This activates the vagal break and that sends a sign to our whole body, the danger’s over, we can regulate and come back into the present because we don’t need be forward thinking and trying to escape the moment anymore. So it’s very powerful. And what I always recommend, I dunno if you remember this, it’s in chapter five of the book, but I give you some examples of breathing and everybody has a favorite. Quite often when I start talking about breathing, people have already got a breathing tool. There isn’t the one magic one.

Whatever you already have, I promise you is going to work for you. You just need to practice it when you’re not feeling stressed so that can you use it when you are so that you can be strategic about it. And what I find is there are apps where you put the sum or finger over the flashing camera and it will show you what your heart rate is doing. These are called biofeedback tools. So if you are someone who when you’re highly stressed, just feels I can’t take a moment to sit and do breathing, download one of these biofeedback tools, heart maths is one, and the self-compassion app is another one that’s got it integrated, pop your thumb over and it does three or four minutes where it slows your breathing. You’re guided to do that. I think when you’re highly stressed, trying to do that on your own is really, really hard. I think being guided, having a voice, telling your writing on the screen and when to breathe out is just really, really helpful. We find it hard to anchor ourselves in those moments. Do you have a favorite breathing tool you already use?

Shay Well, it’s funny. I was thinking of one you mentioned in the book that has some nice research behind it. So you talked about one where you breathe in a full breath in and then you hold a little bit at the top, you take one more sip in, and then you basically exhale slowly through the mouth so that it’s not like a quick dump of air out, but just more of a slow exhale. And I remember one of the things that it mentioned in the book is this helps to maximize the amount of carbon dioxide that is released, which then helps to kind of reset that oxygen carbon dioxide balance so that the body is in a bit calmer state because when we get very stressed, we start breathing in a more shallow way. And so that really changes the way our nervous system functions and feels.

Claire Yeah, lovely. That’s called the physiological sigh. Yeah, that’s a really nice one. Just kind of that last little sip of the air just helps to open all the capillaries up and you get that nice exchange of gases and then a nice long out breath, essentially the longer outbreath really helps the heart rate to go and it starts to come down.

Shay And I thought also you mentioned the vagal break, which you talk about in the book as well, that maybe for our listeners who’ve never heard that term before, just to explain a little bit more what that actually is.

Claire Yeah, it basically means that your lungs and your breathing is the only part of your inner body functioning that you can bring under your conscious control. So this is a really lovely opportunity because you can bring your physiology and your nervous system under your control essentially. And so that’s why it’s become known as the vagal break because you can choose whether you are pressing the brake or not. Imagine you are literally driving a car. Am I going to press the accelerator here? Which would mean maybe activating yourself more jogging on the spot, that kind of thing activates everything, or am I going to choose to slow it all down, put the brake on, calm everything down a little bit. And that’s exactly what regulated slow breathing does. It’s like the quick way to do it.

Shay That’s great. And you talk about some other tools. So you actually go through, you have a table in the book that talks about things you can do for the mouth and the neck. And so because the vagus nerve moves through those areas, what we know, we know splashing cold water on your face is actually a really good way to reset. Some people will go to the restroom, take a moment, splash a little cold water on their face. Gargling also is a tool that stimulates the vagus nerve and can be helpful. You mentioned something like having a flannel close to your neck or face. I think about it kind of like a baby’s blanket, right? All snuggled in by the face and neck that that can be very soothing and calming, obviously the breathing techniques that you’ve described. And then you also discuss some of the handholds where you can place a hand on your heart and another one on the abdomen, or you could place my hand on the heart and another one at the back of the neck. But basically these ways that we can touch in. And I also know you like the butterfly hold, and then I think you do the tapping with that. So it might be good to talk a little bit about the bilateral tapping and some of the benefits of that as well for people that are listening that might not be familiar with tapping.

Claire Yes. So I’m trained in a form of therapy called eye movement desensitization and reprocessing EMDR. And in that we are taught how to use bilateral stimulation, which means stimulating the left and right sides of the brain in quick succession. When you do that in a EMDR session to process trauma, it helps you to activate memory networks and move through them to become more adaptive. However, when you activate stimulation in a slow way through a tap, you can also do it without tapping just through walking. Have you ever noticed that you can start a walk very stressed and there’s something magic that happens during a walk where it seems to work its way out where there’s the bilateral movement that’s happening, walking, jogging, cycling, swimming, these are all bilateral natural movements that we do. So to do this to anyone listening who would like to have a go as we are talking, if you get your hands, so they’re facing you palms up and then cross the thumbs so they’re hooked.

It should look like a little butterfly now and then place it so it’s over your heart area and your fingertips will be kind of touching your collarbone and now you can slowly tap left and then right, left, then right. I’ve got a necklace on. I don’t know if that’s creating a little crinkly sound, but left and then right. What’s nice about all of this is your hands over your heart area, there’s the warmth there. This is key ventral, vagal territory, heart area, heart and lungs. So you are generating warmth for yourself there. You’re there for yourself in a hard moment. And then we find that soothing really gentle, and we find that tapping really gentle and soothing. If you think about other times in your life where there’s been any tapping or rocking, like babies, we often rock side to side. A lot of people like having their hair stroked. So gentle, slow rhythm is really calming for us. So if you’re there in your moment of need, doing it for yourself, and then you can strengthen it through the visuals as well. So if you’re having a really difficult moment, a nice visual of say a moment on a holiday or moment when you’re walking your dog, we can recreate that in our mind’s eye and just add a bit of strengthening via the slow tap that I’ve just talked you through.

Shay Yeah, that’s great. And some of these types of approaches are very practical, let’s say in the middle of your workday. So maybe you can’t get up and do a high intensity movement in the middle of your workday perhaps, but there are other activities that you might be able to do. So the one that you just showed us would be a possibility. Some people will also do that bilateral tapping on their knees, so they’ll tap kind of right to left on their knees. Some people will play with fidget toys or fidget spinners. Also jiggling or shaking the legs is a good way to kind of discharge energy and is actually used in a lot of the trauma release exercises. So shaking. You also talk in the book about progressive muscle relaxation and that’s a very powerful tool. So that might be another good one for you to describe for our listeners is what is progressive muscle relaxation and how would that look?

Claire Yeah, so what we don’t realize is how much tension we are holding in a lot of our muscles from the daily stresses that are coming in at us. So if anyone now just wants to try this, we just choose one muscle group and we’re going to squeeze the muscles. What should we do? Should we do our shoulders?

Shay Sure.

Claire Yeah. Okay. So I’m going to just squeeze my shoulders up really hard to my neck. And what happens when we do that? Push hard. Hold it a minute. Yeah, really good. And then release and let your shoulders fall and just allow that warm tingly feeling that comes from the release. Just notice if you’re still holding on. Anyway, just release. When we release, we let out a lot of the tension that was there. So we pinpoint and we notice it, and then the release helps to let go. And if you do that throughout your body and squeeze them and hold, usually I recommend repeating it at least twice. A nice or funny one to do is to squeeze all the facial muscles up. When I do this in therapy with people, I say, don’t worry, I’m going to do this with you. So we don’t feel silly and we squeeze, squeeze like we’re frowning and then release and it feels so good. Do you want to just try it now with me and anyone listening can just do it. We’ll just be quiet a moment whilst we’re doing it. So give it a really good squeeze.

That’s good. Eyebrows all squeezed and then release so much tension. The eyebrows. Where do you think you carry tension Shay?

Shay I carry it more around my mouth area and a little more in my cheeks than in my forehead and eyebrow area.

Claire Okay. That’s why I’m getting frown lines. I carry it up here. And like you say, this is a good way of discharging some of that pent up energy that we hold in our big skeletal muscle groups because that’s what we’re designed to do for the fight or flight. That’s why it gets stored there. And we might not realize quite to what extent until we start to struggle with tension headaches and muscle pains. So doing this regularly as a lovely preventative step.

Shay And what’s cool for people that are listening, you can do this throughout your whole body. So you could start with your feet and contract all the muscles in your feet and then relax. That’s an easy one to do kind of anywhere. You can do it with your calf muscles, you can do it with your upper leg muscles, you can do it with your buttocks, you can do it with your stomach muscles. So you’re just going through that same process of contraction, holding, and then release and you can literally kind of move through the whole body from head to toe or toe to head either way.

Claire Yeah, and what’s nice about the ones you’ve just said is that you’re not going to look odd in if you’re in a post office queue or something, you’re getting stressed, whereas your face, you’d look slightly scary.

Shay A little more noticeable perhaps. It’s interesting because one of the things a lot of people deal with, I think in modern life, particularly with all the technology that we’re engaged in and exposed to, is this feeling of I’m tired, but I’m wired, I’m exhausted, but I’m unable to settle down and I can’t sleep because my mind just keeps going. And so I’d be interested to hear you talk a little bit about what’s happening in the nervous system when that occurs, and then what strategies can help to break that cycle of tired but wired.

Claire Yeah, so I think we spend a lot of our time without realizing in our sympathetic nervous system, not in our ventral vagal because of the way life is set up to always be pinging stresses at us, literally our phone is often pinging. People are demanding of us and expecting quick responses. So even if you do kind of clear the decks and get to the end of your to-do list, it quickly fills up again because there’s such a quick feedback loop of someone responding and getting on it again. So what this means is that we can end up getting to the end of the day and struggle a lot to actually turn everything off and be boundaried with ourselves because we can work anywhere now and always. So we do tend to feel unsafe to set those boundaries with ourselves and actually turn things off properly. The thing is our ancestors, our ancestors had to keep going. If we were out on the hunt or being chased by predators, we couldn’t just stop and have sleep when we were tired. So we’ve developed the ability to delay until we feel safe enough. And so there is this misconception that we all just fall asleep when we’re tired enough, but actually that’s not how it works. We sleep when we feel safe enough. So I always talk to my clients about, okay, we need to work on increasing cues of safety and decreasing cues of threat.

Shay It’s a really interesting point that you just made that it’s not that we sleep when we’re tired enough, it’s that we sleep when we’re safe enough. It’s a really interesting distinction. I’ve never heard it framed quite that way before, but I think that is helpful for people that are feeling like I’m so tired but I can’t go to sleep. Then it becomes a very different question to ask yourself of what could I do to help myself feel more safe in this moment?

Claire And if you think about anyone who’s ever had kids or knows someone with kids, what we do, kids go to sleep better when they’ve got a nice routine, bedtime routine, a glass of milk, a warm bath, a book, a lullaby. This is about create a sense of safety for the child because they’re going to be away from their parent or caregiver for a long chunk of time. They don’t feel safe. That’s why a lot of kids wake up and don’t want to go to sleep. It’s all about feeling safe enough. We need that too. We need that bedtime routine. We need that wind down routine. So if you’re working from home, think about from the moment you’re starting to shut down your computer, start to weave in routines, get changed into some other clothes, let yourself know, say out loud, I’m finished for the day.

I’m finished for the day. Repeat that hands on heart, I’m finished for the day now and I’ve done a really good job. I did my best. And then create some routine for yourself because I know a lot of people I work with have a tendency just to crash into bedtime from a podcast like this or from a meeting or from doing their online shopping. They go admin, life admin on WhatsApp. There’s always stuff coming in. There’s never going to be a point where you reach all the end of that. So you have to make sure you have a stop point for yourself. If you live with a partner, maybe let them know, let’s have this as a hard stop and then the rest of the evening is winding down and doing something. It doesn’t need to be clever, it just needs to be regular.

Shay Yeah, absolutely. And you give some other really nice simple techniques that people can use. And again, a lot of these are great for recovery from burnout. And also I always think about the preventative side, how you can prevent maybe flipping over into true burnout and notice the early signs that your system’s getting dysregulated because we’re all going in and out of a more regulated state. And in fact, that’s the sign of a healthy nervous system is that you’re able to at times move into that sympathetic state but then easily repair and recover and not get stuck there. That’s what a healthy nervous system is. It’s very resilient. So you could drop into a dorsal vagal state where you’re a little bit more in shutdown, but then you can come back into a ventral vagal state or you can drop into a state where you’re more highly activated in a sympathetic fight or flight, but then you can come back down into ventral vagal.
So that resilience is actually what we’re going for and not getting stuck in one place. And so you have some nice techniques. There’s another one that you talk about in the book called The Technique of 5, 4, 3, 2, 1, and that’s a really simple one. Also, I’m always looking for what could you do on the bus or the airplane or at work or in public places because obviously there’s a lot that we can do privately or when we have the time to exercise because movement is such a good regulator. So when you have the ability to go out and exercise fully, that’s a very good thing to get your system in a regulated state. But what about when you can’t do that? So I thought maybe sharing this technique of 5, 4, 3, 2, 1 would be another simple portable one that people could take with them.

Claire Yeah, absolutely. So if you are feeling like you’re just stuck in your head or you’re feeling really closed down, this is a lovely one for grounding yourself because you are moving your head to have to look around at things and taking in your surroundings. So five things you can see. So just looking around, try and move your neck from left to right and up and down as you’re doing it because you are telling your nervous system, I’m safe and I can move. I’ve got movement, I’m not trapped. So five things and you just say them in your head. It doesn’t need to be clever, just you’re finding your words in your mind’s eye. Again, that’s using your frontal lobes. It’s bringing everything online. So four things you can reach out and touch. I can’t remember the order, it doesn’t really matter. We’re going to do the five senses. So right now I’m touching the desk in front of me that’s nice and soft and cool. I could also reach down and touch my thighs where the jeans feel a little bit rougher. I could touch my skin, which feels nice and soft and yeah, what else is there? Oh, my book, the cover of my book, three things you can hear. So it might be subtle for me, it’s a clock ticking. It’s my kids playing downstairs.

It’s almost the sound of silence when silence is a bit of a buzz.

Shay Yes.

Claire Past. It might just be the cold water like you say, or a sweet tea or something in your bag. What I recommend to my clients, I dunno if you remember reading this bit, but is to create some sort of little kit for yourself. So when I’ve done this with my clients, we’ve again tried to just have something that’s super portable. Quite often a pencil case or a spectacles case works really well because you can slide that in and no one needs to know what it is or will even ask. And in that you put your resources. So if you like this 5, 4, 3, 2, 1 technique, a good idea is to write it down and put it in your kit. Just write down, I’m going to do this, write 5, 4, 3, 2, 1 and put it in there if there’s some sweets or fizzy. So I think nice grounding, taste and texture are strong mints.

We have extra strong mints over here or fisherman’s friends. I dunno what you have in the us but that kind of where it hits the sinuses and clears it all out. Or the fizzy sweets that kind of sizzle on your tongue when you eat them. But it doesn’t need to be that. It could be something a bit gentler, but something pop in your mouth to focus on. Smells, If you want to have something much more soothing, you could choose something really lovely for yourself, like an essential oil, pop it in, pop it on a little hanky chief and put that in a little bag inside. I’ve also had people who pets are really special and really have lots of good connotations, and attachment system is lit up by a lot of our pets. So if you’ve got a little rag of a pet toy, you could pop in. Sometimes people have used that and smelled that and that’s really lovely and activating. What would go in your kit Shay?

Shay Well, photographs, I feel like because connecting to people that I love is always very powerful for me. I would use something sensory like a silk, a little piece of silk, something very nice to touch. Definitely an essential like a frankincense or just a scent that I really appreciate. Those would be a few things that I would enjoy. And then I like too naming something. One of the things you’d mentioned in the book is you can write it down. You can write down, do the 5, 4, 3, 2, 1 technique. Or for me, I might even write down a beautiful piece of poetry that kind of gets me into a space that feels good, but you could literally write down a practice or just something that makes you smile. And that in a funny way kind of almost leads into the next thing that I wanted to ask you about. We had the good fortune of having Deb Dana on the podcast and she talks a lot about these types of nervous system regulating exercises. And she actually came on the show and talked about glimmers and what glimmers are. And for those who didn’t get to catch that particular episode, I think that the idea of glimmers is a fun one as a practice that they could also integrate. So maybe you could share a little bit more about that too.

Claire So glimmers is the opposite of triggers. Triggers are a stimulus that is activated our nervous system in a way to put us on guard sympathetic nervous system. So glimmers mean cues of safety opportunities around us that are happening all the time, but we have to notice them and when we notice them glimmer, we can lean in. So it’s much more of a kind of proper glow then. So glimmers are quite often things that our nervous system interpret as meaning safe. So like you just mentioned photos. So that’s why when you go to work quite often people have photos on their desk of their friends and loved ones. That’s an intervention, that’s a glimmer. You get off a hard meeting, you just take a moment to gaze at the photo. If you’ve got a picture or a scene out your window of nature, this is an opportunity again to just pause and take it in, drink it up.

Literally imagine that this is going topping up your little icon so that you can begin to feel safe again. Natural light, anything natural is really good, so plants. So if you can’t get outside, if there’s no nature near you and you live in a high rise, fill your house of plants. But even photos will help. Music, gentle music or whatever you need that you find makes you feel safe. Animals are a good one. Like I said, I love a cuddle with my Guinea pigs. They’re a nice little moment at the end of the day for me when they make cute little squeaks. But a simple cup of coffee, just taking time, like drinking it in and being really slow. Warmth of the mug, holding that. Do you have any glimmers that you particularly like in your day?

Shay Well, what’s funny, what came to mind is I use these things very practically. I think they’re meant to be used very practically. There’ve been times where I’ve been in a meeting, maybe I’m in someone else’s office and perhaps the tone in the meeting is getting a little stressful or something and I’m just listening. But I’m aware that that’s happening and I’m in more of an unfamiliar space that isn’t my own. And so what I’ll do is start to look around the room to notice things that feel good to me. So I might notice, oh, I like the wood, I like the quality of the wood that’s on that chair or on that table. And of course then I’m also probably starting to work with my own breath, and I’m also probably starting to look around the room physically so I can turn my head a little bit left to right.

And you could do that without looking strange. I’ve done it many a times in a meeting, and so I’m starting to integrate each of these. But it’s amazing how in almost any space you can find something that appeals to you, that gives your nervous system just a little sense of like, oh yeah, that’s right. I’m actually okay. And by turning your head and seeing there isn’t a tiger or a bear nearby, even if the energy in the room because sensitive to energy, even if I can feel like it’s tense, I can usually either speak up and do something to shift that. Or I can also notice cues of safety in my immediate environment. And so for me it’s kind of a combination strategy.

Claire I’ll take that one. I like that you’re deliberately going out and looking for them. And I think also just sometimes when you’re with someone just mindfully, just noticing and saying out loud that you’ve noticed this is a really beautiful thing. I was looking out the window the other day and there was a fruit stall and all the colors just looked beautiful in the fruit stall. And so I just said this out loud and the person with me was a bit taken aback that I was talking about the present moment in such a mindful way I guess. But it was a shared glimmer then, which was just a nice moment. Can I talk about my personal favorite of all of these, which I use a lot? Which is embodied affirmations. Do you remember me talking about?

Shay Yes, please do. That? I do remember you mentioning that, yes.

Claire So I think the word affirmations is that caught on in the us is that a thing?

Shay Yes.

Claire Yeah.

Shay Absolutely.

Claire We mean words or a sentence that you need to hear in a moment that help you meet your needs. So it might be if you’re feeling really low or you need a bit of energy, there’s different kind of ones that you might have self-compassion. Essentially the embodied bit comes with thinking about how am I going to make these words as powerful as possible to connect with so my body can really sense that these mean safety. So first of all, you can think about the tone of voice that you’re using to say the words, slowing your pace down and softening your voice. And also you can think about how you hold yourself. So my hands keep going up. Nobody can see me except you, Shay. But my hands keep going up to my heart where I just kind of hold very firmly over my heart and say the words that I need to hear in a moment.

I’ve got a few examples of affirmations that are my favorites, but you can definitely just notice if other people have ever said words to you and you’ve thought, oh, that’s a good one, write it down, put it in your kit. But for me, it’s often I did my best or I’m doing my best. This is not an emergency, this is not an emergency. It’s okay. I’m okay. I can get through this. I’ve got through it before. These are some of my favorites. And thinking about other people who care about you at that time can also just support that if you find it hard to do that for yourself. You can also record it as a voice note when you’re calm and play it back or get someone who cares about you, record it on a voice note on your phone, and then you can press play and just hold your hands over your heart and have someone say it to you.

Shay It’s a nice idea to have someone that you love record a really sweet message that you could listen to when you’re feeling some stress or challenge in your day. That would be such a nice way to manage that.

Claire It is a nice one, especially if you’ve got a strong inner critic and you find it really hard to soften your own voice and to step out of that when you’re in the middle of it, just knowing someone else who can do that for you and asking them, is this some words that you feel like that would be okay to ask them to do? But if it’s someone who really cares about you, I’m sure they’d be very happy and very flattered to be able to offer some support and be part of your soothing kit.

Shay And one of the things you talk about in the book is how when we’re triggered and feeling stress, what we often forget is our coping abilities. And that sometimes also you could remind yourself like, oh, so for example, let’s say you’re going to do a presentation and you’re nervous about the presentation and everything you have to prepare for that. You can remind yourself, oh, actually I’ve done 20 of these presentations similar to this before. Or actually I’ve spoken in front of audiences many, many times. So there’s a little bit of reassurance too, to remind yourself of your capacity and also your resilience, which can be helpful to gain a little bit of perspective and insight.

Claire Yeah, I mean anxious thinking, sympathetic nervous system impacts on our thinking. Our thoughts become very rigid, very catastrophic. We can only imagine the worst case scenario, and we get closed down to all those images and memories of us being actually an okay person at this. So yeah, this is similar to the affirmations. You could write some of those things down when you need to be reminded of them. And also, so for that, I might also think, obviously I talked about hands over my heart when I’m feeling a bit heavy, those affirmations, but sometimes I do a more active embodiment where I’m doing the Wonder Woman pose. So you put your hands up to create a W and straighten your back and spine, stand up with your legs apart, and this is the Wonder Woman pose. And it can feel, there was a really famous TED Talk that talked about doing this before you go into presentation. And so I just take that on board sometimes for when I need something that’s more of a pick me up than just a gentle, compassionate affirmation.

Shay That’s great. Another idea that you talk about in the book that I think would be valuable for our listeners is something called compassion focused therapy or CFT. And I feel like some people may not be familiar with that. So I thought perhaps you could share a little bit about what CFT is and why compassion, particularly self-compassion is so crucial in healing from burnout.

Claire Yeah, I’d love to. I’m curious, is CFT very big over in America or it’s more of a British?

Shay Not as widely, I don’t think as it is in Europe, it’s not as commonly discussed.

Claire Okay. So it’s a form of therapy that is very focused on supporting you to understand your emotions so that you know what they mean and how you can respond to your own distress more effectively. But essentially with compassion, there’s a few components to this to talk through, but one of them that I think is really helpful for listeners is that there are three flows of compassion. And quite often in CFT, we’re trying to work out where the blockages are. There should be a flow from yourself towards others. And I think probably a lot of your listeners, especially if they’re parents and caring and in helping professions, they’ve got that nailed, that flow is flowing freely probably too much. So they show compassion to others a lot. Another flow should be from others into us. So this is when we allow others to support us, or they say, what do you need?

And you actually answer, I need this. Someone says, can I pick your kids up from school tomorrow because I’m passing and you say yes or you ask for support that’s allowing that flow to get going again. And the final flow is from yourself to yourself. So self compassion, what I need in this moment, and listening to that and responding and making compassionate decisions around your needs. So I think if anyone’s listening, thinking there’s a blockage in flow, then think about that and CFT would help you. And the other really lovely part, which I do a diagram of is the three systems, and this is part of CFT. It’s a diagram that really I found really helpful personally and a lot of my clients really like because it talks about the emotion systems and how essentially imbalance in them causes us distress. So one is this kind of red threat system, which is the sympathetic and the dorsal shutdown.

And one really, and quite often when people come to therapy that if you imagine that as being a big kind of sphere, has got overinflated, a huge sphere that’s taken over a lot of stuff. And the other two are spheres as well. You’ve got blue drive system, and that’s where we are when we are feeling motivated, moving towards our resources. And of course in burnout, sometimes it’s become a bit over stimulated and we’ve been in drive for too long. Quite often we feel safer when we’re in drive. The third system is our green soothing system. So that’s the ventral vagal stuff that we’ve been talking about. And really what we find is a lot of people in therapy have got a very small soothing system. They haven’t really made the use of it, it hasn’t been encouraged. Quite often people will think I need to dampen down my stress sphere by just getting on with stuff just doing, because that makes me feel safe. And quite often it’s more highly socially reinforced.

Shay Maybe stimulating or something like that.

Claire It’s socially reinforced. The drive is more socially reinforced because we talk about promotions doing well in exams in our British school system, for example, we have league tables about how well universities and schools are doing, but that’s all about results. It’s not about how safe and secure and loved the students feel. So this is just an example of how it’s all woven into our culture that drive is very important and that that means people tend to bounce between their threat and their drive system. So yeah, we talk about how to get a better balance in CFT using some of the tools we’ve talked about and more.

Shay Yeah, that’s great. That’s a wonderful tool for our listeners to learn a little bit more about because it is less popular, at least to my awareness in the United States. So as you’ve mentioned, sometimes people when they’re moving into burnout and starting to feel that they’re less able to listen to their body. And so sometimes people will say, wait, well, how do I even listen to my body again? I’ve been shutting that down and trying not to pay attention to the signals and cues that my body’s giving me. So how do I get back to it? And some of the tools you mentioned in the book are mindfulness, things like yoga, obviously breathing techniques. But another practice you talk about that I thought you might want to describe a little bit more are check-ins and how you can do regular check-ins to basically reinitiate your awareness and noticing.

Claire Yeah, I mean, if you think that burnout is about detachment, it’s no wonder that we are then detached from our body because its very part of the symptoms of burnout, which is why it’s then really hard to make the changes but not impossible. And it’s about being really gentle with yourself that you are so detached, it’s not your fault. And we’re not taught to pay attention to our body and our society and our culture. For example, kids at school, we tell them they can’t go to the toilet till break time. And so you get used to shutting off the cues of, I’m hungry, I’m thirsty, I’m stressed, I need the toilet, I need to go and do something, but move my body because it hasn’t been encouraged. And usually we haven’t been able to respond even if we had noticed. So yeah, the check-ins are, well, we kind of do what they say on the tin, really, but the opportunities between activities in your day, there are just a transition point there.

It might not feel like there’s a big transition if you’ve got back-to-back meetings, but there is a moment where you log off from a meeting and log onto the next one or you move to the next thing. So in that gap, it’s about just trying to make it a little bit longer, even if it’s just 30 seconds, and just notice what’s here in my body right now. So if you’re listening, just do that. Now, imagine that you’re in that transition point. Scan from your head into your torso, your neck, down into your tummy, all the way down through your legs. What’s here? Just be curious. Is there tension or intensity? What’s the muscles feel like? What’s your heart doing? And what’s the nature of your thoughts? Are they busy jumping around or are they calm? Are they moving onto other things? Thinking, I don’t have time for this.

That’s where my mind goes. Usually that’s a sign that you’re in sympathetic nervous system, that energy, what’s the energy like? And then you can respond. So that’s the beautiful thing with this is it doesn’t need to be a big thing. Like you were saying earlier, what’s one thing you can do to respond? So right now, when I was listening, I was getting an urge just to have a really big stretch, just to open my arms up. And that just feels good to me right now because I’m sat here. We’ve been sat talking for 50 minutes now, so there’s lots of stored energy on a podcast, and I want to give a good impression trying to find the right words and be eloquent and sound professional. There’s a lot of writing on this. So yeah, of course there’s a bit of tension there, and now I’m just noticing it and I’m just tuning in. Nothing magical is going to happen particularly in that moment, but what does happen over time when you get used to this is you start to catch it quicker. It also means that if you imagine a pressure cooker, if you never released the steam a little bit, it could pop. It means that you’re getting to bedtime without the pressure cooker feeling like it’s rumbling away, ready to pop because you’ve done that throughout the day. What did I need? And you’re transitioning.

Shay Yeah, that’s a very good example. As you know, we have a fair number of caregivers that tune into this show, and most of us at some point in our life will be a caregiver, whether it’s of a child or a parent or a loved one who’s ill or someone in need in our inner circle. Are there specific strategies that you recommend to help caregivers protect themselves from burning out while showing up for people that they love and want to support?

Claire I think that the biggest thing with caregivers is quite often when I was writing my book, I remember there was a fact around often the people they’re caring for is needs are better met than their own. So what are your needs and are you meeting them? But even in just tiny, tiny ways. So with the kids, for example, quite often I remember reading a book called French Children Don’t Throw Food. I dunno if you know that one, but I learned a lot in there about how they don’t immediately respond when their child cries. Whereas in British culture, we will drop everything and immediately respond. I think we’ve been taught that there’s a potential that we’ll rupture an attachment. And actually what the French moms do is they kind of have normalized just saying, I’ll be there in a minute. I’m just finishing what I’m doing and then transitioning there.

So they’re kind of taking the pressure off themselves. And the book also goes on to say, actually that means the children start to regulate themselves a little bit. They know something’s coming, but they start to manage to settle themselves a little bit quicker. So yeah, it’s really, really tough. There’s so many invisible pressures if you’re a caregiver. There’s so much more admin and mental load and probably intense emotions as well. Anger, injustice, there’s lots in there. So just acknowledging that you are holding a lot and just being there for yourself as much as you can in those moments where you’re feeling that particularly, I dunno if I’ve got any clever extra strategies that come to mind, I’m afraid Shay

Shay That’s okay, because everything we’ve used and discussed today are all strategies that can be applied to caregivers. And when you think about it, all of these are tools to help us to regulate our nervous system, to be in a healthier, happier place, to be able to engage and relate better with people around us, whether that’s our family or our colleagues, anyone really even like you were saying, the people at the grocery store, right? It’s like everybody that we engage with. Yeah. Did you have another thought you wanted to?

Claire I thought, yeah, as you were, I suddenly thought something I do think is helpful is to say out loud how you’re feeling, because I use that with my kids and I find it helpful and they find it helpful too. So for example, a classic one for me is when I’m trying to cook and get ready after a day of work. So I am carrying the day of work, still have my head thinking, oh, I haven’t finished doing that yet. And so it’s a hot stove, there’s lots bubbling away, and then I’ve got three kids and they start to come in and say, oh, I didn’t want to eat that for dinner. Oh, can you help me with this homework? What are we doing this weekend? They’re firing questions at me. So you are smiling because you can already feel it, like the tension’s building up those moments.

So now what I say is I can feel myself getting stressed. I say that out loud. And the other second thing I do, which is the second intervention in itself, but so first one, its say it out loud so that, and they know I can feel myself getting stressed. I’m getting hot, I’m getting busy thoughts, I’m feeling overwhelmed. So that’s the first thing. Second thing is trying to remove some stimulation. So for me, I realized there’s been a season of my life where the kids were quite young. I couldn’t listen to the radio anymore because when I had the radio on and all of that happening. So it was just an easy win to stop, turn the radio off. It was one stimulation. The second stimulation I’ve learned now they’re a little bit older, is when I get to those moments, I say, I’m not taking any questions until after dinner or during dinner. I’ll answer all your questions when we’re sat down and eating, but I’m cooking right now and I can’t answer your question because often they’re not even that bothered about my answers. So there I’m spending time trying to cook and think of all the answers to their questions, and they’re already moving on to the next thing. So those are two, maybe slightly more practical strategies, particularly for caregivers. I dunno if there’s anything in that, but hopefully.

Shay Yeah, that’s wonderful. I like to ask all of our guests, because everybody answers this so differently, given their own background and field, how they would define or describe what healing is. And I know you’ve served as a counselor for many years, you’ve worked with a lot of people that are healing through and from all sorts of different things. And so I would be interested to hear in your words, how you would define or describe what healing is.

Claire Yeah. I think for me it’s about being able to tune in and be responsive to your own distress and being compassionate to what’s gone before and understanding that we just find ourselves here. We’ve got complicated brains. We’ve got brains that have evolved over a long time, and we find ourselves here now trying to deal with this current stress, this unique situation, and we are doing our best. And I think that compassion is always what I’m helping and aiming for in my therapy. And when someone says, I dealt with this tricky thing in this way with compassion, I always feel like this is what it’s all about. It’s not about fixing so we don’t have any difficulties or anxiety or problems or being in inverted fixed. It’s about being able to meet our distress and challenges with compassion.

Shay Yeah. That’s beautiful. Well, as we wrap up, Dr. Claire, is there anything else about burnout that you want to share with our listeners?

Claire Only that I’m just grateful that people have listened to the whole of this episode, and we’ll hopefully go away and try one thing. Just go away and try one thing. And obviously you can connect with me on social media. Sorry, I’m assuming you’re going to invite me to do that, but absolutely. If you want to share with me how you’ve got on, I always love hearing, so do feel free to reach out.

Shay Great. And we’ll also put in the show notes, all of the links to you, to your website, and then also to any references that we mentioned in the show today so that people can easily access that.

Claire Sure. Yeah, I’d be very happy to do that. And if you are listening, thinking the book sounds good, but I’m someone who likes to consume books through audio. Then there is an audio book version as well on Audible and on Spotify.

Shay Great. Wonderful. Well, it’s been a real pleasure having you on the show today. I think we covered a lot of just very practical techniques and tools that people can use to integrate into their own lives to sort of provide that self compassion we all need in a world that’s busy and full and find new ways to take care of themselves in the midst of it all so that hopefully they don’t have to have an experience of burnout. So thank you so much for having this conversation with me.

Claire Thanks for inviting me, Shay.

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