Regulate Before You Relate: The Inner Work of Raising Men with Jonny Miller

what's amazing about kids from what I've seen is they are they're like 10 out of 10 in emotional fluidity like they can go from anger to sadness to joy to disappointment in like two minutes that's right they absolutely can yeah and and and that's that you know most adults are capable of that too but we've just we've learnt to shut it down

hi and welcome back to Raising Men today I'm sitting down with Johnny Miller founder of Nervous System Mastery and the host of the Inner Frontier Podcast Johnny's work is all about helping high performing leaders founders and creative find calm resilience and presence in a world that never slows down Johnny welcome to raising men it's great to be here Shawn you know I know that I struggle with this I struggle with remaining present uh with staying regulated

especially with the kids it feels to me like sometimes my nervous system and I are just and we're enemies right and you you talk a lot about how our nervous system shapes how we show up in the world and how we can be the mastery of that system as opposed to letting the system be the mastery of a master of us right when you talk about nervous system mastery what does that actually mean in everyday terms hmm yeah well I I like that frame of of like feeling like the nervous system is your enemy

and I think you know one way to describe it is befriending your nervous system and and listening to your nervous system and having a relationship with it yeah um as opposed to feeling like either like you're a victim or that you need to dominate and and kind of like like whip into submission with uh you know too much discipline um yeah

that is the framing that we kind of have in our culture isn't it it's it's it you either are the victim of of of it and there's no you can't you don't have any control or you have to have the discipline to to beat it into submission that is smash through it have grit grind hustle you know all those different different framings so I mean I think first and foremost the nervous system is is quite literally the lens through which we experience life and depending on the state of our nervous system

it depends on what we experience and and that impacts the quality of our relationships the quality of our attention the quality of our creativity so for me it really is upstream of so many other things and something that I like um what what I find really interesting and useful for myself is this idea of uh reducing the half life of reactivity so you know everyone can probably think of a moment probably in the last like 24 hours but certainly the last week

where they did something out of like a reactive almost like knee jerk reaction maybe they said something or maybe they just picked up their phone and dooms scrolls you know what whatever that is and my I think like you know practical way of framing nervous system mastery is reducing the half life of that reactivity so instead of being in that reactive hijacked state fight flight for you know three hours you know sometimes three days sometimes three weeks

you know people spend like weeks or months in this um you know with a state of anger or unprocessed grief or whatever the emotion is and there are very trainable and learnable skills um that we can go into that's help with reducing that reactivity and then ultimately creating more agency and creating more intentionality that is really what I care about I the nervousness stuff is interesting but ultimately what I care about is how can we live in a way that is in line with our

our highest aspirations and our intentions for who we wanna be and the skills the nervous system skills I find a very it's like a high leverage way of achieving that

yeah I that's that's a really interesting for I think about it as you know we have the two different brains and and one of them is our Conan the barbarian brain which we need to be reactive if we're in a fight or those sorts of things and the other one is our Sherlock Holmes brain which is you know allows us to to apply the the more advanced aspects of our brains and I find that the more time I spend in my Sherlock Holmes brain the better my results are right and

and it's just a better life that I end up having and my my relationships are stronger and you know I get to be you know I I get to control a lot more of my outcomes if if I'm in that state hmm yeah interesting I I like that frame and I think there's a there's a risk in that as well in you know I I from my in my 20s I was in in the tech world and I was you know very much prized having a strong intellect you know having high IQ solving problems like that was that was me

I was like a same type a problem solver yeah and um I think one of the risks of that and and if you know the Sherlock Holmes approach to life is that it can be somewhat disembodied and so if you're and I'm not I you know I'm not saying this is necessarily true but yeah I certainly was almost like numb from my neck down I had very low what's known as interoception very low somatic awareness and as a result I was missing all of the data and feedback that was coming

from my body coming from the signals and by not paying attention to that I ran into burnout you know when I was working on my startup I wasn't particularly emotionally attuned and there's a whole host of issues and problems that come from only being in the Sherlock Holmes brain if that's not also coupled with more embodied intelligence yeah

if you shut the cone in the barbarian brain off and you're not listening to those signals then you run the risk of what you're talking about and I'll tell you that resonate that absolutely resonates with me I I I don't think I've mastered that at all I'm I'm looking forward to talking about the skills you're mentioning and and the fact is that that composure and what what I think you mean when you talk about nervous system mastery that is a hallmark of maturity of success of leadership of when

when we close our eyes and we imagine our best selves it often has that component right you are you are the master of of your outcomes and so you you need that in order to be what who you wanna be yeah well I I think all leadership is ultimately self leadership yeah and um there's an interesting yeah I sometimes work with companies and teams and the nervous system of an organization is a direct reflection of the nervous system of the leader true

and I imagine that's also probably true for parents too like I imagine your nervous system or your kid's nervous system is probably a reflection of your nervous system 100% yeah and that will probably change throughout the course of a day or a week or a month yeah

it it's I've always felt um that I was so good at remaining in in the Sherlock Holmes brain and um in a way maybe that that that you're describing is being maladaptive or or not quite you know disembodied in exactly the way that you're talking about and when my kids came along it's like they have a magic button that they can use to just absolutely just get a rise out of me I would get I I would get angrier with my children I mean at about just when it was you know my boy would be screaming

and I wouldn't know how to make him not scream and it was because he was colicky or he was feeling pain or whatever it was and it tapped into something in me that a a kind of helplessness a kind of um like like I was I wasn't fit for the world I wasn't capable I can't I can't solve this problem I can't troubleshoot this problem how am I supposed to do anything at all and it it enraged me and I I'm not used to being angry I I never so I I'm not a particularly angry person by nature

and so it was it was something that I don't have that skill of dealing with that very healthily and it was it was really tough for me to deal with and um and so I'm interested let's get into the skills I'm really into so there's really two aspects that I really want to tease apart here and that is what do we do in order to practice nervous or develop nervous system mastery in ourselves and how do we cultivate that in our boys also

yeah well I mean just sticking with that example that you just shared is something that I believe and I and I have seen in my own experience is that it's very difficult for us to be with other people in emotions that we don't feel comfortable feeling and expressing for ourselves yeah so you know I felt this in in my life um you know around grief and certainly around anger but there is an impulse that a lot of us have to try and like fix other people's emotions

and I think that core impulse comes from a like a discomfort or a dis a disease with that emotion being brought up in ourselves when someone else is experiencing it so I I think that is actually a core dynamic that is underlying a lot of the nervous system work is essentially essentially I can go into the specific skills but it comes down to can we just welcome the full spectrum of our experience as it's arising like that that's simplest possible way of saying it

that's basically what it comes down to but within that there are kind of specific skills uh one of them I mentioned earlier which is this idea of interception which is when let let's say that anger is arising it's like not only being having the story of like oh this thing just happened so I'm really angry but it's like being in touch with there is a there is like a heat in my chest or there is like a my palms are like sweating or there's like a um an an energy or electricity in my belly you know

there's all of these sensations that come along with the with the experience of anger and tuning into those and and particularly noticing them when they're like a 2 or 3 out of 10 as opposed to like 11 out of 10 yeah once it's 11 out of 10 you're you're done right

11 out of 10 I don't know like full rage blackout like you can yeah fill in the blank so interception is is really like um like a lead domino skill if you don't have that it's very hard to to do anything else and then the seconds let's say pillar of skills is a self regulation um and I categorize this into top down bottom up and outside in and this is where the this is where the agency piece comes online in that there are very effective practices and protocols

which can up or down regulate our nervous system state depending on what is appropriate at the time so for a lot of people they'll be let's say underdeveloped in the down regulation category so whether they're feeling anxiety or frustration or anger it's very helpful to be able to do a breathing practice do humming do orienting there's a number of these different things and come back into a within what's known as your window of tolerance which is basically where you can be with what

what is arising without disassociating without blaming without reacting um and just be with whoever or whatever is arising and then the third category is emotional fluidity which is circling back to the idea of welcoming all of the emotions as they're arising without trying to fix get rid of push away uh blame project etcetera um so I can go into you know any one of those but that's that's a um that's what I describe of that's what what I describe as nervous mastery in a in a nutshell yeah

no I love that let's so let's drill down into each of those in turn we'll start with introspection um I'd like to understand go sorry go ahead

interception different from introspection interception uh what okay say the word again interception intero interception which is the opposite of extraception which is like awareness of senses sounds sight around us okay uh alright okay yeah that uh I I that is that's a new word to me so what does that what does that mean how and how do I how do I trigger myself to do that rather than what I would naturally do in response to stimulus uh huh and how do I you know how do I cultivate that in my boy

hmm hmm

so what is it um working definition is basically how aware of your internal landscape are you at any point in time so it you know includes like are you sleepy are you hungry are you too hot you too cold do you need the toilet um but also what sensations are you noticing like what what mood is present what's uh is there an emotional tone is the joy is the sadness etcetera etcetera and um I find it's helpful to have some kind of like daily practice to just tune in

and you can think of this as like a an interceptive weather report so it can just take you know a minute or two but ideally before you start the day before all the inbound from life kind of starts stream streaming in before the kids are jumping on your bed yeah um just tuning in and and acknowledging and noticing what is there um and I like to think of you're tuning into your awareness is it does it feel contracted does it feel expansive tuning into your posture

do you feel like straight and upright and um present and then tuning into your your emotions or your sensations like what is the what is the tone of uh that is present um and then using that as data to inform you know maybe you notice some tiredness maybe your kids kept you up for hours and you wanna schedule a nap or take a few things off the calendar for that day to recover um or maybe you have a lot of energy a lot of creativity and you wanna tap into that

you wanna schedule some deep work time to express that um or maybe there's some emotion maybe it's like residual anger or sadness from the day before that you wanna set aside a bit of time to just like feel through and process and get to the bottom of so it doesn't come out in a kinked way to your wife or your kids or whoever it is yeah and then it also seems like that sort of tool is also really helpful like if you see your your boy start to get dysregulated

and he starts to freak out and get really really upset I had a I had a situation this morning where um uh my boy had gone downstairs and he was making himself some breakfast and so he's 6 and then the girl went down and she is only 3

so she's unable to pour her own bowl of cereal and pour milk in it so she was asking the boy for help and he was just ignoring her and it was very frustrating for her obviously and so she came back upstairs into our room and was upset and complaining and so I I I went downstairs and I asked the boy to help her with her cereal and he agreed to do it but he really didn't want to and so he was kind of grousing and all of that stuff and I you know I was I was rushed I was in I was kind of in a hurry

and I I ended up getting pretty upset with him like dude I you know we help each other in this family and I'm asking you to help me I'm not asking you to help your sister even I'm asking you to help me otherwise I have to go do it and I'm in a towel I just got out of the shower and um you know I kind of expressed my disappointment at him but what I didn't do is sit down with him and get him to tap into why are you feeling so frustrated about just pouring your sister a a bowl of cereal here and

that probably would have been a better way to handle that I suspect hmm yeah well I mean this I I share my thoughts with the caveat that I don't yet have kids my wife is pregnant we're super excited to have our first Dora and pretty soon now right in about three months time yeah so next well March March coming up pretty soon wow um but you know I I love what you just said there and I think that for me that yeah you know the key is it really is that non judgmental curiosity

like that's the key piece whether it's for your kid whether it's for a loved one or whether it's for yourself

and um if it's you know if it's if it was your own anger and you had a little you know a couple of minutes of spaciousness it's it's like tuning in and be like huh like I'm noticing that I'm angry like what what is it what is the sensation what is underlying this like what's the story yeah and it's the curiosity without an agenda and without judgement which is simple but also really freaking hard especially if you know you're saying you're in a rush this morning and yeah it's it that's

that's when this stuff is simple but not easy at all and you know especially for kids I think often kids just want to be seen and validated in their emotional experience and curiosity is a great way to do that you can just say like like hey like what's what's coming up for you like I see that you're see that you're you're kind of angry right now like like tell me about that and and it it I think I mean what's amazing about kids from what I've seen is they are

they're like 10 out of 10 in emotional fluidity like they can go from anger to sadness to joy to disappointment in like two minutes that's right they absolutely can yeah and and and that's that you know most adults are capable of that too but we've just we've learnt to shut it down we have yeah conditioning and contraction and stories that just get in the way of that um but really really we're aspiring to the level of emotional fluidity of young children yeah with some of the higher level

meta awareness and skills that come with maturity

yeah there's attention there right if you are really emotionally fluid but don't have any influence over what emotional state you end up in that can be really maladaptive I would think actually you know finally like most people would think that but I I actually don't I don't think that that um that's true um as long as the this is the key caveat as long as the emotions aren't being used to subtly manipulate and what I mean by that is you know some people when they're angry

they're angry at someone else and it's basically a way of trying to get what they want or trying to actually not acknowledge or accept ownership of their anger and blaming someone else for it that's that's very different from letting the anger move through you maybe just like stomping on the ground be like like fuck this like that and moving it that way it moves through very quickly and then you come back to a place of like grounded calm and sadness and and this you know the same with sadness

like this is actually more common with this is somewhat controversial to say but it's somewhat more common with women who will sometimes use sadness or disappointment to then manipulate the outcome of other people sure and it's another way of um and I'm not saying this out of judgment I'm just saying that that it's a protective strategy that we learn because it can be it is often uncomfortable to feel those emotions for ourselves and to take full ownership of those emotions for ourselves

and so coming back to parenting the more that we're able to learn the skills of fluidly

welcoming and expressing our own full spectrum of emotions the more that kids will model that from us and just like learn that as a default because kids I'm sure you know like from from what I've heard from what I've seen kids don't really do what we say but they do model what we do yeah yeah and and there's I think it's an important skill to be able to first model the thing and then and then call attention to it right to to anchor it in their exactly in their cognitive brain yeah and

but it's absolutely true that they don't do what we say at all in fact they don't even hear you

they just they just go do yeah and and you have to you have to demonstrate so so just coming back to the interception piece so this is something that um again this is currently theoretical for my wife and I I'm sure that when it comes practically in in three to five three to six months from now yeah yeah yeah but but something that I think we're gonna really attempt to do our best to do is to constantly um be referring our daughter back to her own internal experience

so instead of saying like good job or good girl or um praising or rewarding or or certainly punishing in in any way but instead being like like how did that feel like how was it how did it feel in your body to do X y or Z and do you wanna do that again like did that feel good and just constantly um encouraging that self referential nature so that she's not looking to us for praise or blame or reward or whatever but she's just tuning into listen to her own interceptive experience

and trusting that and if something feels good then it's likely that she'll want to keep doing it more but not because we say that's good but because it feels inherently good for her to do yeah

yeah I think that's a really uh valuable strategy I I it's it's gonna be really tough um to do and and but I I think I I think it's that's the game right there is the whole game and um you'll you'll be able to do it I think you'll be able to do it and um what do you so we talked a little bit about the the daily practice of checking in with yourself and I I I mean I guess that exercises the muscle right and gets you started on it'll allow first of all it exercises the muscle of being able to

inspect your internal state but then it also allows you to change the plan for the day to you know to to be more uh in tune to that that's that you know that's part of the purpose of that daily practice that you were talking about what about during the day and throughout the day when you're in the thick of it you're in the weeds you're you know you're you're traipsing through the jungle how what are some ways that you can start to notice the state of your own nervous system

throughout the day hmm yeah um again it's this can be challenging especially for folks that have full busy schedules full calendars um I like to try and have little check in points in transition moments during the day so whether that's uh between let's say like morning work shift and lunch have a little kind of 5 10 minute pause um if I have time I love the practice of yoga yoga Nidra or NSDR which is a kind of 15 to 30 minutes

like guided body scan that feels like a power nap on steroids is probably the best way to put it and it's actually really helpful for cultivating interception as well because when you're scanning different points around your body you're actually bringing more high definition awareness to those different parts of your body and I like in this to uh like a chef going to culinary school and you kind of develop your flavor palette you also develop your kind of

internal palette of the more kind of subtle high definition sensations that you might otherwise miss so I think I'm a huge fan of NSDR and non sleep depressed if if time is available and it's you know it's amazing if you didn't get much sleep it's I've seen studies that it's you know the equivalent of about two hours sleep from a 30 minute practice so it's very high yeah like high ROI in in in that sense um many people do it like first thing when they wake up in the morning

or after lunch which is yeah you know in line with your circadian rhythm so that's super super practical and I mean that that can that can gain you time I I mean if that's really how it works gain you time then that you know you at the at you know you're taking 30 minutes to get way more than that on the back end of that exactly exactly wow yeah so where where do I learn more about NSDR

um Andrew Huberman actually coined the term OK it's his version of uh yoga Nidra and yoga Nidra has more let's say like mystical and spiritual language sure throwing in so he just wanted to kind of like extract the the practice itself without the additional like intention setting and and yes mystical pieces um I've recorded some if you just Google Johnny Miller NSDR or YouTube there's a couple on there uh we also have an app called State Shifts where there's some recordings on there as well

and there's also a lady that I listen to her name is Ali Boothroyd and she has a bunch of great ones on YouTube a l l y Boothroyd and she's great she has like a nice relaxing voice too she's probably probably better voice than I do so I love that thank you for the those pointers I that's a that's tremendous I'm gonna give that a shot and I I mean I I've always been so resistant to that sort of thing and opening up to it now it's and you know it's it's much easier than meditation because yeah

you don't have to do anything yeah you just lie there and listen and and there's just a very slight trace of awareness that you're moving your awareness through different parts of your body and the feeling that you get afterwards it's like it's like a second wind it's like I don't know I I love it I I yeah I can't recommend it highly enough it's such a good practice yeah I um I've done yoga a handful of times in my life and I just did it again this past Saturday and I went with my wife

and we did a yoga class together and it was I felt that at the end of that and I I it's it's funny I I mean I absolutely felt invigorated and I absolutely felt so much more energy than I went in with

and that's not normally how I feel after kind of a workout session and I I really really clocked that I was like man I I'm I need to be thinking about this sort of thing a lot more yeah nice so so that kind of ties into the um in the self regulation strategies I mentioned top down bottom up and outside in so top down are things like cognitive reframes maybe mindfulness practice maybe affirmations where you're like using your mind to change the state of your body or yeah nervous system

yeah and then the bottom up ones are things like yoga practice things like breathing exercises um humming um where you're basically leveraging your physiology to activate the parasympathetic branch of your nervous system which activates the relaxation and then from there you generally have calmer thoughts and a more relaxed mind because your body is more relaxed okay so so top down means use your mind to try to influence the state exactly your body and then bottom up is

use your body to influence the state of your mind precisely and and there's actually a little little neuroscience nugget there are four times more efferent neurons which are neurons going from your body to your brain than from your brain to your body so it's like a super highway of data going up and like one single lane of traffic going down okay and I kind of take that to imply that there's just more leverage to be had from influencing the body than the bottom up

and then so what's outside in outside in is um changing your environment or changing the people around you so yeah obvious example is like think of the difference you feel between standing on the edge of a cliff with a broad horizon at a sunset versus New York City downtown subway like they're gonna result in two very different nervous system states and you can I like this phrase of we design our environments and our environments design us in return

so to the extent that you're able to influence your environment your surrounding um a very low hanging low hanging fruit is is like changing the lighting have using incandescent bulbs that are um more skewed towards the red light end of the spectrum as opposed to typical LEDs which have a lot of blue light yeah and a lot of flicker as well and the flicker and the blue light especially after sunset are really bad for um inhibiting the melatonin release impact sleep and and you know

they just don't feel good to be around like if you're in a in a supermarket or a hospital with terrible overhead lighting I know exactly what you mean it's like it sucks the energy out of your eyeballs

yes exactly exactly so so lighting is is a very and you know you just change the light bulb in the house once and like it's done like that's that's like a very easy fix but and then you know also a huge category is co regulation which is you know what your kids are gonna be coming to you for many many times a day because when kids are young they don't yet have the wiring to self regulate they require a care a caregiver to help them to regulate yeah and so but as adults it's the same same as well

like when we're outside of our window of tolerance when we're um you know at the edge of our capacity having someone else who is grounded just their presence or even better like a hug or some touch is incredibly effective at downshifting us and just helping us to feel safe again cause we're we're wired to be social creatures we're not wired to be like independent lone wolves right and that is if you're lucky enough to have someone around you that has a grounded nervous system

and they they have a few minutes of time that's probably the best nervous system hack you can you can find is is is connecting with somebody else who's it's yeah it's almost like connection yeah I I think I like that that metaphor that you're kind of touching upon there where it's it's like there's an it's an electrical circuit and and you're getting wound up you've got all this electrical charge in you and you need to discharge it somehow and there are healthy ways to discharge it

and there are unhealthy ways to discharge it one of the healthy ways to discharge it is to find somebody who's grounded and complete the circuit with them I mean even physically you're saying like hug it out yeah right yeah yeah yeah and there's you know there's a few other ways I can extend that metaphor one is that um when our when our vasculature when our bodies are clenched that adds constriction to the circuitry and and so you know anxiety the word literally comes from the Latin angio

which means to constrict and anxiety is actually in my opinion not an emotion but it's a resistance to an underlying emotional experience and so when a lot of people have say they have anxiety it's because consciously or unconsciously they are constricting against an underlying emotional experience and if you're able to release that that clenching in the body and a really practical way that people can think of what what this means is if you imagine turning on your shower to cold

and the moment before you step into the cold shower think about what your body does like you'll just like you like clench like bracing against it that's exactly the same motion that we do when emotions arise that don't feel safe and so the degree to which we can relax and open up and breathe into and just like it's like take an exhale yeah that allows that that energy in the system to flow more fluently I feel like I was trained to do the opposite of that as a child

like I feel like all of the models of masculinity the Marlboro Man you know Clint Eastwood you know all of that's all of the models I had available to me all of the feedback that I got from my culture that I grew up in all taught me to suppress my emotions or just

you know shoulder the Grindstone persevere push through the stress and I you know that's one way to do it right one one way to dis you know get rid of the electrical energy is to put it in a capacitor somewhere in your circuit where you know it stays in the system but it's not active it anymore right it's not it's not circulating it will at some point I'm sure but but it's not doing it right now and it's just like pushing it down yeah um but what you're describing is

is developing the skill and developing the habit of discharging that naturally and you know just to again build on that I think of that move of repressing or storing for later as building emotional debt and it's actually a very useful skill in the short term yeah in many places absolutely yeah very helpful if you're in a in a borderline situation or if like shit hits the fan and you need to act then yeah like that's great um if you're if you're a Navy seal or a Marine that's a very helpful skill

yeah but in the same way that you know when Navy Seals come back from deployment many of them have PTSD because they haven't found a way to metabolize that emotional debt that has been stored from the time that they've been pushing it away you know you've worked with a lot of really high achieving men and I'm I'm so interested in touching into that about like what shifts when they start to to put this into practice and they're starting to to to actually feel the emotion and starting to feel that

and check in with their bodies instead of just trying to fix it or or suppress it hmm

what shifts well I I mean to be to be honest I meet a lot of these folks um not always but sometimes when they're in the midst of or just following some kind of crisis yeah like some kind of either existential crisis maybe they're a founder and they sold their company and they've got eight figures in the bank account but they still feel empty and hollow and dead inside yeah uh or maybe they just hit burnout and they're going through a health crisis or maybe they just broke up with their wife

you know all these things and and so unfortunately it often does take some kind of crisis yeah tragic event to wake us up to humble us sometimes humiliate us to the point where we realize that the current model the current mental models that we have aren't serving us or they're not sustainable yeah and so in the beginning um you know it very much depends on on the person and the case but I think most of these folks they've been rewarded for um for pushing for grinding

for hustling that's absolutely right and and you know society rewards that in the short term right in a lot of cases like you get money status fame from from that

and there's many of your ability to do that is how you feel like you got to where you are yeah not not not not all of them but a lot of folks I think do get that um but it's often at the detriment of their relationships to others their relationship to their self a vicious inner critic a lot of them have as well um diminishing circle of genuine friendships you know the things that actually in my opinion contribute to a a life well lived in a meaningful life

um they might have the kind of external school board taken care of but in terms of like their inner experience of life it's there's a lot there's a lot to be gained so yeah um it really depends on I try and meet people with where they're at but what I noticed is that over time and this stuff does take time like there's there's really not like a kind of week long quick fix um but once their adrenals have kind of come back online if they've gone through burnout

once they've got a bit more resource and capacity and a little bit of spaciousness then um it really I think it's the emotional work that has the biggest ROI like the biggest bang for the buck yeah um because once you stop orienting your life to habitually avoid feeling certain emotions it creates so much more freedom so much more agency and actually so much more joy um there's one of one of our guest speakers in in Nervous System Mastery Joe Hudson has this phrase

he says joy is the matriarch of a family of emotions and she won't come into a house where her children aren't welcome and you can apply you can apply that to parenting but it it's it's really very true that joy is very hard to touch into especially sustained joy or deep levels of joy when there is repressed anger unprocessed grief uh etcetera etcetera

and so and going into the deeper somatic work I I work with breathwork in person with with clients but there's also practices like hakomi somatic experiencing some people use MDMA assisted therapy ketamine assisted therapy um I'm a big fan of those to the degree that they're that they're on contraindications um but really it for me it's the deeper emotional excavation that creates the lasting freedom in people and and that combined with shifting to uh to habits that include you know

non sleep deep breaths a few times a week um breath work and and really a lot of a lot of what underlies this I think is a sense of courageous curiosity which is is like the willingness to be curious about the shit that you've spent the last 20 years running from and that that like that's really the fundamental thing is like going from achieving pushing grinding to run away from that stuff to doing a 1 80 turn and moving towards it and courageously embracing it yeah that is so powerful

and I you know I what that it makes me think of so there's it's like what you described with the NSDR where you feel like you don't have the time to do it but then when you do it it gives you more time it gives you time it gives you more bandwidth totally right totally and Steven Covey has a has a had a great metaphor for that he said it's like you're too busy driving to pull over for gas

yeah yeah yeah and that's what this makes me think of I've I've heard I think that maybe the Dalai Lama someone has said like if you don't have if you have three minutes to meditate you need three hours you know something like that hahaha

yeah I totally get it and um yeah and I'm definitely one of those people that doesn't necessarily have three minutes to to meditate it's giving me something to something serious to think about now let let me ask you so if someone right now is listening and they're caught in that cycle they're they're in that situation where they don't have three minutes to meditate right and and they're just absolutely caught in stress what is one thing they can do one practice they can do right now in real time

to get themselves regulated or get themselves back on track or start on the process hmm yeah um in real time I'm I'm a big fan of um a practice called expanding awareness which comes from uh this guy who created the Alexander technique and very very simple is just noticing the space above you behind you to the sides of you and below you and there's there's almost a one to one relationship between how expanded our awareness is versus how stressed we are like when we get stressed

it's like we experience life through a straw it's almost yeah we get that tunnel vision tunnel vision blinkers on and so it's actually a bi directional relationship where I'm kind of doing it right now like you just remember that you have space behind you space below you and then from that often I'll notice a sigh the physiological sigh is you know one that's been popularized by Huberman that's also very effective yeah um but just reinvigorating the body um also feeling your feet on the ground

feeling your hands coming back into the senses I like coming back into um there's a practice called orienting so naming three things you can see two things you can hear and one thing you can feel okay and just doing that and that will bring you back into the present it'll just like bring you out of whatever loop or mental kind of thought pattern you're in yeah um and that's that's a way to almost like return to center and then you know

once you have a bit of centeredness let's you know use the example of someone that has a crazy busy calendar um honestly the practice of setting boundaries is is very important and saying no to things that aren't completely essential yeah um because people that have you know the the most successful founders and execs typically have close to empty calendars like they they might have 500 person companies but they'll have like two recurring meetings in their week and um yeah so so there's a and and

but that requires fairly fierce Protection of time and and and often it takes having morning practices in the beginning whether it's breath work or meditation or whatever people are drawn to to then make decisions from that place of spaciousness which then typically is self reinforcing and you get more spaciousness over time as opposed to just like filling your calendar with more and more and more and more yeah that is such a tremendously powerful statement right

there is the most high achieving people have very very light calendars and because they have leveraged I mean they've used all the leverage they have uh huh to create to go out there and create the value there and and they have they have boundaries really really strictly enforced boundaries to enforce that

and they have the spaciousness so that when the right opportunity comes by they can go all in they can put 110% of their energy towards that thing I think of it it's it's like I mean I went surfing this morning and great surfers will sit out back like waiting for the waves to come but be in the perfect position so when that set comes they're just like right there and they can paddle in and and catch that wave as opposed to folks who are like in the whitewash just getting pounded by ha ha

ha ha yeah and wave surfing all of their energy that is the perfect metaphor for that concept you know I I I was I was listening to a podcast over the weekend and um somebody was talking about how our modern world with all of the available stimuli uh we've got our computers and we have our devices and we have all the noise of the world and the TV and the radio and all of these things there is just a tremendous amount of stimulus that that is all over the place and we're not naturally

predisposed to be able to handle that properly and it keeps us from being able to think it it we're too busy we're reading or we're listening to podcast or watching YouTube or we're we're doing all these things we're processing our email we're doing all of these things there's all this activity but none of the thinking and the introspection and and the true creativity and we're in a the we're in a pending crisis here because we've got AI coming online that it has no creativity

but it can it can do a lot of the activity or it will be able to do a lot of the activity that humans do today that we think is creating value but it's actually not or it's not going to be in six months or a year or two years and we're losing the ability because of

because of the screens and because of our modern world we're losing the ability to do that that thing that is uniquely human and we need to recapture it and I think that this nervous system mastery concept exactly what you're talking about that's one of the ways we can recapture it isn't it hmm yeah I mean I I agree with you and you know if I think about the social media and like content landscape and what AI is already doing to that especially on TikTok where right

the majority of videos are already AI generated and the algorithms are gonna be so tailored to the precise ways that they can hook you in and often the way they hook you in is through emotions that you haven't welcomed in yourself so like rage bait is is a great way of getting clicks on Twitter and TikTok these days um'cause people don't have a healthy relationship with anger so they click on everything that makes them angry right um but I agree with you I think that you know

that episode was titled I think defense against the Dark Arts of distraction and it is gonna be so so so hard to maintain a sustained sense of nervous system regulation in that kind of environment yeah and they are they're already incredibly good at pulling us out of presents and pulling us you know so I think the average number of phone pickups is something like 150 a day for like most adults and even higher for kids and kids spend three to four hours a day

looking at screens looking at their phones um and you can just feel what it does to you like I I certainly can like I know if I spend even 30 minutes or 10 minutes looking at like a social media feed the way that I feel it's like it's like I I lose some of that internal presence and speaking of masculinity I lose some of that like my capacity for attention and so I you know I do think that these practices and and also setting very clear boundaries with yourself

around notifications around screen time around what apps you even have on your phone I think will be increasingly important combined with increased actually like interception

because if you can tune in and and notice that actually after scrolling for 20 minutes you feel a bit shit inside yeah and then you make a decision from that place of like oh actually like I don't want to be doing that every evening instead of connecting with my kids or connecting with my loved one or whatever it is and so you make different hopefully more aligned decisions from that place once you've listened to that internal feedback um yeah I you know I've I've never been a smoker

but I had a a really close friend who was and I ended up reading a book about quitting smoking and and the quitting smoking I guess is is one of the most and I can imagine I I feel this one of the most difficult things you can ever do but the key to it and most of the people I've ever known who have successfully quit smoking said something along the lines of this at at some point it just clicked with me and I never needed to smoke anymore and it was tough

I had some physical withdrawal for some period of time but after that after the mental thing was over it was done and the mental thing is realizing that it's the cigarette that makes you feel shitty you think you the the the connection you have is that the cigarette is the solution to the the feeling of shittiness but it's not it's the cause of the shittiness it's just delayed and once you make that connection you no longer feel the need to have the cigarette and I think there's a similar

thing going on with picking up Facebook or or or scrolling through social media and we're gonna have to break that cycle if we want to get out of it mm hmm mm hmm yeah yeah and it's um I don't know man like it's gonna be increasingly hard with the way that AI is going yeah um and just the incentive that these enormous multi million dollar companies have to mine and extract the resource of our attention like that's literally what they're designed to do so yeah um I yeah

I just I do think that these some like some especially especially for kids I mean like I

I'm really somewhat I don't wanna say fearful but just I'm just not optimistic about the number the amount of screen time that the average kid has these days I just I just don't think it's gonna lead to good but the hopeful message there and is that your biggest problem you know a big problem is also a big opportunity and the big opportunity here is being able to retain your presentness through that distraction and not get distracted and all that that's a superpower

and that is gonna turn you into Superman compared to the folks who can't do that yeah yeah I I agree and and making decisions from that grounded regulated yeah intentional place yeah um I mean just think what what what what a superpower that is you're able to do that where the rest of the world cannot mm hmm mm hmm yeah and and you know that that also gives you the ability to make great decisions and to think clearly and to be creative and to build deep relationships like those are gonna be this

the only skills really of the a few a handful of the few skills that will be valuable in an age where content creation and even product generation the costs go to zero with AI and robotics um yeah really the the the most valuable thing will be our capacity for attention presence and from their decision making and building deep relationships yeah and so what a gift we can give to our sons if we can yeah make that easy for them totally yeah

totally yeah well I I always like to finish up these conversations with the same question and that is what is one principle that you'd like to leave our listeners with something that they can explore or incorporate into their lives I love that I yeah I will just on a meta note I I really like the idea of developing intentional operating principles for life yeah and I think you do going through and and experimenting with them yeah is such a such a high value activity um OK

so if I was gonna give one 1 operating principle to experiment with let's see um the thing that's coming up is explore welcoming your emotions see what happens like welcome may maybe to put that more concretely yeah embracing intensity yeah embracing emotional intensity embrace emotional intensity that is a really really really powerful principle

and I move towards it instead of run away from it culturally we that is the opposite of what and and also you know allow your children to do that give them the space to do it too I mean one of the things that happens often is the kids will start disregulating and your instinct is to get in their face calm down calm down you basically yell in their face and you scream at them to calm down of course how does that work it it doesn't work at all but yeah because the problem is that you

yourself are becoming disregulated yeah and but you know think about if you if you're able to welcome the intensity the emotional intensity and welcome their emotional intensity too so it doesn't dysregulate you and they recognize ah

I see you know when I can behave this way and it doesn't it doesn't have to blow up into this thing yeah and I don't have to blow up into this thing either that's really really a powerful principle what one of my one of my friends he's a dad and he has this he they like do anger together so when his kids angry they were like yeah let's let's get angry together they like stomp around on the floor and just like go go go and like kid kids love it it's like yeah

like a space where anger is like welcome like great like that's a yeah it's a great practice to have and it's connecting and it's fun yeah I remember this time when when the boy was gosh he was 3 weeks older no he was a little older than that but young I mean very very less than 2 or 3 months and he was he was having colic and uh I was driving him around this is I lived in Chicago and we were driving around at 2 o'clock in the morning in the snow and he was just screaming

and he'd been screaming for an hour and a half and there was there's nothing I could do to give him comfort and I just started screaming with him I wasn't screaming at him uh but I just started screaming with him and we were both just screaming together in the car at 2 o'clock in the morning and it really helped I think it helped both of us yeah and eventually yeah pretty soon he fell asleep

I love that that's so good well Johnny this has been just an absolutely delightful and powerful conversation I really appreciate it if you wanna go deeper into Johnny's work check out Nervous System Mastery at ns mastery.com and his podcast The Inner Frontier for more conversations on resilience and embodied leadership uh and the links are in the show notes Johnny let's keep doing the inner work that helps us raise strong grounded and emotionally aware men

and thank you for all of the work that you do hmm beautiful thank you Shawn this is super fun and I appreciate it and thank you for listening to Raising Men I'm Shawn Dawson and you're a great parent raising men is produced by Phil Hernandez

this episode was edited by Ralph Tolentino