BITESIZE | How To Become Less Reactive & Cultivate A Deep Sense Of Calm | Jonny Miller #653

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0:50And the best thing, of course, is that all this goodness comes in one convenient, tasty daily serving. For a limited time only, get a free AG1 flavor sampler and AGZ sampler to try all the flavors, plus free vitamin D3 and K2 and AG1 welcome kit with your first AG1 subscription order. That's$87 in free gifts for first-time subscribers. See all details at drinkag1.com forward slash live more. Welcome to Feel Better Live More Bite Size, your weekly dose of positivity and optimism to get you ready for the weekend. Today's clip is from episode 569 of the podcast with Johnny Miller, founder of Nervous System Mastery.

1:47In this clip, he shares why learning to work with your body can change how you respond to stress, reduce reactivity, and help you move from overwhelm to calm. We don't see the world as it is. We see the world as we are. So why is that this internal conflict? We know who we are. We know we want to be kind and compassionate. yet we end up being reactive and stressed. And one of the reasons I think, which I think very much mirrors what you're saying, is that if you're chronically stressed, the way you view the world also changes, right? Because when you're stressed, your body thinks it's under threat, right?

2:30So the focus comes in, you're looking for threat, you're looking for problems, you become hypervigilant, right? You're not having this wide perspective, taking the other viewpoint, going, oh, I wonder what they were thinking there. Do you know what I mean? So it feels like it's a vicious cycle from both sides. We're living in a world where people feel chronically stressed, they've got too much to do, which is changing the way they view the world. It's also tightening up their nervous system, which means they're going to also be more reactive even when there's no threat there.

3:02Jonny Miller:Exactly. So I know we're going through practical exercises, but for someone who's perhaps having a light bulb moment during this conversation, can they change it? Yeah, I mean, that's beautifully said. I view the nervous system as literally a lens through which we experience reality. And I think our state of our nervous system and the degree to which we're in a mode of reactivity completely dictates our experience of life. So yes, I mean, it's like doing reps at a gym, right? It does take practice, but our nervous systems are neuroplastic along with our brain. And so with practice, we can rewire these maladaptive responses to stress.

3:43What are some signs in your view that might indicate our nervous systems are a little bit out of whack, which may color the way we view the world and change the way we experience life?

3:57Jonny Miller:So some signs would include forms of reactivity. so if you're like knee jerk anger is obviously a clear one or if there's a sense of fatigue or lethargy or sleep is obviously a huge one as well that's a big symptom of nervous system dysregulation what that we can't sleep that we wake up struggle to fall asleep struggle to kind of downshift at the end of the day without kind of using substances and also i think challenge in relationship is a huge one that I see in my students. So whether it's kind of conflict in different areas or challenges with creating a sense of connection with people that are close to you, there's a lot.

4:39Jonny Miller:Early symptoms of burnout is another one as well. So I think about in terms of like feather brick dump truck. And in the beginning, maybe your nervous system is telling you like almost like tickling you with a feather of like maybe you're going a little bit too hard, maybe it's time to take a bit of a break. And then there's maybe a brick, which could be, you know, you wake up feeling exhausted, maybe you've got brain fog, maybe you can't really perform at work. And then for some people, it takes a dump truck, which might be, maybe it's like an intense breakup, or it's like a health crisis. And it's often, unfortunately, the dump truck, which gets people to really tune in.

5:17Jonny Miller:But it's really just the body giving you feedback. Yeah. It's interesting. Those symptoms you mentioned there, some of them, you know, being overly reactive, relationship struggles, maybe anxiety would be in there for many people. These are very, very common these days. Many people are walking around with these kind of tight and wound up nervous systems that they think is normal. Yet they don't realize that there is That's another way to experience the world out there, isn't there? Yeah, beautiful. I mean, anxiety, I think it's a really good example. And it actually, the word anxiety comes from the Latin ango, which literally means to constrict.

5:57Jonny Miller:And a lot of people try and manage anxiety or like conquer anxiety. But it's really just our reaction to a kind of an underlying emotion. And so it can be really helpful to kind of learn to notice the constriction in the body and kind of like allow it to open up. And there's a number of different practices for that. Yeah, that's interesting. Anxiety is a reaction to an underlying emotion. I imagine that a lot of people think that anxiety is an emotion. Totally. But you're sort of framing it slightly differently. Yeah, it's kind of like a defensive strategy that our nervous system has to constrict against.

6:40Jonny Miller:I think about almost like a hose pipe. like you can turn on the the tap really strongly and you know the water will kind of go through and if if your if your system is kind of unclenched and doesn't have tension it'll kind of flow cleanly but if you're resisting some aspect of your experience could be anger could be sadness could be frustration whatever it is and a really obvious example is like if someone is you know before an important conversation maybe they feel scared and afraid and there's a sense of anxiety but that could also be excitement. And it can just, if that system opens and they're kind of connected to the breath, then it's really just energy, like energy in motion that's kind of moving through.

7:20Is there a difference between anxiety and excitement or is it just the way that we're framing that tension?

7:26Jonny Miller:It's the tension in the body, I think, yeah. Same tension. Yeah. That's a really interesting concept because we know that anxiety is on the rise. So many people are struggling with anxiety and you're saying trying to manage it can make it worse, which in many ways is counterintuitive for people. But I think that's because people don't, they don't know what it feels like these days to experience their body. So I imagine some people will hear you talking and go, yeah, but what are you talking about? Constricting in my body. What the hell does that mean? And so do you find that in the modern world, many people are stuck in their heads and don't even know what's going on beneath the neck?

8:08Jonny Miller:Yeah, totally. So I think about in the kind of journey of nervous system mastery of kind of working with your nervous system, there's three kind of core skills that I think about. And the first is exactly what you spoke to, which is kind of regaining sensitivity of our internal experience. So it's called interoception is the kind of fancy name. I know you've written about it in your book. And it's really relearning to listen to the feedback from our body that's coming all of the time. The second skill is self-regulation. And this is what a lot of people are probably familiar with when it comes to anxiety.

8:46Jonny Miller:There's kind of three ways that I think about self-regulating. There's top-down approaches, which might be like cognitive reframes, might be positive affirmations. Mindfulness is a good example. the second is bottom up which is this is my favorite honestly it's like working with the or leveraging these levers in our physiology things like the breath is a really common one to literally shift our state and create that sense of safety so bottom up techniques or practices would include things like humming is actually really effective it increases nitric oxide by I think 15 fold and it's a vasodilator which helps with eye strain as well and helps us kind of downshift into that parasympathetic state.

9:29Jonny Miller:Other things would be long hold stretches, exhale emphasized breathing practices so like 4-7-8 is a really common one or just any breath where the exhale is twice as long as the inhale. It will have a kind of calming effect. And another one that you can do is kind of playing with your awareness and And awareness is, again, something that a lot of people don't think about, but your awareness in any moment can be kind of expansive. You could be aware of like the space, the sides of you, the space above you, below you. Or usually when people get stressed or reactive, the awareness is almost like it's like looking, experiencing life through a straw.

10:05Jonny Miller:It's like just in front of you and very narrow. So you can be aware of the space like behind you, feeling your feet on the ground, attuning to like the sounds around you. and the more that your awareness is kind of expansive i'm like doing a little bit right now like you can kind of put your hands out and then as you kind of move them behind you you're kind of expanding your peripheral vision and that has this kind of expansive effect and it creates a sense of spaciousness in the system yeah that whole visual piece is really interesting um i work with this incredible movement coach called helen hall and one of the things helen has helped me where there's understanding the importance of peripheral vision when let's say you're running.

10:51And she has shown me and I've seen the data that when you are running or walking with narrow focus vision, you move a certain way. And if you then tune into expanding your vision, softening it, making it more peripherals, your whole movement pattern changes. There's more fluidity. There's more flow. it really helps the way you move and we know that your vision is super related to the state of your nervous system so those practices are actually really helpful to think about I want to go into some of them in detail but you mentioned this bottom-up practices and before you mentioned top-down so it sounds like there's a variety of different body-based actions practices that people can do and is the suggestion for people to play around and experiment with curiosity a variety of these practices and maybe choose a couple that they really like that they can practice regularly that allows them to train this skill of letting go is that a useful way to look at it for people i think that's a really useful way to put it and

12:08Jonny Miller:I think I really emphasize the experiment-based approach. I think in my experience, the bottom up is the most underappreciated and kind of most ignored. And I do believe it's the most effective if someone is in a state of, you know, their anxiety is ramping up maybe towards a panic attack or they're getting really stressed. Yeah. It's the most effective kind of short-term intervention. But in terms of the long term, I mean, I think it's actually, this is kind of going a little like a layer deeper. but I think that both top-down and bottom-up interventions can also be used to avoid feeling emotions and then this is something I call the self-regulation paradox in that if you're just using journaling or CBT or breathwork to kind of ground yourself but ultimately avoid feeling whatever the the emotion is you're not going to make progress over time because I I view these practices as a purely a means to get back into our window of tolerance and then to allow the emotion to actually move through.

13:13Jonny Miller:Because if we're still moving through the world in a way that we are avoiding feeling sadness or anger or grief or whatever the thing is, then we will always be making these predictions that like, oh, that's bad. We're not going to go near that. And so the intensity of our, in which they present in our bodies will just get worse and worse over time. And we'll have to do like more and more of these interventions in order to kind of self-regulate. And the third kind of pillar or category is emotional fluidity. And that is, it's the one that probably takes the longest to learn, but it's learning to welcome the full spectrum of human experience.

13:53Jonny Miller:And beneath anxiety, for a lot of people, it is either like frustration or anger or sometimes sadness. And once there's that sense of safety and calmness that's created from the self-regulation, then the emotion can come through. And actually, it's the resistance to feeling the emotion that is the bit that sucks, basically. Emotions themselves don't last for more than 10 to 20 seconds. It's the way that we constrict and tense against them and try to resist feeling them that is the bit that causes the challenge. That's really interesting. The emotions themselves don't last beyond 10 to 20 seconds.

14:33Jonny Miller:Which is wild, right? Because we don't think about that normally. And the other thing that I want to bring this back to is this idea of emotions or avoided emotions and specifically emotional debt. Because the more that we go through life and our nervous systems have this amazing capacity to buffer our emotional responses. which, you know, in many, many situations is super useful. Like let's say someone on the street just like shout to me or I'm in a boardroom meeting and I get really angry. It's actually good for me to be able to like suppress that and kind of save it for later. But if I do that, you know, repeatedly over many days or weeks or months, that builds up this emotional debt is what I call it.

15:18Jonny Miller:And in the nervous system, this is a buildup of allostatic load. and what this does, this kind of wear and tear, it drains energy from the system which reduces our window of tolerance. So I imagine listeners will be familiar that maybe they start a new job and in the beginning they've got a ton of energy and they feel vibrant but as time goes on it feels like they get more and more reactive over time and that I believe is due to this buildup of allostatic load which is in part contributed to by not allowing the emotional reflex arc to be completed. And so many of us are walking around with pockets of buffered emotional responses, which is contributing to this sense of exhaustion and fatigue and low capacity, basically.

16:10Yeah, I really like the idea of emotional debt and this idea that we're not completing our emotional responses. I think it's a really important point for us all to reflect on. I know you like to give the example of the lion and the impala. So maybe perhaps use that as a way of helping people understand what it means to complete that stress response fully.

16:36Jonny Miller:Yeah. So people can search this on YouTube. There's a great video of an impala that is chased by a lion. It's literally like in its jaws. It manages to escape. and the next kind of five minutes it finds its way to hide under a bush and it just lies down and its entire body just starts shaking. It shakes and shakes and shakes for about two or three minutes and it just gets up and it's totally fine. But that shaking is the kind of mammalian response that we all have of discharging that intensity and that stress that it just went through. And humans have kind of forgotten how to do that. There's definitely ways that you can, whether it's through breath work or whether it's through either practice I call somatic surfing or even just creating a sense of safety.

17:21Jonny Miller:Sometimes the body will kind of go into to complete that emotional response that it wasn't able to at the time because often we will disassociate or we'll push it down and again that's great but if we don't set aside time for some kind of processing to just allow the emotions to complete, then they get stored and they drain energy from the battery of your body, basically. Yeah, that's a very vivid image, an impala almost being dead and having all that stress within them that they then process, the stress is gone, they go about living their life. Yeah. So we're feeling reactive over something we can learn some top-down practices or some bottom-up practices to reduce that reactivity and perhaps reduce how much we react to that stimulus in the future.

18:19Exactly. Unless we go one level deeper and go, okay, we've reduced your activity. Now let's really feel that emotion and let that emotion work through us like the impala sort of shaking it out. It will still be there. It will be having a hold on us. And when the right scenario presents itself, the right comments, the right amount of sleep deprivation, the right comment from your boss, it's like a match that still lights it. Precisely. So going back to your example about the wild and how mammals will complete that stress response. I'm guessing the impala, They've just got this intuitive mechanism that perhaps we have had before and we've lost, right?

19:10Of shaking it out of their system so that they're free afterwards. It makes me think of this movement deprived Western world in which many of us live, right? And we talk about the benefits of physical activity for our hormones or our physical health. There's more talk these days about what physical activity does for our mental wellbeing. but as you were talking i thought do you think that one of the reasons why movement whether it be walking or running or going to the gym makes us feel so good is because it completes or it helps us complete a stress response that may have been left partially uncompleted within our bodies.

19:57Jonny Miller:Yeah, I think that's largely a big part of it. And I used to go for a run. That was my way of, if I'd had an intense day, I'd kind of go for a run around the block or in the park. And I'd feel better when I got back. But ultimately, you're just trying to get back to what that impala already knew, which is this just way of discharging the energy. Hope you enjoyed that bite-sized clip. Do spread the love by sharing this episode with your friends and family. and if you want more why not go back and listen to the original full conversation with my guest if you enjoyed this episode i think you will really enjoy my bite-sized friday email it's called the friday five and each week i share things that i do not share on social media it contains five short doses of positivity articles or books that i'm reading quotes that i'm thinking about exciting research i've come across and so much more i really think you're going to love it.

20:54The goal is for it to be a small yet powerful dose of feel good to get you ready for the weekend. You can sign up for it free of charge at drchatterjee.com forward slash Friday Five. I hope you have a wonderful weekend. Make sure you have pressed subscribe and I'll be back next week with my long form conversation on Wednesday and the latest episode of Bite Science next Friday.

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