How to Master your Nervous System for Productivity and Joy - Jonny Miller

Every time you think you have a decision to be made, like a big decision, it's usually an indication that there is actually an emotion to feel or emotion that you're avoiding. But if something actually lands in you, it's like a signpost that there's like an exiled part there that is wanting love and attention.

This episode is a conversation between me and my friend, Johnny Miller. Now, Johnny is an expert in the nervous system. He teaches a course called Nervous System Mastery, where he's taught over a thousand students how to regulate and take control of the nervous system to enhance their productivity and performance, but also their joy and general enjoyment of life.

I'd say that there's actually an art to the feeling part of feeling good. Joy comes from or emerges on the other side of being willing to welcome and feel the full spectrum of our human experience.

He specializes in teaching people how to access and work more skillfully with their emotions, which is something that I am very interested in.

Now.

Johnny's introduction to these topics is quite interesting and also quite sad.

I was engaged to an amazing, actually, junior medic, junior doctor. Her name was Sophie. She had bipolar disorder, and on October 23, 2017, she took her own life. That journey that followed into and through grief was what unlocked all of this for me.

Hey, Jonny. Welcome to the podcast. How are you doing?

It is great to be here.

Well, thank you for. Thank you for coming on. I was hoping to talk to you about the nervous system, because you are the nervous system guy. At least on Twitter, you've got a course about it. You teach this sort of stuff. And we were talking on this retreat about how, you know, my whole shtick is that to be productive, you want to feel good, you want to find enjoyment and joy in the thing that you're doing, and then you'll be more productive. But your horse stick is that in order to feel good, you should master the nervous system or something to that effect. Like, what's. What's going on with that?

Yeah, totally. So you've been to, you know, been to medical school. You've studied the body physiology. Most people think that we are victims of our nervous system state, so we might get triggered in a certain situation, or we need to use coffee to stimulate or alcohol to relax. What I've learned and what I've realized is that there are these physiological levers that we can use to upshift or downshift our state, depending on what is appropriate. And learning these allows us to show up in ways which are way more appropriate, and we can be Way more productive or way more relaxed without needing substances to change how we feel.

Okay, so what do you mean by state?

So the nervous system has very different states. You can be in a flow state, you can be relaxed, you can be overstimulated. And we have what's known as a window of tolerance. So everyone's tolerance is bigger or smaller, depending on our capacity to be with intensity. And one of the things that I teach is by increasing our window of tolerance, we can show up in more stressful situations, we can go for longer, and also be able to downshift more effectively afterwards. And these different states are. The important piece, is that we have a dynamic nervous system, so we can be adaptable to the situation.

Okay, so if I need to run away from a tiger, I should be in a sympathetic, highly heightened state because I need to fight or flight. I need to get all of the blood flow into my muscles rather than my gut and my brain, and just like, run, run away. And that's quite kind of, like, stressful, but it's a good. It's a good stress to be in if you want to run away from a tiger. Yeah, but if I'm trying to, I don't know, relax with my spouse or, like, chill out on the beach, and I'm feeling that heightened sense of anxiety about what if my business crumbles when I'm gone, or whatever. Yeah, that would be inappropriate for that moment. Is that fair to say?

That's. That's pretty much spot on. Yeah. And there's various ways in which you can upshift or downshift your state, depending on what you want to do.

Okay, so upshift is, like, more towards fight or flight. Downshift is more towards relaxing.

Exactly.

Broadly. Okay, that seems reasonable. So in this podcast, I was hoping we could kind of dive into the sort of the specific, practical things that me and viewers and listeners can do to downshift and upshift our state and stuff. But firstly, why does it matter? Why should we bother? Why not just go with what's the difference between someone who has, I guess, mastery over their nervous system, to whatever degree you can have mastery over your own nervous system, versus someone who doesn't, who just sort of goes. Who's never heard the word nervous system and has never thought about state or any of that?

Yeah, totally. So the frame that I have, I have a framework called rise out of reactivity. And I think this, for me, is the. The key of a lot of what I've learned and a lot of what I teach and it's this idea that a good life is a life that is lived intentionally. And I think this is something we're very much in agreement on. And what takes us out of intentionality or what kind of on the other end of that spectrum is reactivity. And there are so many times in life where we might get triggered, we might be overwhelmed, we might be procrastinating. And that kind of takes us towards the. The reactivity side of the spectrum. And the set of practices that I teach with nervous system mastery and breath work and things bring us back into that intentionality side. So you can think of rise out of reactivity as like a pyramid. The bottom is R. So rise. The acronym R is reactivity. I stands for interoception, S stands for self regulation, and E stands for emotional fluidity. And we can get into what each of those mean. But the basics are the first step is you need to be able to be in touch with how you're feeling, which is your interoception, your interceptive capacity is what is actually going on in my body? What feedback, what data am I getting from my physiology that I can then pay attention to and make decisions from the S. Self regulation. That is basically how do I shift my state using top down, bottom up, or outside in strategies to be appropriate? And then the emotional fluidity is how can I welcome the full spectrum of experience, welcome all emotions, Kind of like we were doing in breathwork yesterday. How can I just be with whatever's happening without trying to fix it or change it?

Okay, so let's say I am really struggling with procrastination, and there is this thing that I have to do. Let's say in my case, it's filling out my tax return or something, something to that effect. And I've been procrastinating on it for months. How might I use these various principles to beat procrastination?

Yeah. So firstly, the interceptor piece is tuning into what is it that you're actually feeling in your body. So if you think back to when you were filling out your taxes, the story you had was, I'm procrastinating. What do you think it was you actually feeling? Or what were you not wanting to feel at the moment?

Yeah. So I think that was a sense of there's a lot of random shit that I'm gonna have to email the accountants. I'm gonna have to dig up the freaking, you know, figure out is Ali Abdul YouTube channel actually owned by the company, owned by myself, which requires me to go through my emails from like, 2006 all the way through 2017 from Google to find out. Oh God, there's a lot of can't be asked to do this. Let me just do it some other time instead.

Yeah, so in that state it sounds like there's like the state is one of almost like stagnation and maybe lethargy. And so in that example, I mean one option would be drink double espresso caffeine and just blitz through it. The other option, which is more of the bottom up option would be something like breath of fire, which we can demonstrate. It's basically rapid exhale through the nose that will create more energy and aliveness in your system, like more arousal energy in the sympathetic branch and you will have more energy to do the thing. Um, yeah, taxes is a tricky one because it's like, like no one kind of wants to do it and you kind of just like have to sit down and get it done at some point.

Yeah, no fair, fair enough. Like my, my strategy around that is to, you know, I've got an hour on my calendar next week and I'm calling my admin party where I'm gonna have some music in the background, I'm gonna bring some friends over, we're all gonna do our together. It's ways to make it feel good.

Yeah. Cool. So. So that, that's a really good point. With the self regulation strategies, there's basically three approaches to changing your state or three broad categories. The first is top down which is like cognitive reframes, cbt, telling yourself a different story. Maybe in the taxes example it's like actually this, doing this allows me to keep running a business which allows me to keep doing what I love. So it's actually really important. That's a good top down reframe outside in. I love the example of playing music and then inviting around your friends. So inviting around your friends actually has this co regulation effect so you feel more chill, more grounded, more safe. There's a greater sense of embodied safety and music as well. Music is an amazing state shifter. So I was just offering. And in addition there could be a bottom up practice which is basically using your physiology in some way. The breath is the easiest leverage, but it could be moving, could be dancing, could be playing music and kind of shifting your state to create the vibe that you want. Maybe vibe is a better word there.

Okay. And so given that procrastination is really when we are trying to avoid some kind of negative emotion by using interoception, we sort of check in with our body and figure out like, okay, what is the emotion that's coming up for me when I'm sitting down to do this task? Then self regulation. And self regulation is where we can regulate ourselves using these different strategies.

Exactly.

And then emotional fluidity. Where does that come into it?

So emotional fluidity is. This is almost like the. This can take a lifetime to learn. It's also what Joe Hudson, who I know you've spoken to, recently, teaches a lot. There's an example that I like to use where every time you think you have a decision to be made, like a big decision, it's usually an indication that there is actually an emotion to feel or emotion that you're avoiding. Otherwise, it would just be the next most obvious thing. It would just be like, we're making choices, or I'm making a choice to drink or not drink water. It's just. We're just doing things. But often it's fear. Whenever there's some kind of emotion that we don't want to feel, we will get paralyzed. There's almost the kind of internal tension that you feel, and that's usually completely dissipated by tuning in, like, oh, actually, I feel, like, a little bit afraid because if I make this decision, then it's going to lead to this consequence that I'm afraid of. And just welcoming that sensation actually allows that tension to dissipate and the next action becomes obvious.

Ooh, that's fun. Yeah, that's really good. So whenever we are making. Whenever we're making a decision, it's because. Oh, whenever we feel like we need.

To make things a big decision, maybe.

You think there's a decision to be made, a big decision, or any decision.

Could be any. Could be big or big or little. If it's a big one, the next most obvious thing might just be, oh, I actually need to do some more research to figure out what. Until the choice becomes obvious.

Yeah. So, like, you coming on this podcast and us having this conversation, there was no decision there. It's just like, oh, it's just. Yeah, it's just the next thing to do makes sense. Which makes perfect sense.

Yeah.

But if someone who was a friend of mine who didn't have something that they were an expert in and was not charismatic on camera was to ask me, hey, Ali, can I come on deep dive? There would be a decision there, right? Of, like, do I say yes or do I say no?

Great example.

And the feeling is like, oh, I don't want to disappoint them. But also, I want to be valuable for my audience and Also, like, and then there's this thing that I'm not feeling, and I would probably just ignore the WhatsApp message and hope they go away rather than actually, like, how, how would you respond in that situation? If someone says, hey, Johnny, I want to come on the podcast, and you're like, oh, I don't think you're the right fit.

Yeah, that's a great example. So this has happened to me a handful of. I have a podcast too. It's happened to me a handful of times recently. I think that the key thing there is not making myself responsible for someone else's emotional reaction or their disappointment in order to stay true to my own sense of integrity. So in that situation, it would be, I think the. Let me feel into that for a moment. The emotion would be a sense of guilt or feeling bad that I'm making myself responsible for them, whatever their reaction is if I say no, as opposed to if I'm like, okay, they might feel a sense of lack of self worth or a sense of rejection, and I am not responsible for the way that they feel. So there's a sense of taking ownership over your own emotional experience and not making yourself responsible for someone else's. And as long as I'm able to do it in a share that. No, in a kind of kind, loving way, in a way that still creates connection, then I don't think there will. And oftentimes I've done this and there's been a sense of like, oh, I actually appreciate that. I appreciate the way that you said that. And often it's like, this doesn't feel like it would be a good fit right now, but maybe down the line that will change, which feels true in my system. I'm not lying, I'm not making anything up. It just doesn't feel like a good fit in this moment. But thank you for your interest.

This thing around taking ownership of your own emotions and actions but not feeling responsible for other people's emotions. This is, this is something I'm struggling with and have done quite a lot because I think I take a lot of, like, I, I, I think I take a probably an unhealthy amount of responsibility for the emotions of the people around me to an extent. If those, if those people are people I care about, like my mum or like my partner or whatever. And so if I, for example, do something that feels authentic to me that I know my mum will be disappointed or angry about because it's no, it doesn't vibe with her values or whatever.

Right.

I feel this sense of guilt and. Or shame that, like, oh, I'm being selfish, I'm being a dick to my mum by doing this thing. I don't really have to do the thing. It's not the end of the world if I don't do the thing. So why not just do the thing that makes my mum happy and I get into this kind of weird thing. Any thoughts?

Yeah, no, there's a lot there. I mean, firstly, coming back to maybe your core values and principles, you strike me as being a very intentional person. So one question is, how does it feel if you were to do that many, many times over the course of months and years, what would be the long term cumulative effect?

Oh, that would be bad on that.

Yes. Okay, so that's like a not good outcome.

Oh, yeah. Okay, nice.

And then on the other side, a principle or something that I've learned is that, and this is particularly relevant in my partnership, I'm married, not taking, like, I am not responsible for triggering or not triggering my partner. And there's a way in which that is actually very freeing. Like, there's a way in which if I was to change what feels true for me in order to keep someone else happy that I care about, I'm kind of caretaking them. And the reason that I'm doing that is because I'm avoiding the way that I would feel if I was to say something that, let's say, upset my wife but was true for me. And in the short term, it might create more disharmony, but in the long term, you're creating trust and safety and actually genuine connection. Because if your connection is based on an implicit agreement not to say things that trigger each other, then there's a way in which that relationship is superficial.

Yeah.

And you're missing out on the deeper levels of connection, which, you know, maybe there's a period where let's say you said something to your. Or you did something that made your mum, or that your mum reacted to in a way that she was disappointed. Maybe in the short term, but as long as you were able to share, like, why this was important to you and maintain, like, connection with her, my sense is that it would actually, like, it would be net positive in the medium term for sure.

What do you mean by maintain connection? Like, what would that look like, let's say, in an argument with a parent?

Okay. So it's actually, it ties in with something we were talking about earlier, which is around, like, prioritizing the nervous system. So if you're going into a difficult conversation if both of you are in a place of. You're like, outside of your window of tolerance that we talked about earlier. If you're. If you're triggered, if you're in a reactive state, there is a very high likelihood that that conversation won't go well.

Correct.

It's almost guaranteed. It is almost certainly guaranteed. So, like, a very practical note, and this is relevant for everyone listening, is if both of you are in that state, then hitting pause, walking away, doing something to reset. Maybe it's like walking in nature. Maybe it's doing some breath work, maybe it's listening to it. Nice, relaxing track, whatever it is, until you feel like you're back in your body. And this kind of ties back to the interception piece. Like, if you're. If you're not aware of how you're feeling in your body, if you're not noticed that your. Your system is really activated or maybe shut down.

Yeah.

And there's actually these. These two modes of reactivity. So we all tend to move one way or the other. Generally. One is kind of. And I'd be interested to hear what your take on this is. But one way is like, people will go towards anger, frustration, aggression, and the other is more like collapsing, shut down, withdrawing, and just becoming numb. Those are two ways, two protection strategies. And so firstly, think, what is your default reactivity tendency? What does that feel like in the body? And then from that place, once you notice the early warning signs, for me, it might be, oh, I'm noticing this heat in my chest. I think I'm going to get angry. I'm going to take a moment for myself and just, like, step away. And then coming back to your question, meeting in a place where both of you are grounded and calm and in your bodies, and you can actually have a conversation where that connection is maintained. And tracking this is actually a really useful point, particularly for podcasts, even right now. Track in yourself is your awareness, Is your attention, Is it more on yourself or is it more on me? Usually, like, for really empathetic people, they might be entirely focused on the other person's experience. This might be your. You might be totally focused on my experience. And you could switch that. So now you're like, okay, I'm aware of, like, oh, there's like a tightness in my lower back, or my throat's a bit dry, et cetera, et cetera. And then you can bring. To kind of meet somewhere in the middle. So you're aware of both at the same time. And that speaking from that place, almost like, regardless of what you're saying that creates a sense of connection and speaking from first person experience. So right now I'm noticing my mouth is a little bit dry, but I'm feeling cool. And just speaking from that, what you're actually feeling, as opposed to projecting stories and things in the head, creates a lot more connection. This is a very long answer and it's an interesting tangent that we're going down, but I think I feel like this isn't fair.

I like how you. I had a bit of a dopamine hit when you mentioned that there's these two different states. Because in my mind I've always equated being triggered with being angry and I don't often get angry. And so I guess I sort of told myself, oh, I don't often get triggered. But actually, now that you mentioned the second one in terms of withdrawal and shutting down, I have had it mentioned to me in the past that if I'm triggered, it will feel as if I am like a stone statue or something, or I become really cold and my voice will be very calm, but, like the person I'm speaking to will feel as if there's no warmth, there's no connection. Using that word, connection.

Yeah.

So I think that's probably my default state. And so if I'm, for example, having an argument with my mum, it is very rare for me to get angry, but it's very common for me to get more into that state where I'm just like. I sort of withdraw from. I sort of disengage from the conversation. Is that kind of what we're talking about?

Yeah, totally. And I'm exactly the same. Like, for the record, my response is, historically, for like 25 years, I was like, oh, I'm just a calm person. I'm not, like, I'm stoic, I don't get angry. And it turned out that I did get these, like, micro frustrations, but I would then kind of push it down, which creates what I call accumulated emotional debt, which over time builds not only resentment towards other people and other situations, but it created this health challenges and just a lack of aliveness. And this is something that I see in the work that I do, that people who have a healthy relationship to anger, there's also more aliveness, more capacity to set boundaries, more capacity to say no. It's actually a really healthy energy when it's not kinked. And often we learned. I learned when I was younger that anger was bad, I was angry and I hurt people, or people were angry and they hurt Me, I was like, okay, anger is bad. Avoid anger all costs. And even though that wasn't conscious, that's the story that I believed. And so I went through these. I did hundreds and hundreds of breathwork journeys. And at some point along the way, my teacher said to me, you are loved in your anger. And I just, like, rage came through. And then I just bawled. I just cried and cried and cried and cried. And there was this deep grief there for me because I'd had shame around my anger for my entire life. And, yeah, that was a fascinating part of my journey. And so a big part of my journey has been kind of going through these emotions. Like, anger was one, shame was another. And then learning to not be ashamed of shame itself and just feeling the sensations of shame as these swampy kind of that gunky, icky things, and be like, oh, that's shame. Oh, what does that feel like? And not then having the thing of like, oh, I shouldn't feel shame because shame is bad, but just allowing everything to come through.

Nice. Yeah. This is some of the stuff I was talking about with Joe. Joe Hudson yesterday. So I think we'll probably put this episode after that one in the running order. But we were talking about how I avoid reading any reviews of my book because I don't want to read negative reviews. And there was one time I did a podcast episode with my brother where we were reading comments on this celebrity gossip forum that were about me in a mean way. And I was sort of convincing myself that I wasn't really feeling anything, even though it was clear that I was nearly in tears. And he could be like, he like, bro, come on, why are you insisting that you're the stoic fucking sage who never feels anything? But actually, come on, everyone can see it. I was like, oh, shit. Because I think I've also drank the stoicism Kool Aid with a. You know, the true stoics would probably say that, like, no, this is not an act, true stoicism. But I, you know, I think I identify quite a lot with the idea that I tend not to experience negative emotions. So that when I do, it's like I feel the thing, and I'm like, oh, well, the story you tell yourself about the thing is, blah, blah, blah. You know, I can't control what someone says. And it's like this cacophony of voices from, like, Tim Ferriss and like, William Irvine and Darren Brown and like, Ryan Holiday and freaking Seneca are all, like, in my head. That's like telling me, no, it's all good. It's all good. It's all good. Change the story. Change the story. Change the story. And then it's like, oh, that emotion is gone. Yeah, gone in inverted commas.

Totally, totally. So this is a really interesting thing to speak to, which is there's something known as the self regulation paradox that I talk about. And in any moment, let's say you're reading a negative review. In certain situations, it actually would be helpful to be able to self regulate away the challenging emotion. So I typically teach breathing practices or awareness practices. It can be bottom up or it could be a reframe. And maybe the reframe is like, oh, actually some people are just angry all the time and it doesn't matter either way. And that emotion starts to kind of go back down again. In the short term, that can be really helpful because you can then continue doing the podcast, doing whatever you're doing without any issues. However, every time that you're self regulating away and kind of pushing back down a challenging emotion, that is adding to that pile of emotional debt that I mentioned earlier. So it's like, and you can imagine most of us have like two, three, four decades of accumulated emotional debt. And this emotional debt in scientific terms is allostatic load. It's basically chronic wear and tear on the body, which creates fragility in the nervous system. This fragility leads to health conditions, burnout, and like chronic reactivity. So you can probably think of someone who just like, you know, like a hair trigger, they will freak out or they'll. They go from burnout to burnout, or they have some kind of chronic health condition that in my experience is a result of this accumulated emotional debt. And so the, the other path, let's say in that situation is maybe not in the moment, but like later on in the evening. Maybe when you're with your partner, you share this thing and you allow yourself to actually like, feel the thing that's there and just kind of like we were doing in breathwork, right, when there were lots of people having different emotional experiences, that emotional debt was being repaid.

Okay, I'm skeptical about this. So, you know, allostatic load, emotional debt, all this starting to err into like, woo territory. And we didn't learn about any of this stuff in med school. And I like to think of myself as a fairly scientific minded chap.

Yes.

I guess first question would be, in terms of people who you've worked with, can you give a sense of what are some examples of emotional debt and how it's manifested in people's lives and what they've done about it. Just so I can get more of a picture in my head of what this actually means.

Yeah, let's see. One example comes to mind. I work with startup founders in a coaching capacity, and one of my former founders went through a pretty intense burnout experience while he was working on his startup. Probably not uncommon. And that burnout then led to an eye condition where he almost went blind.

When it led to that condition, it's.

Challenging to point to exactly what it was, but the blindness and the eye condition started directly after the burnout. So in his mind, it was like this was related. I was so stressed, my body was shutting down and even my eyesight started to go okay.

And this is the thing. Like, we know there's all these correlations between amount of stress you experience and loads of health conditions, even though no one's quite been able to figure out exactly why. Something about inflammation, something about immune systems, something about something or other. But we know that there's a really strong correlation between this stuff.

So there's a study that I can share for the show notes in the links that shows I believe it's an increase in static load, has a 60% increase in energy expenditure in the body, meaning that 60% more energy is being wasted just by kind of keeping this allostatic load going.

Yeah, it's like walking around with like a big ass backpack on you.

Exactly, yeah. Like a big full of rocks. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Okay. So in the case of the startup founder, he both was really afraid of like his own anger. And so like working through that created a lot of aliveness. And then once that kind of that cycle went through, we then went through a phase where he actually, he was afraid of going back into the burnout again. And he hadn't allowed himself to feel the hurt and the pain in that burnout himself. He'd just been disassociated the entire time during the burnout. And that's another common thing. And it connects to the numbness that people feel. People just check out of their bodies and they lose connection. So by kind of working through and allowing him to feel the. The shittiness that was there during that burnout experience, he then stopped being afraid of it and was able to kind of continue working in a. In a healthy way. Sick.

We're just going to take a little break from this conversation to talk about Brilliant, who are very kindly sponsoring this episode. Brilliant is an interactive platform where you learn by doing. They've got thousands of Lessons on maths, data analysis, programming and AI. I've been using Brilliant for the last five years and the thing I love most about Brilliant is that they really focus on learning by doing in a very interactive sense rather than just consuming the content. They've got a first principles approach to learning that helps you build understanding from the ground up, rather than just absorbing information without really knowing how to apply it. Brilliant's lessons are crafted by an award winning team of teachers and researchers and professionals from mit, Caltech, Microsoft, Google and a bunch of other fancy places. And the courses on Brilliant really help you build your critical thinking skills through problem solving, not just memorizing things. So while you're building real knowledge on specific topics, you're also becoming a better thinker. Now, I personally think that learning something new every day is one of the most important, fun and energizing things that you can do each day. And Brilliant makes daily learning super easy. With their curated lessons, they've also recently launched some lessons on large language models, which is the technology that powers things like ChatGPT. And so, given the rise of AI tools more recently, if you understand how they work, that can help you get an idea of how to use them to get your best output, which can be super helpful for whatever industry you happen to work in. Anyway, if that sounds up your street and you would like to try out everything Brilliant has to offer, then head over to brilliant.org deepdive and that will give you a 30 day free trial and also 20% off the annual premium subscription. So thank you Brilliant for sponsoring this episode and let's get back to the conversation. Okay, so if, if this happened to be a one on one coaching session, okay, where, you know, you charge a lot of money for this, I'm sure, but like, if I were to hire you to help me work through stuff, is there anything we can do on air that could demonstrate this for me? Like, how might I understand where are my emotional, where's my emotional debt and what can I do about it kind of thing?

Interesting. So what would you say? What is something that you're like challenged by or stuck on slightly? Like what kind of comes to mind? It can be an area that you're, you know, you don't show up in a way that you would like to show up better. It could be, you know, where you get that kind of like withdrawn response.

Yeah.

Okay.

So if I'm, you know, in my relationship with my mum, if I'm doing something that she disapproves of, then I kind of feel A bit like weird. Yeah, I think.

Yeah. So, I mean, firstly, I think our parents are the most juicy source of triggers. And there's another frame that I want to mention as well, because I think it's important is that at a certain point when you start to go down this, like, I think of it as like an inner adventure. It's like really understanding, like how we work and how we operate and it can be really challenging at times. And parents are often like the kind of boss level version of that adventure. So that's the context. The second thing is at a certain point when you feel that kind of shutdown response trigger in your system, that's actually, in some ways it's like a gift because your mum, let's say, is perfectly positioned to kind of elicit that trigger. And that way in which you are not free, that way in which you are kind of contracted. So all of that is kind of framing in terms of how you could approach that situation. It comes back to having that interceptive awareness to be able to notice, ideally in the moment when you start to feel a certain way, as opposed to four hours later, like, oh, I just realized I've been shut down and frozen for all of this time. Part of the work is like decreasing that half life so that you can catch it earlier. Nice. Once you catch it, the second stage is creating a sense of. The best phrase for this is embodied safety, which sounds a bit woo, but it's basically do I, how safe do I feel in my body and what can I do? Maybe more at ease and ease is another way of putting it. So it could be a relaxing song, it could be sitting on a sofa, it could be just stretching, kind of getting more into your body. And then once you feel like you're kind of regulated in your body, then lying down, bringing back an image of the specific thing that you said to your mum or that your mum was disapproving of and like bringing that image to mind and actually tracking in your body what is happening in this moment. So I have a practice in, in my training called somatic surfing. And it's basically so somatic means like body physical. So we could do that. We do this right now. Let's try it. Bring to mind that image of. Maybe it's your mum's face disapproving of Ali for something that Ali's done. Once you've got that image, drop down into your, into your body and just notice what is happening. Like what are you, what are you tracking right now? What are you sensing? What do you feel. Is there, like. Is there a tightness? Is there a heat? Is there a. What are you. What are you noticing? Is there anything that feels like it might be connected to that image?

Yeah, there's a sort of like pressure type thing over here. Yeah. Like, when. Whenever I've done these sorts of exercises, which have been like. Like three times in my life, I've always kind of felt like. But like, I mean, I've just had some water, so maybe I'm just getting on an abdominal distension, just had some water kind of thing. But there is a sort of tightness around here.

Ish. Okay.

It's also roughly where the stomach is, so don't know.

Yeah. Okay. And so if you stay with that for a moment and maybe you can put a finger on it and just bring a sense of whatever. Your sense of loving presence, let's say there's a part of you that is just bringing a sense of appreciation for that part. And just notice if anything shifts in your. In your experience.

Panic is gone. It's because the water's probably gone through my system. Yeah, that must be it. Yeah. So, like, I've. Is. Is this what people are doing? Like, I've seen Tony Robbins and other type this sort of. Sort of like, bring out the emotion and imagine it's in your hand now. Imagine pouring love into that emotion and all that stuff. It seems to have, like, a visible effect on people. And I've always been a bit like, is that person a stooge? No, surely not. Surely not. Is that kind of what we're getting at?

Yeah. So, I mean, in the breath work circle that we did yesterday, it's probably a good example where the breathwork technique just creates intensity in the nervous system, and it also shifts the state of consciousness, which allows that subconscious material to arise.

That was a lot of stuff. What do you mean by state of consciousness?

Okay, so by breathing in this circular way, it creates changes in the blood chemistry.

Yeah. So you're hyperventilating. So your CO2 levels got down, go.

Down off gas, and sometimes it can be tingling. And this, the actual scientific mechanism hasn't been shown, but from a kind of. Probably 200. This is kind of what happened. I've seen this many, many times in that state. Memories or these incomplete reflexes is probably the most technical way of describing it. Okay. So every time an emotion arises, it is a mobilization response in the nervous system. What can happen?

What do you mean by mobilization?

So it's like, like. Like when you're running away from A tiger. That's a mobilization response. Okay.

So it's getting.

Your system is mobilizing.

Okay, fine.

To do something.

Okay, cool.

What happens when we make any of these emotional experience is bad or wrong is that kind of cuts it short. So it's like this mobilization response doesn't get complete. It is an incomplete reflex. Incomplete response.

So it's like if showing. If as a kid I'm feeling anger towards an authority figure and I get told that it is not allowed. I can't express anger towards any authority figure because that would be disrespectful, then there's an incomplete reflex there.

Totally. Totally. And every time, subsequently, every time that that thing arises, it's then cut off and it's just like, like, no, not now. So should.

On that note, should we let kids scream at the teachers and stuff or if they're feeling anger or like. Like what? Yeah, yeah.

So I mean, I think the way that Joe Hudson raised his kids is a great example where his, his, his daughter, I believe he's telling me the story, she comes home and she gets angry as soon as she gets home because that's where she feels safe. It's in the house where that anger is actually welcome. And so Joe and his family create a space where that anger can actually be released. And it's welcome.

She's mad at a teacher. She's not releasing it at the teacher because that would be destructive. She's really releasing it in a safe place, being able to rant and rave about the teacher.

Totally. And ideally in a school situation, there would be spaces where anger is welcome, not at other people, not at teachers or at others, but just where they can be angry and just be with their anger.

Oh, okay.

Yeah.

Okay.

Which I think would incidentally make the world a much better place.

Okay, nice.

So it doesn't have kinked in. In other situations.

Okay, so. So we've got. We're talking about incomplete reflexes. There's like an emotion that wants to mobilize through the body. Like anger or like grief or sadness or shame or whatever.

Yeah.

In the case of my reading negative reviews, there's an emotion that wants to. And I'm like, yeah, pushing it down. The stoicism, head top down approach. Yeah.

And the art of this is really just getting out of your own way. So maybe a question for you right now would be like, what would be a reason that you wouldn't want to feel or read and feel the associated emotions of the negative reviews?

Because I'm worried they are. Right.

Okay. Okay, and what would that mean?

That would mean that. Oh, good question. What would that mean? That would mean that if they were right. Yeah.

If your book was actually shit.

Yeah, if my book was actually shit, that means that this thing that I've poured loads of time and effort into was actually a waste of time. And I should never have left my stable career in medicine to be a YouTuber and to have the audacity to think that I could do this thing where I share my thoughts and publish them on the Internet or in book format and stuff, and therefore. The life path that I'm on doesn't make sense and something.

Yeah, beautiful. I mean, it sounds like there's a bunch of different emotions that could be connected to that or like feeling states that could be connected to that story of like, I'm doing the wrong thing potentially. Yeah, maybe, like, do I made the wrong decision? Yeah, maybe that's kind of what it could come down to.

Yeah. Made the wrong decision. I'm stupid. I'm dumb. Dumb for thinking that this could be a. This is weird. Like, I don't, I don't usually have what others describe as negative self talk, but when I think as we're, as we're working through this, I'm like, oh, yeah, yeah, obviously that's the reason I'm not reading these, these negative reviews and why I never look at that on that celeb gossip forum.

Yeah, whatever.

Because, like, if someone tells me that I have a slow typing speed, it's like, it's just obviously not true. But if someone tells me that, like, actually the stuff that I write is really just recycled from other people's stuff and have no original thoughts of my own. And like, you know, what does a 29 year old have to teach anyone else about productivity? And like, you should have stayed in medicine, man. I've had. Had many of these thoughts many times.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, Beautiful. I mean, I, I think it's, it's so, it's a really helpful almost like guide to see what criticisms of you actually land. Because like this, the slow typing speed thing, it just like washed like, you just don't care. It's like, like, all right, it doesn't matter, but if something actually lands in you. Yeah, that's, that's, it's like, it's like a signpost that there is something in there. Like some. Another way to put it is like some part of yourself, if you subscribe to the internal family systems model, has been exiled. So it's like there's like an exiled Part there that is wanting love and attention, you can basically boil it down to that. And that exiled part will usually have an associated emotion. So if you think of Ali as multiple parts, multiple ages, when someone writes a cutting book review that actually is articulate and makes a good point, there's. That's like hitting a part of you that is then like, shit. And so the invitation there is, whether you do the somatic thing or whether you go into your room, it's just like, welcoming that part. Whatever it's feeling, if it's feeling shame, if it's feeling helplessness, if it's feeling like all of the shitty stuff that we typically spend our lives avoiding, the freedom and feeling good is ironically on the other side of feeling those discomfort. Like, feeling the discomfort. And the secret, maybe the joke at the end of this is that the feeling that we think is bad is actually our resistance to feeling it. It's not the feeling itself. The discomfort is caused by my resistance to not feel anger. And that's what most people think of as anger, when anger is actually welcomed and clean. It's like determination. It's like. No, it's like clarity. And so, like, it takes time to kind of, like, iron out those kinks that we all learned throughout our British childhoods where we, you know, we both come from an emotionally repressed culture. Yeah. Yeah. I think that's a big part of why I got into this work is I was numb from the neck down for the first 27 years of my life.

Nice. Same.

Great. And it's been. It has been an adventure, kind of thawing my internal experience in the last seven or eight years.

Yeah, sick. Okay. How did you get into this? How did you end up being the guy for this sort of thing?

Yeah. So, I mean, I had a kind of tragic journey. And the commonality that I've noticed between people in this world and honestly, people kind of carving their own intentional careers is there was some form of crisis that was, like, the. The thing that caused them to question everything they were doing. With our friend Paul, it was Lyme disease. With other friends, it's burnout. With some friends, it's like getting a divorce. For me, I was engaged to an amazing, Actually, junior medic, junior doctor, name was Sophie. She had bipolar disorder. And on October 23, 2017, she took her own life. And that. That journey that followed into and through grief was what unlocked all of this for me. Like, I didn't even realize that I was someone that didn't feel my emotions. Anyway, I. I just. You Know, I was a happy guy. I was chill, I was, I was calm. I was generally pretty easy going. And something about the both, like having the courageous curiosity to feel into the grief as it was arising and allowing the what felt like these like tidal waves of emotion to kind of. It felt like they were like obliterating a part of me. And in a way they were because, you know, I had this like entire five year vision of what our life was going to be was like mapped out. You know, we were going to have kids, we were going to move to Bristol, blah, blah, blah, blah. And all of that was just like, it was like gone. And so that journey kind of brought me progressively inwards. Initially meditation, then breath work, then plant medicine, and then like deep nervous system research and science and combining them all into a curriculum that I wish I'd had when I was, you know, in my teenage years, ideally. Wow.

Thank you for sharing and I'm sorry you had to go through it. Like, I cannot even imagine what that's like to lose someone that you love like that. How did, how did you find out? And what were the, what, what were the feelings kind of that were arising in you at the time that you, that you were surprised by?

So we just, we were on a holiday in Portugal climbing, and she went home two days early to start working and she'd taken time off work. It was her first day back. On a Monday morning. I found out I was shaping a surfboard in Portugal and I had a phone call from her sister's partner, Mungo, who called me up, told me, and I collapsed into this giant golden retriever dog that was like right by there and just sobbed. Got on a plane, flew home, met with her family, and really the first few days and weeks were just a blur. It was too much to possibly take in and comprehend. And it really wasn't until her memorial and like the weeks and months afterwards where there was. What I. I'm so glad that I did was basically just like stopped working for that period of time. Just allowed myself to feel, to process. And in those weeks and months afterwards, that's when the. It kind of comes in waves. I don't know if you've experienced grief much, and something about meeting specific people or like going back to places that were very meaningful to us just like surfaced up like a fresh new wave. Yeah. And it's. I ended up giving a TEDx talk called the Gift of Grief. And in that there was a point in which I was. This was maybe a year and a half later, I was Kneeling by her memorial bench in the coast of Leopard Sands in the UK and feeling the intensity of this grief like pouring through me. And at a certain point, if I felt so much like joy and bliss and love and I was like, I was confused, I was like, but wait, I'm meant to be feeling sad, I'm meant to be feeling great. This is meant to be a bad thing. And I was actually experiencing this like just raw aliveness and sense of like, whoa. Like it just felt like an overwhelming amount of love was the experience. And that moment really opened me up to a lot of what then followed, of trying to understand what the hell was happening from a scientific perspective, from an Eastern mystical perspective, from my own lived experience and trying to understand what was going on. That was probably one of the inception moments, I would say. Wow.

So where did, like how, how did, how do we, how do we go from that to you becoming interested in this? The stuff that is broadly labeled. Woo.

Sure. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I, I studied philosophy at university. I've always been just like very curious about what it means to live a good life. Yeah. Kind of like the big question, the big questions of meaning. I then went down a deep meditation path. Did you know? 10 day, 10 day retreats. Spent 10 days in a dark room completely on my own.

Why meditation?

Like what made you meditation? I mean it was kind of like this was in, you know, 2018. It was kind of alive in the Zeitgeist to some degree. And the books that I was reading were like, meditation is the answer. Meditation is like the path to feeling good. Yeah.

What kind of books were there?

So this was like, you know, reading Ram Dass, reading Shinzen Young, who is like has an incredible scientific mind and was able to explain meditation to me in like a very non woo mystical way. It's like very kind of. And that's, you know, I come from a background of like appreciating science and I've been skeptical mind and I'd say like my, my Wu threshold has been increasing gradually like over the, over the years. But I started out as a like firm atheist materialist, just like, like very skeptical of everything that I'm looking at.

And then so what was this guy's description of meditation that vibed with you that made you realize, oh, thinking there's something here.

Yeah, I think it was framing meditation as this actually is very similar to your book. It's like here are some experiments that you can run for yourself and use your own lived experience. Like be like an interior scientist. Right. Run These experiments and see what the effect is. And if it works for you, keep going or do something else. If not, you can ditch it. There was nothing else attached to it. It was like, here's something to try. And then I think the next big unlock for me was, well, psychedelics was a big piece. And then doing a free diving training and experiencing breathwork for the first time. So free diving really connected me to interoception, which is this word we were talking about, where you take a huge breath of air, you start diving down underwater, like pulling yourself deeper and deeper down. This was like 35, 40 meters underwater. And as the ocean pressure increases, the tightness and tension in your diaphragm because your lungs shrink to a third of the normal size of that depth. And in order to get deeper, you have to tune into your internal experience and just like, soften and relax. So that is the secret. Yes, it's taking a lot of air, but really it's about being able to equalize as the pressure increases, as you go deeper and deeper. So the competitive part of me was like, wow, if I can improve my interoception and learn how to surrender into it, I can do really well in freediving. I can go down to like 40, 50 meters. And this is a bit of a long story, but my teacher, a freediving teacher, guided me through my first breath away journey. And during that, I had an experience of profound bliss, grief, just like intensity of. Similar to what some people experienced yesterday that I was like, what the hell was that? Like, what the hell just happened? I want to understand what was going on in my body and why I felt so incredible afterwards. And for the next three days.

Wow. So your freediving instructor, did he call it breathwork or.

Yeah, he was trained separately in a. I think it was biodynamic. Breathwork was his modality. There's many different approaches.

And what's the title of that book that you read by the guy that.

Shin Zhen Yang? Yeah. The Science of Enlightenment, I think, is one of his books. I also really love Ramdas as well. I read all of Ram Dass's book.

Oh, yeah, you recommended Christopher the Mill to me, and I'm still going through it.

Excellent.

And he's using a lot of words that I still don't quite understand. I'm like, interesting. Yeah.

And his approach, he was a Harvard psychiatrist, essentially, and so really speaks both languages in a way that resonates.

Okay, so you get into meditation or you stop reading these books, and all roads lead to meditation, pretty much. Or Like a large number of them anyway. And then you start experimenting with like 10 day retreats and like the dark room stuff. And then what happens on meditation, specifically in your journey here?

Yeah, so I actually, I started moving away from meditation. I think there's a number of traps that are very easy to fall into in the meditation path. There's ways in which you can meditate and be in, you know, sometimes blissful states, but in a very disembodied way. So a lot of people, a lot of very intellectual people get into meditation and they will still stay in their heads and almost like ignore everything in the body, which is ignoring this emotional debt that we kind of touched on earlier. And so this is why I believe you see, meditation masters, people who are supposedly enlightened, will come to the west and there'll be these big scandals. They'll have sex with their students or they'll do all this. And it's because there's still this unprocessed emotions that are kind of like the. It's not technically true that the body keeps a score, but the body is the scorecard. I think that's a better way of framing it, allegedly. It's actually in the bottom of the brainstem. It's like the cortical map where that stuff is stored. But I do believe that meditation without a kind of somatic emotional component actually creates this dryness and this lack of aliveness and this lack of connection. So my approach now is really trying to combine the two, where there's obviously a lot of good stuff in meditation, but if it doesn't have this kind of somatic component where you're also exploring from the neck down, there's a way in which you can kind of get stuck there.

Okay, so you dabbled with the meditation stuff. You got introduced to breathwork through the freediving instructor and you were like, oh shit, like what just happened? And I had my first breathwork experience, which you and Kelly facilitated yesterday. And I also kind of a. I had the sort of kind of vibration hypocapnic response of like the tetany kind of thing, which was like, oh, that was new, that was interesting. But also, as you know, towards the end of the experience, had this and it's gonna sound woo, but like profound feeling of like bliss and joy and that actually everything was perfectly fine as it was. And you know, I don't need to strive for money or status or all this shit because actually happiness is found in the present moment and stuff. And I don't know to what extent all of that was just me sort of parroting the stuff that I've read. But I did, I did in, in that moment have a. What I can only describe as a internal bodily sensation that that was true. I was like, oh, this is interesting because it didn't require any psychedelics. It just required lying on a floor and like breathing, listening to some cool music. And I was like, oh, like, I've long struggled to get into my body or connect with my feelings or connect with my body and all that, but this experience of like an hour of breath work made me think, oh, is. Is this what people are talking about when they say connecting with the body, where it's like. And like being out of the head? And I was like, oh, this is what being out of the head means. Okay, that's useful to know because I now know that, like, if that's the feeling that we're going for when people say get out of your head, go into your body, connect with your emotions, blah, blah, blah, like, oh, there's something here. Is that kind of. Did that sort of vibe with your experience of breath work at all?

Yeah, I mean, I would say, as it says, it's very similar. And I mean, what you just, what you just said, like, it sounds like it was actually very powerful and there's maybe still a part of you that's like questioning the experience and like, was it, how real was it? And, and that's kind of what happens when the mind comes back online. It then starts to like, question everything, which isn't necessarily a bad thing. It's just something to be aware of. I say the other thing that's maybe worth mentioning is I spent a lot of my twenties with this question of like, meaning, of like, of like, of like, why, like, what is the, what is the meaning of life? What is the purpose of this? Like, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And in the state that you just described, I tried asking that question and the question just felt stupid. It felt irrelevant. It was like, that is a dumb question because the meaning was so inherent in the experience and in the moment and in what I was feeling. And so I think that was another pivotal point for me where it helped me to kind of soften the very heady, left brain, intellectual way in which I was like, firing through life, which was like kind of, what is the purpose of this? And into a much more experiential of like, how can I create the conditions for these experiences that are drenched in meaning to just arise? And how can I create the conditions for those states of being to just be more common in my everyday life.

I like that you use the phrase drenched in meaning because that was the phrase spontaneously arised in me. It's like everything is dripping with meaning when I had an ayahuasca experience a few months ago. And also sort of on this breathwork thing, it's like, oh, and of course everything is meaningful just because it is. There's just like a real knowing with a capital K that that's true.

Yeah. And how would your life be different if you were in touch with that sense on a more regular basis?

Yeah, that's a good question. Yeah, I have the memory of that sense, but I don't have the feeling of that sense. And if I were, then I would be a lot more relaxed about growing the business. I would probably still want to grow the business because why not? But it would be coming from a place of true why not and joy and stuff, rather than currently where it's. Yeah, it's partly that, but it's also like a sense of should. A sense of scarcity and all that stuff I would probably be more okay with. I'd probably just eat food more mindfully and just actually appreciate the sensations of food and stuff. I'd probably give myself more time to just relax and go for a walk around Hyde park or Regent's park or something rather than thinking. The point of the walk is to listen to audiobooks, recite thoughts into Voice Pal, an app that I'm building to help create content ideas to help grow the business and get my 10,000 steps while I'm at it, which is currently how I think about going for a walk in Hyde Park. And occasionally there are moments where I'm like, I'm listening to an audiobook at three times speed while walking in Hyde park where I'm like, I don't want to listen to this audiobook and I'll just sort of like put it away and try to experience the whatever nature and stuff. But post breath work in like the. The sort of 20 minutes afterwards as I was like walking, we're in this nice farm in Northern California at the moment, but as I was walking around even actually this morning, I had the memory of what was happen post breath work. And this morning when I went out to grab my bag and stuff, initially my hand reached into my AirPods and I was like, no, actually. And I could almost like feel my foot on the ground and looking around and it's like such a nice day and stuff. And I don't normally have that pure feeling of like, oh, it's such a nice day. What a time to be alive.

Yeah. Yeah.

I generally have an intellectual, like, oh, man, my life is sick. Like, you know, we made it totally GG kind of thing. But this was like a more experiential version of that thing.

Beautiful.

And as I say all this stuff, I'm thinking, like, if me two years ago, heard me saying this, now they think I'm on drugs, that off my rocker and like, you know, what's wrong with you? Yeah, I think.

Yeah.

So, yeah, I think if I were able to connect with that feeling of like, everything is dripping with meaning, everything is fine as it is, there's never any reason to worry, the universe is perfectly designed, blah, blah, that would be a nice way to live.

Yeah.

I mean, how do I. How do I do that?

I mean, it sounds like your. Your book and what the conclusions you came to with, like, feel good productivity was very much like the first stepping stone. I'd say that there's actually an art to the feeling part of feeling good. It's like, easy to, like, feel good based on the checklist of things that you've accomplished, which you've nailed. Like, you have ticked a bunch of those boxes in a really impressive way. I feel like the next stage is like actually receiving and feeling how good that is and how good it is in each moment, how good it is that we're in a beautiful location with amazing people, with people that we love, and that's not a journey that it can take a lifetime. But I think that feels like. And there's ways that this can be practical in the same way that I think one of your takeaways was this idea of focusing on enjoyment over optimizing certain metrics. And how by. By focusing on enjoyment, the outcomes happen anyway, but in a different way. And the process gets to be so much more enjoyable. And something that I think about a lot is how can I create the conditions for my desired state to arise? So a good example that everyone can relate to is sleep. You don't do sleep. If I said to you, you've got to sleep right now, or I'm going to just shoot you at you in the head. It's really hard to actually do sleep, but you can create the conditions for sleepiness to arise. And I think the same is true with creativity. Same is true of forms of productivity. Same is true of connection. And so a question that I ask myself a lot is like, how can I create the conditions for maybe enjoyment to arise? And those conditions are always going to be. There's going to be some internal conditions and there's going to be some external conditions. And you have. You can be the architect of those, and you can shape those and make it increase the surface area for that.

To hit and get that to land in your life. Personally, how do you create the conditions for enjoyment or joy, let's say, within your work and within your life?

Yeah. Such a great question. I think the answer changes all the time, and I think it's something great. It's a great one to reflect on. Journal on end of every week, end of every quarter. I think what comes to mind now is location and environment obviously matters a lot. So my wife and I just moved more into the countryside, into nature. We kind of live in a canyon, really. Prioritizing meaningful connection with other people, I think has been a big one. So starting a men's group, for example, attending events like this, which aren't easy to get to, but the. The reward and the sense of connection and enjoyment that comes from that is just so worth it. And I think being really intentional around how I'm designing my days and weeks and what my calendar looks like is actually a key piece. If I try and bite off too much or cram too much in, it's actually very hard to find enjoyment without some spaciousness. So I think that's good.

It's hard to find enjoyment without spaciousness.

Building things and really prioritizing something. Some spaciousness. I mean, today's a great example, right? We've just had a really intense, like, three days. Like, the insights per minute that were shared and some of the talks was just insane. And now we have like two or three days of spaciousness to let some of that breathe and feel the enjoyment of all of the, like, nourishment that we've just had. And then maybe a third one is. Yeah, I mean, it comes back to coming back into my body and actually like. Like what is the. What does the enjoyment feel like? What is the actual sensation of enjoyment and amplifying that? And that can even be a practice. It can be part of your morning meditation. It can be while you drink tea or coffee in the morning after you journal. So I think it's just something that builds with time. And my experience is that my capacity for enjoyment and joy has actually increased a lot over the last few years. I love this quote that joy is the happiness that doesn't depend on what happens. And so I think having that as something that I come back to and just knowing what joy feels like, it's just become more of a default state in my life. Very nice.

What advice would you have for someone who wants to create the conditions for joy, but who has a real job?

Yeah.

It was always difficult for you.

And I just speak to my condolences. There's a belief that I feel strongly about. I have conviction in that joy is actually our default state. Joy is when the anxiety, when the rumination, when everything else kind of falls away. Joy is just there. Whenever we are resisting some aspect of our experience, it's very hard to feel joy. So my advice would be to what degree can you first intentionally even orient towards. Joy is actually a priority, which for a lot of people that sounds ridiculous because it's like, no, I have these things I want to do with my life. I have ambition. I want to create. So actually prioritizing joy. And yeah, I mean, it comes back to allowing yourself to feel the emotions. And so one thing that a lot of students come to me with, that we work through in the course, is struggling with anxiety, which I think is more rampant than ever in the last two or three years after Covid. And something I learned recently is that the word anxiety, the root or the etymology of that word, is to constrict. And I think when a lot of people, what they experience as anxiety is actually the constriction of a certain emotion. And so by. By kind of welcoming and relaxing into the feelings and trusting that, you know, it won't last forever. I think a lot of people are scared. You know, if they start crying, they'll be crying for the next, like, five years. It's like, that's. That's a fear. But when you're with the sensations, the life cycle of these emotions is between 10 to 20 seconds. It's short. And so I guess the deepest answer that I can give that question is joy comes from or emerges on the other side of being willing to welcome and feel the full spectrum of our human experience.

Nice. You mentioned men's group. What is a men's group?

What is a men's group?

Yeah. And why is it good?

What is a men's group? A men's group. It sounds very kind of culty and bro y. I've been. I started a men's group, gosh, eight or nine years ago. It is a. And I've been part of many at this point. One in Boulder right now, currently, for the way that I've set it up. There's six of us. We meet every two weeks for two hours. Six, 8pm on Thursday. And it's basically a place where we can be seen, heard, celebrated and challenged by four or five other men who there is mutual love and respect for. So our format, if that would be interesting to share, we have a check in round, like how am I doing mentally, physically, emotionally, spiritually? This then a intentions round or we actually call it integrity round where we say, am I in or out of integrity with myself? Am I in or out of integrity with other people? That can be the group can also be relationships. And we then set commitments or intentions for the next two weeks. So I might say I want to get my first YouTube video published in two weeks time. I want to have this difficult conversation with my partner. I want to blah, blah, blah. And then we go into a 40, 50 minute kind of topics or challenges round. So each of us will say number one to five, how important I might be. Like I'm thinking of moving country. That'd be like a 5 out of 5. Someone else might be 1 out of 5. We then go through kind of like the mastermind we've just been to. We'll share. This is the challenge I have. I would love reflections, I would love advice. I actually would love to just be seen and witnessed in this emotion that I'm struggling with. And then we just close and we do that every two weeks for like two hours. And it's one of the most life changing things that I've done, honestly. Because it prevents that emotional debt from building up. Right. Because often I'll go into one of these men's groups not even realizing that this stuff alive for me. And then when it comes to my turn, I'm like, oh, actually I'm feeling this thing that I'm really worried about or I'm feeling really angry or really annoyed at this person. And it creates a space where again, kind of like the breathwork essay where there's just this permission and there's like a safety that everything is welcome. And that's actually pretty rare in most people's lives. So if you can either join an existing one or even design your own, and I can share a playbook that I have for this format. It's game changing. Yeah, it's a real, real game changer.

Why is it men's group rather than men's and women's group?

Sure, yeah. I think that for me at least growing up in the uk, there was a resistance to forming deep male friendships. I don't know if this is true in your experience, but I really struggled to kind of form, I guess like intimate and Deep friendships with other men. And you certainly could do this with co ed with both genders. But there's something about it being other men that changes the energy and particularly around the integrity as well. It's hard to say, but I've really appreciated. And I think also unless there was a deep existing connection between the people, there would be some censoring with what gets shared, particularly in like a relational context, if there were women there as well. So I'm all for this format in both and it would work with just women as well. I think it's just a, it's a different format and it's, it's what's worked for me. Yeah. Yeah.

Because there seems to be, you know, a lot of articles written about this epidemic of loneliness in particular amongst men.

Yeah.

Like women tend, tend not to be as lonely because, I don't know, for whatever reason, women tend to be more sociable and make friends and stuff. But it seems like men, especially once you get into your 30s and 40s, it's very easy for the only people you know to be your spouse and like to the only people you hang out with to be like, I don't know, your couple friends rather than your solo friends. And I wonder if that, that misses out on something.

Yeah, I, I think it does. I mean, what, what's your experience with that? It's that feel tree.

Yeah, not yet, but I am quite mindful of it because I think I've had pretty strong male friendships for. Because I went to a boys school and then at uni, most of my friends were dudes just by the way things turned out. And beyond uni, a lot of the creators and entrepreneurs that I hang out with also happen to be dudes because I think those, those fields skew male anyway. So it's like, yeah, I feel like I've got a good, a good group of male friends. But now being in a relationship where, you know, if I want to get married and stuff, where it becomes less, I guess, relationally acceptable to be always on lads trips and stuff like that, like, I, I can see a lot of my male friends who've gotten married in particular, who then stop hanging out with the boys, especially when kids come in and I'm like, okay, that's a, a default inertia that is basically going to happen unless I do something about it. And so I'm trying to figure out like. So I like the idea of men's group totally.

And I think there's something powerful about committing to that group for the long term. As well. Like, I've. It's been challenging with the amount that we've moved in different locations, but I would love to be part of a group that's together for like, 8, 10, 12 years. And I think that there is something different between, like, hanging out with the lads and like a kind of like a men's group. Like, they may. They might be the same people, but in that space, there's an explicit permission for the deeper, vulnerable things to be shared that in a lads trip, you're probably not going to talk about. And I think that's where the real juice is. It's like explicit permission to say the thing that's scary and to actually ask for support, which is really hard for most men because we want to be seen as being strong, being independent, like, I got this. But actually we all need support in different areas. Right. And asking for that support and. And giving that support is often what creates connection, which is what everyone is like, freaking starved of. That's the nourishment for most people is creating that connection.

Yeah, that's so true. Sometimes I hang out with a lot of creator, entrepreneur type people, and one thing that I notice is some have a significantly higher ability to be vulnerable than others, and those are the people that I want to hang out with more. Because if someone. If I kind of get a sense that someone's fronting or like, you know, they might say to me that, like, hey, the YouTube channel sucks and they're failing at it. But then when another bunch of. Another few creators arrive at the table, it's suddenly like they're like, trying to impress people by the being by pretending they have their shit together when really they don't. I'm always like, bruh. Like, you don't realize that actually you opening up about how much imposter syndrome feeling or how much imposter syndrome you're feeling about how much you hate your analytics or about how you're thinking of quitting. YouTube is actually what everyone else is thinking as well. And it really connects people totally. Whereas when you have this front of like, I've got my shit together, no one connects with that.

Yeah, weirdly, yeah. It's like this. It's like this armor that create. That creates that, like, barrier between people. I mean, this weekend's a great example, right, where Joe opened up with an exercise that was like, basically eye gazing with a stranger, sharing what is most scary for you in that moment. And that. And then the breath work that we did yesterday and the day before, there was a real Sense of a vibe shift right before and after of after this, it's like, wow. And then the quality of conversation and the things that people shared about what was actually going on below the surface level, Persona, stuff that we all put out to the world. And that's, I think, part of what made this weekend so magic.

Yeah, definitely. I took some inspiration from you for this men's group thing, and I started a men's mastermind a couple of months ago in London because there's all these mastermind groups and stuff that happen in the US but there are so few that happen in Europe and the UK it seems. And so initially me and a friend, Chris, who's been on podcast, we were thinking, oh, we should start our own Mastermind. And then as we were making the invitee list, we thought, you know what, actually, let's make it a men's mastermind. And it's not because we hate women or any of that. It's just because there are so few opportunities to hang out with a group of guys who are all facing similar challenges, where a lot of the conversation, half of it was about business and the other half was about life. And I agree, had there been even a single woman in the group, people would have been a lot less comfortable sharing struggles they're having in their relationship, for example, because then there's always the sense of like, oh, it just feels. Feels kind of weird.

Yeah. Yeah.

But that was really effective. So thank you for the inspo.

Amazing. I'm stoked that you're doing it. Yeah. I hope it continues. And I, I. The playbook that I created, I've designed to be open source, so I like. I would love if 5,000 men's groups were created as a result of this conversation, this playbook, and passing it out there because it's. It's so easy. It's such a low lift. Anyone can do it and it makes such a difference.

Nice. We'll put a link in the show notes and video description. Is there an easy URL for this or something? Or is it like a funky weird URL?

It's a Google Doc, so it's got a funky weird URL.

Cool. We'll put a link in the video description.

That's all good.

What have you personally seen as the differences between yourself? How old are you? 35.

35. 35.

So age 35 versus age, like 25 in the last 10 years, as you've been on this arc of personal development, obviously a 25 year old is quite different from a 35 year old. But I guess, what are some of the key differences that you'd have been surprised by age 25 that you are. You are right now?

Yeah. I mean, holy shit. Just. I feel like. It feels weird to say, but I feel like I'm a. Just a different human or a different. Just a very different personality and type of person than I was eight or nine years ago. I think some of the tangible shifts that I can point to, there's a sense of, like, maybe one of the biggest shifts is this sense of, like, deep trust in myself and a trusting of the wisdom or whatever it is that's coming through me. If it's an emotion, if it's an idea, if it's a thought, the trusting that, like, this is something to pay attention to and that actually I can show up in spaces where, whether it's this podcast or whether it's an unknown group of people that I've got this. There's a sense of I'm good, and there's so much more ease in my system. I would say in my 20s, I went down the startup path. We raised funding, we did the whole startup thing, went through techstars, and there was this sense of ambition, but it was really me trying to prove myself to other people and being like, I'm worthy, validate me. We raised all this money, et cetera, et cetera. And maybe the most concise way to frame it is that ambition went away for two or three years, actually, during the grief process. But on the other side, it's almost like the fuel source got changed. So when I was younger, the fuel source was mostly, if I'm honest, oriented towards validation and having an impact, but that having an impact was me wanting to be seen and look good. And I think now it's shifted much more to my baseline is I'm inherently good. Life is amazing, and I feel excitement to do these creative projects, to teach in the world. I love teaching. The work that I'm doing with nervous system mastery is just. Is so enlivening, and I keep learning from it, and it becomes my vehicle for having interesting conversations, for developing new frameworks and techniques and doing things like the breath work that we did, which actually has this. I feel like I'm deeply of service, I guess, and that feels very nourishing to me. And so, yeah, I think the ambition is still there. Maybe it's even higher than it used to be, but it's like, what is fueling that ambition is now very different, I'd say.

So let's say someone's Listening to this and they feel like, yeah, what's fueling them is desire for, I don't know, status or to be seen or to be validated or whatever. Are there any quick routes to getting off that mountain and moving on to the proverbial second mountain where the fuel is service rather than status?

Yeah, yeah, go through a crisis.

Yeah, that's one of good way.

I mean, I joke, but I used to run an accelerator program called Escape the City and we would joke that our purpose was to accelerate people into their first core life crisis. And something about that actually really humbles people. So, yeah, I'm not saying create the conditions for a crisis, but a crisis is definitely something that can drop you in more broadly. I mean, I think contemplating death is obviously a good one that I know you've spoken about. If you think about in the long run, think about your eulogy, think about how would you want to look back on your life? What would make your 8 year old self happy and what would make your 80 year old self happy? I think that's always a good frame of where am I coming from? And. And not judging the way that you're not judging the fact that part of you wants to be seen and validated. But maybe the real hack there is what is the thing that you want that's beneath that? What's the thing that you want beneath having 50,000 YouTube subscribers or 10 million in revenue? What is that a surrogate for? Or what is the feeling beneath that? This goal you think this goal would give you, but you can actually give yourself in a much easier way.

Oh, that's really nice. What's the feeling beneath the goal that I think the goal would give me, but I could give myself?

So I mean, what would be that? Like right now you want your business to make 10 million in revenue each year? What is the feeling that, let's say six months from now you hit that, you nailed the goal. How do you feel?

The first word that comes to mind is safety. Interestingly, because I have in my mind the idea that if we can get the business to a point where not even 10 million, it could be a lot lower than that. But if the revenue generation of the business is not actually tied to me as an individual coming out and sitting on the chair and making YouTube videos and doing podcasts, that is now a true sense of safety. Whereas the sense of safety I feel right now is a. It's only the illusion of safety because it's like, well, if I stop making YouTube videos, the whole thing comes crumbling Down. And I've never really sat down and run the numbers on this to see, like, okay, how much money do I actually currently have? And even if I did stop making YouTube videos, would it come crumbling down, etc. Etc. Never really sat down to run the maths on that. So the first thing that comes to mind for 10 million is safety. The other thing, and I kind of flip flop between how much of it is safety oriented versus excitement oriented. It's just that it's just kind of fun. It's like I play Horizon Forbidden west on very hard difficulty, and once I beat the game on very hard difficulty, I'll probably switch to new game plus and play on ultra hard because why not? It's like the same video game, the video game of entrepreneurship, which is really fun, just played at a higher difficulty level where the stakes are higher. And as long as I can approach that with more of the, with this sense of joy and like, actually I'm loving this process, then 10 million is an arbitrary goal. Great, let's go for 20. Let's go for $100 million exit. Just because. Why not? It's just kind of fun.

Totally.

And over time, I think I've shifted more from wanting safety and security more towards that excitement and joy from just playing the video game at a higher level. But there's still definitely a part of me that has that desire for safety. If we can make the revenue decorrelated with me, all that, all that kind of stuff. So I guess I'm chasing in a way a sense of safety, but also in a way a sense of progress, maybe growth.

Yeah. Beautiful. I mean, just to reflect that back, it sounds like you're both of the fuel pipes are driving you right now. There is this side in which there's playing the infinite game just because it's fun, exciting, and you just love doing it. And why not go for 100 million? That feels great. And there's also this piece around seeking that sense of deep embodied safety, which I'm glad you mentioned that word because it's actually what is often underneath a lot of people's desires to make money is a sense of I want to feel safe. And what I would offer is that there's actually no amount of money that will make you feel safe internally. There are, I've seen them. There are billionaires out there who don't feel safe in their body. They don't feel like they have enough money. They feel like it could go away tomorrow, it could be killed. And that cultivating that internal safety, it's an inner game. That is where the interior work gets done. Part of it is the emotional work. And frankly, part of it is. This is one of the things that shifted for me, actually. I didn't used to feel safe in my body, and now I feel deeply grounded. And there is a way in which breathing down into the lower band of your belly, where a lot of the parasympathetic fibers are, it creates a sense of embodied safety. There is a way that you can breathe, that you will feel safe in the moment. And this is actually underneath a lot of what I teach, like a lot of the workshops that I do. Facilitation. It's about helping people. It's about creating the internal and external conditions for people to feel safe. And you can think of it as a muscle that can be trained. I'm glad you mentioned that. And my challenge for you would be, how can you increase how safe you feel regardless of the income for your business? Because we could tear apart that goal where even if your entire business disappeared next week, you're a smart dude. Like, you could find a way to make that back pretty quickly. And there's another scenario where you could be making 20 million a year and something could happen and it could all get taken away. So really, maybe we can talk about this more off camera. But there are things you can do that can really embody that sense of safety which most people project onto money. Money is just. Some people project power, some people it's safety. And money becomes this thing. If I get enough of it, I'll feel safe. And that story is bollocks.

There is some truth to that story, though. Like, if you're struggling to pay the bills, then getting more money makes you feel more safe in that sense that you don't have to worry about where rent's coming from. So where's the point where it tips over?

Yeah, so actually, I don't. I've met people on the streets of Sri Lanka and on the streets of people who have literally almost no money at all, but they feel safe. Like, often they have relationships and they have connections and they have community, but they have materially, very, very little money. Now, I'm not saying there is anything at all bad. Money is great. I love making money, but the safety actually isn't correlated.

That's controversial.

Yeah.

Because I guess when we were doing the breath work yesterday, one of the things I felt was a sense of safety. I mean, I wouldn't quite have described it as that, but, like, now that I think back to it, you Know, we were in this beautiful barn, the sun was shining, there was the trees outside. And I was thinking, you know, if I lost all my money, I just sat in a. I just had like a wooden cabin to live in, or I could just write and make videos. Life would be pretty goddamn good. And I was like, huh, I don't need a lot of money for that. And it kind of made me realize that, like, I had this deep sense that my happiness is actually completely decorrelated from money and status. Like, I could lose all my subscribers overnight, lose all the money overnight. And actually, like, in that moment, I felt very safe in my body. And I guess over time that's. Is that the sort of feeling that you have all the time?

I mean, maybe not all the time, but a lot of the time. Yeah, a lot of the time, for sure. And at the same time, playing the infinite game of growing businesses and creating and doing awesome videos, that's amazing too. And that can kind of add to it. But I think the point of really questioning and deeply questioning for yourself is that connection true is pretty profound. Or it can be.

One of the things you work with a lot of startup founder, executive type people. Do people ever worry that if they become all nervous system mastery, they're going to be so Zen to the point that they won't actually have any ambition to do big things in the world or whatever?

For sure. I mean, that's a huge, huge concern. I think people are afraid they're going to lose their edge because up until now they have been driven by that, like anxiety or fear or need to prove, desire to be validated, etc. And some very successful people are. But in those cases, I wouldn't want to swap places with many of them because often it's their relationships, it's their health, it's their internal state, their internal monologue that suffers. And most people can think of public examples where that would be true. I've worked with the CEO and founder of a rocket ship company who went through this journey himself. His name's Ben. I'm sure he wouldn't mind me naming him. And he has become a far better leader of his company through doing a lot of this work. There's something that I believe that the nervous system of an organization is a mirror or is a reflection of the nervous system of a leader. And so as he became more grounded, more centered, made decisions from a clear, intentional place, was less reactive, the business outcomes were fantastic. Another example that comes to mind is Joe Hudson, who you've just had on the podcast who I would say Joe is one of the most ambitious people that I know. But Joe also isn't being driven by anxiety, fear, scarcity, greed, any of those things. So there are plenty of examples in both camps, and I would rather kind of focus on the enjoyment and the joy and trust that the. The other material, external things will come in due course, which they are for me. I've had an incredible couple of years, and it seems to just like it's going in an amazing direction.

Do you do yoga? And how does yoga fit into this world of stuff that we're talking about?

Interesting. So traditionally, yoga was. The asanas were seen as a means of creating the conditions for meditation to be easy. That is one of the foundational principles of Hatha yoga. There are certain postures and movements and ways that you can do poses which will shift the state of your body. So to give an example, back bends can be activating. They stimulate the sympathetic nervous system, forward folds, especially if they're held for two or three minutes. They're very relaxing and calming. So if you're looking to, let's say, downshift and relax, doing something like pigeon pose or just like holding onto your feet and maybe even doing some humming at the same time is a great way to downshift at the end of the day. I still practice yoga every two or three days. Part of it's just to feel good in my body, and part of it is for that nervous system shift as well. Nice.

And so, like, you know, this bucket of like yoga, meditation, breath work, psychedelics, energy. There's like this whole starter kit which becomes. Has like a whole spectrum of it where you can go really woo. And, you know, there's more like socially acceptable woo. And like, you know, something like, meditation is not really considered woo anymore, but it was like, it would have been 20 years ago. It would have been a while ago. Like, is all of this stuff leading to enlightenment or some like, where's this all going? Where's it all leading? Because you can imagine a world where. And I'm sure you know people like this who are so in the weeds of the stuff going after Energy healer, this energy heater that, like, doing all the meditation practices, like, what does it all lead to? What's the point?

Yeah, so it's a great question. I think that is up to, frankly, everyone to really decide for themselves. There is a way in which Bali, for example, we've both been to Bali. Bali is like an adult woo Disneyland. You can do breathwork, cambo, sound healing, all the things. And whilst I think there's a time and a place for experimenting with all of that, you can also kind of get stuck on the merry ground of just doing the things over and over again. I think the key thing is to. Is to actually have that experimental mindset form some kind of hypothesis of if I do breath work four times a month in this way, how do I feel afterwards? Is this something that actually serves my life? And keep running those experiments for yourself, tracking how it changes your internal state. And I think the same is true of any of these modalities. Whether it's forms of meditation, whether it's entheogens, plant medicine, men's group breathwork. It's really like, what is it that you're looking to feel more of? And is this supportive? And the real is it working? Is how do you then show up in your life and in your relationships afterwards? I think that is the most honest measure of is this working? So for me, doing hundreds of breathwork journeys in a three or four year period that had dramatic changes on how I showed up in relationship with my net wife and allowed us to get through some of the really rocky periods early on and stay in love and connection and kind of get to the other side and build that trust. So that would be. And I think this especially applies to plant medicine. Ayahuascas are becoming very popular these days. It's very easy to get hooked on, maybe even addicted, on chasing those peak experiences, because peak experiences feel good. And if when you come back down, nothing has changed, if nothing has literally rewired in your nervous system that hasn't integrated, then you can keep doing that until the day you die and nothing changes. And so it's really important. And that's where the spaciousness comes in, that there is time to actually integrate, reflect on, feel the changes of this thing that you did, whether it's a meditation retreat or breath work or whatever, and be like, okay, do I feel different to last week? Did anything change? And trust your own experience. Nice.

I like that. That's kind of how I approach all personal development and productivity advice as well. Experimental mindset. You know what? Let me try working out every morning for the next month and see how that compares. Cool. Let's try doing it in the afternoons or evenings. Oh, the morning is way better. Because in the afternoons and evenings I just don't do it. Okay, morning it is.

Yeah. Fantastic.

Let me see what it's like. You know, if I were to write my goals out every morning because I heard someone say That's a good idea. Oh, shit. That actually really works for me because it helps me feel more connected and more purposeful in whatever I'm doing. Nice. Let me try the Pomodoro technique. I don't really like 25 minutes. I prefer 50. You know, that kind of thing.

Yeah.

And, you know, one thing with our new product, The Productivity Lab, productivitylab.com, one thing that we encourage with our students is don't take anyone's word as gospel, and especially not mine, because, like, you know, the law of equal and opposite advice, something that works well for one person, the exact opposite thing will work well for another person. And so what we're really trying to get our students to do to encourage is this experimental mindset with anything related to any advice at all is, like, try it out, see if it works. If it does, great. If it doesn't, great. That's fine.

Yeah. Beautiful. Beautiful. I love that. And the thing that I'd add to that, and this is maybe something that's changed for me, is when I'm looking at the results of my experiment, I am tracking my interoceptive response as much as I'm tracking Excel as well. So if something. Let's say I'm thinking about taking a new project, I will be like, does that feel expansive and exciting and interesting, or does it feel like there's some kind of contractual. Maybe not. And even if I don't know why, I will take that data from my body into consideration. And there's actually four times more neurons going from our body to our brain than from our brain to our body. It's like a superhighway going this way and, like, one lane of traffic going this way. And I think that's. It's a helpful reminder that actually our body is tracking so many more things than we're consciously able to process. So.

Nice.

That's like. So if you're. If you're running an experiment, if you're not actually taking in all of the data coming your way, then it's a shitty experiment.

Yeah. Damn, that's really good. I'm gonna start doing that.

Yeah.

Because I almost never asked that question. I think I subconsciously do it, but not consciously in the sense that I have found that having a team retreat where we all get together once a quarter is expensive, but it's also, like, really enlivening in, like, a feeling easy kind of way.

Right, right, right.

And even if we can't measure its impact on the bottom line, it's like, well, it's enlivening in a nice way. So we're going to do it.

Totally. Totally. There's, like, one frame for that is like, head, hot gut. Like, how does it feel in the head? How does it feel in the heart? How does it feel in the gut? And they might have different answers. You can journal this down.

So this nervous system stuff, if someone has gotten to the end of this episode, what are some tangible or practical, actionable things that you, I, or anyone else could do to help, I don't know, shift our state towards something that's more productive or more intentional towards the thing we actually want to be doing?

Yeah. Beautiful. So let's see. Yeah. I have a practice I call if this, then breathe. So if, like. Like if this and that. Like if blah, blah, blah. It's like this automation thing. If you feel lethargic and sleepy, do espresso breath. If you feel anxious and overwhelmed, do breath of calm. And we can maybe demonstrate the breath of calm now?

Absolutely.

As an example. Yeah. Okay, great. So get comfortable in your seat. Kind of actually feel your body, feel your butt on the chair. And we'll begin with a very brief awareness practice. So. And you can do this. If you're watching and listening, get comfortable in your chair. You can have your eyes open or closed for this, whichever you prefer. And start by just being aware of the space behind you. So, like, being aware of, in your case, the rocks behind, Noticing that there is even space behind you, Being aware of the space behind you. And now awareness of the space below you, feeling gravity pulling you down, feeling your butt on the seat. And finally above you, awareness of the ceiling. Just feeling this, like, expansion in this, like, awareness bubble around you. And we'll start off with a couple of sighs. So full breath in and then sigh on the exhale. Nice. One more. Beautiful. All right, so opening up the eyes just to watch the demonstration. So going to do something called alternate nostril breathing. This is one of the fastest ways of activating the parasympathetic, I. E. Relaxation nervous system. It creates measurable changes in blood chemistry. Those changes in the endocrine system then make their way into the nervous system, which then changes the thoughts and feelings that we're having. And that cycle kind of continues. So do this by raising right hand. Your thumb's going to cover your right nostril. This ring finger is going to cover your left nostril. And we're going to be breathing to a count of inhaling three, holding three, exhaling six. And then swap sides. So I guide you three. So covering the right nostril. Inhaling, three, left, two, three. Holding both, two, three. Exhaling right, two, three, four, five, six. Inhaling right, two, three. Holding both of, two, three. Exhancing left, two, three, four, Five, six. One more round. Inhale left, two, three. Holding BOTH, two, three. Exhale right, two, three, Four, five, six. Lowering it down. And then we'll finish with two single breath hums. Inhale all the way. And then hum on the exhale, Last one. And just take a moment to close your eyes and just notice if how you feel internally has changed at all. Maybe there's like more spaciousness behind the eyes and see if you notice any difference in your state.

Yeah, I actually feel more. I want to use the word light, but the word light is an imprecise word. But, yeah, light and yeah, like, there's more. More like space around me or something. Or that like my. My awareness has expanded or something. Yeah.

Great. Yeah. Beautiful. And that was like, what, a minute, 45 seconds.

Yep.

And so you can obviously do a few more rounds. You can combine them. You can just do one of. And I can link to some of the practices that people can follow. Follow along to if they want to try it.

Okay, so where, in what context might I use this.

Yeah.

Thing.

So, I mean, I've used it sometimes, like intense social gatherings. I'll do it in the bathroom. I've used it before going on stage for talks, almost always before podcasts when I'm at Zoom at home.

And then. Because it gets you more relaxed.

Yeah, it kind of like, if there's a lot of, like, energy in my system that's like, let's say I'm nervous before, like an important interview, then it helps to, like, calm and ground the energy. And like you said, there's this sense of, like, expansiveness and lightness that is there so I can think more clearly and not be like, huh.

Yeah.

Because this feeling of like, her when the awareness is contracted is like, it's really hard to think clearly. Be productive, feel good. That constriction, like, is the opposite of what you're going for.

Yeah.

So these practices help to feel like, ah, I feel like I feel more useful. I feel good. I feel just like, relaxed.

Oh, that's great. This super vibes with my whole feel good productivity thing because, like, you know, it's like the evidence shows that when we're experiencing negative emotions, it constricts our attention and everything, which is occasionally useful if you're running from a tiger, but not normally helpful chronically.

Exactly.

And if we're feeling positive emotions, it expands our awareness and helps us be more creative and think outside the box and feel less stressed. And there's like, they've done studies where there's like measurable differences in people's heart rate, breathing rate, like physiological parameters by virtue of watching a nice film, a feel good movie clip rather than something that makes them feel bad. It's like, oh. So. Because people have often asked me like, okay, well, how do I actually do that if I have a day job or whatever, if I can't control my calendar? And I've never really had breathing exercises as part of my repertoire, but I can, I can feel the impact where it's like, oh, just doing this for a minute actually just makes me feel lighter and a bit more like.

Totally, totally. Yeah. Like, I love that. And the Feeling Good piece is the releasing of the constriction. Yeah, that's kind of what so much. It's like whatever you can do to get out of that. The constriction and what people think of. Going back to what we were talking about earlier, negative emotions. That is actually just us constricting against the emotion. In that state of like, I feel relaxed and at ease. It just passes through and it actually feels good.

Yeah.

So the feeling bad is the constriction. What enables us to feel good is just opening and like softening in. And these breathing practices, humming non sleep, deep breast, as well as a really powerful Huberman talks about it a lot.

How does that work?

So it's a form of Yoga Nidra, or it's like I have a 14 minute playlist where you lie down blindfold and you do a kind of guided body scan, different parts of the body and a progressive muscle relaxation exercise. And in 14 minutes you just feel rejuvenated, like recharged, re enlivened. And it also builds that interoceptive awareness. So it's like a good practice for working that as well.

I'll add that to my list of experiments to try out.

Great, amazing.

And we'll put a link in the video description and show notes wherever people are listening to this.

Yeah, cool.

Nice. Johnny, thank you so much. This has been wonderful. Final question is, I am about to turn 30 in a few days. Any advice?

Wow. Yeah. I would say my reflection of you, Ali, is someone who has really mastered a lot of things in the outer game, from building businesses to publishing a New York Times bestseller, to networking with incredible people. The invitation I would give you is what would it look like if you were to Master the inner game and the inner world. And yeah, what experiments can you run that would that might move you towards feeling good, feeling that sense of deep safety 95% of the time instead of 5% of the time sick.

That's a great question. Cool, thank you. Where can people learn more about you and the work that you do?

Yeah, so I run a course twice a year called Nervous system Mastery. I also have a self assessment which is@assessment.nsmastery.com which is probably the best way of getting a sense for a lot of the stuff we've been talking about. And also gauging your own benchmark for what is your interoception levels, what is your self regulation levels, what is your environment like and getting a concrete score with specific protocols that are tailored to the answer. So that's probably the best place that I direct people to is assessment. Nsmasthury.com Nice.

Oh, that's fun. I'll try that and we'll put it in the video. If we do a video about this thing. Nice. And on Twitter, website dupe like what's your thing?

Yeah, yeah. So Twitter. I'm JohnnyMiller. J o n n y m 1 l l e r Wish I could get the actual handle separate conversation. I also have a podcast called Curious Humans where our conversation might be coming out soon. And I have many conversations about the. I'd say that the inner game is kind of the theme of the podcast these days.

Lovely. Thank you very much.

Yeah, thank you. This has been so great.

Yeah, it's been so good. All right, that's a wrap. All right, so that's it for this week's episode of Deep Dive. Thank you so much for watching or listening. All the links and resources that we mentioned in the podcast are going to be linked down in the video description or in the show notes, depending on where you're watching or listening to this. If you're listening to this on a podcast platform, then do please leave us a review on the itunes store. It really helps other people discover the podcast. Or if you're watching this in full HD or 4K on YouTube, then you can leave a comment down below and ask any questions or any insights or any thoughts on about the episode. That would be awesome. And if you enjoyed this episode, you might like to check out this episode here as well, which links in with some of the stuff that we talked about in the episode. So thanks for watching. Do hit the subscribe button if you aren't already and I'll see you next time. Bye Bye.