Managing nerves, anxiety, and burnout | Jonny Miller (Nervous System Mastery)

25:44Yeah, and maybe something that we haven't touched on yet, but I think it's important to add in, is this idea of interception or somatic awareness. And the reason I bring it in is because if you you do this practice, but you're not really aware of your body and how you feel, then it'll be less compelling to you. But if you're kind of tuned into like sensations in your body, what's going on, you're more likely to notice the difference in the shifts. Great. So let's get into that. That was something I definitely wanted to touch on here. This awesome acronym to help you with this process of introspection.

26:16So talk about that is and then how to actually go about becoming better at being aware of what your body is doing. Yeah, so it's this idea of interception, which is known as like a sixth sense. And basically it's our ability to kind of sense track and feel our internal landscape. And I like to use a metaphor of a chef in the same way that you train your flavor palette for kind of sweet spicy umami, things like that. You can also train your inter receptive palette and become more aware of the internal sensations whether that's your breath, whether it's tension, whether it's moods and emotions, whether it's the quality of your awareness, the quality of your thoughts, and the more, kind of, in tune with that you are, the more likely you are to notice the kind of early warning sign of something like anxiety, because usually certainly a panic attack doesn't come out of nowhere.

27:08There will be a kind of cascade of subtle things that happen in your body that eventually result in anxiety. And so if you can catch those things early and kind of, like nips them in the bud and do one of these practices, then you can avoid the kind of 10 out of 10 worst case scenarios. Okay, awesome. So I know that there's also specific things you recommend people pay attention to understand what their body is doing as process of interest. Interception, yeah. Intra, okay. What is it? Interroception. Interroception. As opposed to extra reception, which is awareness of all the external stimuli.

27:44Got it. I guess before we get to that, so you mentioned that it's like another sense we have. And I think that's a really important point that I think maybe people didn't catch. So we have these five senses obviously taste and smell and vision and touch. But you're finding and research showed basically this is another sense people don't really know we have. That's right. Yeah, exactly. And it has been studies quite quite a lot, especially in the last decade or so. And there's a number of interesting kind of findings from the research that I found. One being that ADHD tends to correlate with low levels of interception.

28:17as if people have PTSD or trauma, again, interception is lowered. And I'd certainly say for myself, you know, for the first 25 years of my life, I was fairly numb from the neck down. I was not very aware to what was happening in my body in real time. I was also reading a book recently called The Hour Between Dog and Wolf, which looked at Wall Street traders and they correlated higher degrees of interception with basically making more money and making better decisions. And I think the thesis was that by tuning into what their body was doing in certain moments, they could pick up on things on like more intuitive decision -making essentially.

28:55So I think there's like a specific list of things that you recommend people pay attention to, their posture, their breath, things like that, what is that list and then how do we actually do this better? Yeah, so I simplify this to ape, which basically is an acronym which stands for Awareness, posture and emotion. So to kind of go through each one by one. Awareness is to give an example, like I could narrow my awareness and become really focused and just, you kind of tense up and it also is quite activating sometimes, or you can relax and expand your awareness and be aware of the space above me, the space behind me, the space below me, and that is generally a calming thing.

29:37Posture is fairly self -expanded, but again, our posture effects, how we feel. Yeah, I see. Shifting them now. Yeah. And then in emotion, which I include kind of somatic or body -based sensations, which arise. So both kind of what is the overall mood and the flavor or the texture that I'm feeling, like right now, maybe it's like excitement, maybe there's some joy. I'm noticing some like, there's some like heat in my belly, probably from the breathing. Yeah, there's like a little bit of tightness in my lower back from working out yesterday. So just kind of sensing, kind of mapping that landscape of sensation.

30:19And for most people, it's almost like a territin cognita. You have those maps of like, here be dragons. And for a lot of people, there's just these big kind of blind spots in their body. And the advice here is, so there's this acronym 8. And the advice is, think about these three things when you're feeling something that you may not. Like basically something's going on. Slash just often come back to this. I imagine just like whenever you can think of, oh, a awareness posture, emotion. How do I use this? Yeah, exactly. So again, it can be something that you do kind of before you start your day.

30:56Maybe like with a cup of tea, I like to drink tea and just kind of do like it like your body scanners, essentially, and just check each of those three areas. And it's also, it's really valuable, particularly if you're, you know, if you're having racing thoughts, or something, doesn't feel quite right, that just instead of just tackling the problem on the, the level of the mind kind of dropping down into the body and bringing that kind of into the picture as well, I find to be really helpful. Basically, as often as you can, and generally when things are feeling a little off, just remember ape. What is my awareness?

31:35How is my posture? And then what am I feeling? Am I feeling sad? Am I feeling happy? Excited? Angry. Things like that. I think you also talk about breath. Like you have a list that you wrote about this, other things that you might want to pay attention to. Actually, finding paying attention to my breath is really powerful too. So I'm going to try a like a babe, babe version of this. I'm going to try to think about, where is my breath coming from? What am I feeling there? Yeah, so the breath and sensations are two other ones that are really helpful. The breath in particular often people will visit this idea of like email apnea.

32:11When people are checking their emails, they will without noticing it start to hold their breath, which is a generally very activating thing to do. or as I mentioned earlier, if your breath is through the mouth and shallow and into the upper chest, that will also be very activating. Versus is your breath through the nose, is it kind of into the belly and into the sides of the ribcage, and does it feel easeful basically, breathing without tension is ideal. What I think about using this practice is if I were sitting in a meeting and just like like not feeling like amazingly confident, just like come back to this acronym, BAPE or AAPE, whichever one you wanna choose, just like how am I feeling right now?

32:53Oh wow, my whole stomach is clenched because I'm maybe nervous about what might happen or I'm not breathing at all, or my posture is really bad. So I think in a meeting would be really helpful here, maybe you're about to get on a Zoom or an important call or something like that. Maybe I'm one on one. Is there anything else? Any other moments that might be good, the kind of triggers for people of like, I should really be aware of what's happening right now. Let me do any exercises. Yeah, well, just to piggyback on what you just said, if you're about to jump on a meeting and you're noticing that your stomach is clenched, that's actually really useful data to kind of be like, like, why is this happening?

33:29Is it your intuition kind of saying that maybe you shouldn't do this deal with someone or maybe something is off? And so it's assigned to kind of explore that more. or it could be that you've been triggered by something or something that someone said, and you've only just realized it. And then that's again, like more information or something that you can reflect on or go into. Is there anything in your life recently that has an example of this, or are you feeling unsure and maybe you realize, oh, here's where my body's doing? Maybe I should pay more attention to this. Actually, last week, I did a podcast conversation, so I have a podcast myself, and I got off the call and I remember I felt, or I got off the podcast and I felt pretty exhausted and I felt like there was this kind of tension in my chest and this, and again, my breath was kind of all over the place and I realized that I had very much over committed myself for that week.

34:27I'd scheduled back -to -back podcast interviews. The podcast wasn't even the priority for kind of what I'm focusing on in this quarter. So I then made the decision to just push back all my episodes until the summer, basically. I love that example. I know that feeling very well. I'm sure. When you wrote about this idea of inter -oception, you connected it to burnout, and I think you talked about how this is one of the best tools to avoid burnout. Is that right? Am I remembering that right? and if so, how do you think about this and burnout and avoiding burnout in general? Something a lot of people experience.

35:08Yeah, so I have this idea that I call the feather brick dump truck phenomenon. And basically what that means is when we are showing early signs of burnout, our body will give us feedback usually in subtle ways in the beginning. So the feather might be waking up in the morning and feeling a little bit tired, a little that maybe a little bit exhausted. The brick, maybe you ignore that or you don't notice it and then three or four weeks later, you have a fight with someone or an argument or you just feel frustrated and terrible and you lose your cool. And then maybe the dump truck is a month later or even a year later, there's a full -blown health crisis or you develop type 2 diabetes or there's a whole range of things or maybe you get fired.

35:54There's a bunch of different things that can happen but normally depending on how attuned or depending on someone's interceptive capacity, ideally you want to notice when it's the feather and then make adjustments or shift then, and not have to wait until you experience the full -blown pain of the dump truck, which unfortunately is what happens to a lot of people, especially when they experience burnout for the first time. This is such an important point and such a good way of thinking about it. It reminds me of Andy Johns in the episode we had there of just how long and rolling to the episode there of just like how all these little things came up along the way and then eventually just became incredibly unsustainable to live the life that he was living.

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37:42So your advice here is just like pay attention to these little signs that like you're not living a sustainable life right now. What are some examples of these kind of feathery signs of like maybe I need to change something? Yeah, so I'll tie this in with a concept that I call emotional debt, which is basically when our nervous system experiences stress, there's what's known as a mobilization cycle. And if that cycle isn't completed or we don't get to downshift or relax on the other side, that gets stored in the body as a lot of static load, which I call emotional debt. and over time that creates fragility in the nervous system.

38:20And so what that fragility can look like is anything from being impacted by small things in a kind of disproportionate way. So noticing that you're more reactive than normal, maybe you're a little bit more snappy, maybe you get frustrated by little things, maybe your sleep isn't as good, maybe you wake up not feeling fully rested, maybe kind of relationships are often, like especially intimate relationships are usually a place that this shows up or relationships at work. So those are kind of the classic early warning signs and then as that emotional debt threshold increases in the same way that say with technical debt if you're building a product, in the beginning, it's fine.

38:59And in fact, it's even necessary in the beginning. Like it's great that our body can buffer this stress response because it allows us to function. But if we don't pay off that technical debt or emotional debt, then over time it accumulates and it can also come out through kind of health crisis, health challenges. It just gets basically progressively worse until that debt is paid off. I feel like a lot of people listening are like, yes, I know exactly what you mean. How does one notice that you're building emotional debt and then how do you start to release this debt and pay off in this debt? What I've seen with some of my founder clients and in the research that we did where we interviewed 260 leaders, what can often happen is that emotional debt will increase and increase and until it gets to a point where we are well outside what's known as a window of tolerance.

39:57And at that point there's like a crash. It's almost like the fuse switch blows and there's exhaustion, maybe there's complete inability to get up off the couch. And for some people, people with large nervous system capacity, they can keep going for five years, maybe ten years, and they can kind of like keep building this up, and it becomes normalized to kind of live in a way where you're always on and never really relaxing or coming down. What one really key sign actually is, if you're not able to kind of naturally downshift or downregulate your nervous system at the end of day without something like wine or CBD or some kind of like external substance, that's a sign that you're kind of reached a certain threshold of emotional debt.

40:47And then how does one start to pay off its debt? If you've spent years just working way too hard, you've had a relationship that just isn't working great. I don't know. Like, I imagine most people go to therapy and just kind of talk through all these things and try to work through the challenges. What do you recommend? And if you're just like, man, I feel like I have this, what should I do? Yeah, well, that's a big question. I'm actually, I probably get some pushback for this, but I'm not a big fan of talk therapy alone, or at least therapy that doesn't have a somatic or body -based component.

41:23And from my understanding of the nervous system and how we store this stress, just talking about things and keeping things on the level of the intellect doesn't actually address the root of the challenge. What we need to do is create a certain sense of safety to kind of go into those buffered emotional responses and feel them all the way through and allow that mobilization reflex to complete. And so to kind of give a personal example, I, when I was living in Bali, I did kind of several hundred breathwork journeys where you kind of breathe a certain way to get into an altered state. And then in that place, these memories would arise of these things that happened five, 10 years ago.

42:06And my body would, like, it would either move a certain way, or the anger would come through, sometimes it would be sadness or grief. Often there's a lot of stored emotion that's held in our body. That just needs permission to kind of be felt through and be released. And so for me, it was a journey of coming into, like, right relationship with my anger. And my grief and honestly my shame as well, like giving myself permission to feel this like gunk that had been stored in my pelvis. So I'm not saying you have to go to Bali and do 200 breathwork journeys, like that's definitely not that's, I mean, that's a path.

42:44But first it begins with, as I said, cultivating interception and even being aware that there is this tension, there is these things in your body. Secondly, having the practices of self -regulation so that if these things come up, you don't get overwhelmed, you're able to downshift and ground. And then thirdly, it's the practice of what I call emotional fluidity, which is basically creating the conditions of welcoming the full spectrum of emotions as they arise. And often it's very helpful to have a guide or a somatic practitioner. I like somatic experiencing, Hikomi, at two modalities, I'm a big fan of.

43:22And yeah, that's a journey in a process and it depends how many years you've been operating in a slightly numbed way. And it's different for everyone, but it begins by tuning into and listening to the body and then having honestly curiosity about what is there. And just following that curiosity and the body starts to show you what is ready to be seen. I love that it always comes back to the original place we started, which is that the way we feel is a very bottom -up body -based system. It's not we feel something and their body gets nervous. It's our body gets nervous and they're like, oh, here's why I'm nervous.

44:04Your advice is just focus a lot on helping your body release the stuff that you've built up this debt and then also just when you're nervous in the moment. Focus on getting your body to a state versus trying to convince your mind. Not everything's going to be okay. Yeah. Exactly. And specifically on the therapy route, just to touch on that. So your advice there is if you were to work with a therapist and you feel a lot of this stuff that we're talking about is focus on a somatic oriented therapy or it's body oriented not just thinking about it and talking through stuff. It's actually convincing your body.

44:34This is going to be, here's a way to helping your body release this debt, essentially. Yeah, I mean, you can understand in precise detail about whatever the challenge was from 5, 10, 15 years ago, but if you're unable to connect it to the correlating sensations in the body, usually if I was to imagine someone shouted at me yesterday, and I think about that, there's usually a correlating kind of somatic sensation. and the neuroscientist, DiMazio, calls it a somatic marker. So by tracking the somatic markers and then either on your own, just kind of following that sensation and allowing whatever emotion was present at the time to complete, that is the way that we kind of, by we slowly pay off that emotional debt, by like one process at the time.

45:26So maybe going back to this question of, say someone was listening and wondering, am I building emotional debt? am I ignoring things that are these feathers? What are signs? And just I don't know examples of this emotional debt being built up, of this trauma, whatever you want to call it, being built up in the body. I don't know. Is it just like anytime you feel really nervous, that's emotional debt, is it anytime you push something down that you are pretty sure you should deal with in the moment, that's emotional debt? What are just like some examples of what that feels like it looks like? Yeah, so it's typically different forms of nervous system dysregulation and that shows up as you know it could be someone's breathing pattern like if they're constantly in this sympathetic or hyper vigilant state, if they're always tracking for things, looking for the worst case scenario, another common one and this is particularly true in the tech sector is being very much in the head and living in the thoughts and the mind the entire time and there's a form of disassociation that happens as a kind of protection mechanism essentially because it's uncomfortable to be with the sensation in the body and because society tends to reward people for solving problems and being in their mind that is a pattern that continues for many many years or even decades.

46:43Other ones are, I think the most obvious one for people is emotional reactivity where your response to a certain situation is disproportionate to what's happened. So like, for example, if you said something to me, that doesn't make me sense. And I was like, I freeze maybe. And this is another important point that most people have two versions of reactivity. Some people will kind of freeze with draw a shutdown and disconnect. And other people will become more aggressive, become bigger and attack and like fight back. And kind of knowing which way you tend to orient. Most for me, it's usually shrink and freeze and shut down, knowing what your pattern is and also knowing what the sensations are when this happens.

47:29It's really helpful for you to be like, oh, that things happening. My priority now is to downshift and kind of find a sense of safety basically in the body and then interact, then make the decision, then have the conversation. Because if you can keep going from that place of reactivity, like, nothing good happens from that place. No great decisions were made from that place. So again, that's a place where having the intercept of awareness, oh, this is what's going on, being able to then downshift your system, kind of access a sense of, oh, like, I'm okay, that actually this isn't so bad. And then moving on from there, it's a profoundly practical and just useful skill.

48:14Kind of along these same lines, you're at summer, or this idea that you have a big competitive advantage if you feel the feels is the way you described it. Does that ring a bell? And if so, what can you share around that? Just why this is so powerful, especially in the workplace? Yeah, so I think I wrote about this in one of the every essays. I think the title was the best decision making is emotional. And I basically wanted to kind of poke out the phrase, I think I saw someone on Twitter say, fact over feelings, like don't let emotions ruin good decision making. And yeah, there's so much I can say about this, but basically there was a landmark study by this guy, DiMazio, who's this kind of famous neuroscientist, and he studied a patient called Elliot.

48:56And Elliot had a tumor in his brain that was removed, and it basically meant that he was unable to feel emotions. So his entire emotional capacity was removed. And Elliot went from being a successful married businessman to divorced, broke, and and unable to choose what he could have for lunch. He was unable to make the most basic life decisions. And it's because he didn't have access to that emotional sentence brain. And so our brain is like a prediction -making machine. And as I mentioned earlier, this is highway of sensory data that's coming up through the body. And if we don't listen to that when we make decisions, then we're losing out on a lot of information.

49:37And what tends to happen, I see this in clients that I work with, is if they are avoiding feeling a certain way, let's say that they don't enjoy feeling conflict or anger, then they will make decisions subconsciously to avoid feeling that way. And it becomes a huge bias and a huge problem because people make decisions because they're afraid of feeling a certain way. And if you're on the other hand able to just like welcome and be with whatever emotions would arise on the other side of a decision you're able to kind of decide clearly instead of being skewed one way or the other. Easier said than done.

50:18Yeah. Do you find there's ever a downside to being too in touch with what you're feeling? I find like I'm actually not like a feeler of what I'm feeling kind of person like I'm pretty stable partly because I'm not like super in tune with what I'm feeling a lot of sometimes and maybe this is a huge problem that I need to deal with, but I don't know, it's worked out okay. So far, I guess you ever find that sometimes it's okay, sometimes like you don't need to know exactly every moment anything that's hurting your causing you pain. Yeah, it's a good question. And some people do have a very high interceptive capacity and that can be overwhelming in which case I would recommend focusing on the breathing practices to build that capacity to downshift so you're able to just function.

51:04And this day, definitely people who are overwhelmed by the stimuli of day to day life, they're being out in traffic, they're very easily overwhelmed. And for those people, working on increasing nervous system capacity to kind of hold that amount of stress, maybe it's through sauna and cold plunge, maybe it's through gentle titration of stresses and then downshifting, that's actually really valuable. I'd also say that the ability to function well or this applies to high functioning people, which is probably a lot of your audience. It's very helpful in the moment to say something comes up. You want to be able to buffer intense emotions and say, get through the meeting, get through whatever it is.

51:49That's a very helpful skill. But if you don't then give yourself spaciousness afterwards to downshift and allow yourself to feel whatever was brought up by that experience, you're going to be adding to this emotional debt over time. And as I mentioned, some people, they might only, it might be a year before the some kind of breakdown burnout other people It might be, it might be longer and usually it's more unfortunate in the longer case because it creates like a long -term health crisis and then No amount of money or time is able to repair the damage that's been done, which is can be really tragic Which I would end to Johns is a great example of that happening.

52:26Yeah, and these are and these are super examples and I love his vulnerability and honesty in what he's been through. Yeah, I think if you're interested in this topic, definitely watch that episode. Another exercise that you talk a lot about is this idea. It's called NSDR, you think? Talk about that and when that might be useful, how to go about using this tool. Yeah, so NSDR was a practice coined by Andrew Sheeben, who you mentioned earlier. And it basically, it's a more scientific lens on the practice of yoga nidra, which is kind of an ancient yoga practice. But I am a huge fan of it and I do it myself most days for kind of 15 to 20 minutes.

53:06Basically what it looks like is you lie down, put on an eye mask or blindfold and you listen to a guided audio. I've recorded some myself so I can share these in the show in the length. Your voice would be so good for these, by the way. I, the fan you're calling. Nice. Yeah, it's really fun for me to do, but basically what it involves is a Guided body scan. So this is also a great way to practice interception There's it's something that I didn't mention earlier was that when there's cortisol present in our body The cortisol basically acts as a numbing agent. So it's much harder to kind of tune into those sensations but using this I think it's a 14 minute guided NSTR practice you're basically lying down, there's a guarded body scoundless relaxing music in the background.

53:53And by the end of it, you feel like you've had a two -hour nap. It feels incredible. And particularly for people who, myself, tend to get tired in the afternoons, if you kind of space this out, usually between one and three pm for me, that will give you a second win in the afternoon. And it'll mean you won't end the day collapse on the sofa. So I think it's great for improving interception. It's good for allowing your body to downshift and relax instead of being in that kind of high tone sympathetic state all throughout the day. So it gives you a body of break. And it just feels really good. Honestly, it's probably my most played practice of everything that I teach.

54:37Just people listen to it every day. So I'll share that in the show notes as well. And imagine if you feel like you've built this emotional debt, this would be a really good exercise to start to do. Is that right? Yeah, it's fantastic. I mean, most people, there's some people who struggle with having enough energy to kind of get out of Ben function, but again, I imagine listeners to your show, people that live in Silicon Valley, their challenge is the downshifting without external substances. And so NSDR is a really great way of strengthening that ventral vagal tone, which is our body's capacity to go from like on kind of go go go to then relaxing.

55:17There's a quote from Kevin Kelly that I interviewed recently and he said, if you have a great work ethic that needs to be matched with a great rest ethic. And I think that that kind of piece of actually training our capacity to downshift after stress is just completely missing from most people's playbooks. I think with a lot of the sort of advice if you listen to Ferris and Hewroom Inn and everyone's got this stuff you should be doing every day list. And it ends up being so long and there's so many things to do. Cold plunge, sauna. What is it that you practice or come back to slash? What would you recommend people try to do daily?

56:01that is most impactful of all the stuff we've talked about. First experiment with a bunch of different paxes and see which you enjoy. And notice how you feel before and then how you feel afterwards. That's kind of the key. Because once you know that it feels good, you're not going to have to like force yourself or motivate yourself to do it. You'll just do it naturally because you know if you'll feel great afterwards. I would recommend starting really simple. also starting with the 4 -4 -8 breathing or humming, doing that in the morning for just like two minutes. Two minutes in the beginning is enough.

56:37And I would also recommend listening to the NSDR practice at least once or twice. If you work from home, it's pretty easy. After lunch break, something like that could also be in the evening when you get home as well. Some people use it to help pull the sleep. And then the final thing that I would recommend and if you have the resources and you have access finding a somatic practitioner or somatic therapist is so life changing. I mean, I emerged a completely different human on the other side of the 200 breath work journeys. Like I have a different experience of life basically released so much time.

57:14Even my voice sounds different. Like if you listen to the podcast episodes I recorded four or five years ago, my voice is higher pitched. It's like, it just sounds different. It has a different resonant quality to it. Okay, awesome. You've kind of summarized, I was going to try to summarize all the advice you've given. But if you were to do the bare minimum next steps, based on this advice, try this 448 -336 -224 -224 -2. This 224 work too, if you just go real fast. Yeah, perfect. Okay. So do that for a couple mornings. see how that does try this NSDR practice, you'll link to it, recording about to do that.

57:54And then, was there something else you recommended? Oh, Samada, a worker, like basically maybe a therapist, maybe not. Someone that helps you with your body. Yeah, and I'd add in the eight practice for even, you know, 15 seconds before the breathing in the morning and after, just so that you notice the difference. And if you do the NSDR, that is basically a 15 minute interception practice as well. So you're kind of getting two birds with one stone with that practice. What's your perspective on meditation? Does that fit into this? Do you find the SDR replaces the new for meditation? That is a big topic.

58:32I am an avid meditator that I've done many 10 day silent retreats. I was in a dark room for 10 days. With meditation, I think it really depends on what you're training. Like it's like saying, you know, what's your opinion on exercise? Well, are you training mobility or stamina or strength? It's the same with meditation. You could be training, loving kindness. You could be training your focus and attention. You could be training spacious awareness. So I'm a big fan of embodied meditation practices. So this is often the classic Vipassana body scan is a good example. Again, I mean, that's basically inter receptive practice, right?

59:10where you're just moving your attention through different parts of your body over and over and over again for like days on end in the case of a person retreat. Meditation is helpful for the specific skill of increasing the psychological space between a stimulus and your response. So if you have some degree of meditation practice instead of getting wrapped up in a certain emotion or we're even believing a certain thought pattern, there's usually an ability to kind of step back a little bit and see if what it is. So the definitely is a place for meditation, but my viewpoint is that we've kind of over indexed for mindfulness meditation in over the last 20 years.

59:53There's so many apps, there's so much talk about it, and we've completely forgotten the body -based approaches. So, I'm not saying don't meditate, I think meditation for sure has its place, especially if your goal is more of the traditional waking up and seeing through the nature of the self. That's a different kind of path, in my opinion, but if you're looking to function more effectively and kind of be more in tune with your body, then there's a whole different category of taxes in this bottom up variety that we've touched on today. On the topic of bottom up, I imagine you're a big fan of this book that everyone always talks about, the body keeps score, I think it's called.

1:00:33Would you recommend that book, as I connected in large parts of the stuff you talk about? What do you think of that? That book specifically because I hear about it all the time. Yeah, it's a good book. It's by Basil Van De Kolk and there's another one. I think Peter Levine says, the issues are in the tissues is basically the concept. And this is the idea that we have these incomplete mobilization reflexes that are stored in our body and often held as tension. It's not strictly true to say that the trauma is in the body. It is actually a cortical map in the brain which kind of tracks these things, but for kind of practical purposes, it looks and feels as if there is stored grief in my right hip or anger in my solar plexus, that's the experience that we have.

1:01:17And the more that you become aware of these sensations and start to develop emotional fluidity essentially, the more that tension is released and the less reactive you become and the more emotional debt you pay off. So I think the body keeps the score. I think a more accurate way would be the body is the scorecard in a way. I think that's kind of a slight reframe. And if you're interested in this, the work of Peter Levine waking the tiger is kind of the seminal book on this like mobilization reflex stuff that I'm describing. I never knew that part of it. And basically, it's actually kept in the brain, but it comes across as somewhere in the body.

1:01:57Yeah, exactly. Fascinating. I want to spend a little time on a new segment that we have in this podcast that I call Contrary in Corner. So let's visit Contrary in Corner. I feel like you'll have something interesting here. So the question is, is there something that you have a very Contrary in opinion about? Something that you believe that a lot of other people really don't believe? We've already touched on, I'm not a big fan of talk -based meditation, which will probably get me some comments. I would imagine. I'd say the other one that's worth mentioning is, I think that we vastly underestimate the impact of burnout, particularly on a kind of from a like bottom line perspective.

1:02:38There was a research report that I did a couple of years ago where we interviewed these leaders and they'd all experienced burnout of some degree and we said if you were to estimate like how much this cost your startup of business, what would you say? And the media response was $100 ,000, which I imagine is more than most people would think and most people aren't actively investing in burnout insurance. It's not something that's on many people's radar besides meditation practices and things like that. I think part of the reason that the cost is higher is because there are these second and third -order consequences of talent attrition, of opportunity costs, lost productivity, you lose great leaders, make shitty decisions in the run -up to the burnout itself.

1:03:24There's also this idea of emotional contagion, which there's some research from Wharton, I believe, and they show that the leader of the CEO has a disproportionate impact, or their emotional state has a disproportionate impact on the people in their team. So something I'd like to say is the nervous system of an organization is a reflection of the nervous system of the CEO. And so I think that's just something which I would like to see talked about more. Just on this idea of burnout. I don't think you're saying don't work really hard if you want to work really hard. It's that you need to maintain your Body and mind and nervous system if you're working insanely hard like if you're working long hours you feel free But just know there's debt you're building up and you need to be doing things to pay off that debt as you're doing that Precisely.

1:04:11It's very much like building technical debt in the other days of a startup like it's it's worth doing But just do it intentionally like know that you're doing that and that so let's say you you work really hard for eight months give yourself a month or two off to really downshift. It's also really worth building that nervous system capacity. It's great to be able to push it really hard and focus, and then combine it with that rest ethic as well. So do NSDRs find a way to downshift so that that way of working can be sustainable? Johnny, we reached a very exciting lightning round. Are you ready?

1:04:48Let's do it. First question. What are two or three books they recommended most to other people? Well, I actually had a sense this question was coming and I have a book with me here. The first book is Constellations by David White. This is the book that I've gifted most to friends, I think more than any other book. And he basically has 52 definitions of words like ambition is, I think, the first word. And his writing is just, it just blows me away. I open this to a random page, read the definition, and it's just... It's probably affected me more than any other book, so that's one that I love. 15 commitments of conscious leadership, which I imagine has come up before in your podcast.

1:05:34This is by Jim Dethma and Diana Chapman. They have the conscious leadership group. And this is basically, in my opinion, it's the best leadership book that I've come across, and it combines practicality with a lot of great theory. So this is awesome. And then finally, this is a bit out there, but recapped to the rapture by Jamie Wheel. Big fan of Jamie's work, Jamie's writing. This is kind of three books in one. The beginning is like addressing the metacrisis and a lot of like the craziness that we're seeing in the world. The second chapter is very related to what we've been talking about. He tools at hedonic engineering.

1:06:12and it's basically practices for accessing, shifting, shifting, just your state of consciousness. And the third is ethical cult building, which I'll just leave that there. Anything? Do you have a favorite recent movie or TV show? You're really enjoying it. My wife and I love animations, and we saw Kubo and the two strings recently, which was fantastic. So, so great. And that and also wolf workers, which was an Apple TV series Yeah, those have been my two favorite movies I've seen recently. If you like animated content Check out scavengers rain on HBO I mentioned it on this podcast before but it's incredible.

1:06:54It's a TV show on HBO So I usually ask do you have a favorite question you like to ask candidates you're interviewing but I know you coach people So to kind of turn this question a little bit around You have a favorite question you like to ask executive coaching clients that you work with. I stole this question from a guy, Joey Keloner, who's who's here in Boulder. And the question is amazing. It has, it's so good. And it's basically how you complicit in creating the conditions that you say you don't want. And so the word complicit there is key because it's not saying like in what ways is it your fault, but it's like in what, in what ways we complicit in creating the the conditions for anxiety, for building up emotional debt.

1:07:36And just the question kind of opens up the door to ways in which you're like an active participant in creating these challenges in your life. And that's a really rich journal question or a question to explore with with a friend, co -founder, colleague. I remember him sharing that on the Tim Ferriss podcast. Many years ago when I stuck with me and I often think of it, but I never am complicit of anything that goes wrong. It's never my fault. It has nothing to do. Just kidding. Excellent. The other favorite product you've recently discovered, they really like. One is these blue -blocking glasses.

1:08:16These are raw optics blue -blocker glasses. They block out 100 % of blue light and they are a lifesaver if I'm ever going out of the house or basically after dark. I'll wear these to drive, I'll wear these to, even like dinner with friends sometimes. And it basically means that I'm able to then sleep well that evening. So that's one. And then the other thing I'll briefly share, this came through the other day. You mentioned the vagus nerve earlier in that device. I have three devices here that are all vagus nerve stimulation devices. This one is called Neurosim. This one I believe is pulsetto.

1:08:53and I think this is a Apollo strap. I haven't used them that much yet, but they basically work by sending low -level electrical stimulation directly to your vagus nerve. So this clips on your ear because the vagus nerve goes through the right side of the neck, same with pulsetto, and I'm really curious to kind of compare the effect of these versus say breathwork, humming, the other body based practices. Obviously you can do both at the same time, but I'm just is interested in playing. So I wouldn't recommend them yet, but I think it's interesting that they exist. How cool would that be? We just put these things on.

1:09:30We don't have to do anything else. Just get up, slap on our device, and life is amazing. We meditate, you don't have to breathe in a different way. I'm gonna need to do this while I'm on the podcast, just wear all these devices. Let's see how that goes. Awesome. Well, I guess somehow a report back to us, how these go, because that feels really great. Next question, do you have a favorite life motto that you often come back to share with friends either in work or in life? State over story would be one which we've touched on. State over story. And then I think the other one which I think about often is I say I like to say make generous assumptions.

1:10:13And by that I mean in any situation like what is the most generous story that I can tell of this person, of this situation, not kind of naively fabricating something, but usually there's a spectrum of like, I can assume that they're a bad person and they did this thing out of spite, or maybe they had a bad day, maybe they have a lot of emotional debt, you know, there's many stories that can be told, and I usually try to have a practice of telling the most generous story that I can. I like that a lot. Another way of describing that is just assuming good intentions. I often think about... Exactly.

1:10:54Final question. You seem extremely calm, always and very centered and stable. What still gets you riled up and unsettled? And what do you do when that happens?

1:11:07Well, I was nervous before this book gust. So I did some breathing practices and some stretching and some humming before jumping on here. I still at times notice ways in which I'm conflict -avoidant. I've been working on it actively for a while, but there's a part of me that can sometimes avoid conflict. And so I've actually noticed how there's a relationship between that and having a healthy relationship to anger. So basically giving myself permission to express frustration not at someone, but just allow it to be there and then from that place set better boundaries with my time with what I'm doing, saying no to certain things.

1:11:49I think that's the practice that's most alive for me right now. Johnny, you are awesome. Two final questions. Working folks, finding online and explore the things that you offer. I think you teach a course, whatever else you offer, talk about that and then how can listeners be useful to you? Yeah, well this has been so much fun. I am a very active on Twitter or X, my handle is Johnny Miller, it's J -O -N -Y -M -1 -L -L -E -R. And yeah, if this was interesting or listens would like to dive deeper, I teach a course. Our next cohort is running in the spring. The end of March applications are now open.

1:12:28And the website is nsmastery .com -lennie. I've created a custom page and there's a $250 juicy discount for listening if they They want to slide up. I'm going to get a sign up for this myself. I didn't know you're going to do that. That's awesome. And NS mastery stands for nervous system mastery. Exactly. Amazing. Anything else? And then the second question of how this nurse can be useful to you? Well, firstly, if any of this resonates, I'd love to hear from you on Twitter or email me as well. I can pass it positive email. And I would just love it if you experiment with this stuff. I love this idea of just being a scientist of life.

1:13:09So if anything that we've talked about resonates or any of the practices you want to try, just go out and try it and see how it feels. I think that would be, and then tell me about it. That would be the greatest gift, I think. And the best way to tell you about it is, we're at you or some else. Tweet at me or my email is johnnyatcurushumans .com. So feel free to email me as well. All right, I'm going to use all these things. Johnny, thank you so much for being here. You're awesome. I am excited for the show, and it's we're going to have to give people actual tools to use to become less anxious and nervous in their work at life.

1:13:45Thank you again for being here. Amazing. Thanks so much, Lenny. This was SuperFun. Same for me. Bye, everyone. Thank you so much for listening. If you found this valuable, you can subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app. Also, please consider giving us a rating or leaving a review as that really helps other listeners find the podcast. You can find all past episodes or learn more about the show at Lenny's Podcast .com. See you in the next episode!