BITESIZE | How To Become Less Reactive & Cultivate A Deep Sense Of Calm | Jonny Miller #653

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Welcome to feel better live more by 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 overwhelmed to calm.

We don't see the world as it is, we see the world as we are.

So why is 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

hyper vigilance, right?

You're not having this wide perspective, taking the other viewpoint, going, I wonder what

they were thinking about.

Do you know what I mean?

It feels like it's a vicious cycle from both sides, well, 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 that they're going to also be

more reactive, even when there's no threat there, exactly.

So I know we're going through practical exercises, but for someone who's perhaps having a light

bond moment during this conversation, can they change it?

Yeah, I mean, that's beautifully said.

I view the nervous system as a, 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 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 worlds and change the way we experience

life?

So some signs would include form 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 do 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 your,

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

break up 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.

So symptoms you mentioned there, some of them, you know, being overly reactive, relationship

struggles, maybe anxiety would be in there for many people, these are very, very common

these days.

Totally.

Many people are walking around with these kind of tight and wound up nervous systems that

they think is normal.

Yeah.

Yet they don't realize that there is another way to experience the world out there, isn't

that?

Yeah, beautiful.

And 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 a 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.

Yeah.

I imagine that a lot of people think that anxiety is an emotion.

Totally.

Right, 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 host pipe, like you can turn on the tap really strongly.

And you know, 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 kind of connect it to the breath, then

that 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.

Mm-hmm.

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 try to manage it can make

it worse.

Yeah.

Which in many ways is counterintuitive for people, but I think that's because people

don't, they don't know what it feels like these days to experience their body.

Right.

So I imagine some people will hear you talking to go, yeah, but what are you talking

about?

Constricting in my body.

What the hell does that mean?

And so 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 your nervous system, there's three kind of core skills that I think about.

And the first is what exactly we spoke to, which is kind of regaining sensitivity of our

internal experience.

So it's called inter-reception 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 my body that's coming all

of the time.

And 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, there's kind of three ways that I think about self-regulating.

There's 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 the, 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.

So bottom-up techniques or practices would include things like humming is actually really

effective.

It increases the nitric oxide by, I think, 15 fold.

And it's a vasodilator, which helps with eye strain as well.

And helps this kind of downshift into that parasympathetic state.

Other things would be long-hold stretches, exhale, emphasized breathing practices.

So like, 4.78 is a really common one.

Or just any breath where the exhale is twice as long as the inhale.

It will have a kind of calming effect.

And another one that you can do is kind of playing with your awareness.

And awareness is, again, something that a lot of people think about, but your awareness

in any moment can be kind of expansive.

You can be aware of the space.

The side 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.

It's like just in front of you in very narrow.

So you can be aware of the space behind you, feeling your feet on the ground, attuning

to the sounds around you.

And the more that your awareness is kind of expansive, I'm doing it a little bit right

now.

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.

I work with this incredible movement coach called Helen Hall.

And one of the things Helen has helped me where there's 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 peripherals,

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, 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 it's 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 the skill of letting go.

Is that a useful way to look at it for people?

Yeah, 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 underappreciated and most ignored.

And I do believe it's the most effective.

If someone is in a state of their anxiety is ramping up maybe towards a panic attack

or they're getting really stressed.

That'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 then 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 bad, we're not going to go near that.

And so 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 more and more of these interventions in order to kind of self-regulate.

And the third kind of pillow 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.

Beneath anxiety for a lot of people is either like frustration or anger or sometimes

sadness.

And once there's that sense of kind 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.

The emotions themselves don't last for more than 10 to 20 seconds.

It's the way that we constrict and tense against them and try to resist feeling them.

There 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?

It is wild.

We don't think about that normally.

And the other thing that I want to bring this back to is this idea of emotion, or avoided

emotions in specifically emotional depth.

Because the more that we go through life and our nervous system have this amazing capacity

to buffer our emotional responses, which in many, many situations is super useful.

Like let's say someone on the street just shout to me or I'm in a boardroom meeting

and I get really angry.

It's actually good for me to be able to suppress that and save it for later.

But if I do that repeatedly over many days or weeks or months, that builds up this emotional

depth is what I call it.

In the nervous system, this is a build up of allostatic load.

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 maybe they start a new job and in the beginning

they've got like a ton of energy and 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 build up of allostatic load, which is in part contributed

to by not allowing the emotional reflex arc to be completed.

And so many of us are walking around with 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.

Exactly.

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 impolice, 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 that's 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 it's 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's shaking is the kind of mammalian response that we all 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 breath work or whether it's

through every practice cycle, 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 get stored and they drain energy from the battery of your body

basically.

Yeah, that's a very vivid image, an impala, almost being dead and having all that stress

within there, that they then process the stress has gone, they go about living their life.

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 reduce the reactivity, now let's really feel that emotion

and let that emotion work through us like the impala sort of shaken 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's still light set.

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.

What makes you 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 movement,

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 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 blocker in the park.

I'd feel better when I go 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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