Hello friends. Welcome back to the show. My guest today is Johnny Miller. He's a writer, nervous system coach and a podcaster. Emotions are scary. Feeling feelings and truly being connected to.

Your life is hard.

But what if the solution to these thinking problems doesn't lie in thinking more, but in fixing your body, nervous system and breath first, expect to learn why it's so hard to feel feelings, whether it's possible to think your way out of over feeling, how to use breath work to master your nervous system what the personal development three gets wrong why negative self talk is holding you back, how to regain control after losing your temper and much more I've been loving my cold plunge and sauna from the team over at plunge. I literally use them every single week because the benefits of hot and cold contrast therapy make me feel fantastic. I have more energy during the day, sleep better at night, and recover faster after hard workouts. Plunges evolve collection includes four brand new offerings made to fit your lifestyle space and goals. The new plunge pure Pro chiller uses state of the art technology to filter water and chill it at the same time. The all new plunge air is amazing. If you're looking for a lightweight, space efficient option, you can connect it to the plunge, pop up for maximum portability and affordability, or go with the XL plunge Pro for their signature style.

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Head to join dot whoop.com modernwisdom. That's join dot whoop.com modernwisdom. But now, ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Johnny Miller.

Why is it so hard to feel feelings.

Jumping right in? I mean, we both grew up in England, and I think we're kind of known for having a stoic, keep calm, carry on mantra in our culture. And I. I think that, I mean, speaking for myself, I grew up. What I realized now was numb from the neck down. I was really out of touch with so much of what was going on outside of my intellect. And it's really been the last five or six years that I've come back into appreciating the flavors that are going on inside my system. I mean, I'd also be curious for you, what is your journey with feeling emotions been like? Do you consider yourself as someone who, we both went to Newcastle Durham, up there. It's not cool to express emotions in public. What's your journey?

Yeah, standing on the front door of a nightclub isn't exactly a hotbed of talking about feeling feelings. And, yeah, there's a lot of expectation, I think, about being a young guy that wants to be attractive and competent and have mastery and is sort of competing with other people, other guys, especially in an industry like nightlife and yeah, emotions are kind of a sign of weakness. I got really disappointed with the it's okay to talk campaign that happened in the UK. I thought that that was just so dickless and telling guys it's okay to talk. Like, what does that mean? What does it mean? It's okay to talk. They haven't got. They don't know what they're feeling. I didn't know. I don't know what I'm feeling much of the time. You know, I think I had a small, and probably still do a small number of buckets of emotions that I kind of default to. It sort of snaps across into one of a bunch. So very competent at feeling anxiety, very competent at feeling worry, getting better at feeling excitement, but, you know, distinguishing. Okay, so what are we talking about? Is this restlessness? Is this resentment?

Is it bitterness? Is it frustration? Is it anger? Is it, you know, like really kind of breaking apart the component notes of emotions. There's just a few that I seem to snap to in terms of a default. And one of the main reasons that I wanted to have this conversation with you in particular is between the UK and the US. There is so much turmoil at the moment. Like the entire world just feels like it's up in the air, changes in political party and you should care about this thing and climate change and all the rest of it. And so much of that is outside, but so much of that is impacting the way that we feel internally. And I think it's nice. I like believing, you know, I'm a stoic ship in a storm and I'm not going to move. And, you know, the world out there isn't going to hurt me and all the rest of it. I can David Goggins myself for long enough, but it feels to me like that's swimming upstream rather than swimming downstream. Like the world is out there. It is going to have an impact on you.

Just allow yourself to absorb that. Work out how to work with emotions, how to regulate your nervous system and how to actually start using emotions to inform decisions to make you a better person, as opposed to just like gripping really, really hard and going, no, fuck you, I'm not a pussy. Emotions are for bitches.

Yeah, I mean, I'm pretty sure we're on the same page here. I think that part of the issue is that we've confused what I mean, let's say anger is, I think, a pretty good example. When people are aggressive or using anger to manipulate situation or have their own way, we kind of see that as being a bad thing. Or anger when it's kinked can really hurt people. And I think it's really kind of coming into, for me at least, it was like, like, what are the sensations that are here? And how can I allow them to kind of move through me and be expressed and not get kinked? And this is something that Joe Hudson talks about, who I think has been on your show as well. And if he gets kinked one way, it gets repressed, and it's like, I'm not angry. It just kind of turns into this low level passive aggression. And when it gets kinked the other way, it's aggressive. It's like anger at someone. And both are kind of strategies for not feeling the thing. It's both protection mechanisms that we've learned when we were growing up to avoid feeling whatever that emotion is.

Is that where you think much of emotional numbness comes from, then a lack of safety? An emotion arises, and someone doesn't feel safe in feeling it, so they repress it. What have you learned on your trajectory about the origins of emotional numbness?

Yeah, I mean, I think a lot of it comes from learning that it wasn't safe to express when we were young. So for me, I was, like, bullied as a kid. There were times when I was sad and I was like, friends, like, that's not okay. Same with anger. And I think it really does come down to feeling safe in our bodies and having permission from ourselves and other people that it's okay to feel.

Can you think your way into feeling?

This is a good question. I mean, I think it's really helpful as a starting point to become kind of intellectually aware of what's going on. And this is where talk therapy has such a great role of understanding that there are emotions here. But if it stays on that level of intellectual, kind of. I think I'm angry, but you're not actually feeling the thing, then it causes this emotional loop. I think that's honestly what people are afraid of, is going into something, and then they get trapped, and they get stuck there. And the principles of nervous system regulation are not that you don't feel the things, but you don't get stuck in any one state, you don't get stuck in anger, you don't get stuck in sadness. And the life cycle or the reflex of an emotion is usually anywhere between, like, ten to 20 seconds, but it just gets looped almost like a velcro. Velcro thought. It gets looped if we're not able to actually feel it, but we're just in the story of what the emotion is. And this is something that I see a lot when I do breath work. And you can see when someone is like, they're up in the head, and there's maybe there's some emotion going on, but their awareness is really with the story, and it's really just a case of dropping down into the body and, like, what is, what's here?

And getting in contact with the sensations.

This is one of the reasons I really have been on a big push over the last few months to try and talk about this. I think I'm probably a pretty good figurehead for lots of the people in the audience of someone that spends way too much time in their head, likes the idea of being sort of rational and cerebral and cognitive, and I play with ideas, and that's very, very fun to me. And that can be a bit of a trap, because building up your curiosity and your intellect can cause you to almost armor yourself against feeling things, I think. And yes, certainly a lot of my friends, a lot of my very, very smart friends are actually trying to actively down tune their brain from stepping in to feeling things, and they're trying to sort of get out of their own way. So this is one of the reasons I was really keen to talk to you. I know that you've done an awful lot of work in this. One of the topics that I've been obsessed by since I started the podcast was high agency humans. So can you talk to me about the relationship between emotions, feeling feelings, and having high agency?

Because I don't think that that is immediately apparent.

Totally, yeah. And I love that you use the word curiosity, and that's something that I think was the kind of gateway drug in for me was like, in my early twenties, I was so curious about ideas. I did philosophy at Durham. I was so curious about the world around me. And at some point, that curiosity turned inwards, and I started getting curious about my inner landscape and how that connects to this high agency idea. I feel like, for me, high agency is almost synonymous with being intentional. It's like, can I have an impulse or an idea or something that I want to execute in the world, something that I want to do? And it's like following through with that intention. And for me, what gets in the way of intentionality are reactive tendencies. So if I, let's say I have an intention to ask a girl out, or I have an intention to start a business. But the intensity of that situation causes me to either kind of go into anxiety, overwhelm, worry, or kind of collapse and shut down, which are these two kind of reactive modes. Then it's going to be really hard for me to.

To follow through with any of these intentions, and thereby I will be a low agency human. And so a lot of what I've been thinking about are, firstly, how can you identify the kind of the somatic markers for these reactive tendencies upstream? So before I go to a level ten panic attack, I'm like, okay, I'm noticing there's this tightness in my chest. The last time that happened, I ended up breathing into a bag. Or maybe it's a feeling in my gut. And, okay, last time that happened, I went into a collapse. That's one strategy. And then the second is practices for literally expanding your capacity. So expanding your capacity to be with intensity. And those are two traits which I believe, if cultivated, will accelerate people to be more high agency humans and be able to live more intentionally, which is ultimately what I care about. I think that's what I'm most passionate about, sharing with the world and cultivating for myself.

That's great. I really haven't thought about that before. And me and George have thought about high agency for six years now. We spoke about it. We're on Broadway on Nashville yesterday and talking a ton about it. But I've never considered before that your emotional governor, like your speed limiter on a car, this thing steps in and you can have all of the intentionality, all of the agency in the world that you want. But again, it comes back to swimming upstream versus swimming downstream for me. Do you want to make life easier? Because you can probably get there. Homozy does like Alex is. Alex fucking hates many of his work sessions, but he'll grit his teeth and get through it. And I think that a lot of people have been very seduced. Me too. And I support it. The David Goggins jockey Willink, like, just fucking grind and get it done. Like, that's good because it allows you to kind of blast through all of these restrictions that have been placed in front of you. I'm worried about going over and speaking in front of this business meeting. I've got a job interviewed this week, and I'm terrified to go and do it.

So instead of working into the emotion, feeling it, and then trying to deconstruct that so that it doesn't have the same hold over you, what you use is the classic type a solution, which is just a big fuck off sledgehammer. And you beat it to death. And it's like, on the floor, it's like a hydra or something. You beat it, you can't kill it, but it's down and out for now. And you've just used grit and determination and resilience, and you've got through. But the next time that you go to go and do the thing, I think it's much more likely that that's going to arise. I don't think that that's a long term solution to this problem. So, first off, I absolutely love that. And thinking about using your nervous system as a cue to. Okay, so what is it that I'm feeling in my body? And this isn't woo. You hold trauma in your left hip stuff. I think Bessel van der Kolk's really great book. The title, I think, probably did a lot of disservice and confused a lot of people who never read it and made assumptions about what was in the book.

But, yeah, the body informs you. Not necessarily. The body keeps the score in that way.

The body is the scorecard, according to Lisa Feldman Barrett, which I think is a more accurate.

She's coming on the show. I just confirmed her 1st September.

Nice. Fantastic.

Okay, so just dig in a little bit more. This sort of restriction in high agency to nervous system relationship, like, how. How is someone's nervous system going to inform them when they're stepping in to go and do something?

Yeah, so, I mean, firstly, I just want to comment on the goggins kind of jocko paradigm because I think it's a really good example. And it's actually, it's a really important thing to talk about. And, like, when we're trying to do these, these achieve our goals in life, like start a business, whatever the thing is, the options are like, you can either, let's say some emotion, some resistance comes up. You can either up your willpower, or you can use things like breath work to self regulate and down regulate the emotion away. And that in the short term, is a viable strategy. It will allow you to continue functioning as if whatever that emotion was, was never there. But in the long term, it adds allostatic load into the system, which I call emotional debt. And at some point, depending on people's respective levels of capacity, that emotional debt will get to a certain point where it will cause the nervous system to be so fragile that will become much more easily overwhelmed, and it will require even more willpower, even more self regulation to get rid of whatever that thing is. We don't want to feel.

And so for some people, I think they can viably go for 510, 15, maybe even 20 years in that kind of sledgehammer mindset. But at some point, and these are a lot of the founders and execs I work with, that strategy stops, and I call it the feather brick dump truck analogy your body will give you. Maybe it's like a tickling with a feather, and you're like, just brush that off. Maybe there's a brick. Maybe it's a breakup. Maybe it's like, I don't know, you lose a business deal or you get exhausted one day, and then sometime it's eventually going to be a dump truck, which might be like a chronic illness, or it might be like you just wake up one morning and you literally cannot get out of bed. And at least that's what I've seen with the clients that I've worked with. I've kind of been through burnout myself. And so to kind of come back to the going upstream piece, having a practice for building what's known as interoception, which is basically, how aware of your inner landscape are you? Like, to what degree? Is it like a kind of vague.

I think there's this sensation going on. Or do you have this high definition clarity over the different sensations and somatic markers that you have? Because every time you have an emotion, it's not just a thought. A lot of people think, oh, I'm angry because I have this story that this guy was a dick to me. But with every emotion, there's a corresponding kind of somatic marker. According to Damasio, often the somatic markers pop up before we're consciously aware that there is an emotion in the system. And so by practicing interception, which can be done in any number of ways, we're attuning to this repository of data that otherwise we would be ignoring.

This is the trap of the rational, cognitive, like, left brain person. I think this sort of desire to understand and to explain the problem is that that can become a trap. I first learned what you said about emotions lasting this very short half life, way shorter than we would presume from Sam Harris. And he said, try to remain angry without thinking about being angry. And it just comes, and then it goes. But this story that you tell yourself that anger can last for months, you know, like resentment and bitterness and that story, and I would have said that, and if they'd said that, I would have said this, and they would have looked at me, and they would have known, oh, my God, what is this. This weird, like, sex fantasy thing. Like resentment, revenge sex, like a fucking John Wick movie playing out in your head. But it's linguistic between you and somebody else. It's so strange. And I think just accepting that, accepting the bizarreness. And I most importantly realizing that that's not the way that it has to be. Now, I'm speaking completely hypothetically here because I'm totally captured by all of this stuff.

But I've been reliably told by people that have done more self work than me that this isn't the way that it has to be. So let's get into the nervous system. Talk to me about the modes of reactivity in the nervous system.

Yeah, sure. Well, I mean, I'm glad you brought up Sam Harris, because he has this wonderful phrase that I love, and this is in the context of meditation, but he talks about reducing the half life of reactivity. I think that's a really good way to put it, because progress in this arena is not like, I never get angry. I never get reactive. I'm not reactive for three days, like you said. From three days, maybe it's down to 5 hours, down to an hour, down to maybe five or ten minutes. So I think that's what progress looks like. And what I found helpful is understanding these different modes of reactivity. There's typically two responses that humans have to stressors that are beyond their window of tolerance, like outside of their capacity. One response is hyperarousal, which looks anything, looks like frustration, looks like anxiety, looks like maybe aggression. That kind of like the sympathetic branch of the nervous system is getting so kind of overwhelmed that we struggle to stay present, we struggle to be receiving whatever the situation is. So that's hyperarousal. And then the other side is kind of associated with the parasympathetic side.

The nervous system. It's like shut down. So when some people go into a stressful response, their system will collapse, it will shut down, or it will freeze. And so thats almost like the emergency handbrake is being pulled on the system. And people will often feel guilty or shameful about this. Maybe theres a situation where they really had to show up. And its like the choke. Theres a literal freeze response. And this is obviously both of these are on a spectrum. Its not like we go from zero to 100 sometimes, but being aware of the early signs when we're kind of on the edge of our capacity, let's say, so that we can be like, oh, right. I'm feeling like I'm kind of being pulled out of my intentionality. What can I do to either? And this is where I think there is a choice point. Either do some form of self regulation, just like a simple sympathetic sigh. It could be a just grounding, could be like looking at a wide horizon, doing some breathing affirmations, like top down or bottom up. Either way, or if it's a suitable environment, it's feel the thing. It's like, allow whatever this emotion that I'm resisting to just flow through me.

And maybe you just shout at a wall, or maybe you let a couple of tears come through, and as we were just saying, that can last 20, 30 seconds. And then you're like, oh, my God, I feel. I feel so much better. I think part of the skill here is both learning the tools and practices for both the emotional fluidity and the self regulation, and then being able to apply them at a relevant time or context.

So it feels like there's three main skills that people need here. The interoception, the self regulation, and the emotional fluidity. Is that the three horsemen of the regulation apocalypse, 100%.

And I say maybe there's a fourth, which is environment design. And I think of this idea of, like, we design our environments, and our environments design us in return. And so there's ways that you can remove unnecessary ambient stresses from your environment. But broadly speaking, I think those three, and I also think in that order as well, because if you don't have interoception, you're not going to know when the right time to self regulate or feel an emotion is. So that's like, you need that as a foundation. And then the self regulation and emotional fluidity come on top of that as you progress.

Okay, let's go through them, then interoception, self regulation, emotional fluidity. Let's start off. How can people improve their interoception?

Yeah, so what I love about this is you can really do it in any moment. I find it helpful to have both. I mean, I don't do this so much anymore, but I used to have, like, a morning practice that was, like, in meditation, but it was really just like a check in. It was like me asking, like, how's the weather right now? And I had this acronym, ape, which stood for awareness, posture, emotion. And I just kind of go through those things. Like, how is my awareness? Is it, like, expanded? Is it kind of contracted posture? Like, literally, like, what is. How is my body right now? And then emotion. And for me, emotion is kind of like, what sensations am I feeling? What am I noticing? Is the tightness here. Am I hungry? Am I sleepy? What's the mood? What's the tone? And just doing those micro check ins at least once a day. And ideally, maybe I started doing it when I was lifting weights as I was doing a deadlift, really tuning into all of the tiny little muscle components and particularly my breath as well, and really gaining much more definition over what was going on.

But you can really do it at any time and it's particularly helpful in moments when you're activated in some way.

So let's say that you are activated. What's the process that somebody goes through.

To improve interception or to. So, I mean, usually when someone's activated, if they are in the, if they're in hyper arousal, then chances are they won't want to intercept because there will be so much going on inside the body. They will likely be looking for some kind of distraction, maybe scrolling on the phone, some form of numbing protective strategy. I wouldn't necessarily recommend going in too much. It's better to downshift the system until you're a place where I feel I'm good and then kind of tuning in and also noticing the difference before and after doing some form of practice. I think this is particularly good with breath work because you can tune in, be like, okay, I took a mental check of how I feel, do some breath work, practice, maybe acai or humming or four, four, eight breathing. And then afterwards you tune in and you're like, wow, I feel so much different. And that kind of before and after noticing, I think helps to really make it a habit and helps you realize, oh, this bottom up practice is really having a noticeable effect on my nervous system and therefore how I feel.

So I'm more likely to do it again as opposed to just saying, oh, Huberman said that this downregulates my nervous system, so I'm just going to do it.

Yeah. The positive reinforcement of actually feeling better and checking in and going, wow, I did that thing and it worked. This is such a, such a great point. I can't remember whether it was Hubman or Mike Israel that said this, where going to the gym and getting a pump is one of the very few pursuits where you actually get to front load your progress while you're doing the thing. So you with a pump is what you in six months wants to look like flat, but it's not like in the middle of a spanish lesson, you suddenly get three x your lingo and are now able to bring it into the present and go, oh, wow, in six months, if I keep going. This is the amount of Spanish that I'm going to be able to speak. Yeah, no, it's bullshit. So I like the sort of positive reinforcement. What else to say about increasing interoception? What else haven't we covered?

Well, just to kind of like follow that thread, I think the way that I, and this comes back to the high agency point, the way that I think about this journey is as a series of self experiments. So I have this idea of be an n of one, be a scientist of your own experience. And for all of these practices, whether it's interception, whether it's forms of breath work, whether it's somatic approaches to feeling an emotion, go in with a literal hypothesis. I'm going to try this thing. I'm going to notice how I feel before, I'm going to notice how I feel during, and then I'm going to take an inventory and then reflect afterwards. And like, did it work? Do I feel better? What would I do differently next time? Was this interesting? And going in with this, I call it like courageous curiosity of like being willing, like being open, but still being willing to like move or embrace some form of intensity, I think is like, is like so fucking foundational to all of this work. And if you just embrace that mindset and run enough experiments, eventually you will get to interesting places.

What are some of the mantras that you rely on? Is there something that you come back to where you're thinking, I really need to go inside. Is there a bunch of sayings that you rely on for that?

Oh, interesting. Let's see. There were two that I think I've used that come to mind. One is this idea of take it to the mat, and this was during a breath work training I did where the idea that I remember, I was really pissed off and triggered by something that my teacher said. And this phrase take it to the mat, which is part of the training, came to mind. And it's this idea that the thing that triggered me on the surface, it actually wasn't about that. And I did a breath work journey like 30 minutes later and this whole thing moved. That was from 1020 years ago. And so this idea of the things that we are annoyed by, frustrated by, that we're angry at, it's almost always like a signpost to something inside that some experience we had prior that just wasn't an emotional reflex that wasn't able to be fully completed. And so this idea of take it to the mat is like really finding some degree of gratitude, like maybe not right away. But if someone says something that really sticks, like insult you in a way that really lands, it's like, oh, that's actually a gift in a way, because I get to go inside and feel whatever that was related to.

And then the second one was, this kind of came to me more in, like, the grief kind of chapter of my life. And this was just, I am willing, and I would say this, when the tidal wave of intensity of grief was moving through, I realized, or at least I have this theory, that the five stages of grief were actually five ways in which we resist grief, whether it's denial or all of that. And so for me, this mantra of, I am willing, it was like, I am willing to just feel and experience and let this tidal wave of intensity move through me. And that was really, really helpful, particularly in some of the tougher 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 women called Sophie Spooner. She was a junior doctor, and she. We went on holiday and she'd been diagnosed with bipolar before we got together. And her first day back at work, she had an anxiety attack and she ended up coming home and taking her own life. And that was. I was in Portugal at the time when I got the phone call. And that basically, I mean, it just. It just obliterated me. It, like, completely destroyed, you know, the vision for life that I had for the next five years. And I'd never, you know, 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. By something that was just, like, unspeakably tragic. And so. And so for me, I remember seeing adults, like, I remember seeing people in the UK who, like family members who'd lost someone close to them, but they hadn't grieved, they hadn't really allowed that grief to move through.

And 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, like, I'll probably end up like that. Like that resentful, bitter 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 tendevapasana, and pretty soon after, it was some plant medicine. It was breath work. It was going back to the places that had. That almost had these horcruxes of grief that I go back to, places that were meaningful over that period, it totally changed my life. It was very much before and after kind of rite of passage experience.

Dude, I'm sorry you went through that. It 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. Right? You've got this thing living in you that isn't you, but is controlling you. The toxoplasma gondi of, uh, of emotions. It's so funny.

Yeah. And so kind of. Kind of what comes to mind. And, um. Yeah, there's maybe two things I want to share. One is that when the. The grief was, like, fully able to move through, um, it went from being this very, like, uncomfortable thing that I was kind of running from to, oh, this just feels like. It feels like pure love. Like, there was this moment when I was on her memorial bench and just kind of tearing my eyes out, just, like, bawling 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 ecstatic state. And 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 fucking freezing cold water. And you know how when you first get into, like, freezing water, I. Yeah, I'm sure you're familiar. It's like everything tenses up. You're like, ah, you just, like, want to resist it.

And then slowly, if you can, like, almost like a clenched fist, you can just, like, slowly, like, 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, 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 organs shrink because of the air pressure or the ocean pressure, and 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 soften that, then it allows you to equalize and you can then kind of sink even deeper. And so that, for me, almost became like a metaphor or a training ground for the same with the grief, the same with the emotions. And so I kind of applied the same move of noticing the tension and the contraction, like the closed fist, and just being like, ah, just like, soften slightly and that would allow a little bit more to move.

And 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 been like, no fucking way.

Okay, so that's interoception self regulation. Next, what is there to know?

Yeah, so self regulation is, I mean, it's like a therapeutic term, but basically it's like, how can you increase an embodied sense of safety and parasympathetic downshift in the moment? So my favorite, some people use mantras, affirmations, maybe cognitive reframes, but these are top down strategies for self regulation. I tend to prefer the bottom up approaches. Things like humming is insanely effective. It releases nitric oxide. It has this really instantaneous calming effect, the psy, obviously, as Huberman talks about, also things like four four eight breathing, or alternate nostra breathing, or even just bringing your awareness, bring your awareness down into your feet or your hands and being reminded of the space around you. So just expanding your awareness to the sides below you, above you, and it's just like, ah, you feel like a sense of softening.

So let's dig into the specifics of a few of those, whichever ones you want to pick.

Yeah, so let's say four, four eight 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 brains, like, oh, the threats gone. I can be more chill. Which then creates calmer thoughts and feelings. So there's this kind of virtuous cycle. And the reverse is also true 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 neurons. There's faster breathing, often through the mouth, and that has the reverse effect. So that will activate the sympathetic system, which then sends adrenaline things into the endocrine system, which then sends. Which creates the story and the felt sense and the emotions of, oh, shit, whatever it is, I'm activated. Which then I'm not safe. That's kind of what it comes down to.

Yeah. So the breath is a incredibly powerful tool for, like, very, very quickly shifting your state, either up regulating or down regulating. And there's a lot of times when up regulating 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 understand. 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. Sorry, longer or just more emphasized, then it's calming.

How many rounds of four, four, eight.

Until you feel a shift? Yeah, usually at least three or four. Sometimes more if you're really activated. And the other thing that 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 exhale. Just completely fall out. I'll sometimes do it against one of those swiss balls. I 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. After, like, a long day or after whatever's. Whatever's coming up, it's. It's so effective.

I saw a tweet from you saying that maybe the solution to all of our emotional problems is just fucking humming. What?

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. And that nitric oxide is a vasodilator, which basically has this calming effect. And it's also really good for reducing eye strain or eye fatigue. You can do it for like 30 seconds. And if you want to amplify it, there's a thing from yoga called be breath, where you put your. I can't do it now because I'm wearing headphones, but 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? Are there rounds with this? Is there a tune I'm following?

You can do a tune. No. So basically through the nose and all the way to the end of exhale. So taking a full breath in. Inhale, and then, and then all the way to the end of exile, whatever pitch feels good to you, right?

Okay, whatever, whatever you default to. Okay, so there's, 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 32nd rounds of humming. And how long is that for?

Yeah, so I'll do like, at least like three rounds. And then usually by, by the end of that I'll feel pretty good. And with the four for eight, you can also, if you do it through alternate nostrils. Again, this is something from the yoga world. My theory is that because it reduces the aperture of the inhale, it increases the calming effect. But I'll do like, inhale four left, hold for four, exhale eight. Right, inhale Inhale right four, hold four, exhale left eight. And yeah, I've looked for studies on why this is more effective. I haven't found that much, but in my own experience, it's a, 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, but 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 co worker that really set them off, or 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. It's one of those common perversions on our mind balance.

Yeah, yeah. I usually. I 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 really just frustrated about whatever the thing is, then I'll use either top down, bottom up, or outside in kind of practice to downregulate. So that could be the affirmation, could be a cognitive reframe, could be some of the breathing exercises, could be a state change, maybe sauna, sauna, cold plunge type thing, or outside in. It could be co regulation. Just a hug from a friend or going for a walk with your dog, whatever that is, something to allow the system to find, like stability and safety. Once that's there, then I'll do a like. I teach a practice called somatic surfing, which is essentially kind of dropping into the body, dropping into that interoceptive 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 kind of courageous curiosity thing comes in.

I'll find a sensation, I'll track it, and then it's really a process of 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 with a somatic therapist or with a friend or a men's group, something like that. But if you're doing it on your own, it's really just bringing welcome resource to that part. I mean, through the lens of internal family 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 knows what to do. It's really just us, like, creating enough safety internally and externally for the body to take over and it just moves. It will complete that buffered reflex in the same way that you can search on 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 in the lion's jaws five minutes ago.

And it just starts. At first it's 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, like runs away. And that shaking is the mammalian, like way of completing that stress cycle. And that's. That's basically what we've forgotten to do as humans. Like kids, kids do it. My. My teacher Ed was in a scooter accident, and when he was by the side of the road, he did exactly that. Like, he was hit by the scooter and he just shook for maybe five minutes or so and then got up and he was great. And that kind of stopping of the reflex is what creates, over time, the allostatic load increase, which creates the fragility and emotional debt over time.

You used that term before, allostatic load. What is that?

Hmm. It's like a fancy term for wear and tear on the body. Basically, like, accumulated stress creates allostatic load in the system. Energy, that is, energy that is being used to hold that thing in place that could otherwise be used for something else. It takes energy to hold that, to stop that reflex from being completed.

I understand. So im thinking about this relationship between what occurs in the moment and regulating our system when that happens. And then theres another level of regulating the system to make it feel safe for us after when were 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 five or 10 seconds. I don't want to kind of paint the picture. This needs to be like a long, drawn out thing. It can literally be a 1020 2nd thing. But yeah, that's like, if you were to kind of break down the process, that's what it looks like.

Okay. 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, you know, a handful of emotions, like I'm comfortable feeling. Maybe it's like, maybe it's sadness, maybe it's worry, maybe it's joyous. But there's almost always another pocket of things that, for whatever reason, we just avoid or we default to feeling that. The standard box of crayons. And so it's like, how do we start? Yeah, I actually quite like that metaphor. How do we start coloring in with some of these other crayons that we've kicked out of the box?

That's cool.

That's cool. And for me, it's actually been a process of almost working with one crayon at a time, primarily through breath work. Initially, grief was the big one, and then. Then it was. 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 bawled my eyes out. I was like, oh, my God. Like, every time I've been angry, I've been like, this is bad. I'm a person.

What do you think it was that caused you to feel so resonant with, you are 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 spent the first 25 years of my life thinking, I'm just not an angry person. I'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, like, explicit permission to. That I could be, like, a good person. I was safe when I was in that angry state.

And I think, for me, it's 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 hurt 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 is not a good thing to feel. And with that, there was a connection there to this people pleasing tendency 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 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 set a healthy boundary or 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 the people pleasing, like, oh, yeah, yeah, sure. Or 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, you just don't have boundaries. And 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, those things don't feel safe. And it's so interesting where that comes from. Mm hmm.

Yeah, I mean, I think, I think a 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, I mean, it really is. Really is everything. And also in relationship as well. Like, if you're in a relationship where it is safe to express your feelings, it is safe to, you know, move, move through these things. It can be, it can be really transformational and like, relearning that safety is what increases our capacity to be with more intensity over time.

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 understand that if you do breath work, the state change is pretty dramatic, especially if you do some aggressive wim hof stuff or if you do some down regulating thing. I feel good. I feel good for a little while afterward, but relating that to the trait change, and you said I did 1000 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 breath work practice look like? What's the modality, what's the process and what's the outcome?

Yeah, it's a really great question. Two things come to mind. One is the style of breath work that I trained in was called facilitated breath repatterning. And one of the theses of this modality is that all of our emotions or emotions have corresponding breathing patterns. And so if when I was in a process afterwards, if the practitioner was reading my breath as I'm breathing, if the breathing pattern changes, that's a cue that there's a likelihood that something shifted there. But in a more practical sense, my. 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 Wim, Hof, holotropic breathwork, things like that, it's almost like taking a tab of LSD. You can have incredible 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. And 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. There's literally rest like. Like that's what the body will naturally want to do at the end of a stress cycle, to like allow it to rest and relax. If you like, you could do like a. An SDR 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, it's not in the peak experience, it's afterwards in the rest or sleep that night as well.

How common is facilitated breathwork practice sessions? Is this something that people can find locally to them in a class? Is this 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 connected breathing or CCB. It's a more common approach, and it's a way of breathing which, in my opinion, honors the nervous system more. It doesn't send us out in the way that holotropic or Wim Hof does. There's various other breath work forms as well, but my favorite is CCB or FBR, which is facilitated breath repatterning.

Okay, and what are you doing? Presumably, you're not just breathing. There has to be some sort of mental process 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 breath work 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. The surprise for me was often these huge emotional processes would go through, and there was, like, zero story. I had no idea what it was attached to. And in some cases, it was likely, like a pre verbal experience. So something that happened in the first 18 months of life before I even had the capacity to articulate or to speak 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. It will release or something will happen.

Right. 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 you perhaps can't even remember, but to do it in a very particularly safe way, which is then retraining and re patterning yourself to go, it's okay to feel this particular emotion. Is that it?

Exactly. No, we got it. It's the same.

Fuck it.

Finally, the same is. I mean, I. Taking MDma, like an MDMA assisted therapy journey, it's doing the same thing. It's like creating that activation, and MDMA, being the empathogen, creates even more safety in the system so that big stuff can arise and it won't overwhelm you. It'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. 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. That beforehand, I would shut down, or I'd get super angry, or I'd be distracted by being on my phone. But Johnny taught me how to do 448 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 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. So I'm not saying it's like. I'm not saying don't do it, but know that it is ultimately a short term, like, band aid solution, and that at some point, you will have to 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 too silly. It just felt like a pie in the sky. Another bro science 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. But 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. There's anger again. It comes and then it goes. It's like, okay, but if that's just going to 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 things triggering you.

It's always the same emotions that come up. Why 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 and has used an awful lot of mindfulness to have things arise and go, okay, there it is. And 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 over time.

Yes, well articulated. I couldn't improve on that.

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 an awful lot, that the over optimizer, the Huberman fan, the Tim Ferriss fan, the Me fan, will find a relaxation strategy which they can apply their winner's mentality to, and then try and use the ice bath or the sauna or the breath work as an option. Dude, I've done this. I've done this three times now during a breath work class where I've literally thought to myself, I'm going to win at breathwork. I'm like, first off, no one's fucking looking at you. 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. Talk to me about this type a relaxation problem. I love that idea.

Yeah, well, I mean, it was more of. More just like a jest that I think it is a great trojan horse to get people like. 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. And if you're hard charging and you're like David Goggins ing your way through life, then ideally there should be a kind of like equal and opposite downshift afterwards. And that downshifting is really hard for a lot of people. And so I actually think it's overall a very positive thing that people are HRV 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, probably a good trend. I mean, at some point, my sense is that mentality, trying to win at being the most relaxed, basically, it's like, has an, has an endpoint. Like, at some point you have to, like, drop that too, because it's going to be like 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 edgely on the show. You know Ross swam around the UK?

Yes.

Yeah.

Amazing.

Just, he just did the world's longest single river swim, 314 miles. And I asked him 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 or 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 dad was mean to me and those people in school, I'm going to prove them wrong. And all the rest of this stuff, you 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 misses WilkInson and that thing that she said to me in year nine because he'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 Ross edgely swimming for 55 hours, not you trying to run for 26 miles.

And 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 or the bottom of region beta. But when it gets to real long, okay, is this the way I want to live my life? Do I want to end up on my deathbed 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 sixties and seventies and eighties? It's not for me. I don't want to 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.

So given that, I've probably already created some momentum now, why don't we try and just wash a little bit of this away? Wipe a 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 nitric fuel really does get shit done. I mean, there's a lot of very successful entrepreneurs who still riding 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, 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 two minutes listening to.

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.

Yeah. So it is a bi directional relationship. Like, it's not one or the other, but something that I've noticed. This is just nf one, but I had a very active, like, inner critic in teenage years, most of my twenties, and in the last three or four years that has. It's really gone quiet. I have thoughts, but it feels like my mind is my buddy. It's sending me ideas. Or did you think of this thing or try doing this? And there's 95% less critical, negative looping velcro thoughts going on. And I really do attribute that to a lot of the. Just like the somatic shit that I've, that I've released in through a bunch of these different, like, emotional processes, and also, also flexibility as well. Like, there was so much tension that I was holding in different areas that it's just not as. Not as present. I mean, I mean, it's still fucked 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 of 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. It's not being even really that objective. It's just this very cutting, castigating, harsh inner critic 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 things don't need to be that way. That's not the way that things need to occur, that there are better routes and when it comes to. But, 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. It'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? 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 that was what was coming to mind for me is like, I mean, going back to the high agency thing, like, to what degree are those sounds like counterproductive thoughts, like 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. And my sense is they might even be negatively impacting the progress towards the goals that you set or the intentions that you have. I mean, that was certainly true for me, but it depends on the context.

Talk to me about the neuro aperture hypothesis.

Yeah. This is a half baked idea that I shared on Twitter recently. It's basically a sense that I was researching the etymology of the word anxiety, and it comes from a latin word which means to constrict. And 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 closed fist metaphor we were talking about earlier. It's like a constriction against another underlying emotion. And if you're able to 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. Their system didn't feel safe to feel that joy. So it was tensing, it was constricting, it was causing an experience of anxiety. But if they just loosened that a little bit, it would literally turn into joy. Probably the very thing that they are wanting to feel more of in their life. And I think the same is true of other emotions as well, 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 come to the surface. 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. And yeah, you kind of want to reveal that mask through safety and say, oh, wow. And that's something that we've spoken today, a good bit about anger, sort of bitterness, anxiety, rage, those sorts of things. But there's definitely fear on joy, elation, excitement, hope, all of these things coming through too, that there's just sort of extremis, anything that's outside of the very narrow Overton window. I think of it like an emotional Overton 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. No, no, unacceptable, sorry, you can't use that word. Not with a hard rhein and you depression with a hard on. So 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 something gets activated.

You go, wow. Like, I mean. I mean, someone, you, is this safe? 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. Just means that a sad thing happened. And that's the emotion that's with you now?

Yeah. I mean, man, I'm so. I so agree. And I think the. 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 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. But even especially the sadness. There's this real beautiful tenderness and this rawness and feeling connected to myself, to the world around me. And to think that 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. It's a part of being human, dude.

That'S so bang on. I've been thinking this to myself for a long while. That look, you have this beautiful suite of human emotions that you can live within. And why would you not want it all? Why not? It's like saying, I have all of the colors available on my television, but I'm just going to watch him black and white and. No, 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. Not in a hedonic, I 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 ly that are available to me. And I decided to not shut those things off. And I just think, I. God, like, what? 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 like, 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. Yeah. 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. 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 love that so much. And the metaphor that that comes to mind is almost viewing our human biology as, like, an instrument. And that there are ways in which conditioning culture experiences, gets our human instrument to be out of tune. And that if we're going around life playing in the wrong key, things aren't going to go well. So by taking a little bit of time to basically inquire, 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 gonna be a pretty boring song. Like, I think the goal is to have that, like, we want, like, an orchestra of experience. That, for me, is, like, one definition of a. 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. Like, fine. There's nothing wrong with that. But to me, that feels like it's 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?

Yeah. So something that I learned from this guy, Steve Martz, 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. And so going into any, you know, even, like. Like an emotional inquiry process with this, like, oh, there's this 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. He calls it a self unfoldment, which is maybe, you know, like a fan 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's there without a change agenda. And this is something that I, like. I really fell into this trap, like, over and over again. I would be like, oh, I noticed. Like, I'm triggered. I'm gonna go. I'm gonna do a breath weight journey. I'm gonna feel it. I'm gonna fix it.

It was like the same, like, taipei mentality of like, I'm gonna feel the shit out of this. I'm just gonna feel it so hard. I'm gonna win it. Yeah, I'm gonna win it. Exactly. Exactly right. It worked to some degree in the beginning, but at some point I realized that the way in which I was going in with this self improvement agenda was actually creating the resistance that was getting in the way of just the thing that wanted to unfold naturally. That's something I'm still, frankly, working with, and I think it's a lifelong journey. But I find it so interesting to 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 y thing will 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. The question of what if nothing needed fixing? What if nothing needed healing? What if you were okay and safe in this moment?

And what would be the motivation for changing if that was the case?

The changing and the growth happens naturally in the same way that, like, you wouldn't judge a sapling oak tree for being, like, 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 your growth, your learning, your development will happen. It will happen naturally. It wants to. And the trying or the forcing it to happen, in my opinion, actually gets in the way of what wants to unfold.

It's a beautiful answer. Very beautiful answer. So you've done all of this self work, all of this breath work, all of this time orthogonally, looking at the personal development world, how 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, what would. A 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 practices that I found myself with that I think are very broadly applicable. NSDR is a really wonderful foundation. Non sleep, deep breasts that Huberman bangs on about a lot. And what I love about that is both. It increases interoception, because you're basically doing a guided body scan over and over again. And it's also increasing that down regulation. And it's only in that downshifted place where the emotional inquiry is even possible. I'm a huge fan of somatic based therapy as well.

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 type a 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. And if you don't like my voice, then Ally 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 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 there's a lot of different options out there for this work. I have a course myself called nervous system mastery that has basically been my attempt to distill this into a five week protocol based course. And we do it as a live cohort. We've had 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 breath work, whether it's somatic. Experiencing Hakomi is another great modality that I appreciate or just, you know, some people love mend work, some people gravitate towards different areas. But I think the key is, like, what are you genuinely excited about? Like, not going out of place of, oh, I should do this because, you know, I need fix it. But, like, what is actually genuinely interesting and then following that with this mentality of courageous curiosity and this, like, like, I'm willing. Like I'm increasingly willing to feel. And borrowing capacity from other people is literally what a therapist does. Like, they. They are giving you additional nervous system capacity so that your system can, can hold the intensity of something that it's not able to hold.

That's 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.

Totally. That's exactly what's happening. Yeah. And that's part of what I attempt to do with this course, I think there's a limit to how deep you can go when you're working in an online environment. But at the same time, I've attempted to share the core protocols, basically for self exploration and as a foundation for doing deeper dives in a kind of one on one context.

I know that you're a fan of that Jerry Colonna 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. It's kind of like the conditions you say you don't want are 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?

I 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. Yeah, 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 ever read the Wizards of Mercy. It's this amazing story by Ursula Le Guin. And basically the main character, Ged, releases this shadow, this gebeth 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, like, 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, like, looking at it and eventually welcoming it and loving it, that is the whole fucking joke. It really is that simple.

What's that book again?

Finding the wizard of Earthsea by Ursula le Guin. It's one of my favorite fiction books.

Hell, 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 Hubman on board doing the NSDR stuff, you know, hypnosis, another angle, like David Spiegel's stuff. I think that's another vector that we're going to see a lot more of. We had the mindfulness revolution, whatever, ten years ago. Andy Puddicombe and the guys from calm 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 going to want to check out all of the things you do in your courses and the rest of your content.

Yeah. Beautiful. Thanks so much. The best place to go would be nsmastery.com. there's a cohort coming up in October. We're accepting applications now. If folks are interested, that would be the number one place. And then I'm also super active on Twitter, so if people want to say hi there, ask questions, that's Johnnymiller, Jonnym, one 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.

Offense, get away.

Get offense.