Hello friends, welcome back to the show of my guest today.
Is Johnny Miller? He's a writer, nervous system coach, and a podcaster.
Emotions are scary, feeling feelings and truly being connected to your life is hard.
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Expect to learn why it's so hard to feel feelings, whether it's possible to think your way out of over feeling, how to use breath work to master your nervous system, what the personal development industry gets wrong, why negative self-talk is holding you back, how to regain control after losing your temper, and much more.
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But now, ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Johnny Miller.
Why is it so hard to feel feelings?
We both grew up in England, and I think we're known for having a stoic, keep calm, carry on mantra in our culture.
I think that speaking for myself, I grew up, what I realized now is numb from the neck down.
I was really out of touch with so much of what was going on outside of my intellect.
It's really been the last five or six years that I've come back into appreciating this flavour that it's going on inside my system.
I'd also be curious for you, what is your journey with feeling emotions?
Do you consider yourself, for someone who we both went to, Newcastle, Durham, up there?
It's not cool to express emotions in public.
What's your journey? Yeah, standing on the front door of a nightclub isn't exactly a hotbed of talking about feeling feelings.
And there's a lot of expectation, I think, about being a young guy that wants to be attractive, and competent, and have mastery, and competing with other people, other guys, especially in an industry like Nightlife.
And yeah, emotions are kind of a sign of weakness.
I got really disappointed with the It's OK to Talk campaign that happened in the UK.
I thought that that was just so dickless, and telling guys, It's OK to talk like, what does that mean?
What does it mean It's OK to talk?
They haven't got, they don't know what they're feeling.
I didn't know what I was.
I don't know what I'm feeling much of the time.
I think I had a small and probably still do a small number of buckets of emotions that I kind of default to.
It sort of snaps across into one of a bunch.
So very competent at feeling anxiety, very competent at feeling worry, getting better at feeling excitement.
But distinguishing, OK, so what are we talking about?
Is this restlessness? Is this resentment?
Is it bitterness? Is it frustration?
Is it anger? Is it really kind of breaking apart the component notes of emotions?
There's just a few that I seem to snap to in terms of a default.
And one of the main reasons that I wanted to have this conversation with you in particular is between the UK and the US, there is so much turmoil at the moment.
The entire world just feels like it's up in the air, it changes in political party, and you should care about this thing, and climate change, and all the rest of it.
And so much of that is outside, but so much of that is impacting the way that we feel internally.
And I think it's nice. I like believing that I'm a stoic ship in a storm, and I'm not going to move.
And the world out there isn't going to hurt me in all the rest of it.
I can David Goggins myself for long enough.
But it feels to me like that's swimming upstream, rather than swimming downstream.
The world is out there. It is going to have an impact on you.
Just allow yourself to absorb that.
Work out how to work with emotions, how to regulate your nervous system, and how to actually start using emotions to inform decisions, to make you a better person, as opposed to just gripping really, really hard, and going, no, fuck you, I'm not a pussy.
Emotions of a bitch. Yeah, I'm pretty sure on the same page here.
I think that part of the issue is that we've confused what...
Let's say, Angers, I think they're pretty example.
Like, when people are aggressive, or like using anger to manipulate situation, or have their own way, we kind of see that as being a bad thing, or anger when it's kinks can really hurt people.
And I think it's really kind of coming into...
For me, at least, it was like, like, what are the sensations that are here, and how can I allow them to kind of move through me and be expressed, and not get kinks?
And this is something that Joe Hudson talks about, who I think has been on your show as well.
And if he gets kinks one way, it gets repressed, and it's like, like, I'm not angry, like, it just kind of turns into this low-level passive aggression.
And when it gets kinked the other way, it's like aggressive.
It's like anger at someone, and both are kind of strategies for not feeling the thing.
Like, it's both protection mechanisms that we've learned when we were growing up to avoid feeling whatever that emotion is.
Is that where you think much of emotional numbness comes from, then, the lack of safety, an emotion arises, and someone doesn't feel safe in feeling it, so they repress it?
What have you learned on your trajectory about the origins of emotional numbness?
Yeah, I mean, I think a lot of it comes from learning that it wasn't safe to express when we were young.
So, for me, I was like bullied as a kid.
There were times when I was, you know, sad, and I was like, you know, friends like, that's not okay, same with anger.
And I think it really does come down to feeling safe in our bodies and having permission from ourselves and other people that it's okay to feel.
Can you think your way into feeling?
This is a good question.
I mean, I think it's really helpful as a starting point to become kind of intellectually aware of what's going on.
And this is where, you know, talk therapy has such a great role of understanding that there are emotions here.
But if it stays on that level of intellectual kind of, I think I'm angry, but you're not actually feeling the thing, then it causes this like emotional loop.
And that's, I think that's honestly what people are afraid of, is going into something and then they get trapped and they get stuck there.
And the principles of nervous system regulation are not that you don't feel the things, but that you don't get stuck in any one state.
So you don't get stuck in anger, you don't get stuck in sadness.
And the life cycle or the reflex of an emotion is, you know, usually anywhere between like 10 to 20 seconds, but it just gets looped, almost like a velcro thought, it gets looped if we're not able to actually feel it, but we're just in the story of what the emotion is.
And this is something that I see a lot when I do breath work.
And you can see when someone is like, they're up in the head.
And there's maybe the similar motion going on, but their awareness is really with the story.
And it's really just the case, like dropping down into the body.
And like what is, what's here?
And getting in contact with the sensations.
This is one of the reasons I really have been on a big push over the last few months to try and talk about this.
I think I'm probably a pretty good figurehead for lots of the people in the audience of someone that spends way too much time in their head, likes the idea of being sort of rational and cerebral and cognitive.
And I play with ideas. And that's very, very fun to me.
And that can be a bit of a trap because building up your curiosity and your intellect can cause you to almost army yourself against feeling things, I think.
And yes, certainly a lot of my friends, a lot of my very, very smart friends are actually trying to actively down tune their brain from stepping into feeling things.
And they're trying to sort of get out of their own way.
So this is one of the reasons that I was really keen to talk to you.
I know that you've done an awful lot of work in this.
One of the topics that I've been obsessed by since I started the podcast was high agency humans.
So can you talk to me about the relationship between emotions, feeling feelings, and having high agency?
Because I don't think that that is immediately apparent.
Totally, yeah. And I love that you use the word curiosity.
And that's something that I think was the kind of gateway drug in for me was like in my early 20s, I was so curious about ideas.
I did philosophy at Durham.
I was like so curious about the world around me.
And at some point that curiosity turned inwards.
And I started getting curious about like my inner landscape.
And how that connects to this high agency idea.
I feel like for me, high agency is almost synonymous with being intentional.
It's like can I have an impulse or an idea or something like one execute in the world, something that I want to do.
And it's like following through with that intention.
And for me, what gets in the way of intentionality are our reactive tendencies.
So if I, let's say, have an intention to ask a girl out or have an intention to start a business.
But the intensity of that situation causes me to either kind of go into anxiety, overwhelm, worry, or kind of collapse and shut down, which are these two kind of reactive modes.
Then it's going to be really hard for me to follow through with any of these intentions.
And thereby, I will be a low agency human.
And so a lot of what I've been thinking about are, firstly, how can you identify the kind of the somatic markers for these reactive tendencies upstream?
So before I go to a level 10 panic attack, I'm like, OK, I'm noticing there's this tightness in my chest.
The last time that happened, I ended up breathing into a bag.
Or maybe it's a feeling in my gut.
And last time that happened, I went into a collapse.
And so that's one strategy.
And then the second is practices for literally expanding your capacity.
So expanding your capacity to be with intensity.
And those are two traits, which I believe if cultivated, will accelerate people to be more high-agency humans and be able to live more intentionally, which is ultimately what I care about.
I think that's what I'm most passionate about sharing with the world and cultivating for myself.
That's great. I really haven't thought about that before.
And I've been in Georgia, I've thought about high-agency for six years.
Now, we spoke about it. We're on Broadway on Nashville yesterday.
And I'm talking to Tony about it.
But I've never considered before that your emotional governor, like your speed limiter on a car.
This thing steps in. And you can have all of the intentionality, all of the agency in the world that you want.
But again, it comes back to swimming upstream versus swimming downstream for me.
Do you want to make life easier?
Because you can probably get there.
Holmose does. Like Alex's fucking hates many of his work sessions.
But he'll grit his teeth and get through it.
And I think that a lot of people have been very seduced.
Me too. And I support it.
The David Goggins' jocker willing, like just fucking grind and get it done.
Like that's good. Because it allows you to kind of blast through all of these restrictions that have been placed in front of you.
I'm worried about going over and speaking in front of this business meeting.
I've got a job interview this week.
And I'm terrified to go and do it.
So instead of working into the emotion, feeling it and then trying to deconstruct that so that it doesn't have the same hold of you, what you use is the classic type A solution, which is just a big fuck off sledgehammer.
And you beat it to death.
And it's like on the floor, you know, it's like a hydra or something.
You beat it, you can't kill it.
But it's down and out for now.
And you've just used grit and determination and resilience and you've got through.
But the next time that you go to go and do the thing, I think it's much more likely that that's going to arise.
I don't think that that's a long term solution to this problem.
So first off, I absolutely love that.
And thinking about using your nervous system as a cue to, okay, so what is it that I'm, what is it that I'm feeling in my body?
And this isn't woo you hold trauma in your left hip stuff.
I think Bessel Vanderkulk's really great book.
The title, I think probably did a lot of disservice and confused a lot of people who never read it and made assumptions about what was in the book.
But yeah, the body keeps, the body informs you.
Not necessarily the body keeps the score in that way.
Body is the score card, according to Lisa Feldman-Barratt, which I think is a more accurate.
She's coming on the show.
I just confirmed her for September.
Nice, fantastic. Okay, so just digging a little bit more, this sort of restriction in high agency to nervous system relationship.
How is someone's nervous system going to inform them when they're stepping in to go and do something?
Yeah, so, I mean, firstly, I just want to comment on the Guggen's kind of jocco paradigm, because I think it's a really good example.
And it's actually a really important thing to talk about.
And when we're trying to do these, achieve our goals in life, start a business, whatever the thing is, the options are, like you can either, let's say some emotion, some resistance comes up.
You can either up your willpower, or you can use things like, you know, breath work to self-regulate, and down, down regulate the emotion away.
And that, in the short term, is a viable strategy.
Like it will allow you to continue functioning as if whatever that emotion was was never there.
But in the long term, it adds allocytic load into the system, which I call emotional debt.
And at some point, depending on people's respective levels of capacity, that emotional debt will get to a certain point, where it will cause the nervous system to be so fragile that our will become much more easily overwhelmed, and it will require even more willpower, even more self-regulation to get rid of whatever that thing is we don't want to feel.
And so for some people, I think they can, you know, vibe be go for like 5, 10, 15, maybe even 20 years, like in that kind of sledgehammer mindset.
But at some point, and these are a lot of the founders and execs that I work with, that strategy stops.
And I call it like the feather brick dump truck analogy.
Like your body will give you, maybe it's like attifling with a feather.
And you're like, yeah, just like brushed it off.
Maybe there's a brick, maybe it's a breakup, maybe it's like, I don't know, you lose a business deal or you get exhausted one day.
And then sometimes it's eventually going to be a dump truck, which might be like a chronic illness, or it might be like you just wake up one morning and you literally cannot get out of bed.
And at least that's what I've seen with the clients that I've worked with.
I've kind of been through bed at myself.
And so to kind of come back to the going up stream piece, that having a practice for building what's known as inter- reception, which is basically how aware of your own landscape are you.
Like to what degree is it like a kind of like vague, I think there's this, you know, sensation going on or can you do you have this like high definition clarity over the different sensations and somatic markers that you have.
Because every time you have an emotion, it's not just a thought.
A lot of people think, oh, I'm angry because I have the story that this guy was a dick to me.
But with every emotion, there's a corresponding kind of somatic marker according to Demazio.
And if we can, and often this somatic marker's pop up before we're consciously aware that there is an emotion in the system.
And so by practicing interception, which can be done in any number of ways, we're attuning to this like repository of data that otherwise we would be ignoring.
This is the trap of the rational, cognitive, like left brain person, I think.
This sort of desire to understand and to explain.
The problem is that that can become a trap.
I first learned what you said about emotions lasting.
This very short half life, you know, way shorter than we would presume from Sam Harris.
And he said, try to remain angry without thinking about being angry.
And it just comes and then it goes.
But this story that you tell yourself that anger can last for months, you know, like resentment and bitterness and that story and I would have said that.
And if they'd said that, I would have said this.
And they would have looked at me and they would have known, oh my God, what is this?
This weird, it's like sex fantasy, like resentment, revenge, like a fucking John Wick movie playing out in your head.
But it's linguistic between you and somebody else.
It's so strange. And I think just accepting that, accepting the bizanis and most importantly realizing that that's not the way that it has to be.
Now I'm speaking completely hypothetically here because I'm totally captured by all of this.
But I've been told, I've been reliably told by people that have done more self-work than me.
That this isn't the way that it has to be.
So let's get into the nervous system.
Talk to me about the modes of reactivity in the nervous system.
Yeah, sure. Well, I mean, I'm glad you brought up Sam Harris because he has this wonderful phrase that I love.
And this is in the context of meditation where he talks about reducing the half life of reactivity.
I think that's like a really good way to put it because like progress in this arena is not, like I never get angry.
It's not, I never get reactive.
It's, I'm not reactive for like three days.
Like you said, it's like from three days, maybe it's down to like five hours, down to an hour, down to like maybe five or 10 minutes.
And so I think that's what progress looks like.
And what I found helpful is understanding these different modes of reactivity.
There's typically two responses that humans have to stresses that are beyond their window of tolerance, like outside of their capacity.
One response is hyperarousal, which looks anything, it looks like frustration, looks like anxiety, looks like maybe, maybe aggression.
That kind of like the sympathetic branch of the nervous system is getting so kind of over, like overwhelmed that we struggle to stay present.
We struggle to like be like receiving whatever the situation is.
So that's hyperarousal.
And then the other side is kind of associated with the power and the sympathetic side of the nervous system.
It's like a shutdown. So when some people go into a stressful response, their system will collapse, it will shut down or it will freeze.
And so that's almost like the emergency handbrake is being pulled on the system.
And people will often feel like guilty or shameful about this.
Like maybe there's a situation where they really had to show up.
And it's like the choke, it's like there's a literal freeze response.
And this is obviously both of these are on a spectrum.
Like it's not like we go from like 0 to 100 sometimes.
But being aware of the early signs when we're kind of on the edge of that, on the edge of our capacity, let's say, so that we can like, oh, right, like I'm feeling like I'm kind of being pulled out of my my intentionality.
What can I do to either? And this is where I think there is a choice point.
I either do some form of self-regulation, like it's just like a simple like sympathetic side.
It could be a just grounding.
Could be like looking at white horizon, doing some breathing, affirmations like top down or bottom up, either way.
Or if it's like, if it's a suitable environment, it's feel the thing.
It's like allow whatever this emotion that I'm resisting to just like flow through me.
And maybe you just like like shout at a wall or maybe you let a couple of tears come through.
And as we were just saying, that can last like 20, 30 seconds.
And then you're like, oh my god, I feel so much better.
And so I think part of the skill here is both learning the tools and practices for both the emotional fluidity and the self-regulation.
And then being able to apply them at a relevant time or context.
So it feels like there's three main skills that people need here.
The interception, the self-regulation and the emotional fluidity.
Is that the three horsemen of the regulation apocalypse?
100%. And I say maybe there's a fourth which is environment design.
And I think of this idea of like we design our environments and our environments design us in return.
And so there's ways that you can remove unnecessary ambient stresses from your environment.
But broadly speaking, I think those three.
And I also think in that order as well.
Because if you don't have interception, you're not going to know when the right time to self-regulate or feel an emotion is.
So that's like you need that as a foundation.
And then the self-regulation and emotional fluidity come on top of that as you progress.
Okay, let's go through them then.
Interception, self-regulation, emotional fluidity.
Let's start off how can people improve their interception.
Yeah, so what I love about this is you can really do it in any moment.
Like I find it helpful to have both, like I mean I don't do this so much anymore, but I used to have like a morning practice that was like in meditation, but it was really just like a check-in.
It was like me asking like how's the weather right now?
And I had this acronym ape which stood for awareness posture emotion.
And I just kind of go through those things like how is how is my awareness?
Is it like expanded? Is it kind of contracted?
Posture, like literally like what is how is my body right now?
And then emotion, and for me emotion is kind of like what sensations are my feeling?
What am I noticing? Is the like tightness here?
Am I hungry? Am I sleepy?
What's the mood? What's the tone?
And just doing those like micro check-ins, at least once a day and ideally, you know, maybe when you're, I started doing it when I was lifting weights.
So like really as I was doing a deadlift like really tuned in to all of the tiny little like muscle components and particularly my breath as well and really gaining like much more definition over what was going on.
But you can really do it at any time and it's particularly helpful in moments when you're activated in some way.
So let's say that you are activated.
What's the process that somebody goes through?
To to improve interception or to so I mean usually when someone's activated, if they are in if they're in hyper arousal, then chances are they they won't want to intercept because there will be so much going on inside the body.
They will likely be looking for some kind of distraction, maybe scrolling on the phone.
Some form of like numbing protective strategy.
I wouldn't necessarily recommend like going in too much.
It's it's better to kind of downshift the system until you replace where like okay I feel like I'm good and then kind of tuning in and also noticing the difference before and after doing some form of practice.
I think this is particularly good with with breath work because you can you know you can tune in be like okay I took a mental check of how I feel.
Do some breath work practice maybe like a sigh or humming or four for eight breathing and then afterwards you tune in and you're like wow I feel I feel so much different and that kind of before and after noticing I think helps to really make it a habit and helps you realize oh this bottom up practice is really having a noticeable effect on on my nervous system and therefore
how I feel so I'm more likely to do it again as opposed to just saying oh she even said that this down regulates my nervous system so I'm just going to do it.
Yeah the positive reinforcement of actually feeling better and checking in and going wow I did I did that thing and it worked this is such a such a great point I kind of remember it was human or Mike is retell that said this were going to the gym and getting a pump is one of the very few pursuits where you actually get to front load your progress while you're doing the thing
so you with a pump is what you in six months wants to look like flat but it's not like in the middle of a Spanish lesson you suddenly get three X your lingo and are now able to bring it into the present and go wow in six months if I keep going this is the amount of Spanish I'm going to be able to speak yeah no it's bullshit so I like the sort of positive reinforcement what else
to say about increasing interreception what else haven't we covered?
well just to kind of like follow that thread I think the way that I and this comes back to the high agency point the way that I think about this journey is is is as a series of like self experiments so I have this like this idea of like and like be an end of one be a scientist if you're an experience and for all of these practices or whether it's interreception whether it's
forms of breathwork whether it's somatic approaches to feeling emotion like go in with like a like a literal hypothesis like I'm going to try this thing I'm going to notice how I feel before I'm going to notice how I feel during and then I'm going to like take an inventory and then reflect afterwards and like did it work do I feel better what would I do differently next
time? was this interesting and and going in with this I call it like courageous curiosity of like being willing like being open but still being willing to like move or embrace some form of intensity I think is like is like so fucking foundational to to all of this work and if you just embrace that mindset and run enough experiments eventually you will get to interesting
places. What is what is some of the mantras that you rely on is there something that you come back to where you're thinking I really need to go inside is this is there a little bunch of sayings that you rely on for that?
Oh interesting um I let's see there were two that I think I've used that come to mind one is this idea of take it to the mat and this was during a breathwork training I did where the idea that um I remember I was like I was really pissed off and triggered by something that my teacher said and um this phrase take it to the mat which was part of the training came to mind and it is this idea that like
the thing that triggered me on the surface it actually wasn't about that and I did a I did a breathwork journey like 30 minutes later and this whole thing moved that was like from you know 10 20 years ago um and and so this idea of like the things that we are annoyed by frustrated by that we're like angry at it's it's almost always like a signpost to something inside that like
some experience we had prior that just wasn't like an emotional reflex that wasn't able to be fully completed and so this idea of take it to the mat is like it like really finding some degree of gratitude like maybe not right away but like if someone says something that really sticks like insult you in a way that really land it's like oh that's actually a gift in a way
because I get to go inside and and feel whatever that was related to and then the second one the second one was um this kind of came to me more in like the the grief kind of chapter of my life and this was just I am willing and I would say this when when the like tidal wave of intensity of grief was was kind of moving through um I realized at least I have this theory that the five
stages of grief were actually five ways in which we resist grief whether it's like denial or um all of that and so for me this mantra of like I am willing it was like I am willing to just like feel and experience and let this like tidal wave of intensity move through me and that was that was really really helpful um particularly in some of like the tough moments for me can you
take us through that story kind of what triggered you on this journey hmm yeah sure so I was um living in Brighton in UK I was engaged at the time to amazing women called Sophie Spina she was a junior doctor and she uh we we went on holiday and she'd been diagnosed with bipolar before we got together and her first day back at work she had an anxiety attack and she ended up
coming home and taking her own life and that was I was in Portugal at the time when I got the phone call and that basically I mean it just it just obliterated me it like completely destroyed you know the vision for life that I had for the next five years and I'd never I had a pretty easy life I'd like went to went to school in England like nothing really tragic or bad had happened
to me and it was the first time that I was really confronted by by something that was just um like unspeakably tragic and so and so for me I I remember seeing adults like I remember seeing people in the UK who like family members who'd lost them were close to them but they hadn't grieved they hadn't really allowed that grief to move through and they were this like just
like a shell like a husk of a human being you know like kind of glazed eyes like resentful cynical and I remember thinking like knowing my lack of attunement to my own kind of emotional landscape I remember thinking it like I'll probably end up like that like that resentful bit of person if I don't allow if I don't really kind of intentionally feel this and so I kind of went
on a mission of sorts to be like okay I'm just gonna quit my job like just give myself like a year to move through this um in in any way that I could and so that was like I did a 10 day of a pass and I'm pretty soon after it was some plant medicine it was breath work it was going back to the places that had that like um like almost had had these like horcruxes of grief that I'd go back
to places that were meaningful and yeah and in that um over kind of that period it it totally changed my life like it was a very much like before and after kind of right of passage experience dude I'm sorry you went through that it reminds me of that Carl Jung quote where he says until you make the unconscious conscious it will direct your life and you will call it fate
and that's kind of like those people who have had some incident or maybe not just one incident maybe just a sort of compounding of lots of small um molestations on their emotional health and uh they just keep repeating these same patterns they seem to kind of be controlled by this thing it's not them but it's becoming a part of them it's almost like being emotionally
uh parasitized right you've got this thing living in you that isn't you but is controlling you the toxoplasma Gandhi of uh of emotions it's so funny yeah and so say like what comes to mind and um yeah there's maybe two things I want to share one is that when the the grief was like fully able to move through um it went from being this very like uncomfortable thing that I
was kind of running from to oh this just feels like it feels like pure love like there was this moment when I was on her memorial bench and just kind of tearing my eyes out just like boiling my eyes out and there was this moment that like I was like if I didn't have the story that I just lost someone very close to me I would think I was in like I was on MDMA I would think I was in this like
ecstatic state um and and I think for me that the two the two practices that I had that allowed me to kind of build that emotional fluidity one was swimming in in Brighton in the ocean in the like fucking freezing cold water and you know how it you when you first get into like freezing water I'm sure you're familiar it's like everything tenses up you're like ah you just
like want to resist it and then slowly if you can like almost like a clench fist you just like slowly like soften that resistance and like let it in it's like not so bad then eventually it's like oh this is actually quite nice like I could be here for a while and that's same that same kind of process which I also then applied to freediving where again it's a similar thing
where the deeper you dive down underwater the more pressure there is from the ocean and the more like constricted literally like your your organs shrink because of the air pressure or the the ocean pressure and everything inside gets super tight and if in that moment you can kind of drop down into your body and be like okay I'm like noticing my stomach is like really
really tight and it's like soften that then it allows you to equalize and you can then kind of sink even deeper and so that for me almost became like a like a metaphor or a training ground for the same with the grief the same with the emotions and so I kind of applied the same like move of noticing the tension and contraction like the closed fist and just be like oh just like
soften slightly and that would allow a little bit more to move and I really think that's I mean for me it's been a really powerful metaphor for the the process of gradually titrating and welcoming even more intensity that I previously would have shut down or just been like like no fucking way him okay so that's interreception self-regulation next what is that to
know yeah so self-regulation is I mean it's like a therapeutic term but basically it's like how can you increase a embodied sense of safety and a parasympathetic downshift in a moment so my favorite like some people use like mantras affirmations maybe like a cognitive reframes but these are like top down strategies for self-regulation I tend to prefer the bottom-up
approaches so things like humming is insanely effective it releases nitchcock side it has this really really instantaneous kind of calming effect the sigh obviously it's you've been talked about also things like four four eight breathing or alternate enough to breathing or even just like bringing your awareness like bring your awareness down into your your
feet or your hands and like being reminded of the space around you so just like expanding your awareness to the sides below you above you and it's just like ah like you feel like a sense of softening so it's dig into this is something let's dig into the specifics of a few of those whichever ones you want to pick yeah so let's say um four four eight breathing which the the exhale
is twice as long as the inhale that's kind of what makes it calming and when you're breathing in this way there's a part of your brain in the in the insula which is basically tracking how you're breathing the whole time and when you breathe in this particular way it's send signals to activate your parasympathetic nervous system which then sends signals to your endocrine
system which then feeds back into your brain and your brain's like oh like the threat's gone like I can I can beat be more chill which then creates calmer thoughts and feelings so this is kind of virtuous cycle and the reverse is also true like if you're when when you're overwhelmed when you're stressed it tends to be a kind of breathing into the the upper chest where there's
more sympathetic um neurons there's faster breathing often through the mouth and that has the reverse effect so that will activate the sympathetic system which then sends you know adrenaline things into the endocrine system which then sends which creates the the story and the felt sense and the emotions of like oh shit like whatever it is I'm activated which then
I'm not safe that's kind of what it comes down to yeah um so the breath is is a incredibly powerful tool for like very very quickly shifting your state like are regulating or down regulating and there's you know there's a lot of times when up regulating is also helpful like if you're feeling lethargic in the morning and you don't want to drink another espresso or you
just want to increase the intensity um so under and the key thing there is when the inhale is more intense or longer than the exhale it's activating when the exhale is longer or more relaxing uh sorry longer or just more emphasized than it's it's calming how many rounds of 448 until you feel a shift yeah um usually at least at least three or four uh sometimes more if you're
if you're really activated and the other thing that can can be um really helpful is breathing into the belly against some resistance so you can either lie down face forward on a hard surface and like take a full breath in like a sigh and then just allow the the exhale just just like oh just like completely fall out or sometimes do it against um like one of those wrist balls
are like breathe into that and then the the pressure will like push the air out of my lower diaphragm and it's man it's it's so calming it's really good after you know after like a long day or after whatever's whatever's coming up it's it's so effective i saw a tweet from you saying that maybe the solution to all of our emotional problems is just fucking humming what yeah
there was uh what one of the students in my cohort posted a video of him holding his like six-month-old baby who was trying and he he like hummed for like 30 seconds and the baby just went like just like super super quiet um what is happening is the the humming is releasing nitric oxide in our um in our system um and that nitric oxide is a vatidialator which basically has this like
calming effect and it's also really good for reducing um i strain or i fatigue so yeah I mean you can do it for like 30 seconds and if you want to amplify it there's a thing from yoga called be breath where you put your I can't do it now because I'm wearing headphones but um thumbs in the ears these two fingers over the eyes and then this thing over the nose and as you hum it
just creates this like vibrational um resonance effect in the sinus cavities and it just uh it feels so good man like try it it's also really good before podcast conversations what do you mean when you say hum is there a frequency people need to do is there a length of time they need to do it for their rounds with this is there a tune i'm following you can do a tune no so uh
basically um through through the nose and all the ways the end of excel so taking full breath in inhale and then mmm and then all the way to the end of excel and whatever pitch feels good to you right okay whatever whatever you do pop too okay so there's there's two four by four by eight so four in four at the top eight down and then it does no break at the end on that and you're
saying at least four rounds up until you feel like you've actually reset a little bit and then the alternative is around about 30 second rounds of humming and how long is that for yeah so um i'll do like at least like three rounds and then usually by by the end of that i'll feel pretty good and with the four for eight you can also um if you do it through alternate nostrils
again this is something from the yoga world my theory is that because it reduces the aperture of the the inhale it increases the calming effect but i'll do like inhale four left hold for four excel eight right in health inhale right four hold for excel left eight and uh yeah i've looked for studies on on you know why this is more effective i haven't found that much but in my
own experience it's it does help so i'm interested in how people can better integrate a deregulating experience so they've gone through something maybe they have or haven't been able to step in using some of the techniques that you've suggested or some of their own but something's happened and it's later in that day and they're sort of reflecting on this argument
that they had with a random person in a coffee shop or that disagreement with a partner or that bit of road rage or that comment from a coworker that really set them off or whatever it is how would you advise someone after the fact to integrate a deregulating but normal experience this isn't getting the call that you got while you were in Portugal it's one of those common perversions
on our on our um mind balance mm-hmm yeah yeah so um i usually i think of this as in like two phases the first phase is getting to a point where i feel somewhat like present again in in my body and able to be with whatever the situation is if if that's not there let's say you're still like really just frustrated about whatever the thing is then i'll use either a top down bottom
up or outside in kind of practice to to to down regulate so that can be could be the the affirmation could be a cognitive reframe could be some of the breathing exercises could be like a state change maybe sauna sauna coal plant type thing or or outside in it could be like co-regulation you know just like a hug from a friend or like going through work with your dog like
whatever that is something to kind of allow the system to find like stability and safety once that's there then um i'll do a like i i teach a practice called somatic surfing which is essentially kind of dropping into the body dropping into that intercept of awareness and being like okay like i'm i'm angry at this person for this thing like what do i what do i notice in my
body what's what's here and this is where the kind of courageous curiosity thing comes in i'll find a sensation i'll track it and then it's it's really a process of um like softening resistance and welcoming whatever's there and the first few times that you do this and it can often be helpful to do this you know with a somatic therapist or with a friend or a men's group
something like that but if you're doing it on your own it's it's really just bringing like welcome resource to that part it i mean three the lens of internal family systems it's like there is some kind of like activated part and you're bringing resource to that part um and it might want to maybe there's like a thing that you want to say or you want to like shout at a pillow
or maybe you just want to like lie down and like just like shed a few tears it it will just um what's remarkable and what i find endlessly fascinating is how the body always it always knows what to do it's it's really just us like creating enough safety internally and externally for the body to take over and it just it just moves it will complete that buffered reflex in the same
way that you can um search in youtube there's an amazing video of an importer that was chased by a lion and it's it's sitting behind a bush and it was it was literally like in the lion's jaws like five minutes ago and it just starts at the first it's still and it just starts shaking it just starts like trembling for like maybe like three or four minutes and then it just gets
up and just like like runs away and that shaking is the mammalian like um way of completing that stress cycle and that's that's basically what we've forgotten to do as humans like kids kids do it um my my teacher ed was in a scooter accident and uh when he was by by the side of the road he did exactly that like he was he was hit by the scooter and he just like like like shook
for like maybe five minutes or so and then got up and he was great and that that kind of um uh like stopping of the of the reflex is what creates over time the alicellic load increase which creates the fragility and an emotional debt over time used that term before alistatic load what is that hmm it's it's like a fancy term for wear and tear on the body um basically like
accumulated stress creates alistatic load in the system energy that is energy that is being used to hold that thing in place that could otherwise be used for something else it takes energy to hold that to stop that reflex from being completed i understand so i'm thinking about this relationship between what occurs in the moment and regulating our system when that happens
and then there's another level of regulating the system to make it feel safe for us after when we're going to try and integrate this experience and then we have a final stage which appears to be allowing the feeling of feelings is that kind of the the way to think about it yeah totally and sometimes um you can just skip the whole first bit and just like if it's a small thing
you just like it can happen in you know five or ten seconds i don't want to kind of paint the picture that this needs to be like a long drawn out thing it can literally be a ten twenty second thing um but yeah that's like if you were to kind of break down the process that's that's what it looks like okay emotional fluidity the final skill yeah so um i mean we've touched on this a fair
bit it if i was to sum it up it's it's basically welcoming the full spectrum of our experience and most of us are comfortable in like you were saying earlier like you know a handful of emotions like uncomfortable feeling maybe it's like maybe it's sadness maybe it's worry maybe it's um joy um but there's almost always like another pocket of things that for whatever
reason we just avoid or we default to feeling that the standard like books of crayons and so it's like how do we start yeah i actually quite like that matter but how do we start like calling in with some of these other crayons that we've like kicked out of the books that's cool that's cool um and for me it's been it's actually been a process of almost working with like one
one crayon at a time primarily through breath work like initially it was grief was like was the big one and then then it was it was anger and um like for me the turning point there was like uh my teacher said he said the words you are loved in your anger and i just like i just pulled my eyes out i was like oh my god like every time i've been angry i've been like like this is bad
i'm i'm about what do you think it was the cause due to uh feels so resonant with you are loved in your anger it was because i didn't think i was because i every time anger came up i would and and you know i'd spent the first 25 years of my life thinking i'm just not an angry person i'm just like chill calm like i don't get frustrated very easily and um it turns out there was a lot
of like a lot of rage that had just been like pent up over the years and and so i i think it really was this like explicit permission to um that i could be like a good person i was safe when i was in that angry state and i think for me it's not bad for feeling it exactly and i think one of the experiences that kind of lodged that in was when i was a kid i got angry and like like hurt
this other kid on the playground and got like punished for it as as kids often do and i think that like was one of the things that cemented in okay anger's not a good thing to to fuel and and with that like there was there was a connection there to this like people pleasing tendency and this kind of um way in which i was being overly nice but often not kind and so that was this this kind
of nice versus kind of was a dynamic that i was exploring at the same time as being like um allowing the anger to move through tell me more about that nice versus kind so in my experience being kind is often being able to to set the healthy boundary or to to say something which might initially be received as hurtful but is in the long run the kind of thing to do whereas the nice
is like the people pleasing like oh yeah yeah sure or like not actually giving genuine feedback to someone and in the short term it avoids hurt but over time you lose trust you lose uh faith in yourself and you just you just don't have boundaries and so for me i would i would say yes to everything and and and everyone and just be oh then you know overwhelmed naturally it's
so interesting how much as you're talking about this emotional fluidity dysregulation so much of it the words safe is just like floating around the whole time do you feel safe feeling the things that you're feeling is it bad for you to be angry it's okay for me to be self-critical it's okay for me it's safe for me to be self-critical it's safe for me to be anxious but for me
to feel excitement or joy or rage to indignation uh at things no no no no those things don't feel safe and it's so interesting where that comes from mm-hmm yeah i mean i think i think you're spot on and it's also i mean a lot of people don't necessarily identify as not feeling safe but that's ultimately what it comes down to and when we receive cues from the environment
or from other people um that we are safe then and and this is i think you know 80% of what say a good therapist will do is they will create a container they will say you know this is confidential um no one can hear what we're going to say everything is welcome they are like permissioning that safety basically and that and so and and then you know everything comes from there
and um yeah it i mean it really is really is everything and also in relationship as well like if you're in a relationship where it is safe to to express your feelings it is safe to um you know move move through these things it can be it can be really transformational and like relearning that safety um is is what increases our capacity to be with more intensity um over time
yeah you've used that you've used that term before capacity to be with more intensity and um one of the things that i'm interested in is this relationship between state and trait so i think lots of people will understand that if you do breath work the uh state change is pretty dramatic especially if you do some aggressive whim hop stuff um or if you do some down regulating
thing i feel good i feel good for a little while afterward but relating that to the trait change and you said you know i did a thousand sessions of breathwork and i helped it helped me to work through my grief it helped me to work through my anger um we're talking about a trait change rather than a state change there so what is it that you're doing for someone like me who's
really only used breathwork to get high and cry a bit what and does a trait change from a breathwork practice look like what's the modality what's the process and what's the outcome yeah it's a really good question um two two things come to mind one is the style of breathwork that i i trained in was called facilitated breath repatting and one of the decis of this this modality
is that all of our emotions or emotions have like corresponding breathing patterns and so if when i was in a process afterwards the if the practitioner was was reading my breath as as i'm as i'm breathing if the breathing pattern changes that's a cue that there's the likelihood that like something shifted there um but but in a more in a more practical sense um my my
hypothesis around this is that there needs to be a period of um downshift time like deep parasympathetic state after whatever the release is for the neural rewiring to to happen and with things like whimhoff holotropic breathwork things like that they are you know it's it's almost like taking a tab of lst like you can have incredible like out of body like almost
psychedelic experiences the the downside and this is you know maybe somewhat controversial is i think a lot of people are basically disassociating and they're checking out of their bodies and having these like crazy psychedelic experiences and then coming back in but nothing has really changed and so the the the challenge here is to um to breathe in such a way
or to however you engage where you're still within your window of tolerance and that basically means you're still present with your experience you haven't like checked out and gone somewhere else and if you can be present with your experience the whole way through and then allow some time at the end for just there's literally rest like like that's what the body
will naturally want to do at the end of a stress cycle to like allow it to rest and relax if you like you could do like a nsdr practice or just take a nap or just you know lie down somewhere um but from my understanding that is when the the rewiring in the nervous system takes place is actually it's not in the peak experience it's afterwards in the rest or you know sleep that night
as well how common is facilitated breathwork practice sessions is there something that people can find locally to them in a class is there's something that you can do online it's not super common um the main practitioner's basis in barley unfortunately but you can search conscious-nated breathing or ccb at some more common approach and it's a way of breathing
which in my opinion honors the nervous system or it doesn't send us out in the way that holotropic or whim Hof does there's there's various other breathwork forms as well but my my favorite is ccb or fbr which is facilitated breath repatement okay and what are you doing presumably you're not just breathing there has to be some sort of mental processes as emotions
arise as thought to rise as stories and narratives that you tell yourself assumptions about the world what are you doing from a more cognitive perspective through these breathwork sessions yeah what I what's kind of crazy about it is is you really are just breathing and this was a big shift for me in that like there is no it's yeah well the the surprise for me was was often
these these huge emotional processes we would go through and there was there was like zero story like I had no idea what it was attached to and in some cases it was likely like a pre verbal experience so something that happened in the first 18 months of life before I even had the capacity to articulate or to speak um the from a kind of cognitive standpoint it's really
a practice of staying with the breath and then when as as you know going back to the emotional fluidity piece when there's some discomfort getting curious about it and then like softening or surrendering into it and just like welcoming it and that's like it really is that simple it's like get curious until you identify the thing or you like feel into something like
if you're breathing then breathe into it and then at some point it will it will release or something will happen right so in this way are you seeing the breathwork as creating a moderate dysregulation or at least the container for emotions to arise emotions that maybe haven't been felt that you perhaps can't even remember but to do it in a very particularly safe way
which is then retraining and repatting yourself to go it's okay to feel this particular emotion is that it exactly now we got it it's the same fuck it finally this the same as I mean taking MDMA like an MDMA assisted therapy journey it's doing the same thing it's like creating that activation and MDMA being the impatagen creates even more safety in the system so that like
big stuff can arise and it won't overwhelm you it's like oh yeah that thing happened but I still feel this like overwhelming love and safety which is I think a big part of why it's been so effective in in the maps trials and elsewhere that's cool I like that's a nice little framing that we've gone through I think it explains to me as well about how breathwork creates that trait
change one thing that I've been thinking about throughout all of this is the tendency for people who learn skills of mindfulness of self-regulation to basically create another prophylactic in between them and their emotions that beforehand I would shut down or I'd get super angry or I'd be distracted by being on my phone but Johnny taught me how to do for for a breathing
so hooray I just have a new way to not feel my feelings is that a trap that people step into yeah absolutely and a good story that kind of exemplifies this there was a Tibetan monk that came to one of our trainings and I didn't witness this myself but my friend basically said that there was like like so much rage and anger that was like trapped in his and this monk had you
know probably meditated 20 30 thousand hours and yeah I love meditation and I think it's an incredibly powerful valuable practice but it can also be used to effectively disassociate or to self-regulate away the emotions which in the short term yeah like you might be more productive you might be able to you might feel less anxious during the day so I'm not saying
it's like I'm not saying don't do it but know that it is a ultimately a short term like band-aid solution and that at some point you will have to like open that Pandora's box of stuff that you haven't been wanting to look at dude I feel so vindicated that someone who actually knows what they're talking about agrees with I had this insight I never wrote it in my newsletter
because I felt I felt too silly it just felt like a pine this got another broad science theory from me but I had it in my head it'll be in my notes somewhere saying that mindfulness or like observing allowing and releasing is just another way to not feel feelings that it's great and it's significantly infinite levels better than allowing them to capture you or obsessing
about them but it doesn't ask the question where did this come from why is it that when I encounter this situation I have to go back to my noting technique oh there's there's anger again it comes and then it goes it's like okay but if that's just going to keep flowing through you it it is still arising and again this is swimming upstream versus swimming downstream do
you want to can you develop this fantastic coping regulation strategy for dealing with these emotions when they come up but it's not these emotions it's those four emotions in those five situations it's always the same things triggering you always the same emotions that come up why not try and get closer to the root of the problem and that I think requires you certainly
you know speaking as someone who's done a lot of meditation it has used an awful lot of mindfulness to have things arise and go okay there it is just sort of letting it float off into the distance that's great but it's it's helped with state dealing but not with trait dealing yes over time yes well I think I did I couldn't improve on that it's well I love your idea as well
of the self-regulation paradox being similar to like a type a relaxation problem so this is this is something I've noticed in awful lot that the overoptimizer the human fan the the timferris fan the me fan will find a relaxation strategy which they can apply their winners mentality to and then trying to use use the ice bath or the sauna or the breath work as an object
dude I've done this I've done this three times now during a breath work class where I've literally thought to myself I'm going to win at breath work I'm like it's first off no one's fucking looking at you second win what who who against yourself what does this mean and the three times all of the three times that I've done it I've pushed myself too far and I've like come
back around to find the breathwork lady sort of leaning over me rubbing rubbing my neck because I've like sent myself into some other other universe and yeah talk to me about this sort of type a relaxation problem I love that idea yeah well I mean I um it was more of it more just like a gest that I think it is a great trojan horse to get people like like myself honestly you
like folks in this kind of high achieving space to take um down regulation serious and treating it like being like a like a cognitive athlete and if you're hard charging and you're like David Gugging Gugging's in your way through life then ideally there should be a kind of like equal and opposite downshift afterwards and that um that down shifting is really hard
for a lot of people and so like I actually think it's like overall a very positive thing that people like HIV flexing and they're just like bragging about how much time they spend in the sauna um I think it's funny but it's actually in my opinion like probably a good trend I mean at some point that um my sense is that mentality like that trying to win at being the most relaxed
basically it's like that that has has an has an endpoint like at some point you have to like drop that too because it's going to be like contributing to a certain ceiling of relaxation that you're able to get like at some point you have to let that drop away too oh dude I uh I had Ross actually on the show you know Ross swam around the UK he's just amazing just he just did the world's
longest single river swim 314 miles and I asked him about the same thing his his approach to resilience is suffering strategically managed and what he's talking about is maybe for a marathon or a triathlon and maybe even an iron man or an endurance race you can maybe get away with sort of just grabbing and gritting and adrenaline and chip on your shoulder and my dad
was mean to me and those people in school I'm going to prove them wrong and all the rest of the stuff you can kind of take that that hot fire energy and use it but he says that if he's going to try and swim I think he swam for 55 hours without sleep without touching land eating pooping in the water full works and he said he needs to keep his nervous system just as steady as he
can the whole time there's no use in him trying to think about Mrs Wilkinson and that thing that she said to me in your nine because he's just going to fry himself out and I think that when we're that's such an interesting reframe for life that life is very much Ross edgeley swimming for 55 hours not you trying to run for 26 miles and that potent but toxic fuel when it's
used for too long of the bitterness of the resentment of the rage of the need to prove yourself of the desire for validation those things are so good at getting you activated at the beginning kicking you out of that job you hate leaving that relationship you're not happy with like falling out the top of the bottom of region beta but when it gets to real long to okay is this the way
I want to live my life so I want to end up on my deathbed still telling people that I've proved them wrong that their assumptions about me I look at all of the things that is that really the energy that you want to take into your sixties and seventies and eighties it's not for me I don't want to do that you think okay so if that's the place that I'm going to end up at why not just
bring a little bit of that into now why not try and embody okay well that's where I'm going to go going to end up in a place where I don't want to be using that as fuel a so given that I've probably already created some momentum now why don't we try and just you know wash a little bit of this away wipe a little bit of that off yeah I love that so much it it feels like like what you're
saying is almost like changing the fuel source it's like in the beginning that like night chick fuel it really really does get shit done I mean there's a lot of very successful entrepreneurs who are still like writing that that rocket fuel and just certain point whilst it may be fuel in one area of life often quite a narrow area it tends to the fumes let's say I'm just
making this up as I go but like the fumes end up with like you know they're on the like fifth marriage or they are they don't have any close friends or they have self-talk that you wouldn't want to spend like two minutes listening to and so the not that just you you mentioned self-talk and I've had it in my head the entire time I'm desperate to ask you whether the inner voice
is downstream from the body or the body is downstream from the inner voice yeah so it is a bi-directional relationship like it's not one or the other but something that I've noticed this is just you know any one but I I had a very active like energetic in teenage years most of my 20s and in the last three or four years that has I get really gone quiet like I still I have thoughts
but it almost it feels like my mind is like my buddy it's like sending me like ideas or like did you think of this thing or like try doing this and there's there's you know 95% less critical negative like looping like Velcro thoughts going on and I really do attribute that to a lot of the just like the somatic shit that I've that I've released in through a bunch of these
different like emotional processes and also also flexibility as well like there was so much tension that I was holding in different areas that is just not as not as present I mean I mean it's still a fact on there but it's like a lot less than it used to be I'd say yeah I uh I was talking with George yesterday and we had this little experiment we were asking whether or not your
mind is your friend or your enemy is your mind working with you and for you or against you and just the fact that for me certainly my mind is working against me so much of the time it's not my friend it's not being supported it's not patting me on the back and telling me that I've got done a good job it's not being even really that objective it's just this like very cutting
castigating harsh inner critic that tells me maybe you did okay today but unless you can do better tomorrow today it probably doesn't really matter and tomorrow is going to be a waste as well so you better get cracking you better work harder and uh yeah that's that's just a really interesting realization that that it does it things don't need to be that way that's
not the way that things need to occur that there are there are better routes and when it comes to yeah but that's facilitating success that's allowing you to get to a place of worldly acclaim and prestige and all the rest of it it's like yeah but for what end that what's the point if the road towards your worldly success is paved with personal misery what was the point
all along it actually selling the soul of your inner experience so that other people think that you're cool or that things have gone well and I'm also not sure that you need that cutting inner voice in order to become successful in any case I'm pretty sure there is an equanimous well balanced way of achieving those things yeah yeah I mean that that was what was coming
to my interest is like I mean going back to the high agency thing like to what degree are those you know sounds like counterproductive thoughts like actually getting in the way if you just like being present and like getting out of the way and doing your thing that you do really really well and my sense is they might even be negatively impacting the the progress towards
the goals that you've set or the intentions that you have I mean that was certainly true for me but it probably yeah it depends on the context talk to me about the neuro aperture hypothesis yeah this is a half baked idea that I get on Twitter recently it's basically a sense that I was researching the the esomology of the word anxiety and it comes from a Latin word which means
to constrict and I have this I have this kind of working hypothesis that anxiety isn't really an emotion in and of itself it's actually a constriction or a tensing kind of coming back to that like closed fist metaphor we were talking about earlier it's like a constriction against another underlying emotion and if you're able to like increase that aperture of the emotional
energy then that actually turns into on the other end of the spectrum joy and I know people that you know students that I've worked with who they they started to feel anxious when the the emotion of joy it was arising like they were they their their system didn't feel safe to feel that joy so it was it was tensing it was constricting it was causing an experience of anxiety
but if they just loosen that a little bit it would it would literally turn into joy probably the very thing that they are like wanting to feel more of in their life and and I you know I think the same is true of other emotions as well like people that are chronically anxious I would say there was a very good chance that there is another emotion just like just below the surface
that if they were able to like loosen that grip a little bit then it would it would like come to the surface which yeah you know so it's very related to everything that we've we've just been riffing on it's interesting to think what emotion is your anxiety causing you to not feel or what emotion is masquerading as anxiety and yeah you kind of want to reveal that that mask
through safety and say oh wow and that's something that you know we've spoken today a good bit about anger sort of bitterness anxiety rage those sort of things but there's definitely fear on joy elation excitement hope all of these things coming through to that there's just sort of extremists anything that's outside of the very narrow overton window I think of it
like an emotion overton window right you have these acceptable ranges of emotions and it tends to be maybe a little bit more it leans slightly more into the negative than it does into the positive but if you just get extreme in any direction you're no no no unacceptable sorry you can't use that word not with a hard are and you depression with a hard are so you can't do
that and it really makes me think about it really really makes me think about that I think so many people myself included extreme emotions come through they're not even that extreme but something outside of the normal day-to-day experience of emotions come through and there's something get activated you go wow like I mean I mean someone you is this safe is this okay
and if you don't at least my current bro signs working theory is if you don't step in and sort of check in and just remind yourself like you are safe this is fine to feel even if it's sad it doesn't mean that you're going to be sad for the rest of time just means that a sad thing happened and that's the emotion that's with you now yeah I mean I'm so I so agree and I think the the surprising
thing for me was was actually that it was the resistance to feeling the thing that sucks it was the resistance to feeling my sadness or my anger that was like painful and uncomfortable and that I didn't want to be with but when that goes away the the actual emotion it feels so fucking good and not not just joy not just excitement not just a bit like even like especially
something you know the sadness there's this like real beautiful tenderness and this like rawness and feeling connected to myself to the world around me and to think that like I I believe that my life would be meaningfully diminished if I was to shut that away and to not allow that to to move through me it's so bang up and part of being human dude that's so bang on it I've
been thinking this to myself for a long while that look you have this beautiful sweet of human emotions that you can live within and why would you not want it all why not you have you know it's like saying I have all of the colors available on my television but I'm just going to watch in black and white and you would know you have this massive spectrum of emotions that you
can tap into that literally add color to your existence you're going to get to the end of your life and look back and realize that all of the the buffet of human existence was open to you and you decided to sample all of it not in a hedonic I went and fucked the bitches and flew on the planes and did the drugs style way that's open to your preference but in a there is a range
of experiences in a Lee that are available to me and I decided to not shut those things off and I just think God like what what the fuck else are we here for if it's not to enjoy the emotional state that we're almost everything that we do is trying to find a way to enjoy the present moment and that doesn't necessarily need to be good emotions all of the time but to just think
like this current state that I'm in is interesting it's inspiring it's something that I'm going to look back on and remember yeah I uh the more that I think about it the more that I realize that I think emotions and feeling feelings are kind of just what we're here to do and everything else everything else is trying to get our lives or the environment that we're in into
a state to give us a good enough reason to just be feeling joy in the present moment or present in the present moment I love that so much and the the metaphor that comes to mind is um almost viewing our human biology as like an instrument and that there are ways in which conditioning culture experiences like gets our human instrument to be out of tune and that if we're
going around life playing like in the wrong key like things things aren't going to go well so by taking a little bit of time to basically inquiry inwards tune up your instrument then you you will have greater access to these these melodies these these scales these these harmonics that were previously out of range and if we're just playing like the two or three notes
the whole time it's going to be a pretty boring song like I think the goal is to have that like we want like an orchestra of experience like that that for me is like one definition of a of a good life is like is like being intimate with the world in a way that we can like allow all of those notes all of those colors to kind of move through without being like no I just want to play
in A or I just want to color in red like fine like there's nothing wrong with that but to me that feels like a it's like a diminished vision of life basically agreed yeah emotionally living in black and white as opposed to living in color so given your I guess kind of progressive perspective on self-growth self-improvement do you think that the current personal development
industry is built on a flawed premise hmm yeah so I'm something that I learned from this guy Steve March this amazing amazing dude he has this controversial but I think really valid opinion that's the self-development industry the self-improvement paradigm is flawed in that it starts from the premise that something in you is broken something in you need fixing
and so going into any you know even like like an emotional inquiry process with this like oh this is part of me that needs to be healed so that I can be okay like starting from that point will diminish the range of outcomes that are possible versus what what he calls a he calls it a self-unfoldment which is maybe you know like a fancy term but it basically means like what if everything
right now is okay what if actually you were safe and then applying that curiosity and presence to whatever's there without a change agenda and this is something that I like I really fell into this trap like over and over again I would like oh I noticed like I'm triggered I'm gonna go I'm gonna do a breath of a journey I'm gonna feel it I'm gonna fix it it was like the same
like Taipei mentality of like I'm gonna feel the shit out of this I'm just gonna feel it so I'm gonna win yeah I'm gonna win exactly exactly right and that um you know it it worked to some degree in the beginning but at some point I realized that the the way in which I was going in with this like self-improvement agenda was actually creating the resistance that was getting
in the way of just the thing that wanted to unfold naturally and so that I mean that's something I'm still frankly working with and um you know I think it's a lifelong journey but I find it's so interesting to like look out at the self-improvement industry and how much of the messaging and marketing is geared towards you are ex-broken in some way and this why thing will will fix
you and that just by starting from that premise I that I think there's a ceiling to how much actual improvement can happen what is a better frame for somebody who is currently existing in that world yeah I think the um the question of what if nothing needed fixing what if nothing needed healing like like what if you were okay and safe in this moment and what would be the motivation for changing
if that was the case the changing and the growth happens naturally you know in the same way that like you wouldn't judge a sapling oak tree for being like too small it like it will naturally want to grow it will naturally want to evolve um trees don't get in the right way but humans tend to and so like your your growth your learning your development will happen it will it
will happen naturally it's just it's just it's just wants to um and the the the trying or like the forcing it to happen um in my in my opinion actually gets in the way of what wants to unfold it's a beautiful answer very beautiful answer so you've done all of this self-work all of this breathwork all of this time orthogonally looking at the personal development world
how would you suggest that someone who wants to really step into this world what would a protocol look like are there any bugs that you would suggest are there any courses that you think that they should take are the their practices is there a weekly daily what would a daily routine what what would you say just a little prescription for the the 80-20 of of how someone
would begin on this journey hmm yeah I mean it's um there's there's a lot of choice out there and and it obviously always depends on on the person I I think the practice that I found myself for that I I think are very broadly applicable um NST R is a is a really wonderful foundation non-sleep deep rest that human bangs on a battle lot and what I love about that is it is both
um it increases interception because you're basically doing a guided body scan like over and over again and it's also increasing that's uh down like that down regulation and it's only in that like downshifted place where the the emotional inquiry is even possible um I'm I'm a huge fan of semantic based therapy as well just going back to the NSTR where should people
get is there an app is there a website is there a course how often do they do it we've got type A is wanting to win at at emotions here great so I have I have a couple of recordings I can send a link to put in the show notes um and if you don't like my voice then Ali Boothroid on YouTube is also really good if you prefer soothing female voice um and then uh so the the other practice
that I that I love to prescribe is is just getting curious about your interception so I like the acronym ape awareness posture emotion using that throughout the day um and and see you know really like treating it as like a creative creative exploration and like like what can I how can I increase the definition or the fidelity or like the the flavors of my internal landscape
how can I like really appreciate them a bit more um but I mean there's there's a lot of there's a lot of different options out there for this work I mean I have a course myself called nervous system mastery that I uh is basically been my attempt to distill this into a five week kind of protocol based course and we do it as a as a live cohort we've had like over a thousand students
go through um that's that's been my my best attempt to share some of these practices and kind of set people off on this path um and it's also it's not a replacement for I would say working with um some like in person semantic based exploration whether that's in person breathwork whether it's semantic experiencing Hikomi is another great modality that I appreciate
um or just you know some people love men's work some like people gravitate towards different areas but I think the the key is is like what are you genuinely excited about like not going out of place of oh I should do this because you know I need fix it but like what what is actually genuinely interesting um and then following that with this mentality of um they've courageous
curiosity and this like like I I'm willing like I'm increasingly willing to feel and and borrowing capacity from other people like this is literally what the therapist does like they they are giving you additional nervous system capacity so that your system can can hold the intensity of something that is not able to hold that's such an interesting way to think
about therapy that you're basically offloading some of that emotional capacity onto the person in the room that you know is confidential and is safe and is trained total that's exactly what's happening yeah and and that's part of what I attempt to do with this this course I think there's a a limit to how deep you can go when you're working in in an online environment
um but at the same time I've attempted to share the the core protocols basically for self exploration and um as a foundation for doing deeper dives in a kind of one and one context I know that you're a fan of that Jerry Kologna question which is in what ways are you complicit in creating the conditions you say you don't want and that's very uncomfortable to think about the the fact
that the things that you're complaining about I have this quote I love about the magic that you're looking for is in the work you're avoiding uh it's kind of like yeah uh the conditions you say you don't want are in the ways that you're complicit of creating um yes is there anything else are there any other questions that have really sort of broken your brain um I mean that's
that's a beautiful question Jerry actually lives here in Boulder and we did a podcast recently so that's that's one that's on my mind um another question let's see um yeah it would be something along the lines of uh uh what what is the what is the feeling or experience that you have been running from um um and that there's a beautiful just to give that some context I don't
know if you have ever read the wisdom is this amazing story by us Ligwin and basically the main character Ged releases this the shadow this gebbeth that he spends most of the book running from in different creative ways and at some point he like turns around and embraces it and and names it and that's that kind of process of like turning around and accepting responsibility
for the ways in which you are complicit in creating the conditions the reactivity that you don't want the lack of agency and like looking at it and event like eventually welcoming it and loving it that like that is the whole fucking jet like it really it really is that simple um it's what's that bucket finding uh the Wizard of Earthy by Ursula Ligwin it's one of my favorite
fiction fiction books how yeah Johnny Miller ladies and gentlemen Johnny I really love what you're doing I think that this forefront of somatic informed personal development of tapping into emotions I think this is one of the big pushes that we're going to see we've obviously got human on board doing the nsdr stuff uh you know hypnosis another angle like David
Spiegel's stuff I think that's another vector uh that we're going to see a lot more of we have the mindfulness revolution you know whatever 10 years ago Andy puttycomb and the guys from calm and so on and so forth but uh I think this is one of the the next ones and I'm glad that you're uh here repatriating this great nation with me um trying to take take take over one step
at a time where should people go they're going to want to check out all of the things you do in your courses and and and the rest of your content yeah beautiful uh thanks so much so the the best place to go would be nsmastery.com um there's a cohort coming up in october uh we're accepting applications now if folks interested that would be the number one place and then I'm
also super active on twitter so if people want to say hi there ask questions uh it's johnny mellow j-o-n-y-n-one l-l-e-r it's a annoying handle with the one there dude I really appreciate you I'm looking forwards to seeing what you do next and uh thank you thank you I really appreciate it beautiful thank you so much this is super fun
