How To Stop Living Life In Your Head - Jonny Miller

why is it so hard to feel feelings ah jumping right in um I mean we both grew up in England and I think you know we're kind of known for having a stoic Keep Calm carryon uh Mantra in in our culture and I think that I mean speaking for myself I grew up what I realized now was like numb from the neck down I I was really out of touch with much of what was going on outside of my intellect and it's really been you know the last like five five or six years that I've come back into appreciating this like um the like flavors that are going on inside inside my system so I mean I'd also be curious like for you what what has your journey with feeling emotions been like like do you consider yourself as someone who you know we both went to uh Newcastle darham like up there it's it's not it's not cool to kind of express emotions in public what what's your journey with yeah standing on the front door of a nightclub isn't exactly a hot bed of talking about feeling feelings um and yeah there's a lot of expectation I think about being a young guy um that wants to be attractive and and competent and have Mastery and and you know is sort of competing with other people other guys especially in an industry like nightlife and um yeah emotions are kind of a a sign of weakness um I got really disappointed with the it's okay to talk campaign that happened in the UK I thought that that was just so [ __ ] and telling guys it's okay to talk like what does that mean what does it mean it's okay to talk they haven't got they don't know what they're feeling I didn't know I was I don't know what I'm feeling much of the time you know 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 SN Maps across into one of a bunch so very competent at feeling anxiety very competent at feeling worry getting better at feeling excitement but you know distinguishing okay so what are we talking about is this is this uh restlessness is this resentment is it bitterness is it frustration is it anger is it you know like really kind of breaking apart the component notes of emotions there's just a few that I seem to snaap to in terms of a default uh 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 like the the entire world just feels like it's up in the air 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 I like believing you know I'm a stoic ship in a storm and I'm not going to move and you know the world out there isn't going to hurt me and all the rest of I can David Goggins myself along enough but it feels to me like that's swimming Upstream rather than swimming Downstream like 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 like gripping really really hard and going no [ __ ] you I'm not a [ __ ] em emotions of [ __ ] yeah I mean I I I'm pretty sure we're on the same page here um I think that part of the issue is that we've confused what let's I mean let's say anger I think a pretty good example like when people are aggressive or like um using anger to manipulate situation or um have their own way we we kind of see that as being a bad thing or or anger when it's kinked can can really hurt people and I think it it's it's really kind of coming into um for me for me at least it was like like what are the sensations that they here and how can I allow them to kind of move through me and be expressed and not get kinked and this is something that um Joe Hudson talks about who I think's been on your show as well and if it gets kinked one way it gets repressed and it's like like I'm not angry like it just kind of turns into this like lowlevel passive aggression um and when it gets ked 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 both like protection mechanis 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 a 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 um for me I was I was like bullied as a kid there were um times when I was you know sad and I was like you know friends were like that's not okay same with anger and I think it it really does come down to feeling safe in our bodies and having permission from ourselves and other people that it's that it's okay to feel can you think your way into feeling this is a good question I I mean I I think it's 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 has such a great role of understanding that there are emotions here but if it stays on that level of intellectual kind of um I I like I think I'm angry but you're not actually feeling the thing then it causes this like emotional Loop and that's that 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 the the principles of nervous system regulation are not that you don't feel the things but you you don't get stuck in anyone state so you don't get stuck in Anger you don't get stuck in sadness and the the life cycle or the 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 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 their head and there's maybe there's some emotion going on but their their awareness is really with the story and it's it's really just a case of like dropping down into the body and like what is what 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 uh a bit of a trap because building up your curiosity and your intellect can cause you to almost armor yourself against feeling things I think and um yes certainly a lot of my friends a lot of my very very smart friends are actually trying to actively downtune their brain from stepping in to feel 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 I don't think that that is immediately apparent totally yeah and um I love that you use the word curiosity and that's that's something that I think was the the kind of gway 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 um I feel like for me high agency is is almost synonymous with being intentional it's like can I have like an Impulse or an idea or something that I want to execute in the world something that I want to do and it's like following through with intention and for me what gets in the way of intentionality are are reactive Tendencies so if I let's say have an intention to ask a girl out or I have an intention to start a business but the the intensity of that situation causes me to either kind of go into anxiety overwhelm worry or kind of collapse and shut down which is these two kind of reactive modes then it's going to be really hard for me to um to follow through with any of these intentions and and thereby I will be a low low agency human and so a lot of what I've been thinking about are like firstly how can you how can you identify the kind of the sematic markers for these reactive Tendencies Upstream so before I go to like a level 10 panic attack I'm like okay I'm noticing there's this like tightness in my chest the last time that happened I ended up like breathing into a bag like um or you know maybe it's like a feeling in my gut and like okay last time that happened I went into like 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 high agency humans and be able to to live more intentionally which is ultimately what I care about I I think that's what I'm that's what I'm most passionate about sharing with the world and cultivating for myself that's great I I I really haven't thought about that before and me and George have thought about high Agency for six years now we spoke about it we're on uh we're on Broadway on Nashville yesterday and uh talking a ton about it but I've never considered before that you're emotional Governor like your speed limiter on a car um 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 it comes back to swimming Upstream versus swimming Downstream for me do you want to make life easier because you can probably get there hosy does like Alex is Alex [ __ ] hates many of his uh 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 me too and I support it the David gogin jocker willink like just [ __ ] grind and get 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 uh 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 over you what you use is the classic type a solution which is just a big [ __ ] off sledgehammer and you beat it to death and it's like on the floor you know it's it's like a Hydra or something you know you beat it you can't kill it but it's 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 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 vul'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 uh yeah the body 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 felin Barett which I think is a more accurate she's coming on the show I just confirmed her for September nice fantastic um okay so just di in a little bit more this sort of restriction in high agency to nervous system uh relationship like how how is someone's uh nervous system going to inform them when they're stepping in to go and do something yeah so um I mean firstly I just want to comment on the the goggin's kind of Joo Paradigm because I think it's a really good example and it's actually it's a really important thing to to talk about and like when we're when we're trying to do these these achieve our goals in life like start a business whatever the thing is the options are like you can either let's let's say some some emotions 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 downregulate 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 it adds allostatic 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 um will become much more easily overwhelmed and it will require even more willpower even more self-regulation to 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 viably 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 and execs I work with that strategy stops and I I call it like the the feather brick dump truck analogy like your your body will give you maybe it's like a tickling with a feather and you're like H just like like brush that off maybe there's a Breck maybe it's a breakup maybe it's like uh I don't know you you lose a business deal or you you get exhausted one day and then sometime it's event going to be a dump Chuck 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 that's at least that's what I've seen with the clients that I've worked with I've kind of been through burnout myself um and so to kind of come back to the the going Upstream piece um the having a practice for building what's known as inter reception which is basically how aware of your in a landscape are you like to what degree um is it like a kind of like vague I think there's this you know sensation going on or can do you have this like high definition Clarity over the different Sensations and sematic 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 there's a corresponding kind of sematic marker according to deasio and if we can and often the sematic markers 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 um we're attuning to this like uh 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 and the problem is that that can become a trap I first learned what you said about um emotions lasting this very short halflife 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 go what is this this weird like sex fantasy thing like like resentment Revenge sex like a [ __ ] John Wick movie playing out in your head but it's linguistic between you and somebody else it's so strange and um yeah I think just accepting that accepting the Bizness and most importantly realizing that that's not the way that it has to be uh now I'm I'm speaking completely hypothetically here because I'm totally captured by all of this stuff but um I've been told I've been reliably told by people that have done most self work than me that this isn't the way that it has to be so talk let's let's get into the nervous system talk to me about the modes of reactivity in the nervous system yeah sure well um I mean I'm glad you brought up Sam Harris because he has this this wonderful phrase that I love and this is in the context of meditation but 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 you know I never get reactive it's it's I'm not reactive for like 3 days like you said it's like from 3 days maybe it's down to like 5 hours down to an hour down to like maybe 5 or 10 minutes and I so I think that's what progress looks like um and and what I found helpful is understanding these these different modes of reactivity um 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 hyper arousal which looks anything looks like frustration looks like anxiety looks like maybe maybe aggression um that 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 we struggle to um like be like receiving whatever the situation is so that's hyper arousal and then the other side is uh kind of associated with the parasympathetic side of the nervous system it's like 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 the emergency handbreak is being pulled on the system and you know people will often feel like guilty or shameful about this like maybe there's a a situation where they really had to show up and they it's like the choke it's like there's a literal freeze response um and this is obviously both of these are on a spectrum like it's not like we go from like not to 100 sometimes but being aware of the 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 of my my intentionality what can I do to either and this is where I think there is a a choice Point either do some form of self-regulation just like a simple like sympathetic sigh it could be a um just grounding could be like looking at a wide Horizon doing some breathing affirmations like top down or bottom up um 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 a wall or maybe you let like let a couple of tears come through and and as we were just saying that can you know that can last like 20 30 seconds and then you're like oh like oh my God I feel I feel so much better and so and so I think part of the 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 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 they the three Horsemen of the regulation apocalypse 100% And I I say maybe maybe there's a fourth which is um 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 um but broadly speaking I think those three and I 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 that's like you need that as a as a foundation and then the self-regulation and emotional fluidity come on top of that as you as you progress okay let's go through them then inter reception self-regulation emotional fluidity let's start off how can people improve their interre reception yeah so what I love about this is you can you can really do it in in any moment like um 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 your 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 like how is how is my awareness is it like expanded is it kind of contracted um 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 am I feeling what am I noticing is there like tightness here am I hungry am I sleepy what's what's the mood what's the tone and just doing those like microe 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 tuning into 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 um but you can really do it at any time and it's 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 uh 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 um I wouldn't necessarily recommend like going in too much it's it better to to kind of downshift the system until you're a place where like okay I feel like I'm good and then kind of tuning in and also noticing the difference um 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 um a sigh or humming or 448 breathing and then afterwards you Che 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 bottomup 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 shman said that this downregulates 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 can't remember whether it was hubman or Mike isrel that said this where going to the gym and getting a pump is one of the very few Pursuits where you actually get to frontload your progress while you're doing the thing so you with a pump is what you in six months wants to look like flat uh but it's not like in the middle of a Spanish lesson you suddenly get 3x your lingo and are now able to bring it into the present and go oh wow in 6 months if I keep going this is the amount of Spanish that I'm going to be able to speak yeah no no no it's [ __ ] um so I I I like the sort of positive reinforcement uh what else to say about increasing interception what else haven't we covered well just to kind of like follow that thread I think um 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 I have this this idea of like n like be an N of one be a scientist of your own exp erience and for all of these practices whether it's interception whether it's forms of breath work whether it's sematic approaches to feeling and emotion like go in with like a like a little 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 um was this interesting and and going in with this um I I call it like courageous curios it 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 [ __ ] 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 um I totally what are some of the mantras that you rely on is there something that you come back to where you're thinking I 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 there were two that I think I've used that come to mind one is this idea of uh take it to the mat and this was during a breath work 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 which was part of the training came to mind and it's 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 breath work 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 like really finding some degree of gratitude like maybe not right away but like if someone says something that really sticks like that insult you in a way that really lands 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 um and then the second one the second one was um this kind of came to me more 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 I realized or 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 tougher moments for me can you take us through that story kind of what triggered you on this journey yeah sure so I was um living in Brighton in UK uh I was engaged at the time to amazing woman called s SP she was a junior doctor and she uh we we went on holiday and she hadd been diagnosed with by Polo 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 uh I mean it just it just obliterated me it like completely destroyed you know the vision for life that I had for the next 5 years and I'd never you know I i' had a pretty easy life I'd like Went to went to school in England like nothing really tragic or 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 someone 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 like I'll probably end up like that like that resentful bitter 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 going to 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 tend over passer 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 these like h cruxes of grief that i' go back to places that were meaningful and yeah and and that um over kind of that period it it totally changed my life like it was a uh very much like before and after kind of WR of Passage experience dude I'm sorry you went through that it reminds me of that KL young quote where he says uh 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 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 is controlling you it's the Toxoplasma gandi of uh of emotions it's so funny yeah and and so so kind of what 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 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 [ __ ] freezing cold water and you know how you when you first get into like freezing water I'm yeah I'm I'm sure you're familiar it's like everything tenses up you're like H you just like want to resist it and then slowly if you can like almost like a clench fist if you can 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 this is actually quite nice like I could be here for a while and that same that same kind of process which I also then applied to free diving 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 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 just 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 or a training ground for the same with 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 the closed Fist and just being like ah just like soften slightly and that would allow a little bit more to move and I really think that's a I mean for me it's been a really powerful metaphor for the process of gradually titrating and welcoming even more intensity than I previous previously would have shut down or just been like like no [ __ ] way okay so that's interception self-regulation next what is there to know yeah so self-regulation is um I mean it's 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 the moment so my favorite like some people use like mantras affirmations maybe like a you know cognitive reframes um but these are like top down strategies for for self-regulation um I tend to prefer the bottom up approaches so things like humming is is insanely effective uh it releases nitric oxide it has this um really really instantaneous kind of calming effect um the Sigh obviously as hubman talks about um also things like 448 breathing or alternate Noster breathing or even just like um 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 let's dig into this is let's dig into the specifics of a few of those whichever ones you want to pick yeah so let's say um 448 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 um uh in the in the Ino which is basically tracking how you're breathing uh the whole time and when you breathe in this particular way it 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 be be more chill which then creates it's karma thoughts and feelings so there's this kind of virtuous cycle um and the reverse is also true like if you're when when you're overwhelmed when you're stressed there 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 [ __ ] 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 either up regulating or down regulating and there's you 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 and the key 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 then 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 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 your full breath in like a sigh and then just allow the the exhale just just like just like completely fall out I'll sometimes do it against um like one of those Swiss balls I 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 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 [ __ ] humming what what know about that um yeah there was uh one of the students in my cohort posted a video of him holding his like six-month old baby who was crying 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 vasid dilator which basically has this like calming effect and it's also really good for reducing eye strain or eye 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 B breath where you put your I can't do it now cuz I'm wearing headphones but um thumbs in the ears these two fingers over the eyes and then this finger 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 progress 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 are there 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 way to the end of exhale so taking a full breath in inhale and then and then all the way to the end of exhale um whatever pitch feels good to you right okay whatever whatever you default to okay so there's there's two four by four by eight so four in four at the top eight down and then there's 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 30C 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 4 fo8 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 exhale eight right inhale inhale right four hold four exhale 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 cooworker that really set them off for 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 yeah yeah so um I 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 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 uh top down bottom up or outside in kind of practice to to to downregulate 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 SAA C plunge type thing um or or outside in it could be like co-regulation you know just like a hug from a friend or or like going for 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 sematic surfing which is essentially kind of dropping into the body dropping into that inter receptive 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 sematic 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 I mean through 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 Impala 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 5 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 3 or 4 minutes and then it just gets up and just like like runs away and that shaking is the mamalian 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 a scooter accident and uh when he was by by the side of the road he did exactly like he was he was hit by the scooter and he just 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 alistic load increase which creates the fragility and and emotional debt over time you used that term before alistic load what is that it's it's like a fancy term for wear and tear on the body um basically like accumulated stress creates allostatic 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 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 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 10 seconds I don't want to kind of paint the picture that this needs to be like a long jout thing it can literally be a 10 20 second thing um but yeah that's it'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 the the standard like box of crayons and so it's like how do we start yeah I actually quite like that metor how do we start like coloring in with some of these other other crayons that we've like kicked out of the boook that's cool that's cool um and and for me it's been it's actually been a process of almost working with like one one cray at a time primarily through breath work like initially it 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 boled 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 a bad person what do you think it was that caused you to uh feel 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 is in that angry State and I think for 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 a kids often do and I think that like was one of the things that cemented in okay anger is not a good thing to to feel and and with that like there 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 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 a 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 then you know overwhelmed naturally it's so interesting how much as you're talking about this emotional fluidity disregulation so much of it the word safe is just floating around the whole time do you feel safe feeling the things that you're feeling is it bad for you to be angry or 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 uh rage to indignation at things no no no no no those things don't feel safe and it's so interesting where that comes from MH yeah I mean I think I think a 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 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 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 understand that if you do breath work the uh State change is pretty dramatic especially if you do some aggressive whm hofs stuff um or if you do some downregulating 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 breath work and I helped it helped me to work through my grief it helped me to work through my anger 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 use breath work to get high and cry a bit what does a trait change from a breath work practice look like what's the modality what's the process and what's the outcome yeah it's it's a really great question um two two things come to mind one is the style of breath work that I I trained in was called facilitated breath repatterning and one of the thesis 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 there's a likelihood that like something shifted there um but but in a in a more practical sense um my my hypothesis around this is that there needs to be a um 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 whof holotropic w work things like that they are you know it's almost like taking a tab of LSD like you can have incredible like outof body psych 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 just 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 breath work practice sessions is there something that people can find locally to them in a class is this something that you can do online it's not super common um the main practitioners Bas is in barley unfortunately but you can search conscious connected breathing or CCB as as a more common approach and it's a way of breathing which in my opinion honors the nervous system more it doesn't send us out in the way that holotropic or Wim Hoff does um there's there's various other breath work forms as well but my my favorite is CCB or FB PR which is facilitated breath rep pattering okay and what are you doing presumably you're not just breathing there has to be some sort of mental process as as emotions arise as thoughts arise as stories and narratives that you tell yourself assumptions about the world what are you doing from a more cognitive perspective uh through these breath work sessions yeah well what 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 in in that like there is no key um yeah well the the the surprise for me was was often these these huge emotional processes would go through and there was there was like zero story like I had no idea what it was attached to um and in some cases it was likely like a preverbal experience so something that happened in the first 18 months of life before I even had the capacity to articulate or to or to speak um the from a kind of cognitive standpoint it's 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 it really is that simple it's like get curious until you identify the thing or or you 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 um right so in this way are you seeing the breathwork as creating a moderate disregulation 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 reping yourself to go it's okay to feel this particular emotion is that it exactly no we got it it's the same [ __ ] it I finally this the same is I mean taking MDMA like an MDMA assisted therapy Journey it's doing the same thing it's like creating that activation and mgma being the empathogen 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 phrase that we've gone through I think it explains to me as well about how breath work 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 448 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 um a good story that kind of exemplifies this there was a tietan monk that came to one of our trainings and uh 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 and this monk could you know probably meditated 20 30,000 hours um and you know I I love meditation and I think it's an incredibly powerful valuable practice um 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 pie in the another bro science theory from me uh but I had it in my head it'll be in my notes somewhere saying um 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 it is still arising and again this is swimming Upstream versus swimming Downstream do you want to you've developed 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 it's 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 and has used an awful lot of mindfulness to have things arise and go okay there it is and 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 over time yes well articulated I I couldn't improve on that well I love your idea as well of the self-regulation Paradox being similar to like a a type A relaxation problem so this is this is something I've noticed off a lot that the over Optimizer the hubman fan the the Tim Ferris fan the me fan will find a relaxation strategy which they can apply their winners mentality to and then try and use use the ice bath or the sauna or the breath work as an opp 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 [ __ ] looking at you second win what who who against yourself what does this mean and um 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 breath work lady sort of leaning over me rubbing rubbing my neck because I've like sent myself into some other other universe and uh yeah talk to me about this sort of type A relaxation problem I I love that idea yeah well I mean I um it was more of more of just like a Gest that I I think it is a great Trojan Horse to get people like like myself honestly you like folks in this um kind of high achieving space to take um down regulation serious and and and treating it like being like a like a cognitive athlete and if you're hard charging and you're like David go goining your way through life then ideally there should be a kind of like equal and opposite downshift afterwards and that um that downshifting is really hard for a lot of people and so like I I actually think it's like overall a very positive thing that people are like HRV flexing and they're just like bragging about how much time they spend in this da um I think it's funny but it's actually in my opinion like probably a good Trend I I mean at some point that's um my senses that mentality like that trying to win at being the most relaxed basically it's like like has has an has an end point 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 Edgley on the show you know Ross swam around the UK he just uh he just he just did the world's longest single River 314 miles and I asked him about the same thing his his uh 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 this 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 peeing 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 just fry out and I think that when we're that's such an interesting reframe for life that life is very much Ross Edgley 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 at 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 or the bottom of region beta but when it gets to real long okay is this the way I want to live my life do 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 60s and 70s and ' 80s 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 embod 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 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 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 Nitric fuel it it you know really does get [ __ ] done I mean there's a lot of very successful entrepreneurs who are still like riding that that Rocket Fuel um and at a certain point um whilst it may be fuel in one area of Life often quite a narrow area it tends to the the fumes let say I'm just making this up as I as I go but like the fumes end up with like you know they're on their like fifth marriage or they are they don't have any close friends or they have selft talk that you wouldn't want to spend like 2 minutes listening to um and so the not just you you mentioned selft talk and I I I've had it in my head the entire time I'm desperate to ask you uh whether the inner voice is Downstream from the body or the body is Downstream from the inner voice yeah so uh it is a bidirectional relationship like it's not one or the other but um something that I've noticed uh this is just you know n of one but I I had a very active like inner critic in teenage years most of my 20s and in the last three or four years that has it's 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 sematic [ __ ] that I've that I've released in through a bunch of these different like emotional processes um and also also flexibility as well like there was so much tension that I was holding in different areas that is just not as um not as present I I mean it's still [ __ ] 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 supportive 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 in a critic that tells me maybe you did okay today but unless you can do better tomorrow today probably doesn't really matter and tomorrow's going to be a waste as well so you'd better get cracking you'd better work harder and uh yeah that's that's just a really interesting realization that that it does things don't need to be that way that's not the way that things need to occur that there are there are better room and when it comes to but 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 and it's like yeah but for what end like what's the point if the road towards your worldly success is paved with personal misery what was the point all along you're 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 in a 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 mind for me is 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 of 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 negative ly impacting the the the progress towards the goals that you've set or the intentions that you have I mean that was certainly true for me um but it probably yeah it depends on the context talk to me about the neuro aperture hypothesis yeah this is um a half-baked idea that I shared on Twitter recently uh it's basically a sense that um I I was researching the the atmology of the word anxiety and it 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 a constriction or a tensing kind of coming back to that like Clos 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 the the other end of the spectrum joy and I I know people that uh you students that I've worked with who um they they started to feel anxious when the the emotion of Joy was arising like they were the there 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 loosened 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 you know I think the same is true of other emotions as well like people that are chronically anxious um I would say there's a very good chance that there is a another emotion just like just below the surface that if they were able to um like loosen that grip a little bit then it would it would like come to the surface um 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 is anxiety and uh 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 too that there's just sort of extremist anything that's outside of the very narrow Overton window I think of it like an emotional 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 no no unacceptable sorry you can't use that word not with a hard r and you depression with the hard are um so you you can't do that and um it 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 comes through and there's something gets activated you go wow like I'm mean I'm in someone you is this safe is this okay and if you don't at least my current science 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 man I'm I'm so I I I so agree and I I think the the surprising thing for me was was actually that um it was the resistance to feeling the thing that sucks it 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 it feels so [ __ ] good and not not just Joy not just excitement not just bit like even like especially some 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 like I 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 such an important part of Being Human dude that's so bang on and I I've been thinking this to myself for a long while that look you have this beautiful Suite 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 uh I have all of the colors available on my television but I'm just going to watch him black and white and would no 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 honic I went and [ __ ] the [ __ ] and flew on the planes and did the drugs style way that's open to your preference but in a there is a a range of experiences inly that are available to me and I decided to not shut those things off and I just think God like what what the [ __ ] else are we here for if it's not to enjoy the emotional state that we're in 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 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 I love that so much and the the the metaphor that 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 in choir 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 you know two or three notes the whole time it's going to be a pretty boring song like like I think the goal is to have that like we want like an orchestra of experience um it's 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 an A or I just want to color in red like like fine like there's nothing there's nothing wrong with that but to me that feels like a it's like a diminished uh 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 yeah so um something that I I learned from this guy Steve March this amazing amazing dude uh he has this controversial but I think really valid opinion that the self-development industry the self-improvement Paradigm is flawed in that it starts from the premise that something in you is something in you needs fixing and so going into any you know even like like an emotional inquiry process with this like oh there's this 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 fan fancy term but it basically means like what if everything right now was okay what if actually you were safe and then applying that Curiosity and presence to whatever's there without a change agenda and and this this is something something that I like I really fell into this trap like over and over again I would be like oh I noticed like I'm triggered I'm gonna go I'm G to do a breath Journey I'm going to feel it I'm going to fix it it was like the same like taipe mentaly of like I'm going to feel the [ __ ] out of this I'm just going to feel it so hard I'm going to win it yeah I'm going to win it 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 it's a lifelong journey but I find it 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 y thing will will fix you and that just by starting from that premise like 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 and what would be the motivation for changing if that was the case the the changing and the growth happens naturally you know in the same way that like you wouldn't judge a a sapling oak tree for being like too small 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 just it 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 that 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 breath work 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 books that you would suggest are there any courses that you think that they should take are are there practices is there a weekly daily what would a a daily routine what would you say just a little prescription for the the 8020 of of how someone would begin on this journey yeah I mean it's um there's there's a a lot of choice out there and and it obviously always depends on on the person I I think the practices that I found myself for that I I think are very broadly applicable um nsdr is a is a really wonderful Foundation non-sleep deep breast that sheaman bangs on about a 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 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 sematic based therapy as well so just going back to the nsdr 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 typ aers wanting to win at at emotions here great so I have um 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 booy on YouTube is also really good if you prefer a soothing female voice um 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 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 a creative uh 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 has basically been my attempt to distill this into a five-week kind of protocol based course um 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 like it's not a replacement for I would say working with um some like in-person sematic based exploration whether that's inperson breath work whether it's sematic experiencing hakomi is another great modality that I appreciate um or just you know some people love men's work some people gravitate towards different areas but I think the the key is is like what are you genuinely excit about like not going out of place of oh I should do this because you know I need fixing like like what is actually genuinely interesting um and then following that with this mentality of um of courageous curiosity and this like like I I'm willing like I'm increasingly willing to feel and and borrowing capacity from other people 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 that's 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 totally 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 an 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-on-one context I know that you're a fan of that Jerry Colona question which is in what ways are you complicit in creating the conditions you say you don't want 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 uh the conditions you say you don't want are in the ways that you're complicit of creating um 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 bould 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 what what is the what what is the feeling or experience that you have been running from um and the there's a beautiful just to give that some context I don't know if you have ever read the wizard of versy it's this amazing Story by URS lewinn and basically the main character G releases this this Shadow this GTH 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 that kind of process of like turning around and accepting responsibility for the ways in which you are compl 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 [ __ ] joury like it really it really is that simple um it's just finding uh the wizard of earthy by Ursula leuin it's one of my favorite fiction fiction books hell yeah Johnny Miller ladies and gentlemen Johnny I really love what you're doing I think that this Forefront of sematic 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 hubman 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 had the mindfulness Revolution you know whatever 10 years ago Andy pycom 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 nsasy decom um there's a cohort coming up in October uh we're accepting applications now if folks are 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 that's Johnny Miller Jo nny M1 l l e r it's an annoying handle with the one there dude I really appreciate you I'm looking forward 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 if you enjoyed that episode you will love a selection of the best clips from the podcast over the last couple of months and it's available right here go on give them a watch