Jonny Miller, a nervous-system coach, explains how to shift your mental state for better focus and mood. He introduces the RISE framework and practical techniques like Breath of Fire to upshift energy or co-regulation to calm down, with a concrete example of using these tools to finally do your taxes.
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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, Jo, Jr. Medic, Jr. 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, Johnny, 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're 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 earlier 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 whole shtick 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, you've 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 run right away. And that's quite kind of stressful. But it's a good stress to be in if you want to run away from a tiger. But if I'm trying to, I don't know, relax with my spouse or 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, that would be inappropriate for that moment. Is that fair to say?
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 has 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 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 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 priority 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. I've been procrastinating on it, 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 like, there's a lot of random shit that I'm going to have to email the accountants. I'm going to have to dig up the fricking, 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.
So in that state it sounds 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. Yeah, taxes is a tricky one because it's like no one kind of wants to do it. You kind of just have to sit down and get it done at some point.
Yeah, no, fair enough. My strategy around that is to I've got an hour on my calendar next week and I'm calling my admin party where I'm going to have some music in the background, I'm going to bring some friends over, we're all going to do our thing together. It's ways to make it feel good.
Yeah, cool. So 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 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.
