Jonny Miller on Nervous System Mastery

We tend toward negativity, self pity, jealousy, or fear. We see what we don't have instead of what we do. We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it's not just about thinking. Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction, how they feed their

good wolf. Thanks for joining us. Our guest on this episode is Johnny Miller, perhaps best known as the host of the Curious Humans podcast and for his ted X talk on the Gifts of grief. Johnny also coaches ambitious founders to scale themselves and runs a five week boot camp for nervous System mastery, and is the co founder of Maptia, a global visual storytelling platform. Hi Johnny, Welcome to the show. It's great to be here. I'm excited

to have you on. I've been following your work for a while, particularly some work you've done around nervous system, you know, really working with our nervous system more skillfully. You've got a great podcast called Curious Humans that I also really like, So jump into all that. But let's start, like we always do, with the parable. In the parable, there is a grandparent who's talking with their grandchild. They say, in life, there are two wolves inside of us that

are always at battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love, and the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the grandchild stops and thinks about it for a second, looks up at their grandparents, says, well, which one wins, and the grandparents says, the one you feed. So I'd like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life and in

the work that you do. So I've heard a lot of your guests contemplate and answer that question, and I was thinking about this last night, and what came up for me It was that I think, for the first kind of chapter of my life, let's say, I was really curious and obsessed with feeding the good wolf and kind of asking how can I become a virtuous person

and essentially live a good life. But what feels like has been a more recent chapter in the last four or five years has been this exploration of feeding the bad wolf and of kind of cultivating a sense of courageous curiosity towards the things inside of myself that I label as as being bad. This could be for example, when I was younger, I um I had an experience where I got really angry at someone and actually caused

them caused them some pain. And in kind of more recent years, I've been trying to cultivate a more healthy relationship with anger, for example, and realizing that in there is my capacity to set boundaries and to kind of have a deep determination. And so I guess I've been on this journey to try and integrate these parts of myself that I've labeled like bad wolves and kind of coming to understand what their needs are, kind of what they're asking for. And yeah, that's kind of the theme

that's been alive in my life recently. That makes a lot of sense. I was talking with a guest recently and we were looking at the Buddhist tradition, which, you know, very early Buddhism was very much you know, there's wholesome and unwholesome states, and you want to cultivate the wholesome ones and you want to get rid of the unwholesome ones. And it was it was very much sort of good wolf, bad wolf kind of thing. And then later Buddhism is sort of evolved into much more of a hey, it's

all part of you. You want to be kind to all parts of it. It's all different energies expressing themselves, and so it's kind of transformed over time. And the question I have found that I'm very interested in lately is when is one of those approaches the better approach versus the other, because I actually think they both have a place. You know, there are times in my life where it's like negative thought patterns that are just habitual

and they're just running. It's like, okay, you know what, enough like I'm going to try and sort of work on not feeding those and what can I cultivate instead, And then there are lots of other times where exactly as you're saying, I think that the more skillful strategy is to like investigate what's going on here, you know, what's what's at the root of this? Is there something

to be learned here? And so I'm kind of interested in when we do each of these things because I think they both have a place, and I think we probably as people also may have a default way of dealing with it. I have a default mechanism towards get perspective, realize it's all going to be okay, shut down the feeling. So I need to air a little bit more on all right, let me just give these emotions a little bit more space. And so I think we all have

an habitual direction of overcorrection that's really well put. And what comes to mind for me is that we need to have a really healthy, strong, good wolf in place in order to then have a conversation with a bad wolf. And if if, if if the good wolf is kind of just out of control or there's a sense of depression that it's the focus is definitely on bringing a

liveness back to that. But then when you feel hold, you feel kind of ready, you feel well, will read sourced, you have a you know, a large capacity, that's the time when you can kind of go into some of the more shadowy, kind of painful aspects of experience. That's that's however you Yeah, that's a really great insight. Actually,

I think that's right on. I mean I think early on for me, I talked about my recovery often, and I want to get to sort of a seminal moment in your life here in a moment, and when I talk about recovery, I talk about how, you know, the bad wolf was kind of eating me in that early days of recovery. It was all about like I have got to feed the good wolf, and this bad wolf just I need to be like stay down there in the corner please for a little while until I'm a

little bit stronger. So I think that's a really good point. So you've done a ted talk about this, and you talk about kind of what really led you deep into the type of work that you're doing right now, and it's a pretty tragic experience. I was wondering if you could maybe share it with listeners, just for people to get a sense of kind of where you're coming from and how all this work is really grounded in your

own life. Yeah, sure, sure, thank you for asking. So the story begins, I guess about almost five years ago now, and I was living in the UK, in Brighton at the time, and I had a fiance. Her name was Sophie, and she was working as a doctor. She was kind of working in hospitals, and she had had bipolar all of her life, and I was away on this particular

occasion and she went back to work. It was a Monday morning, and she had an anxiety attack at work, and she ended up coming home to an empty house and overdosing on her own medication and ultimately taking her own life. And this, as one might imagine, just really kind of completely turned my life upside down. It was initially too much too begin to digest, to kind of comprehend.

But over the following months, I think I'd seen people, particularly older people, who had lost someone in their life and they hadn't fully digested their grief and it had turned them into these kind of bitter, almost like a shell of a human essentially, And I think honestly, that scared me, and I think that I made this decision to almost kind of turn the other way into face

this grief head on. And this this led to a kind of multi year journey to explore my inner landscape, essentially, and this started off with the passing and meditation retreats, learning meditation, plant medicine, ceremonies, breathwork, this kind of whole different exploration of different modalities to understand what it was that I was feeling, and ultimately to learn how to surrender to the pain that was there and to almost allow myself to be to be obliterated by it in

some ways. And that in itself was then kind of a journey into realizing how disconnected I'd been from my own body and particularly my emotions. Growing up in in England as a guy, you know, it's it's pretty common to just live in your head and to be rewarded for that and to be just kind of numb from

the neck down. And so for the years before, I've had this kind of fascination for travel, for the outside world, for seeing new places, and it was almost like that curiosity was turned inwards and I started really kind of mapping my own inner landscape initially through this kind of

very harrowing at times experience of grief and loss. And I think this was the surprising thing for me, was that there was this deep joy and this deep beauty on the other side of of grief, and that when you kind of invited in, it's almost like it just opens up your heart and you just feel so alive and you feel raw, and it's painful, but it's also exquisite, like there's a kind of really rich beauty to it

as well. And it was just this unfolding invitation to surrender and to kind of surrendering into what it came up into these different waves of grief that would emerge when I went back to places that were meaningful to us, or going back to the memorial bench, and then on her birthdays and years the comment it was just this kind of like progressive initiation almost into that world. So before that sounds like you would say, you're not somebody

who was very interested in your internal world. I think I was interested intellectually, Okay, I think I was. I studied philosophy at university, and so I was very interested in what it meant to live a good life. And you know, reading Aristotle, et cetera. But I don't think that I had an embodied sense what that meant makes sense. So a lot of your work seems to have come together in a recent program you've developed called Nervous System Mastery.

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

so it's a combination of skills. I guess the two primary ones are interception and self regulation. And what I mean by interception, it's a term from the neuroscience, is essentially how in tune are we with our in a landscape. How able are we to kind of sense, track and feel and taste the sensations that we're feeling. Whether that's a heartbeating, whether that's how our breath is, tension in our belly. And then the second part is the self

regulation protocols, so reclaiming agency over our internal state. And there are various levers in the body, in the nervous system that allows us to pretty effectively change how we're feeling in a few minutes. And what I've found is that a lot of people who particularly kind of live in the head, they try and change their thought patterns, they try and change their beliefs these things, And in

the neuroscience, this is like top down principles. And what I found is that bottom up principles, which you may have heard of, are just much more effective for changing the state of our nervous system, for dropping us into

this kind of high tone parasympathetic state. And so a lot of the training and the work I do is focused on teaching these bottom up protocols for either upregulating, which is kind of activating or kind of increasing alertness, or down regulating which is calming, kind of being able to sleep at night, all those things. So that's kind

of the gist of it. Yeah, I like that idea of delinea in between pop down and bottom up approaches and recognizing that they both have a place right, there is a place for both of them, and that bottom up I think it's starting to become something we hear

a lot more about. I think top down dominated the self help spirituality marketplace for a long time, and I would say it seems to me, as somebody who's kind of closer to the pulse of this, having done this for for years, I see more and more focus on the bottom up slash somatic elements of this, right working with the body in very skillful ways. I want to ask you about the first part of this, which is

in teroception. You did Vipasna meditation, you studied that, and I don't know how much you've studied Buddhism around that, but there's a concept in Buddhism of the five scandas, right, these five things that make up what we are as humans. And ever since I learned about in ter reception, I've often thought it's very close to what in traditional Buddhism would be called the donna or sensations, you know, which is sort of a described most basically as a sense

of pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral. But it's the first contact with what's going on inside of us? And I'm curious if you could just elaborate a little bit more about from your perspective, what inter reception contains or what are the various aspects of it are. Yeah, it's it's a great question. And in the neuroscience literature it's often measured by how accurately can someone count their their heartbeat and so kind of how aware of that, because that's like

a very it's an easy thing to measure. But I think from my perspective, and this is slightly more poetic answer, but I've almost been seeing it as a journey to learn how to like taste myself and to increase the definition in which I can be aware of all of the different kind of multi contextual things that are arising passing within my body and not necessarily moving my attention there all the time, but just being aware of that. And the ones which are particularly practical and useful are

the breath for example. I mean, if you start to notice that you're maybe holding your breath when you're checking email, or if breath is shallow and it's kind of in the upper lungs, it's a pretty immediate sign that's you're going to in a sympathetic state and that you're going to be not as relaxed as you might be. And so I think I've been viewing interception as a way of becoming increasingly embodied, and I think crucially treating what

we sent as feedback from the body. So in the same way that I'm wearing an or ring right now, and this is one way to get, you know, really good feedback on how is my sleep, how is my heart rate variability? But I think that for me, it's almost like a proxy to confirm how it is that I'm actually feeling in my body. You know, if I I worke up this morning with like a score of ninety, and I'm like, do I feel like in ninety? Like? Does that? Does that feel about right? Like? And so

it's it's almost um for me. These these wearable texts great, but I think that ultimately it's only a tool to help you to trust the feedback that's coming from your body,

you know, the entire time throughout the day. And so in terro reception then is really just tuning into what it feels like to be in my body, yes, exactly, And it's distinguished from the reception which we can also talk about, but that's more about how our nervous system is being impacted by the stimulus around us, be that loud noises, be that cats fighting in the background, all the kind of external stimulus and interception is about the

internal stimulus. I assume they're connected. Yeah, for sure. I think that in order to have a strong sense of exto reception, you actually need to have inter reception first, because you need to be able to discern how different

environments change your state. For example, if you have bright lights on in the evening, if you have a good sense of inter reception, you'll be able to tell that it's it's kind of keeping your alert, keeping your awake, and it's probably going to be trickier to sleep if you're if you're going to try and go to bed. So what are some ways of improving our inter reception?

I mean, I can tell you right away that I would not accurately probably give you my my heart rate, like how often my heart is beating, which I've known about that test for a while, and I've known for a while I wouldn't sit very well. How do you improve this? There's a couple of approaches. One is just knowing that if you have a high level of cortisol present in your body, then that acts as kind of

numbing our capacity for interception. Um, so if you're in a kind of like a mild state of stress or alert, then it will be harder to kind of go inwards

and to track that. So that's kind of one piece, And then I like to have kind of just a morning practice of just checking in with myself and kind of doing a body scan, kind of placing my attention in different areas and noticing how my posture is, noticing how my if there's tension in my shoulders, how my belly is, then bring it down into my belly area just kind of consciously softening, and from there just honestly

just kind of noticing. It's similar to in the kind of zen tradition of meditation, where you just kind of sit back into the witness and you don't try and do anything, but you just pay attention to what is arising, and you kind of step out of the doing mentality and just kind of tune in with a sense of curiosity.

I use the metaphor yes today with a friend where it's like if you're a chef and you're learning to taste food, you kind of want to like like really kind of try and taste the flavors and like really notice and pay deep attention to what is coming alive. And so it's kind of the same in your body.

If you notice, like say, there's a there's a tightness, and I feel something my sterning right now, and I just kind of like tune into that and almost amplify what's there sometimes as well, just to kind of get

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

this size and it's that size, and it leads like precise sort of definition. I think, yeah, that's beautiful. And I experienced very much the same. And the other thing that I've been noticing, and some of my students have commented on as well, is how tension in certain parts of the body also correlates to certain thought patterns, and how when certain thoughts are kind of or people who in thought loops, they also they're also aware of certain

tensions maybe in their shoulder or in their side. And this is something that I've been exploring through the modality of breathwork and kind of mapping how certain emotions tend

to be located in certain areas of the body. It can also be a really interesting sign that, for example, if I feel something in my stern and that's normally connected to some kind of like anxiousness or energy, or it's it's known as the fear belt in breathwork training, so it can also provide indications to emotional qualities that could be present as well. You've just kind of walked your way right into another of my things I'm really interested in, which is this idea of how thoughts and

emotions and also behavior interact and influence each other. There are simplistic notions out there like that you know what we think causes what we feel, which is I think a vast oversimplification right. There are times that, yes, I can think of thought like if I have a thought like I don't know, my mom hates me, Right, I might have a bodily reaction to that. Right, But as you're saying conversely, there are ways in which our body

or our emotions then drive our thoughts. And so, you know, I've started to wonder on some level, we talk about thought and emotion and bodily sensations as if they are discrete things, but they seems to me always co arise. You don't get one usually without the other. Right, there's this co arising. Now, we may be more aware of one than the other, we may have a default way of tuning into one more than the other. But the connection is so deep that sometimes I wonder is it

even useful to distinguish him? I think the answer is yes. But I've just a more and more recognizing the bi directional nature of all these things. Yeah, that's a It's a really powerful insight. And what I've been noticing for myself is often the sensation is primary to the emotion

and then the thoughts. And something that my colleagues and I hear here and Barley have been exploring we call it breath lab and we've basically been correlating breathing patterns to difference incomplete reflexes or expressions of emotion and what the theory is and we're hoping to run some studies

in the coming months. But the theory is that when we have experiences that are say traumatic or safe immobilization reflex that we're unable to complete, then that gets stored in our nervous system at some point, and when you drop into this trance state through constius connected breathing, these different breathing rhythms, as we kind of pulse into them with a sense of safety, they elicit that incomplete reflex, which will often have a strong emotional component attached as well.

And so it's really interesting to see how, say, when someone's breath starts to go down into their belly or their pelvic floor, that might be kind of feelings of shame being associated it, or if there's if there's tightness around the neck and around the kind of jaw area, then maybe some anger kind of comes through. And as someone increases the dynamism of their of their breath, then they also increase their dynamism of their kind of emotional capacity.

And expression, and this is something that I'm really really curious about as well. And it also ties into when people go through these experiences, there's often also a story or a thought pattern associated as well, which kind of

comes through in their share at the end. And so as you say, like, all of these things are kind of care rising and at the same time, often it's almost like the body is just doing it itself, like we're just kind of we're helping to facilitate the breath using body work and nerve lossing in these things, but really it's just witnessing the body complete this reflex and

it can be incredible to watch. Sometimes there's movement, limbs flailing, all kinds of sounds, and it's a really fascinating process to witness. So when you see an incomplete reef, say more about that. I know what you mean, but say more for other people who may not understand what you mean by that. Yeah. So if people are familiar with the work of Peter Levin, he kind of talks about how and and this is really interesting to look at

in the animal world. There's some videos online of I think it's a imparlor that's just been chased by a lion and it survived, and the lion kind of walks away, and you just see the imparlor shaking kind of pretty violently shaking on the floor afterwards for several minutes afterwards. And that's the impartier's way of discharging that mobilization reflex,

that kind of mobilization energy. But the challenge is that we as humans where it's not kind of social acceptable, like if you get in a fight, you don't just lie down and shake on the floor. That would it would look weird, like we suppress it um And it's also the same interestingly with surgeries when often when people are an ethicized, that also suppresses the completion of that mobilization reflex. And so what happens is that energy gets stored in the nervous system for a future time. And

the nervous system is amazing like it. We can store a lot of these kind of incomplete reflexes throughout our life, but at a certain point we reach a threshold where we start to have so much tension in our body that it causes sin as allostatic load or I call it emotional debt, where it's like we've had so many of these experiences in our life that our bodies are just holding so much that needs to be kind of let go of and released. And so this completion of

the mobilization reflex. And it could be I've had somewhere in my arm just kind of flails. My right arm will just be flailing for like five minutes or um. Sometimes will be full body shakes, sometimes will be a sound wants to come to. And it's basically the memory from that experience is coming from the lower brains them it's being relived and then it's being stored and integrated in the in the midbrain. Yeah, that's essentially the process. So emotional debt, say a little bit more about that.

That's a really interesting term. Yes, So this is a term that my research partner and I kind of came up with to some degree. We were studying burnout in executives and the start up founders. It was pretty common when we kind of looked at the trajectory of someone going through burnout, and often there would be a series of kind of events, maybe like you fights or getting angry, or moments of just kind of pushing themselves too hard.

And people have different levels of capacity and often these kind of high performers type A. Type A individuals had enormous capacity, so they could hold an enormous amount of this emotional debt and like effectively kind of continue using their minds to run their bodies for for long periods of time. But ultimately there was almost always a point where that debt caught up to them, as financial debt might, and there was this kind of crash and this burnout

kind of through the lens of the nervous system. This is known as a dorsal shutdown. The dorsal vegel branches is one of the branches the nervous system, and it's almost like a fuse switching, like when there's too much charge in the system. The dorsal fuse just kicks in and you shut down. And that's when someone will realize

that the burnout hits them. It's like being hit by by a ton of bricks um and it's that kind of rock bottom moment where they realize, oh ship, like I'm my body is fried, like I'm done, And it's when that emotional debt from months, maybe years has kind of finally caught up with them and their bodies like, right, we just need to rest now. So earlier you were describing after your fiance's suicide, you were describing seeing people

who had lost someone who became bitter. Would you say that the consequence of them not working through grief in a full way is causing an emotional debt which is then translating later into a sense of bitterness. Is that kind of what we're talking about here? That's my sense. Yeah, that's what I believe, And I'm hoping to kind of contribute to two studies which will I guess back this

up with data. But yeah, that's that's certainly my my theory. Yep. Well, I certainly know in my life, I've had a sense of at a certain point in my life where I felt like I had a lot of emotional debt, and my tip off was my reaction to something that's happening

seems all out of proportion to what's happening. Right, Like, I love the term emotional debt, I would have said more like, it's like I've got a bucket of sadness here that never got emptied, right, and every time something sad happens, I experienced that whole bucket, and so I need to be like draining that thing out you know, and I did a lot of work. It's been decades

at this, well has it been. Yeah, it's been a couple of decades where I really, you know, went deep into a lot of that type of going into childhood experiences, trying to sort of re experience and re feel, you know, a variety of things that that were not felt at the time that we're suppressed. But I love that term emotional debt because I think it speaks very clearly to what this is. As a former technology guy, it reminds me of the term technical debt, right, like we you know, yeah, yeah,

technical debt is for those who don't know. It's like when you're developing software, you're taking all kinds of shortcut and you're like, I know that's not a good idea right now, but I gotta get this thing done, and it's necessary. At the time, it's necessary to it, that's right. But over time it accumulates and at a certain point you're like, well, this thing is gonna break. Every every time I was involved in developing software, um and I

wasn't a developer. I was always like a managing developers or product management. My main thought was always like, somebody is going to look back in five or ten years and be like, who is the idiot that designed this? Like it's inevitable. It's just inevitable that like it's gonna look bad in retrospect because they won't see the pressures

and the things that we're happening at the time. In nervous system mastery, you're talking about these two core components we've talked about in ter reception, right, the ability to sort of know and feel what's going on inside me. And then you talked about self regulation protocols, and this is really the ability to upregulate or down regulate our system. One of the things that you say is really worth paying attention to though in this process, is recognizing the

dangers of our auto pilot self regulation strategies. Say a little bit more about that. Yeah, sure, Actually, just before we go there, I just made a connection to the emotional debt and interception as well. And the connection is that I think the more interception that we have, the more inter receptive capacity, the more we can notice that

emotional debt early on. I think when people have very low interception, instead of it being like a feather or maybe you know, a brick moment, where they kind of get slapped. It takes like a dump truck for them to realize that they have this pile up of emotional debt. And so in some ways, cultivating interception helps you to recognize some of the emotional debt that's that's already under

the surface. Makes sense, But yeah, so so so coming to also regulation strategies, So it's something that we all have kind of habitual ways of either up regulating or down regulating during the day, depending on what time of data is. So an example might be in the evening, so you've had a busy day of work, you come home, you drink a beer, kind of watch Netflix. That's effectively a way of using external stimulus to downregulate your nervous

system before sleep. But the challenges I think for a lot of people that they're not conscious that this is actually what's going on, so they don't they don't necessarily realize that they have this habit of watching Netflix in order to to kind of unwind at the end of

the day. And not that there's anything wrong with that, but I think it can be helpful to almost kind of doing do an audit of what are the different ways in which you either increase your sense of alertness, you know, coffee things like that in the morning and

then unwind and during the day as well. And I found it really helpful in my life to replace some of these with more conscious strategies and simple breathing exercises is a wonderful, free, kind of zero cost way of changing your state and regulating your nervous system really effectively without relying on substances that and to have kind of

down and stream consequences if they're abused. And so when you're talking about up regulating and down regulating, you're basically talking about, you know, one of the purposes of inter reception, even when it's the non conscious part of it. Right to hear neuroscientists talk, is that your body is always trying to sort of Lisa Felm embarrass says, like balance

out your body budget. Right, Internally, it's trying to say, look, there's a zone that I need to be in here, right, it's always doing this temperature, I've got to stay in this temperature. I've got to increase decrease, right, And so our nervous system has something similar. So what we're talking about is if I am overstimulated stressed out, anxious, you know, high arousal. Then I want to I want to be able to downregulate that back into a zone that my

body is like, okay, I can work with this. Right. Conversely, we may be too low energy, right, sluggish, and in this case we're trying to upregulate, and we've developed methods of doing this thing that has to happen and without really thinking about it. And what you're proposing in the program and what you're teaching in the program is that primarily this is not the only tool that you use, but a main tool that you use is the breath.

That breathing in different ways can either downregulate or upregulate us, and it's a very powerful tool for doing that that's really well put. That zone is known as the window of tolerance in the neuroscience, and generally speaking, a lot of the people that certainly come through the program there their challenges are with the down regulations. So sometimes people can get stuck in that kind of high tone sympathetic state where their mind is racing, where you know, they're

easily angered, frustrated, etcetera. And so a lot of people are trying to find more effective strategies for coming back down instead of being stuck there, coming back down into kind of the healthy zone, which is the kind of where the ventual vegas nerve is online. And some of the most effective practice that I've come across are in the moment just doing either alternate noster breathing or box breathing,

or actually humming can be really effective as well. Humming or kind of making a sound and belly and then like a hum releases nigric oxide which acts as a vacid dilator, and that helps to kick in the parasympathetic

system and then for a slightly longer reset. There's a branch of protocols known as non sleep depressed, which are primarily drawing from the yoga ninja tradition, and these are kind of thirty minute guided power napps essentially where someone can kind of go through a visualization where they stay aware,

they stay awake, but their body rests. And so there are kind of various protocols for down regulating when we're kind of slightly stuck in that just outside our window of tolerance and we want to kind of come back down into rest or maybe we would kind of want to be more creative or it's just not suiting the environment, and we decide that we want to come back down again. It's interesting, is I looked at your course. The part that interested me was I sort of need more of

the upregulation. Like I'm I'm pretty down regulated. You know, when you're talking about like high cortisol makes it hard to do in ter reception. My cortisol is always like just sort of like the bottom of what's sort of an acceptable level. I know, I don't know if that's because it was too high for too long or what what the what the what the cause of that is. But let's talk about energizing. What are ways that we

energize our nervous system. Yes, So to kind of prepare for this this conversation, I set my alarm early at about five am, and I went down the road to a sawndom and cold blunch that we have access to and that if you're lucky enough to have access, is an incredibly effective way of stimulating your nervous system and

kind of activating the hot cold combination. But more and more simply, there's a practice known as bellows breathing or Kabbalah batty in yoga, which is essentially a series of rapid excels through the nose and the belly, and usually kind of thirty or forty forced exhales will also stimulate the sympathetic nervous system in a similar way, and I usually like to combine something that's activating like that wim Hoff is an even more kind of intense example, and

then have a kind of an equal duration of a relaxation breathing, so it could be cadence breathing or box breathing afterwards, to just kind of settle down the nervous system so you're not left in kind of slightly like you know, tingly kind of overcharged state. In what ways is bellows breathing different than what wim Hoff advocates. It's

a little bit less intense. And have a number of friends who've been through wim Hoff kind of workshops, and some people have been kind of like retraumatized through kind of breathing that intensely. It can kind of create these very powerful alter states of consciousness and big emotions can surface, and it can also leave people stuck in that heightened sympathetic state that we talked about earlier, and some people really struggle to come back down from that. So bellows

breathing is more gentle. It's kind of just through the nose, which is less intense than breathing through the mouth. And so for me, it's something that um I would recommend over something like wim Hoff, which can be very It's it's great for some people, but I think for five tempers end of the population that do have that tendency to get stuck in that high turned state, it's not helpful. We had whim half on the podcast and he basically yells like he's not a calm talker in any way,

shape or form. Like everything's yelling. So I'm like my normal sort of like, well, how are you doing? And he's yelling. You know, there's one court where he's like everybody loves a good wolf, you know, screaming it. It's just it's a hysterical sounding interview. The guy is so wound up. He's also amazing. I think what he comates a kind of popularized breathing is phenomenal, but I do think that there should be some caution or just kind of more I guess nervous system literacy kind of shared

alongside the practices. That's right, that's right, yep. I thought James Nestra did a nice job in his book also sort of laying some of that out, you know, about how there's a role for both these to use your terminology, these up and down regulating types of breathing. When you do a cold plunge, how long are you doing it for? Typically the cold plums that we have here is very cold.

It's about three or four degrees centigrade. I'm not sure what that is in fahrenheit, freaking cold, but I typically to fifteen minutes in the sauna and then about three or four minutes at that temperature. But if it's warmerth and you know, maybe four or five minutes, you want to get to the point where you're not shivering, but

there's usually initially there's a shock. And that is a really good way to kind of practice, is associating the fear response from the kind of mental stories, because you can kind of sit with that. And if you sit with that, as with motions, actually, like when you sit with that, it kind of changes and it becomes easier

to sit with. And I initially when I was in Brighton, actually in the months after losing Sophie, I would swim in the ocean around the pier during the winter when the water was freezing cold, and it was a similar sensation. If there is that initial shock and like I don't want to be here, I don't want to go in.

I like what hell am I doing? And then once you're in there for kind of a few minutes, it does start to kind of settle and your body gets used to it, and there's this beautiful, just like profound feeling of sometimes like joy or ecstasy that can kind of come through. And so, yeah, it's interesting how it

does change. But if you're just starting out, you can even start with cold showers and that kind of gets you into it, and then buying chest freezers is a is a great way you can kind of d I y your own cold plans that some of the people in my course did for not very much money, So you don't need to have access to a fancy gym necessarily. I am in the cold shower camp and have been for years, basically because I live in a small place.

There's no room for an ice chest or jim. But it helps, you know, I don't I don't do it as long or but it does wake me up and energize me. It's also just primarily a way of sort of as you describe a little bit like intentionally wading into discomfort and going you know, I can handle being uncomfortable. I've been thinking lately about how as we get older what I see with a lot of people as we get older. I don't think it's conscious, but we begin

to subconsciously really over prioritize comfort. You know. It seems to be something that happens as people age. I think there's some natural part of that, but it's a thing that I certainly am like, Well, I don't want to over prioritize that, you know, I don't want that to be the defining value. You know, it's just am I comfortable? Which is what a lot of us do. Yeah, it's

a really important point. And in the neuroscience, the concept you might be familiar with men's US which is essentially the kind of a little small amounts of stress for short periods of time are really really good for us um And you can think of the astronauts on the I S S Like if they stay there for too long because the lack of gravity, they lose bone density, and there's there's so many examples in life where if we don't have some stress or some stresses, then our

capacity just gets diminished. And there's a really really strong case for as long as you have a relatively well regulated nervous system for deliberately introducing stresses into your life and then followed by a recovery period and then your capacity grows. I mean, and this is intuitive when it comes to say, lifting weights in the gym, but it

applies to our nervous system in general. And our nervous system as well is very neuroplastic, and people think of just you know, your brain is neuroplastic and you can learn, but our nervous systems and neuroplastic two, and we can increase or decrease our kind of window of tolerance and capacity, and thing practices like could plunging saunas also kind of walking breath holds is a really effective way to increase your pacity and your your CEO two tolerance, which has

a bunch of health benefits down the line as well. Um So some people will like drink a big sip of water when I'm walking a dog on the beach and just hold the water in my mouth while I'm walking and hold my breath for like maybe thirty or forty paces and then let it out and then kind of do the same thing again. And having a healthy CEO two tolerance is very helpful for mitigating like when you do get really stressed in life, you can handle it. Like when something a huge curvell comes your way, you

don't get knocked off center. So I think it's a it's a really important thing to emphasize. So if you're going to do a breath hold like that, say more about how you do it and what the benefit is. I'm going to make that question a little bit more specific. Do you breathe all the way out before you start it, or do you breathe take a deep breath in before

you started or neither. So I came to this through free diving, and so I kind of practiced much longer breath holds with the intention of then diving down underwater. But for someone just starting out, and this is actually comes from Patrick McEwen who wrote a book called The

Oxygen Advantage that I really recommend. The idea is you inhale and then you just exhale to a comfortable amount and on that exhale retention then you begin walking, and he recommends at minimum of kind of fifteen paces, can go up to forty or fifty until you start to feel what he describes as mild air hunger. So you don't want to be like gasping for breath, but you also want to wait a little bit kind of after

you feel that first need to breathe. And for a lot of people that kind of managed maybe fifteen to twenty in the beginning, then pretty quickly you can work way up to fifty even even longer. So it's a pretty trainable thing. And what's the benefit of training it? You mentioned if you get a big curve bark on where you handle it better. What's the mechanism that causes

there to happen. Yes, so you're increasing your body's capacity for c O two, and when you have high levels of c O two in the body, your pH becomes more acidic, which is basically a stress on the body.

And in extreme cases, if you hold your breath for four or five six minutes, as free divers do, it's simulating the fear of death, kind of the death reflex, and so you're basically sitting in this very primal kind of reflexive need to breathe, but at the same time, in your mind you're like, I'm okay, I have enough

oxygen in my body. Nothing is going to happen. But it's the increase in CEO two and the corresponding blood acidity which creates this like this deep need to breathe, which can be kind of overridden to a certain point. So it's also a way of training your mind as well. So I want to talk a little bit about emotional resilience. We've talked about emotional debt, talked about you know, being overwhelmed, but you describe four main barriers to resilience. What are

the barriers to resilience? And then let's talk about how do we actually increase it. So I think there's two approaches here, right, ones reducing barrier as the other is increasing our ability. I think I are like twelve barriers to resilience in in one of the posts. But some of the main ones I think are the ones that come to mind immediately are One is what I call like lone wolf syndrome, which is kind of an inability to ask for help and a kind of belief that

you can get through everything on your own. And this was certainly true for me kind of up until the grief experience, to be honest, that I kind of felt like I could do everything myself, and in that experience I realized I had to lean on friends, family, people to kind of get through it. So that's that's certainly one big one. Another barrier. I think fixed mindset versus kind of growth mindset is definitely one. And people you know, thinking that they are a certain way and that they

can't change, they can't adapt, they can't grow. Which were the ones that you were referring to, You sort of hit one with which was insufficient support structures. I think I pulled this out of your paper you did with your colleague, But we've talked about one of these, which is lack of emotional and physical awareness, right, lack of inter reception and perceived vulnerability. Talk about what that means, because I don't think you're using vulnerability in the sense

that it's often used as a positive thing these days. Yeah, well, I think it can be a very scary thing, particularly men, particularly kind of men in tech and British men in tech, to talk about and have conversations about their emotions. And that was kind of certainly true for me for a good of time. And I think just normalizing kind of having conversations about emotions without judgment, without kind of making things right or wrong, but just you know, this is

what is arising. I'm noticing and coming up in my body like and then getting curious about it. And I think that is emotional literacy. And I think it's something that is in part down to the individual and also the culture in which the individual is embedded, and so ways of increasing our emotional resilience. You've got two primary practices of protocols that you describe in this section. One

is conscious connected breathing. The other is self enquiry general I do you want to just briefly tell us about both those perhaps for some context. It always recommends if someone's going into this work that they do it with someone else or ideally with some professional support in the beginning, because having a professional to help corregulate your nervous system with if something intense does come up, it's really helpful

to have a guide. Once you kind of have some practice under your belt, then it's much easier to kind of go into the more self guided practices. But um, I kind of preface with in the beginning, having support from a semantic experiencing therapist or or a breath worker or someone that can help you go to these places

it is really helpful. But to speak to those practices specifically, the conscious connected breathing is essentially a breath work practice where you're inhaling a full vibrant inhale and then a relaxed excel and if you begin to loop your breath in this way, you will enter kind of an altered state of consciousness in which subconscious material can arise, including

these incomplete reflexes that we mentioned. And it's it's usually done to music, to a journey where a follows a bell curve with a intense peak in there a long period for integration and relaxation. And this is a very efficient way of surfacing emotional debt emotional material and having it be completed as long as there's an embodied felt sense of safety. Again, this is best done with a facilitator.

Is that a broad category in which certain things like say holo tropic breathwork fit up under tropic breathwork a type of this. It's a very it's a very kind of complex map, but essentially there's the breath work at the top, and then within that there is a holo

tropic is a modality pineed by Stanard Stangrof. And then there's also there's rebirth thing, there's transformational breathing, there's some other ones and contus connected fits under that, and then actually within conscious connected what we're practicing here we ball FBR or facilitated breath repatterning, which kind of speaks to the fact that there is guided facilitation to use bodywork, verbal cues and things to facilitate to ease in the breath.

And is this the sort of thing that you do with people virtually or is it more something you really want to do when you say with a guide that you want to do in person or you can get your support virtually, what's your recommendation. So there are people offering this virtually on a kind of one to one basis,

which certainly can work. I've chosen to work in person um just because there is access to the community here and for me being able to have kind of human connection and literally coregulate your nervous system with someone and be able to read their breath and then make facilitations based on what I'm seeing for me, is just a much more effective way of working compared to if you're just mitigated through zoom or something, which I know can

still have effects as with whim Hof. My fear is that there is a kind of small percentage of the population who whom something big will arise and they won't have another person there to help them to downshift, and they'll be kind of stuck in that state. And then self enquiry journaling talk a little bit about. I mean, everybody's going to know what journaling is, but there's a

specificity to this. Describe that process. Yeah, So I'll sometimes combine this with kind of a somatic inquiry meditation as well, where I'm kind of using my interception to kind of track these sensations that are alive and then inquiring into what emotions or what you know, thoughts memories might be underneath that. So I'll usually do that first and then afterwards I have a journaling practice which is built on internal family systems, which I imagine some of your listeners

are probably familiar with. But it's this idea of um working with different parts within myself and there might be a kind of like an inner trials within me that fuels hurt by something that might be the kind of warrior that wants to defend me and you know, get angry. Everyone else there's maybe the king who has more of a discernment and more of a sense of like courage

to look at something that might be comfortable. And so I'll use these different characters, and I think it's a fun creative process for people to almost like come up with who are the characters inside themselves they've noticed that maybe they associated with certain thought patterns, you know, certain moments that nervous system states, and then to kind of facilitate dialogue between these parts and just to ask, you know, what is it that this like hurt part of myself

actually wants or what is underneath this story that I'm telling myself. And maybe it's not about story, but it's about something beneath that, and it's about, you know, something that happened earlier. So it's almost this kind of excavation process. And and usually what I find is like, it's not about the thing. It's not about the thing I think

it is. It's like I go into that and then once I start journaling, or once I start feeling into my body it's like, oh, there was this thing that happened five years ago and I'm still piste off about now. That's now, that's surfacing, but you have to start with what to life. Awesome, Well, Johnny, thank you so much

for coming on the show. I've really enjoyed this. You and I are going to continue in the post show conversation where I want to talk a little bit about the foreigners of a system archetypes, and also just some riffing on kind of like what's next for you. I'm really really kind of curious about where your work is going,

so we'll be talking about that in the post show conversation. Listeners, you can get access to add free episodes, post show conversations with great guests, and all sorts of other goodies at when you Feed dot net slash join. So again, Johnny, thanks so much for coming on. It's been such a pleasure. Thank you so much. Yeah, this has been so much fun. I really appreciate it. If what you just heard was helpful to you, please consider making a monthly donation to

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