Jonny Miller on Nervous System Mastery

Simple breathing exercises is a wonderful, free, zero cost way of changing your state and regulating your nervous system really effectively without relying on substances that tend to have downstream consequences if they're abused.

Welcome to the one you feed throughout time, great thinkers have recognized the importance of the thoughts we have. Quotes like garbage in, garbage out, or you are what you think ring true. And yet, for many of us, our thoughts don't strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self pity, jealousy or fear. We see what we don't have instead of what we do. We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it's not just about thinking our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent and creative effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction. How they feed their good wolf.

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Thanks for joining us. Our guest on this episode is Johnny Miller, perhaps best known as the host of the Curious Humans podcast and for his TEDx talk on the gifts of Grief. Johnny also coaches ambitious founders to scale themselves and runs a five week boot camp for nervous system mastery and is the co founder of Maptia, a global visual storytelling platform.

Hi Johnny, welcome to the show.

It's great to be here.

I'm excited to have you on. I've been following your work for a while, particularly some work you've done around Nervous System. You know, really working with our nervous system more skillfully. You've got a great podcast called Curious Humans that I also really like, so we'll jump into all that, but let's start like we always do with the parable. In the parable, there is a grandparent who's talking with her grandchild. They say, in life, there are two wolves inside of us that are always at battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love, and the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the grandchild stops and thinks about it for a second and looks up at their grandparents and says, well, which one wins? And the grandparent says, the one you feed. So I'd like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life and in the work that you do.

So I've heard a lot of your guests contemplate and answer that question. And I was thinking about this last night, and what came up for me was that I think for the first kind of chapter of my life, let's say I was really curious and obsessed with feeding the good wolf and kind of asking, how can I become a virtuous person and essentially live a good life? But what feels like has been a more recent chapter in the last four or five years has been this exploration of feeding the bad wolf and of kind of cultivating a sense of courageous curiosity towards the things inside of myself that I label as being bad. This could be, for example, when I was younger, I had an experience where I got really angry at someone and actually caused them some pain. And in kind of more recent years, I've been trying to cultivate a more healthy relationship with anger, for example, and realizing that in there is my capacity to set boundaries and to kind of have a deep determination. And so I guess I've been on this journey to try and integrate these parts of myself that I've labeled as, like, bad wolves and kind of coming to understand what their needs are, kind of what they're asking for. And, yeah, that's kind of the theme that's been alive in my life recently.

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. I was talking with a guest recently, and we were looking at the Buddhist tradition, which very early Buddhism was very much, there's wholesome and unwholesome states, and you want to cultivate the wholesome ones and you want to get rid of the unwholesome ones. And it was very much sort of good wolf, bad wolf kind of thing. And then later, Buddhism has sort of evolved into much more of a, hey, it's all part of you. You want to be kind to all parts. It. It's all different energies expressing themselves. And so it's kind of transformed over time. And the question I have found that I'm very interested in lately is when is one of those approaches the better approach versus the other? Because I actually think they both have a place. You know, there are times in my life where it's like negative thought patterns that are just habitual and they're just running. It's like, okay, you know what?

Enough.

Like, I'm going to try and sort of work on not feeding those and what can I cultivate instead? And then there are lots of other times where exactly as you're saying, I think that the more skillful strategy is to, like, investigate what's going on here. You know, what's. What's at the root of this? Is there something to be learned here? And so I'm kind of interested in when we do each of these things because I think they both have a place. And I think we probably, as people also may have a default way of dealing with it. I have a default mechanism towards get perspective, realize it's all going to be okay, shut down the feeling. So I need to err a little bit more on the. All right, let me just give these emotions a little bit more space. And so I think we all have a habitual direction of overcorrection that's really well put.

And what comes to mind for me is that we need to have a really healthy, strong, good wolf in place in order to then have a conversation with the bad wolf. And if the good wolf is kind of just out of control or there's a sense of depression, then it's. The focus is definitely on bringing aliveness back to that. But then when you feel whole, you feel kind of ready, you feel well resourced, you have a large capacity. That's the time when you can kind of go into some of the more shadowy, kind of painful aspects of experience. That's how I view it.

Yeah, that's a really great insight, actually. I think that's right on. I mean, I think early on, for me, I talk about my recovery often, and I want to get to sort of a seminal moment in your life here in a moment. And when I talk about recovery, I talk about how, you know, the bad wolf was kind of eating me in that early days of recovery. It was all about like, I have got to feed the good wolf and this bad wolf. Just, I need to be like, stay down there in the corner, please, for a little while until I'm a little bit stronger. So I think that's a really good point. So you've Done a TED talk about this and you talk about kind of what really led you deep into the type of work that you're doing right now. And it's a pretty tragic experience. I was wondering if you could maybe share it with listeners just for people to get a sense of kind of where you're coming from and how all this work is really grounded in your own life.

Yeah, sure, sure. Thank you for asking. So the story begins, I guess about almost five years ago now. And I was living in the UK in Brighton at the time, and I had a fiance, her name was Sophie and she was working as a doctor, she was kind of working hospitals and she'd had bipolar all of her life. And I was away on this particular occasion and she went back to work, it was a Monday morning and she had a anxiety attack at work and she ended up coming home to an empty house and overdosing on her own medication and ultimately taking her own life. And this, as one might imagine, just really kind of completely turned my life upside down. It was initially too much to begin to digest, to kind of comprehend. But over the following months I think I'd seen people, particularly older people who had lost someone in their life and they hadn't fully digested their grief and it had turned them into these kind of bitter, almost like shell of a human essentially. And I think honestly that scared me and I think that I made this decision to almost kind of turn the other and to face this grief head on. And this, this led to a kind of multi year journey to explore my inner landscape essentially. And this started off with vipassana, meditation retreats, learning meditation, plant medicine, ceremonies, breathwork, this kind of whole different exploration of different modalities to understand what it was that I was feeling and ultimately to learn how to surrender to the pain that was there and to almost allow myself to be, to be obliterated by it in some ways. And that in itself was then kind of a journey into realizing how disconnected I'd been from my own body and particularly my emotions growing up in England. As a guy, you know, it's pretty common to just live in your head and to be rewarded for that and to be just kind of numb from the neck down. And so for the years before, I'd had this kind of fascination for travel, for the outside world, for seeing new places. And it was almost like that curiosity was turned inwards and I started really kind of mapping my own inner landscape initially through this kind of very harrowing at times experience of grief and loss. And I think this Was the surprising thing for me was that there was this deep joy and this deep beauty on the other side of grief. And that when you kind of invite it in, it's almost like it just opens up your heart and you just feel so alive and you feel raw. And it's painful, but it's also exquisite. Like there's a kind of really rich beauty to it as well. And it was just this unfolding invitation to surrender and to kind of surrendering into whatever came up and to these different waves of grief that would emerge when I went back to places that were meaningful to us or going back to the memorial bench and then on her birthdays in years to come. And it was just this kind of like progressive initiation almost into that world.

So before that sounds like you'd say you're not somebody who is very interested in your internal world.

I think I was interested intellectually. Okay. I think I studied philosophy at university. And so I was very interested in what it meant to live a good life and, you know, reading Aristotle, etc. But I don't think that I had an embodied sense for what that meant.

Makes sense. So a lot of your work seems to have come together in a recent program you've developed called Nervous System Mastery. As I looked at some other things you've done in the past, as I looked at your TED talk, as I looked at some research that you published around leadership and burnout and resiliency, and I looked at all that, I sort of saw it all kind of wrapped up in nervous system mastery, kind of. You know, I could see threads of it all in there. So I thought we would sort of just jump in there as the place to get started. First, just tell me a little bit about what do you mean by nervous system mastery?

Yeah, so it's a combination of skills, I guess the two primary ones are interoception and self regulation. And what I mean by interoception, it's a term from the neuroscience is essentially how in tune are we with our inner landscape? How able are we to kind of sense, track and feel and taste the sensations that we're feeling, whether that's a heart beating, whether that's how our breath is tension in our belly. And then the second part is the self regulation protocols, so reclaiming agency over our internal state. And there are various levers in the body, in the nervous system, that allow us to pretty effectively change how we're feeling in a few minutes. And what I've found is that a lot of people who particularly kind of live in the head, they try and change their thought patterns, they try and change their beliefs, these things. And in the neuroscience this is like top down principles. And what I found is that bottom up principles, which you may have heard of, are just much more effective for changing the state of our nervous system, for dropping us into this kind of high tone, parasympathetic state. And so a lot of the training and the work I do is focused on teaching these bottom up protocols for either upregulating, which is kind of activating, or increasing alertness, or downregulating, which is calming, kind of being able to sleep at night, all those things. So that's kind of the gist of it.

Yeah, I like that idea of delineating between top down and bottom up approaches and recognizing that they both have a place. Right. There is a place for both of them. And that bottom up, I think it's starting. We hear a lot more about, I think top down dominated the self help spirituality marketplace for a long time. And I would say, it seems to me as somebody who's kind of closer to the pulse of this, having done this for years, I see more and more focus on the bottom up slash somatic elements of this.

Right.

Working with the body in very skillful ways. I want to ask you about the first part of this, which is interoception. You did vipassana meditation, you studied that. And I don't know how much you've studied Buddhism around that, but there's a concept in Buddhism of the five Skandhas, right? These five things that make up what we are as humans. And ever since I learned about interoception, I've often thought it's very close to what in traditional Buddhism would be called vedana, or sensations. You know, which is sort of a described most basically as a sense of pleasant, unpleasant or neutral. But it's the first contact with what's going on inside of us. And I'm curious if you could just elaborate a little bit more about from your perspective, what interoception contains or what all the various aspects of it are.

Yeah, it's a great question. And in the neuroscience literature it's often measured by how accurately can someone count their heartbeat and so kind of how aware of that, because that's like a very. It's an easy thing to measure. But I think from my perspective, and this is a slightly more poetic answer, but I've almost been seeing it as a journey to learn how to like taste myself and to increase the definition in which I can be aware of all of the different kind of multi contextual things that are arising and passing within my body and not necessarily moving my attention there all the time, but just being aware of that. And the ones which are particularly practical and useful are the breath, for example. I mean, if you start to notice that you're maybe holding your breath when you're checking email, or if breath is shallow and it's kind of in the upper lungs, it's a pretty immediate sign that you're going to be in a sympathetic state and that you're going to be not as relaxed as you might be. And so I think I've been viewing interoception as a way of becoming increasingly embodied and I think crucially treating what we sense as feedback from the body. So in the same way that I'm wearing an OURA ring right now, and this is one way to get, you know, really good feedback on how is my sleep, how is my heart rate variability. But I think that for me it's almost like a proxy to confirm how it is that I'm actually feeling in my body. You know, if I woke up this morning with like a score of 90 and I'm like, do I feel like a 90? Like, does that, does that feel about right? Like. And so it's almost for me, these, these wearable texts, great. But I think that ultimately it's only a tool to help you to trust the feedback that's coming from your body the entire time throughout the day.

And so interoception, that is really just tuning into what it feels like to be in my body.

Yes, exactly. And it's distinguished from exteroception, which we can also talk about, but that's more about how our nervous system is being impacted by the stimulus around us. Be that loud noises, be that cats fighting in the background, all the kind of external stimulus. And interoception is about the internal stimulus.

I assume they're connected.

Yeah, for sure. I think that in order to have a strong sense of extraoception, you actually need to have interoception first because you need to be able to discern how different environments change your state. For example, if you have bright lights on in the evening, if you have a good sense of interoception, you'll be able to tell that it's kind of keeping you alert, keeping you awake, and it's probably going to be trickier to sleep if you're going to try and go to bed.

So what are some ways of improving are interoception? I mean, I can Tell you right away that I would not accurately probably give you my heart rate, like, how often my heart is beating, which I've known about that test for a while, and I've known for a while I wouldn't pass it very well. How do you improve this?

There's a couple of approaches. One is just knowing that if you have a high level of cortisol present in your body, then that acts as kind of numbing our capacity for interoception. So if you're in a kind of, like, mild state of stress or alert, then it will be harder to kind of go inwards and to track that. So that's kind of one piece. And then I like to have kind of just a morning practice of just checking in with myself and kind of doing a body scan, kind of placing my attention in different areas and noticing how my posture is, noticing how my. If there's tension in my shoulders, how my belly is, then bring it down into my belly area, just kind of consciously softening, and from there, just honestly just kind of noticing. It's similar to in the kind of Zen tradition of meditation, where you just kind of sit back into the witness and you don't try and do anything, but you just pay attention to what is arising, and you kind of step out of the doing mentality and just kind of tune in with a sense of curiosity. I used the metaphor yesterday with a friend where it's like, if you're a chef and you're learning to taste food, you kind of want to, like, really kind of try and taste the flavors and, like, really notice and pay deep attention to what is coming alive. And so it's kind of the same in your body. If you notice, like, say there's a. There's a tightness, and I feel something in my sternum right now, and I just kind of like, tune into that and almost amplify what's there sometimes as well, just to kind of get curious about the sensations that are one of.

The things that I think is so interesting about paying attention to bodily sensations, at least my experience with them is often when I start tuning into them, you realize how, I guess, for lack of a better word, nebulous they are. So, for example, like, if I have pain, it seems like I've got pain. Like, it's a thing, right? But when I go to investigate it, I'm like, my goodness, it is just shifting and moving, and it's, you know, this size and it's that size, and it eludes, like, precise sort of definition.

I think yeah, that's beautiful. And I experience very much the same. The other thing that I've been noticing, and some of my students have commented on as well, is how tension in certain parts of the body also correlates to certain thought patterns and how when certain thoughts are kind of or people are in thought loops, they're also aware of certain tensions maybe in their shoulder or in their side. And this is something that I've been exploring through the modality of breathwork and kind of mapping how certain emotions tend to be located in certain areas of the body. It can also be a really interesting sign that, for example, if I feel something in my sternum that's normally connected to some kind of like anxiousness or energy or it's known as the fear belt in breathwork training. So it can also provide indications to emotional qualities that could be present as well. Sam. With Venmo Stash a taco on one hand and ordering a ride in the other means you're stacking cash back with Venmo stash, get up to 5% cash back when you pick a bundle of your favorite brands. Earn more cash when you do more with stash Venmo Stash terms exclusions apply. Max $100 cash back per month. See terms of Venmo me stashterms.

You know, one thing I've learned, whether it was running a software team or now running the one you feed, is that who you hire matters more than almost anything else. As business owners, we don't ever really clock out. Our work follows us everywhere. That's why I like that when we clock out, LinkedIn jobs clocks in. LinkedIn makes it simple. Post your job for free, share it with your network and manage qualified candidates all in one place. They'll even help you write the job description. And if you choose to promote your job, you'll get three times more qualified applicants. And the quality really matters. 72% of small and mid sized businesses say LinkedIn helps them find high quality candidates. I've used LinkedIn jobs several times and I always find it to be the best tool for the job. That pun was totally intended by the way. Post your job for free@LinkedIn.com oneyoufeed that's LinkedIn.com the1 y o u f E E D Terms and conditions apply. Mr. Monopoly here. Monopoly is back at McDonald's. Register in the McDonald's app so you're ready to get your bag. Two ways to P for a chance to get your bag Physical peels with select items and digital peels with others. To get your bag, play Monopoly at McDonald's. No purchase necessary. See rules@play atmcd.com for full details and amoe.play@mcd.com to play without purchase ends November 23rd. But bonus play ends November 2nd. Monopoly is a registered trademark of Hasbro. Copyright McDonald's. You've just kind of walked your way right into another of my things I'm really interested in, which is this idea of how thoughts and emotions and also behavior interact and influence each other. There are simplistic notions out there like that, you know, what we think causes what we feel, which is, I think, a vast oversimplification, right. There are times that, yes, I can think a thought. Like, if I have a thought, like, I don't know, my mom hates me, right. I might have a bodily reaction to that. Right. But as you're saying, conversely, there are ways in which our body or our emotions then drive our thoughts. And so, you know, I've started to wonder on some level, we talk about thought and emotion and bodily sensations as if they are discrete things, but they seems to me always co arise. You don't get one usually without the other. Right? There's this co arising. Now. We may be more aware of one than the other. We may have a default way of tuning into one more than the other, but. But the connection is so deep that sometimes I wonder, is it even useful to distinguish them? I think the answer is yes, but I've just been more and more recognizing the bidirectional nature of all these things.

Yeah, it's a really powerful insight. And what I've been noticing for myself is often this sensation is primary to the emotion and then the thoughts. And something that my colleagues and I here in Bali have been exploring. We call it Breath Lab. And we've basically been correlating breathing patterns to different incomplete reflexes or expressions of emotion. And what the theory is, and we're hoping to run some studies in the coming months, but the theory is that when we have experiences that are, say, traumatic or, say, immobilization reflex that we're unable to complete, then that gets stored in our nervous system at some point. And when you drop into this trance state through conscious connected breathing, these different breathing rhythms, as we kind of pulse into them with a sense of safety, they elicit that incomplete reflex, which will often have a strong emotional component attached as well. And so it's really interesting to see how, say, when someone's breath starts to go down into their belly or their pelvic floor, there might be Kind of feelings of shame being associated, or if there's, if there's tightness around the neck and around the kind of jaw area, then maybe some anger kind of comes through. And as someone increases the dynamism of their breath, then they also increase their dynamism of their kind of emotional capacity and expression. And this is something that I'm really, really curious about as well. And it also ties into when people go through these experiences. There's often also a story or a thought pattern associated as well, which kind of comes through in their share at the end. And so as you say, like all of these things are kind of co arising and at the same time, often it's almost like the body is just doing it itself. Like we're just kind of helping to facilitate the breath using bodywork and nerve flossing and these things. But really it's just witnessing the body complete this reflex. And it can be incredible to watch. Sometimes there's movement, limbs flailing, all kinds of sounds. And it's a really fascinating process to witness.

So when you say an incomplete reflex, say more about that. I know what you mean, but say more for other people who may not understand what you mean by that.

Yeah. So if people are familiar with the work of Peter Levine, he kind of talks about how. And this is really interesting to look at in the, the animal world. There's some videos online of, I think it's a impala that's just been chased by a lion and it survived. And the lion kind of walks away. And you just see the impala shaking, kind of pretty violently shaking on the floor afterwards, first several minutes afterwards. And that's the impala's way of discharging that mobilization reflex, that kind of mobilization energy. But the challenge is that we as humans, it's not kind of socially acceptable. Like if you get in a fight, you don't just lie down and shake on the floor. It would look weird. Like we suppress it. And it's also the same, interestingly, with surgeries when, often when people are anesthetized, that also suppresses the completion of that mobilization reflex. And so what happens is that energy gets stored in the nervous system for a future time. And the nervous system is amazing. Like we can store a lot of these kind of incomplete reflexes throughout our life. But at a certain point we reach a threshold where we start to have so much tension in our body that it causes allostatic load, or I call it emotional debt, where it's like we've had so many of these experiences in Our life that our bodies are just holding so much that that needs to be kind of let go of and released. And so this completion of the mobilization reflex, it could be. I've had some where my arm just kind of flails. My right arm will just be flailing for like five minutes. Or sometimes there'll be full body shakes. Sometimes there'll be a sound wants to come through. And it's basically the memory from that experience is coming from the lower brainstem. It's being relived and then it's being stored and integrated in the midbrain. Yeah, that's essentially the process.

So emotional debt, say a little bit more about that. That's a really interesting term.

Yes. This is a term that my research partner and I kind of came up with to some degree. We were studying burnout in executives and startup founders. It was pretty common. We kind of looked at the trajectory of someone going through burnout and often there would be a series of kind of events, maybe like fights or getting angry or moments of just kind of pushing themselves too hard. And people have different levels of capacity. And often these kind of high performers, type A individuals had enormous capacity, so they could hold an enormous amount of this emotional debt and effectively kind of continue using their minds to run their bodies for long periods of time. But ultimately there was almost always a point where that debt caught up to them, as financial debt might. And there was this kind of crash and this burnout kind of through the lens of the nervous system. This is known as a dorsal shutdown. The dorsal vagal branch is one of the branches of the nervous system. And it's almost like a fuse switching. Like when there's too much charge in the system, the dorsal fuse just kicks in and you shut down. And that's when someone will realize that the burnout hits them. It's like being hit by a ton of bricks. And it's that kind of rock bottom moment where they realize, oh shit, like I'm. My body is fried, like, I'm done. And it's when that emotional debt from months, maybe years has kind of finally caught up with them. And their body's like, right, we just need to rest now.

So earlier you were describing, after your fiance's suicide, you were describing seeing people who had lost someone who became bitter. Would you say that the consequence of them not working through grief in a full way is causing an emotional debt, which is then translating later into a sense of bitterness? Is that kind of what we're talking about here?

That's my sense, yeah. That's what I believe. And I'm hoping to kind of contribute to studies which will I guess back this up with data. But yeah, that's certainly my theory.

Yep. Well, I certainly know in my life I've had a sense of. At a certain point in my life where I felt like I had a lot of emotional debt and my tip off was my reaction to something that's happening seems all out of proportion to what's happening. Right. Like, I love the term emotional debt. I would have said more like, it's like I've got a bucket of sadness here that never got emptied. Right. And every time something sad happens, I experience that whole bucket. And so I need to be like draining that thing out, you know, And I did a lot of work. It's been decades at this point. Well, has it been. Yeah, it's been a couple decades where I really, you know, went deep into a lot of that type of. Going into childhood experience is trying to sort of re. Experience and refill, you know, a variety of things that, that were not felt at the time that were suppressed. But I love that term emotional debt because I think it speaks very clearly to what this is. As a former technology guy, it reminds me of the term technical debt.

Right.

Like we.

That's where it came from. Yeah, exactly.

Yeah. Technical debt is for those who don't know. It's like when you're developing software, you're taking all kinds of shortcuts and you're like, I know that's not a good idea right now, but I got to get this thing done it.

And it's necessary at the time, it's necessary to do it.

That's right. But over time it accumulates and at a certain point you're like, well, this thing's going to break every. Every time I was involved in developing software and I wasn't a developer, I was always like managing developers or product management. My main thought was always like, somebody is going to look back in five or 10 years and be like, who is the idiot that designed this? Like it's inevitable. It's just inevitable that like, like it's going to look bad in retrospect because they won't see the pressures and the things that were happening at the time. In nervous system mastery, you're talking about these two core components. We've talked about interoception, right. The ability to sort of know and feel what's going on inside me. And then you talked about self regulation protocols. And this is really the ability to upregulate or Downregulate our system. One of the things that you say is really worth paying attention to though, in this process is recognizing the dangers of our autopilot self regulation strategies. Say a little bit more about that.

Yeah, sure. Actually, just before we go there, I just made a connection to the emotional debt and interoception as well. And the connection is that I think the more interoception that we have, the more our interoceptive capacity, the more we can notice that emotional debt early on. I think when people have very low interoception, instead of it being like a feather or maybe, you know, a brick moment where they kind of get slapped, it takes like a dump truck for them to realize that they have this pile up of emotional debt.

Yeah.

And so in some ways cultivating interoception helps you to recognize some of that emotional debt. That's, that's already under the surface.

Makes sense.

But yeah. So coming to auto regulation strategies. So it's something that we all have kind of habitual ways of either up regulating or down regulating during the day, depending on what time of day it's. So an example might be in the evening, say you've had a busy day at work, you come home, you drink a beer, kind of watch Netflix. That's effectively a way of using external stimulus to down regulate your nervous system before sleep. But the challenge is, I think for a lot of people that they're not conscious that this is actually what's going on. So they don't necessarily realize that they have this habit of watching Netflix in order to kind of unwind at the end of the day. And not that there's anything wrong with that, but I think it can be helpful to almost kind of do and do an audit of what are the different ways in which you either increase your sense of alertness, you know, coffee, things like that in the morning, and then unwind and during the day as well. And I found it really helpful in my life to replace some of these with more conscious strategies and simple breathing exercises is a wonderful free kind of zero cost way of changing your state and regulating your nervous system really effectively without relying on substances that tend to have kind of downstream consequences if they're abused.

And so when you're talking about up regulating and down regulating, you're basically talking about, you know, one of the purposes of interoception, even when it's the non conscious part of it, right. To hear neuroscientists talk, is that your body is always trying to sort of of Lisa Feldman Barrett says, like Balance out your body budget, right? Internally, it's trying to say, look, there's a zone that I need to be in here, right? It's always doing this temperature. I've got to stay in this temperature, I got to increase, decrease, right? And so our nervous system has something similar. So what we're talking about is if I am overstimulated, stressed out, anxious, you know, high arousal, then I want to, I want to be able to downregulate that back into a zone that my body's like, okay, I can work with this, right? And conversely, we may be too low energy, right? Sluggish. And in this case, we're trying to upregulate. And we've developed methods of doing this thing that has to happen without really thinking about it. And what you're proposing in the program and what you're teaching in the program is that primarily this is not the only tool that you use, but a main tool that you use is the breath, that breathing in different ways can either down regulate or upregulate us. And it's a very powerful tool for doing that.

That's really well put. That zone is known as the window of tolerance in the neuroscience. And generally speaking, a lot of the people that certainly come through the program, their challenges are with the downregulation. So sometimes people can get stuck in that kind of high tone, sympathetic state where their mind is racing, where they're easily angered, frustrated, etc. And so a lot of people are trying to find more effective strategies for coming back down. Instead of being stuck, they're coming back down into kind of the healthy zone, which is kind of where the ventral vagus nerve is online. And some of the most effective practices that I've come across are in the moment just doing either alternate nostril breathing or box breathing or actually humming can be really effective as well. Humming or kind of making a sound in belly and then like a, hmm, releases nitric oxide, which acts as a vasodilator. And that helps to kick in the parasympathetic system. And then for a slightly longer reset, there's a branch of protocols known as non sleep deep rest, which are primarily drawing from the yoga nidra tradition. And these are kind of 30 minute guided power naps, essentially where someone can kind of go through a visualization where they stay aware, they stay awake, but their body rests. And so there are kind of various protocols for down regulating when we're kind of slightly stuck in that just outside our window of tolerance. And we want to kind of come back down into rest. Or maybe we would kind of want to be more creative or it's just not suiting the environment and we decide that we want to come back down again.

It's interesting. As I looked at your course, the part that interested me was I sort of need more of the upregulation. Like I'm pretty down regulated. You know, when you're talking about like high cortisol makes it hard to, to do interoception. My cortisol is always like just sort of like the bottom of what's sort of an acceptable level. I know. I don't know if that's because it was too high for too long or what, what the, what the, what the cause of that is. But yeah, let's talk about energizing. What are ways that we energize our nervous system?

Yeah. So to kind of prepare for this, this conversation, I set my alarm early at about 5am and I went down the road to a sauna and cold plunge that we have access to. And that if you're lucky enough to have access, is an incredibly effective way of stimulating your nervous system and kind of activating the hot cold combination. But more simply, there's a practice known as bellows breathing or kabalabhati in yoga, which is essentially a series of rapid exhales through the nose and the belly and usually kind of 30 or 40 forced exhales will also stimulate the sympathetic nervous system in a similar way. And I usually like to combine something that's activating like that. Wim HOF is an even more kind.

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Hence example and then have a kind of an equal duration of a relaxation breathing. So it could be cadence breathing or box breathing afterwards to just kind of settle down the nervous system so you're not left in kind of slightly like, you know, tingly kind of overcharged state.

In what ways is bellows breathing different than what Wim HOF advocates?

It's a little bit less intense. I have a number of friends who've been through WIM HOF kind of workshops and some people have Been kind of like re traumatized through kind of breathing that intensely. It can kind of create these very powerful altered states of consciousness and big emotions can surface. And it can also leave people stuck in that high tensy sympathetic state that we talked about earlier. And some people really struggle to come back down from that. So Bellows breathing is more gentle. It's kind of just through the nose, which is less intense than breathing through the mouth. And so for me, it's something that I would recommend over something like Wim Hof, which can be very. It's great for some people, but I think for 5, 10% of the population that do have that tendency to get stuck in that high tone state, it's not helpful.

We had Wim Hof on the podcast. He basically yells like he's not a calm talker in any way, shape or form. Like everything's yelling. So I'm like my normal sort of like, well, how you doing? And he's yelling. You know, there's one quote where he's like, everybody loves a good wolf. You know, screaming.

It. It's just.

It's a hysterical sounding interview. The guy is so wound up.

He's also amazing. I think what he wanted to kind of popularize breathing is phenomenal. Yeah. But I do think that there should be some caution or just kind of more, I guess, nervous system literacy kind of shared alongside the practices.

That's right. That's right. Yep. I thought James Nestor did a nice job in his book also sort of laying some of that, you know, about how there's a role for both these, to use your terminology, these up and down regulating types of breathing. When you do a cold plunge, how long are you doing it for?

Typically the cold plunge that we have here is very cold. It's about 3 or 4 degrees centigrade. I'm not sure what that is in Fahrenheit freaking cold, but I typically do 15 minutes in the sauna and then about three or four minutes at that temperature. But if it's warmer, then maybe four or five minutes. You want to get to the point where you're not shivering. But there's usually initially there's a shock. And that is a really good way to kind of practice disassociating the fear response from the kind of mental stories, because you can kind of sit with that. And if you sit with that, as with motions, actually, like when you sit with that, it kind of changes and it becomes easier to sit with. And I initially, when I was in Brighton, actually in the months after losing Sophie I would swim in the ocean around the pier during the winter when the water was freezing cold and it was a similar sensation. If there is that initial shock and like, I don't want to be here, I don't want to go in. I like, what the hell am I doing?

Totally.

And then once you're in there for kind of a few minutes, it does start to kind of settle and your body gets used to it and there's this beautiful, just like profound feeling of sometimes like joy or ecstasy that can kind of come through. And so, yeah, it's interesting how it does change, but if you're just starting out, you can even start with cold showers and that kind of gets you into it. And then buying chest freezers is a great way you can kind of DIY your own cold plunge that some of the people in my course did for not very much money. So you don't need to have access to a fancy gym necessarily.

I am in the cold shower camp and have been for years, basically because I live in a small place. There's no room for an ice chest or a gym. But it helps. I don't do it as long, but it does wake me up and energize me. It's also just primarily a way of, of sort of, as you described, a little bit like intentionally wading into discomfort and going, you know, I can handle being uncomfortable. I've been thinking lately about how as we get older, what I see with a lot of people as we get older, I don't think it's conscious, but we begin to subconsciously really over prioritize comfort. You know, it seems to be something that happens as, as people age. I think there's some natural part of that, but it's a thing that I certainly am like, well, I don't want to over prioritize that, you know, I don't want that to be the defining value, you know, is just, am I comfortable?

Yeah.

Which is what a lot of us do.

Yeah, it's a really important point. And in the neuroscience, the concept you might be familiar with, known as hormesis, which is essentially that kind of a little small amounts of stress for short periods of time are really, really good for us. And you can think of the astronauts on the ISS like if they stay there for too long because the lack of gravity, they lose bone density. And there's so many examples in life where if we don't have some stress or some stresses, then our capacity just gets diminished. And there's a really, really strong case for as long as you have a relatively well regulated nervous system for deliberately introducing stressors into your life and then followed by a recovery period and then your capacity grows. I mean, and this is intuitive when it comes to, say, lifting weights in the gym, but it applies to our nervous system in general. And our nervous system as well is very neuroplastic. People think of just, you know, your brain is neuroplastic and you can learn. But our nervous systems are neuroplastic too, and we can increase or decrease our window of tolerance and capacity and practices like cold plunging saunas. Also kind of walking breath holds is a really effective way to increase your capacity and your CO2 tolerance, which has a bunch of health benefits down the line as well. So some people will like drink a big sip of water when I'm walking a dog on the beach and just hold the water in my mouth while I'm walking and hold my breath for like maybe 30, 40 paces and then let it out and then kind of do the same thing again. And having a healthy CO2 tolerance is very helpful for also mitigating, like when you do get really stressed in life, you can handle it. Like when something, a huge curveball comes your way, you don't get knocked off center. So I think it's a really important thing to emphasize.

So if you're going to do a breath hold like that, say more about how you do it and what the benefit is. I'm going to make that question a little bit more specific. Do you breathe all the way out before you start it, or do you take a deep breath in before you start it? Or neither.

So I came to this through freediving, and so I kind of practiced much longer breath holds with the intention of then diving down underwater 30, 35 meters. But for someone just starting out, and this actually comes from Patrick McEwen, who wrote a book called the Oxygen Advantage that I really recommend. The idea is you inhale and then you just exhale to a comfortable amount and on that exhale retention, then you begin walking. And he recommends at minimum of kind of 15 paces. You can go up to 40 or 50 until you start to feel what he describes as mild air hunger. So you don't want to be like gasping for breath, but you also want to wait a little bit kind of after you feel that first need to breathe. And for a lot of people that kind of manage maybe 15 to 20 in the beginning, then pretty quickly you can work your way up to 40, 50, even longer.

So it's a pretty trainable thing. And what's the benefit of training it. You mentioned if you get a big curve ball coming your way, you handle it better. What's the mechanism that causes that to happen?

Yeah, so you're increasing your body's capacity for CO2. And when you have high levels of CO2 in the body, your blood pH becomes more acidic, which is basically a stressor on the body. And in extreme cases, if you hold your breath for four or five, six minutes, as free divers do, it's simulating the fear of death, kind of the death reflex. And so you're basically sitting in this very primal kind of reflex, reflexive need to breathe. But at the same time, in your mind, you're like, I'm okay, I have enough oxygen in my body. Nothing is going to happen. But it's the increase in CO2 and the corresponding blood acidity which creates this, like this deep need to breathe, which can be kind of overridden to a certain point. So it's also a way of training your mind as well. Got it.

So I want to talk a little bit about emotional resilience. We've talked about emotional debt, talked about being overwhelmed, but you describe four barriers to resilience. What are the barriers to resilience? And then let's talk about how do we actually increase it. So I think there's two approaches here, right? One's reducing barriers, the other is increasing our ability.

I think I wrote like 12 barriers to resilience in one of the posts. But some of the main ones, I think, or the ones that come to mind immediately are. One is what I call lone wolf syndrome, which is kind of an inability to ask for help and a kind of belief that you can get through everything on your own. And this was certainly true for me kind of up until the grief experience. To be honest, I kind of felt like I could do everything myself. And in that experience, I realized I had to lean on friends, family, people to kind of get through it. So that's certainly one big one. Another barrier, I think fixed mindset versus kind of growth mindset is definitely one. And people, you know, thinking that they are a certain way and that they can't change, they can't adapt, they can't grow, which were the ones that you were referring to.

You sort of hit one, which was insufficient support structures. I think I pulled this out of your paper you did with your colleague. But we've talked about one of these, which is lack of emotional and physical awareness, Right. Lack of interoception and perceived vulnerability. Talk about what that means, because I Don't think you're using vulnerability in the sense that it's often used as a positive thing these days.

Yeah, well, I think it can be a very scary thing, particularly men, particularly kind of men in tech and British men in tech to talk about and have conversations about their emotions. And that was kind of certainly true for me for a period of time. And I think just normalizing, kind of having conversations about emotions without judgment, without kind of making things right or wrong, but just, you know, this is what is arising. I'm noticing anger coming up in my body and then getting curious about it. And I think that is emotional literacy. And I think it's something that is in part down to the individual and also the culture in which the individual is embedded.

And so ways of increasing our emotional resilience. You've got two primary practices or protocols that you describe in this section. One is conscious connected breathing, the other is self inquiry journaling. Do you want to just briefly tell us about both those?

Perhaps for some context? I'd always recommend if someone's going into this work that they do it with someone else or ideally with some professional support in the beginning. Because having a professional to help co regulate your nervous system with, if something intense does come up, it's really helpful to have a guide. Once you kind of have some practice under your belt, then it's much easier to kind of go into the more self guided practices. But I kind of preface with in the beginning having support from a somatic experiencing therapist or a breath worker or someone that can help you go to these places is really helpful. But to speak to those practices specifically the conscious connected breathing is essentially a breathwork practice where you're inhaling a full vibrant inhale and then a relaxed exhale. And if you begin to loop your breath in this way, you will enter kind of an altered state of consciousness in which subconscious material can arise, including these incomplete reflexes that we mentioned. And it's usually done to music to a journey follows a bell curve with an intense peak and a long period for integration and relaxation. And this is a very efficient way of surfacing emotional debt, emotional material and having it be completed as long as there's an embodied felt sense of safety. Again, this is best done with a facilitator.

Is that a broad category in which certain things like say holotropic breathwork fit up under? Is holotropic breathwork a type of this?

It's a very kind of complex map, but essentially there's the breathwork at the top and then within that there is holotropic is a modality pioneered by Stan Groff. And then there's also, there's rebirthing, there's transformational breathing, there's some other ones, and Conscious Connected fits under that. And then actually within Conscious Connected, what we're practicing here we call FBR or facilitated breath repatterning, which, which kind of speaks to the fact that there is guided facilitation to use bodywork, verbal cues and things to facilitate greater ease in the breath.

And is this the sort of thing that you do with people virtually or is it more something you really want to do when you say with a guide that you want to do in person or you can get your support virtually, what's your recommendation?

So there are people offering this virtually on a kind of one to one basis, which certainly can work. I've chosen to work in person just because there is access to the community here. And for me being able to have kind of human connection and literally co regulate your nervous system with someone and be able to read their breath and then make facilitations based on what I'm seeing for me is just a much more effective way of working compared to if you're just, you know, mitigated through zoom or something, which I know can still have effects. As with WIM hof. My fear is that there is a kind of small percentage of the population whom something big will arise and they won't have another person there to help them to downshift and they'll be kind of stuck in that state.

And then self inquiry journaling, talk a little bit about. I mean, everybody's going to know what journaling is, but there's a specificity to this. Describe that process.

Yeah, so I'll sometimes combine this with kind of a somatic inquiry meditation as well, where I'm kind of using my interoception to kind of track these sensations that are alive and then inquiring into what emotions or what thoughts, memories might be underneath that. So I'll usually do that first and then afterwards I have a journaling practice which is built on internal family systems which I imagine some of your listeners are probably familiar with. But it's this idea of working with different parts within myself. And there might be a kind of like an inner child within me that feels hurt by something. There might be the kind of warrior that wants to defend me and you know, get angry everyone else. There's maybe the king who has more of a discernment and more of a sense of like courage to look at something that might be uncomfortable. And so I'll use these different characters and I think it's a fun creative process for people to almost like come up with who are the characters inside themselves. They've noticed that maybe they associate with certain thought patterns, certain moments, certain nervous system states, and then to kind of facilitate dialogue between those parts and just to ask what is it that this hurt part of myself actually wants? Or what is underneath this story that I'm telling myself? And maybe it's not about a story, but it's about something beneath that and it's about something that happened earlier. So it's almost this kind of excavation process. And usually what I find is it's not about the thing. It's not about the thing I think it is. It's like I go into that and then once I start journaling or once I start feeding into my body, it's like, oh, there was this thing that happened five years ago that I'm still pissed off about now that's surfacing. But you have to start with what's life. Awesome.

Well, Johnny, thank you so much for coming on the show. I've really enjoyed this. You and I are going to continue in the post show conversation where I want to talk a little bit about the four nervous system archetypes and also just some riffing on kind of like what's next for you. I'm really, really kind of curious about where your work is going, so we'll be talking about that in the post show conversation. Listeners, you can get access to ad free episodes, post show conversations with great guests and all sorts of other goodies@oneyou feed.net join so again Johnny, thanks so much for coming on. It's been such a pleasure.

Thank you so much. Yeah, this has been so much fun. I really appreciate. Foreign.

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