Jonny Miller: Nervous System Mastery - Cultivating Calm, Reducing Nervousness, Enhancing Resilience & More

What if nothing needed to change? Like, what if everything was was. What if I'm already whole? Essentially? Like, what if I'm not broken? And starting from that premise, there is a whole different conversation that unfolds from that place. And that's, I think that's the, the transition that I'm interested in helping people through. Because, you know, people can often they achieve some level of success, whether it's like financial or whether it's in their physical well being, but they still don't feel fully content or, you know, it doesn't give them everything that they thought it would, that success, however success was defined. And then it becomes a question of making that shift from kind of by me, like I am the author to through me, which is like life is. Life is coming through me. I'm not controlling as much. I'm kind of letting go of the steering wheel slightly.

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My guest today is Johnny Miller he's the founder of Nervous System Mastery, a course that has helped a thousand plus high performing humans from all walks of life cultivate calm, reduce nervousness, enhance resilience and elevate their sense of aliveness. Johnny, how are you? So nice to see you.

It's wonderful to be here. Yeah, I'm excited for this conversation.

I told you that so many people in my life mentioned your name and I thought that this conversation was meant to be, it had to happen. So Paul Miller and Tom Morgan that were on the show and they're good friends, put up your name and I thought, I have to talk to Johnny. And then you shared with me quite a bit about the work that you do. And I was really excited and looking forward to this conversation. So I want to jump right in and you know that I have more questions than we have time, so let's do it. I want to ask you about the early days. You might know that already. I asked about childhood and upbringing and how you think that time shaped you.

Yeah, I like to start my podcast with the same question, actually. I think for me I was, I was very much into like fantasy stories, reading the wizard of Earthsea Adventure. I played a lot of sports as a kid and I think I was really, I was really curious. Like, I was kind of like fascinated by the world, you know, asking why a thousand times, as kids are prone to do. And I think I had a really tough time during school. I went to a kind of private school and it was very, very strict, very regimented. And I felt that like life force and aliveness in me get somewhat stifled. And you know, you're rewarded for giving correct answers as opposed to asking interesting questions. And so I think I was shaped to some degree by that. But I still kept this like this love of adventure and this deep desire to see the world, which as soon as I left school I, I kind of pursued. And I spent 11 months traveling around the world in Southeast Asia and Australia and Sri Lanka and places like that. And that, that experience really shaped me. Like it was really travel that I think opened up my, like stretched my mind beyond its kind of quite narrow limitations. So I think that's, that's kind of what comes, comes to mind. And I never left my or I never lost my fascination with like mystery and fantasy and adventure and curiosity.

When I'm listening to you, I'm thinking that formal education might get in the way of the curiosity and the way we want to experience the world. And I remember I would pick up books that were not at school that I was curious about, and I had an obsession with Egypt, snakes and the World Geographies. I would have maps in front of me, and it didn't really fit in the school schedule because they had different things they wanted to teach us at that point. But you could leave me with a book about Egypt, and I was a happy kid. So I think we hear those voices and we pursue those things, and then you have to fit in into this organized system that might not be on the same page for quite a while. And then you left school. And I remember leaving school and finally reading books. I wanted to read, but never had time to read. And to me, the underlying force behind it all is understanding. I just wanted to make sense of things. And even this podcast I'm trying to understand. You know, there are questions I have, but I'm really trying to understand both our human experience. Some of the conversations are very technical, so the investment side. But all about it, it's really people, people behind it all. So related to that. I want to ask you how you found your way to the work that you do.

Yeah. So I also want to kind of touch on the maps piece as well, because that was a huge fascination of mine, particularly maps from the 15th or 16th century where we hadn't quite figured everything out. There were still these big hippie dragons, terra incognita, kind of spots on the maps. And I think something about that kind of the unknown frontiers was very alluring to me. And also the same with. In the wizard of Earthsea, the first two pages are these very detailed fantasy maps about a world that doesn't exist outside of the imagination. So I think I was very captured by that. And my. The first six years of my, I guess, like, career was building a startup called Mapsia, where we tried to create the most inspirational map in the world. And I think that shapes like that was. That allowed me to pursue my love of travel and curiosity about the. The outer world. And then in 2017, I had a very experienced a very tragic loss in that my. My former fiance had bipolar and she had an anxiety attack and she ended up taking her own life when I wasn't, I wasn't around. I was in Portugal at the time. And that. That experience really turned my world upside down. It's kind of obliterated both, you know, the relationship, but also like the, the. The dream of a future that, you know, we were going to have kids, we were going to like, you know, buy a house together and all of that. And I think that experience of grief and Loss, really. I mean, it was a very. It was just a huge inflection point for my life. And it led to, I think, that curiosity about the external maps and the outer maps kind of getting turned inward. And I started to see the enormous terra incognito. That was my own kind of internal experience, my own internal landscape became the new territory that I was curious to explore. And I think that I. I also knew that growing up in England, I was, let's say, like, not very emotionally literate. Like, British people aren't known for having a, you know, full spectrum of their expression, of their emot. And there was also a fear in me as well, that if I didn't allow myself to move through and feel the grief, that I would end up like some of the, like, older people that I'd met who'd experienced loss but hadn't really clearly hadn't processed it. And there was this, like, dullness and kind of like lack of life force in them that I was, I guess, afraid of becoming if I didn't learn how to feel the grief.

There's so much that you shared. My first thought was, what was your first step in finding your way to your emotions?

Choosing to turn towards them, choosing to lean in and explore. Even though I knew it would be really hard.

There's this idea that we can outrun the discomfort, the pain. We can somehow get away from it. And there are moments when we realize facing it might be more helpful because maybe the monster is not as big as we thought, first of all. And second, how can you address the monster if you're running the other way? But, you know, there's more to it, and I'm no expert, just from my own experience, I realized that there are certain things that are not worth running away from, and it's maybe better just to face them. I have so many questions, but I want to ask you about the nervous system operation manual that you talk about. Can you introduce us to some of the building blocks that go into it? Where do we start and how does it help?

Totally. So I guess there's a bit of context. I realized that the human nervous system was in a way, the central thread for all of the modalities, you know, breath work, meditation, inner exploration that I was curious about. And that there was also, you know, a lot of science behind it as well. And so for me, the nervous system is the lens through which we experience our lives. And we can also. We have some that many people, I think, grow up feeling like they are victims of their nervous system state to some degree, like they find themselves in some forms of reactivity or anger or shutdown or collapse. And that there are a series of kind of empowering practices that allow us to reclaim agency over our internal state. And so that's what I think of as a nervous system operating manual. I view it as really like skill acquisition. And I think there's three buckets of skills, broadly speaking, that kind of go towards nervous system mastery or kind of like mastering this, this operating manual. And those three skills are. The first one is interoception, which is essentially how aware of your internal state are you, moment to moment. Somatic awareness is another way to put that. The second is capacity or self regulation. So this is to what degree can you remain grounded, present with whatever is happening in your internal, external state? And then the third, which frankly takes a lifetime to master, is, I call it emotional fluidity. It's essentially to what degree can you welcome and not resist whatever emotions are arising in your experience. And so those three kind of somewhat separate skills, I think, can be combined to create this nervous system operating manual. And then of course, the skill becomes which practice is appropriate for which moment. And there's a whole, yeah, I guess, like, methodology around that.

I'll come back to all the pieces, but I wanted to ask you about something that really struck a chord with me when I was reading some of your writing. You say how we can't make decisions without emotions. Can you talk more about it? I've heard it before and it really resonated with me. But, you know, coming from the investment profession, I manage money for wealthy families and I've been doing it for 20 years. And the idea is that you can be so rational, and being rational is the best way to go. I've learned that there's more to it, and you have to listen to your own emotions. And if you have clients, you have to listen and be aware of their emotions. So I'm curious about how you look at it. Decision making and emotions.

Yeah. So there's two things I want to share here. The first is, well, this is really pulling from the work of Antonio Damasio, who had a very famous kind of landmark study where he had a patient who, due to a tragic injury, lost his capacity to feel his emotions. And this, this patient, this client of his went from being successful in business, married, you know, very successful in many areas, to being unable to make even the most basic decisions. He couldn't even choose what color pencil to use to fill out some of these forms, or what to have for Lunch and his marriage dissolves, his business went under. And dimasio used this to illustrate the fact that our brains are essentially prediction making machines. And emotions are an enormous part of that. We make decisions based on what we think will help us feel good in the future. And so how this relates to, let's say, investment decisions or decisions about who to marry, things like that, if we are afraid to feel a certain emotion that will bias us and skew our decision making. And ironically, by avoiding, let's say the emotion is disappointment. By deciding, making decisions in a way that we want to avoid disappointment, the. The world will usually conspire to like, hit us with that disappointment in like, a way that we, that we often didn't want. And so I think there's a direct relationship between our emotional fluidity and our capacity for truly lucid decision making.

You know, when, when you study finance and business and accounting and investing at school, they make it sound like it's, you're operating in a vacuum with no humans. Even some of the hypotheses assume that we're all equal. We're making decisions with the equal mindset, with the equal needs, with all of those things equal. Now you go to the real world and you sit down with a real client and you realize they have certain fears that might have started when they're five. They might be acting in a certain way because of something that happened when they were a teenager. They might be even having a relationship with the money they inherited because of the father, grandfather, grandmother, and on and on and on. Not being aware of emotions, I feel like you're depriving yourself of a whole vocabulary and a whole, you know, map, as you said earlier, to navigate this new territory. Right. It's like you, you're going blindfolded if you don't pay attention to the emotions that go into it and say, you know, it's a scientific experiment, human emotions don't matter. It doesn't work that way. Until to me, it was fascinating that you actually have to pay attention to your own emotions. And if you're working with somebody else, to their emotions. Johnny related to that, you introduce a concept that really made me pause and think. You call it emotional debt, and you tell us we can pay it off. What is emotional debt? How do we pay it off?

Yeah. So how do I describe this in a, in a very simple kind of simple terminology? Emotional debt is what we accumulate when some kind of intensity arises in our experience and the emotion doesn't get completed. So you can see this with, with animals in the wild, there's a great video of an impala that is chased by a lion, and it like, just escapes from the lion's jaws. And it, after this, a few minutes after, it crouches under the bush and it starts shaking. And that shaking is its way of completing that emotional cycle. When we, for whatever reason, if we don't feel safe or we're too busy, then we have an incredible human capacity to buffer our emotional responses for later. And this is essential. I think it's very, very useful that we can do this. And in the same way that if you're building a startup, it's, you know, good to be scrappy in the beginning and maybe you accumulate some technical debt, but at a certain point, if you don't pay off the technical debt, then the whole system becomes fragile. And it's the same with human nervous systems. And there's actually a really interesting emerging field of neuroscience being pioneered by this guy, Michael Edward Johnson, and he, he believes that, or his thesis shares that trauma essentially is stored in the smooth muscle tissue via what's known as latches. And I believe the accumulation of these latches, which are essentially like tension patterns in our. In our body, create this sense of emotional debt. And when we have more emotional debt than our system can handle, we're much more reactive, we're much more fragile, we're more prone to burnout, we're more prone to outbursts of anger. And the way to pay it off is essentially creating sufficient safety to go back and really relive some of those experiences. And I, I work as a, as a. As a breathwork facilitator. And you can see I did a session with a guy last week, and he was, he was a former kickboxer, and his body was reliving some of the, some of the same experiences he had during those kickboxing matches. It was like, it was wild. He wasn't doing it consciously, but his body had remembered those patterns and was unfold. So I was, I was trying to, like, pin him down. His body was replaying these experiences. And we all have some degree of emotional debt, I believe, as humans. But it's very useful to be. I think it's a very useful concept and to really set aside time for processing. And let's say we have a stressful experience. Maybe it's like a car crash or, or surgery or something. Allowing the body to complete that in a way is, Is a really helpful skill.

I love that idea of emotional debt just as a way to explain something that's happening and as in financial debt, I'm guessing you have short term and long term debt, debt that's been around for a while, and debt that you just collected. And just as a personal example, I'll share with you how I remember March 2020 and the market was falling down and I was taking calls from clients and I'm the patient, calm person and presence in their life and that's the role I play and I help them through this period. But I realized that I'm collecting a little bit of whatever they brought to the call with every single interaction. And there was a point in mid March, I think, where I wasn't well, my sleeping, my stomach didn't feel well, I wasn't, I didn't have appetite. But on the surface I thought, I'm fine. And I realized I have to rethink how I'm going to process this because I would take a difficult call, you know, once every year. But then taking a difficult call, difficult in the sense that they were going through so much, they wanted somebody to just listen. Right. In that sense, difficult. But if I was taking a handful of those before lunch and a handful of those after lunch, there's a physical limit to how much the body can carry. So my wife and I would go on longer bike rides or longer walks. I felt like I just have to take a step away because I can't serve my clients as well if I'm the one that's not even physically performing or feeling well. I can't. So I have to find a way to release and pay off this kind of emotional debt as I go. So that was quite a lesson for me. And reading this, this is just one of a million examples. I'm sure this, you know, long term debt that people accumulate when it comes to many things in life, including money. I want to ask you about something that you brought up earlier and you call it flexing the interoceptive muscle or interoceptive, you correct me, how to pronounce it? How do we flex that muscle and how does it help us?

Beautiful. I just want to briefly comment on the story that you shared in that. My, my, my sense, my theory is that when folks like yourself are coaching clients, you're in some ways you're like loaning them nervous system capacity. That's kind of the working and it's the same with, you know, with therapy as well. And you're absolutely right. Like, you're like, if you're not coming from a kind of place where it feels like you have a full cup, it will Drain you as well. I just want to mention that. And in terms of flexing interoceptive capacity. Yeah, I mean, I, I like the frame of taking curiosity and just getting really interested in your. In your internal experience. And there's actually kind of in from the finance world, there's a great book called the Hour Between Wolf and Dog. And the author, John Coates, essentially he kind of runs and ran some studies and showed that traders who had a higher interoceptive capacity, and I believe this was measured by how well they could feel their own heartbeats and some other measures as well, that they actually made far better trading decisions than those who had higher IQs or went to better schools. And that interoceptive capacity was, I think he said, like the single best predictor of their performance as a trader, which is fascinating. I find that really, really interesting. And essentially the way that I like to teach it in the beginning, I have an acronym called ape, which stands for awareness, posture, emotion, or sensation. And just tuning in, you know, minimum. At the beginning of your day, maybe when you sit down and have a cup of tea, like, what is the state of your awareness? Does it feel contracted? Does it feel expanded? How is your posture? And then what sensations are you aware of internally? It could be. Could be, oh, I'm hungry. It could be, oh, I feel tight. It could be, I feel tired. What's the. What's the mood? What's the tone? It's like a. Like an internal weather report is maybe another way to put it.

I think we. We live in the world and. And maybe it's just me that that's so fast that we don't even have moments like that. And you have to go out of your way to create moments like that. And in a way, the pandemic for me was it was such a saturated, condensed experience in such a short period of time that it. It made me rethink the way I process. As you mentioned, you know, when you work with people, you loan out that capacity to other people and they appreciate that they need it. But then you have to go back and recharge and find a way to recharge it. And then you talk about that muscle. I think the more we look inside and we pay attention, the better we get at it. But it's an. It's an acquired skill and it's not taught at school. And I think it can come. And I'm curious how you look at it in moments of crisis where you feel like, I just can't handle it. I have to find a better way to deal with it. I wonder if there's a way to go about developing it before the crisis, so to speak.

I mean, if you find out what that is, I would love to know. Because my sense is I have this, this model of feather brick dump truck. And for some people it does only take like a feather before they kind of pay more attention internally. For others, it's a brick. Maybe it's like a breakup, maybe it's they lose their job or it's a dump truck. Maybe it's like, you know, like a friend. Paul had Lyme disease. It could be a health crisis. Or Tom Morgan had a four year dark night of the soul experience. And so I think that to some degree, some amount of suffering I think is usually often required in order to really get people to pay attention and to go inwards. Yeah, I wish that there was another. I wish that it wasn't the case. But I think often that's just the way that humans work.

You would think that it's like with the whole medical profession in general, we would think about prevention first right before we treat things. But in many systems we set up the solutions once we have the problem instead of thinking how can we avoid the problem to begin with. I think there's a bigger topic and bigger thought there.

I mean it certainly could be taught, I would say, like at schools, you know, if say interoceptive awareness was taught as part of, you know, other subjects. I think it's, it would make life a lot easier later on for sure.

Very much so. I think my experience was, and I'm guessing other people too, that in the early years, in your 20s, you're doing a lot of things that are not sustainable in terms of even your work and life set up. Instead of not using the word balance here it's not balanced for many years and you feel like you can get away with it. And then you realize maybe that's not sustainable. But in those years we say yes to so many things and we feel like we'll pay the debt later. And then it catches up with you and you feel, figure out, if I want to be doing this for 50 years, I need a different system in place. Right. Five years, it's a different conversation. But 50 years, it's a different conversation. I want to ask you about a big picture idea. You talk about personal development, how it's going from control based to unfolding based from, by me to through me.

Borrowing a framework from the conscious leadership group clg. And I think it's a really fascinating lens for Human development. And their model is you can imagine a four part quadrant where it starts with to me, by me, through me and then as me. And their sense is that most people, let's say maybe like 80% of the population are in the to me quadrant, which essentially means that personal development for them is escaping victim mindset to some degree. So, and you can look at say like, I think David Goggins is a good example of someone who is very much like the archetype of like empowerment, of like you can use brute force and willpower to go from being a victim to kind of taking control over your life. Even Huberman protocols I think is also somewhat control based and that's incredibly popular in the mainstream and it's very helpful for people who feel like they have no control or agency in their life to I can wake up in 4am and I can like blast through my limitations, etc. Etc. And I think those control based personal development philosophies have a limit and a breaking point as well. And from there there are. One of my favorite examples is Steve March from Alethea, who you should really have on this podcast. He's amazing and his he describes the distinction between self improvement versus self unfoldment and self improvement is the everything I just mentioned kind of like the David Goggins jocko willing kind of archetype. And self unfoldment is asking the radical question of what if, what if nothing needed to change? Like what if everything was what if I'm already whole? Essentially like what if I'm not broken? And starting from that premise, there is a whole different conversation that unfolds from that place. And that's, I think that's the transition that I'm interested in helping people through. Because you know, people can often they achieve some level of success, whether it's like financial or whether it's in their physical well being, but they still don't feel fully content or you know, it doesn't give them everything that they thought it would. That success, however success was defined. And then it becomes a question of yeah, I think making that shift from kind of by me, like I am the author to through me, which is like life is life is coming through me. I'm not controlling as much. I'm kind of letting go of the steering wheel slightly.

When I'm listening to you, I'm thinking how we ask a question and we take the first answer and then we could ask more questions and get deeper. Just a quick thought that I had was about financial independence, just as an example that people think that they reach a certain number, net worth, and then everything will be fine. And I had Jordan Grummet, who was a hospice doctor, who was a financial independence expert, but who also worked with people close to the end of their life and got to talk to them and learn from them, and wrote a book about purpose. And he mentioned to me something that really resonated with me, given the work that I do with people with financial means, how if you make that number your goal and you make all those compromises, sacrifices even to get there, it. It kind of hides all the other issues and you feel like money is the only problem. Let me solve the money problem. And you get there and you realize, no, there are new problems that come with that money. First of all, I mean, I'm worried I'm going to lose it. I'm worried if it's invested properly, I'm worried if the right person is investing it for me. And on and on and on. And then all the other things that you put aside, they come to the surface because you can finally worry about them because you've been worried about money. And I thought it's very interesting because money is just one example, but if you can ask more questions. And I like what you said, that you're whole as you are, that idea that you don't have to change anything. And for a moment, like, just think about it. And also it's a bigger question. I've been thinking about the things we do in our life. If you ask yourself, why do you really do it? And we are all very creative of the answer, I love this, I love that. But then you say, actually, I thought that's what would make my dad happy, or I think that's what would make my grandpa proud. And then you take those things away and you say, well, let's assume you're not going to do that. What else is left? What else is left? What else is left? And it's a scary thought because you realize a couple of things. One of them is that how much you're doing because other people. For other people, right? Because other people told you this is something you should be doing. Even a teacher told you you're really good with numbers, right? And then it stays with you. And then you end up teaching math or, you know, I don't know, becoming a, you know, software engineer. But if you take all of those things away and you ask, what do you want? I think it's a scary question to ask, but that's been on my mind. If you take all of those things away. Do you have some thoughts about it?

Yeah, I definitely do. I mean, I think money is a great example because my perspective is that we project our desired feelings or states onto money. So money becomes a projection for if I have enough money I will feel safe, or if I have enough money, I will feel respected. And I think it's really interesting if you almost like inverse that and, and ask, you know, oh, it seems like I want to feel safe, like what else can I do to feel deeply safe, regardless of whatever number is in my bank account or my investment account. And I think at a very bare minimum, getting honest about what is the feeling that having X number of dollars in the bank account do we think will it will give us. And then maybe brainstorming, like what other strategies could I explore to feel that way? Because that's I think, what we're ultimately seeking. Kind of going back to the brain as a prediction making machine. Like we make a prediction that If I have $10 million in the bank, I will feel X. And like finding other ways to feel X intrinsically without needing that could, you know, probably save people a lot of time and heartbreak. But then the heartbreak is also part of what breaks us open into growing. So it's, it's interesting.

Money is such a fascinating concept and the more I spent around conversations around money, the, the more questions I have and the fewer firm, firm answers I have than I thought before. And it's, it's such a personal experience and, and it's just one experience impression of, you know, who we are and what we're about. But we put a lot of weight on it. And I think there is a certain duality to it when we aspire to have it. We only look at the positive things, the desirable things. We forget about all that comes with it that we might not want. But that's, that's a whole open ended topic that I'm fascinated with. I want to ask you about David White. You've been running into him. You had him on your podcast and he's been a great influence on you from what I can tell. Can you introduce the audience to him and his work?

Absolutely, yeah. I, I very spontaneously ran into him in a co working space in Costa Rica last week and I, I hadn't seen him for gosh, like six years. I, I went on one of his poetry walking tours in, on the west coast of Ireland. This was kind of less than a year into my grieving journey. And his poetry, it really was exactly what I needed at that point in Time. And I'd never had any interest in poetry prior to discovering his work. And I think if I was to introduce him, he is a philosopher poet, I would say. He thinks deeply about life and about what it means to be human. And he has a almost mystical ability to articulate that. The first book of his I read was called the Three Marriages, which I actually gave my copy to our mutual friend Paul Millard in Portland. And inside that book with all of my kind of, like, scribbles and underlines, one of the phrases was the pathless path, which then, you know, became kind of Paul's book and. And path. But I. I view him as someone who is able to. And I think all good writing does this. But he articulates internal experiences that I have in a way that is unlike any other writer that I. That I've come across. And he also has a way of. If you listen to him speak, it's almost like he's casting a spell with his words. There's this way in which he, like, casts this net of, like, rapturous attention, particularly in person, but also just listening to an audio conversation with him. And. Yeah, my. My third ever podcast was with him in on the west coast of Ireland. And I feel like my podcasting career peaks on episode three. But I just have, like, enormous gratitude for his writing. And so for listeners wanting to get into his work, I'd recommend either the Three Marriages or the book Consolations, which is this kind of collection of everyday words defined in a very unusual but beautiful poetic ways.

I listened to that episode you recorded with him in person. Am I right? Was it at his home?

It was on the west coast of Ireland. After this.

This walking tour, there was a fireplace involved.

Yeah. And Scotch. And it was just like a dream scenario.

I can only imagine. I mean, I love those conversations and I love the ease of setting up, you know, virtual recordings, but I can only imagine that in person, especially with somebody like him in this setting at that time, I think might have been, you know, just a unique way, way of capturing the moment and the experience that you two had and the conversation that you had. And speaking of pathless Path, I'll ask you about Paul in a second. I'm very curious about staying calm. And you write about it, talk about it. It's. It's part of the work that you do. Could you share a bit more how. How you go about finding calm and you have some practices and advice around it?

Yeah, sure. So I think it's. There's two things to say here. Well, actually many more than that.

But.

There are essentially three buckets of strategies that I teach. The first bucket is top down approaches, the second is bottom up, and the third is outside in. Top down approaches for cultivating calm would be things like reframing the situation or positive affirmative affirmations or traditional mindfulness, kind of using the mind to rewrite the story about what is happening. So we kind of downshift our stress levels. Those are very common in the world. I think the second category of bottom up is probably the most interesting and the most effective. And this is essentially leveraging our biology, particularly through the breath, but other forms too, to activate our parasympathetic nervous system and calm down. And this, let's say, kind of use the example of humming is very effective. Or breathing in a way where the exhale is twice as long as the inhale. So you could inhale for four, hold for four, exhale for eight, as an example. And that activates the parasympathetic nervous system, stimulates vagal tone, which then has a cascading effect on the, on our blood chemistry, on our endocrine system. And that leads to having karma thoughts, kind of karma stories. And so I think that that for me, that kind of like bucket of practices is just incredibly effective. Outside in is changing, changing your environment or kind of creating the conditions for calm to arise naturally. So maybe it's dimmer lighting or a smell that you. That kind of relaxes you, like lavender or something. The second thing that I want to mention there is, there is also a trap that I call the self regulation paradox, where these practices are, let's. Let's say a humming practice is fantastic. And at the same time, if you use it every time an emotion arises to kind of self regulate away the emotion, then you're essentially kind of creating more of that emotional debt over time. So it's really about kind of skillfully knowing when to do that type of practice and when to allow yourself to feel whatever is arising. Because I mean, breath work practices are, I would say, a significant improvement from using alcohol or caffeine to regulate your state kind of up and down. But at the same time they can still be used as a way to avoid our feelings, which is ultimately kind of going back to the beginning of this conversation. Turning towards that is what I think nervous system mastery is about ultimately. But in the short term, they can be incredibly effective. You know, if you're about to give a speech or about to go on stage, or about to have a difficult conversation, or even before a Podcast or client call. They can be really, really helpful for grounding whatever intensity you're feeling and staying present, staying with your interoceptive sensations and not checking out.

Before this episode, I was on the floor doing yoga stretches and just closing my eyes and staring, staring at the ceiling for a second, and I just wanted to ground myself. You know, you run through the day, there are things happening, and I. I thought for this conversation, I really want to be here. And you have to take a moment out of your day to really stop and pause. When I was listening to you, I was thinking about thoughts, emotions, and body. Just to simplify it for a second, you could be sitting or you're in your bed, it's late at night, you have a thought. I just realized I was supposed to send this one thing and I didn't. And. And the emotions come up. Whoever was supposed to receive that email will be really upset they didn't get it before the end of the day. And I can hear my heartbeat go up and I can hear my breath speed up and my whole body responds. Isn't it funny how it's all connected and it just started with one simple thought? And then I realized, wait a second, I did send it. The emotions go away, the body comes down and I fall asleep. Right? And we do it to ourselves again and again and again, don't we?

Yeah. And there the. I think the real ninja move is to really notice the sensations. Where I find people can get stuck is they. They will loop in the stories about whatever the thing means, as opposed to actually acknowledging and feeling the sensation. And often I find that if I notice, I mean, let's say that I was 10 minutes late for this podcast episode, maybe that would show up as a tightness in my chest as well as the story of, oh, I'm going to look really bad, and that's like, how embarrassing. And the conversation is going to be terrible. But if I can just acknowledge the tightness and just soften and relax into that, then the stories kind of fall away as well. It's almost like our minds are like kind of PR teams just, like confabulating in real time about what is happening and telling a compelling story that we think is the reason. But actually the stories are secondary to.

Our embodied experience and it feeds on itself. You know, I'm so, so upset in the moment. Then the story gets even bigger and the emotions kick in, and then, I mean, it's going to be a bigger deal than I thought. And then it escalates. You bring up something in Your writing that really struck a chord with me. And I'll tell you in a minute why you say that. We could look at our day, our life as a video game and you have this image of, you know, energy units that we have and we go through the day and the units go down and down and down in different pace. What are some of the cheat codes to get through that video game?

Yeah, I mean the cheat codes are the three things that I just mentioned earlier around interceptive awareness. Because without that you're not going to be able to see your dashboard. That's like seeing how many hearts you have or what your XP meter is. The second is knowing practices that can restore, restore or recharge your heart meter. So one of my favorites that I teach a lot in the course is NSTR or Non Sleep Deep Rest. And this is also known as Yoga Nidra. And this is kind of like a 15 to 20 minute guided body scan that is just incredibly rejuvenating. Flushes cortisol improves that interoception. It's a great, great way to train interoception actually. And I just like on the other side of that I feel like, yeah, like my heart meter has like doubled in, in terms of energy that I have. And then, you know, we can also increase our capacity over time. So there's this, this concept of eustress, which is essentially like we are designed to go through stressful experiences. The challenge is when we're always in a stressed state and we're not able to downshift effectively. If we, we go through a short term intensity, we then recover the next morning the same as if we're like doing bicep curls. Like it'll be intense at the time, but as long as there's sufficient recovery, then your biceps will be slightly stronger the next day. It's the same with the neuroplasticity of our nervous system. Like if we kind of go through stress and then we recover, downshift the next day, we will have a little bit more capacity.

You're touching on so many fascinating things. So let me start in the middle. Do you ever imagine or feel that you, you wake up in the morning or going through the early day and you feel like you will not have the energy to finish this day? Do you have those feelings at, at some point?

Yeah. I mean, honestly, like right now, I, I tweaked my back yesterday after a motorbike ride and yesterday was really challenging for me. I was in like a huge amount of pain for most of the day and it felt, it, you know, it felt like my capacity went from having 10 hearts to like two hearts. And so I was having to take way more breaks throughout the day and just taking on fewer things and lying down every, you know, 45 minutes. It was actually quite, quite humbling.

Are you feeling better today?

A little bit, yeah. It's still, it's still noticeable, but you're.

Very aware of it and you know how many hearts you have for the day. It's very empowering to think that way. Right. So you're not booking your day for six hearts if you have two hearts or not for 15 hearts if you have only nine. And, and I think many of us don't really have that kind of control, for lack of a better word, over our day and other people schedule the day for us. It's no longer the case for me, but there was definitely a point where I just didn't know when my day will end because somebody else was in charge of my day and then, you know, somebody scheduling a 6pm meeting. I'm not the same person that I was at 9am at 6pm before was a big day. I mean, not gonna lie to you. So you gotta only get as much at 6:00pm Well, I think, yeah, I.

Mean, I think that's such a wise point. And then to the degree that you're able to like set setting boundaries, I mean, if you know that about yourself, to the degree that you can tell your boss or your, or your colleague or your co worker of like, if it's an absolute emergency, then yes, I will. But generally speaking, this, by only taking calls from X hours during the day, I will be a much more effective employee or whatever it is in the long run. And my experience is that people respect that a lot when those are shared. I'm sure it depends on the working culture, but I think getting clear of what your personal boundaries are. For me, I usually try to take calls between like 2 to 4pm like that's my creative time is in the morning, I have a break for lunch and then social time and calls in the afternoon. And that generally is a really good flow for me. But again, it requires, as you were just speaking to, tuning in and being like, oh, when do I feel like I have the most energy and capacity? And then when does my energy naturally drain? What can I do to recharge it? And yeah, it's really just, I think maybe kind of the meta point here that I want to share is that running and designing experiments for your life and not just doing something because you or I say that it's good, but to kind of run these tests and see for yourself, like how do I feel? Tune in before, run the test, tune in afterwards. Do I feel better? Do I feel worse? Would I take do it again? Would I change the experiment? And that iterative process is really what creates transformation in the long term.

It's fascinating because I know a lot more about how I operate now than when I was 20. And you know, at 20 you just go, go, go. And then you realize and you mentioned like different peaks of the day that we all have and we're all different. And I can tell that this is my good hour, this is not my best hour. I can still show up, you want to see me, but it's not my best hour. But just being so aware of it and then I feel like time is non not linear to me. A five minute call that's really difficult can drain a lot more hearts than spending three hours going deep and doing some research about an investment I'm considering. And I even walk away with an extra heart from that because I get excited about where this is going to take me. But than a five minute call that derailed me for a bit. Right. It's funny how that works. It's not units, the units are not linear in that sense. It's not one to one.

And it's also people as well. I mean I notice how some of my coaching clients, I feel more energized afterwards. It's like the conversation recharges me. I'm feeling that so far in this conversation and others more draining. And so it's like the people, the environments, the types of work, the style of working, how much context switching is happening, how much multitasking. I think these are all great questions to be asking.

The context switching is a fascinating concept. I love uninterrupted blocks of time and I can't do better work if I don't have three, four hours when nothing is happening. I can just go in and do things and it's very important for me and I can create more of those now in the second half of my 20 year career than I could in the first half. But it's something that I think we don't appreciate enough. We think that we can work on something for five minutes and switch to the next and switch to the next. We can't. And I don't have to convince people, there are people that have done studies and research about it, but we can't. Johnny, I want to ask you about Paul Millard how did your paths cross? And tell me about the overlaps that you've had? And Paul was a wonderful guest on the show and I'd love the audience to have a chance to get to know him more.

Yeah, I mean, Paul is a dear friend. We first met at a conference in Portland where we were both, I would say, very early on in our pathless path careers. I had just finished teaching entrepreneurship in London. I kind of had like left the world of startups and I think we were both, we bonded over the fact that we didn't know what the hell we were doing with our lives. I think we were both in these, like, in this very liminal space of trying to figure out what did meaningful work look like to us. We both knew that there were kind of like default scripts about success, about work that we no longer wanted to follow, but we hadn't quite figured out what the new, what the new scripts were. And so I think we just felt a great, like a high degree of camaraderie in that exploration. And honestly, having friends like Paul on the path is just, it's just essential because you don't feel like you're the only crazy person or, or you don't feel like you're the only person that doesn't have like a five year plan or like, you know, we were both leaving a significant amount of like money on the table in a sense that we, you know, we could have been earning a lot more if that was our priority, but it wasn't. I think we were both driven by something deeper. And honestly, I think David White was also someone who kind of brought us together through his work and through his ideas. We spent a lot of time talking about the book and what experiments we were trying and how we were thinking about cobbling together a living and making money. Yeah, so I'd say we're just like, like pathless path buddies.

I think on a, on a human experience level it's fascinating and I see it with my clients too, how sometimes you might think that you're the only one facing a certain challenge. It never happened to anybody else before. I'm the first one and then here I go, I have to figure it out. And then working with somebody, you realize now there are other people facing a very similar story that rhymes. And maybe they already have a solution, maybe they nobody who know somebody who has a solution and we can tap into it. So that's obviously the camaraderie that you talk about, but also the resources that you can have because somebody has already done it. And is facing something similar and making sure choices and you can, you can tap into it and learn from it. So Johnny, you share a certain quote that you know I'm going to ask about. You said in 2020 you attempted to spend 10 days inside a dark room on the Oaxacan coast to explore darkness, technology and live without light for 240 hours. I'm dying to hear about.

Well, this is maybe an example of something that I wanted to experiment for myself that was very much not on the default path.

Right.

So I'd been exploring meditation quite kind of deeply in the years previous. I'd just done a ten day silent meditation retreat and this meditation center that I was at in Mizunte in Oaxaca had a dark room which I was fascinated by. And I was particularly fascinated after reading it was a paper by Mantak Chia who talks about how DMT is released from the pineal gland after between six to nine days in complete darkness because the melatonin turns into something which I can't remember, which then turns into dmt. And so I was like, like, like what would, what would that be like? And I, you know, I'd read stories of monastics and monks that spent long periods of time meditating in caves and there was, yeah, it just fascinated me and I was just very curious basically. And so I went in. It was a 10 day, a 10 day stint. Even the way that the room is constructed is very interesting. There's a, a two way kind of box that they put food in so you get fed twice a day. The outside gets opened and then closed, closed with Velcro so no light gets through and then you open from the inside. But like you have to eat with your hands. You can't even see the food. Even like basic things like brushing your teeth at night. Like I ended up putting the toothpaste inside my mouth instead of on the toothbrush because I couldn't see the toothbrush. And I still do that to this day. But it ended up being a just a very deep series of meditation experiences. I remember there was one day where it felt like a smile kind of came to my face for no reason at all. And I ended up feeling ecstatically happy and blissful and joyful for really no good reason. And I've since learned that this is what's known as a jhana state. But the, the experience of feeling deep, deep, deep joy, almost like rapture for no apparent reason, like there wasn't a thing happening that led me to feel it just arose was I think, very Insightful in the sense of helping me to realize that I don't. I don't need the world to be. I don't need to achieve anything. I didn't need the world to be a certain way for me to feel as good as if I'm on some dose of MDMA or whatever the substance is. So I think that was. That was really powerful for me. And I think maybe more than anything, I really enjoyed it. I actually enjoyed the company of my own mind and I enjoyed the process of. There was some relief for sure, coming out on the other side and seeing light for the first time. And that appreciation of. They actually let you out at 6am at sunrise. And my now wife, Kelly walked me down to the beach and saw like a beautiful sunrise when I opened my eyes, which was a very memorable moment. But, yeah, it was. It was a great experience and also just deeply rejuvenating. I mean, particularly the first couple of days. I think I slept a lot for probably the first 48 hours. And I felt very. Just deeply nourished on the other side of it as well.

I'm thinking of sensory deprivation, and there are different ways to go about it, and I know people that practice it, but in general, the idea of filtering things out, like in my world, I don't read the daily news. I don't even even check where the stock market is today. I'm buying stakes in businesses I want to hold for many years. I don't really care about the daily noise. But if you can take all of those distractions away, something more valuable stays and you took it to the whole next level where you couldn't even see the world around you. And I feel like your mind has to be looking for something worth focusing on if you're not distracted with anything else. And I know that people go in the salty water and they're. They're deprived of their. The sense of, you know, being in the body because they're just floating around. I love floating in the ocean. I love the ocean. I love the water. We'll talk about surfing in a second. And so I know that when you let the mind focus on something else than just your physical experience of sitting in a chair and staring at a. I don't know, a wall or a TV screen or a computer screen, your mind has to be looking for something more important and valuable to consider. That's how I imagine what you are going through. And I think fascinating things can come up. I don't even know where you took it. And I'm curious if you sat down and wrote down what happened to you right after. But I'm sure things happened.

Yeah, I mean, my sense actually is that the more that our bodies feel like deeply safe, a phrase that I love, is this idea of secure attachment, but with reality. So in the way that you can be securely attached in relationships, can you be securely attached to life? And you know, when you're floating in salt water or when you have like sensory deprivation, I think there is like an even deeper sense of deep rest and relaxation that can happen. And the more that that happens, the more I think a natural intrinsic, like feeling good tends to arise. And actually it's kind of going back to what we were talking about earlier. It's the latches, the kind of the contractions, the tensions, these compensatory patterns that are defending us in the some way from, from those things often due to prior life experiences. And when they can, when they feel safe enough to open and release, there's this deep sense of like, like deep okayness, deep sense of like I am inherently welcome, like not contingent on, on anything else. And so I think that's what some of these, like darkness technologies or these experiences, maybe breath work, things like that can help us to reconnect with.

I like the sound of that. I love scuba diving for many reasons. Not just seeing the world, but the way the body itself feels underwater. That you can forget about the body for a second and you're, you're just present and you can move in any direction. I don't know, there's something magical about it because it's so different than the experience above the water. And the other thing is that our reaction, or my reaction, first time going scuba diving is the whole body and the mind screams. It's not okay. We're not supposed to be breathing underwater. Right. Because usually if you breathe underwater, you drown. And here you have this equipment that allows you to experience the world in a whole different way where you're okay if you breathe under underwater. I don't know if you're a scuba diver. Do you scuba dive?

I'm actually a free diver and I.

I have scuba freedive.

And there's a. Yeah, there's, there's a moment where when you free dive, when you reach neutral buoyancy, it's usually between 12 and 15, 15 meters where you start to free fall down. So you're kind of like head down, you're kind of following a line and you just start to kind of free fall down into the abyss below. And what I love about freediving Is it's actually a beautiful mirror for your interoceptive capacity because as you go deeper, tension starts to build inside your body because it's of the pressure from the ocean. Your lungs will actually shrink to even a third of their size at 30 meters underwater. And the art of freediving is kind of tuning in, noticing the tension, relaxing the tension, and then you fall deeper because you're able to equalize. And so I think of freediving as like a very interesting, almost like high stakes interoceptive training ground where depth is a direct correlation for how in tune you are with what's happening inside. And how much can you just allow and relax. You really want to be as relaxed as possible with almost no tension in your body. And like you say when you're down there, particularly once you go down, you hold on to a tennis ball at the bottom of the line and you just hang out there so quiet and it's so peaceful and you look up and there's like, I don't know, 30 meters up to the surface and it's just you with your breath. It's really, really magical. Yeah, it's one of my favorite things to do.

Wow. And the second favorite is surfing, isn't it?

Surfing is probably the favorite, to be honest. Yeah, I love surfing.

So my wife and I discovered surfing four or five years ago and where I think the word is obsessed. So it really changed our life. It's very different than any other physical activity or sport, however you want to call it. And I'm curious about your thoughts. How did you discover it and what kind of a role it plays in your life?

Yeah, well, I discovered it on that year of traveling that I mentioned I did when I was 19. And I mean, so many things, things I could say. I think one of the biggest things that the gifts that surfing gave me was, was confidence. I went from, you know, not being a natural swimmer to learning how to catch a wave, let's say two foot, three foot, and gradually increasing the size in which I was comfortable kind of being out there, up to like six, seven, eight, like nine foot waves. And the idea that I could paddle for a wave that, you know, when you look down the face of a, of an eight or nine foot wave, you think that like you're gonna die if you, if you miss, miss the, miss the takeoff or miss the drop and you can go right over the falls and get pummeled by the wave. But then every time you pop out on the other side and you know, you might have inhaled a bit of salt Water, but you're fine. And that, the confidence of that, I think that that gave me, that then translated to confidence on land was a real gift, particularly at that age. And then I think, I mean, I think about surfing as like a kind of a church, a gym, and kind of a community, like all in one. I think I had my first, first, I would say, like semi mystical experiences being in the water. It's taken me to just beautiful places around the world that I never would have gone to otherwise. And it's, it's where I feel, I'd say where I first felt like deeply at home in the world. There was a sense. I remember I was in Balangan beach in Bali and sitting in the lineup, it was like the sun was setting. This huge dogfish like, leaped out of the water with a fish in his mouth and just like sank in front of the sunset. And these peeling, eight, nine foot waves were coming through. And I was just like, this is exactly where I'm meant to be. There is nowhere else in the world that I would rather be in this moment. And yeah, it's just I've made absolute, absurdly big life decisions around or orienting, like access to good waves, my life, including being here in Santa Cruz. And so it's. Yeah, it's one of my, One of my happy places.

It's. I can relate to all that that you mentioned and I, I discovered it, you know, later in life and it changed how we loved the ocean before, but now we love it in a different way as well. And you said about sitting in the lineup and being calm before, but there are moments when we're out there and there's no wave coming for a second and the turtles come up to the surface and they don't come up for everybody. I think they can read human emotion on some level, but they come up to us and they look, they're curious, they flap a little bit and then go away. And it's just such a special moment where you feel like you've become part of that ocean life for a brief moment and they see you again the next day. And the next day I think they just wonder, where do you go to sleep? But they feel like this is your home as much as it's their home. I think that's something special, maybe miraculous about it. I wrote down a question for you that was inspired by one of your posts. And the question is, what is the one question that you like to be asked that somehow few, or maybe no one asks you.

That'S such a generous Question in and of itself. I think one of the, the questions that's been on my mind recently that I've been speaking with Paul a lot is around parenthood and fatherhood and how might my life be completely different on the other side of having a kid. My wife and I are currently, we're about to start trying for a kid and yeah, I think questions around what are the foundations to kind of put in place before the kid arrives? What does, what does the adventure of parenthood look like? I think I'm kind of seeking like fatherhood mentors in some ways, like role models of people that I think have been doing fatherhood, have been doing it well. And my definition of well is they are still thriving in their life. And yeah, it's just like expressing the archetype of fatherhood in a beautiful way. So I think that's a question that I'm exploring right now.

I love the sound of that. It's a fascinating journey. Johnny, I could keep you here all day. I have one last question I want to ask you about your definition of success. How do you think about it?

I think about this or have thought about this a lot, particularly early on in my path. It was a real driving, the question was really what is a good life? What does it mean to live well? But I think that's a placeholder for success.

And.

One thing that comes to mind is if I imagine myself, you know, as an 80 year old man or maybe 120 year old man on my deathbed and like thinking about that, the phrase of like did I love well comes to mind. I think like that is maybe more than anything else, like did I love well? But I think maybe more than that there's like a, there's an orientation to integrity, to sharing my unique gifts with the world, kind of contributing the puzzle piece that is mine to give and. Yeah, and perhaps like embracing life's inevitable heartbreaks in a way that expands my capacity to feel at home in the world and to love. I think that's probably the, on the broadest level that's how I think about success.

Well, I love the sound of that. Johnny, this was such an incredible conversation and I'm so grateful you made it happen. And thank you for sharing all the experience you've had, all the knowledge that you have and I think there's so much more that this audience could learn from you. But I'm very grateful for this time that we had together today. Thank you.

Thank you so much. Yeah, this has been a real pleasure. Appreciate it.

You are listening to Talking Billions. We talk about big ideas, big inspirations, big topics. We take on the hardest subject of all. But our conversations lead us to an even bigger question. What it means to live a rich life beyond money. If you enjoyed the show, please take a moment and follow. Subscribe, rate and share with friends and family. We rely on word of mouth to promote the show. One click for you means the world to us.

Thank you.

Until next time, your host, Bogumil Baranosky.