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To Feel Better, Live More.
Bite Size your weekly dose of positivity and optimism to get you ready for the weekend.
Today's clip is from episode 569 of the podcast with Johnny Miller, founder of Nervous System Mastery.
In this clip, he shares why learning to work with your body can change how you respond to stress, reduce reactivity and help you move from overwhelm to calm.
We don't see the world as it is.
We see the world as we are.
So why is there this internal conflict?
We know who we are.
We know we want to be kind and compassionate, yet we end up being reactive and stressed.
And one of the reasons, I think which I think very much mirrors what you're saying is that if you're chronically stressed, the way you view the world also changes, right?
Because when you're stressed, your body thinks it's under threat, right?
So the focus comes in.
You're looking for threat, you're looking for problems, you become hypervigilant, right?
You're not having this wide perspective, taking the other viewpoint going.
Oh, I wonder what they were thinking there.
Do you know what I mean?
It feels like it's a vicious cycle from both sides.
We're living in a world where people feel chronically stressed.
They've got too much to do, which is changing the way they view the world.
It's also tightening up their nervous system, which means they're gonna also be more reactive even when there's no threat there.
Exactly.
I know we're going through practical exercises, but for someone who's perhaps having a light bulb moment during this conversation, can they change it?
Yeah, I mean, that's beautifully said.
I view the nervous system as literally a lens through which we experience reality.
And I think our state of our nervous system and the degree to which we're in a mode of reactivity changes completely dictates our experience of life.
So yes, I mean, it's like doing reps at a gym, right?
It does take practice, but our nervous systems are neuroplastic, like, along with our brain.
And so with practice, we can rewire these maladaptive responses to stress.
What are some signs, in your view, that might indicate our nervous systems are a little bit out of whack, which may color the way we view the world and change the way we experience life?
So some signs would include anxiety.
Forms of reactivity.
So if your knee jerk, anger is obviously a clear one, or if there's a sense of fatigue or lethargy, or sleep is obviously a huge one as well.
That's a big symptom of nervous system dysregulation.
What, that we can't sleep?
That we wake up, struggle to fall asleep, struggle to kind of downshift at the end of the day without kind of using substances.
And also I think challenge in relationship is a huge one that I see in my students.
So, whether it's kind of conflict in different areas or challenges, with creating a sense of connection with people that are close to you.
There's a lot.
Early symptoms of burnout is another one as well.
So I think about it in terms of like feather brick dump truck.
And in the beginning, maybe your nervous system is telling you like, almost like tickling you with a feather of like, maybe you're going a little bit too hard.
Maybe it's time to take a bit of a break.
And then there's maybe a brick which could be.
You wake up feeling exhausted.
Maybe you're, you've got brain fog, maybe you can't really perform at work.
And then for some people it takes a dump truck, which might be maybe it's like an intense breakup or it's like a health crisis.
And it's often, unfortunately, the dump truck, which gets people to really tune in.
But it's really just the body giving you feedback.
Yeah.
It's interesting.
Those symptoms you mentioned there, some of them you know being overly reactive relationship struggles.
Maybe anxiety would be in there.
Yeah, for sure.
These are... very, very common these days.
Many people are walking around with these kind of tight and wound up nervous systems that they think is normal.
Yet they don't realise that there is another way to experience the world out there, isn't there?
Yeah, beautiful.
I mean, anxiety, I think, is a really good example.
And It actually, the word anxiety comes from the Latin ango, which literally means to constrict.
And a lot of people try and manage anxiety or like, conquer anxiety, but it's really just our reaction to a kind of an underlying emotion.
And so it can be really helpful to kind of learn to notice the constriction in the body and kind of like, allow it to open up.
And you know, there's a number of different practices for that.
Yeah.
That's interesting.
Anxiety is a reaction to an underlying emotion.
I imagine that a lot of people think that anxiety is an emotion.
Totally.
But you're sort of framing it slightly differently.
Yeah, it's kind of like a defensive strategy that our nervous system has to constrict against.
I think about almost like a hosepipe.
You can turn on the tap really strongly, and the water will kind of go through.
And if your system is kind of unclenched and doesn't have tension, it'll kind of flow cleanly.
But if you're resisting, some aspect of your experience could be anger, could be sadness, could be frustration.
Whatever it is.
And a really obvious example is like if someone is, you know, before an important conversation, maybe they feel scared and afraid and there's a sense of anxiety.
But that could also be excitement and it can just.
If that system opens and they're kind of connected to the breath, then It's really just energy, like energy in motion.
That's kind of moving through.
Is there a difference between anxiety and excitement, or is it just the way that we're framing that tension?
It's the tension in the body, I think, yeah.
Same tension.
Yeah.
That's a really interesting concept because we know that anxiety is on the rise.
So many people are struggling with anxiety.
And you're saying, trying to manage it can make it worse, which in many ways is counterintuitive for people.
But I think that's because people don't know what it feels like these days to experience their body.
So I imagine some people will hear you talking and go yeah, but what are you talking about constricting in my body?
What the hell does that mean?
Do you find that in the modern world, many people are stuck in their heads and don't even know what's going on beneath the neck?
Yeah, totally.
So I think about in the kind of journey of nervous system mastery, of kind of working with, with your nervous system, there's three kind of core skills that I think about.
And the first is is what you, exactly what you spoke to, which is kind of regaining sensitivity of our internal experience?
So it's called interoception is the kind of fancy name I know you've written about it in your book.
And it's really relearning to listen to the feedback from our body that's coming all the time.
The second skill is self regulation.
And this is, you know, what a lot of people are probably familiar with when it comes to anxiety.
This is this kind of three ways that I think about self regulating this top down approaches, which might be like cognitive reframes, might be, you know, positive affirmations.
Mindfulness is a good example.
The second is bottom up, which is this is my favorite.
Honestly, it's like working with or leveraging these levers in our physiology.
Things like the breath is a really common one to literally shift our state and create that sense of safety.
Bottom up techniques or practices would include things like humming is actually really effective.
It increases nitric oxide by 15 fold and it's a vasodilator.
It helps with eye strain as well and helps us kind of downshift into that parasympathetic state.
Other things would be long hold stretches, um exhale, emphasized breathing practices.
So like four seven, eight is a really common one um, or just any breath where the exhale is twice as long as the inhale.
It will have a kind of calming effect.
Um, and another one that you can do is kind of playing with your awareness, And awareness is again something that a lot of people don't think about.
But your awareness in any moment can be kind of expansive.
You could be aware of, like the space, the sides of you, the space above you, below you, or usually when people get stressed or reactive, the awareness is almost like it's like looking, experiencing life through a straw.
That's like just in front of you and very narrow.
So you can be aware of the space like behind you, feeling your feet on the ground, attuning to like the sounds around you.
And the more that your awareness is kind of expansive.
I'm like doing a little bit right now like or you can kind of put your hands out and then, as you kind of move them behind you, you're kind of expanding your peripheral vision and that has this kind of expansive effect and it creates a sense of spaciousness in the system.
Yeah, that whole visual piece is really interesting.
Um, i worked with this incredible movement coach called helen hall and One of the things Helen has helped me with is understanding the importance of peripheral vision when, let's say, you're running.
And she has shown me, and I've seen the data that when you are running or walking with narrow focus vision, you move a certain way.
And if you then tune into expanding your vision, softening it, making it more peripheral, your whole movement pattern changes.
There's more fluidity.
There's more flow.
It really helps the way you move.
And we know that your vision is super related to the state of your nervous system.
Totally.
So those practices actually...
Yeah, they're really helpful to think about.
I want to go into some of them in detail, right?
But you mentioned this bottom-up practices, okay?
And before you mentioned top-down.
So it sounds like there's a variety of different body-based actions, practices that people can do.
And is the suggestion for people to play around and experiment with curiosity a variety of these practices and maybe choose a couple that they really like, that they can practice regularly, that allows them to train this skill of letting go?
Is that a useful way to look at it for people?
I think that's a really useful way to put it.
And I think I really emphasize the experiment based approach.
I think in my experience, the bottom up is the most like underappreciated and kind of most ignored.
And I do believe it's the most effective if someone is in a state of you know their anxiety is ramping up, maybe towards a panic attack, or they're getting really stressed.
It's the most effective kind of short term intervention.
But in terms of the long term, I mean, I think it's actually this is kind of going a little like a layer deeper.
But I think that both top down and bottom up interventions can also be used to avoid feeling emotions.
And this is something I call the self-regulation paradox, in that if you're just using journaling or CBT or breathwork to kind of ground yourself, but ultimately avoid feeling whatever the emotion is, you're not going to make progress over time.
Because I view these practices as a purely a means to get back into our window of tolerance and then to allow the emotion to actually move through.
Because if we're still moving through the world in a way that we are avoiding feeling sadness or anger or grief or whatever the thing is, then we will always be making these predictions that like oh that's, that's bad.
We're not going to go near that.
And so the the intensity of our in which they present in our bodies, will just get worse and worse over time.
And we'll have to do like more and more of these interventions in order to kind of self regulate.
And the third kind of pillar or category is emotional fluidity.
And that is it's the one that probably takes the longest to learn, but it's learning to welcome the full spectrum of human experience.
And beneath anxiety.
For a lot of people it's either like frustration or anger or sometimes sadness.
And once there's that sense of safety and calmness that's created from the self-regulation, then the emotion can kind of come through.
And it's actually, it's the resistance to feeling the emotion that is the bit that sucks, basically.
Emotions themselves don't last for more than 10 to 20 seconds.
It's the way that we constrict and tense against them. try to resist feeling them.
That is the bit that causes the challenge.
That's really interesting.
The emotions themselves don't last beyond 10 to 20 seconds.
I think Which is wild, right?
Because like, it is why we don't think about that normally.
And the other thing that I want to bring this back to is this idea of emotions or avoided emotions and specifically, emotional debt.
Because, the more that we go through life and you know, our nervous systems have this amazing capacity to buffer our emotional responses which, you know, in many, many situations is super useful.
Like, let's say, someone on the street on the street just like shout to me, or i'm in a in a boardroom meeting and i get really angry.
It's actually good for me to be able to like suppress that and kind of save it for later.
But if i do that repeatedly over many days or weeks or months, that builds up.
This emotional debt is what I call it.
And in the nervous system, this is a buildup of allostatic load.
And what this does?
This kind of wear and tear.
It drains energy from the system, which reduces our window of tolerance.
I imagine listeners will be familiar that like, you know, maybe they maybe they start a new job.
And in the beginning, they've got like a ton of energy and they they feel vibrant.
But as time goes on, it feels like they get more and more reactive over time.
And that, I believe, is due to this buildup of allostatic load, which is, in part, contributed to by not allowing the emotional reflex arc to be completed.
And so you know, many of us are walking around with like pockets of buffered emotional responses, which is contributing to this sense of exhaustion and fatigue and low capacity.
Basically,
Yeah, I really like that idea of emotional debt and this idea that we're not completing our emotional responses.
I think it's a really, really important point for us all to reflect on.
I know you like to give the example of the lion and the impala.
So maybe perhaps use that as a way of helping people understand what it means.
To complete that stress response fully.
Yeah.
So people can search this on YouTube.
There's a great video of a impala that is chased by a lion.
It's literally like in its jaws.
It manages to escape.
And the next kind of five minutes, it finds its way to hide under a bush.
And it just lies down and its entire body just starts shaking.
It shakes and shakes and shakes for about two or three minutes.
And it just gets up and it's totally fine.
But that shaking is the kind of mammalian response that we will have of discharging that intensity and that stress that it just went through.
And Humans have kind of forgotten how to do that.
There's definitely ways that you can, whether it's through breathwork or whether it's through either practice I call somatic surfing, or even just creating a sense of safety.
Sometimes the body will kind of go into to complete that emotional response that it wasn't able to at the time, because often we will disassociate or we'll push it down.
And again, that's great.
But if we don't set aside time for some kind of processing to just allow the emotions to complete, then they, they get stored and they drain energy from the battery of your body.
Basically yeah, that's a very vivid image an impala um, almost being dead and having all that stress within them.
Yeah, that they then process, the stress is gone, they go about living their life.
Yeah, so we're feeling reactive over something.
We can learn some top-down practices or some bottom-up practices to reduce that reactivity and perhaps reduce how much we react to that stimulus in the future, unless we go one level deeper and go okay, we've reduced your activity.
Now, let's really feel that emotion and let that emotion work through us like the Impala, sort of shaking it out.
It will still be there.
It will be having a hold on us and when the right scenario presents itself, the right comments, the right amount of sleep deprivation, the right comment from your boss, it's like a match that still lights it.
Precisely.
So going back to your example, about the wild and how mammals will complete that stress response.
I'm guessing the impala.
They've just got this intuitive mechanism that perhaps we have had before and we've lost right.
Of shaking it out of their system so that they're free afterwards.
It makes me think of this movement deprived Western world in which many of us live, right?
And we talk about the benefits of physical activity for our hormones or our physical health.
There's more talk these days about what physical activity does for our mental wellbeing.
But as you were talking, I thought do you think that one of the reasons why movements whether it be walking or running or going to the gym makes us feel so good is because it completes, Or it helps us complete, a stress response that may have been left partially uncompleted within our bodies?
Yeah, I think that's largely a big part of it.
And, you know, I used to go for a run.
Like that was my way of.
If I'd had an intense day, I'd kind of go for a run around the block or in the park.
And I'd feel better when I got back.
But ultimately you're just trying to get back to like what that impala already knew, which is this just way of discharging the energy.
Hope you enjoyed that bite-sized clip.
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