Managing nerves, anxiety, and burnout | Jonny Miller (Nervous Systems Mastery)

I have this idea that I call the feather brick dump truck phenomenon. And basically what that means is when we are showing early signs of burnout, our body will give us feedback, usually in subtle ways in the beginning. So the feather might be waking up in the morning and feeling a little bit tired, maybe a little bit exhausted. The brick, maybe you ignore that or you don't notice it and then three or four weeks later you have a fight with someone or an argument, or you just feel frustrated and terrible and you lose your cool and then maybe the dump truck is a month later or even a year later, there's a full blown health crisis or you develop type 2 diabetes or there's a whole range of things or maybe you get fired. Ideally you want to notice when it's the feather and then make adjustments or shifts then and not have to wait until you experience the the full blown pain of the dump truck. Which unfortunately is what happens to a lot of people, especially when they experience burnout for the first time.

Today my guest is Johnny Miller. Johnny teaches courses and does one on one coaching with tech professionals, helping them with something he calls nervous system mastery, which is essentially a set of tools and techniques for cultivating calm, upgrading your resilience and increasing your aliveness. If you can get better at dealing with stressful situations, avoiding burnout, and being more confident in meetings and big presentations, it becomes a superpower and a huge advantage in both business and in life. I actually read a post by Johnny about a year ago and it totally changed the way that I think about nervousness and stress and I still apply many of his lessons today. In our conversation we dive deep into Johnny's key insights. We talk about why the best way to stay calm in stressful situations is to focus on the state of your body and not your mind. How to create calm and confidence by changing the state of your body through breath. Johnny shares a bunch of very specific breathing exercises for creating calm and also for creating energy that we actually try out on the podcast. We also get into a bunch of advice for how to tell if you're seeing early signs of burnout, how to release emotional debt that you may be feeling. Also why feeling the feels gives you a competitive advantage in business. Also a practice called APE which reminds you to focus on your awareness, your posture and your emotions that I've started practicing ever since our chat and so much more. If you enjoy this chat, definitely check out Johnny's full course@nsmastery.com Lenny if you use that URL, you actually get $250 off the course Course with that I bring you Johnny Miller. After a short word from our sponsors.

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Johnny thank you so much for being here.

Welcome to the podcast.

It's great to be here.

Lenny so I read this post that you wrote. I think it was over a year ago at this point. It was called the operating manual for your nervous system and first of all blew my mind when I read it. Second of all, I always think about it when I get nervous or anxious in a situation. It's like really stuck with me and I know that people in the workplace often get nervous and anxious doing all presentations, meetings, performance reviews, all the things. So I thought it'd be awesome just to dive into the stuff that you've kind of uncovered about how we can become less nervous and less anxious before we get into the meat of it. I'd love to just spend a couple minutes just getting a sense of why you got into this stuff. What actually got you to spend so much of your energy and life force trying to understand how the nervous system works, how to get people to be less nervous and anxious.

My story starts in I was kind of have a background in tech. I had a startup, we went through Techstars back in 2012. About five and a half years into that experience, I went through burnout, which is pretty common in the startup world. But that actually wasn't the trigger for me. I find that usually people that get into this type of work, there's some kind of catalyst or some kind of challenging life event. And for me, that was October 23, 2017. And my fiance at the time had an anxiety attack and she took her own life. And that kind of completely just. Just destroyed me at the time. And I realized that I'd been so disconnected from my body and my emotions. And it kind of sent me on this, this five plus year journey to. To kind of discover all of this inner landscape that I'd been numb from the neck down. And I went into breathwork, meditation retreats, did hundreds of breath work journeys, researched with a breath lab over in Bali, and basically just kind of directed all of my focus and attention onto understanding this inner landscape that I'd been pretty much oblivious to. And since then have been working with founders, executives, running courses and teaching what I'm learning and hopefully still researching at the same time as well.

Wow. And I imagine the thinking was that if your wife had these skills, she would have had another path.

Yeah, that was definitely part of it. Yeah. And also just since realizing how many people are struggling with anxiety, depression, all of this kind of constellation of mental health challenges, both in the workplace and at home as well. And yeah, it's been a very rewarding journey. All right.

This episode's already gotten very heavy and I'm sucked in. I'm excited to learn all these things that you've uncovered. So let's just get into the meat of it. Just talk about this kind of general method that you've found for how to help people become less nervous and anxious.

Yeah. So I find this kind of top down, bottom up distinction to be incredibly helpful. Most people, when they try to calm down, they use kind of tactical reframes or maybe mindfulness or maybe reframing the situation in a positive light. There's lots of different practices that people use which do have some effect, but in my experience, working with the physiology, using what's known as a bottom up approach, primarily using the breath, although there's also other approaches that you can use. It's just such a, like, rapidly more effective way at shifting your state. And to kind of give a little bit of context and maybe some science as well, we have what's known as afferent and efferent neurons kind of going up, up and down our body. And there's four times more afferent neurons going from the body to the brain as from the brain to the body. So you can almost imagine this like a superhighway of traffic of information going up to the brain and much less, four times less going from the brain to the body. And so by learning how to kind of pull on the levers of our physiology, we can rapidly change our state. And then from there, by changing our state, that impacts the thoughts and feelings that we have. So instead of kind of trying to change the story or trying to fix something or trying to solve something, which is what, you know, most people do by default, myself included in the past, if you change your state first, then there's a cascading effect which changes your, your thoughts and your feelings.

Okay, amazing. Yeah. And just to like, share how I felt when I was reading this and try to understand, this approach is whenever I get nervous, there's always this like, oh, my body's starting to feel anxious. And then I think of a reason. Like, oftentimes I don't know why it gets nervous, why my body's starting to create this feeling of anxiety. And then I often realize I'm just now trying to just explain why it happened. Oh, I have this, like, big meeting coming up, or I have this podcast episode I'm nervous about, or I'm not going to make a deadline for my newsletter. Like, I often experience this where it's just like, oh, something feels nervous. And then, okay, here's the explanation. So maybe just along those lines, what else is there that might be helpful for people to think about in this context?

I mean, I think it's helpful to understand the process by which, by changing the way that we breathe, for example, it shifts our physiological state and changes our nervous system. So if you're, if you're listening to this, maybe, Yulen, you can try this as well. If you start breathing into your upper chest, shallow, fairly rapid, maybe even through the mouth, that will, then there's a part of your brain called the insular cortex, which, which is basically constantly spying on the way that we're breathing. And it will register that change. It will then send information to activate the endocrine system, which then creates shift in our blood chemistry. The sympathetic nervous system gets activated, and that increase in adrenaline and cortisol starts to flood your body. Everyone's probably very familiar with that feeling. And then that will then have a cascading impact on the thoughts that you're having and the way that you feel. And so, like you just shared, we have a tendency to kind of confabulate or make up stories that match the state that we're in. And so that's kind of what happens when we're breathing in that way. And then you can also consciously change your breath to breathe in a different way, which has the reverse effect, which I can go into, but I'll pause there. Yeah.

So I think one of the big actionable takeaways here is that instead of trying to convince yourself, no, this talk is going to go great. I don't need to worry about how I'm going to look in this meeting. Basically, instead of going top down, trying to calm your body through thought, your advice is calm your body first, because then your mind will notice. Hey, I'm actually not as nervous as I thought. Maybe things are going to be okay. Is that right?

Yeah, precisely. And I mean, I've used this myself many times before presentations. I gave a TEDx talk a few years ago, and I was like my entire body. I was just terrified. And I did 15 minutes of this breathing practice before and walked on stage kind of almost cool as a cucumber. It's very effective.

Sounds too good to be true. But we're going to do some of these exercises for people before we get into why. Why is it that breath specifically so powerful? It feels like such a strange thing to work so well. Just this idea of breathing in a different way. You talked a bit about this. I forget what you called it. That kind of watches how you're breathing. But I guess. What else can you share about just why is breath so effective in changing our state?

Sure. Well, it's one of the few things which happens automatically, but we can also control it consciously. And so what? Scientists have discovered that when the exhale is twice as long as the inhale, it has a calming effect. And when the inhale is either more intense or twice as long as the exhale, it has an activating effect. So you can kind of think of this as like an up or down lever on the nervous system.

You also have this really clever way of describing this system. You call it state over story, essentially focusing on the state of your body versus the story you're telling yourself. Is that the way to think about it? And can you just talk about that concept?

Yeah. So it's basically a shorthand for what we've just been talking about, which is most people tend to approach the problem or try to solve things on the level of story. So there's multiple ways you can do that. Through the breath, as we just talked about, you can also defocus your gaze and kind of relax your eyes, and that has a similar effect. You can expand your awareness and kind of bring your awareness to behind you and the sides of you and below you. Or you can breathe in these ways which emphasize the exhale. And so when we breathe in a way with, say, the exhale twice as long as the inhale, that part of the brain, the insular cortex, then sends signals to the parasympathetic nervous system, which then has the cascading effect on our endocrine system and calms us down. And what I usually find as well is that the kind of reactive thoughts and feelings that we have when we're in that kind of anxious loop, they can be self reinforcing. And so if someone has a thought of like, oh, no, I'm nervous before this important presentation, then that exacerbates the breathing pattern and then the whole thing just goes into this spiral, which can end up in like full blown panic attacks if it's not. If there's not an intervention of some sorts.

Yeah, that's what I find with my nervous. Like, I hate talking on stage. I. I get nervous before every podcast. Like, this is not my natural state.

Interesting.

Yeah. And the people, I hide it.

Well, is that, Is that still the case with podcasts today?

Absolutely. And it's like different levels of nervousness, but it's always just like, oh, there we go. Like, I'm not a performer person. Even like, I kind of push myself to do this podcast as a way to get better at this, to be honest. And so it's still a thing that I think about. And what I find is the nervousness comes from exactly what you described of the nervousness of being nervous. It's like, like, I don't know, there's no reason specifically to be anxious, but it's. I don't know how I'll be once I do the thing. So it's like nervous of what it Might look like or end up being like. So that's exactly what I ran into.

Yeah. And there's obviously, you know, people say mindfulness meditation, things like that, that. That can increase the. The psychological space between stimulus and response, and that is something that obviously does help over the long term, but it's, in my opinion, nowhere near as kind of rapid and effective and efficient as just changing the way that you're breathing.

Awesome. So let's get into it. I know you have a couple exercises specifically for this, and then we'll go from there.

We can stack a few of the exercises, and I'll try and keep it to, like, a minute or so. So, yeah, if you want to get comfy in your chair and sit up straight, feel your butt on the seat. And I find it helpful to kind of be aware of the space behind you and above you as well, kind of expanding your awareness so that you're aware of the space behind to the sides and above.

And should we close our eyes?

Yeah, and close your eyes down. If you're listening and driving, obviously don't do that, but, yeah, closing the eyes down just sure helps. And now we're just going to do simple breath. Going to inhale in through the nose for four. We're going to hold the breath at the top for four, and we're going to exhale for eight, and then we're going to repeat. So let the breath go. And inhaling through the nose, inhale, two, three, four. Hold the breath, two, three, four. And exhale, eight. Two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight. Inhale, two, three, four dot hold the breath, two, three thousand four. And exhale, two, three, four, five, Six, seven, eight. And now you can let go of the breath completely. And we'll end with one round of hummingbird, which is surprisingly effective at calming as well. So take a full breath in and humming through the nose all the way to the end of exhale, Let out a sigh if that feels good. And open up your eyes.

I feel extremely calm. I should do this every. Every podcast episode.

Before we start, a note on the humming. It also releases nitric oxide, which is a vasodilator, and that helps to create that kind of calming effect. And it also reduces eye tension as well. So I'll do it if I've been looking at a screen for too long. It's really good for kind of reducing eye fatigue as well.

There's also, like, a vagus nerve component to it because your body's vibrating. Is that true?

Yeah, precisely. So it kind of tones or stimulates the vagus nerve, which stimulates the parasympathetic nervous system.

What's your advice for doing this? Is this like before you go into a big meeting or a presentation, how do you apply this?

I kind of like to share building a toolkit of different practices that are appropriate for different contexts. So something like the four for eight breathing, you could do pretty much anywhere without anyone necessarily noticing. Humming is slightly more obvious, but if you're about to jump on a zoom or something, you can totally do it with your eyes closed. Things like expanding your awareness or bringing your awareness down to your feet and your hands, which creates a kind of grounding, calming effect that also you can do if you're in a busy room. Maybe you have social anxiety. Even orienting and kind of labeling things that you're hearing and feeling. Kind of bringing the awareness and attention back into the body. That also has an effect. And then there's longer practices for say, non sleep, deep rests, belly breathing, things that you can do if you have 10, 20 minutes and you're at home and you want to downshift. So I like to kind of give people a big toolkit to see what works for them and then cherry pick which ones are suitable to different situations. And another way that I think about this is I call it if this then breeds. So it's like if I feel overwhelmed, then I do the humming. If I feel anxious, then I do 4, 4, 8 breathing or alternate nostril breathing. And kind of having my own little recipe set that I have for different contexts is really helpful. And I work with people to kind of build those toolkits themselves.

This sounds like it needs to be a website where people can go with these lists of if then then that. Is there a place that we could send people in the show notes? And if not, you should make one before we go live.

There is not currently it's part of the curriculum in the course that I have, but it's okay. Great. I can wait maybe see if I can spin one up as well.

But yeah, okay, cool. We'll link to the course. If nothing else, amazing.

Okay.

Along this line of calming breath exercise, Huberman also has a different version which I've tried and I'm going to do both. Now you breathe in fully and then you breathe in a little bit more.

Imagine you've seen that piece of advice that's also fantastic. He calls it the physiological sigh. And it, it's both very effective, especially if you just have like, you know, five seconds and you just take it. Take a full Sigh. It's great. I'd also add that the sigh happens naturally as a result of doing these downshifting practices. So if you notice after you do, let's say the 4, 4, 8 breathing at the end, you might naturally just want to let out a sigh, and that's a signal that your body is naturally downshifting. Or if you're. If you're with a friend and you feel just like comfortable and relaxed, then your body might sigh. And it's something that we do a lot. And as you say, you can consciously do it and that will help as well. That's another one of the practices.

Awesome. So link to that. And I think throughout this episode, as you said, we're going to give people a bunch of tools that they can use. And it feels like some are like in the moment. I need to feel calmer right now. Here's a thing you could do. And then there's things you can do ongoing that build. I guess another way to think about it is just make your body more calm as a baseline practice that you work on there.

Yeah, precisely.

Awesome. Okay. I think the other breathing exercise we're going to do is the opposite. Get you all excited. Is that right?

Yeah, sure, let's. Yeah, we can do that as well. I call this expresso breath. So this is the opposite. This is very activating. I would only recommend this if you're feeling lethargic. Or maybe instead of drinking a coffee in the afternoon, you could do this for a minute or so. In the scientific literature, it's Bellow's breath or Breath of Fire. And it basically looks like a series of rapid exhales through the nose. I like to keep it through the nose only because if you do it through the mouth, it can be very too activating and it can kind of overwhelm people. Obviously, there's the WIM Hof practice that I'm sure many people are familiar with. So this is like a more gentle version of. If WIM Hof is like Red Bull, this is kind of like a. At a small coffee.

I like that. And you call it the espresso breath.

Espresso breath.

So yeah, that's a good metaphor there.

Yeah. Yeah. So yeah, let's do it. So again, kind of sit up straight and this time you want to be pumping the breath from your. From your lower belly and you pump the breath on the exhale. So I'll demonstrate it briefly. It's like breathe in. Okay.

So.

Yep. Take a full breath in and begin. And let go. And full breath in and sigh on the exhale. I already feel a little bit tingly.

I'm energized. Let's do this.

Go, go, go, go.

That was great. Okay, look at that.

We're back to where we started.

The full circle of energy. That was great.

Up and down.

And then how long do you recommend doing that one for?

So it kind of depends on how activating you find it, but I usually find 30. 30 breaths per round, and then kind of take a breath, have a long pause on the exhale, and then if you want to do another round or two.

Amazing. And the cases where this might be helpful is maybe you're about to give a big talk. Like, I guess in a talk, you both want energy and you want calm. So it's kind of complicated.

You can certainly, especially if you're. If you're kind of meetings early in the morning, you haven't quite got going yet, you can do the espresso breath to begin with, and that activates you. And then do some of the downshifting practices to kind of ground and stabilize that aliveness.

Are there any other tactical breathing exercises that are worth doing real quick? I know we'll get into some longer practices and deeper stuff, but is there anything else that would be helpful here?

No, I think we've covered kind of the bases. I don't want to overwhelm people too much.

Just as a takeaway, there's kind of these two techniques. One to help you get more calm when you need to be calm in the moment. The other is to get energy.

And.

And then I guess is, are these things that you recommend doing ongoing to build this muscle in your body, or are these mostly for. You need this now in the moment, and it's not worth just doing a few times a day, even when you're fine?

Yeah, great question. So I like to kind of recommend both a morning practice, particularly to kind of build the. The muscle of just. Of just doing it and getting used to it. So, you know, maybe five minutes in the morning before you start work, before breakfast, something like that. And then you're more likely to remember that you kind of have access to that in the moment. Because usually the challenge is that when someone is kind of in that flustered state, remembering to do the practice is often the last thing that comes to mind. So by kind of having a deliberate practice for at least kind of seven to 10 days so that you get the hang of it, then it feels much more natural to do it when you're feeling. That's kind of like Playing the game on hard mode. When you're. When you're really stressed and anxious, it's like, that's when you need it the most, but it's also when you're least likely to remember to do it.

Awesome. Okay, so the first exercise to calm you down is essentially breathe in four seconds, hold it for four seconds, breathe out slowly for eight seconds, and do that for about 30 seconds. Is that right? Or for a minute?

Yeah, I. I'd say for at least a minute or two. We kind of did a short, shorter version. Um, I'll also add that the important thing is that the exhale is twice as long as the inhale. So if exhaling for 8 is too long, you could do 3, 3, 6, or even 2, 2, 4, or even 5, 5, 10, depending on your. Your lung capacity, essentially, and your CO2 tolerance.

Okay, good to know. And then the espresso breath, when you need energy, where you just kind of pump air out of your belly through your nose, and you do that for how long would you recommend?

Two to three rounds of 30. Okay, 30 pumps? Yeah.

And again, the reason this is effective and powerful is coming back to your original big insight that though our state is driven by what our body is doing, and our mind often explains what we're feeling based on what our body's doing. So that if you can change the state of your body and become less nervous in your body, your mind will be like, all right, everything's fine.

Yeah. And maybe something that we haven't touched on yet, but I think is important to add in, is this idea of interoception or somatic awareness. And the reason I bring it in is because if you. You do this practice, but you're not really aware of your body and how you feel, then it'll be less compelling to you. But if you're kind of tuned into, like, sensations in your body, what's going on, you're more likely to notice the difference in the shifts.

Great. So let's get into that. That was something I definitely wanted to touch on here. This awesome acronym to help you with this process of introspection. So talk about that is. And then how to actually go about becoming better at being aware of what your body's doing.

Yeah. So it's this idea of interoception, which is known as our sixth sense. And basically, it's our ability to kind of sense, track and feel our internal landscape. And I like to use the metaphor of a chef in the same way that you train your flavor palette for kind of sweet Spicy umami, things like that. You can also train your interoceptive palate and become more aware of the internal sensations, whether that's your breath, whether it's tension, whether it's moods and emotions, whether it's the quality of your awareness, the quality of your thoughts. And the more kind of in tune with that you are, the more likely you are to notice the kind of early warning signs of something like anxiety. Because usually, certainly a panic attack doesn't come out of nowhere. There will be a kind of cascade of subtle things that happen in your body that eventually result in anxiety. And so if you can catch those things early and kind of nip them in the bud and do one of these practices, then you can avoid the kind of 10 out of 10 worst case scenarios.

Okay, awesome. So I know that there's also specific things you recommend people pay attention to to understand what their body is doing in this process of inter.

Interoception.

Yeah, intra. Okay, what is it?

Interoception as opposed to exteroception, which is awareness of all the external stimuli.

Got it. I guess before we even get to that. So you mentioned that it's like another sense we have. And I think that's a really important point that I think maybe people didn't catch. So we have these five senses, obviously, taste and smell and vision and touch. But your finding and research showed basically this is another sense people don't really know we have.

Yeah, exactly. And it has been studied quite a lot, especially in the last decade or so. And there's a number of interesting kind of findings from the research that I found. One being that ADHD tends to correlate with low levels of interoception, as does if people have PTSD or trauma. Again, interoception is lowered. And I'd certainly say for myself, for the first 25 years of my life, I was fairly numb from the neck down. I was not very aware to what was happening in my body in real time. I was also reading a book recently called the Hour between Dog and Wolf, which looked at Wall street traders and they correlated higher degrees of interoception with basically making more money and making better decisions. And I think the thesis was that by tuning into what their body was doing in certain moments, they could pick up on things, on more intuitive decision making, essentially.

So I think there's a specific list of things that you recommend people pay attention to. Their posture, their breath, things like that. What is that list? And then how do we actually do this better?

Yeah, so I simplify this to ape, which basically is an acronym which stands for awareness, posture and emotion. So to kind of go through each one by one awareness is to give an example, like I could narrow my awareness and become kind of really focused and just you kind of tense up and it also is quite activating sometimes. Or you can relax and expand your awareness and be aware of like the space above me, the space behind me, the space below me. And that is generally kind of a calming thing. Posture is fairly self explanatory, but again our posture affects kind of how we feel now and then emotion, which I include kind of somatic or body based sensations which arise. So both kind of what, what is the overall mood and the flavor or the texture that I'm feeling like right now? Maybe it's like excitement, maybe there's some joy. I'm noticing some like, there's some like heat in my belly, probably from the breathing. Yeah, there's like a little bit of tightness in my lower back from working out yesterday. So just kind of sense kind of mapping that landscape of sensation. And for most people it's almost like a terror incognita. You have those maps of here be dragons. And for a lot of people there's just these big kind of blind spots in their body.

And the advice here is, so there's this acronym ape and the advice is think about these three things when you're feeling something that you may not like, basically something's going on, slash just often come back to this I imagine just like whenever you can think of oh, ape. Awareness, posture, emotion. Is that how to use this?

Yeah, exactly. So again it can be something that you do kind of before you start your day, maybe like with a cup of tea, I like to drink tea. And just kind of do like a body scan essentially and just check each of those three areas. And it's also, it's really valuable, particularly if you're, if you know, if you're having racing thoughts or something doesn't feel quite right. Instead of just tackling the problem on the level of the mind kind of dropping down into the body and bringing that kind of into the picture as well, I find to be really helpful.

Basically as often as you can and generally when things are feeling a little off, just remember where's my awareness, how was my posture? And then what am I feeling? Am I feeling sad, am I feeling happy, excited, angry, things like that. I think you also talk about breath like you have a list, you wrote about this, of other things that you might want to pay attention to, actually finding Paying attention to my breath is doing is really powerful too. So I'm going to try like a BAPE version of this. I'm going to try to think about what am I, where is my breath coming from, what am I feeling there?

Yeah. So the breath and sensations are two other ones that are really helpful. The breath in particular. Often people will. There's an idea of like email apnea. When people are checking their emails, they will, without noticing it, start to hold their breath, which is generally a very activating thing to do. Or as I mentioned earlier, if your breath is through the mouth and shallow and into the upper chest, that will also be very activating. Versus is your breath through the nose? Is it kind of into the belly and into the sides of the ribcage and does it feel easeful? Basically like breathing without tension is, is ideal.

What I think about using this practice is if I were sitting in a meeting and just like, not like, not feeling like amazingly confident, just like come back to this acronym BAPE or ape, whichever one you want to choose. Just like, how am I feeling right now? Oh, wow. My whole stomach is clenched because I'm maybe nervous about what might happen or I'm not breathing at all or my posture is really bad. So I think in a meeting would be really helpful here. Maybe you're about to get on a zoom or an important call or something like that. Maybe a one on one. Is there anything else? Any other moments that might be good that kind of triggers for people of like, oh, I should really be aware of what's happening right now. Let me do an APE exercise.

Yeah, well, just to kind of piggyback on what you just said, if you're about to jump on a meeting and you're noticing that your stomach is clenched, like that's actually really useful data to kind of be like, ha, why am I, why is this happening? Is it your intuition kind of saying that maybe you shouldn't do this, deal with someone, or maybe something is off and so it's a sign to kind of explore that more. Or it could be that you've been triggered by something or something that someone said and you've only just realized it and then that's again more information or something that you can reflect on or go into.

Is there anything in your life recently that is an example of this where you're feeling unsure and maybe you realize, oh, here's what my body's doing, maybe I should pay more attention to this.

Actually last week I, I did a podcast conversation. So I have have a Podcast myself. And I got off the call and I remember I felt or got off the podcast and I felt pretty like exhausted and I felt like my. There was this kind of tension in my chest and this. And again my breath was kind of all over the place. And I realized that I'd very much over committed myself. For that week, I'd scheduled back to back podcast interviews. The podcast wasn't even the priority for kind of what I'm focusing on in this quarter. So I then made the decision to just push back all my episodes until the summer, basically.

I love that example. I know that feeling very well.

I'm sure.

When you wrote about this idea of interoception, you connected it to burnout. And I think you talked about how this is one of the best tools to avoid burnout. Is that right? Am I remembering that right? And if so, how do you think about this and burnout and avoiding burnout in general? Something a lot of people experience.

Yeah. So I have this idea that I call the feather brick dump truck phenomenon. And basically what that means is when we are showing early signs of burnout, our body will give us feedback, usually in subtle ways in the beginning. So the feather might be waking up in the morning and feeling a little bit tired, maybe a little bit exhausted. The brick, maybe you ignore that or you don't notice it and then three or four weeks later you have a fight with someone or an argument, or you just feel frustrated and terrible and you lose your cool. And then maybe the dump truck is a month later or even a year later, there's like a full blown health crisis or you develop type 2 diabetes, or there's a whole range of things, or maybe you get fired. There's a bunch of different things that can happen, but normally depending on how attuned or depending on someone's interoceptive capacity, ideally you want to notice when it's the feather and then make adjustments or shifts then. And not have to wait until you experience the. The full blown pain of the dump truck. Which unfortunately is what happens to a lot of people, especially when they experience burnout for the first time.

This is such an important point and such a good way of thinking about it. Reminds me of Andy Johns in the episode we had there of just how long and willing to the episode there of just like how all these little things came up along the way and then eventually just became incredibly unsustainable to live the life that he was living. This episode is brought to you by Miro.

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Most complex projects with Miro. That's m I r o.com Lenny what are some examples of this feather? So your advice here is just like, pay attention to these little signs that you're not living a sustainable life right now. What are some examples of these kind of feathery signs of like, maybe I need to change something.

Yeah. So I'll tie this in with a concept that I call emotional debt, which is basically when our nervous system experiences stress, there's what's known as a mobilization cycle. And if that cycle isn't completed or we don't get to downshift or relax on the other side, that gets stored in the body as allostatic load, which I call emotional debt. And over time that creates fragility in the nervous system. And so what that fragility can look like is anything from being impacted by small things in a kind of disproportionate way. So noticing that you're more reactive than normal, maybe you're a little bit more snappy, maybe you get frustrated by little things, maybe your sleep isn't as good, maybe you wake up not feeling fully rested, maybe kind of relationships are often like especially intimate relationships are usually a place that this shows up or relationships at work. So those are kind of the classic early warning signs. And then as that emotional debt threshold increases in the same way that, say, with technical debt, if you're building a product in the beginning it's fine, and in fact it's even necessary in the beginning, it's great that our body can buffer this stress response because it allows us to function. But if we don't pay off that technical debt or emotional debt, then over time it accumulates and it can also come out through kind of health crises, health challenges. It just gets basically progressively worse until that debt is paid off.

I feel like a lot of people listening are like, yes, I know exactly what you mean. How does one notice that you're building emotional debt and then how do you start to release this debt and pay off this debt?

What I've seen with some of my founder clients and in the research that we did where we interviewed 260 leaders, what can often happen is that emotional debt will increase and increase and increase until it gets to a point where we are well outside what's known as our window of tolerance. And at that point, there's like a crash. It's almost like the fuse switch blows and there's exhaustion, maybe there's complete inability to get up off the couch. And for some people, people with large nervous system capacity, they can keep going for five years, maybe 10 years, and they can kind of keep building this up and it becomes normalized to kind of live in a way where you're always on and never really relaxing or coming down or. One really key sign actually is if you're not able to kind of naturally downshift or downregulate your nervous system at the end of a day without something like wine or CBD or some kind of external substance, that's a sign that you kind of reached a certain threshold of emotional debt.

And then how does one start to pay off this debt? If you've spent years just working way too hard, you've had a relationship that just isn't working great. I don't know. I imagine most people go to therapy and just kind of talk through all these things and try to work through the challenges. What do you recommend? If you're just like, man, I feel like I have this weight, what should I do?

Yeah, well, it's. I mean, that's a big question. I'm actually, I probably get some pushback for this, but I'm not a big fan of talk therapy alone, or at least therapy that doesn't have a somatic or body based component. And from my understanding of the nervous system and how we store this stress, just talking about things and keeping things on the level of the intellect doesn't actually address the root of the challenge. What we need to do is create a certain sense of safety to kind of go into those buffered emotional responses and feel them all the way through and allow that mobilization reflex to complete. And so to kind of give a personal example, when I was living in Bali, I did kind of several hundred breathwork journeys where you kind of breathe in a certain way to get into an altered state. And then in that place these memories would arise of these, these things that happened five, 10 years ago. And my body would like it would either move a certain way or the anger would come through. Sometimes there would be sadness or grief. Often there's a lot of stored emotion that's held in our body that just needs permission to kind of be felt through and be released. And so for me it was a journey of coming into right relationship with my anger and my grief and honestly my shame as well, like giving myself permission to feel this like gunk that had been stored in my, in my pelvis. So I'm not saying you have to go to bali and do 200 breath work journeys like that. That's definitely not, that's, I mean that's a path. But first it begins with, as I said, cultivating interoception and even being aware that there is this tension. There is, there are these things in your body. Secondly, having the practices of self regulation so that if these things come up, you don't get overwhelmed, you're able to downshift and ground. And then thirdly, it's the practice of what I call emotional fluidity, which is basically creating the conditions of welcoming the full spectrum of emotions as they arise. And often it's very helpful to have a guide or a somatic practitioner. I like somatic experiencing. Hakomi are two modalities I'm a big fan of. And yeah, that's a journey and a process. And it depends how many years you've been operating in a slightly numbed way. And it's different for everyone, but it begins by tuning into and listening to the body and then having honestly curiosity about what is there and just following that curiosity and the body starts to kind of show you what is ready to be seen.

I love that it always comes back to kind of the original place we started, which is that the way we feel is a very bottom up body based system. It's not we feel something and our body gets nervous. It's our body gets nervous and they're like, oh, here's why I'm nervous. And your advice is just focus a lot on helping your body release the stuff that you've built up this debt. And then also just when you're nervous in the moment, focus on getting your body to a state versus trying to convince your mind now everything's gonna be okay.

Exactly.

And specifically on the therapy route, just to touch on that. So your advice there is if you were to work with a therapist and you feel, really, you feel a lot of this stuff that we're talking about is focus on a somatic oriented therapy where it's body oriented, not just thinking about it and talking through stuff. It's actually convincing your body this is going to be. Here's a way to helping your body release this debt, essentially.

Yeah. I mean, you can understand in precise detail about whatever the challenge was from 5, 10, 15 years ago. But if you're unable to connect it to the correlating sensations in the body, like usually if, say, I don't know, if I was to imagine someone shouted at me yesterday, and I think about that, there's usually a correlating kind of somatic sensation. The neuroscientist Dimasier calls it a somatic marker. So by tracking the somatic markers and then either on your own, just kind of following that sensation and allowing whatever emotion was present at the time to complete that is the way that we kind of by, we slowly pay off that emotional debt by like one, one process at a time.

So maybe coming back to this question of say someone is listening and wondering, am I building emotional debt? Am I ignoring things that are these feathers? What are signs and just, I don't know, examples of this, of emotional debt being built up, of this trauma, whatever you want to call it, being built up in the body? I don't know, is it just like anytime you feel really nervous, that's emotional debt? Is it anytime you push something down that you are pretty sure you should deal with in the moment, that's emotional debt. What are just like some examples of what that feels like and looks like?

Yeah. So it's typically different forms of nervous system dysregulation and that shows up as, you know, it could be someone's breathing pattern, like if they're constantly in this sympathetic or hypervigilant state, if they're always tracking for things, looking for the worst case scenario. Another common one, and this is particularly true in the tech sector, is being very much in the head and living in the thoughts and the mind the entire time. And there's a form of disassociation that happens as a kind of protection mechanism, essentially because it's uncomfortable to be with the sensations in the body and because our society tends to reward People for solving problems and being in their mind. That is a pattern that continues for many, many years or even decades. Other ones are. I think the most obvious one for people is emotional reactivity, where your response to a certain situation is disproportionate to what's happened. So, like, for example, if you said something to me of like, that doesn't make any sense, and I was like, I freeze maybe. And this is another important point that most people have two versions of reactivity. Some people will kind of freeze, withdraw, shut down and disconnect, and other people will become more aggressive, become bigger and attack and fight back. And kind of knowing which way you tend to orient, for me, it's usually shrink and freeze and shut down. Knowing what your pattern is and also knowing what the sensations are. When this happens, it's really helpful for you to be like, oh, that thing's happening. My priority now is to downshift and kind of find a sense of safety basically in the body and then interact, then make the decision, then have the conversation. Because if you can keep going from that place of reactivity, nothing good happens from that place. No great decisions were made from that place. So again, that's a place where having the intercept of awareness, oh, this is what's going on. Being able to then downshift your system, kind of access a sense of, oh, I'm okay, that actually this isn't so bad. And then moving on from there is a profoundly practical and just useful skill.

Kind of along the same lines you wrote somewhere this idea that you have a big competitive advantage if you feel the feels is the way you described it. Does that ring a bell? And if so, what can you share around that? Just why this is so powerful, especially in the workplace.

Yeah, so I think I wrote about this in one of the Every essays. I think the title was the Best Decision Making is Emotional. And I basically wanted to kind of poke at the phrase. I think I saw someone on Twitter say fact over feelings. Don't let emotions ruin good decision making. And yeah, there's so much that I can say about this, but basically there was a landmark study by this guy Damasio, who's this kind of famous neuroscientist. And he studied a patient called Elliot. And Elliot had a tumor in his brain that was removed. And it basically meant that he was unable to feel emotions. So his entire emotional capacity was removed. And Elliot went from being a successful married businessman to divorced, broke, and unable to choose what he could have for lunch. He was unable to make the most basic Life decisions. And it's because he didn't have access to that emotional center in his brain. And so our brain is like a prediction making machine. And as I mentioned earlier, there's this highway of sensory data that's coming up through the body. And if we don't listen to that when we're making decisions, then we're losing out on a lot of information. And what tends to happen, I see this in clients that I work with, is if they are avoiding feeling a certain way, let's say that they don't enjoy feeling conflict or anger, then they will make decisions subconsciously to avoid feeling that way. And it becomes a huge bias and a huge problem. Because people make decisions because they're afraid of feeling a certain way. And if you're on the other hand able to just welcome and be with whatever emotions would arise on the other side of a decision, you're able to kind of decide clearly instead of being skewed one way or the other.

Easier said than done.

Yeah.

Do you find there's ever a downside to being too in touch with what you're feeling? I find like I'm actually not like a feeler of what I'm feeling kind of person. Like I'm pretty stable partly because I'm not like super in tune with what I'm feeling a lot of times. And maybe this is a huge problem that I need to deal with, but I don't know. It's worked out okay so far, I guess. Do you ever find that sometimes it's okay sometimes, like you don't need to know exactly every moment, anything that's hurting you, causing you pain?

Yeah, it's a good question. And some people do have, you know, a very high interceptive capacity and that can be overwhelming. In which case I would recommend focusing on the breathing practices to, to build that capacity to downshift so you're able to just function. And there's definitely people who are overwhelmed by the stimuli of day to day life. Being out in traffic, they're very easily overwhelmed. And for those people working on increasing nervous system capacity to kind of hold that amount of stress, maybe it's through sauna and cold plunge, or maybe it's through gentle titration of stresses and then downshifting, that's actually really valuable. I'd also say that the, the ability to kind of function well, or this applies to kind of like high, like a lot of high functioning people, which is probably honestly a lot of your audience. It's very helpful kind of in the moment to Kind of, let's say something comes up, you want to be able to buffer intense emotions and say, get through the meeting, get through whatever it is. Like that's a very helpful skill. But if you don't, then give yourself spaciousness afterwards to downshift and allow yourself to feel whatever was brought up by that experience. You're going to be adding to this emotional debt over time. And as I mentioned, some people, they might only it might be a year before there's some kind of breakdown, burnout. Other people, it might be longer. And usually it's more unfortunate in the longer case because it creates like a long term health crisis and then no amount of money or time is able to repair the damage that has been done, which is. Can be really tragic.

My chat with Andy Johns is a great example of that happening.

Yeah, Andy's a superb example and I love his vulnerability and honesty and what he's been through.

Yeah, I think if you're interested in this topic, definitely watch that episode. Another exercise that you talk a lot about is this idea. It's called nsdr, I think talk about that and when that might be useful, how to go about using this tool.

Yeah, so NSDR was a practice coined by Andrew Huben, who you mentioned earlier. And it basically it's a more scientific lens on the practice of yoga Nidra, which is kind of an ancient yoga practice, but I'm a huge fan of it and I do it myself most days for kind of 15 to 20 minutes. Basically what it looks like is you lie down, put on an eye mask or a blindfold and you listen to a guided audio. I've recorded some myself so I can share these in the show note links.

Your voice would be so good for these by the way. You found your calling.

Nice. Yeah, it's really fun for me to do. But basically what it involves is a guided body scan. So this is also a great way to practice interoception because it's something I didn't mention earlier was that when there's cortisol present in our body, the cortisol basically acts as a numbing agent. So it's much harder to kind of tune into those sensations. But using this, I think it's a 14 minute guided NSDR practice. You're basically lying down, there's a guided body scan, there's relaxing music in the background, and by the end of it you feel like you've had like a two hour nap. Like it feels incredible and particularly for people who like myself, tend to get tired in the afternoons. If you kind of space this out usually between like 1 and 3pm for me. That will give you a second wind in the afternoon and it'll mean you won't kind of end the day collapsed on the sofa. So I think it's great for improving interoception. It's good for allowing your body to downshift and relax instead of being in that kind of high tone, sympathetic state all throughout the day. So it gives your body a break and it just feels really good. Honestly, it's probably my most played practice of everything that I teach. Just people listen to it every day. So I'll. I'll share that in the show notes as well.

And imagine if you feel like you've built this emotional debt, this would be a really good exercise to start to do. Is that right?

Yeah, it's fantastic. I mean, most people, there's some people who struggle with having enough energy to kind of get out of bed and function. But again, I imagine listeners to your show, people that live in Silicon Valley, their challenge is the downshifting without external substances. And so NSDR is a really great way of strengthening that ventral vagal tone, which is our body's capacity to go from like on kind of go, go, go to then relaxing. There's a quote from Kevin Kelly that I interviewed recently and he said if you have a great work ethic that needs to be matched with a great rest ethic. And I think that that kind of piece of actually training our capacity to downshift after stress is just completely missing from most people's playbooks.

I think with a lot of this sort of advice, if you listen to Tim Ferriss and Huberman and everyone's got this like, stuff you should be doing every day list and it ends up being so long and there's so many things to do. Cold plunge Sana, what is it that you practice or come back to? Slash, what would you recommend people try to do daily that is most impactful of all this stuff we've talked about?

First, experiment with a bunch of different practices and see which you enjoy and notice how you feel before and then how you feel afterwards. That's kind of the key because once you know that it feels good, you're not going to have to like force yourself or motivate yourself to do it. You'll just do it naturally because you know you'll feel great afterwards. I would recommend starting really simple, so starting with the 4, 4, 8, breathing or humming. Doing that in the morning for just 2 minutes, 2 minutes in the beginning is enough And I would also recommend listening to the NSDR practice at least once or twice. If you work from home, it's pretty easy after a lunch break. Something like that could also be in the evening when you get home as well. Some people use it to help fall asleep. And then the final thing that I would recommend is if you have the resources and you have access. Finding a somatic practitioner or somatic therapist is so life changing. I mean I emerged a completely different human on the other side of the kind of 200 breath work journeys. I have a different experience of life. Basically released so much time, even my voice sounds different. Like if you listen to the podcast episodes I recorded four or five years ago, my voice is higher pitched. It's like it just sounds different. It has a different resonant quality to it.

Wow. Okay, awesome. So you've kind of summarized. I was going to try to summarize all the advice you've given, but if you were to do the bare minimum next steps based on this advice, try this 448, 336, 224. Does 2 2, 4 work too? If you just like go real fast. Like it. Yeah. Okay, perfect. Okay. Um, so do that for a couple mornings. See how that does. Try this NSDR practice. You'll link willing to a recording of how to do that. And then was there something else you recommended? Oh, somatic worker. Like basically a maybe a therapist, maybe not. Someone that helps you with your body. Yeah.

And I'd add in the. The eight practice for even 15 seconds before the breathing in the morning and after just so that you notice the difference. And if you do the NSDR, that is basically a 15 minute interoception practice as well. So you're kind of getting two birds with one stone with that practice.

What's your perspective on meditation? Does that fit into this? Do you find the SDR replaces the need for meditation?

That is a big topic. I am an avid meditator as well. I've done many 10 day silent retreats. I was in a dark room for 10 days with meditation. I think it really depends on what you're training. Like, it's like saying, you know, what's your opinion on exercise? Well, are you training mobility or stamina or strength? It's the same with meditation. You could be training loving kindness, you could be training your focus and attention. You could be training spacious awareness. So I'm a big fan of embodied meditation practices. So this is often the classic Vipassana body scan is a good example. Again, I mean that's Basically interoceptive practice, right, where you're, you're just moving your attention through different parts of your body over and over and over again for like days on end. In the case of a vipassana retreat, meditation is helpful for the specific skill of increasing the psychological space between a stimulus and your response. So if you have some degree of meditation practice, instead of getting wrapped up in a certain emotion or even believing a certain thought pattern, there's usually an ability to kind of step back a little bit and see it for what it is. So there definitely is a place for meditation. But my viewpoint is that we've kind of over indexed for mindfulness and meditation over the last 20 years. There's so many apps, there's so many, there's so much talk about it and we've completely forgotten the body based approaches. So I'm not saying don't meditate. I think meditation for sure has its place. Especially if your goal is more of the traditional waking up and seeing through the nature of the self. That's a different kind of path in my opinion. But if you're looking to function more effectively and be more in tune with your body, then there's a whole different category of practices in this bottom up variety that we've touched on today.

On the topic of bottom up, I imagine you're a big fan of this book that everyone always talks about. The Body Keeps Score, I think it's called. Would you recommend that book? Is it connected in large part to the stuff you talk about? What do you think of that book specifically? Because I hear about it all the time.

Yeah, it's a good book. It's by Basil van der Kolk. And there's another writer, I think Peter Levine says the issues are in the tissues is basically the concept. And this is the idea that we have these incomplete mobilization reflexes that are stored in our body and often held as tension. It's not strictly true to say that the trauma is in the body. There's actually a cortical map in the brain which kind of tracks these things. But for kind of practical purposes, it looks and feels as if there is stored grief in my right hip or anger in my solar plexus like that.