#826 - Jonny Miller - How To Stop Feeling So Frustrated All The Time

27:55And so for me, this mantra of like, I am willing, it was like, I am willing to just like feel and experience and let this like tidal wave of intensity move through me. And that was really, really helpful, particularly in some of the tough moments for me. Can you take us through that story kind of what triggered you on this journey? Yeah, sure. So I was living in Brighton in UK. I was engaged at the time to amazing woman called Sophie Spina, she was a junior doctor and we went on holiday and she'd been diagnosed with bipolar before we got together. Her first day back at work, she had an anxiety attack and she ended up coming home and taking her own life.

28:45I was in Portugal at the time when I got the phone call and that just obliterated me. It completely destroyed the vision for life that I had for the next five years. And I'd never, I had a pretty easy life. I'd like went to school in England, like nothing really tragic or bad had happened to me. And it was the first time that I was really confronted by something that was just unspeakably tragic. And so for me, I remember seeing adults, like I remember seeing people in the UK who like family members who'd lost them close to them, but they hadn't grieved. They hadn't really allowed that grief to move through.

29:30And they were this like, just like a shell, like a husk of a human being, you know, like kind of glazed eyes, like resentful cynical. And I remember thinking, like knowing my lack of attunement to my own kind of emotional landscape. I remember thinking it like, I'll probably end up like that, like that resentful bit of person if I don't allow, if I don't really kind of intentionally feel this. And so I kind of went on a mission of sorts to be like, okay, I'm just gonna quit my job, like just give myself like a year to move through this in any way that I could. And so that was like, I did a 10 -day -of -a -passonner, and I'm pretty soon after.

30:15It was simple on medicine. It was breath work. It was going back to the places that had these like, haur cruxers of grief that I'd go back to places that were meaningful. And yeah, and that over kind of that period, it totally changed my life. Like it was a very much like before and after kind of right of passage experience. Dude, I'm sorry you went through that.

30:47It reminds me of that Carl Jung quote where he says, until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate. And that's kind of like those people who have had some incident or maybe not just one incident, maybe just a sort of compounding of lots of small molestations on their emotional health. and they just keep repeating these same patterns. They seem to kind of be controlled by this thing. It's not them, but it's becoming a part of them. It's almost like being emotionally parasitized. You've got this thing living in you that isn't you, but is controlling you.

31:29It's the Toxoplasma Gandhi of emotions. It's so funny. Yeah. So what comes to mind? and yeah, there's maybe two things I want to share. One is that when the grief was fully able to move through, it went from being this very uncomfortable thing that I was kind of running from to, oh, this just feels like, it feels like pure love. There was this moment when I was on Hermen Moral bench and just kind of tearing my eyes out, just like boiling my eyes out. And there was this moment that I was like, If I didn't have the story that I just lost someone very close to me, I would think I was in like, I was on MDMA, I would think I was in this like ecstatic state.

32:16And I think for me that the two practices that I had that allowed me to kind of build that emotional fluidity, one was swimming in Brighton in the ocean in the like fucking freezing cold water. And you know how when you first get into like freezing water, I'm sure you're familiar. It's like everything tenses up. You're like, ah, you just want to resist it. And then slowly, if you can like, almost like a clench fist, you just like slowly soften that resistance and like let it in, it's like not so bad. Then eventually it's like, oh, this is actually quite nice. Like I could be here for a while. And that same kind of process, which I also then applied to freediving, where again, it's a similar thing, where the deeper you dive down underwater, the more pressure there is from the ocean, and the more constricted, literally your organ shrink because of the air pressure or the ocean pressure.

33:11And everything inside gets super tight. And if in that moment you can kind of drop down into your body and be like, okay, I'm noticing my stomach is really, really tight. And it's like softened that, then it allows you to equalize and you can then sink even deeper. And so that, for me, almost became like a metaphor for or a training ground for the same with the grief, the same with the emotions. And so I kind of applied the same like move of noticing the tension and contraction, like the closed fist and just being like, ah, just like soften slightly and that would allow a little bit more to move.

33:47And I really think that's, I mean for me, it's been a really powerful metaphor for the process of gradually titrating and welcoming even more intensity that I previously would have shut down or just being like, like, no fucking way. Okay, so that's interreception, self -regulation next. What is that to know? Yeah, so self -regulation is, I mean, it's like a therapeutic term, but basically it's like, how can you increase a embodied sense of safety and a parasympathetic downshift in a moment? So my favorite part, like some people use like mantras, affirmations, maybe like a cognitive reframes, but these are like top down strategies for self -regulation.

34:33I tend to prefer the bottom -up approaches, so things like humming is insanely effective. It releases nitric oxide, it has this really, really instantaneous kind of calming effect. The sigh, obviously it's super and it talks about also things like four for eight breathing or all -time enough to breathing. Or even just like bringing your awareness down into your feet or your hands and like being reminded of the space around you, so just like expanding your awareness to the sides below you above you. And it's just like, ah, like you feel like a sense of softening. So let's dig into the specifics of a few of those, which ever ones you want to pick.

35:20Yeah, so let's say, 4, 4, 8 breathing, which the exhale is twice as long as the inhale, that's kind of what makes it calming. And when you're breathing in this way, there's a part of your brain in the insula, which is basically tracking how you're breathing the whole time. And when you breathe in this particular way, it sends signals to activate your parasympathetic nervous system which then sends signals to your endocrine system, which then feeds back into your brain and your brain's like, oh, like the threat's gone. Like I can beat B more chill, which then creates calmer thoughts and feelings.

35:59So this is kind of virtuous cycle. And the reverse is also true. Like if you're when you're overwhelmed, when you're stressed, it tends to be a kind of breathing into the upper chest where there's more sympathetic like, you're on, so there's faster breathing often through the mouth, and that has the reverse effect. So that will activate the simple neck system, which then sends a adrenaline things into the endocrine system, which then sends, which creates the story and the felt sense and the emotions of like, oh shit, like whatever it is, I'm activated, which then I'm not safe. That's kind of what it comes down to.

36:34Yeah. So the breath is a incredibly powerful tool for like very, very quickly shifting your state. Like, are that regulating or downregulating? And there's a lot of times when upregulating is also helpful. Like, if you're feeling lethargic in the morning and you don't want to drink another espresso or you just want to increase the intensity. So under and the key thing there is when the inhale is more intense or longer than the exhale, it's activating when the exhale is longer or more relaxing. something, sorry, longer or just more emphasized than it's, it's calming. How many rounds of 448? Until you feel a shift, yeah.

37:21Usually at least, at least 3 or 4, sometimes more if you're, if you're really activated. And the other thing that can, can be really helpful is breathing into the belly against some resistance. So you can either lie down, face forward on a hard surface and take a full breath in like a sigh and then just allow the DX hell just completely fall out. I'll sometimes do it against one of those Swiss bulls, I'll breathe into that and then the pressure will push the air out of my lower diaphragm and it's so calming. It's really good after a long day or whatever's coming up, it's so effective. of eyes or a tweet from you saying that maybe the solution to all of our emotional problems is just fucking humming.

38:08What one of you can know about that? Yeah, there was one of the students in my cohort posted a video of him holding his like six month old baby who was crying and he like hummed for like 30 seconds and the baby just went like just like super, super quiet. What is happening is the humming is releasing nitric oxide in our system. That nitric oxide is a vascular dilator, which basically has this calming effect. It's also really good for reducing isotrain or ifotique. You can do it for 30 seconds. If you want to amplify it, there's a thing from yoga called BeBreath where you put your I can't do it now because I'm wearing headphones.

38:56But thumbs in the ears, these two fingers over the eyes and then this finger over the nose. And as you hum, it just creates this like vibrational resonance effect in the sinus cavities. And it just, it feels so good, man. Try it. It's also really good before podcast conversations. What do you mean when you say hum? Is there a frequency people need to do? Is there a length of time they need to do it for or their rounds with this is the retune I'm following. You can do a tune. No, so basically through the nose and all the way to the end of Excel. So taking a full breath in, inhale, and then all the way to the end of Excel.

39:39Whatever pitch feels good to you. Right, whatever you default to. Okay, so there's two, four by four by eight. So, four in, four at the top, eight down, and then there's no break at the end on that, and you're saying at least four rounds up until you feel like you've actually reset a little bit, and then the alternative is around about 30 second rounds of humming, and how long is that for? Yeah, so I'll do at least three rounds, and then usually by the end of that I'll feel pretty good. And with the full for eight, you can also, if you do it through alternate nostrils, again, this is something from the yoga world.

40:21My theory is that because it reduces the aperture of the, of the inhale, it increases the calming effect, but I'll do like inhale four lefts, hold for four, exhale eight right, inhale right four, hold for exhale left eight. And yeah, I've looked for studies on, you know, why this is more effective. I haven't found that much, but in my own experience, it's, it does help. So I'm interested in how people can better integrate a deregulating experience. So they've gone through something, maybe they have or haven't been able to step in using some of the techniques that you've suggested or some of their own.

41:01But something's happened and it's later in that day and they're sort of reflecting on this argument that they had with a random person in a coffee shop or that disagreement with a partner or that bit of road rage or that comment from a coworker that really set them off for whatever it is. How would you advise someone after the fact to integrate a deregulating but normal experience? This isn't getting the call that you got while you were in Portugal.

41:40It's one of So I usually think of this as in like two phases. The first phase is getting to a point where I feel somewhat like present again in my body and able to be with whatever the situation is. If that's not there, let's say you're still like really just frustrated about whatever the thing is, then I'll use either top down, bottom up or outside in kind of practice to down regulate. So that could be the affirmation, could be a cognitive reframe, could be some of the breathing exercises, could be like a state change, maybe sort of a sort of cold -plunge -type thing, or outside in, it could be like co -regulation, you know, just like a hug from a friend or like going through a work with your dog, like whatever that is, something to kind of allow the system to find stability and safety.

42:35Once that's there, then I'll do a... I teach a practice called somatic surfing, which is essentially dropping into the body, dropping into that intercept of awareness, and being like, okay, I'm angry at this person for this thing. What do I notice in my body? What's here? And this is where the courageous curiosity thing comes in. I'll find a sensation, I'll track it, and then it's really a process of like softening resistance and welcoming whatever's there. And the first few times that you do this, and it can often be helpful to do this, you know, with a somatic therapist or with a friend or a men's group, something like that.

43:21But if you're doing it on your own, it's really just bringing like welcome resource to that part. I mean, three of the lens of internal fan systems, it's like there is some kind of like activated part and you're bringing resource to that part and it might want to maybe there's like a thing that you want to say or you want to like shout at a pillow or maybe you just want to like lie down and like just like shed a few tears. It will just What's remarkable and what I find endlessly fascinating is how the body always it always knows what to do. It's really just asked like creating enough safety internally and externally for the body to take over and it just moves.

44:02It will complete that buffered reflex. In the same way that you can search in YouTube, there's an amazing video of an Impala that was chased by a lion. And it's sitting behind a bush and it was literally like in the lion's jaws like five minutes ago. And it just starts, the first is still and it just starts shaking. It just starts like trembling for like maybe like three or four minutes and then it just gets up and just like runs away. And that shaking is the mammalian way of completing that stress cycle. And that's basically what we've forgotten to do as humans. Kids do it. My teacher Ed was in a scooter accident and when he was by the side of the road, he did exactly that he was hit by the scooter and he just shook for maybe five minutes or so and then got up and he was great.

44:54And that kind of,

45:00like stopping of the reflex is what creates over time, the allocelic load increase, which creates the fragility and emotional debt over time. You used that term before, allocelic load, what is that? It's like a fancy term for wear and tear on the body. Basically, accumulated stress creates a listatic load in the system. Energy that is being used to hold that thing in place, that could otherwise be used for something else. It takes energy to stop that reflex from being completed. I understand. So I'm thinking about this relationship between what occurs in the moment and regulating our system when that happens.

45:51And then there's another level of regulating the system to make it feel safe for us after when we're going to try and integrate this experience. And then we have a final stage which appears to be allowing the feeling of feelings. Is that kind of the way to think about it. Yeah, totally. And sometimes you can just skip the whole first bit and just, like if it's a small thing, you just like, it can happen in, you know, five or ten seconds. I don't want to kind of paint the picture that this needs to be like a long drawn out thing. It can literally be a 10, 22nd thing. But yeah, that's like if you were to kind of break down the process, that's that's what it looks like.

46:31Okay, emotional fluidity, the final skill. Yeah, so I mean we've touched on this a fair bit. If I was to sum it up, it's basically welcoming the full spectrum of our experience. And most of us are comfortable in, like you were saying earlier, like a handful of emotions, like I'm comfortable feeling, maybe it's like, maybe it's sadness, maybe it's worry, maybe it's joy. But there's almost always another pocket of things that for whatever reason we just avoid or we default to feeling the standard like books of crayons. And so it's like how do we start yeah I actually quite like that matter but how do we start like calling in with some of these other crayons that we've like kicked out of the books.

47:16That's cool. That's cool. And for me it's been it's actually been a process of almost working with like one one crayon at a time. Primarily through breath work like initially it was grief was like was the big one and then it was anger. And like for me, the turning point there was like my teacher said, he said the words, you are loved in your anger. And I just like, I just pulled my eyes out. I was like, oh my god, like every time I've been angry, I've been like, like, this is bad. I'm about. But you think it was caused you to feel so resonant with you I loved in your anger. It was because I didn't think I was because I every time anger came up, I would, and you know, I'd spent the first 25 years in my life thinking, I'm just not an angry person.

48:05I'm just like chill, calm, like I don't get frustrated very easily. And it turns out there was a lot of like, a lot of rage that had just been like pent up over the years. And so I think it really was this explicit permission to that I could be a good person I was safe when I was in that angry state. And I think for me, it could be. It's not bad for feeling it. Exactly. And I think one of the experiences that kind of lodged that in was when I was a kid, I got angry and this other kid on the playground and got punished for it as kids often do. And I think that was one of the things that cemented in, okay, anger's not a good thing to feel.

48:49And with that, there was a connection there to this like, people please, and this kind of way in which I was being overly nice, but often not kind. And so that was this kind of nice versus kind, it was a dynamic that I was exploring at the same time as being like, allowing the anger to move through. Tell me more about that, nice versus kind. So in my experience being kind is often being able to to set a healthy boundary or to to say something which might initially be received as hurtful but is in the long run the kind of thing to do. Whereas the nice is like the people pleasing like oh yeah yeah sure like not actually giving genuine feedback to someone and in the short term it avoids hurt, but over time you lose trust, you lose faith in yourself and you just don't have boundaries.

49:45And so for me, I would say yes to everything and everyone and just be then overwhelmed naturally. It's so interesting how much, as you're talking about this emotional fluidity, dysregulation, so much of it, the word safe is just floating around the whole time. Do you feel safe feeling the things that you're feeling? Is it bad for you to be angry? It's okay for me to be self -critical. It's okay for me. It's safe for me to be self -critical. It's safe for me to be anxious, but for me to feel excitement or joy or rage to indignation at things. No, no, no, no, no. Those things don't feel safe. And it's so interesting where that comes from.

50:33Yeah, I mean, I think I think you're spot on and it's also, I mean, a lot of people don't necessarily identify as not feeling safe, but that's ultimately what it comes down to. And when we receive cues from the environment or from other people that we are safe, then, and this is, I think, you know, 80 % of what say a good therapist will do is they will create a container. They will say, you know, this is confidential. No one can hear what we're going to say. Everything is welcome. They are like permissioning that safety basically and that and so and then you know everything comes from there. And yeah, it really is, really is everything and also in relationship as well.

51:15Like if you're in a relationship where it is safe to express your feelings, it is safe to move through these things. it can be really transformational. And like, relearning that safety is what increases our capacity to be with more intensity. Yeah, you've used that term before, capacity to be with more intensity. And one of the things that I'm interested in is this relationship between state and trait. So I think lots of people will understand that if you do breath work, the state change is pretty dramatic, especially if you do some aggressive, whim -hoved stuff, or if you do some down -regulating thing, I feel good.

52:00I feel good for a little while afterward. But relating that to the trait change, and you said, I did a thousand sessions of breath work, and it helped me to work through my grief. It helped me to work through my anger. We're talking about a trait change rather than a state change there. So what is it that you're doing for someone like me who's really only used breath work to get high and cry a bit. What does a trait change from a breathwork practice look like? What's the modality, what's the process, and what's the outcome? Yeah, it's a really good question. Two things come to mind. One is the style of breathwork that I trained in was called facilitated breath repatoning.

52:44And one of the thesis of this modality is that all of our emotions emotions have like corresponding breathing patterns. And so if when I was in a process afterwards, the if the practitioner was was reading my breath as I'm as I'm breathing, if the breathing pattern changes, that's a cue that there's the likelihood that like something shifted there. But in a practical sense, my hypothesis around this is that there needs to be a period of downshift time, like deep parasympathetic state after whatever the release is, for the neural rewiring to happen. And with things like Wimhoff, holotropic breathwork, things like that, they are, you know, it's almost like taking a tab of LSD, like you can have incredible, like out of body, almost psychedelic experiences, the downside and this is maybe somewhat controversial is I think a lot of people are basically disassociating and they're checking out of their bodies and having these crazy psychedelic experiences and then coming back in but nothing has really changed.

54:00And so the challenge here is to breathe in such a way or to however you engage where you're still within your window of tolerance. And that basically means you're still present with your experience. you haven't like checked out and gone somewhere else. And if you can be present with your experience the whole way through and then allow some time at the end for just literally rest like that's what the body will naturally want to do at the end of a stress cycle. Just like allow it to rest and relax if you like you could do like a NSDR practice or just take a nap or just you know lie down somewhere, but from my understanding that is when the rewiring in the nervous system takes place is actually it's not in the peak experience, it's afterwards in the rest, or you know, sleep that night as well.

54:51How common is facilitated breathwork practice sessions? Is there something that people can find locally to them in a class? Is there something that you can do online. It's not super common. The main practitioner's base is in Bali, unfortunately, but you can search conscious -nated breathing or CCB at some more common approach. And it's a way of breathing, which in my opinion, honors the nervous system, or it doesn't send us out in the way that holotropic or Wim Hof does. There's various other breathwork forms as well, but my favorite is It's CCB or FBR, which is for Solitative Breast Repair. Okay, and what are you doing?

55:31Presumably you're not just breathing. There has to be some sort of mental processes as emotions arise, as thoughts arise, as stories and narratives that you tell yourself assumptions about the world. What are you doing from a more cognitive perspective through these breathwork sessions? Yeah, what's kind of crazy about it is you really are just breathing. And this was a big shift for me in that like, there is no key. Yeah, well, the surprise for me was, was often these huge emotional processes we would go through and there was like zero story. Like I had no idea what it was attached to. And in some cases, it was likely like a pre -verbal experience.

56:18So something that happened in the first 18 months of life before I even had the capacity to articulate the author or to speak. The from a kind of cognitive standpoint, it's really a practice of staying with the breath and then when as you know going back to the emotional fluidity piece, when there's some discomfort, getting curious about it and then like softening or surrendering into it and just like welcoming it. And that's like it really is that simple. It's like, get curious until you identify the thing, or you like feel into something. Like, if you're breathing, then breathe into it, and then at some point it will release or something will happen.

57:01Right. So in this way, are you seeing the breathwork as creating a moderate dysregulation, or at least the container for emotions to arise, emotions that maybe haven't been felt that perhaps can't even remember, but to do it in a very particularly safe way, which is then retraining and repatting yourself to go, it's okay to feel this particular emotion. Is that it? Exactly. No, we got it. It's the same fuck. Finally. The same as, I mean, taking MDMA, like an MDMA assisted therapy journey, it's doing the same thing. It's like creating that activation and MDMA being the impatagen creates even more safety in the system so that big stuff can arise and it won't overwhelm you.

57:43It's like, oh, yeah, that thing happened, but I still feel this overwhelming love and safety, which is I think a big part of why it's been so effective in the maps trials and elsewhere. That's cool. I like that's a nice little framing that we've gone through. I think it explains to me as well about how breathwork creates that trait change. One thing that I've been thinking about throughout all of this is the tendency for people who learn skills of mindfulness, of self -regulation to basically create another prophylactic in between them and their emotions. But beforehand I would shut down or I'd get super angry or I'd be distracted by being on my phone.

58:26But Johnny taught me how to do 4, 4, 8 breathing. So hooray, I just have a new way to not feel my feelings. Is that a trap that people step into? Yeah, absolutely. And a good story that kind of exemplifies this. There was a Tibetan monk that came to one of our trainings. And I didn't witness this myself, but my friend basically said that there was like so much rage and anger that was like trapped in his... And this monk had probably meditated 20, 30 ,000 hours. and I love meditation and I think it's an incredibly powerful valuable practice, but it can also be used to effectively disassociate or to self -regulate away the emotions, which in the short term, yeah, like you might be more productive, you might be able to, you might feel less anxious during the day.

59:19So I'm not saying it's like I'm not saying don't do it, but know that it is a ultimately a short term like band -aid solution and that at some point you will have to like open that Pandora's box of stuff that you haven't been wanting to look at. Dude, I feel so vindicated that someone who actually knows what they're talking about agrees with. I had this insight I never wrote it in my newsletter because I felt I felt too silly. It just felt like a pie in the sky. Another the bro signs theory from me. But I had it in my head, it'll be in my notes somewhere, saying that mindfulness or like observing, allowing and releasing is just another way to not feel feelings, that it's great and it's significantly infinite levels better than allowing them to capture you or obsessing about them.

1:00:09But it doesn't ask the question, where did this come from? Why is it that when I encounter this situation, I have to go back to my noting technique, oh, there's anger again. It comes and then it goes. You say, okay, but if that's just gonna keep flowing through you, it is still arising. And again, this is swimming upstream versus swimming downstream. Do you want to, you've developed this fantastic coping regulation strategy for dealing with these emotions when they come up? But it's not these emotions. It's those four emotions in those five situations. It's always the same thing triggering you to always the same emotions that come up.

1:00:49Why not try and get closer to the root of the problem? And that I think requires you, certainly speaking as someone who's done a lot of meditation, it has used an awful lot of mindfulness to have things arise and go, okay, there it is. Just sort of letting it float off into the distance. That's great, but it's helped with state dealing, but not with trait dealing all the time. Yes. Well, I think later I couldn't improve on that. That's what I think. I love your idea as well of the self -regulation paradox being similar to like a type a relaxation problem. So this is something I've noticed in awful lot that the overoptimizer, the human fan, and the Tim Ferris fan, the me fan, will find a relaxation strategy which they can apply their winners mentality to and then try and use the ice bath or the sauna or the breath work as an object.

1:01:56I've done this three times now during a breath work class where I've literally thought to myself, I'm going to win at breath work. I'm like, it's first off, no one's fucking looking at you. Second, win what? Who against yourself? What does this mean? And the three times, all of the three times that I've done it, I've pushed myself too far and I've come back around to find the breathwork lady leaning over me, rubbing my neck because I've sent myself into some other universe. And yeah, talk to me about this type of relaxation problem. I love that idea. Yeah, well, I mean, it was more just like a jest that I think I think it is a great trojan horse to get people like myself, honestly, you like folks in this kind of high achieving space to take down regulation serious and treating it like being like a cognitive athlete.

1:02:54And if you're hard charging and you're like David Guggen's in your way through life, then ideally there should be a kind of like equal and opposite downshift afterwards. and that down shifting is really hard to a lot of people. And so I actually think it's overall a very positive thing that people like HIV flexing and they're just bragging about how much time they spend in the sauna. I think it's funny, but it's actually, in my opinion, like probably a good trend. I mean, at some point that my sense is that mentality, like that trying to win at being the most relaxed. Basically, it's like that.

1:03:31that has an end point. Like at some point you have to drop that too because it's going to be contributing to a certain ceiling of relaxation that you're able to get. Like at some point you have to let that drop away too. Oh dude, I had Ross actually on the show, in a Ross swim around the UK. He just did the world's longest single river swim, 314 miles. And I asked Tim about the same thing. his approach to resilience is suffering strategically managed. And what he's talking about is maybe for a marathon or a triathlon, and maybe even an Iron Man or an endurance race, you can maybe get away with sort of just grabbing and gritting and adrenaline and chip on your shoulder, and my data was mean to me and those people in school, I'm going to prove them wrong and all the rest of stuff.

1:04:24You can kind of take that hot fire energy and use it. But he says that if he's going to try and swim, I think he swam for 55 hours without sleep, without touching land, eating, pooping, peeing in the water, full works. And he said he needs to keep his nervous system just as steady as he can the whole time. There's no use in him trying to think about Mrs Wilkinson and that thing that she said to me in year nine because it's just going to fry himself out. And I think that when we're, that's such an interesting reframe for life, that life is very much, rosègely swimming for 55 hours, not you trying to run for 26 miles.

1:05:11And that potent but toxic fuel when it's used for too long of the bitterness of the resentment of the rage, of the need to prove yourself, of the desire for validation. Those things are so good at getting you activated at the beginning, kicking you out of that job you hate, leaving that relationship you're not happy with, like falling out the top on the bottom of Region Beta. But when it gets to real long to, okay, is this the way I want to live my life? So I want to end up on my deathbed, but still telling people that I've proved them wrong, that their assumptions about me, I look at all of the things, is that really the energy that you want to take into your 60s and 70s and 80s?

1:05:55It's not for me, I don't wanna do that. You think, okay, so if that's the place that I'm going to end up at, why not just bring a little bit of that into now? Why not try and embody, okay, well that's where I'm going to go. Going to end up in a place where I don't want to be using that as fuel. And so given that I've probably already created some momentum now, why don't we try and just, you know, wash a little bit of this away? Why the little bit of that off? Yeah, I love that so much. It feels like what you're saying is almost like changing the fuel source. It's like in the beginning that like night chick fuel, it really does get shit done.

1:06:33I mean, there's a lot of very successful entrepreneurs who are still like writing that rocket fuel. and at a certain point, whilst it may be fuel in one area of life, often quite a narrow area, it tends to, the fumes, let's say, I'm just making this up as I go, but the fumes end up with, you know, they're on their fifth marriage or they don't have any close friends or they have self -talk that you wouldn't want to spend like two minutes listening to. And so, not that just you mentioned self -talk and I've had it in my head the entire time, I'm desperate to ask you, whether the inner voice is downstream from the body or the body is downstream from the inner voice?

1:07:19Yeah, so it is a bi -directional relationship, like it's not one or the other, but something the I've noticed, this is just, you know, NF1, but I had a very active, like, in a critic in teenage years, most of my 20s. And in the last three or four years, that has, like, it's really gone quiet. Like, I still, I have thoughts, but it almost, it feels like my mind is like, my buddy, it's like sending me, like, ideas, or like, did you think of this thing? Or like, try doing this. And there's, there's, you know, 95 % less critical, negative, like looping, like Velcro, what's going on. And I really do attribute that to a lot of the, just like the somatic shit that I've released in through a bunch of these different, like, emotional processes.

1:08:10And also, also flexibility as well. Like there was so much tension that I was holding in different areas that is just not as present. I mean, I mean, it's still a fact on there, but it's like a lot less than it used to be, I'd say. Yeah, I was talking with George yesterday and we had this little experiment. We were asking whether or not your mind is your friend or your enemy, is your mind working with you and for you or against you? And just the fact that for me, certainly my mind is working against me. So much at the time, it's not my friend, it's not being supportive, it's not patting me on the back and telling me that I've done a good job.

1:08:48It's not being even really that objective. It's just this very cutting, castigating, harsh, inocritic that tells me, maybe you did okay today, but unless you can do better tomorrow today, probably doesn't really matter. And tomorrow's going to be a waste as well. So you'd better get cracking, you'd better work harder. And yeah, that's just a really interesting realization that that, it does it, things don't need to be that way. That's not the way that things need to occur, that there are better roots. And when it comes to, yeah, but that's facilitating success, that's allowing you to get to a place of worldly acclaim and prestige and all the rest of it.

1:09:34It's like, yeah, but for what end? Like what's the point? If the road towards your worldly success is paved with personal misery. What was the point all along? It's actually selling the soul of your inner experience so that other people think that you're cool or that things have gone well. And I'm also not sure that you need that cutting in a voice in order to become successful in any case. I'm pretty sure there is an equanimous, well balanced way of achieving those things. Yeah, yeah. I mean, that was what was coming to my interest for me. It's like, I mean, going back to the high agency thing.

1:10:11To what degree are those sounds like counterproductive thoughts, actually getting in the way of you just being present and getting out of the way and doing your thing that you do really, really well. My sense is they might even be negatively impacting the progress towards the goals that you've set or the intentions that you have. That was certainly true for me, but it probably, yeah, it depends on the context. Just talk to me about the Neuro -Aperture Hypothesis. Yeah, this is a half -baked idea that I get on Twitter recently. It's basically a sense that I was researching the etymology of the word anxiety and it comes from Latin word which means to constrict.

1:11:00And I have this kind of working hypothesis that anxiety isn't really an emotion in and of itself, it's actually a constriction or a tensing kind of coming back to that like closed fist metaphor we were talking about earlier. It's like a constriction against another underlying emotion. And if you're able to like increase that aperture of the emotional energy, then that actually turns into on the other end of the spectrum joy. And I know people that students that I've worked with, who they started to feel anxious when the emotion of joy was arising. They were, their system didn't feel safe to feel that joy, so it was, it was tensing, it was constricting, it was causing an experience of anxiety.

1:11:49But if they just loosened that a little bit, it would, it would literally turn into joy, probably the very thing that they are, like wanting to feel more of in their life. And I think the same is true of other emotions as well, like people that are chronically anxious. I would say there was a very good chance that there is another emotion just like just below the surface that if they were able to loosen that grip a little bit, then it would like come to the surface. Which yeah, you know, so it's very related to everything that we've just been riffing on. It's interesting to think what emotion is your anxiety causing you to not feel or what emotion is masquerading as anxiety.

1:12:36And yeah, you kind of want to reveal that that mask through safety and say, oh, wow. And that's something that, you know, we've spoken today a good bit about anger, sort of elation, excitement, hope, all of these things coming through to that there's just sort of extremists. Anything that's outside of the very narrow, over -ten window, I think of it like an emotional over -ten window, right? You have these acceptable ranges of emotions and it tends to be maybe a little bit more, it leans slightly more into the negative than it does into the positive. But if you just get extreme in any direction, you're, no, no, unacceptable, sorry, you can't use that word, not with a hard r, and you depression with a hard r.

1:13:30So you can't do that. And it really makes me think about, it really, really makes me think about that. I think so many people, myself included extreme emotions come through. They're not even that extreme. But something outside of the normal day to day experience of emotions comes through. And there's something gets activated. You go, wow, like, I mean, I mean, someone is this is this okay? And if you don't, at least my current bro science working theory is if you don't step in and sort of check in and just remind yourself like, you are safe. This is fine to feel. Even if it's sad, it doesn't mean that you're going to be sad for the rest of time.

1:14:08Just means that a sad thing happened and that's the emotion that's with you now. Yeah, I mean, I'm so, I so agree. And I think the surprising thing for me was actually that it was the resistance to feeling the thing that sucks. It was the resistance to feeling my sadness or my anger that was like painful and uncomfortable and that I didn't want to be with. But when that goes away, the actual emotion, it feels so fucking good and not just joy, not just excitement, not just a bit like even like especially something, you know, the sadness. There's this like real beautiful tenderness and this like rawness and feeling connected to myself to the world around me and to think that like like I believe that my life would be meaningfully diminished if I was to shut that away and to not allow that to move through me.

1:15:06It's so bang on part of being human. Dude, that's so bang on it. I've been thinking this to myself for a long while that But look, you have this beautiful suite of human emotions that you can live within. And why would you not want it all? Why not? You have, you know, it's like saying, I have all of the colors available on my television, but I'm just going to watch in black and white. And you would know you have this massive spectrum of emotions that you can tap into that literally add color to your existence. You're going to get to the end of your life and look back and realize that all of the, the buffet of human existence was open to you and you decided to sample all of it.

1:15:48Not in a hedonic eye -went and fucked the bitches and flew on the planes and did the drugs style way. That's open to your preference. But in a, there is a range of experiences in a Lee that are available to me and I decided to not shut those things off. And I just think, God, what the fuck else are we here for if it's not to enjoy the emotional state that we're in? Almost everything that we do is trying to find a way to enjoy the present moment. And that doesn't necessarily need to be good emotions all of the time, but to just think this current state that I'm in is interesting, it's inspiring, It's something that I'm going to look back on and remember.

1:16:37Yeah, the more that I think about it, the more that I realize that I think emotions and feeling feelings are kind of just what we're here to do and everything else is trying to get our lives or the environment that we're in into a state to give us a good enough reason to just be Feeling joy in the present moment or present in the present moment. I I love that so much. And the metaphor that comes to mind is almost viewing our human biology as an instrument and that there are ways in which conditioning culture experiences like gets our human instrument to be out of tune and that if we're going around life playing like in the wrong key, things things aren't going to go well.

1:17:22So by taking a little bit of time to basically inquiry inwards, tune up your instrument, then you will have greater access to these melodies, these scales, these harmonics that were previously out of range. And if we're just playing like two or three notes the whole time, it's going to be a pretty boring song. I think the goal is to have that. We want an orchestra of experience. That for me is one definition of a good life is like being intimate with the world in a way that we can like allow all of those notes, all of those colors to kind of move through without being like no, I just want to play an A or I just want to color in red.

1:18:05Like fine, like there's nothing wrong with that, but to me that feels like a, like a diminished vision of life basically. Agreed. Yeah, emotionally living in black and white as opposed to living in color. So given your, I guess kind of progressive perspective on self growth, self improvement, do you think that the current personal development industry is built on a flawed premise? Hmm. Yeah, so I'm something that I learned from this guy, Steve March, this amazing, amazing dude. He has this controversial but I think really valid opinion that the self -development industry, the self -improvement paradigm is flawed in that it starts from the premise that something in you is broken, something in you needs fixing.

1:18:57And so going into any, you know, even like an emotional inquiry process with this like, oh, this is part of me that needs to be healed so that I can be okay. Like starting from that point will diminish the range of outcomes that are possible. Versus what he calls a self -unfoldment, which is maybe a fancy term, but it basically means like, what if everything right now is okay? What if actually you were safe? And then applying that curiosity and presence to whatever is there without a change agenda. And this is something that I really fell into this trap like over and over again. I would be like, oh, I noticed like I'm triggered.

1:19:38I'm going I'm going to do a breath of it, Johnny, I'm going to feel it, I'm going to fix it. It was like the same like Taipei mentality of like, I'm going to feel the shit out of this. I'm just going to feel it, say what? I'm going to win it. Yeah, I'm going to win it. Exactly, exactly right. And that, you know, it worked to some degree in the beginning, but at some point, I've realized that the way in which I was going in with this like self -improvement agenda was actually creating the resistance that was getting in the way of just the thing that wanted to unfold naturally. And so that, I mean, that's something I'm still, frankly, working with.

1:20:12And, um, I, you know, I think it's a life long journey. But I find it's so interesting to like look out at the self -improvement industry and how much of the messaging and marketing is geared towards you are ex -broken in some way. And this, why I think we'll, we'll fix you. And that just by starting from that premise, I think there's a ceiling to how much actual improvement can happen. What is a better frame for somebody who is currently existing in that world? Yeah, I think the question of what if nothing needed fixing? What if nothing needed healing? Like what if you were okay and safe in this moment?

1:20:54And what would be the motivation for changing if that was the case.

1:21:02The changing and the growth happens naturally. In the same way that you wouldn't judge a sapling oak tree for being too small. It will naturally want to grow, it will naturally want to evolve. Trees don't get in the right way, but humans tend to. And so, like, your growth, your learning, your development will happen. It will happen naturally. It's just, it is once too. And the, the, the trying or like the forcing it to happen, in my, in my opinion, actually gets in the way of what, wants to unfold. To beautiful answer. Very beautiful answer. So you've done all of this self -work, all of this breathwork, all of this time, orthogonally looking at the personal development world.

1:21:54How would you suggest that someone who wants to really step into this world? What would a protocol look like? Are there any books that you would suggest? Are there any courses that you think that they should take? Are there practices? Is there a weekly daily routine? What would you say, just a little prescription for the 80 -20 of how someone would begin on this journey? Yeah, I mean, there's a lot of choice out there and it obviously always depends on the person. I think the practice that I found myself for, I think, are very broadly applicable. NSDR is a really wonderful foundation, non -sleep deep rest that Huberman bangs on about a lot.

1:22:39And what I love about that is it is both, it increases interception, because you're basically doing a guided body scan like over and over again. And it's also increasing that down regulation. And it's only in that like downshifted place where the emotional inquiry is even possible. I'm a huge fan of semantic based therapy as well. So just going back to the NSDR, where should people get, is there an app, is there a website, is there a course? How often do they do it? We've got Taipei as wanting to win at emotions here. Great. So I have a couple of recordings I can send a link to put in the show notes.

1:23:17And if you don't like my voice, then Ali Boothroyd on YouTube is also really good if you prefer soothing female voice. And then, so the other practice that I love to prescribe is just getting curious about your interception. So I like the acronym ape awareness posture emotion using that throughout the day. And really treating it as a creative exploration. And like, what can I, how can I increase the definition or the fidelity or the flavors of my internal landscape? How can I really appreciate them a bit more? But I mean, there's a lot of different options out there for this work. I mean I have a course myself called nervous system mastery that I has basically been my attempt to distill this into a five -week kind of protocol -based course and we do it as a live cohort.

1:24:17We've had like over a thousand students go through. That's been my best attempt to share some of these practices and kind of set people off on this path. And it's also, it's not a replacement for I would say working with Some in -person, somatic -based exploration, whether that's in -person breathwork, whether it's somatic -experiencing, Hacomi is another great modality that I appreciate. Or just some people love mendwork, people gravitate towards different areas, but I think the key is, what are you genuinely excited about? Not going out of place of, oh, I should do this because I need to fix it, but what is actually genuinely interesting?

1:25:01And then following that with this mentality of courageous curiosity and this like I am willing, like I'm increasingly willing to feel and borrowing capacity from other people. That's literally what the therapist does. Like they are giving you additional nervous system capacity so that your system can hold the intensity of something that is not able to hold. That's such an interesting way to think about therapy that you're basically offloading some of that emotional capacity onto the person in the room that you know is confidential and is safe and is trained total that's exactly what's happening Yeah, and and that's part of what I attempt to do with this this course I think there's a a limit to how deep you can go when you're working in an in an online environment But at the same time I've attempted to share the the core protocols basically for self exploration and as a foundation for doing deeper dives in a kind of one -on -one context.

1:26:00I know that you're a fan of that Jerry Kallona question, which is in what ways are you complicit in creating the conditions you say you don't want. That's very uncomfortable to think about. The fact that the things that you're complaining about, I have this quote, I love about the magic that you're looking for is in the work you're avoiding. and it's kind of like the conditions you say you don't want in the ways that you're complicit of creating. Is there anything else, are there any other questions that have really sort of broken your brain?

1:26:41I mean, that's a beautiful question. Jerry actually lives here in Boulder and we did a podcast recently, so that's one that's on my mind. Another question, let's see.

1:27:10Yeah, it would be something along the lines of... What is the feeling or experience that you have been running from? And there's a beautiful, just to give that some context. I don't know if you have ever had the Wiz Diversity. It's this amazing story by Ursula Gwynne. And basically the main character Gid releases this shadow, this gebbeth that he spends most of the book running from in different creative ways. And at some point he turns around and embraces it and names it. And that kind of process of turning around and accepting responsibility for the ways in which you are complicit in creating the conditions, the reactivity that you don't want, the lack of agency, and looking at it and eventually welcoming it and loving it.

1:28:03That is the whole fucking joint. It really is that simple. It's just that book again. Finding The Wizard of Earthy by Ursula Laguin. That's one of my favorite fiction books. How, yeah. Johnny Miller, ladies and gentlemen, Johnny, I really love what you're doing. I think that this forefront of somatic informed personal development of tapping into emotions, I think this is one of the big pushes that we're going to see. We've obviously got human onboard doing the NSDR stuff. You know, hypnosis, another angle, like David Speagle's stuff. I think that's another vector that we're going to see a lot more of.

1:28:39We had the mindfulness revolution, you know, whatever 10 years ago, Andy Puttycomb and the guys from Karm and so on and so forth. But I think this is one of the next ones and I'm glad that you're here repatriating this great nation with me, trying to take over one step at a time. Where should people go? They're gonna want to check out all of the things you do in your courses and the rest of your content. Yeah, beautiful. Thanks so much. So the best place to go would be NSMars3 .com. There's a cohort coming up in October. We're accepting applications now. If folks interested, that would be the number one place.

1:29:16And then I'm also super active on Twitter. So if people want to say hi there, ask questions. It's Johnny Miller, J -O -N -Y -M -1 -L -L -L -E -R. It's an annoying handle with the one there. Dude, I really appreciate you. I'm looking forward to seeing what you do next and thank you. Thank you. I really appreciate it. Beautiful. Thank you so much. This is super fun.