How To Become Less Reactive & Cultivate A Deep Sense Of Calm with Jonny Miller #569

27:56Now, it's natural to look for extra ways to support our immune defenses, but most people don't want to juggle multiple pills. They want something simple, effective, and easy to stick with. AG1 is a daily health drink that provides key immunity-supporting nutrients, vitamin C, vitamin A, zinc, and selenium, all of which contribute to the normal function of the immune system. These nutrients are included in highly bioavailable forms, meaning they are much easier for the body to absorb and use. Backed by clinical research, expert formulation, and continuous improvement, each batch is independently tested for quality and safety.

28:39That's how they guarantee what's in your scoop and what's not. And 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, 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.

29:21Jonny Miller: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. 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 in many, many situations is super useful. Like let's say, I don't know, someone on the street just like shout to me or I'm in a boardroom meeting and I get really angry.

30:04Jonny Miller:It's actually good for me to be able to suppress that and kind of save it for later. But if I do that repeatedly over many days or weeks or months, that builds up this emotional debt is what I call it. 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 like, you know, maybe they start a new job. And in the beginning, they've got like a ton of energy and they feel vibrant. But as time goes on, it feels like they get more and more reactive over time.

30:42Jonny Miller:and that I believe is due to this buildup of allostatic load which is in part contributed to by not allowing these the emotional reflex arc to be completed and and so you know many of us are walking around with like pockets of buffered emotional responses which is contributing to this sense of exhaustion and fatigue and and low capacity basically yeah I really like that idea of emotional debt and this idea that we're not completing our emotional responses okay i think it's a really really important point for us all to reflect on i know you like to give the example of the the lion and the impala so maybe exactly perhaps use that as a way of helping people understand what it means to complete yeah that stress response fully yeah so people can um search this on YouTube, there's a great video of an impala that is chased by a lion.

31:41Jonny Miller: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.

32:19Jonny 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. And I mean, it's really interesting. last July my family and I for our summer holidays we went to Kenya and one of the things we did was go on safari I was quite scared before I went like I cognitively I couldn't get my head around the fads that I was going to be in a car and I was actually hoping our car was closed but it wasn't it was open right which was great but I was just like hold on so there's going to be wild animals there and I was quite tense the first time.

33:35For sure, I was holding on to the edge and trying not to look afraid to my kids. But I was, right? Because I'm not used to being in these environments and I softened up over days. But I do remember once, we drove past two lions and something really profound shifted in me because, you know, this is the wild, right? There was blood all around their faces, their jaws right and all my fear went i just thought oh i don't think i mean i don't think they're going to attack us anyway but i also thought oh they're full like that line is literally full they've i think they've just killed a wildebeest their stomach is distended and full they're probably in that relaxed parasympathetic state now just chilling they're not interested in coming after me do you know what i mean it's sort of it was very it was very profound and then going Going back to your example about the wild and how mammals will complete that stress response.

34:37It 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?

35:19Jonny 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. And I think the other thing that you're speaking to is the environment that we're in very much dictates our own experience to some degree as well. So I think about the best metaphor I have for the nervous system is as an instrument. Like we have these human instruments and sometimes we can get out of tune. That's how I think of dysregulation. But in certain environments, I mean, I felt this the other day on a like incredibly busy London underground tube.

36:01Jonny Miller:Like we are kind of co-regulating with the other people and the environments that we're in. And as mammals, we feel much more grounded, relaxed, expansive in something like, you know, I was at a Soho park just before this podcast. and there I was like, oh, I feel so good. And everyone can relate to that. But I think that it's really helpful to think about how we can, to the degree that we can design our environments, they then will design us in return. And so there's constantly this kind of like attuned relationship between me and you right now, between the room that we're in, the plants. Like our nervous system is constantly looking for these signals of like, am I safe?

36:45Jonny Miller:Can I relax? And so I think there's definitely an argument to be made of intentionally designing your environment for the state that is appropriate for that moment. So another example is there's something called the cathedral effect, which is where if you have like a high ceiling, there have been studies that show that's better for like creative thinking versus like a low ceiling is much better for like analytical kind of maybe data driven tasks. And so we're constantly being, yeah, like impacted by our environment. Yeah. So it's interesting. We're in the middle of London at the moment in a studio recording this conversation.

37:23So many people do live in very urban settings. And of course, some people cannot exert much control over their external environment. So what are the kind of things that we can do in our homes, in our flats, in our apartments to try and negate the effects of the outside world?

37:45Jonny Miller:Well, I'd say there's both internal things and there's external things. So your body is constantly getting signals from both your body and the environment. So for people who are in these kind of like busy, loud environments, obviously, you know, externally you can wear noise-canceling headphones, things like that, or just like reduce the intensity of stimulus if you're looking to kind of unwind at the end of the day, for example. But I think more practical and more effective, honestly, are learning what I call bottom-up techniques or practices. So these would include things like humming is actually really effective.

38:21Jonny Miller:It increases nitric oxide by 15-fold and it's a vasodilator. This helps with eye strain as well and helps us kind of downshift into that parasympathetic state. Other things would be long hold stretches, exhale-emphasized breathing practices. So like 478 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 without, you know, externally changing anything is kind of playing with your awareness. So you can be aware of the space like behind you, feeling your feet on the ground, attuning to like the sounds around you.

39:00Jonny Miller: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 with is understanding the importance of peripheral vision when let's say you're running and And she has shown me and I've seen the data that when you are running or walking with narrow focus vision, right, which many of us would be doing.

39:46And if you're in a narrow urban street, you're probably are going to be doing that. 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.

40:03Jonny Miller:Yeah. it really helps the way you move. And we know that your vision is, you know, it's super related to the state of your nervous system. Totally. So those practices actually, yeah, they're really helpful to think about. I want to go into some of them in detail, right? But you mentioned this bottom up practices. Okay. And before you mentioned top down. Okay. So I want to really kind of unpack it. Okay. So top down, i.e. with your mind from your brain downwards you're cognitively reframing things you're thinking about things differently bottom up is some sort of body-based practice like the breath for example that is naturally changing things in your nervous system how would you frame it yeah so so the example you gave with the the lion seeing that the lion's belly was full was a great example of like a top-down reframe because you noticed that oh so now the line is no longer a threat so you you kind of changed a belief that you had that was making a prediction about the world about whether or not the line is a threat so that was a great example of like a very effective top-down intervention there's many others in the kind of um you know cbt is another good example of like cognitive reframes but what i love about bottom-up and there's some interesting science around this as well in that we have, I believe it's something like four times more afferent neurons than efferent neurons.

41:32Jonny Miller:And the afferent neurons are the ones that go from the body up to the brain, up to the head. And efferent go from the brain head down to the body. So there's essentially like a kind of four lane superhighway of information going up and like one lane of traffic going down. And to me, that kind of indicates that the way that we make predictions is much more heavily influenced by what our body is experiencing than by the kind of thoughts and feelings and emotions that we're having. Okay, love it. So this is where I'm at with my thinking with this at the moment. Compared to, let's say, five years ago, I feel my nervous system is in a completely different states.

42:15Generally speaking today, I feel pretty calm, contented most of the time. I'm not really reactive. Very little stresses me out compared to what used to happen. Now, the internet, the modern world wants to know what was the one thing I did or one does. And the truth is there wasn't a one thing. Okay. There were a variety of different things. But one of the things I did a lot of was cognitive reframing. Okay. And for people who listen to my show, they'll know that a conversation I had with the Auschwitz survivor, Edith Eager, had a huge impact on my life because she could cognitively reframe her experience whilst in a death camp.

42:57Now, I found that the most inspiring thing because for months after that, whenever I got triggered or I felt reactive to something that was outside my control. And back then it was a lot. Once my kids had gone to bed in the evening, I wasn't able to do it in the moment. Once they'd gone to bed in the evening, I would then think about those situations. I'd go, okay, instead of blaming the external world for my internal emotions, I would own them and go, okay, what did that bring up in me? Okay. Oh, that reminded me of this from my childhood or what someone said to me when I was 14 or whatever it might be.

43:35And through that process, or that's at least one part of it, I feel the way I interacted with the world and day-to-day life experience completely changed. So I'm always trying to be aware of my biases. I think we've all got biases. When something has worked for us or we perceive it's worked for us, I think a lot of us then falsely jump to the conclusion that that must be the way that everyone needs to approach stuff. and I try and be aware of that. Actually, no, that worked for me. It doesn't mean it's going to work as well for everyone. So that would be an example of a top-down intervention. Now, I will also acknowledge, I mentioned Helen, my movement coach, my body and the way I move and my ability to access different movements has also completely changed through working with Helen.

44:30right and so um i also believe as you do i think that the body stores emotions in inverted commas right and therefore once you can start to access different movements your posture your personality your emotions start to change right so i've also done that at the same time yeah yeah so i can't say it was just that but i guess what i'm trying to get to with you is you know you're sort of saying that you think that bottom up is arguably more powerful than

45:05Jonny Miller:top down yeah i mean so i would say first first off the ideal is you stack you stack the top down the bottom up and also the outside in is the third category as well that's like the people around you your environment the things we were talking about as well so you said you hit it from multiple angles yeah you hit it from from all of the angles um i think in my experience the bottom up is the most like 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.

45:38Jonny Miller: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 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 emotion is, you're not going to make progress over time. Because I view these practices as purely a means to get back into our window of tolerance, and then to allow the emotion to actually move through.

46:23Jonny 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 gonna go near that. And so the intensity 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. Yeah, I love that, right? I love the way you frame that. 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.

47:09unless 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.

47:42Jonny Miller:Precisely, precisely. And you mentioned earlier that emotions are stored in the body. And up until recently, I think this was a fairly kind of almost like a fringe belief where we didn't really have like a mechanism for this. And there's a really interesting theoretical neuroscientist called Michael Edward Johnson. And he has this idea that in the smooth muscle tissue, there are these latches that are created every time we kind of buffer these emotions. And so there are literally like pockets of tension that are stored in the smooth muscle tissue using this latch bridge mechanism. And my belief, I'd love to find a way to test this.

48:17Jonny Miller:I'm working with them to try and run an experiment on this. But I would love to be able to do a kind of before and after. Let's say, you know, before a series of five breathwork journeys or before MGMA assisted psychotherapy. Like what is someone's latch profile before and after? Because, you know, you can see it. sometimes my students or my breathwork clients, you can literally see the tension kind of dissolve in their face or different areas, or they feel like, oh, like I suddenly I have, like, I have sensations in my belly that I didn't have before. You know, these things happen anecdotally, but I would bet that there is a, you know, strong correlation between these latches in the smooth muscle tissue and the amount of just unprocessed, undigested emotions.

48:58Yeah, that is so interesting. Super interesting. Well, it brings up quite a few things for me. Firstly, this idea that emotions are stored in the body. And this idea that you mentioned that until recently, it's been deemed like quite a fringe concept. And I think in many ways, that is a reflection of the head-based rational world in which we live, right? The need to find a mechanism for something that many humans will say, well, we've intuitively known this for thousands of years. Now I'm not saying we shouldn't find a mechanism. I think it's fun to. At the same time, I find many things are deemed fringe when we don't have a scientific mechanism to explain them.

49:38You know, I've been into enough movement classes over the years to see when people have certain movements unlocks and released, they can be shaking and crying.

49:48Jonny Miller:Yeah. Like 20 minutes sometimes. It's like, oh my God, what on earth was stored in your hip flexors that when you finally release them for the first time, you were just shaking. It reminds me of the impeller, right? Yeah, yeah, exactly. Maybe that emotion got stored. It wasn't completed. Exactly. And that movement allowed it to be completed, which then begs the question for me,

50:14if you have a stored emotion that's there from a previous trauma or a previous event, can you process it without even thinking about it yes yeah yeah you can and i think that's why

50:31Jonny Miller:that's why my bias is more in the bottom up category because i i've had a number of you know personal experiences mostly through you know doing hundreds of breathwork journeys it was kind of my approach but i've had many many experiences i i believe that many of them were kind of pre-verbal so things that happened between the ages of you know zero to a year and a half before i even had language. And so I'd be experiencing these incredibly intense emotions from like abandonment, grief, rage. And I had no story of what was going on. It was purely just, I was just witnessing these really intense emotions, like coursing through my body, but having zero idea what they were connected to.

51:12Jonny Miller:And that's happened, you know, more times than I can count. Which is why I think the intellectual piece, the top down piece is a really useful kind of like wedge in the door, because it gets people in contact with the felt sensation. But I think that if it remains purely in the realm of the intellect and there isn't some kind of contact with the physical somatic kind of sensation and response, then I don't believe that the latches can actually be opened. Yeah, that is such a beautiful example. I mean, if things have been stored in our body before we could even speak, how the hell are we going to cognitively reframe that?

51:46We don't have language for it, yeah, exactly. Exactly. And it also makes me think, where I'm sort of landing on this, I won't call it a conundrum, but this kind of top-down, bottom-up, which again, I actually do believe is an artificial separation because that is then predicated on the belief that the body and mind are separate, which I don't believe they are. So you could even make the case that even a powerful form of cognitive reframing is in some way changing the body. It is, yeah. Because these things aren't separate. Totally. I think where I love top down as a short-term thing at least is to help people understand cognitively at least maybe not on the body yet and I agree with you that bottom-up is super important as well right so it's it's more for the um for the purpose of a conversation that I bring these things up because I think it's really interesting to explore I agree I one thing I want to sort of impart with people is this idea that the responses within you are being brought up within you.

52:47It's very easy to blame the external world for our internal responses. But until you understand that actually the external world might send you some signals, right? But ultimately it's your internal response to those signals that's causing the issue. It in war or you're suffering severe trauma, you know, and someone's traumatizing you. I'm not saying that isn't happening or it's not incredibly difficult, but let's take it away from those extreme examples and talk about a comment on social media, right? Which people are walking around getting triggered every single day by what I would call neutral comments on social media.

53:28I think top down is really useful to help people understand, look, the comment really at its core is neutral.

53:36Jonny Miller:You know, what you're touching on is a really important piece, which is this idea of like full ownership and full agency. And I think that when we are suffering and when we're resisting our experience, it's because we are feeling in some way, shape or form, like we're a victim of that. Like we had no control or power, whether it was like something your boss said or your partner said or a victim of even circumstances. And when you make that move to, no, I'm creating this. At the same time, it also softens your resistance to the physical things that you're feeling as well. And so as you said, the top down, bottom up distinction is actually in some ways, it doesn't exist.

54:21Jonny Miller:And for people who've done like extended meditation retreats, for example, they can notice when a certain thought arises, there will be a corresponding like subtle tension in their body. So every time we have a thought or an idea, there is a corresponding mental kind of sensation that arises on just a really kind of like very subtle level and so as you say there is this this dark this direct connection yeah you shared um a story recently about a monk who came and did one of your courses oh yeah yeah and it was such a powerful story because my recollection of it and perhaps you could share it again is that It's...

55:05There was a monk who'd done a ton of meditation, yet somehow would manage to avoid feeling their emotions. And so there was anger raging within them that they didn't know about until it came out. So could you just share that? Because I think that's an incredibly powerful example how some of the time we're bypassing our emotions and think we're moving forwards when we're actually not.

55:29Jonny Miller:Yeah, I know. I'm really glad you brought this up. so this was a monk who'd spent 20 plus years in a monastery and I actually get a surprising number of students in my course who are long-term meditators but they still aren't happy honestly they still experience anxiety they still experience reactivity and I love meditation myself I've you know I practice regularly but I do think that it is a very obviously there's different types of meditation. But often what long-term meditators will get very good at is that kind of move to where they are deconstructing reality or they are, what's the word, kind of creating cognitive distance between themselves and the feeling or the emotion.

56:16Jonny Miller:And it's very, very different to neutrally observe a feeling or sensation versus like fully welcome it. And the example that I think will make this real for people is if you imagine if you imagine your kids like neutrally observing your kids having a tantrum is very different from like going up and giving them a hug like you will have a very different reaction between in the in those two scenarios and and so in the example of this monk through a series of breathwork journeys just realized that there was a huge amount of unprocessed anger essentially and rage that was likely the reason he got into meditation in the first place to kind of avoid feeling that discomfort all the time.

57:01Jonny Miller:And yeah, and I find often, often anger is one of the things that like once it moves, it releases such like, like aliveness in the body again, and kind of energy and like vibrancy. And even, you know, people, again, this is anecdotal, but people who've been depressed and lethargic for long periods of time, the anger is almost being turned inwards through the inner critic. So they will be like angry at themselves and judging themselves and have all this negative self-talk and once that anger gets a chance to kind of be expressed and be externalized it like frees up all this energy and I love seeing it because it's like like someone really comes alive after after that moves through um so yeah I think it's another good example of like a very nuanced pitfall on a path of you know you might say yeah meditation's great like meditate as much as you can but it is um if you're only meditating in certain ways, I mean, I think metta practice or like loving kindness practice or jhana practice actually is slightly different versus the kind of mindfulness, which is most common in our society.

58:05It's such an interesting point that this monk, I think you said that he or she had meditated for 20 or 30 ,000 hours, right? I think most of us would assume that someone who had done that much meditation, especially let's say taking vows as a monk and gone away to meditate would have processed their emotions and they were living in a state of inner calm. And so I think that really stuck out me when I heard that. I go, wow, how many of us are bypassing our emotions? Could I be bypassing my emotions in some parts of my life without realizing it? It's really interesting to reflect on. And you said before, let's say you're in a meeting at work and you feel angry, let's say at your boss, and you're saying it's quite a good skill to be able to suppress the anger and not show it in the moment.

58:54Okay, so let's go back to that example. So I think this is a scenario that many people will feel whether it's their boss or their colleagues they're in a situation that they feel angry but it's not appropriate in their work environment to express that anger. Okay, so for the purpose of that meeting they kept it in and they were as, in inverted commas, professional as they could be. what should that person then do in your view or what are some of the things that person can then do to feel the anger to process the anger and then move on from the anger

59:37today's episode is sponsored by ag1 a daily health drink that has been in my own life for over seven years. Now, it's natural to look for extra ways to support our immune defences, but most people don't want to juggle multiple pills. They want something simple, effective, and easy to stick with. AG1 is a daily health drink that provides key immunity-supporting nutrients, vitamin C, vitamin A, zinc, and selenium, all of which contribute to the normal function of the immune system. These nutrients are included in highly bioavailable forms, meaning they are much easier for the body to absorb and use.

1:00:19Backed by clinical research, expert formulation, and continuous improvement, each batch is independently tested for quality and safety. That's how they guarantee what's in your scoop and what's not. And 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, 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. Today's episode is sponsored by AG1, a daily health drink that has been in my own life for over seven years.

1:01:13Now, it's natural to look for extra ways to support our immune defenses, but most people don't want to juggle multiple pills. They want something simple, effective, and easy to stick with. AG1 is a daily health drink that provides key immunity-supporting nutrients, vitamin C, vitamin A, zinc, and selenium, all of which contribute to the normal function of the immune system. These nutrients are included in highly bioavailable forms, meaning they are much easier for the body to absorb and use. Backed by clinical research, expert formulation, and continuous improvement. Each batch is independently tested for quality and safety.

1:01:56That's how they guarantee what's in your scoop and what's not. And 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, 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.

1:02:38Jonny Miller:So I'll actually give two suggestions here. One's like the kind of beginner level and the other is like the advanced level and I'll maybe give some more context around anger as well because it's a really good example um so anger can in my view get kinked in two different ways and if you think of like it moving through a hose pipe if you kink it one way something happens if you kink it the other something else happens okay if you kink it one way it comes out as like passive aggression where you know someone's like oh like like like nice t-shirt or you know it's that kind of like kinked way of like being angry but not really owning your anger what's wrong with my t-shirt Yeah, I mean, mate.

1:03:15Jonny Miller:You actually have a nice t-shirt on it. I really like it. And then the other way is, you know, what people more commonly think of as anger, which is like aggression. And again, it's not really feeling the anger. It's like blaming someone else for your experience, basically, and being overly aggressive. So hold on. So let's just really try and land this. So something's happened that we're feeling angry about, but instead of feeling it, we're sort of blaming the other person. Getting defensive. We're getting defensive, right? So help people understand what's the difference between that and feeling the anger?

1:03:47Because some people might feel that, hold on a minute, well, that is me being angry. My defensiveness is a reflection of me being angry, but you're saying that's not

1:03:56Jonny Miller:feeling the anger yeah there's a really um i'd say the best way to uh articulate this is to the degree that you're kind of grounded in in your body when you're expressing the anger and so like anger that it's like clean anger let's say is the phrase that i have is basically just like clarity and determination and like setting a boundary what comes from really clean anger is like setting a boundary from a place of love is like, no, like that's not okay. Like that's kind of the energy of like clean anger. But often it takes a while to kind of get to the point where we can just express in that kind of like clean, loving way.

1:04:39And so having a practice.

1:04:42Jonny Miller:So let's kind of go back to the example of someone in a boardroom. Someone said something super angry. It wasn't appropriate to kind of maybe even speak. So they leave the room. They're really charged. there's this like, oh, there's like real energy. I mean, there's a number of ways that you can kind of work with this. Some of my clients will like go on drives and they'll just like roll the windows up and drive on the road and just like, like let it out, like make loud sound. I generally recommend like breath, sound and movement are three good kind of ways of expressing the energy. Breath, sound and movement.

1:05:17Breath, sound and movement. And you say expressing the energy, is that the same as feeling the energy? Or is that subtly different?

1:05:24Jonny Miller:So some of the signs that I can kind of give to people are like, if you feel a sense of relief, or like an exhale, or like a sigh afterwards, that particular reflex or that motion has completed. Okay, hold on. Right. So you're, okay, let's make this super practical. So you're in the room, you don't like something that's happened, you feel your boss hasn't spoken to you. in the way that you think is appropriate. Okay. And, but you keep a lid on it, but you're angry on the inside. Okay. The meeting finishes. Let's say it's lunchtime now. You've got a one hour lunch break. Yeah. Okay. And you're saying earlier that that emotion technically is only there for 10 or 20 seconds, right?

1:06:07Yet many people are still angry a week later. Okay. Which is clearly a problem. What can they do in that lunch break? Okay. So they're, you know, maybe they haven't got a car, they can't go for a drive at the coast, they can't go and ground in the local park. I mean, imagine it's a rainy, cold, dark winter's day and that's happened to someone. What can they do in that one hour break that allows them to feel that anger and process it?

1:06:34Jonny Miller:Yeah, okay. So really, yeah, really great example. Often I will say it's ideal if you can kind of be in your own home, especially if you're kind of doing this in the beginning. So it's helpful to maybe like wait till the end of the day. Great, fine. Go back, like go to your bedroom, like a kind of private space. The simplest is either like kind of hitting pillows sometimes would be good, like allowing some sound to move through. Can you even say, God, that guy's such an idiot and bang your pillow. Completely. You know, you would say that's healthy. I would say it's healthy. I think the key thing is that at some point you have to, and this kind of comes back to the top down, bottom up distinction, is if you are constantly recycling the story of what happened and not actually connected to the sensations that are associated with the anger, what we call just like looping, where it will feel as if the anger goes on forever because you're kind of connected to the story and the story is continuously like bringing up more and more anger.

1:07:31So your mind actually now from the top is actually generating more stress. Yes, exactly. And it's actually taking that anger that actually is that short-term feeling and emotion that you have that perhaps you haven't felt and the story you're telling yourself is pouring fuel on the fire making the anger much bigger than

1:07:49Jonny Miller:it is exactly so this is where the body comes in right so the key is and then coming back like full circle back to interoception if you can connect to the sensations that you're experiencing so for many people it's like heat it's like tightness in the chest um and then kind of make the movements or sounds from that place that's when there's the sense of like like oh like and And it will take 10, 20, 30 seconds, sometimes longer for people, but there will be a felt sense of relaxation and just like, oh, thank God on the other side of that. Yeah, okay. So let's say you come out of your bedroom, you've acknowledged you're angry, which is important because some people don't even acknowledge that.

1:08:33They think, oh, like you said before, everyone thought you were calm. Yeah, yeah. You weren't calm, you were suppressing, right? So it came across as calm, but actually there was a whole tension behind that calmness. Okay, so someone could just lie there or sit down, make sure the belly's coming out, make sure they're really breathing, feeling where the tension is, trying to let it go. Some people even struggle with something like that, especially initially. They're not used to feeling that tension in their body. No, totally. If they were so inclined and they went on their street or their local park and did five minutes of hard sprinting, let's say, right?

1:09:13Because we're saying that there's an emotion stored in our body, maybe stored in our muscles, depending on what you believe and what you read and what your take is on that. This idea that you don't need to know with your mind how you're processing something, but you can do it simply through your body is a really seductive concept to me, right? I think about the Impala and how the Impala hasn't actually, not that I know what it's like to be an Impala, okay, to be clear, right? But I'm guessing the Impala - It's probably not telling a story about that bloody lion. Yeah. They've just got this intuitive mechanism that perhaps we have had before and we've lost, right?

1:09:56Of shaking it out of their system so that they're free afterwards. Could it be as simple as that for some humans where we shake it out of our system? is that why yoga is so useful is that why sprinting is that why jumping jazz can be so useful because i think for some people that might feel easier than sitting in silence and trying to see where is that tightness in my body can i let that go yeah help us understand that so there's two things

1:10:24Jonny Miller:i want to add to that the first is that there is i think actually an important role for a top-down like orientation in this process. And for me, like I really remember this. I was doing a breathwork training and my teacher said to me, he said, you are loved in your anger. And I just like, I remember in that moment, I just like broke down crying. And I think that many of us, particularly maybe men growing up in England, like myself, there's a way in which like, I think when I was younger, I'd hurt other people from like in state fits of anger. And I then viewed my anger as being inherently bad.

1:11:07Jonny Miller:And this was kind of happened. I wasn't aware of that. It was like below my conscious awareness and having that frame of like, oh, I can still be loved even when I'm being angry was like, like Jesus, like, like that just like opened me up and it allowed me to, allowed anger to kind of flow in a way that I wasn't actually trying to kind of like contract against it because I had a belief that I was inherently bad if I was being an angry person. And so I think that's, and I imagine there's many people out there that consciously or unconsciously have that kind of belief running in the background of like, and, you know, even meditation, like it can subtly reinforce this idea of like, you're bad if you're angry, like you're a bad meditator if anger comes up.

1:11:50Jonny Miller:And so I think that's, that was a big unlock for me personally. And then secondly, kind of speaking to the way that you, the way that this moves, at the risk of sounding like woo or whatever, there's a way in which the body has its own intelligence, right? And all you need to do is get out of the way and the body will know how to complete that. And so what I think like sprinting can be great, shaking can be great. But really all you're doing is trying to kind of like get to the point where the body will almost just it will start moving on its own and it'll just know what to do. And you just have to like witness it and just watch it happen.

1:12:28Jonny Miller:And so many of these practices, so I have one called somatic surfing, somatic experiencing. There's many different, sometimes shaking, sometimes TRE. There's many ways of like getting into this state. But ultimately, you're just trying to get back to what that impala already knew, which is this just way of discharging the energy. Yeah, it's interesting, isn't it? We think we've become more advanced. Like the human minds and look at all these buildings and all this technology. And of course, depending on how you look at the world, you could say humans are incredibly advanced in terms of what we can now do.

1:13:02but i do question that sometimes because you know if you look at like some pretty objective data um despite all the material things we have access to and all the technology and you know the fact that many of us now are living lives that are better than royalty maybe 250 years ago in terms of the standard of our lives and that in terms of material quality unhappiness is on the rise yeah anxiety is on the rise depression is on the rise so i even sometimes question this kind of whole idea that oh you know we're getting better because are we yeah of course we are in some levels but that impala seems to have that you know innate intelligence that it hasn't lost yet yeah now of course the impala's life is under threat every day as well so i acknowledge that you know thankfully I live in a safe country, in a safe place where my life is not under threat.

1:13:58So I'm not trying to romanticize. It's not either or, is it? It's like, how can we live in this beautiful world in which humans have created and at the same time not lose the innate intelligence that all of us had, that those guys, the wild animals still have, that we've lost. I really do like the idea that the body knows what to do if we get out of its way totally totally well the way that i think

1:14:24Jonny Miller:about this on maybe like the deepest level is this idea of like coming back home to ourselves but the phrase the phrase that i really like is secure attachment with life secure attachment with reality and most people you know many people have heard of this idea of having attachment strategies with partners, but this idea of coming back to feeling fundamentally at home in our bodies and in the world. And I think ultimately this is what is, this is the, you know, the deeper journey of nervous system mastery is opening up these latches, is creating the conditions of safety so that all parts of our psyche learn to feel inherently like safe in the world.

1:15:08Jonny Miller:And the safer you feel, the less you will get triggered, the less you will get reactive, the less you will get anxious. And the way that I've started to view this myself is viewing anxiety as like, it's like a beautiful signpost. It's like, oh, like here's a way in which you're still protecting yourself from some aspect of your experience. And like, what a gift. Like that's an invitation to kind of get curious about it, to move towards it. And maybe like courageous curiosity, because it take some courage to kind of move into it but like like on the other side there's like there's like more freedom there's more agency there's more aliveness and that for me is like it almost turns life into a game right it's like every little time i start to get like triggered or annoyed or whatever it is that's like oh cool like i wonder what's there for me i know for many years love it when i get triggered nice honestly i know it sounds ridiculous to some people maybe not to you but yeah i'm like oh wow because without that triggering i would have i would never would have had the opportunity to kind of process yeah this thing that's under the surface that i'm not maybe cognizantly aware of and it's only by that experience that comment that event yeah that you know because you can either push it away or go oh wow there's still something there on process there's still something because the thing that you think is triggering you is not the thing that's actually triggering you or it's not the root cause of it is it yeah yeah it's it's something else on the need that hasn't been processed like a beautiful mirror so something that's beautiful mirror inside yeah i know you're a fan of this um this quote from a tribe um knowledge is only a rumor until it lives in the muscle yeah and i think we can interpret that in many different ways but i kind of think we can apply it also to some of the things that you've just said that we've been talking about you know we're living in a world of more and more knowledge aren't we where there's more podcasts there's more health blogs there's more health books right so we've got more and more knowledge in our minds so yeah i think a lot of the time people feel that they've done something with that knowledge when they haven't they've just heard the knowledge and I passionately believe that the most important things in life can't be taught they have to be experienced yes and I think that quote really speaks to that and speaks to this idea that actually we need our minds to get out of the way and if we get out of the way our body just does it for us exactly yeah exactly so the way that I like to teach in my you know with my coaching clients and in the course is through this idea of being a scientist of your own experience.

1:17:54Jonny Miller:And, you know, like you said, you can listen to a hundred podcasts and you can hear the same thing over and over again. But if you don't run some kind of experiment in your own life to actually verify it, it won't, it won't land in your system as true. And so I think there's, there's like a, there's an amazing opportunity for just so many creative experiments that you can create. And I know you, you kind of have some of these on your, on your tour and in your book. I think kind of co-creating experiments with people so they can feel some of these things for themselves is the way that we learn.

1:18:26Jonny Miller:And so an example might be, I love recommending people take a cold shower, but not because of the health benefits, even though there are a bunch of health benefits, but paying like really close attention to what happens to your body as you start to go towards the cold, icy water. and for most people there's a sense of like contracting and tensing like you're bracing yourself against the freezing cold water i used to go swimming around the pier in brighton every morning and most of the time i'd approach it and i'd be like like i'm gonna be gonna be freezing and that bracing is the same the exact same response that we have to emotions and to kind of life situations and if you can kind of be attuned to what that feels like in your body and gradually start to relax, the cold and emotions can actually feel very, just like enlivening.

1:19:17Jonny Miller:And for me, this was actually how I kind of moved through grief. I lost my ex-fiance, took her own life. And it was through going swimming around this pier in Brighton and learning to like let in the cold and not tense against it. and then applying that same, that same, like move in a way to the grief and just allowing it to kind of move through me that I was like, like, wow. And, you know, and that totally like that changed my life. Um, and so finding ways to create experiments, I mean, you could take a number of things that we've talked about and design your own experiment around it so that you can see if you can feel it.

1:19:58Jonny Miller:And another example is, you know, doing humming or doing one of the breathwork practices like four seven eight breathing it won't stick unless you you notice how you feel in the beginning you do the breathing practice and then you notice how you feel afterwards and if you feel different or better that will like register in your body of like oh like i'll do that again and you'll remember to do it in a time down the line when you need it yeah as opposed to just intellectually thinking that it's a good idea hey man i'm sorry to hear about um what you've been through um do you feel able to share a little bit more about that because it sounds it sounds like that was pivotal in the journey you've embarked upon and what you do today yeah yeah i was actually down in brighton yesterday um visiting her memorial tree that was a tree that we planted down there um i mean i think what's what's relevant to this conversation is Sophie was a junior doctor and she suffered from an anxiety attack one morning at work when I was I was traveling in Portugal and she came back and she took her own life and she overdosed on medication and yeah I mean this completely this was like my pivotal kind of turning point where I'd never you know I'd had a pretty great childhood I'd never been through anything hard or challenging but I'd seen other adults who had who had not digested their grief and there was this sense of like um almost like deadness or numbness or like lack of aliveness in them that I was honestly I was like terrified by and I said to myself like if I don't move towards this grief I will end up like those like husks of human beings and so I kind of turned towards it and went like really leaned in.

1:21:54Jonny Miller:In the beginning, it was meditation retreats, breath work, all this kind of stuff and like learning how to feel the grief essentially. And there was one moment that I just like really, really remember. I was kind of approaching her memorial bench in this place called Lee Over Sands. And every step I took towards it, there was this like, this like intensity building in my system. And it just felt like, I felt like the grief was like a tidal wave that was like moving through me. And as I got closer and closer, it, it felt like it almost just like, it was like more than I could take and it almost just like obliterated me.

1:22:37But what was so shocking was that if I let go of the story about having this tragic

1:22:43Jonny Miller:loss it actually felt beautiful it felt like it was like the energy of love like the energy of like deep connection and like rawness and that was such a that was it was just it was confusing in the beginning because I was like grief is meant to be this like hard challenging thing this terrible thing happened to me and to her but it was it was beautiful and it felt almost like deeply joyful in a way and that just and at that point i was okay i everything i thought i knew about emotions is clearly like i have more to learn here um and so that kind of set me on this path which eventually eventually landed in the nervous system work and kind of teaching this stuff yeah many people struggle with death they don't know what to do when a loved one dies

1:23:36and i once heard you say that you believe that the five stages of grief might well be the five ways in which we try and resist grief which is really powerful it's very thought-provoking and it kind of fits with an idea that i think is probably been sitting on top of everything we've spoken about today which is this idea that what we resist persists. So this idea that actually we live in the world, we interact with the world, and we're going to feel certain emotions. And as long as we feel that emotion, process the emotion, and then move on from the emotion, in many ways it doesn't stay stuck within us.

1:24:24It doesn't cause that emotional debt that you were talking about earlier. And I think people can get their head around that with the boss who maybe talks to them badly at work. But when it comes to death and grief, I think people then think, well, this is a completely different scenario. So you've obviously been through some incredible grief. And thank you for sharing certain elements of that story. It's very, very powerful.

1:24:58what would you like to say to someone who's listening right now who is really struggling with grief they're overwhelmed and they don't know what to do and they're feeling stuck

1:25:11Jonny Miller:what would you say to them yeah i mean um i would say there is a there is like a healthy denial I think that happens in the beginning like for me there was almost this like overwhelm numbness it was almost like too much to process I think and that's it's just part of the process um I think that at some point I had this idea of um this mantra in my mind of like I am willing was like the phrase that I said to myself and it almost felt like being willing to be obliterated by this like tsunami wave of grief and intensity that felt like it felt like too much to too much to experience and I think parts of my parts of my identity had to die like the the future vision I had of our relationship and of having a family and of you know the life that I had imagined for us together that had to die and I think that's what that's what grief is like we experience it with changes in um location and not only living losing loved ones but it happens all the time and I think it's it's allowing parts of our identity to literally be obliterated and that in the beginning feels initially painful but my my experience was that it was almost like it deepened my capacity to love over time it was almost like hollowing me out and yeah i i felt on on in many moments this this raw aliveness um and and again you know this is it's kind of exemplifies many of the themes we've talked about of there is this like innate intelligence in me like my my body my nervous system knew how to feel and process the grief i just had to show up and be willing to let it move through me in all the ways that it did and and to the to the idea of like the five stages of grief being the ways that we resist it i think that it's almost like the ways in which that grief gets it's like kinked in our system maybe we we blame the circumstances for what happened or in in the beginning there was part of myself that like i blamed myself for not doing more and for not you you know, spotting it and these things.

1:27:32Jonny Miller:And it would have been very easy for me to get almost like stuck in that endless loop and that endless eddy. But for whatever, maybe good fortune, maybe good luck, I was able to just like allow it to keep on moving and keep on unfolding. And this is, again, kind of coming back to the nervous system, dysregulation is just when we get stuck. it's when we don't allow the kind of natural cycles to complete. It doesn't mean we don't experience enormous intensities of emotion and I think grief being like a particularly vivid and extreme example that people can relate to. You said the cold helped you start to face that grief and feel it.

1:28:19The cold is sort of a mechanism that kind of forces people to be in their bodies, right? You can try not to, but depending on how cold it is, you're gonna ultimately end up there. So let's just really unpick that. So you're struggling with grief or someone is struggling with grief. How might a cold shower help them start to feel that emotion?

1:28:49Jonny Miller:Yeah. Yeah, so I'll use the example of when I was swimming in the cold. but it could apply to a shower as well. Like in the beginning, there is that bracing, that kind of like defending against the cold. And with, you know, after maybe 30 seconds, maybe a minute or so, that intensity starts to die down. And I almost imagined like letting the cold in. And I felt in my body, there was like less tension, less bracing. And it's also at the same time, it stops being uncomfortable. And at a certain point, the cold actually feels there's like heat gets generated in the body and it feels good. It feels amazing.

1:29:28When you start resisting. Yeah, exactly. For anyone who's done a cold plunge or a cold shower, like once you start resisting before you know it, you feel totally relaxed. Exactly. But you feel like you're holding, oh, it's cold. You're tight. You're tight. You're holding on. But we don't realize you just need to let go and actually lean into it. And actually it gets a lot more comfortable.

1:29:47Jonny Miller:So it trains that move of letting go. And I think that's the thing that we, that's the rep that we need to do in order to practice. I love that. It sounds like it's not that you had decided, right, I need to process my grief. And so I'm going to go into the ocean to help me process it. It sounds like it was subtly different, which is when I'm in the ocean, it allows me to stop resisting. And as you say, let go. So the skill that I'm practicing in the cold water then is a universal skill that I am naturally starting to apply to every other element in my life, including my ability to not resist the grief.

1:30:33Exactly.

1:30:34Jonny Miller:Yeah, exactly. Right. Which I guess in many ways speaks to this wider concept of bottom-up practices, okay? Taking this out of grief, you offer people, and we discussed a few of them, and I know on your website, on your course, you offer way more, right? But it sounds like there's a variety of different body-based actions, practices that people can do. Breath work, cold shower, progressive relaxation the ape awareness posture emotion you know expanding our awareness whatever it might be for some people be yoga right and it's 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 i think i i really emphasize the experiment-based approach because everyone is coming to this work from a different place like some people might be experiencing anxiety some people might be experiencing grief some people might be burnt out and just really stressed and there's going to need to be a different approach or a different kind of prescription for everyone depending on where they're at.

1:32:06Jonny Miller:And, you know, for some people, maybe just practicing interoception, that's often a really good starting point for a lot of people is just gaining 10 % more awareness of their internal state at five times during the day. And again, you have mentioned a few things, but how can somebody do that quite simply? Yeah. So I mean, I recommend either kind of setting a little timer or doing it first thing after you wake up in the morning and then a little time during the day when you have a transition moment and then to help downshift or to kind of transition at the end of the day, maybe after a work day or something.

1:32:40Yeah. I find on a personal level that, you know, so many of us store tension and stress in our pelvis. Yeah, completely. And so one thing I find quite useful is, you know, at various points of the day, I'll just stop and make sure I'm taking some big whole body breaths into my lower abdomen, really focus on my diaphragm and my pelvic floor and how it's moving. And, you know, I think those things, we just don't realize how powerful they are. But instead of then that tension building up and you're not doing that, so it just keeps accumulating, keeps accumulating, keeps accumulating. So you think, you know, you think it was the email at 5pm that bothered you.

1:33:21No, it wasn't the email at 5pm that bothered you. It was the fact that you were just accumulating stress, stress, stress, emotional debt. So by the time you read that email, you were past your window of tolerance.

1:33:31Jonny Miller:Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, it's funny, as you were saying that, I like, I kind of, even without thinking about it, I noticed I brought my awareness down to my pelvis and I felt it's like, oh, there's like, I was holding tension in my lower back, like even just from this. And also something that people don't like to talk about is cosmetically, we have been taught whether consciously or unconsciously to hold our tummies in to have a flat belly yeah so people are walking around terrible for breathing terrible for movement terrible for your pelvic floor terrible for stress but I think people have been conditioned myself included for many years so much that we don't even realise when we're doing it so we need to bring this kind of conscious awareness to don't hold your belly in don't hold your belly in you know do you know what I mean it's everywhere It's like, you know, you mentioned top down, bottom up, but also the environment.

1:34:17Well, that's the environmental conditioning teaching so many of us to hold tension in our bodies by holding our tummies in.

1:34:25Jonny Miller:No, completely. And there's also another kind of interesting like anecdotal correlation I've noticed is once people start to be able to bring awareness and breath down into the pelvic floor and in the bellies, there's a sense of, there's like an embodied sense of safety, which doesn't make sense unless you've actually experienced it. But there's something about releasing tension there and bringing breath and presence down there that creates a sense of, I think it's like a sense of grounded safety that people self-report. And then from that place of safety, you can move through the world making less fear-based kind of predictions and decisions.

1:35:02Jonny Miller:Yeah. I love, Johnny, observing societal trends and trying to sit back and go, what does this societal trend tell us about the state of society? Okay. So I've got a couple of questions that have just come up for me that I want to put to you about what these trends tell us about the state of our nervous systems. okay okay there's more and more people now intentionally embracing the cold right cold plunge cold showers we've spoken about that today a little bit okay what do you think that growing trend of cold plunges tells us about the state of societal nervous systems if anything yeah interesting if i was to kind of hazard a guess i think there's a lot of people that feel in some way like numb to their lives and to the world and my guess is that many people are looking for experiences that help them to feel alive and i think that freezing cold water is is a incredibly efficient mechanism for creating a like undeniable sense of aliveness in the body even if it's only for a short period of time.

1:36:26Jonny Miller:And my guess is that that would be part of it, you know, beyond the kind of health benefits and, you know, there's a kind of like bravado and like kind of power that comes from it as well. But I think for me, at least, that's part of the draw is there's a sense of aliveness and also a sense of like empowerment. I think a lot of people feel like they are, going back to what we were talking about earlier, are the kind of victims of the world, of reality in different ways. And by learning how to overcome the intensity of the reaction to the cold and to be able to sit with it, if they can do that in the cold, then they can do it in other areas of life as well.

1:37:08Jonny Miller:And so I think there's probably a combination of those two. The growing rise of coffee shops and cafe culture. Yeah. What does our caffeine consumption say about the state of our nervous system? I love the taste of coffee myself. So I have nothing against coffee, but I will say that when there's caffeine in our system, it releases hormones, which actually make it more difficult to feel our interoceptive sensations. There's a way in which the adrenaline and the cortisol and things, they numb our bodies. And so my sense is that as well as the kind of drive towards productivity and getting stuff done and all the reasons people take coffee, I think that there's a way in which it also numbs us somewhat against what we're experiencing moment to moment.

1:38:00Jonny Miller:And people will notice that like if maybe if they stop taking coffee, they might start to feel things again that maybe they've been not wanting to feel for a while. yeah it's interesting i i love a cup of coffee as much as the next person um but if i'm drinking too much i just feel it all going up into my head not the coffee i feel i experience the world much more through my head yeah and i'm less grounded yeah yeah um and i think i could be wrong maybe it's my childhood memory but i i don't think there was this kind of epidemic of coffee shops now to be clear, I love a coffee shop as much as the next person, right?

1:38:40At the same time, I do think it says something about the state of society, you know, go, go, go, productivity, you know, no resting, pushing through. And then what I also think many of us do is that we lean on epidemiological studies showing that coffee consumption is associated with lower risk of Alzheimer's and, you know, a whole host of other things, lower risk of type 2 diabetes. and for many people that is a license to drink more than actually is good for us and our nervous system so i whilst i acknowledge those studies and i don't inherently think there's anything wrong with caffeine in balance with the rest of your lifestyle and your nervous system i do think for many people they've got fried nervous systems they're not resting and switching off enough they've accumulated a ton of emotional debts right they don't feel their emotions and they're using caffeine to allow them to keep going.

1:39:38Jonny Miller:Yeah, it's that. And I would add something else to this as well, which is that people learn to feel safe in that stimulated state. And that actually starting to rest and downshift feels unsafe in their system. And often when they begin to, it will start to bring up some of those, again, like things that don't feel good. and then they will find another way to kind of stay stimulated to avoid actually deeply resting. Yeah. I mean, I'm experiencing aversion of that at the moment, right? I'm on the back of a busy and outward focusing six to eight months with book launch and national tour. It's all been great.

1:40:20I want to experience life and see how I respond in different scenarios. At the same time, I would say one of my crutches when I've got a lot on tends to be coffee. If I'm being completely honest with myself, I know that my intake has just crept up a little bit over the last few months in a way that's not fully in balance with my nervous system, nor is it in balance with the person I want to be. and I'm it's funny when you said that I think sometimes I can totally recognize that where you have it and then you you feel a bit more stimulated you're like oh this is my safe space because it's where I've been for the last few months yeah totally and it's almost leaning into that discomfort of going no well yeah you might feel a bit fatigued yeah but that's okay you don't necessarily need to caffeinate your fatigue every time it's okay to experience tiredness right and not be in that simulated state which i don't know i find it quite interesting yeah no i think it's

1:41:20Jonny Miller:it's fascinating and the the key thing that i want to kind of maybe for for listeners to take away is it's great to be in those states i mean you've just done like a uk tour you've been on stage like that is kind of the peak of um i'd say like a healthy sympathetic state where you need to be activated to be on stage and to give a performance but what is key is um so we haven't really talked about this, but I think about capacity and resilience. Capacity is how grounded can you stay even when there's like intensity moving through your system and being on stage and doing a live show is a good example.

1:41:56Jonny Miller:But then resilience is how efficiently, how effectively can you downshift? And that's the skill that I think most people are missing and kind of need to actively train. And so I'm a big fan of NSDR, which Shibaman has popularized, non-sleep deep rest yoga nidra um there's many different ways of doing it but learning how to go from that activated state and it's almost like the more activated you are you need to be equally deeply resting so if you've been go go go for kind of like two or three months you'll you'll need to have a period of time where you're like deeply resting and recovering for almost an equal period of time because we're like cyclical beings and it's great to be able to kind of show up with that intensity.

1:42:40Jonny Miller:But if you don't also rest with that same intensity, it will become burnout over time. I just, an image popped into my mind of the Olympic athlete who was on the horse. And before he went to perform and won a gold medal, he was literally asleep, like minutes before he was about to perform. And we think about like athletes know that recovery is just like crucial to their performance. But we don't really think about it as like cognitive athletes or podcast hosts. Like we need to prioritize recovery as much as we're prioritizing performance yeah it's so interesting just to make it really practical for people though who maybe don't have as much autonomy with their life or their job right this is what sundays used to be for people yeah yeah right yeah sundays before all the shops were open before internet shopping social media yeah you know sundays i remember i'm sure it's the same for you growing up as a kid you know sundays nothing much happens there was formula one on the television and it was like it might be a a football match of the day special like go for a walk in the park supermarkets were shut yeah like you couldn't do so there was enforced family time and chill out time into that seven day cycle i think that's one of the most toxic things about the modern world is how those those natural rest periods yeah have just been obliterated i mean coming back to societal trends I think that the ability to set boundaries is now such an essential skill because you need to now like actively design that into your life because if you're just passive and you don't have some degree of intentionality, you will just be in this perpetual like go, go, go activated state because there's always going to be more stimulation coming towards you.

1:44:20Jonny Miller:You really have to kind of protect your spaces, your time on an hourly level, daily level, weekly, monthly level. it's a practice on all scales of time I think. Johnny I love talking to you I really think what you're doing is incredible I think you've got a very unique take on the nervous system and how we can start to tackle it you've got two things don't you out there for people you've got the nervous system mastery course that five week course and you've got the NSQ the nervous system quotients can you just talk us through what those things are and how people who want to learn more from you can access them.

1:44:58Jonny Miller:Yeah, totally. So the NSQ was basically my attempt to design a self-assessment that gives people a sense of like benchmarks of where their nervous system is at in these kind of four categories that we've been talking about. So like a score for your nervous system. Yeah, you literally get a score. You get a score out of 100 in these different areas. And some are green, some might be orange. And then we've designed it so that you'll get kind of practices designed to help improve the lowest areas through kind of email. And it's all totally free as well. So how How can people do that if they want to do it?

1:45:26So if they go to the website is nsmastery.com.

1:45:30Jonny Miller:So NS standing for nervous system. Exactly. Okay, nsmastery.com. And in the top right, I think, is the self-assessment button. And then if people are interested, there's more information about the five-week cohort of nervous system mastery. That's when we go into all the stuff we've been talking about, interception, self-regulation, emotional fluidity, in a kind of community-based approach. So there's live cohorts, live sessions, guest speakers as well. And yeah, it's my attempt to really like distill all of the practices we've been talking about in a kind of actionable, kind of condensed way that is also compatible with people's busy lives.

1:46:08Jonny Miller:So we have like founders, CEOs, parents, you know, all kinds of people from all over the world take it. I mean, who doesn't want a better nervous system, right? A more balanced nervous system. I'm biased, but I would agree. yeah it's kind of a universal skill i think most of us would like to master yeah at some point i you know when you really think about life and the nervous system you know it really is the master control switch of how we view the world how we experience the world isn't it yeah and i guess not enough people are paying attention to what their nervous system is doing so they feel in that reactive mode all the time thinking that that's the only way to exist.

1:46:49Jonny Miller:I mean, we just weren't taught these things growing up. Like I wasn't, you know, I only found out about it in the last like 10 years or so. But I mean, imagine if these practices were in schools or taught by parents or taught by young people, there'd be less like unlearning that has to happen. Yeah. Well, I think what you're doing is incredible. You know, for someone who has been listening to this conversation, Johnny, and they're like, okay, I've not really paid much attention to my nervous system but i'm definitely someone who's stuck in my head and when i first heard johnny say where am i feeling that in my body i didn't have a clue what he was talking about right hopefully they understand it now you've mentioned a variety of different practices but for that person who's never felt what it's like to be in their body and they want to start what would you say to them yeah i would say just start super simple kind of first thing in the morning before you check your phone, kind of sometime between waking up and leaving the house, just set a timer for five minutes and do what I call an interceptive weather report.

1:48:00Jonny Miller:So just like an internal check-in of like, how is my mind, busy thoughts, stories about things, how is my awareness, how is my posture, do I feel tired, do I feel energized? And then like, what is the kind of, what is the mood? Is there like an emotional tone? Am I noticing any sensations? And even just that kind of brief check-in on a daily basis will compound over time. And you will start to gradually be more aware of what is happening internally when you're going about your day, maybe when you're stressed out, maybe if challenging things arise. And it really just is a practice that gets way, way, way easier over time.

1:48:44what's interesting for me is that you don't actually have to do anything no with the things that you notice you're just noticing exactly yeah and i think that's i think that's quite a key um key point yeah for people to really understand it's okay if you're feeling tight or you're feeling sad but what you're asking people is to train the awareness that that's what's coming on

1:49:10Jonny Miller:Exactly, exactly. And this is, we haven't talked about this distinction, but there's this idea of self-unfoldment versus self-improvement. And self-improvement often comes from this premise of there is something in me that is broken or that needs fixing. Whereas self-unfoldment is like the impala. It's just like allowing whatever is coming up to be there. and I really think like having this frame of self-unfoldment is is so so helpful for people because you know things like this check-in it's just it's just welcoming and allowing whatever is arising maybe you're tired maybe maybe you're angry at something maybe you're frustrated maybe the sadness and that's like that's all great that's all welcome um but the more that you can tune in and listen to the the feedback and the data of your body the more in tune you can be and the more regulated and intentional you can kind of show up for what's important to you.

1:50:06Helping us all experience the full breadth of human emotions. Johnny Miller, thank you so much for coming on the show. Thank you so much. This has been just such a pleasure.

1:50:18Really hope you enjoyed that conversation. Do think about one thing that you can take away and apply into your own life. And also have a think about one thing from this conversation that you can teach to somebody else. Remember when you teach someone, it not only helps them, it also helps you learn and retain the information. Now before you go, just wanted to let you know about Friday Five. It's my free weekly email containing five simple ideas to improve your health and happiness. In that email, I share exclusive insights that I do not share anywhere else including health advice how to manage your time better interesting articles or videos that i've been consuming and quotes that have caused me to stop and reflect and i have to say in a world of endless emails it really is delightful that many of you tell me it is one of the only weekly emails that you actively look forward to receiving so if that sounds like something you would like to receive each and every friday you can sign up for free at drchatterjee.com forward slash Friday Five.

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1:52:41Thank you.