Break Free from the Burnout: Release Your Harmful Energetic Patterns

Steven Puri Reveals the Hollywood Burnout Crisis No One Talks About and What to do About It.

• Dr. Anastasia Chopelas • Season 2 • Episode 36

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Today, I sit down with Steven Puri, an Academy Award-winning Hollywood executive turned burnout prevention advocate. Steven's journey from the glittering heights of Hollywood success to discovering profound truths about sustainable achievement is absolutely insightful, and I know his revelations will resonate deeply with so many of you who are pushing hard but feeling like you're not progressing.

What struck me most about our conversation was Steven's raw honesty about his experience in the entertainment industry—from the soul-nourishing culture at DreamWorks to the energy-draining environment at Fox that nearly broke him. His story beautifully illustrates something I see with so many of my clients: that invisible exhaustion that comes from pouring your precious life force into work that doesn't align with your values.

Here's what you'll discover in this informative episode:

 ✅ How a chance encounter with a yoga teacher in the middle of an Indian forest became Steven's wake-up call to break free from the burnout cycle and reclaim his authentic path

 ✅ The surprising science behind "dopamine management" and why understanding your brain's reward system is crucial for avoiding the energy-draining traps of our digital world

 ✅ Steven's powerful revelation about flow states—those magical moments when time disappears and high-quality work happens effortlessly—and practical techniques you can use to access them consistently

 ✅ Why the "other thing" principle is essential for creativity, and how giving your executive mind something else to focus on unlocks your subconscious problem-solving abilities

 ✅ Simple but profound strategies for staying productive without burning out, including the game-changing approach of focusing on just three priorities instead of overwhelming yourself with endless to-do lists

What I absolutely love about Steven's approach is how he combines his engineering background with deep spiritual wisdom to create practical solutions for modern burnout. His Sukha app and methodology aren't just about working harder—they're about working in harmony with your natural rhythms and energy patterns.

https://thesukha.co.  email at steven@thesukha.co

Get The Net and the Butterfly by Cabane and Pollack  about breakthrough thinking as mentioned in the episode



Show notes at https://www.breakfreefromtheburnout.com
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Today my special guest, Steven Puri, shares his journey from Academy Award-winning Hollywood executive to burnout prevention advocate revealing the hidden energetic traps of high achievement and powerful tips to break free from the burnout and rediscover joy in both work and life. Releasing burnout is easier than you've been led to believe. Stay tuned for this very special episode. Welcome to Break Free from the Burnout. I'm your host, Dr. Anastasia Chopos, physicist turned energy healer. I'm here to help you make the quantum shifts to release the hidden blocks to your success. Your next breakthrough starts now. Welcome to the show, Steven. I'm so happy you're here. I appreciate that and, you have such a canon of really helpful and thoughtful episodes. I hope this fits in there. Oh, I have no doubts. after I read through what you have to offer, I am really excited to introduce this because a lot of highly successful, highly active people fall into the trap of not taking care of themselves, and I think that your message of self-care is, is really important. So what, during your career, if you could just explain it a little bit. Is what was the turning point that led you to focus on preventing burnout? Let me frame it this way so that we can understand the context of what I'm gonna share, which is I started as a junior engineer because my parents were both engineers at IBM. So that was what I knew as a youth, right? When I was at USC, the other school in la, I fell into film. Because film was becoming digital, so my engineering skills applied and it was a backdoor into film. So that began my film career, which went through my twenties. I sold my first company. I had done the Digital Effects for Independence Day, and we won the Academy Award for the visual effects on that. And Roland Dean and I, the director in Pruser, started a company. So I did that. And that was a large arc for me of visual effects led to being in film, which led to development, and that led to being a senior executive, at Fox Executive, at Dreamworks and stuff like that. I had a moment where I stepped away from film and returned to engineering. So it's a full circle right now that I, that I've come. And what I'm doing now is a lot about how to use engineering to solve problems that may be, I know as you would frame them as energetic ones, I view them as of spiritual ones. that's what I'm super passionate about, is helping people to, to realize what's inside them. To make that manifest. So I think you asked me about when some of the turning points, right? Yeah. that gives context to what was the turning point that led you to focus on preventing burnout? definitely when I was at Dreamworks, there was a culture of go home tonight and try and make your projects 1% better. It's the last studio run by a filmmaker. when I went to Fox, which is NewsCorp, you know, style comes from the top. The organization is infused with the values of the people who lead it. And it was more culture of go home tonight and try and make your projects 1% cheaper. And you do that for year or two and it wears away your soul where you're like, wow, I am using the one resource I can't replenish, time, to do something I don't think is actually that meaningful or good. that was really hard for me. It laid a lot of friction with my boss, who was the chairman of, Fox Filmed Entertainment and he was very set, for example, on like, we're just gonna make the next Die Hard movie. Bruce has a window in his schedule. I'm not really concerned about the quality of the writer, the quality of the script. I just wanna make sure the budget is under this number because I can project that we'll be safe. We'll exceed that number by Sunday night. So by the time people tell each other it's really bad, we will already be in the black. That was a soul killer for me. And what was really hard was I, when I was there long enough to figure out this was not aligned with me, right? Like Dreamworks was awesome because even if Dreamworks made some bad movies. It's really hard to make a great movie. No one really sets out to make bad movies, but it's hard. But at Dreamworks, we really tried to find movies where at the heart of it, there was a story that was real. There was some truth to a story of two brothers, a story of a man looking for his wife, and you can add genre elements to it to make it a big movie. Mm-hmm. But at the core, you're like, it's a man who's lost his wife. Right. I don't think that the movie industry is alone in demanding that kind of commitment. Like a no no, no. 24 7 commitment. medicine is that way. Even science is that way. When I was a graduate student, people would stay until midnight

and then come in at 6:

00 AM mm-hmm. I just work the whole time and I wasn't like that. I'm not built that way. I think there is that aspect of you can work two hours on something that is soul sucking and it's more painful to working eight hours on something that inspires you, that you think will change the world. exactly. And that was the situation I was stuck in and I was kept there. I had an offer for Warner Brothers to leave and Fox extended my contract solely to make sure I didn't go to Warner Brothers and make movies there. And that was just the end of it for me. I was like, I'm out. So a lot of our listeners feel like they're pushing but not progressing. And that's what it sounds like you were just talking about. Mm-hmm. So what energetic or behavioral patterns do you think contribute most to that feeling of invisible exhaustion or paralysis? For me, the awareness of how my energy rises and falls in the rhythms of that. Really evolved, like a sort of quantum change around when I discovered yoga and it was not when I first did yoga, that was earlier. My ex-girlfriend Allison, who's still a good friend of me and my wife, she and I dated years ago and she was the director of marketing for Yoga Works. She gave me a mat and she gave me a class card, like, Hey, try this. You're eight classes or 10 classes, whatever. And I did it. And I'll be honest, after that last class, I didn't wake up the next morning and go, oh, I can't wait to get back. good boyfriend check did the thing. Couple of years later, it was around the fox time now. Right. It's funny the way the universe works. So I was traveling with my dad and some family friends who are Indian through India we were staying at an Oberoi Hotel, which is a nice hotel, but it's set in this national park, called Ranthambore. And the reason you go there and a good analog in this country would be like Yosemite or Yellowstone or something like that, where you don't go there all the time, but you go there maybe once when you're a little kid and then once with your fiance or your family, right? So the reason you go there is the Royal Bengal, Tiger Preserve is within the park, right? Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. So we got there the first day we arrived, the hotel set up just as tents, luxury tents that are set up, scattered in the forest and you can't see one from the other. It's very much like we didn't wanna destroy the forest with some tall building, right? So I was walking down a path and I saw this little Indian guy standing in a white dhoti in the middle of a clearing. And I walked up to him, I was like, hi, what are you doing? And he is like, oh, I lead a yoga practice. And I thought this was very amusing because there is no one in sight. In is like the middle of a forest and he's standing there. So I was like, oh, for whom? For anyone who comes by when this afternoon. None of, he never even smile for this. It was just like very matter of fact. So I was like, so let me be clear. If I go to lunch with my dad and our friends and I come back here, you're going to teach yoga in this clearing here? He's like, yes. So I go to lunch and you've lived in Los Angeles, so you've had friends visit and maybe they want to go to Disneyland or they wanna, you know, go to Universal Studios and you're like, I've been 10 times. Like, you guys go, I'm so good. Right? So I go to lunch and I'm like telling my dad who's Indian and a bunch of our friends. Oh my God, there's this guy in the forest, he's gonna do yoga. It's kind of cool, right? We should do this. And they're all like, Steven, you go, that's really good for you. Like we're we, we've done enough yoga, we're we're covered, right? So I was like, okay, fine. I'm going. And I went and I did yoga in the clearing. He was still standing there and one other person had shown up. At the end of that class, I wanted to call Allison and say, oh, I understand now the gift you tried to give me a couple years ago. I just wasn't ready. And that practice for me, which is very spiritual and very physical, sort of intertwined, really helped me see, oh, I'm on this burnout path with Fox, where it's just, do I stick this out to be tough and try and make another Wolverine movie and another thing da? Or is this a meaningless way to spend my days? And I think yoga helped me say, you know what? My worth is not, "Well, I'm the guy making Wolverine. I'm the guy doing, this thing." It's more, am I affecting other people in a positive way the way yoga affects me? And that was a huge turning point in my life. That's awesome. Yeah. People don't realize how much each person affects the wellbeing of at least 10 other people. Right. I was a member of friends and family of alcoholics, also known as Al-Anon. Sure. Right. And we always said that one alcoholic could make 10 people sick. I believe that. But, but one uplifted, aware, awakened person can also make 10 people healthy. I'm with you on that one. Yeah. So yes, you are very affected by people around you. A lot of what I do now is I have a strong thesis that we all of us have something great inside us. And the question of this lifetime is simply, are you gonna get it out or not? I make tools now for people to go and do something with their lives as opposed to turn it over to one of the energy draining social media apps these sort of black holes of, of energy that, that just suck you in. I wanna enable people like, go do something great. And sometimes it, it gets really hard because when you get tired and burned out mm-hmm. You just wanna zone out and to stay productive all the time. What is it that you do? And I said you, you mentioned eating the frog and dopamine management. Yes. It's a funny term, right. Should we talk about that? Do you wanna talk about that a bit? Yeah. Dopamine management. That sounds really interesting. Well, especially with someone with your, background. I will, let me link two things together that I think are very, uh, healthy. There is the society and the dopamine economy that we live in now where. Enough people making tech products are very aware of the neurochemicals that we use to transmit to ourselves and to others, happiness, exhaustion, fun, sexual interest, frustration, all the things, right? So many of these apps are designed with an eye toward, okay, we get the way you work, not just psychologically, but almost neurochemically. And we're going to exact the same kind of dopamine reaction you get from like the variable rewards of gambling. it's a truth that if you won every time, you actually would not be addicted. It's that there's the variable reward that makes it addicting.'cause then you suddenly get that great dopamine burst. So that dopamine economy is a, is a real thing. What I have worked hard to understand and to some extent, make available to people, is that there are ways of being healthy about how you do the things you need to do or you want to do. Maybe inside you or inside me, there is the next Great American novel or an app, or a restaurant or a company that we're gonna create. if you don't understand how to create a positive sort of dopamine in a relationship for yourself, you are going to end up 80 years old on the sofa, scrolling and double tapping and being that. Person who's like, oh, I could have done that. Oh, I could have written that book. I had that idea. And that's a miserable way to end your life, isn't it? Yeah. Les Brown always says that, all of the graves are filled with people that have buried their dreams there. That's it. Yeah. If there's something, 'cause you know, I'm about to have my first child, I'm having a son in eight weeks. Yeah. And then hopefully if things go well, a daughter in two years. I think a lot about how do we release into the world tools that make sure people don't die with their dream inside them. Yep. It's true. And yeah, I mean, it doesn't even matter. when I was writing my book, I created a book cover and I wrapped it around another book. Mm-hmm. Just holding that. Just uplifted me and said, you could feel that in your heart, right? Yeah. I'm going, this is going to be real. this is coming real. It's almost there. And then when a box, I ordered 300 of them so I could distribute them. Yeah. And when I got that box of those books, it's like, woo. It was really, it was really amazing. These amazing is a great feeling. Yeah. And people are still buying it, even though I wrote it in 2015, they're still buying it. Congratulations 'cause it's all about healing. It's talks about the stress and the releasing the stress.'cause people think that stress is just emotional, but it can also be physical. Like if you fall down and hurt your knee, that's stress. Yeah. If you eat a food that you're allergic to, that's stress. It stresses your system. Yeah. Yeah. So it causes an undue stress in your body. It causes an inflammation. It causes a biochemical, waterfall of difficult things. So the healing is the opposite of stress. I'm just gonna say yes. Yes, exactly. So, so many purpose-driven entrepreneurs feel isolated and disconnected when they're working remotely. What's the secret to staying connected, motivated, and energized when you're working behind a screen? Okay, so let me tell you a story from my life and then I'll load apart a little bit. When I was a development executive, this is back in the film days before the tech days, right? Mm-hmm. I lived in West Hollywood. You know where that was? You lived in Torrance, right? Yeah. And there is a famous Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf that's right across Sunset Boulevard from the Director's Guild. Mm-hmm. And it's known, it's kind of a writer's clubhouse. You go in there and everybody's on their, little MacBooks writing away, and in the corner there's the crazy old guy who's written $3 million scripts this year, and this is just his habit to come write here for 20 years. He's been coming here, you know, and there are, you know, people just got off the bus yesterday that are writing their first tee script, and there's an energy to that room where I can't write to save my life, but I had to read a lot of material. You know, when you're a studio executive and you get tons of stuff thrown at you, like, buy this, buy this, buy this, right? I would go there to read because it was inspiring to be around other people, who are trying to do something great. So I very much connect to what you're saying about being an entrepreneur, a solopreneur. Many knowledge pursuits, especially if you're doing it remotely, can become isolating and that is not healthy as much as we can. All, even the introverts appreciate the things you can do on your own, right? You can do alone. We still ultimately are not islands, so. That learning I had about, the coffee shop and why I was drawn to that, even though I wouldn't talk with anyone and I wouldn't be a writer. When we were designing the, the Flow State app that I made, it was a single player game, if you will. It was, you could come use all the tools alone, and I knew a lot of people in there because they were the ones who were emailing me and chatting with me and suggesting things. Mm-hmm. But none of them knew each other. I thought, what if we change that? What if this is about, people connecting and feeling this sense of each other? So I'm gonna tell you, this is where I learned something that I didn't see coming. I asked a couple people that were members, can I talk to you for like five, 10 minutes? I just wanna bounce an idea off you. One woman I spoke to and I said, listen, is this the worst distraction in the world? Will this destroy what we're doing? Or is this. Like energetically gonna bring us closer. And she looked at me like I was an idiot and she said, listen Steven, I can go to the Nike store. I can buy a pair of shoes. They'll sell me a left shoe and a right shoe. I can put them on my feet, I can go run. It works great. But there are a hundred million people in the Nike Run Club for a reason. You run further and you run faster and you're more accountable. The days when you don't have the energy to do it, your friends come by and they're like, oh, come on Steven, let's do this. And you go run and it feels great. And the day one of your friends needs you to be the one who picks them up, that feels even better. Mm-hmm. She's like, you should absolutely do this, because so many of us now are disconnected and isolated, remote, and even just to look up while we're working and see, like in the website that we created, you can just see avatars of people around the world working and then you suddenly go, oh, that's right. I'm among others. I'm not alone. Yeah, there are. Because what you bring up is real. There are people that are actually setting up, get your work done hours where you just all come onto Zoom even. Yeah. And okay, we're gonna work for 15 minutes and then we're gonna pause and interact and then we'll work for another 15 minutes and people are getting stuff done that way. Yeah. Yeah, that's what the whole idea behind those workspaces that are popping up everywhere too. Mm-hmm. Probably inspired from that coffee bean and tea leave. Okay, so let's talk a little bit about work-life balance. Beyond the hours worked, what are the small but powerful rituals or breaks that keep you grounded and in flow throughout your day? There is a bunch of research, and you're probably even more articulate about this research than I, so let me do my layman's version of it. Okay. And you can just smile and nod. Fair. Yes. That's what we wanna do. Talk like a lay person does. So people get it. I try to do it, but I don't always succeed. But you did a great job with the methylation. That was a very great way of explaining how the genome is affected and the suppression expression of proteins and parts of the genome. That was awesome. Right? Oh, thank you. But back to what I was gonna say, which is this, as we do, stand on the shoulders of very smart people who came before us, they did the research on how this works, like to be very reductive. Yes, your brain does require a certain amount of fuel, just like muscles require fuel. Combustion engines, electric cars, everything requires some energy source, right? So to run your brain at full tilt for eight hours straight, may seem heroic. If you have. Elon Musk standing over you, flogging you to make him richer or something like, wow, I'm doing such a great job. But in reality, it's not actually a healthy way to either do that work because the marginal value of the work you're doing, the quality is going to fall off by the eighth hour as well as you're not gonna be able to sustain that over time. Right. Well actually it probably won't last more than two to three hours. Right, exactly. So the answer to your question is in looking at how this works and. I'm a big fan of the, concept of the Pomodoro technique. Mm-hmm. I know that in his original, design of that, it is a 25 and five cycle that then repeats and you have a longer break after two hours, that sort of thing. Right. I think that there is some specificity to how everyone is individual. Like I personally used that until I realized that. I kept running into 25 minute breaks when I would be in the middle of a thought, like the cadence of my thoughts were not 25 minute sprints, they were more like 45. And then I'd take 10 or 15 minutes off. And once I adapted that, I became much happier. And it does have that little bit of recharge, so you can do a few cycles during the day and actually do higher quality work than trying to press through and just be a hero and never get up from your desk and you know, that sort of thing. So in terms of healthy practices. One of the things that I implemented, and we actually put in the Sukha, the thing I created, when you, your Pomodoro comes up and says, Hey, you set a 30 minute cadence or four, whatever it is, now's the time and you get a little, just, I stole this from yoga, a little chime bell from meditation. So you come up on whatever time you've set, 25 minutes, and then on your break, which you know defaults to five minutes, but you can customize it, you get an option of saying, Hey. Here's some things you could do and we reward you, like we allow you to see day over day. Are, are you getting better by giving you a score, showing you what you did that was healthy and productive, and what you did that was actually pulling you backwards, right? You opened your phone while you're working, you lost some points. Oh, you didn't touch a website for 30 minutes, right? So one of the things we do is if you say, Hey, I'm gonna go get a glass of water. I'm gonna go for a walk. You get five or 15 points for that. We offer a couple of breathing meditations. If you just wanna sit at your desk and just box breathe for five minutes or something. Or if you want to do a stretch. So just like encouraging those simple things, again, in a gamified way of saying these are generally good for you. Choose your own adventure. What works for you in this moment? Put, do something. Don't just sit there sedentary for hours on end. It's not good for your cv, it's not good for, you know, not good for anyone involved. So a lot of people when they have this problem that they have been trying to chip away at the, solution to the problem, a lot of times they'll go do something else, take a shower, go for a run. even take a nap, have a conversation with somebody and then all of a sudden their subconscious just pops out the answer. Mm. And one of 'em that's kind of funny is that a lot of people when they're sitting on the toilet and letting go is when their ideas will pop up. So, okay, I'm gonna tell you a funny story. When I was just getting out of SC, one of my first jobs as I was making money in film and not just being a student, was there was a. trailer company, an ad agency that did trailers for movies, commercials, stuff like that, right. And run by these two guys that were very well respected in film. They had a, a golden sense of like how to market a movie. And my job was, we would get rough cuts in, largely from Warner Brothers and Buena Vista, which is Disney, right? And I would assign them to a writer, producer. Hey, Jerry, you did that great job with that Will Ferrell comedy. Sony has another one for next summer. Like look at this, right? So Jeff, who's one of the two principals, came in my office one day and he always called me Stevie. Just for the purpose of this story. He calls me Stevie. So he comes and he goes, Stevie, do you know Bart? I'm like, yeah, there's a guy in the vault who delivers tapes named Bart. He seems nice. Why you ever a, you ever give Bart a trailer to write? And I was like, we're talking about the guy who delivers coffee. Bart. He seems awesome. Why? Where are you going with this? He's like, I just have an instinct about him, Stevie. Jeff, your name is on the door. You doing this for 20 years? Let me find him a title. Let's give him a shot. Jeff leaves, I find like a Warner Brothers B title that had like a month deadline. So if he didn't want to do it, we can assign it to someone else, right? Two days later, Jeff's in my office. Stevie, how's Bart doing? I was like. I gave him this movie like two days ago. Like, what? Well, I'm not gonna bug him yet. I'll talk to him on Monday. He's like, okay, okay, okay. What else did you give him? Jeff? He's never written a trailer in his life. I gave him one movie. He just blow his brains out. He goes, Stevie, lemme teach you how creativity works. It is always about the other thing. Said, if you give Bart one thing to focus on, he's got little beads of sweat that come down his temples and he is going to write the most B version of that trailer you can imagine. You have to give him something else,'cause the part of your mind that does the ah chocolate and peanut butter. I wonder what these look like. The other, it's not the part you're thinking with. And as you said, I have seen Jeff proven right over the past 20 years, so many times it's ridiculous. In tech and in film and maybe have you ever read the book The Net and the Butterfly? No. You would probably appreciate this. It's um, Olivia Fox and Judah Pollock writing about like the executive mode and default mode networks. And you know why it is, we have ideas when we're driving or doing the dishes or walking or things like that, or on the toilet, as you said. Yes. Well, well, it's actually a bit of science is that the, conscious mind is a gatekeeper. Mm-hmm. And it's limited. And the subconscious mind is where all the creativity flows from. So as soon as you start doing something else, the gatekeeper gives up on that idea and lets it pop through. You would love this book because it's exactly about that. The executive mode network that is executing action, being the adult, and the default mode, like you said, that's the inquisitive, curious part of the brain. And the, child, like default mode can't really operate until the executive mode's busy with something else and it's like, ooh, you know, wonder what that cell phone tastes like. You know, the, the adult in the room would never think, but it leads you to strange, funny places. You would love that book, the Net and the Butterfly. Okay. I will definitely put it on my list to, of things to look at. At, at some point, is my little thought here. Yeah. So we're talking about getting in the flow and productivity. Mm-hmm. So what's your top tip for staying productive, present, and not getting swallowed up in the hustle? That is so easy. Before you start your day, be clear about your intention for that day. What is the most important thing you're gonna do? Don't dive into work. Don't start returning emails. Don't start reading the news. Don't do first go. What is the thing I need to get done that moves my life forward? Or your team's life, if it's that environment. But just be clear on that before you get lost in the haze of the, the trees. Awesome. Yeah. I always know what I'm gonna do every single day. That's awesome. Yeah, it just lined up, right? Yeah. When you have a goal, it just lines up. It's true. I'll mention this tomorrow. I'm doing that. Yeah. Something that I learned, because I, I think you talked about this in a previous episode, about you can have a certain paralysis around having too many options about too many things. You can see. So one thing that I learned about myself is I do procrastinate in the mornings when I look at that task list, and it might be 17 things that need to get done and they all need to get done, but it's paralyzing to look at them and go, how am I gonna get all these things done? Right? And we did a simple thing, like with my platform, what we did was we said, you know what? As soon as you hit play in the morning and the music starts and we block your distraction, all that we hide. Everything on your task list except the top three things. Mm-hmm. That is all you can see while you're working. Can I tell you, 77% higher chance our members will finish all three. Now that they can only see three than when they could see their whole list, it would finish. One or two's changed. Oh, that's interesting. Same members, same kind of tasks. Simply that overwhelm of what should be my priority today. I'm looking at too many things. It's so simple. Yeah. There's a way of prioritizing that's also very simple. If you have a long list, you just say, is this more important than that? Mm-hmm. And if it is it up, then you keep it up there. And then the next one, is this one more important than that? Right. Co. And you can go down the list. It takes, it takes like two minutes to do. Yeah. And you can reorder your priorities, which is the most important to get done because it helps relieve the stress. Yeah, I completely agree. And I, I used to journal every morning. I don't so much anymore because I kind of journal when I go out for a walk. Mm-hmm. In my mind, but, but I used to journal in the morning and just journaling and getting everything down on paper stopped that. I always called it the maelstrom of thoughts that just would go around and around. Because I have like 10 tracks running in there and, and I just got everything down and then my mind went really quiet and I could just go forward because I raised two children by myself and ran a big household and ran a research program all at the same time. So, wow. You know, I cooked all the, the meals, did all the laundry, took the kids and visited their, their schools, and I just took care of all the bits and pieces and. A lot of people said, how do you do that? Like a lot of the younger students when they saw was a woman professor at, at University of Washington and they go, you're raising two kids and you're running a household. And a lot of 'em thought that wasn't possible. It, it is, uh, It's possible. You just slice, you have to prioritize your day up and you just, yeah. You just march through it one step at a time. I think there's a, a related concept to what you're talking about. You know, the Zeigarnik effect, which is about, and I'm going to be very reductive here. I'm not a scientist like you are, but that brain relief that you enjoy when you capture those things. You don't have to carry them in your short term memory. Yeah. You're like, let me just get these out in paper so that you're not holding them using energy to hold 'em in, in your mind. I think that's, that is a great thing to do. Yeah. Yeah, and that's why I always encourage people that are feeling overwhelmed and burned out. Mm-hmm. To just start their day with five or 10 minutes of writing. And if they say, that's awesome, I have time. Then just wake up five or 10 minutes earlier and do it.'cause it's a really important task to get that stress out of the way. yeah. I'm with you. And so what's one truth you've learned that you wish more people understood about burnout and success? Really, the biggest thing that I've learned that I want to share with people is the fact that flow states exist. That they are things that you can reproduce there. It's great research on how to get into that state where you lose track of time, distractions fall away. You do high quality work in a shorter period of time, and if you do that in such a way that it returns energy to you as opposed to drains you of energy. It's a wonderful experience and then you want to do it again. Once you've done it, you're like, that was really magical. Like I would love to do that. And that's what I'm really focused on at this point in my life is just sharing that knowledge around here's the body of work on what it is, how to do it. I made an app that helps people get into it. It's about, this is great, what people should know. What's the name of your app? it's called the Sukha, uh, sukha is the Sanskrit word for happiness. Oh, the one like on there, the S-U-K-H-A-S-U-K-H-A. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. I really appreciate all of your wisdom and your knowledge, and this has been probably helpful for a lot of people that feel like they're overwhelmed and burned out. I appreciate you saying that and, and let me close by just offering this because I'm, I'm very honored to be on your pod, which is, if there is anyone that has heard something we talked about and wants to know more about it, because we talk about many things in a, you know, sort of superficial way. My email address is very public. I'm happy if someone's like, oh, I'd love to know more about that book. Or, who is this person or the guy that created Flow States or discovered Flow states. Um, my email address is just Steven with a v. The Sukha, T-H-E-S-U-K-H a.co for company. If you drop me an email, you're like, can you send me a link to that book or whatever? Yeah, I'll, I'll reply to all my emails in 24 hours or less when I'm not sick or traveling. I'm happy to do that. I'll put everything we've talked about here on the show notes at break free from the burnout. So there'll be a, there'll be a source and also your bio will be there so people can read a little bit more about you. Who was that guy? Who did she have him on? Yeah. Who was that? That just went by? I know the time flew by, but yes. Yes, it. That's awesome. Time flies when you're having fun. We always used to say, I totally with you on that. Thank you for having me. This is great. And for those listening, I appreciate that you listened to us. Awesome. Thank you so much. Have a great day. You too. If you're feeling burned out and ready to reset, not just your mind, but your biology, I invite you to join me in a call to see which program is right for you. Go to scientifichealer.com/quantum. Enjoy today's podcast? Give it a thumbs up or a five star rating. Share with your friends and be sure to subscribe to my channel. Thank you for listening to break free from the burnout. Resources and show notes are available at breakfreefromtheburnout.com Until next time, I'm Dr. Anastasia Chopelas, sending you golden healing, light, and success vibes to becoming aligned, confident, and prosperous. Your gifts are so needed in this world.

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Dr. Anastasia Chopelas

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Steven Puri

Guest