Ep. 227: Jonny Miller - On Nervous System Mastery and Decision-Making

I like to think about the idea of decreasing the half life of reactivity. So early on, someone might be frustrated by something someone said to them and they'll be mad for like two days. And then with increased interoceptive practice with noticing that and then allowing and welcoming it, maybe that reactivity half life goes down to like a couple of hours. And then with more attunement and practice, it's only like 20 minutes. And then maybe it's like 30 seconds. And I think that, and I think it's important to mention why this matters, because when we get caught in these reactive triggers or these reactive tendencies, it's very, very hard to show up intentionally, let alone make good decisions. I mean, no one has ever made a good decision from a place of triggered reactivity. It's frigging obvious, but I think it's worth saying. And so to the degree that we can notice when we are being hijacked by this limbic part of our brain, and then have a practice for A downshifting and grounding, and then B just allowing that emotional experience to be completed, we can then return to an intentional state where good decision making is even on the table.

That's Jonny Miller, and this is the.

Decision Making Studio podcast.

Welcome.

And welcome back to the Decision Making Studio podcast. I'm Ben Catano, your host. I'm also the founder of the Decision Making Studio, my firm. And on this show we discuss decision making under uncertainty to understand ourselves and our world a little bit better. Today we delve into the role of our nervous system on decision making and we explore the question of whether or not the best decision making is, is emotional. And this one will perhaps make you think differently about that. Now that does not mean that we ought to decide impulsively or like a toddler, but it does mean that we ought to integrate our emotional states into our decision making. And doing that is a skill and that involves knowing how to work with our nervous system. My guest is Johnny Miller, who makes his second appearance on the show. Johnny works with leaders and founders on burnout and how to regulate their nervous systems. He was a successful startup founder himself, but for the last several years has studied and practiced nervous system mastery intensely. And he has curated the most effective evidence based practices he's found and he leads a program called Nervous System Mastery. On this episode we cover breath work and how to regulate our nervous system.

How to work with our emotions, the.

Body and its role in emotions and decision making.

Why Johnny believes that the best decision.

Making is indeed emotional making decisions in triggered States and how to avoid that leadership and so much more. This is fascinating. Let's dive in. Here is Johnny Miller.

Johnny, welcome. And welcome back. Or welcome to the Decision Making Studio podcast. It's really great to see you again and I know we're going to have a fabulous conversation. So welcome, welcome back.

Yeah, I'm excited to be here. Ben, thank you so much for having me back.

This is going to be fun. What I wanted to do is. Well, first of all, you were on the show before and people can listen to that, but it would be interesting to get from you a little bit of a background story as to how you got involved in what you do now and particularly around nervous system mastery and breathwork and the, the journey that, that took you there. That would be a really great place to start, I think.

Yeah, sure. I mean, it's, it's a long backstory, but I'll, I'll do my best to give the abridged version. So let's see. I. I mean, I started out in the kind of startup world. I think we first connected when I was working Escape the City, teaching entrepreneurship in London. Feels like a lifetime ago. And whilst I was as at. Whilst I was at fiance at the time, Sophie had bipolar. And one day when I was traveling, she returned to work, she had an anxiety attack and she ended up taking her own life. And that experience for me, just kind of thrust me into grief, essentially into this kind of very intense, kind of whirlwind process where I kind of stopped working. And I. I realized that really up until that point, I'd been somewhat numb from the neck down. I'd been kind of very much operating from my head, from my mind, from my intellect. I kind of got good grades and gone through the startup world driven by my intellect, really. And at the same time, I'd seen adults, people who'd also been through grief and lost someone, but hadn't really metabolized it. And there was this sense of almost lack of aliveness or like numbness that I felt from them and it kind of scared me. And so I kind of went through this intentional process to feel through this grief and to kind of learn what that even meant. So I begun by exploring meditation, as many people do, vipassana, and then went into breath work, went into the science of the nervous system, tried all of these different modalities, somatic practices, and just became fascinated along the way. And at a certain point it stopped being about kind of feeling through this tragic event. And it became this deep fascination for a part of Myself that I had completely ignored. And I think what is really a very missing skill set from our society of learning how to notice, acknowledge and welcome and feel through, you know, the full spectrum of our emotions and practices for shifting our state to, you know, be in a more kind of optimal physiology for whatever we're doing in the moment. I'm sure we'll, we'll get into this. But yeah, that's really been my, the kind of path of the last five years or so has just been being really curious and speaking to lots of experts, reading books, experimenting on myself and just learning what works and eventually sharing that with others as well.

Yeah, that is, thank you for sharing that. And it's, it's an interesting way that you approach it and you've, I think from what I can tell is you really, you, you dive deep into a lot of, a lot of things and I, one of the thing, one of the aspects of the, all of these modalities, the various modalities that you mention. And I'm just curious how, how you went through that journey, how you took things away from each of the things that you, that you tried. Because I think there's a temptation when we see something about breath work or something about, it could be, I don't know, psychedelics or some, something that there's a solution in a singular way of a singular practice. And I often find that somewhat dangerous that what might be better, which sounds like what you did, is you studied these things, you took away things, you experimented, you took away things that worked for you and perhaps you left things that you, that didn't work for you. I'm just curious how you, how you approached it, how you got curious about a certain practice and, and then how you said, okay, this is, this is what I, this is what, yeah, beautiful.

Yeah. So, so I, I, I've attempted to take a kind of self experimentation approach to everything that I've done. And to me this is actually a really important piece because it's, you know, it's easy to read books or blindly kind of follow the advice from experts. If you don't actually design an experiment in your own life and like notice the kind of before and after effects, then I think it's very easy to be kind of taken along for a ride by dogmatic practices. And it also just doesn't land as deeply like when you, when you have an experience and you notice the before and after and you track something, there's a way in which that just lands much more deeply in your system and it's much more likely to stick as a practice as opposed to something that you, you feel like, oh, I should meditate for whatever reasons or whatever. The thing is, so, so in, in everything that I do and in, in what I teach as well, I think this principle of designing your own experiments and running that test for yourself and seeing what is, you know, does this work for me, is this supportive for where I'm at at this point in my journey is actually essential.

Yeah, I love that. That's a great way of, of coming at it. And I think also, and we can get into this a little bit right now that, that there's a, a reluctance. I'm thinking about people that I interact with perhaps more frequently than you generation generationally that maybe have a bit of a reluctance to experiment with breath work, for example, because there are dogmatic practices. But if one approaches things from more of an experimental mindset and say I'm going to try this and see what it does for me and I can take something away and if not I might try something else, I think that that is a much healthier way of approaching different practices because there is, there is some woo woo and there are, there are some hucksters out there that, or there are, there are some dogmatic practitioners out there that think that my approach is the best way and it, it does feel at times a bit cult like. But what I think you describe is a, is the right way to do it. It's a healthy way of doing, of doing something, of trying things out. In fact, we could talk a little bit about, we will talk a bit about uncertainty, but often the only way that we can figure stuff out in the midst of uncertainty, and we're living in a world of high uncertainty, is to experiment and pivot and experiment again and again and again and iterate. So I, I, I really love that. I want to talk so I, I, I want to talk just generally first about, so just breath work. And what I find so fascinating is how we can so I'm very interested in sports psychology. So an athlete can perform physically more effectively by using some mental tools. And certainly breath work is one. But then in often corporate settings and organizational settings, we don't think about the reverse. We don't think about how our physical states can affect the quality of our thinking. And the bulk of the work that people are doing these days in corporate settings, organizational settings is knowledge work. It's the quality of our thinking now with AI and things paramount. And so perhaps we could just ease into this by thinking about the how Our physiological states affect the quality of our thinking and what, you know, what does breath work have to do with all of that? And maybe we branch out from there. But I'm sure you have, you have some, some thoughts on that, Many thoughts on that.

Yeah, I, I definitely have thoughts. Yeah. Well, I mean, I think from my kind of perspective, kind of coming at it from the nervous system perspective, I think that the ideal nervous system state, or a regulated nervous system state, which is kind of the common term these days, is one which is appropriate to the situation or appropriate to the environment. And we can be in very activated states sometimes and we can be in very calm, relaxed states in others. And it's obvious that there are times when it's optimal and ideal to be relaxed and recovering from maybe a kind of intense, energetic output or a busy workday when we need to rejuvenate. And there's times where we really want to be in that flow state. We really want to be able to think at a high level, to make kind of quick decisions. And even things like this, being on a podcast, there needs to be some level of activation in the system to even have a good conversation. Like if I was just like, you know, borderline asleep right now, it wouldn't be a very engaging chat. And so I kind of want to start from this idea of like, there are optimal and non optimal nervous system states that we can be in. And then the second piece is that there are ways that we can intentionally design or augment our current nervous system state to be more or less optimal. And there are three main approaches for augmenting your nervous system state. Those are, I'll go through these one at a time, but top down, bottom up, and outside, in very, very broadly, three buckets, top down is what a lot of people are familiar with. These are kind of cognitive reframes, like mental based strategies, maybe positive reframes. You know, if something stressful happens, you can say, well, I'm glad this happened because xyz. And you know, there's ways that you can kind of reframe the situation or some people use affirmations, things like that. And you know, these have some mileage. You can kind of use these to some degree. The second category, which I think is the most underappreciated and underutilized is the bottom up. And this is essentially changing aspects of our physiology to up or down regulate our state. And the breath is a really, is one of the most effective mechanisms for that. And we can go into that. And then the third bucket is what I call outside in. And this is referring to the kind of observable phenomenon that we are constantly being impacted by the people, environments, sensory stimuli coming towards us. So for example, I heard there was a siren in the background, like your microphone, and that creates a low level of activation. That police siren or the quality of the lighting, the nervous system state of the people around us sounds obvious, but it's an important point that who we're around also impacts our state. So to the degree that you are then able to re. Architect or redesign your surroundings, you can also change your state. It could be as simple as changing room or listening to a certain music, or there's a number of ways of doing that. So that feels like a good jumping off point to me is to delineate the three ways in which one can shift their state to a mode that is more optimal for whatever they're attempting to do.

That's great. And one of the things, one of my pet peeves is the standard open plan office that is designed for is suboptimally designed. It's the reason why we have open plan offices for one reason, one reason only. And they're relatively cheap. That's, that's, that's it. And if that's the, the sole criterion for the quality, you know, for the work that gets done in them, it's not a very good place to, to be. But we, and I've always hated them because you've got bits of conversations going on around you and depending on, you know, if there's a high stress thing happening over here, I'm, I'm agitated and if there's not enough natural light, just all sorts of things that we just, we don't, we don't even, we don't realize and, but what you say is in many ways kind of a radical idea. It shouldn't be, but it, it's, when we think about the built environment, it's, it's actually quite, quite radical. Maybe just because we'd have to redesign all this stuff and we'd have to work in, in different ways, but we ought to. And it's something that we, we really do need to give some serious attention to because as you say, we are, we're taking in a lot of stimuli that we, it's almost imperceptible and I, we can get into this a little bit. But you know who Rory Sutherland is. Yeah. So, and this I think plays to conversation we're having before about left and right hemisphere and the world is really designed for the left hemisphere over Design over. Designed for the left hemisphere. And I think he references Iain McGilchrist book or his work and talks about the alchemy. So how do you get, how do you influence decision making and through advertising. Advertisers really get this. He's. He's saying that the rational part of the brain is the explanatory. It's the PR part of the brain. So we make decisions at an emotional level in, in many respects. And then we rationalize, we explain using logic and reason. And so it's a very interesting take. And maybe it's not that black and white. Maybe it's more of a continuum. We're very slanted towards the rational left brain. And we can kind of think, oh well, you know, we could all do this wonderful work in, I don't know, an open plan office or in a. Whatever. We actually stop and take some time and think about that. The bottom up. I think this is probably what you teach is the quality of thinking, let alone nervous system mastery, but just the quality of everyday thinking can improve.

Yeah, there's a bunch of different directions that we could go from here. One thought is that it reminds me of the phenomenon of confabulation which has been studied in some of these split brain experiments where the connection between the left brain and right brain has been cut in some patients due to, I think it was a tumor in this case. And certain questions were asked to different hemispheres. And in some of the situations, I think the patient got up to kind of close the curtain and the left hemisphere, the left brain would literally invent a reason for why they did that, which was completely not the reason that it was actually for. And it was just such a stark example of this idea of confabulation. That being, you know, not knowing why we do something is so difficult for our minds and brains to combine. So we do just literally confabulate these stories to make sense of our actions and decisions. So that was one piece. And then, yeah, I mean, maybe a kind of practical example from the perspective of environment design is there's something called the cathedral effect where if someone has higher ceilings, more vaulted ceilings, they're more likely to be able to access the kind of right hemispheric, kind of abstract thinking, kind of more creativity versus if, you know, they're in a much more kind of enclosed low ceiling environment. It's much more suited for say if someone is doing data entry and spreadsheets or they're doing something that needs that kind of capacity. But again, it's important to know which one is relevant and useful for different moments. And as you say, decision making is largely driven by our emotions, whether or not we're consciously aware of that. And one of the things that I really want to kind of see popularized in the mainstream is this capacity for interoception. And there's a book called, I think it's the Hour between Dog and Wolf. I think I'm getting that correct. Which was. You've probably read it as well.

One of my favorites.

One of my favorite books.

Yes.

Phenomenal. Yeah. And the capacity for interoception increases the quality of their decisions and turns people with average IQ to make much better trading decisions. And they, as a consequence of that, made a lot more money. And so I think that this idea of the fact that we're ignoring this torrent of interoceptive data that is coming through our sensorium, coming through our five senses, ignoring that and ignoring the emotional kind of intuitive component is really, you know, missing out on a lot of like, high quality data that can be used to make better decisions. Whether that's in finance, whether that's in chess. You know, you can kind of name the discipline, but people that work at a high level, they've. They've really cultivate. And I love. I was listening to Josh Waitzkin the other day. I love the way that he described this in the context of chess and push hands, where that kind of interoceptive sensitivity allows him to be. To really perform it at the highest level.

Yeah, there's so many fabulous directions we could take. We can go here. I was just about to look at the height of my ceiling, and I'm sure we have a few listeners who, looking up, you know, when you said that I do want to touch on. So I do want to actually not just touch on, but I want to dive into breath work, but also just when in sport, in athletics. So a baseball batter trying to hit a ball. We think that what they're doing is they've got good hand eye coordination and they can react to the ball coming at them. My understanding is that's not exactly how it works. That that's not what's happening is there are all these little signals about how the ball comes out of the pitcher's hand and their body language and all kinds of other signals that tell the batter where the ball is more likely to go, as opposed to. I'm just really good at tracking baseball is kind of use baseball because baseball's come at you really, really quickly and you. We just don't have the. We Just, we just can't follow and respond that quickly. We've got to anticipate. And there are all these signals that from my understanding, I think it's from the book the Sports Gene, if I'm not mistaken. But it's, it'. It's interpreting all of these signals in, in a way that allows the batter to, to hit, hit a ball, which in many ways should be kind of impossible to do. So that we're, that's, that's why the, the whole, I think the whole mind body thing is, is interesting and under, certainly underexplored. But I, I do want to talk about, so breath work. So what is it about the breath that can affect our mental states? I you hear people. I've had, you probably know Patrick McCune, you know of his work, the Oxygen. Yeah. So I've had him on the, on, on the podcast and he talked about while it's not a deep breath, I in I've been many rooms where I take a deep breath. And so let's just, let's just talk about the breath. Let's just go to basics. And what does the breath do to our, to our mind, our mental states? And how does that feature in the bottom up piece? Or does it feature, I guess it features in the bottom up piece for you.

Yeah, yeah, totally. And just to kind of tie into what you were sharing with the baseball analogy, there's another book that I've been reading recently that's really good called the Experience Machine. And it's basically positing this idea that our brains are prediction making machines and they are constantly taking in data, information the entire time to make accurate predictions. And we don't actually perceive the world as it is. We perceive the world through the lens of the prediction and the nervous system state that we imagine will be there. And sometimes we get prediction errors and our predictions are updated. But in terms of how this relates to the breath, there's a part of our brain in the insular cortex which is constantly basically spying on the way that we're breathing. It's spying on the amount of air that's coming in, how intense the inhale is relative to the exhale, whether the breath is in the kind of upper chest or down in the kind of lower belly in the lower diaphragm. And it's doing this as a way of getting real time data as to how activated our system is. And so to give an example, and if you're listening to this, you can kind of try it and experiment with it. You can breathe Fairly kind of fast and shallow into your upper chest, almost like you're kind of hyperventilating. And that the insular cortex will notice that it will then send signals to activate the sympathetic branch of the nervous system that most people are probably familiar with, the fight flight aspect. That will then have a cascading effect to impact our endocrine system. It will release adrenaline, norepinephrine into our bloodstream. That will then cross the blood brain barrier and cause us to have thoughts, experiences. And going back to what you're saying about that will then send information to the PR department of our mind. And we'll then start to have more, maybe anxious, maybe kind of activated thoughts, maybe fear based thoughts, et cetera. Because our body's like, there's a threat here. And so the mind and the story that we tell is downstream of our physiology. And so what's in some ways magnificent and very fortunate about the breath is that we can. We don't usually do this, but we can consciously both become aware of it and then shift our breathing pattern. And by shifting our breathing pattern to, in this case, one that emphasizes the exhale, where the exhale is longer than the inhale. So you could imagine a pattern of inhaling for four, then exhaling for eight. That in and of itself, that will then have the reverse effect, which will then activate the parasympathetic nervous system, will send a different cocktail of chemicals into the bloodstream and creates calmer thoughts and feelings. And the moment when I really realized the effect of this, I was learning to free dive. And I was wearing one of those heart rate monitors and just breathing in this way for 30 to 60 seconds, my heart rate started to decrease. I started to feel more relaxed. There was less tension in my body. And it's remarkably efficient. The fact that you can almost have this lever that within certainly less than a few minutes, you can go from feeling quite activated to much calmer. And there's different breathwork practices that we can talk about from like the physiological sigh that Huberman popularized. Humming is another kind of very effective downstream.

Sorry, what was that? As well, humming.

You said humming. Humming, yeah, humming. So, yeah, just kind of taking your full breath in and then humming all the way to the end of exhale. So again, you're kind of extending the exhale. And the humming releases nitric oxide in the sinus cavities, which is a vasodilator. And. And that also enhances the relaxation effects. And you can try this listening. You can just going outside, go for a walk or Kind of lie down and just hum for 30 seconds and again run the experiment. How did I feel before? How do I feel afterwards? What's the delta? What's the difference? So.

That'S all fascinating. I could dive into breathwork a bit. Perhaps one of the areas that might be interesting to explore with regard to breathwork is just anxiety. Like situations of high anxiety, like giving a presentation. Right so. Or going into a conversation that might be quite difficult. Giving, giving a pitch. High stress, high, high impact, high stakes situations where, and we all, we've all been there, you prepare, so you know your stuff, you prepare. But there's still, you know, there's still something going on, there's still anxiety, there's still something that, that may, yeah, we're worried about how can one use the breath in those types of situations which are actually fairly much more common than, than perhaps we realize.

Yeah, totally. So I mean, to give an example, I, I gave a TEDx talk a few years back and I'd never really given a kind of presentation on that scale. There were like 600 plus people in the audience, including my parents, you know, all of that. And I was like just so, so freaking nervous backstage. My heart was racing, I was sweating, my mind was going blank with like what I was going to be talking about. And I did. It was about five minutes of alternate nostril breathing, which, so it's basically what I just described, but inhaling through the left for four, holding the breath for four, exhaling the right for eight and by switching the nostrils, you're reducing the aperture of the air that goes in. And there's also some research to show that it helps to balance the hemispheres of the brain as well. But anyway, I did that and within five minutes I went from being almost incapable of giving the presentation to, I felt like the energy in my system was kind of grounded, I was still activated, I was still ready to go, but there wasn't a sense of contraction and constriction. And I think this is another interesting thing to mention as well. And in fact the word anxiety itself, it actually comes one of the root words in Latin. Ango I think is the root word which literally means to constrict. And I think of anxiety not as an emotion in and of itself, but actually a kind of constriction against whatever the emotion that's wanting to come through. So in addition to doing something like a breathwork practice or a top down strategy for being like, oh, this activation is only here because I care, there's also a way in which we can kind of relax and welcome the sensations. In this case it was probably fear, like fear of speaking in front of a huge number of people as opposed to constricting against it. And that has this effect of almost like expanding the aperture of awareness is how I think about it. And that's another way in which we almost like expand our capacity for more intensity of activation energy to kind of flow through our system. Almost like increases the bandwidth, so to speak. And so those are kind of two of the levers that I like to play with. Like on the one hand you can directly activate your parasympathetic system to just calm down the system. On the other, through these kind of awareness expanding practices, you can actually allow more of that intensity to flow through without the constriction. And the constriction is what creates the anxiety and the vicious cycles.

Right, right. Almost like trying to get yourself into a state of flow more. As more deliberately than perhaps otherwise would be the case. Yeah, okay. Yeah, okay. So let's, let's maybe branch this out a little bit more then and just talk about just the nervous system. Like when, when I see your course, it's nervous system mastery, I'm like, oh, that's intriguing. Like how I'd love to manage my nervous system or master it. Well, manage it, let alone master it. But I kind of feel like oftentimes it's mastering me. But you feel that sort of runaway things that you've probably been in this space before as a new sort of startup founder, waking up at three in the morning and the way the world's on your shoulders and all kinds of things like, like this that. That's probably nervous system driven in many ways. Okay, so let's just maybe talk about the nervous system. You have a part of your course, you talk about the nervous system fundamentals. And so maybe if we just. I'd love to just explore when we talk about the nervous system, like what is it? And then can we actually master it? So that'd be a good place to start.

Yeah, sure. Well, even the language that you used just there, I think was really illuminating in the sense of. You mentioned sometimes it feels like we are almost like a victim or we are being mastered by our nervous system. And I think of this journey in some ways as like three stages. The first stage is what feels almost like an empowerment piece where we go from feeling like we are a passive victim to the anxiety or the frustration or the collapse or the depression that seems to happen to us. And through practices, particularly breathwork I think, is a fantastic mechanism for this. We can manage our nervous system states and actively intentionally control and shift kind of one way or the other. And what's interesting is that that kind of managing of states at some point also becomes a. I wouldn't say trap, but there is a way in which by always managing our emotions, we're actually not allowing them to kind of move through and be felt. And so in some ways it's a form, it's a much more subtle or refined form of emotional repression, let's say. And that can be really helpful in circumstances like I'm about to give this presentation, because you want to be able to manage that stress response which, which isn't contributing to giving a good presentation. However, at a certain point, the, the next stage of practice, the next stage of mastery becomes allowing and actually welcoming the full spectrum of those emotions. So in the same way that my journey was like learning to welcome the waves of grief that felt like they were too intense for me to hold or to feel, or welcoming anger or frustration, whatever the experience is, there is, there's a lot of research to show that the life cycle of an emotion is somewhere between like 8 to 20 seconds, which is not what most people experience. Because what most people experience is the resisting of an emotion, which is often very unpleasant and not fun. And that's what people confuse for experiencing the emotion itself. So it's, you know, people naturally push them away more and they don't want to feel them, and they kind of lock them up in some dark cavern of their consciousness. But when, when you kind of begin this journey of, I call it, emotional fluidity, and you start to kind of open that aperture of awareness, you start to release the constriction and the tension. There's an enormous amount of energy that gets unlocked just by virtue of like allowing it to flow through. And so that kind of also can take a lifetime really, to kind of learn the nuance and go from. Let's say, I like to think about the idea of decreasing the half life of reactivity. So early on, someone might be frustrated by something someone said to them and they'll be mad for like two days. And then with increased interoceptive practice with noticing that and then allowing and welcoming it, maybe that reactivity half life goes down to a couple of hours. And then with more attunement and practice, it's only like 20 minutes. And then maybe it's like 30 seconds. And I think that, I think it's important to mention why this matters, because when we get caught in these reactive triggers or these reactive tendencies, it's very, very hard to show up intentionally, let alone make good decisions. I mean no one has ever made a good decision from a place of triggered reactivity. It's friggin obvious, but I think it's worth saying. And so to the degree that we can notice when we are being hijacked by this limbic part of our brain and then have a practice for A downshifting and grounding and then B just allowing that emotional experience to be completed, we can then return to an intentional state where good decision making is, is even on the table.

Yeah, I love that we as, so I say we as men struggle with that and I know I've struggled with that. So you know, just thinking about like what is this emotion, right? Maybe it's that repression that you talk about but like I'll feel something or might show up. I see this a lot actually in group dynamics, particularly with people say in positions of powers when you see defensiveness and I've been there as well when someone says, you know, this is wrong or you know, I, I can feel it, you can certainly feel that in my, my body. But then you can see say a, a group setting kind of go off the rails when someone lashes out based on that. And, and it just, the, the, the palette of emotions is I think is a lot wider than what I, well no one's really ever train me when I was younger, when I, you know, perhaps when I really needed it. It's just sort of, well, we've got, you know, red, green and something else and that's it. Right. So you've got anger and happiness or something else and, and actually a lot of stuff. Maybe that's the reaction to the emotion for men, it shows up as anger a lot I think because we're actually not able to just take a moment and say well why? What's going on here? Right. And, and then, and then respond. So just being able to notice I think is a very powerful skill. I've, I found meditation helps but even that I, I'll have moments where it's like, you know, get close to usually when I'm cycling in London maybe. But yeah, there are, there are moments where.

You know, we, we, we, we.

Can get, we can get triggered.

It's.

But it's super interesting. So how do we get better at. Especially if like, let's say someone is listening to this like you know, this is all, this all a little bit. Woo woo. I am thinking that probably a few listeners now who are sort of like, I don't know, where is this all going? But just being able to notice what's going on here. Right. I'm not comfortable here. I'm not happy here. I'm feeling a little bit anger. But how can we sort of tune in to saying what's the, what's actually the emotion here versus what's my reaction to the emotion? Or maybe it's my, I'm angry. So I was. Sometimes we get, we get angry about how we're feeling, like we shouldn't, like we shouldn't. I shouldn't feel defense. I shouldn't feel sad or threatened because I'm, you know. But emotions are emotions and we just have to, you just have to let them. We just have to feel them, which is something that you, you emphasize. But anyway, that's, there's a lot there. Just maybe it'd be useful to talk about how do we get better at feeling the emotions? Just this letting the emotions be and noticing what is actually going on.

Totally. Yeah. So I, I, I guess I want to start by loosely defining an emotion, and this is coming from Lisa Feldman Barrett's work, that emotions are physical sensations plus context or story. So what we think of as an emotion is made up of certain interoceptive feedback from our body. Let's say in the case of anger, it might be like a tightness or heat in the chest. And there's certain heat maps that you can see where people have shown how different emotions show up somatically in the body. And so there's this sensory component and then there's the story. And what I typically see, and this was me as well, for most of my life, was getting stuck in the story. So let's say someone, you were cycling and some idiot driver cut you up. And people tend to kind of loop with the story. And when you're only when your awareness doesn't go below the neck, then that looping will continue indefinitely until you basically get exhausted. So the kind of, the practical move is to the story might be there, you can acknowledge it. But to actually drop below the neck into the body and ask, okay, what does this actually feel like? And do I need to express or do something to let this out? And I think it's a common, particularly in today's culture, I think anger is really demonized because it has caused a lot of hurt, a lot of harm. People have been angry. When you're angry at someone, that's basically never productive. But if you're just cycling in the streets and you're like, ah, you just let it out. I think that's an incredibly healthy thing. As opposed to again, looping the story of oh, I shouldn't be angry or this isn't right or whatever the story is that just pushes that down. And over time, when we repeatedly kind of push these emotions down, it creates a buildup of what I call emotional debt. And the more that this happens, it creates allostatic load in the system which basically creates fragility, more liability to kind of move towards burnout and in extreme cases, chronic health challenges, things like that. And there's studies to show the correlation between these two things.

You used a phrase there, allostatic load. Could you just explain allostatic load a little bit more?

Mm.

What is that?

Yeah, it's essentially there's a, there's a study that I saw recently that was allostatic load was connected to a 60% increase in the body's energy expenditure. So allostatic load is a kind of catch all term used by researchers, neuroscientists to describe wear and tear from stress on the body. That's essentially what it's referring to.

And what's interesting as well, you talk about that. I've also read your, one of your posts where you reference what's happening with. It was an animal, right? It was a, an impala. Is that how you say that? It looked like a deer. It looks like a deer but basically had a near death experience. And, and then it's kind of, it's this really interesting video that just kind of sort of sat there. Then it gets obviously shakes and then it, then it carries on. And when I was so a few years ago I lost my father to cancer and I was, I would say I was in that state for a few months where really low energy. I just needed to, I needed to veg out for a few months before I could gather my energy again and just, I just needed to let that, that happen. And it's not quite that. So it's, it's, it's not at all the same thing. And we're talking, you know, we could be talking about completely different experiences, but when you describe that as when there's a stressful event, we do, we do need. And you talk about, maybe talk us through the. So there's, there's rest, but there's also, is there something before rest or there's a recovery and then there's, there's rest and what's going on? What's going on? Let's say we go through a Stressful achievement. This can happen at a micro level, right. So we think about our workday, right? So now, now we're kind of shifting over so we don't have near death experiences in a workday. But we, we do have these little micro moments where, or let's say I have a big presentation that's my, it's my afternoon. And then if we immediately go into another stressful meeting or something that we're not going to perform very, very well. And then when we elongate that, stress that out and we think stretch it out to say some kind of a life experience could be a death of a loved one or it could be, be something else or near death. Whatever it is, we do need to take that, that time to let the, let the emotions kind of happen and recover energy and all this stuff. So anyway, suffice to say I probably didn't do a great job of summarizing what you, what you talk about. I, what I, I love that post and it just, it just gets me, it just got me thinking about the sort of peaks and troughs of very emotionally charged moments and the need to recover. And you, you said something that I, I just latched onto, which is we.

Can push through.

Very stressful or situations of sustained stress, but at some point that catches up with us. So anyway, that's, there's a lot to unpack there. But you probably pick up on some of what I've said and just maybe share how that relates how you work with some of the clients and people that you work with, people that come to you anyway. Over to you.

Yeah, no, great, there's a bunch there. I think the most helpful frame is this concept of the kind of arousal or stress activation cycle. And this is something that as you rightly pointed out can happen on a micro or macro scale. And initially let's kind of use the example of the impala that was being chased by, I think it was a lion in that video. There is a huge stress response that is necessary. Adrenaline courses through the system. There's this activation and then at some point that kind of subsides, that passes and it naturally transitions into the parasympathetic, firstly shaking off that activation energy and then transitioning into resting and recovering. And the challenge with humans is that we tend to get stuck at different points of this activation cycle. And so if someone can be, go, go through a stressful experience, let's say it's like a conflict in a, in a board meeting, you know, like the example you used earlier. If after that There isn't a kind of like, metabolizing of that emotion and then arrest afterwards. It's easy to remain stuck in that kind of fight flight mode. And I'm sure people can relate to this, of coming home at the end of a workday and there's still that activation in their system. And it's really hard to connect meaningfully with loved ones or to downshift and unwind for bed. And you just lie in bed just like ruminating on whatever the situation is. And that's a symptom of being stuck in the activation section of this mobilization response. And so the way through that is, as we were talking about earlier, to kind of acknowledge and allow whatever the, the energy of that emotion is that says anger, frustration to just move through. And then on the, on the other side of that, the body will naturally just relax. There will be a sense of like, like probably an exhale, maybe a sigh, maybe a yawn, and there'll be a natural downshift. And this isn't, this isn't something that anyone has to do. Like, it will happen naturally. All we have to do is get out of the way and stop resisting whatever's keeping us stuck. And sometimes that can be a story like, like, oh, I shouldn't be feeling this, or I'm bad for feeling this. Maybe there's shame or guilt kind of waving in. And those shame and guilt really kind of stagnate these very natural emotional cycles.

Right. And what, what happens when we don't do that downshifting? And I'm thinking about this from the perspective. So I was having a conversation with someone the other day and they were just telling me, and this is something that happened to me a fair bit, doesn't happen so much anymore. But you have a holiday booked and the first day of the holiday you get sick, you get, you get a cold. Right. So seems to happen more with, with lots of frequency with, with people that I know used to happen with me. And is that what's going on, is that we haven't downshifted and we haven't regulated our, our nervous systems? And so it's catching up to us. Is that, could you explain that a little bit? And maybe is that what's going on with burnout as well, that we're just not just stacking these emotionally charged moments on top of one another? Or is that a little bit what's happening?

Yeah. So the analogy or the phrase that I like to use is feather brick dump truck. And we have, each of us has different windows of tolerance or amount of capacity of stress that we can sustain for periods of time. So for some people, they can, they can keep going and remain high functioning in stress, in states of high stress for, let's say, like weeks, maybe even months. But eventually that will kind of, as you mentioned, that will catch up to them. And the idea of the feather brick dump truck is our body, our physiology gives us little warning notifications along the way. And in the beginning, that'll just be like a little feather or a little warning light of like, okay, maybe you wake up one morning feeling tired, like under rested. And then if you ignore that, you ignore the warning light or the feather, then another sign of a brick. Maybe it's like you really overreacted a partner, or maybe you just feel completely exhausted. At the end of the day, there's a bunch of different systems. And then if you ignore that and you continue to stay in this kind of highly activated state for a period of time, for months, sometimes even years in some cases, that eventually there's like the dump truck moment. And for some people, they'll break down in tears in public, or it'll be precipitated by a breakup, or they get fired from work and then it like hits. And then their system goes from being high tone, sympathetic, like very activated, to like deep down in collapse and shutdown, where there's a. An inability to even, you know, get up off the couch for weeks, weeks on end. Because that recovery is just being like, taken by the body. Because we're like, we, we need, we need this, and we're gonna like, screw everything up in life to make sure to make you rest if you're unwilling to, to take it deliberately.

Is that what's behind that popular book, the Body Keeps the Score? Do you know that book or do you agree with what is in that is effectively the same concept, same idea.

It's slightly different. So the book is by Bethel Van Der Kolk. There have been some, I guess, slight nuances since it's been published. Phrase of like, the body is the scorecard, as opposed to the body keeps the score is maybe a slightly more accurate way of saying it.

Right. I'm glad you raised that, actually. Essentially, yeah, I'm just glad you raised that because sometimes. Sorry, the delay, but because sometimes, you know, it. It's not to say that every illness, every ailment we have is self inflicted, self created. That's, that's, that's kind of the problem. That's where I, I have a problem with some interpretations of that, that it's not. That's, that's not what's happening here.

So.

I know. Just glad you mentioned that.

Yeah. But it, it is accurate to say that there are patterns of tension in the vasomuscular system which correlate with these incomplete reflexes. The, you know, these can be held from early childhood. I've completed some that were essentially pre. Verbal. Like I didn't even, I wasn't even able to remember what was going on. It felt like something that had been held in my system since I was very, very young. So there are these, these tension patterns that can be held in place and often there are emotions associated as well. And that's. I think that's the experience that Bassel van der Kolk and others refer to.

And is. So when we. I'm very interested in this, that sort of body heat map thing, that study of emotions and where they, they kind of show up that you, that you shared in one of your, your posts that I actually want to get to which is all about entitled the best decision making is emotional. And I, I'm just. Perhaps we could just talk about where some of these that, that study that you referenced, I think it was a Finnish study that certain the emotions show up in different states or parts of the body. If I've got that correct. Could you summarize that if I've got that right or is there is a slightly different interpretation?

Yeah. So the Finnish study, I think it was a 2012 study, basically asked participants to click on a heat map where they felt or experienced different emotions and they would also associate did it feel hot or cold? I think were the two temperatures. So there's like some parts of the body are red, some parts of the body are cold, some are neutral. And I think what's important to mention in this context is that everyone experiences these emotions slightly differently in their system. So you know, these weren't photographs, these weren't scans of someone's body. They were self reported. This is, this is my experience and this is where the, the interoceptive capacity really comes in. And you know, some people will have very low fidelity, very low definition body maps of how they experience emotions. This, this was me again for most of my life. But with, with practice with interoceptive training, we can go to kind of having very high definition. We can notice the nuanced kind of flavors of our experience. I also like the metaphor of like a chef who's kind of going through culinary school and learning to improve their flavor palette, their taste palette. You can improve your interoceptive palette of your experience. And so you can be much more present to the nuanced distinctions between say anger, frustration, guilt, sadness or emotions that are layered sometimes. They'll often be anger that is protecting us from feeling some hurt or some sadness or something that's beneath that kind of. Yeah, attuning to that, I think is a very, very, very helpful skill and as the post mentioned, is also very relevant for decision making as well because it allows us to actually know what we're feeling and experiencing as opposed to just being in the story.

Excellent. That's a great segue. I want to dive into that when I shared that to my LinkedIn network, got lots of great comments and reactions, but there was also a small minority that would say they looked at the headline and, and thought, fuck's sake, here's more of this woo woo crap. Read the headline and they thought that what you were saying. So I don't think what you're saying is, you know, this sort of classic go with your gut, go with your heart type of approach, which I didn't take that away at all from the, from the article and you even mentioned is that the emotions are data and we, we've got to integrate them into how we make decisions. The article describes and what we've been talking about is how to tap into that. Right. It would be, it'd be good to just talk. Just maybe you could summarize that, that article. But how do we, what is it about emotions? How do we integrate emotions into decisions? How do we, rather than think about them as, you know, getting in the way of making good decisions. We haven't. Like I, I'm in this world of people who say, who say we've got, it's got to be objective and rational. And that's actually. The world doesn't really. We're not robots, you know, the world doesn't work like that. We're human beings and we've got emotions so we've got to bring them in. But anyway, what is it about emotions? How do we. Why is the best decision making emotional?

Yeah. So this place was really inspired by the work of Damasio and he has a landmark somatic marker hypothesis is the frame. And he looked at a patient who had, through a kind of tragic circumstance, the emotional centers of their brain were kind of removed basically. So this, this person was the kind of quintessential Spock like character, like could only be purely objective, was unable to access their emotional landscape. And this patient went from being married highly successful businessman to divorced. Their business fell Apart. And in the context of the study, they were unable to even choose a time to meet with the researchers or choose which color pencil to use because all of these kind of tiny decisions. And I think the other thing that's interesting to mention here is that we're making choices every single second of the day.

Yes.

Like the entire time we're making these choices. And we only think it's a decision often when there's some unfelt emotion to be processed or acknowledged. And, you know, I can imagine the list as being like, that sounds like rubbish. That sounds like, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

That'S woo, woo, yeah, yeah, that's okay.

But I mean, even just choosing the words to say like, I'm making choices, as soon as you think it's a decision, there's often some kind of fear that's not wanting to be felt. Maybe it's like, it feels like there's a binary choice and if the decision doesn't go well, maybe it leads to bad consequences. And that kind of brings up fear in the system. But if it was just viewed as like, oh, this is just another choice, then we just take the next obvious next step. That might be doing more research, gathering more data, speaking to more people until the choice becomes clear. And that could be a big thing, like my wife and I thinking about moving location, like rerouting to a different part of the country. Or it could be an investment decision. There's a certain point where the next most obvious thing is to just do the thing and it doesn't have to be this huge decision that we get kind of constricted around.

Yeah, that's great. I love all of that. That is very helpful. As you were talking about that even I was thinking about again, I was thinking about these, these environments where in a, in a corporate or an organizational setting, if you don't think that there's emotions and decisions, let's think about just crafting an email to, you know, the CEO about something important. Like people stew over for, you know, hours, right, in sentences and things like this. Like, because they do, you know, the words do, do matter because they're, they can be emotive and you might say something, maybe it's something kind of critical. People are very careful often with how they, how they phrase that. Maybe they shouldn't be. Most, many people are. Some people just are very, very blunt. But I think I've taken Britishisms that, that are very subtle. But like, certain words matter. You don't tell someone they're. They're steering the ship into the, the iceberg, maybe sometimes you have to. But there's the way we phrase things. They, they create emotional responses and that's why people are very careful about the choice of, of words. There's a lot of emotion in that. So anyone who's listening to this should just, just think about your day to day and just think about crafting a, you know, a message about a delicate matter to someone who's important or communicating a decision that's not going to be popular or things like that. Those are things that I think drive the point home that any decision brings them, not sometimes it's others. So I'm kind of, maybe we could explore as well group settings, right when decisions are made, maybe in a collective sense, or they will impact others who may or may not be involved in them or may not like the choice. And now we're not just talking about one person's emotions, we're talking about a whole group that would maybe interesting to, to just touch on. But anyway, what I like about this conversation is I'll say a few things and then you react. So there's no direct question in any of that, but it's just that, that.

That, that, that works for me. Yeah, well, there's two things there. One is the, the kind of principle of emotional contagion, which is this kind of very well documented and studied phenomenon at a point that in a group of people and particularly the emotional state of a leader disproportionately impacts the rest of the team. So if a leader is like resisting their fear or is perpetually resisting their anger, then that will trickle down into the team in a very meaningful way. But the other thing I wanted to mention is, you know, maybe using the example of being nice versus being kind because I think this is a very kind of practical way to make a point. And this is something that I, you know, for most of, again, most of my, certainly most of my 20s, I had this chronic kind of people pleasing tendency where I would be the guy writing that email, you know, not wanting to say anything that could possibly offend someone, wanting to kind of pander to all of their needs. And at some point I realized that this was coming from a place in me that was afraid to receive their disappointment or to be the recipient of their anger or frustration. But on the flip side of that, that meant that I kind of saying the direct things that could cause or elicit anger or disappointment or hurt, but in the long run were actually the right things to do. And often I know this shows up in, in team Dynamics and certainly interpersonal relationships where one, one person will be afraid of the other's anger or disappointment, and so they will just say things to be nice all of the time and that it kills trust because it, you know, if, no, if no one's able to say the thing that is true, or at the very least true for them in their experience, then trust just gets eroded and it kind of collapses from there.

Yeah, that's a very useful distinction. And those messages. I was like that as well. It's very cognitively demanding to try and figure out the right words and not to offend, but to say the thing that you still want to say, but in the right. Oh, my God, how draining that is. Right. Emotionally draining and cognitively draining.

That's.

It's not, it's not, it's not fun. It's not fun. So I can understand. I can be.

Just to riff off that. I think there's another important point around whenever we try to manage someone else's emotional experience. So in this case of like writing the perfect email to elicit the right response from our boss, again, like, things never really end well and people can usually sense when they're being, you know, in some ways, like subtly manipulated to feel a certain way as opposed to just sharing and expressing what is, what is real and true for us and what feels most honest.

That's. Yeah, that's interesting. I've been thinking a lot about leadership and leading as of late, and I think we desperately need a shift in the leadership of organizations to one that embraces much more humility, much more curiosity, and much more courage. And that runs counter to the way in which a lot of people who are in very senior leadership roles, how they've been raised or how they've practiced leadership, because they, I think there is a lot of that. There's a sense of I have to be omniscient. And when you, even when you said the, the emotional state of the leader rubs off, I know some people might be thinking, so that means I have to project confidence.

Right?

I have to project that. I, I, this. Got this, Got this covered. And I'm not so sure that that's, that's true. I'm not so sure that's, that's the right way that I actually, I, I shared a. There was an article that came out the end of last year, and it, there was a, it was basically a survey and they, they surveyed. It was an American Men and women. And the question was, could you land an airliner in an emergency situation? And 50% of males said they could, 15% of females said they could. And I was like, we need more female leaders. Because I don't want someone that's going to steer the, try and land the fucking plane and blow it up. I want someone who can stand up and say, actually I don't know, I don't know the answer, but let's figure it out. And it's that kind of leadership that I think we need much more of. So it was interesting when you said that the emotional state rubs off. That's not necessarily, that can be taken by some as a cue that I need, I need to really project this, this sense of confidence and omniscience. But people can see through that.

Yeah, I mean, I totally agree. And I've been thinking about how in some ways the nervous system of a leader is upstream of, I think a lot of good leadership. And most leadership development, at least that I've seen, tends to be very cognitive, very heady, very framework based. And whilst there's certainly a place for that, my sense is that you can walk into a room and you can usually feel someone that has a high leadership capacity and it's usually an ability to stay grounded and stay kind of centered and stay intentional in high stakes, high stress situations and not get reactive, not get triggered. And. Yeah, and that really isn't taught, at least as far as I'm aware, in lots of these, most leadership settings.

Yeah. These are practices. And it doesn't mean omniscience, it doesn't mean fake it till you make it. It doesn't mean false bravado. Oh, it's, I think it means forms of thoughtfulness, forms of, but deliberation. But once we, once we decide, you know, sense of calm around decisions, around communicating those things, all of that kind of. So the opposite would be, you know, I don't, I don't know, I don't know what the fuck I'm doing. I'm really scared. That probably won't elicit the right, the right response either. But, but I think the type of leadership that is really required is the one that I think you describe around the. How, how I address deliberate think about and master my emotions. Right. How do, am I, am I a good master of my emotions? I think that that is a leadership requirement, but sadly not one that gets, that often gets taught.

Yeah. Just to kind of come back to what you mentioned earlier around courage and curiosity. I think those are in some ways the two meta skills. And I talk about courageous curiosity often. And I think in my opinion it's one of the most underrated leadership skills. Whether it's applying that courageous curiosity to whatever is happening internally for the leader. And maybe you're right, maybe it's, oh, actually, I don't know, in this situation, in this moment, I need to ask for help. And that is the kind of honest and true thing. Or it might be the reverse. Like maybe they are on a plane and maybe the courageous curiosity is, wow, actually maybe I could, maybe I could land this plane. Maybe that's the thing to do. But it's about staying honest and not getting fixated or stuck in these kind of identity based patterns.

Yeah, interesting.

Interesting.

Yeah. I think having confidence in the leader's ability to master their emotions, practice quality decision making and then communicate how they've done that, that's the type of confidence that I think we need. And that probably rubs off more authentically than either bravado or sheer terror. Although people who are in leadership positions who are like sort of a deer in headlights tend not to do all that well. But anyway, a couple of areas I just wanted to touch on before we start to wrap up, but one was you have a part around, in your course around environment redesign. And we, we talked a little bit about this at the, at the, our, our physical environments make a huge difference in the quality of our thinking. And, and I'm just, just curious how you view that and how you talk to individuals, clients about how to redesign environments, how to think about their environments, how to redesign them and what goes into that.

Yeah, well, the, the most obvious starting point is I like to kind of help guide people through designing what I call a sleep sanctuary. So basically, basically a bedroom environment that is conducive to relaxation and sleep at the end of the day and ideally having some kind of transition or wind down routine after kind of a stressful day. And that can involve stretching, breathing practices, non sleep, deep breasts, but thinking about all of the different kind of sensory cues that are coming in. So using the bedroom as an example, having a, you know, a really dark room, having like blackout blinds thing, super important. Maybe having a certain relaxing scent or incense or something that is like a cue for, okay, it's time to, time to downshift, time to sleep. Or a certain, my wife and I have like a certain playlist that's like instrumental piano music that we'll play in the, in the evening. Another really important one is lighting. When we look at kind of artificial blue lights after sunset, it delays the onset of melatonin, which is basically necessary for falling asleep. So if someone's been watching a really bright screen or they've got really bright lights in their living room and then they try and sleep right away and they're not able to and they're like, why can't I fall asleep right now? And lighting is such a key thing. Candles or orange salt la kind of a nice, a nice option. And these things are all like automated on a timer so I don't have to think about it. They just like at a certain time, they just like click on, go in. There's like this kind of orange dimly lit environment and I immediately feel myself like, oh yeah, I'm like, I'm like ready for bed now. And sometimes, you know, it might even be still be slightly light outside. But it's using these sensory cues to trigger that downshifting in my system. And you can also combine that with, you know, maybe I'll have my yoga mat out so I do some stretching without having to like get it from downstairs or something. And it's just like reducing friction for the practices that make downshifting easier as well.

You mentioned non sleep, deep rest. Sounds good. What is that?

Yeah, so I'm actually designing an iOS app for, for this, this exact thing because I think it's so, so impactful. It's popularized by Dr. Andrew Huberman, who I'm sure many listeners have heard of. And it's a form of both positive.

And I guess negative just to add.

But anyway, yeah, yeah, so there's various practices that vary between 10 to kind of 40 minutes long. And essentially you lie down and it's a guided body scan. So you're both increasing your interoceptive awareness, kind of which we talked about earlier. But it also really helps with downshifting. And sometimes there'll be a progressive muscle relaxation exercise beforehand where you kind of, you inhale, you tense your feet and then you exhale and let it go. And then you inhale and tense your glutes and exhale and let it go. And I really like to do this after, after lunch kind of normally when there's like that energy dip and instead of needing a hit of espresso or something in the afternoon by taking a 20 minute NSDR, I then have a natural second wind of energy for the afternoon. And it really helps with preventing me from being in that, like we talked about earlier, that sympathetic kind of go, go, go state all day, which our bodies, our physiology aren't designed for, it's important to build in that, that downshift so that in the same way that a Sprinter has periods of rest where that muscle tissue gets rebuilt. It's the same with kind of cognitive athletes where we need to have these intentional defocusing practices. NSDR is one of several. You could also go for a walk, spend some time in nature. There's other ways to do it. But I found NSDR to be incredibly just effective and very accessible as well.

Yeah, fabulous. I, I really like that. One of the things I enjoyed since starting my own company is just the ability to downshift, typically in the afternoon. But I, I actually like naps. I like 20 minute naps and just to just lie down actually on the floor as opposed to just in the, in the bed because it's a different, my body knows that this is a nap. It's not, it's not going to, going to sleep. And I find that's very refreshing. But that sense of, yeah, that I like that concept of non sleep deep rest. I'd want to link some of this back to decision making. And one of the things I think more of us should be doing is just thinking about our sort of day or week or month through the lens of what are the, some of the decisions we're going to have to make, particularly the kind of, you know, the kind of meaty ones. And, and I'm just wondering how you think about these things in terms of making, making decisions, say high stakes decision. We've got this. I like to use the James Clear hat, haircut and tattoo thing, which is some decisions are tattoos so they're irreversible. So we've got to be like really? We've got to spend a lot of time and make it in a high quality way. The haircut one is okay, that sort of in the middle might have to wait a few weeks, but it's not as. And then the hat is, you know, take the hat off. So it means just decide quickly. And I like that as a framing device. But when we're thinking about sort of some of the big decisions or some of the kind of the haircut ones, I think it's really important to consider our physical and mental states. Right. Like am I rested, am I hungry, am I emotionally charged? So I'm just wondering how some of what you do teach that could kind of fit into a decision quality practice, a decision making practice, particularly for someone who's maybe in a senior role, who their main job is making decisions. We all make decisions. We all, we all have big decisions in our lives. So just, just wondering how some of what you teach maybe meshes into some of that. That'd be interesting to get your thoughts on.

Yeah, totally, totally. It's, it's a really great question and I, I love that I actually hadn't heard that frame. I, I think about it as like decisions that are one way doors or two way doors. And to give an example, my wife and I are in the inquiry around children, which is maybe the best example of an irreversible decision. And it's. Yeah, I think there's a lot that can be shared here. One practice that I've. Or like one heuristic that I have I've had for a while and to give context, I used to be the guy who, I think, I think when we were at Escape the City, I actually had, you know, a spreadsheet of like, yeah, here are the kind of weighted factors.

Sure.

When you consider these things in then it's like 8.8 out of 10, you know, whatever it is. And like I was that guy for a long time and I started, I think I started asking the question of like, does this feel expansive or contracted in my system? And you know that's, that's obviously not like, yes, I should do this, no, I shouldn't do this. But it's another really interesting data point and when for me the answer is, oh, I actually feel some sense of contraction around this. That, that's for me it's either an indication that oh, there's an emotion here to be, to be inquired into to get curious about.

Yes.

Or it's actually, it's my intuition being like, no, this, this person isn't going to make a good business partner or whatever. The thing is, it's my intuition kind of giving me really useful feedback. So I think that kind of like does this feel expansive and open or does it feel contracting and narrowing is one kind of good heuristic. Secondly, there's the really obvious thing around not making any decision, really any decisions honestly from triggered states of reactivity. This is something that my wife and I have learned and we might be having a discussion. And if I'm noticing that I'm in a space where I'm in that defensive kind of posture, I've got a lot better at this where I'll just say, okay, pause, just time out. I want to continue this discussion but I'm going to take a 10 minute walk to just collect myself recenter and then continue the conversation from there. And I think that practice as well, because you know, we can get in these, in these spirals where you're both just digging deeper and Deeper holes and that can be in with a partner, with a team, etc. So just knowing again, like tracking that, okay, I'm in this kind of hijacked state. Nothing, no good decisions will get made from this place. So I'm going to take ownership of my state and then come back when I feel more, more centered and grounded. So that's another thing. Yeah, I mean, what comes to mind for you? Like how have you shifted your decision making? Well, I think that's all these somatic practices.

Yeah, look, that's all great. By the way. I was also just on the spreadsheet point. I think there are types of decisions where those are great tools. Right. There are tons of contexts where it's a question of discernments. Right. And in my framework of the, the, the F in this word focus stands for framing. So it's, how do we, you know what I want to get out of this? How much time should I take? Who should I involve? And you can ask yourself some, some very simple questions to, just to do that. And, and so there might be situations where, yeah, you, let's do a spreadsheet. Makes, makes a lot of sense, but not for, not for everything. And there's no the, the. It's knowing which tools. This is the thing about tools. Right. I love collecting tools and, and techniques and analytical things. But you have to know the more that you have, right. The, the more complicated, the more that you can just start to rely on the wrong thing for the wrong purpose. So anyway, so that, I mean, that's one. I'm, I, I'm getting better at tapping into certain emotions. The other day I, I ended a sort of a relationship with an advisor and I was just dreading the call, like something in the diary, and I was just dreading it. It was just a sense of dread. And I don't know why, but it was just the, you know, this isn't, it's not, it's not working and I just don't want to. So I, it wasn't that I made an emotional decision, but I just sort of stopped and said, well, why, why do I have a sense of dread? Like, oh, this is happening tomorrow. Oh. And they're just like, why am I not looking forward to tomorrow? Because I've got this thing in the, in the diary and I'm just getting better at tapping into the, you know, the, what I'm feeling. And, and I'm not to say I'm, I'm not deciding based on emotion, but I'm using emotion as data. As a, as a, you know, as an input. And so I call. But all of these things for me anyway, the, I think for everyone. But I view them as a practice, right. They're not methods or tools or processes, they're practices. And so we've got to practice them, right. And, and then we can get better at them over, over time. So and that's what I, that, that's, that's what I now I, I teach, I coach, I advise that these things are, these things are practices. That's how I look at it. And for organizations I'm starting to, people come to me and they say well, we need to get a better decision making process in place. And I push back on that now and I say, well actually what you probably, will probably serve you more is to develop your own decision making heuristics, right. The five or six things that we always do or we never do, we always check in on our.

Yeah.

Principles. We check in on our values or we don't decide until everyone has had some input or when I feel like this and I'll take a walk and then I'll come back. Those kinds of things are I think far more effective. And in big organizations we tend to not think in those ways. And let's face it, there's just like in life there's the formal, there's how the org charts are structured and how the processes are supposed to work. But then there's how it actually works. Tapping into the, how it actually works is far better. And that goes in our sort of personal lives. Like we might tell the story. Well, I have my spreadsheet but after a while your spreadsheet doesn't work for certain contexts. So you probably have developed really finely honed heuristics and principles based on what you've done and maybe you revise them every now and then based on. And that's totally healthy. So I don't know if that's a clear answer, but I think sadly or excitingly, the world is uncertain, right? So we have uncertainty, we've got complexity. We cannot, the world's not an engineering problem. So this constant, maybe we just touch on uncertainty, but this concept of trying, adjusting, there's a lot of. There's so many things that the only way we are going to find out is by trying and as you say, experimenting and then we get the data we're not going to find. The data doesn't exist until we try something. So anyway, that's a very long winded way of just. I view it as a Practice, I think we need to integrate the emotional and we're amazing at analytical reasoning and we shouldn't throw that away actually we need to combine those things. So that's how I view it. But your stuff is so fascinating because it's so underdeveloped. A nervous system fundamentals, nervous system mastery, so many good things there that they just aren't taught. And if we just tapped into some of that would just be far better. We'd just be much more effective at decision making. So gone on for a bit there, but I don't know if you had any reactions and then we can maybe start to.

That was great. And I also really like the frame of finding decision making heuristics. And another one that came to mind for me was whenever I think that there is a binary decision to be made, that's often a sign that I'm hijacked, that I'm in a kind of nervous system reactive state. And to give an example, my wife and I were in this inquiry of where should we live? And we're thinking about maybe having kids. So we were framing the decision or the problem as where are we going to spend the next decade of our life? And with that decision there was this contraction. Even when I thought about a place that we were excited about, there was this like, oh, I don't know. And so I noticed that and kind of had a conversation with my wife being like, why do I feel kind of contracted around this idea? And then she was like, well, maybe we're not asking the right question. Maybe we should ask where would we be interested in spending a six month experiment to see if we actually like the place. And immediately I was like, oh my God, that feels so much better. And from there it was like, okay, well we'll spend the six months in this place. And so it turns out that by listening to how I was feeling, I was able to identify that we were framing the question in completely the wrong way and that there was this kind of third door possibility that I hadn't thought about that presented itself when we had this more curious mindset.

That's so good. And I talk about divergent and convergent thinking a fair bit nowadays. What's interesting, also going back to this escape the city thing because I wanted to launch a thing on decision making and I didn't really quite get it right. And I think what I got wrong was just not enough of what we've been talking about, not enough of every time I would go to test things, people would say, well I, I decide with my gut and I do. And I, there's no, I couldn't get away from it. And, and actually the just leaning into it is, is, is the better approach. But I think what you, that example is just one of the sort of divergent. Divergent thinking, like just exploring possibilities and finding, you know, asking is there another way achieving something? Or what is the, you know, what are we really trying to do here? Or, or maybe we just don't know. Maybe we just, we just have to play a little bit more with the ideas and opportunities and possibilities open up. And I think you're right. I think that, that heuristic of when I get into binary thinking, there's a cognitive bias called the either or fallacy. That that's, that could be, that's a useful trigger, right?

That.

Oh, what's, what's going on here? Have I really dismissed everything else that I could do and narrowed, you know, or is there something else? Is there something else going on? Because probably not like there's. And we don't make enough time in, certainly in the workplace, but all I would argue increasing in our lives for creative thinking, for that space, for allowing. Because those possibilities may come to us during a walk or during a moment of non sleep, deep rest or whatever. And you've got to allow for that. And that's a sort of divergent thing. And then the convergent is the okay, well what do I need to do? Who do I need to inform? Like what are the, you know, all that stuff once we've, we've narrowed stuff down and we need, we need space, we need space for the increasing. This is the left brain, right brain thing, right? This is that we need more con. Divergent thinking. We need much more diver, Divergent thinking in our organizations, in our lives, in our societies. It's not enough of it. So that's why I really love what you.

Yeah, that's fantastic. And maybe to kind of give like a practical experiment for people to try for a while. I've had this practice where I will give my subconscious a question to chew on before I go to sleep. So like as I'm, as I'm winding down, as I'm stretching, I'll write down in my journal. It could just be a single question. And then in the morning, I like to start the day with some practice of, of stillness. That could be meditation. I've been drinking tea for a while, could be going for a walk. And what I found is that my subconscious will just serve up really amazing answers to whatever this question from the Previous night is. So I've almost been thinking about how do I prime my subconscious and then create a state of stillness and openness for new creative solutions to just kind of emerge as opposed to having, which is the kind of right. Brain approach. Right. And as you said, there's definitely a place for both. But I think what most people are lacking are those kind of out of the box like problem reframing type solutions which in my experience do require that spaciousness and that maybe a practice of stillness in order for them to have enough space to arise.

Yeah, that's great. I just listen to you. I, I, I, I do a meditation practice, but I, I need to experiment a little bit more with, with things because I, I also find as I'm promoting my business and, and things like this, I spending far too much time on LinkedIn to be honest. Right, right. Um, and, and if there's something that happens in your brain that does hijack it. So I, you know, you shouldn't open up your social 30 minutes of waking up. That's not, that's, that's not a great way to start your day. And so I think there are lots of, lots of practices that are, that are incredibly valuable and, and on that I'd be grateful if you could just talk a little bit about your nervous system mastery course and what's involved and how that, that works and all of that good stuff. I would just love to hear a bit more on that and I'm sure my listeners would.

Yeah, I'd love to. So nervous system mastery is really my attempt to distill everything that we've been talking about and all of the experiments that I've been running on myself into a five week cohort based training. And the way it's set up is there's kind of 30 minutes of prerecorded audio that's kind of the theory for each week. But then we have live sessions and practices and protocols to experiment with. And that I find is really the only way that these new ways of thinking and operating in the world actually stick. Because without the practices there's a beautiful quote of Knowledge is only a rumor until it lives in the muscle. It's a proverb from a Papua New guinea tribe. And I think it's so true that we can read books, we can ingest infinite amounts of information, but unless we actually change the practices and ideally embedded in a learning community where you're getting real time feedback, then the changes don't really happen. So I've designed this five week cohort which Kind of goes through the pillars of training, interoception, self regulation, emotional fluidity and environment design. Those are the kind of four core aspects. And yeah, we've had over a thousand students go through at this point, many CEOs of large organizations, startup founders, young parents, firefighters. We had a Broadway show in the last a Broadway show star in the last cohort. And yeah, it's really rewarding work. And I also bring in guest lecturers to give sessions on things like public speaking or working with ADHD or like circling practice. There's a bunch of different experts that I don't have expertise in, things like nutrition that are also supportive to nervous system flourishing as well. So yeah, it's been a really rewarding thing to watch evolve in the last couple of years.

Fabulous. I'll share that in the show notes if people are curious about signing up and being part of it. Sounds fascinating. So great. Thank you for that. Was there anything that you wanted to mention that you don't think we got time to cover?

Gosh, I mean this has been great. I've loved how we've just like ping ponged between so many different topics. Yeah, I don't think so. No, I feel like we covered a lot of ground.

Okay, brilliant. Well, Johnny, I just wanted to thank you once again for taking the time to chat with me and my listeners. This was great. I loved every minute of it. So thank you very much and let's stay in touch and really curious. Going to continue to follow your stuff, but thank you, this was great.

Thank you, Ben. Yeah, this has been. It's also been really interesting for me to see how nervous system work overlaps with decision making as well. And it's something that I want to continue to kind of be curious about. So yeah, grateful for the conversation and the questions.

No, my pleasure is a totally under explored area. So it's. Yeah, I'm sure we'll have more conversations in the future, but thank you very much.

Foreign.

I hope you enjoyed that and found.

It as fascinating as I did. Do follow Johnny and check out his nervous system mastery program. We also have our own decision making program coming up. Our next Decision Navigators course is happening on September 24th. Do check that out. Links are also in the show notes and if you enjoy the podcast, do share it. That helps us out a lot. And of course check out the Decision Making Studio, my firm.

We will be back very soon.

Until then, and as always, don't forget, uncertainty is life.