How To Become Less Reactive & Cultivate A Deep Sense Of Calm with Jonny Miller #569

Many of us are living with chronically dysregulated nervous systems, yet we mistake this reactive state for normal. Research suggests that our nervous system acts as a lens through which we experience reality. But when that lens is out of balance, we start to see threats where none exist – and respond in an exaggerated way to everyday situations. Today’s guest believes that by learning to work with our body’s innate wisdom, we can transform not just how we respond to stress, but how we experience life itself. Jonny Miller is the founder of Nervous System Mastery, a 5-week bootcamp where he has taught over a thousand students - from the CEO of a rocket-ship company and burned-out startup founders to busy parents and elite performers - how to cultivate calm, rewire reactivity and restore aliveness. After experiencing profound grief following the loss of his fiancée Sophie, Jonny embarked on a journey to understand how our nervous system shapes every aspect of our lived experience. During this incredible conversation, we discuss: Why anxiety isn’t actually an emotion, but a protective strategy used by the nervous system to shield us from deeper underlying feelings, and the difference between managing emotions and truly feeling them The three core skills of nervous system mastery: interoception (tuning into our internal world), self-regulation and emotional fluidity, and why developing these can transform every part of our lives How emotions themselves typically last just 10 - 20 seconds, but our resistance to feeling them creates what Jonny calls “emotional debt,” which can keep us stuck for weeks, months or even years Why working with the body (a bottom-up approach) can be more effective than trying to ‘think’ our way out of stress, and how it differs from cognitive strategies like reframing How practices like cold exposure can help train us to stop resisting discomfort and allow challenging sensations to move through us naturally Jonny’s reflections on grief are particularly moving. He shares how losing Sophie taught him that emotions – even the most painful ones – carry their own kind of wisdom. At its heart, this episode is about remembering what the body already knows. Jonny shows us that beneath our stress and reactivity lies a deep intelligence, and that when we learn to trust it, we can move through life with more presence, resilience and peace. I hope you enjoy listening. Support the podcast and enjoy Ad-Free episodes. Try FREE for 7 days on Apple Podcasts https://apple.co/feelbetterlivemore. For other podcast platforms go to https://fblm.supercast.com. Thanks to our sponsors: https://thriva.co https://calm.com/livemore https://drinkag1.com/livemore Show notes https://drchatterjee.com/569 DISCLAIMER: The content in the podcast and on this webpage is not intended to be a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Always seek the advice of your doctor or qualified healthcare provider. Never disregard professional medical advice or delay in seeking it because of something you have heard on the podcast or on my website. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Speaker 00

  The phrase that I really like is secure attachment with life, secure attachment with reality. This idea of coming back to feeling fundamentally at home in our bodies, creating the conditions of safety so that all parts of our psyche learn to feel inherently safe in the world.

• 0:21Rangan Chatterjee?

  Hey guys, how are you doing? I hope you're having a good week so far. My name is Dr. Rangan Chatterjee and this is my podcast, Feel Better, Live More.

• 0:34Rangan Chatterjee?

  Why is it these days that so many people are feeling stressed, anxious, close to burnout and have exaggerated responses to simple everyday situations? Well, this week's guest thinks this is a natural consequence of the fact that many of us are walking around each day with overloaded and dysregulated nervous systems. Jonny Miller is the founder of Nervous System Mastery, a five-week bootcamp where he has taught well over a thousand students, including CEOs, high performers and busy parents, how to cultivate calm, rewire reactivity and restore aliveness.

• 1:19Rangan Chatterjee?

  His work combines cutting-edge neuroscience with practical body-based approaches that help people move from chronic reactivity to intentional living. And you can see all details at the course homepage, ns mastery.com. After experiencing profound grief following the death of his fiancee Sophie, Jonny embarked on a journey to understand how our nervous systems shape every aspect of our lived experience. And in this conversation, we discuss why anxiety isn't actually an emotion, but a protective strategy used by the nervous system to shield us,

• 2:01Rangan Chatterjee?

  the three core skills of nervous system mastery, interreception, self-regulation and emotional fluidity.

• 2:10Rangan Chatterjee?

  How emotions themselves typically last just 10 to 20 seconds, but our resistance to feeling them creates what Jonny calls emotional debt. Why working with the body can be more effective than trying to think our way out of stress. And how practices like cold exposure can help train us to stop resisting discomfort and allow challenging sensations to move through us naturally. Jonny's reflections on grief are particularly moving and he shares how Sophie's death taught him that emotions, even the most painful ones, carry their own kind of wisdom.

• 2:52Rangan Chatterjee?

  At its heart, this conversation is about remembering what the body already knows. Jonny shows us that beneath our stress and reactivity lies a deep intelligence and that when we learn to trust it, we can move through life with more presence, resilience and peace.

• 3:18Rangan Chatterjee?

  As you well know, we don't see the world as it is, we see the world as we are. What are some signs in your view that might indicate our nervous systems are a little bit out of whack, which may colour the way we view the world and change the way we experience life?

• 3:40Speaker 00

  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 some signs would include.

• 4:01Speaker 00

  Forms of reactivity. So if you're like knee jerk anger is obviously a clear one. Or if there's a sense of fatigue or lethargy or um. Sleep is obviously a huge one as well. That's a big symptom of nervous system dysregulation.

• 4:16Rangan Chatterjee?

  What, that we can't sleep?

• 4:18Speaker 00

  That we or or 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 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 I think about it in terms of like feather brick dump truck. And in the beginning, maybe your your nervous system is 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 know, you wake up feeling exhausted.

• 5:00Speaker 00

  Maybe you're you've got brain fog, maybe you you can't really perform at work. And then for some people, it takes a dump truck, which might be um. Maybe it's like an intense breakup or it's like a health crisis. And it's often unfortunately the dump truck which gets people to really tune in. But it's really just the body giving you feedback.

• 5:20Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah. It's interesting, those symptoms you mentioned there, some of them, you know, being overly reactive, relationship struggles. Maybe anxiety would be in there, you know, for many people. These are very, very common these days. And it's kind of interesting as I sort of think about your work. I think about this idea that I often say on this show that when people are not eating well in a nourishing way and they've never done it before, they don't know how good they can feel.

• 5:50Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 5:51Rangan Chatterjee?

  Right? So until they actually go through the process of having just whole unprocessed foods for two weeks, they have no idea just how much their processed food diet is affecting them in terms of energy, vitality, and how they experience the world. And I kind of see a similar thing with the nervous system, right?

• 6:08Speaker 00

  Totally.

• 6:09Rangan Chatterjee?

  Many people are walking around with these kind of tight and wound up nervous systems that they think is normal.

• 6:16Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 6:17Rangan Chatterjee?

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

• 6:22Speaker 00

  Yeah, beautiful. I mean, anxiety, I think is a really good example. And it actually, the word anxiety comes from the Latin angio, which literally means to constrict. And a lot of people try and manage anxiety or like conquer anxiety, but it's really just our, our reaction to a kind of an underlying emotion. And so it can be really helpful to kind of learn to notice the, the constriction in the body and kind of like allow it to, to open up. And, you know, there's a number of different practices for that.

• 6:54Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah. That's interesting. Anxiety is a reaction to an underlying emotion.

• 6:58Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 6:59Rangan Chatterjee?

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

• 7:03Speaker 00

  Totally.

• 7:04Rangan Chatterjee?

  Right, but you're sort of framing it slightly differently.

• 7:06Speaker 00

  Yeah, it, it's kind of like a, a defensive strategy that our nervous system has to constrict against, I, I think about almost like a, like a hosepipe. Like you can turn on the, the tap really strongly and, you know, the water will kind of go through. And if, if your, 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, it could be anger, it could be sadness, it could be frustration, whatever it is. And a really obvious example is like if someone is, you know, before an important conversation, maybe they feel scared and afraid and there's a sense of anxiety, but that could also be excitement. And it can just, if that system opens and they're kind of connected to the breath, then

• 7:50Speaker 00

  that, it's really just energy, like energy in motion that's kind of moving through.

• 7:54Rangan Chatterjee?

  Is there a difference between anxiety and excitement? Or is it just the way that we're framing that tension?

• 7:59Speaker 00

  It's the tension in the body, I think, yeah.

• 8:02Rangan Chatterjee?

  Same tension? Yeah, that's a really interesting concept because we know that anxiety is on the rise. So many people are struggling with anxiety. And you're saying trying to manage it can make it worse. Which in many ways is counterintuitive for people, but I think that's because people don't, they don't know what it feels like these days to experience their body. Right, so I imagine some people will hear you talk and 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?

• 8:42Speaker 00

  Yeah, totally. So I think about in the kind of journey of nervous system mastery of kind of working with with your nervous system, there's three kind of core skills that I think about. And the first is what you, exactly what you spoke to, which is kind of regaining sensitivity of our internal experience. So it's called interoception is the kind of fancy name. I know you've written about it in your book. And it's really relearning to listen to the feedback from our body that's coming all of the time. The second skill is self-regulation. And this is, you know, what a lot of people are probably familiar with when it comes to anxiety. This is, 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

• 9:27Speaker 00

  know, positive affirmations, mindfulness is a good example. The second is bottom up, which is, this is my favorite, honestly, is 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. And from there, the third kind of pillar or category is emotional fluidity. And that is, it's the one that probably takes the longest to learn, but it's learning to welcome the full spectrum of human experience. And beneath anxiety, for a lot of people, it 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,

• 10:12Speaker 00

  then the emotion can kind of come through. And it's actually, it's the, the resistance to feeling the emotion that is, is the bit that sucks, basically. It's the emotions themselves don't last for more than, you know, 10 to 20 seconds. It's the way that we constrict and tense against them and. Try to resist feeling them, that is the bit that causes the challenge.

• 10:34Rangan Chatterjee?

  That's really interesting, but emotions themselves don't last beyond 10 to 20 seconds. I think.

• 10:42Speaker 00

  Which is wild, right? Because like.

• 10:43Rangan Chatterjee?

  It is wild.

• 10:43Speaker 00

  We don't think about that normally.

• 10:45Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah, and I know you run this incredible five week course nervous system mastery where you teach people about all these things. And I think I've read somewhere, you say that one of the goals of that course is to reduce the half life of reactivity.

• 10:58Speaker 00

  Right.

• 10:59Rangan Chatterjee?

  Which was really interesting, especially in the context of what you just said. And in some of the stuff I've read from you, you say like a beginner, for example, might feel angry for, I don't know, two days. And an expert might feel angry for two seconds.

• 11:14Speaker 00

  Right, exactly.

• 11:16Rangan Chatterjee?

  But what was interesting for me is that the expert wasn't not feeling angry.

• 11:20Speaker 00

  Completely.

• 11:21Rangan Chatterjee?

  Right? You were just reducing how long you felt that anger for.

• 11:25Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 11:26Rangan Chatterjee?

  So I want to definitely explore that, but I wonder if we should think about like an everyday example that people can relate to. Right? Because at the start, some of those signs that might indicate our nervous system is a little bit out of balance. Let's say, relationship conflict. Right? So many people know that feeling, let's say, let's say they have a partner. And their partner says something, you know, arguably trivial, okay? They say something. And the other partner, let's say the person listening, gets incredibly triggered by that comment and starts to create stories about what that comment actually means. They feel angry and not listened to, whatever it might be. Okay?

• 12:10Rangan Chatterjee?

  So is that a useful example to try and unpick, you know, what's actually going on there? So like through your lens, I think it would be quite helpful to help people understand that.

• 12:20Speaker 00

  No, totally. I mean, that's a great example. There's basically two modes of reactivity that all humans have. One mode, the technical term is hyper arousal, like aggression, intensity, anger. And then hypo arousal is more like collapsing, shutting down, kind of guarding against. And most people tend to lean one way or the other. So for example, I tend to kind of become more guarded, tend to be kind of more emotionally unavailable in conflict. And. The way that you know that you're in some kind of pattern or trigger is, as you say, you're kind of responding disproportionately to what has happened. So it's very normal if someone, if you were to shout at me or insult me, it would be normal for me to have a reaction to that.

• 13:04Speaker 00

  But if you say something that isn't designed to offend me, but I get reactive or I start to close down, then that's a sign that I'm in some kind of trigger. And for me, it's kind of closing off, it's becoming emotionally unavailable. And what's funny is for a long time, I thought that I was just a very calm person. I thought that I was very even keeled, didn't get reactive at all. But actually, in so many situations, I was subtly withdrawing a sense of connection out of self-protection, basically. And as soon as I was able to notice that that was what was happening for me, and my

• 13:44Speaker 00

  partner, kind of the same as well for her, then I could prioritize coming back into what's known as the window of tolerance, which is a very important concept in this world of nervous system practices. And I know I'm in my window of tolerance when I feel grounded, I feel in myself, I feel a sense of, I'm like here, I'm not disassociated, I'm not checked out, I'm not trying to attack someone. And it's really, really hard to have any kind of productive conflict in a relationship. And I think all relationships have some degree of conflict. I think it's really healthy.

• 14:22Speaker 00

  But if one or both of you isn't in that place of being in their bodies and has that sense of regulation and being in that window of tolerance, then it'll just be back and forth. Usually, the pattern is like someone gets aggressive and someone gets defensive.

• 14:40Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah. Well, come back to relationship in just a minute. You said something that's really interesting for me, and it's something I think about a lot, the idea that you need to be in your body. Now, I think some people are gonna hear that and go, yeah, I know exactly what you mean. You know, I know what it means to be in my body. I know what it means when I'm not in my body. But there'll also be maybe fifty percent of people listening, as a rough guess, who heard that phrase and thought, I don't know what Johnny's talking about. What does it mean to be in my body? So I'm guessing that people who come onto your five-week course, I imagine there's some people who come in who also don't know what that means. So can you just help people understand that?

• 15:22Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, I think it's not binary, right? It's definitely on a spectrum. So I think about it as almost like upgrading your sense of your internal landscape, like a chef kind of learning to taste, right? When someone goes into culinary school, they will learn to train their flavor palate to notice like increasing subtlety in the flavors that they're tasting. And it's kind of the same with our sensations and with our emotions. We have this like interoceptive palate that we can increasingly tune into and treat as real-time feedback coming from our body. And this is known as interoception. And it helps with decision-making. It helps with knowing, you know, what state we're in.

• 16:07Speaker 00

  Like, maybe we need to take a bit of a break. Maybe when you wake up in the morning, like you kind of tune in, like, how are you feeling? And the three, the kind of practice that I teach around this, you know, it's very trainable. I call it APE, which stands for Awareness, Posture, and Emotion. And awareness is, again, something that a lot of people don't think about, but your awareness in any moment can be kind of expansive. You could be aware of like the space, the sides of you, the space above you, below you. Or usually when people get stressed or reactive, the awareness is almost like, it's like looking, experiencing life through a straw. It's like just in front of you and very narrow. Posture is another one. And then emotions and sensations, again, like, like right now, I can kind of like

• 16:50Speaker 00

  notice my butt on the seat, my feet on the floor, kind of feeling into my hands, feeling the back of my body. And it's really just the kind of practice of tuning into the different facets of your experience.

• 17:03Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah.

• 17:05Rangan Chatterjee?

  It's interesting, isn't it? Because you grew up in the UK, like me. I know you've moved now to America.

• 17:12Rangan Chatterjee?

  But I imagine it's the same in America. It's quite a head-based culture. And I know you've read my latest book in Chatswarm, which is one of my favorite chats, which is all about trusting yourself and interception. And I mention this story from a tribe where they were very confused that people in America thought with their heads, because to them, they think with their abdomen, right? Which I found so fascinating, just this idea that, well, we all experience the world differently, don't we? And actually, just because we live in a head-based culture, it doesn't mean everyone does, right? So other cultures,

• 17:53Rangan Chatterjee?

  and many people within our cultures, are used to being in their bodies, but many people aren't. So bringing it back to conflict in a relationship, right? So let's say, and of course, there's practice on these things, which you might have to do away from the event and learn so you can bring the new improved you back to those conflict situations. But if we just sort of try and unpick it, okay, let's take a comment online, for example. Like, people say, oh, that comment is offensive. Actually, technically, that's not true. No comment can be offensive, right? Because if the comment was intrinsically offensive, 100% of the people reading that comment would take

• 18:36Rangan Chatterjee?

  offence to it. So it's not the comment, right? There is a comment. And then the offence, for whatever reason, body, brain, mind, whatever, is coming from us, right? Something within us has been activated, so we then call it offensive. But there is a space, isn't there, between the stimulus, the comment, and our response, us saying it's offensive, right? So can we sort of try and unpick that? Let's say, I don't know, husband-wife relationship, okay? The husband says something. The wife doesn't like it. Okay, so what's going on, right? And in terms of how can we bring our body into that? Does that make sense as a kind of framing?

• 19:14Speaker 00

  No, it's a great example. And maybe another kind of frame to add to this is that our nervous system uses what's known as predictive processing. So it's essentially making predictions the entire time about our lived experience and about what is happening. So as you say, you can read a comment and you can form a prediction in a hundred different ways about what that means. And those predictions will also be informed by your current state of being. So if I'm in a kind of like triggered reactive, stressed out, exhausted state, I'm going to read that comment differently than if I'm like well slept, you know, well hydrated, et cetera, et cetera.

• 19:51Rangan Chatterjee?

  We see the world through the lens of our nervous system.

• 19:54Speaker 00

  Exactly, exactly. And so being aware of the state that you're in is actually really useful information for when you're interpreting, let's say a comment or let's say a conflict. And one of the practices, because I want to make this as practical as possible, that was pioneered by Damasio, who was this really famous neuroscientist. He talked about somatic markers. And what that basically means is everyone has a different set of somatic markers, which are like the early warning signs that you're entering some kind of reactive state.

• 20:25Rangan Chatterjee?

  Okay.

• 20:25Speaker 00

  So in the example of a conflict between a married couple, let's say,

• 20:32Speaker 00

  maybe for me, I start to notice there's like, oh, there's like some tension in my chest while we're talking. Or maybe there's like a knot in my stomach and it feels like, oh, and there's this like, oh, that doesn't feel good.

• 20:46Speaker 00

  And if you're aware of that, you can kind of like bring it up and present it and say like, hey, I'm noticing that there's this tension in my chest. When this has happened before, I've ended up like shouting at you. And so I'm going to take like a few minutes to kind of step away, put my feet on the grass, get some fresh air and then come back. And I want to have this conversation. I want to have, you know, this is really important, but I don't feel like I'm able to kind of be grounded in this state.

• 21:14Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah, I love that, right? I think for me, there's a really key point there, which is.

• 21:20Rangan Chatterjee?

  Nervous system mastery, as you call your course, right? Which I think is a wonderful name.

• 21:27Rangan Chatterjee?

  It's going to take some time.

• 21:28Speaker 00

  Totally.

• 21:28Rangan Chatterjee?

  Right?

• 21:29Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 21:29Rangan Chatterjee?

  If you are living in a reactive state and you get overly triggered to, let's say, the actions of your partner.

• 21:36Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 21:37Rangan Chatterjee?

  You're not going to just hear this podcast and suddenly go, oh yeah, great, I'm going to be totally chilled now when it happens. Now, it's going to be a process of learning. Like, if you were going to train to run a marathon, you'd have to practise.

• 21:48Speaker 00

  Exactly.

• 21:48Rangan Chatterjee?

  So what you just said there for me is something that I feel I probably brought into my marriage a few years ago, as I've been on this journey to kind of regular my own nervous system, which is, you know, if something, if there's any conflict or a disagreement and you're feeling, for whatever reason, I'm a bit wound up, I'm still thinking about work, I'm overly stressed. Even the awareness to sort of say, hey, listen, I know this is important. I don't think now's the right time for us to get into this. You know, I'm not ignoring it, I know we need to talk about it, but maybe in half an hour, or maybe I'm just going to go for a walk around the block, is that okay?

• 22:29Rangan Chatterjee?

  Even that can almost at source prevent this kind of downstream.

• 22:36Speaker 00

  Exactly.

• 22:37Rangan Chatterjee?

  Like, I don't know, set of flames that can often start in relationships, right?

• 22:41Speaker 00

  Exactly.

• 22:41Rangan Chatterjee?

  Is that, is that what you're meaning by that?

• 22:43Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's exactly that. And I would say the kind of path of mastery or the learning journey is kind of, again, like the time that you spend in that kind of reactive state before you realise and you start to kind of take another path. So, you know, for many people, it might be like, you know, you're angry for like two days or you're not talking to your partner or you're kind of in this, in this dynamic. And if that shortens, you know, if that shortens from like two days to even down to like two hours or 20 minutes, that is, that is like a huge life upgrade because it allows you to move through the world with, and this is what I really care about. You get to have more intentionality, you get to.

• 23:27Speaker 00

  Act and kind of show up with more agency and showing up in a way that you wanna show up and in a way that's like aligned with your values. And when we're, when we're triggered, when we're in these reactive states, it's really hard to show up as the people that we wanna be because we are in this kind of defensive, contracted, protective state. And that's not a bad thing. I think that's, that's the other important thing to mention is that it's not bad that this happens. It's just a part of us, like a part of our psyche that is feeling unsafe and is, has learned this strategy to kind of protect ourselves, basically. And, and you can kind of like have compassion for that part and walk away, do a breathing practice or, or humming or some grounding or whatever it is that works for you, maybe

• 24:12Speaker 00

  even just time outside and then, and then come back and kind of, and like start again. And I don't know, I mean, I think that it just saves so much unnecessary suffering to have this kind of pretty simple toolkit of skills.

• 24:25Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah, it's interesting that this is not just about having a better relationship or managing conflict better with your loved one, right? Yes, it is about that, but it's so much more than that. It's your experience of life. It's, as you say, your ability to create an intentional life. The way I often talk to people about this concept is this idea that we all have these internal values that represent the person we know ourselves to be. And so the question then becomes, why are we sometimes behaving in a different way?

• 25:03Speaker 00

  Exactly.

• 25:04Rangan Chatterjee?

  Why, why is there this internal conflict? We know who we are, we know we wanna be kind and compassionate, yet we end up being reactive and stressed and making little digs at people, right? Why? And one of the reasons, I think, which I think very much mirrors what you're saying is that if you're chronically stressed, the way you view the world also changes, right? Because when you're stressed, your body thinks it's under threat, right? So the focus comes in, you're looking for threat, you're looking for problems, you become hypervigilant, right? You're not having this wide perspective, taking the other viewpoint, going, oh, I wonder what they were thinking there. Do you know what I mean?

• 25:43Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 25:44Rangan Chatterjee?

  It, it feels like it's. It feels like it's a vicious cycle from both sides. We're living in a world where people feel chronically stressed, they've got too much to do, which is changing the way they view the world. It's also tightening up their nervous system, which means they're gonna also be more reactive, even when there's no threat there.

• 26:04Speaker 00

  Exactly.

• 26:05Rangan Chatterjee?

  So, I know we're going through practical exercises, but for someone who's perhaps having a lightbulb moment during this conversation, can they change it?

• 26:20Rangan Chatterjee?

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• 27:04Rangan Chatterjee?

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• 27:51Rangan Chatterjee?

  Today's episode is sponsored by the daily health drink AG1. The clocks are about to change, the mornings are darker, everyone around you seems to be coming down with something and suddenly that wellbeing you felt in the summer seems a long time ago. I certainly know that feeling and that's why at this time of year, I remind myself to lean into the fundamentals. And one of those fundamentals is AG1. AG1 is a daily health drink that has been in my own life for over eight years. And one of the many things I like about it is the fact that many of the nutrients it contains, for example, vitamin C, vitamin A, zinc and selenium, supports a healthy immune system. Some of the other things I really like about AG1 is that they are committed to continuous improvement

• 28:35Rangan Chatterjee?

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• 29:26Speaker 00

  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. And the other thing that I want to bring this back to is this idea of emotions or avoided emotions and specifically emotional debt. Because the more that we go through life and our nervous systems have this amazing capacity to buffer our emotional responses, which in many, many situations is super useful. Like, let's say... I don't know, someone on the street just like shout to me or I'm in a in a boardroom meeting and I get really angry. It's actually good for me to be able to like suppress that

• 30:10Speaker 00

  and kind of save it for later. But if I do that, you know, repeatedly over many days or weeks or months, that builds up this emotional debt is what I call it. And in the nervous system, this is a buildup of allostatic load. And what this does, this kind of wear and tear, it drains energy from the system, which reduces our window of tolerance. So I imagine listeners will be familiar that like, you know, maybe they maybe they start a new job and in the beginning, they've got like a ton of energy and they they feel vibrant. But as time goes on, it feels like they get more and more reactive over time. And that, I believe, is due to this buildup of allostatic load, which is

• 30:52Speaker 00

  in part contributed to by not allowing these the emotional reflex arc to be completed. And and so, you know, many of us are walking around with like pockets of buffered emotional responses, which is contributing to this sense of exhaustion and fatigue and low capacity, basically.

• 31:13Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah, I really like that idea of emotional debt. And this idea that we're not completing our emotional responses. Okay, I think it's a really, really important point for us all to reflect on. I know you like to give the example of the lion and the impala. So maybe perhaps use that as a way of helping people understand what it means to complete that stress response fully.

• 31:39Speaker 00

  Yeah, so people can search this on YouTube. There's a great video of a impala that is chased by a lion. It'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 its entire body just starts shaking. It shakes and shakes and shakes for about two or three minutes. And it just gets up and it's totally fine. But that shaking is the kind of mammalian response that we all have of discharging that intensity and that stress that it just went through. And

• 32:13Speaker 00

  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 either practice, I call it somatic surfing, or even just creating a sense of safety. Sometimes the body will kind of go into to complete that emotional response that it wasn't able to at the time. Because often we will disassociate or we'll push it down. And again, that's great. But if we don't set aside time for some kind of processing to just allow the emotions to complete, then they they get stored and they drain energy from the battery of your body, basically.

• 32:49Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah, that's a very vivid image. An impala almost being dead and having all that stress within them.

• 32:58Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 32:58Rangan Chatterjee?

  That they then process, the stress is gone. They go about living their life.

• 33:04Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 33:04Rangan Chatterjee?

  And I mean, it's really interesting. Last July, my family and I, for our summer holidays, we went to Kenya. And one of the things we did was go on safari. I was quite scared before I went. Like, I cognitively, I couldn't get my head around the fact that I was going to be in a car. And I was actually hoping our car was closed, but it wasn't. It was open, right? Which was great, but I was just like, hold on. So there's going to be wild animals there. And I was quite tense the first time, for sure. I was holding on to the edge and like, trying not to look afraid to my kids. But I was, right? Because I'm not used to being in these environments. And I softened up over days.

• 33:48Rangan Chatterjee?

  But I do remember once driving, we drove past two lions. And something really profound shifted in me. Because, you know, this is the wild, right? There was blood all around their faces, their jaws, right? And all my fear went. I just thought, oh. I don't think, I mean, I don't think they're going to attack us anyway. But I also thought, oh, they're full. Like, that line is literally full. They've, I think they've just killed a wildebeest. Their stomach is distended and full. They're probably in that relaxed, parasympathetic state now, just chilling. They're not interested in coming after me. Do you know what I mean? It's sort of, it was very, it was very profound.

• 34:33Rangan Chatterjee?

  And then going back to your example about the wild and how mammals will complete that stress response. It 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?

• 35:14Rangan Chatterjee?

  Is because it completes or it helps us complete a stress response that may have been left partially uncompleted within our bodies?

• 35:24Speaker 00

  Yeah, I, I think that's a, I think that's largely a big part of it. And, you know, I used to go for a run. Like, that was my way of, if I'd had an intense day, I'd kind of go for a run around, around the block or in the park. And I'd feel better when I got back. And I think the, the other thing that you're speaking to is the, you know, the environment that we're in very much dictates our own experience to some degree as well. So I, I think about, the best metaphor I have for the nervous system is as a, it's like as an instrument. Like, we have these human instruments and sometimes we can, we can get out of tune. That's how I think of dysregulation. But in certain environments, I mean, I felt this the other day on a, like incredibly busy London Underground tube.

• 36:06Speaker 00

  Like, we are kind of co-regulating with the other people and the environments that we're in. And as mammals, we feel much more grounded, relaxed, expansive in something like, you know, I was at Soho Park just before this, this, this podcast. And there, I was just, oh, I feel so good. And everyone can relate to that. But I think that it's really helpful to think about how we can. To the degree that we can design our environments, they then will design us in return. And so there's constantly this kind of like attuned relationship between me and you right now, between the room that we're in, the plants. Like, our nervous system is constantly looking for these signals of like, like, am I safe? Can I, can I relax?

• 36:51Speaker 00

  And so I think there's definitely an argument to be made of intentionally designing your environment for the state that is appropriate for that moment. So another example is there's something called the cathedral effect, which is where if you have like a high ceiling, there've been studies that show that's better for like creative thinking versus like a low ceiling is much better for like analytical kind of maybe data-driven tasks. And so we're constantly being, yeah, like impacted by our environment.

• 37:20Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah. So it's interesting. We're in the middle of London at the moment in a studio recording this conversation. Okay, so many people do live in very urban settings. Okay, and of course, some people cannot exert much control over their external environment. So what are the kind of things that we can do in our homes, in our flats, in our apartments to try and negate the effect of the outside world?

• 37:50Speaker 00

  Well, I'd say there's both there's internal things and there's external things. So your body is constantly getting signals from both your body and the environment. So for people who are in these kind of like busy, loud environments, obviously externally you can wear noise cancelling headphones, things like that, or just like reduce the intensity of stimulus if you're looking to unwind at the end of the day, for example. But I think more practical and more effective, honestly, are learning what I call bottom-up techniques or practices. So these would include things like humming is actually really effective. It increases nitric oxide by, I think, 15-fold. And it's a vasodilator, which helps with eye strain as well, and helps us kind of downshift into that parasympathetic state.

• 38:35Speaker 00

  Other things would be long hold stretches, exhale emphasized breathing practices. So like four, seven, eight is a really common one. Or just any breath where the exhale is twice as long as the inhale. It will have a calming effect. And another one that you can do without externally changing anything is playing with your awareness. So you can be aware of the space like behind you, feeling your feet on the ground, attuning to the sounds around you. And the more that your awareness is expansive, I'm doing a little bit right now. Or you can put your hands out and then as you move them behind you, you're expanding your peripheral vision and that has this expansive effect.

• 39:18Speaker 00

  And it creates a sense of spaciousness in the system.

• 39:21Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah. That whole visual piece is really interesting. I worked with this incredible movement coach called Helen Hall. And one of the things Helen has helped me with is understanding the importance of peripheral vision. When, let's say, you're running. And she has shown me, and I've seen the data, that when you are running or walking with narrow focus vision, which many of us would be doing. And if you're in a narrow urban street, you probably are going to be doing that. You move a certain way. And if you then tune into expanding your vision, softening it, making it more peripheral, your whole movement pattern changes.

• 40:05Rangan Chatterjee?

  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.

• 40:16Speaker 00

  Totally.

• 40:17Rangan Chatterjee?

  So those practices actually, they're really helpful to think about. I want to go into some of them in detail, but you mentioned this bottom up practices. Okay, and before you mentioned top down. Okay, so I want to really unpack it. So top down, i.e. with your mind, from your brain downwards, you're cognitively reframing things, you're thinking about things differently. Bottom up is some sort of body-based practice like the breath, for example, that is naturally changing things in your nervous system? Or how would you frame it?

• 40:54Speaker 00

  Yeah, so the example you gave with the lion, seeing that the lion's belly was full was a great example of like a top-down reframe, because you noticed that, oh, now the lion is no longer a threat. So you kind of changed a belief that you had that was making a prediction about the world, about whether or not the lion was a threat. So that was a great example of like a very effective top-down intervention. There's many others in the kind of, you know, CBT is another good example of like cognitive reframes. But what I love about bottom up, and there's some interesting science around this as well, in that we have, I believe it's something like four times more afferent neurons than efferent neurons.

• 41:36Speaker 00

  And the afferent neurons are the ones that go from the body up to the brain, up to the head. And efferent go from the brain head down to the body. So there's essentially like a kind of four-lane, superhighway of information going up and like one lane of traffic going down. And to me, that kind of indicates that the way that we make predictions is much more heavily influenced by what our body is experiencing than by the kind of thoughts and feelings and emotions that we're having.

• 42:06Rangan Chatterjee?

  Okay, love it. So this is where I'm at with my thinking with this at the moment.

• 42:12Rangan Chatterjee?

  Compared to, let's say, five years ago, I feel my nervous system is in a completely different state. Generally speaking today, I feel pretty calm, contented most of the time. I'm not really reactive, very little stresses me out compared to what used to happen. Now, the internet, the modern world wants to know what was the one thing I did or one does. And the truth is, there wasn't a one thing, okay? There were a variety of different things. But one of the things I did a lot of was cognitive reframing. Okay, and for people who listen to my show, they'll know that a conversation I had with the Auschwitz survivor Edith Eger

• 42:54Rangan Chatterjee?

  had a huge impact on my life because she could cognitively reframe her experience whilst in a death camp. Now, I found that the most inspiring thing because for months after that, whenever I got triggered or I felt reacted to something that was outside my control, and back then it was a lot. Once my kids had gone to bed in the evening, I wasn't able to do it in the moment. Once they'd gone to bed in the evening, I would then think about those situations. I go, okay, instead of blaming the external world for my internal emotions, I would own them and go, okay, what did that bring up in me? Okay, oh, that reminded me of this from my childhood or what someone said to me when I was 14, or whatever it might be.

• 43:39Rangan Chatterjee?

  And through that process, or that's at least one part of it, I feel my, the way I interacted with the world and, you know, day to day life experience completely changed. So I'm always trying to be aware of my biases. I think we've all got biases, you know, when something has worked for us or we perceive it's worked for us. I think a lot of us then falsely jump to the conclusion that that must be the way that everyone needs to approach stuff. And I'm trying to be aware of that, go, actually, no, that worked for me. Doesn't mean it's going to work as well for everyone, right? So that would be an example of a top down intervention, right?

• 44:20Rangan Chatterjee?

  Now, I will also acknowledge, I mentioned Helen, my movement coach. My body and the way I move and my ability to access different movements has also completely changed through working with Helen, right? And so I also believe, as you do, I think that the body stores emotions in inverted commas, right? And therefore, once you can start to access different movements, your posture, your personality, your emotions start to change, right? So I've also done that at the same time.

• 44:54Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah.

• 44:55Rangan Chatterjee?

  So I can't say it was just that, but I guess what I'm trying to get to with you is, you know, you're sort of saying that you think that bottom up. Is arguably more powerful than top down.

• 45:11Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, so I would say first first off, the ideal is you stack. You stack the top down, the bottom up, and also the outside in is the third category as well. That's like the people around you, your environment, the things we were talking about as well.

• 45:23Rangan Chatterjee?

  So you said you hit it from multiple angles.

• 45:25Speaker 00

  Yeah, you hit it from from all of the angles. I think in my experience, the bottom up is the most like underappreciated and kind of most ignored. And I do believe it's the most effective if someone is in a state of, you know, their anxiety is ramping up maybe towards a panic attack or they're getting really stressed.

• 45:42Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah.

• 45:43Speaker 00

  It's the most effective kind of short term intervention. But in terms of the long term, I mean, I think it's actually, this is kind of going a little like a layer deeper. But I think that both top down and bottom up interventions can also be used to avoid feeling emotions. And then this is something I call the self regulation paradox in that if you're just using journaling or CBT or breath work to kind of ground yourself, but ultimately avoid feeling whatever the emotion is, you're not going to make progress over time because I 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.

• 46:27Speaker 00

  Because if if we're still moving through the world in a way that we are avoiding feeling sadness or anger or grief or whatever the thing is, then we will always be making these predictions that like, oh, that's that's bad. We're not going to go near that. And so the the intensity of our, in which they present in our bodies will just get worse and worse over time. And we'll have to do like more and more of these interventions in order to kind of self regulate.

• 46:53Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah, I love that. Right. I love the way you frame that. So we're feeling reactive over something.

• 47:01Rangan Chatterjee?

  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.

• 47:14Speaker 00

  Exactly.

• 47:15Rangan Chatterjee?

  Unless we go one level deeper and go, okay, we've reduced the reactivity. Now let's really feel that emotion and let that emotion work through us like the impala, sort of shaking it out.

• 47:27Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah.

• 47:28Rangan Chatterjee?

  It will still be there. It will be having a hold on us. Like, and when the right scenario presents itself, the right comments.

• 47:39Speaker 00

  Yeah, exactly.

• 47:40Rangan Chatterjee?

  The right amount of sleep deprivation, the right comment from your boss. It's like a match that still lights it.

• 47:46Speaker 00

  Precisely, precisely. And you mentioned earlier that emotions are stored in the body. And up until recently, I think this was a fairly kind of almost like a fringe belief. But we didn't really have like a mechanism for this. And there's a really interesting theoretical neuroscientist called Michael Edward Johnson. And he has this idea that in the smooth muscle tissue, there are these latches that are created every time we kind of buffer these emotions. And so there are literally like pockets of tension that are stored in the smooth muscle tissue using this latch, latch bridge mechanism. And my belief, I'd love to find a way to test this. I'm working with him to try and run an experiment on this.

• 48:24Rangan Chatterjee?

  Wow.

• 48:24Speaker 00

  But I would love to be able to do a kind of before and after of let's say, you know, before a series of five breathwork journeys or before MDMA assisted psychotherapy. Like what is someone's latch profile before and after? Because you know, you can see it sometimes my students or my breathwork clients, you can literally see the tension kind of dissolve in their face or different areas. Or they feel like, oh, like I suddenly I have like, I have sensations in my belly that I didn't have before. You know, these things happen anecdotally, but I would, I would bet that there is a strong correlation between these latches in the smooth muscle tissue and the amount of just unprocessed, undigested emotions.

• 49:02Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah, that is so interesting.

• 49:03Speaker 00

  Super interesting.

• 49:04Rangan Chatterjee?

  Well, it brings up quite a few things for me. Firstly, this idea that emotions are stored in the body.

• 49:12Rangan Chatterjee?

  And this idea that you mentioned that until recently, it's been deemed like quite a fringe concept. And I think in many ways, that is a reflection of the head-based rational world in which we live, right? The need to find a mechanism for something that many humans will say, well, we've intuitively known this for thousands of years. So I'm not saying we shouldn't find a mechanism. I think it's it's fun to. At the same time, I find many things are deemed fringe when we don't have a scientific mechanism to explain them.

• 49:42Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 49:42Rangan Chatterjee?

  You know, I've been into an, you know, I've been enough movement classes over the years to see when people have certain movements unlocked and released, they can be shaking and crying.

• 49:52Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 49:53Rangan Chatterjee?

  For like 20 minutes, sometimes it's like,

• 49:55Speaker 00

  Totally.

• 49:56Rangan Chatterjee?

  Oh, my God, what on earth was stored in your hip flexors that when you finally released them for the first time,

• 50:03Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 50:04Rangan Chatterjee?

  you were just shaking. It reminds me of the Impala, right?

• 50:06Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, exactly.

• 50:07Rangan Chatterjee?

  Maybe that emotion got stored. It wasn't completed.

• 50:09Speaker 00

  Exactly.

• 50:10Rangan Chatterjee?

  And that movement allowed it to be completed, which then begs the question for me.

• 50:18Rangan Chatterjee?

  If you have a stored emotion

• 50:23Rangan Chatterjee?

  that's there from a previous trauma or a previous event, can you process it without even thinking about it?

• 50:32Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 50:32Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah.

• 50:33Speaker 00

  Yeah, you can. And I think that's why that's why my bias is more in the bottom up category, because I've had a number of, you know, personal experiences, mostly through, you know, doing hundreds of breathwork journeys. It was kind of my approach. But I've had many, many experiences. I believe that many of them were kind of pre-verbal. So things that happened between the ages of, you know, zero to a year and a half, before I even had language. And so I'd be experiencing these incredibly intense emotions from like abandonment, grief, rage. And I had no story of what was going on. It was purely just, I was just witnessing these really intense emotions like coursing through my body.

• 51:14Speaker 00

  But having zero idea what they were connected to. And that's happened, you know, more times than I can count. Which is why I think the the intellectual piece, the top down piece is is a really useful kind of like wedge in the door because it gets people in contact with the felt sensation. But I think that if it remains purely in the realm of the intellect and there isn't some kind of contact with the physical somatic kind of sensation and response, then I don't believe that the latches can actually be opened.

• 51:43Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah, that is such a beautiful example. I mean, if if things have been stored in our body before we could even speak, how the hell are we going to cognitively reframe that?

• 51:51Speaker 00

  We wouldn't have language for it, yeah, exactly.

• 51:52Rangan Chatterjee?

  And it also makes, where I'm sort of landing on this, I won't call it a conundrum, but this kind of top down, bottom up, which again, I actually do believe is an artificial separation because that is then predicated on the belief that the body and mind are separate.

• 52:08Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 52:09Rangan Chatterjee?

  Which I don't believe they are. So you could even make the case that even a powerful form of cognitive reframing is in some way changing the body.

• 52:16Speaker 00

  It is, yeah.

• 52:17Rangan Chatterjee?

  Because these things aren't separate.

• 52:18Speaker 00

  Totally.

• 52:20Rangan Chatterjee?

  I think where I love top down as a short term thing at least, is to help people understand, cognitively at least, maybe not on the body yet, and I agree with you that bottom up is super important as well, right? So it's it's more for the for the purpose of a conversation that I bring these things up. So I think it's really interesting to explore.

• 52:40Speaker 00

  I agree.

• 52:42Rangan Chatterjee?

  I, one thing I want to sort of impart with people is this idea that

• 52:48Rangan Chatterjee?

  the responses within you are being brought up within you. It's very easy to blame the external world for our internal responses. But until you understand that actually the external world might send you some signals, right? But ultimately, it's your internal response to those signals that's causing the issue. It doesn't mean it's not hard in some situations. Of course, if you're in war or you've you're suffering severe trauma, you know, and someone's traumatizing you, I'm not saying that isn't happening or it's not incredibly difficult. But let's take it away from those extreme examples and talk about a comment on social media, right? Which people are walking around getting triggered every single day by what I would call neutral comments on social media.

• 53:33Rangan Chatterjee?

  I think top down is really useful to help people understand, look, the comment really at its core is neutral.

• 53:41Speaker 00

  You know, what you're touching on is a really important piece, which is this idea of like, of like, full ownership and full agency.

• 53:47Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah.

• 53:48Speaker 00

  And I think that when we are suffering and when we're resisting our experience, it's because we are feeling in some way, shape or form, like we're a victim of that. Like, we had no control or power, whether it was like something your boss said or your partner said, or a victim of even circumstances. And when you make that move to, no, I'm, I'm creating this, it, at the same time, it also softens your resistance to the physical things that you're feeling as well. And so, as you said, the top-down, bottom-up distinction is actually, in some ways, it doesn't, it doesn't exist. And, you know, for people who've done like extended meditation retreats, for example, they can notice when, when a certain thought arises,

• 54:32Speaker 00

  there will be a corresponding, like subtle tension in their body. So every time we have a thought or a, or an idea, there is a corresponding mental kind of sensation that arises on just a really kind of like very subtle level. And so, as you say, there is this, this dark, this dark connection.

• 54:49Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah. You shared a story recently about a monk who came and did one of your courses.

• 55:00Speaker 00

  Oh, yeah.

• 55:01Rangan Chatterjee?

  And it was such a powerful story because my recollection of it, and perhaps you could share it again, is that

• 55:10Rangan Chatterjee?

  there was a monk who'd done a ton of meditation,

• 55:14Rangan Chatterjee?

  yet somehow would manage to avoid feeling their emotions. And so there was anger raging within them that they didn't know about until it came out. So could you just share that? Because I think that's an incredibly powerful example, how some of the time we're bypassing our emotions and think we're moving forwards when we're actually not.

• 55:33Speaker 00

  Yeah, I know, I'm really glad you brought this up. So this was a monk who'd spent 20-plus years in a monastery. And I actually get a surprising number of students in my course who are long-term meditators, but they still... Aren't happy, honestly. They still experience anxiety. They still experience reactivity. And I love meditation myself. I've, you know, I practice regularly. But I do think that it is a very, obviously, there's different types of meditation. But often, what long-term meditators will get very good at is that kind of move to where they are deconstructing reality.

• 56:12Speaker 00

  Or they are, what's the word, kind of creating cognitive distance between themselves and the feeling or the emotion. And it's very, very different to neutrally observe a feeling or sensation versus like fully welcome it. And the example that I think will make this real for people is if you imagine, if you imagine your kids, like neutrally observing your kids having a tantrum is very different from like going up and giving them a hug. Like you will have a very different reaction between, in those two scenarios. And so in the example of this monk, through a series of breathwork journeys, just realized that there was a huge amount of unprocessed anger essentially and rage

• 56:57Speaker 00

  that was likely the reason he got into meditation in the first place, to kind of avoid feeling that discomfort all the time. And yeah, and I find often, often anger is one of the things that like, once it moves, it releases such like aliveness in the body again. And kind of energy and like vibrancy. And even, you know, people, again, this is anecdotal, but people who've been depressed and lethargic for long periods of time, the anger is almost being turned inwards through the inner critic. So they will be like angry at themselves and judging themselves and have all this negative self-talk. And once that anger gets a chance to kind of be expressed and be externalized, it like frees up all this energy. And I love seeing it because it's like, like someone really comes alive

• 57:42Speaker 00

  after, after that moves through. So yeah, I think it's another good example of like a very nuanced pitfall on a path of, you know, you might say, yeah, meditation's great, like meditate as much as you can, but it is.

• 57:57Speaker 00

  If you're only meditating in certain ways, I mean, I think metta practice or like loving kindness practice or jhana practice actually is slightly different versus the kind of mindfulness, which is, you know, most common in our society.

• 58:09Rangan Chatterjee?

  It's such an interesting point that this monk, I think you said that he or she had meditated for 20 or 30,000 hours, right? I think most of us would assume that someone who had done that much meditation, especially, let's say, taking vows as a monk and gone away to meditate, would have processed their emotions and they were living in a state of inner calm. And so I think that really stuck out to me when I heard that. I go, wow, how many of us are bypassing our emotions?

• 58:37Speaker 00

  Exactly.

• 58:38Rangan Chatterjee?

  Could I be bypassing my emotions in some parts of my life without realizing it? It's really interesting to reflect on. And you said before, let's say you're in a meeting at work and you feel angry, let's say your boss, and you're saying it's quite a good skill to be able to suppress the anger and not show it in the moment. Okay, so let's go back to that example. So I think this is a scenario that many people will feel, whether it's their boss or their colleagues, they're in a situation that they feel angry, but it's not appropriate in their work environment to express that anger. Okay, so for the purpose of that meeting, they kept it in and they were, in inverted commas, professional as they could be.

• 59:21Rangan Chatterjee?

  What should that person then do in your view? Or what are some of the things that person can then do to feel the anger, to process the anger and then move on from the anger?

• 59:42Rangan Chatterjee?

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• 1:00:06Rangan Chatterjee?

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• 1:00:51Rangan Chatterjee?

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• 1:01:12Rangan Chatterjee?

  Today's episode is sponsored by the daily health drink AG1. The clocks are about to change, the mornings are darker, everyone around you seems to be coming down with something and suddenly that wellbeing you felt in the summer seems a long time ago. I certainly know that feeling and that's why at this time of year, I remind myself to lean into the fundamentals. And one of those fundamentals is AG1. AG1 is a daily health drink that has been in my own life for over eight years. And one of the many things I like about it is the fact that many of the nutrients it contains, for example, vitamin C, vitamin A, zinc and selenium, supports a healthy immune system. Some of the other things I really like about AG1 is that they are committed to continuous improvement

• 1:01:56Rangan Chatterjee?

  and updating their formula as a scientific research involves. And each batch is independently tested for quality and safety markers, including heavy metals, allergens and banned substances. This is how they can guarantee what's in your scoop and what's not. Right now, AG1 is offering a free AG1 flavour sampler and AGZ sampler to try all the flavours, plus free vitamin D3 and K2 and AG1 welcome kit with your first AG1 subscription order. That's $87 in free gifts for first time subscribers. All you have to do is head to drinkag1.com/livemore to claim this offer before it ends.

• 1:02:47Speaker 00

  So I'll actually give two suggestions here. One's like the kind of beginner level and the other is like the advanced level. And I'll maybe give some more context around anger as well, because it's a really good example. So anger can, in my view, get kinked in two different ways. And if you think of like it moving through a hosepipe, if you kink it one way, something happens. If you kink it the other, something else happens.

• 1:03:08Rangan Chatterjee?

  Okay.

• 1:03:08Speaker 00

  If you kink it one way, it comes out as like passive aggression, where you know, someone's like, oh, like, like, like, nice t-shirt, or, you know, it's that kind of like kinked way of like, being angry, but not really owning your anger.

• 1:03:20Rangan Chatterjee?

  What's wrong with my t-shirt?

• 1:03:21Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, mate.

• 1:03:24Speaker 00

  You actually have a nice t-shirt on it. I really like it. And then the other way is, you know, what people more commonly think of as anger, which is like aggression. And again, it's, it's not really feeling the anger. It's like blaming someone else for your experience, basically, and being, and being overly aggressive.

• 1:03:39Rangan Chatterjee?

  So hold on. So let's just really try and land this. So the, something's happened that we're feeling angry about, but instead of feeling it, we're sort of blaming the

• 1:03:49Speaker 00

  Getting defensive.

• 1:03:50Rangan Chatterjee?

  We're getting defensive, right? So help people understand what's the difference between that and feeling the anger? Because some people might feel that, hold on a minute, well, that is me being angry. My defensiveness is a reflection of me being angry, but you're saying that's not feeling the anger?

• 1:04:06Speaker 00

  Yeah, there's a really, I'd say the best way to.

• 1:04:11Speaker 00

  Articulate this is to the degree that you're kind of grounded and in your body when you're expressing the anger. And so like anger that it's like clean anger, let's say, is the phrase that I have is basically just like clarity and determination and like setting a boundary. What comes from really clean anger is like setting a boundary from a place of love is like, no, like, that's not okay. Like, that's kind of the energy of like clean anger. But often it takes a while to kind of get to the point where we can just express in that kind of like clean, loving way. And so having a practice, so let's kind of go back to the example of someone in a boardroom. Someone said something super angry.

• 1:04:55Speaker 00

  It wasn't appropriate to kind of maybe even speak. So they leave the room, they're really charged, there's this like, ah, there's like real energy. I mean, there's a number of ways that you can, you can kind of work with this. Some of my clients will like go on drives and they'll just like roll the windows up and drive on the road and just like, like let it out, like make loud sound. I generally recommend like breath, sound and movement are three good kind of ways of expressing the energy.

• 1:05:24Rangan Chatterjee?

  Breath, sound and movement.

• 1:05:25Speaker 00

  Breath, sound and movement.

• 1:05:26Rangan Chatterjee?

  And you say expressing the energy, is that the same as feeling the energy? Or is that subtly different?

• 1:05:32Speaker 00

  So some of the signs that I can kind of give to people are like, if you feel a sense of relief or like an exhale or like a sigh afterwards, that particular reflex or that emotion has completed.

• 1:05:46Rangan Chatterjee?

  Okay, hold on, right. So you, okay, let's make it super practical. So you're in the room, you don't like something that's happened, you feel your boss hasn't spoken to you in the way that you think is appropriate. Okay. And but you keep a lid on it, but you're, you're angry on the inside. Okay. Meeting finishes, let's say it's lunchtime now, you've got, you, you've got a one hour lunch break.

• 1:06:08Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:06:09Rangan Chatterjee?

  Okay. And you're saying earlier that that emotion technically is only there for 10 or 20 seconds, right? Yet many people are still angry a week later.

• 1:06:18Speaker 00

  Mm hmm.

• 1:06:19Rangan Chatterjee?

  Okay, which is clearly a problem. What can they do in that lunch break? Okay, so they're, you know, maybe they haven't got a car, they can't go for a drive at the coast, they can't go and ground in the local park. I mean, imagine it's a rainy, cold, dark winter's day and that's happened to someone. What can they do in that one hour break that allows them to feel that anger and process it?

• 1:06:42Speaker 00

  Yeah, okay, so, so really, yeah, really great example. Often I will say it's ideal if you can kind of be in your own home, especially if you're kind of doing this in the beginning. So it's helpful to maybe like wait till the end of the day.

• 1:06:54Rangan Chatterjee?

  Great, fine.

• 1:06:55Speaker 00

  Go back, like go to your bedroom, like a kind of private space. The simplest is either like kind of hitting pillows sometimes will be good, like allowing some sound to move through.

• 1:07:05Rangan Chatterjee?

  Can you even say, God, that guy's such an idiot and bang your pillow?

• 1:07:09Speaker 00

  Completely.

• 1:07:09Rangan Chatterjee?

  You know, that, you would say that's healthy.

• 1:07:11Speaker 00

  I would say, I would say it's healthy. I think the key thing is that at some point you have to, and this kind of comes back to the top down, bottom up distinction is if you are constantly recycling the story of what happened and not actually connected to the sensations that are associated with the anger, what we call just like looping, where it will feel as if the anger goes on forever because you're kind of connected to the story and the story is continuously like bringing up more and more.

• 1:07:39Rangan Chatterjee?

  So your mind actually now from the top is actually generating more stress.

• 1:07:44Speaker 00

  Yes, exactly.

• 1:07:45Rangan Chatterjee?

  And it's actually taken that anger that actually is that short term feeling and emotion that you have that perhaps you haven't felt. And the story you're telling yourself.

• 1:07:54Speaker 00

  Is pouring fuel on the fire.

• 1:07:56Rangan Chatterjee?

  Making the anger much bigger than it is.

• 1:07:58Speaker 00

  Exactly.

• 1:07:59Rangan Chatterjee?

  So this is where the body comes in, right?

• 1:08:00Speaker 00

  So the key is, and then coming back to like full circle back to interception. If you can connect to the sensations that you're experiencing, so for many people, it's like heat, it's like tightness in the chest. And then kind of make the movements or sounds from that place. That's when there's the sense of like, like, oh, like, and you know, it will take, you know, 10, 20, 30 seconds, sometimes longer for people, but there will be a felt sense of, of like relaxation and just like, oh, like, thank God on the other side of that.

• 1:08:32Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah. Okay. So let's say you've come out to your bedroom. You've acknowledged you're angry, which is important because some people don't even acknowledge that. They think, oh, like you said before, everyone thought you were calm.

• 1:08:44Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:08:45Rangan Chatterjee?

  You weren't calm, you were suppressing, right? So it came across as calm, but actually there was a, there was a whole tension behind that calmness.

• 1:08:51Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 1:08:53Rangan Chatterjee?

  Okay. So someone could just lie there or sit down, make sure the belly's coming out, make sure they're really breathing, feeling where the tension is, trying to let it go. Okay. Some people even struggle with something like that, especially initially. They're not used to feeling that tension in their body.

• 1:09:10Speaker 00

  No, totally.

• 1:09:11Rangan Chatterjee?

  If they were so inclined and they went to their, on their street or their local park and did five minutes of hard sprinting, let's say, right? Because we're saying that there's an emotion stored in our body, maybe stored in our muscles, depending on what you believe and what you read and what your take is on that. This idea that you don't need to know with your mind how you're processing something, but you can do it simply through your body is, is, is a really seductive concept to me. Right? I think about the Impala and how the Impala hasn't actually, not that I, I know what it's like to be an Impala, okay, to be clear, right? But I'm guessing the Impala.

• 1:09:55Speaker 00

  Probably not telling a story about that bloody lion.

• 1:09:57Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah. 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.

• 1:10:08Speaker 00

  Right.

• 1:10:09Rangan Chatterjee?

  Could it be as simple as that for some humans where we shake it out of our system? Is that why yoga is so useful? Is that why sprinting? Is that why jumping jacks can be so useful? Because I think for some people that might feel easier than.

• 1:10:25Rangan Chatterjee?

  Sitting in silence and trying to see where is that tightness in my body? Can I let that go? Help us understand that.

• 1:10:31Speaker 00

  Yeah, so there's two things I want to add to that. The first is that there is, I think, actually, an important role for a top-down like orientation in this process. And for me, like, I really remember this, I was, I was doing a breathwork training and my teacher said to me, he said, "You are loved in your anger."

• 1:10:54Speaker 00

  And I just like, I remember in that moment, I just like broke down crying. And I think that many of us, particularly, maybe, maybe men growing up in, in England, you know, like myself, there's a way in which like, I think when I was younger, I'd hurt other people from like in state fits of anger. And I then viewed my anger as being inherently bad. And this was kind of happening, I wasn't aware of that, it was like below my conscious awareness. And having that frame of like, "Oh, I can still be loved even when I'm being angry," was like, like, Jesus, like, like, that just like opened me up. And it allowed me to, it allowed anger to kind of flow in a way that I wasn't actually trying to kind of like, contract against it.

• 1:11:39Speaker 00

  Because I had a belief that I was inherently bad if I was being an angry person. And so I think that's, and I imagine there's many people out there that consciously or unconsciously have that kind of belief running in the background of like, and you know, even meditation, like, can subtly reinforce this idea of like, you're bad if you're angry, like, you're a bad meditator if anger comes up. And so I think that's, that was a big unlock for me personally. And then secondly, kind of speaking to the way that you, the way that this moves, at the risk of sounding like, like woo or whatever, there's a way in which the body has its own intelligence, right? And all you need to do is get out of the way and the body will know how to complete that.

• 1:12:22Speaker 00

  And so what I think, like, sprinting can be great, shaking can be great, but really all you're doing is trying to kind of like, get to the point where the body will almost just, it will start moving on its own and it'll just know what to do. And you just have to like, Witness it and just watch it happen.

• 1:12:37Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:37Speaker 00

  And so many of these practices, so I have one called somatic surfing, somatic experiencing. There's many different, sometimes shaking, sometimes TRE. There's many ways of like getting into this state. 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.

• 1:12:55Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah, it's interesting, isn't it? We think we've become more advanced.

• 1:12:58Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:12:59Rangan Chatterjee?

  Like the human minds and look at all these buildings and all this technology. And of course, depending on how you look at the world, you could say humans are incredibly advanced in terms of what we can now do. But I do question that sometimes because, you know, if you look at like some pretty objective data,

• 1:13:19Rangan Chatterjee?

  despite all the material things we have access to and all the technology and, you know, the fact that many of us now are living lives that are better than royalty, maybe 250 years ago. In terms of the standard of our lives and the, in terms of material quality, unhappiness is on the rise.

• 1:13:35Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:13:36Rangan Chatterjee?

  Anxiety is on the rise, depression is on the rise. So I even sometimes question this kind of whole idea that, oh, you know, we're getting better. Because are we? Yeah, of course we are in some levels, but that impala seems to have that, you know, innate intelligence that it hasn't lost yet.

• 1:13:56Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:13:56Rangan Chatterjee?

  Now, of course, the impala's life is under threat every day as well. So I acknowledge that, you know, thankfully I live in a safe country, in a safe place, where my life is not under threat. So I'm not trying to romanticize, it's not either or, is it? It's like, how can we live in this beautiful world in which humans have created? And at the same time, not lose the innate intelligence that all of us had, that those guys, the wild animals still have, that we've lost. I really do like that idea that the body. Knows what to do if we get out of its way.

• 1:14:30Speaker 00

  Totally, totally. Well, the way that I think about this on maybe like the deepest level is this idea of like coming back home to ourselves. But the phrase that I really like is secure attachment with life, secure attachment with reality. And most people, you know, many people have heard of this idea of having attachment strategies with partners, but this idea of coming back to feeling fundamentally at home in our bodies and in the world. And I think ultimately, this is what is, this is the, you know, the deeper journey of nervous system mastery is opening up these latches, is creating the conditions of safety so that all parts of our psyche

• 1:15:13Speaker 00

  learn to feel inherently like safe in the world. And the safer you feel, the less you will get triggered, the less you will get reactive, the less you will get anxious. And the way that I've started to view this myself is viewing anxiety as like, it's like a beautiful signpost. It's like, oh, like here's a way in which you're still protecting yourself from some aspect of your experience. And like, what a gift. Like, that's an invitation to kind of get curious about it, to move towards it. And maybe like courageous curiosity, because it takes some courage to kind of move into it. But like, like on the other side, there's like, there's like more freedom, there's more agency, there's more aliveness. And that for me is like, it almost turns life into a game, right?

• 1:15:56Speaker 00

  It's like every little time I start to get like triggered or annoyed or whatever it is, that's like, oh, cool. Like, I wonder what's there for me.

• 1:16:03Rangan Chatterjee?

  I know for many years, love it when I get triggered.

• 1:16:06Speaker 00

  Nice.

• 1:16:06Rangan Chatterjee?

  Honestly, I know it sounds ridiculous to some people, maybe not to you, but I'm like, oh, wow. Because without that triggering, I would have, I would never would have had the opportunity to kind of process this thing that's under the surface that I'm not maybe cognizantly aware of. And it's only by that experience, that comment, that event

• 1:16:27Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:16:28Rangan Chatterjee?

  That, you know, because you can either push it away or go, oh, wow, there's still something there on process. There's still something because the thing that you think is triggering you. Is not the thing that's actually triggering you, or it's not the root cause of it, is it?

• 1:16:43Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:16:43Rangan Chatterjee?

  It's it's something else on the need that hasn't been processed.

• 1:16:46Speaker 00

  It's like a beautiful mirror. So it's something that's happening inside.

• 1:16:49Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah. I know you're a fan of this, um, this quote from a tribe. Knowledge is only a rumor until it lives in the muscle.

• 1:16:57Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:16:58Rangan Chatterjee?

  And I think we can interpret that in many different ways. But I kind of think we can apply it also to some of the things that you've just said, and we've been talking about. You know, we're living in a world of more and more knowledge, aren't we? Where there's more podcasts, there's more health blogs, there's more health books, right? So we've got more and more knowledge in our minds.

• 1:17:21Speaker 00

  Information, yeah.

• 1:17:22Rangan Chatterjee?

  I think a lot of the time, people feel that they've done something with that knowledge when they haven't. They've just heard the knowledge. And I passionately believe that the most important things in life can't be taught. They have to be experienced.

• 1:17:37Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 1:17:38Rangan Chatterjee?

  And I think that quote really speaks to that and speaks to this idea that actually we need our minds to get out of the way. And if we get out of the way, our body just does it for us.

• 1:17:50Speaker 00

  Exactly. Yeah, exactly. So the way that I like to teach in, you know, with my coaching clients and in the course is through this idea of being a scientist of your own experience. And, you know, like you said, you can listen to a hundred podcasts and you can hear the same thing over and over again. But if you don't run some kind of experiment in your own life to actually verify it, it won't, it won't land in your system as true. And so I think there's like, there's an amazing opportunity for just so many creative experiments that you can create. And I know you, you kind of have some of these on your, on your tour and in your book. I think kind of co-creating experiments with, with people to, so they can feel some of these things for themselves is, is the way that we learn.

• 1:18:35Speaker 00

  And so an example might be, um, I love recommending people take a cold shower, but not because of the health benefits, even though there are a bunch of health benefits, but paying like really close attention to. What happens to your body as you start to go towards the cold icy water? And for most people, there's a sense of like contracting and tensing, like you're bracing yourself against the freezing cold water. I used to go swimming around the pier in Brighton every morning. And most of the time I'd approach it and I'd be like, huh, like I'm gonna be, I'm gonna be freezing. And that bracing is the same, the exact same response that we have to emotions and to kind of life situations. And if you can kind of be attuned to what that feels like in your body and gradually

• 1:19:19Speaker 00

  start to relax, the cold and emotions can actually feel very, just like enlivening. And for me, this was actually how I, I kind of moved through grief. I lost my, my ex fiance took her own life. And it was through going swimming in, around this pier in Brighton and learning to like let in the cold and not tense against it. And then applying that same, that same like move in a way to the grief and just allowing it to kind of move through me, that I was like, like wow. And, you know, and that totally, like that changed my life. And so finding ways to create experiments, I mean, you could take a number of things

• 1:20:02Speaker 00

  that we've talked about and, and design your own experiment around it so that you can see if you can feel it. And another example is, you know, doing humming or doing one of the breathwork practices, like four, seven, eight breathing. It won't stick unless you, you notice how you feel in the beginning, you do the breathing practice, and then you notice how you feel afterwards. And if you feel different or better, that will like register in your body of like, oh, like I'll do that again. And you'll remember to do it in a time down the line when you need it.

• 1:20:30Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:31Speaker 00

  As opposed to just intellectually thinking that it's a good idea.

• 1:20:35Rangan Chatterjee?

  Hey, I'm sorry to hear about what you've been through.

• 1:20:41Rangan Chatterjee?

  Do you feel able to share a little bit more about that? Because it sounds, it sounds like that was pivotal in the journey you've embarked upon and what you do today.

• 1:20:54Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, I was actually down in Brighton yesterday, um, visiting her memorial tree. It was a tree that we planted down there. I mean, I think what's, what's relevant to this conversation is Sophie was a junior doctor and she suffered from an anxiety attack, uh, one morning at work when I was, I was traveling in Portugal. And she came back and she took her own life and she overdosed on medication. And yeah, I mean, this completely, this was like my pivotal kind of turning point where I'd never, you know, I'd had a pretty great childhood. I'd never been through anything hard or challenging, but I, I'd seen other adults who had, who had not digested their grief.

• 1:21:37Speaker 00

  And there was this sense of like, um, almost like deadness or numbness or like lack of aliveness in them that I was honestly, I was like terrified by. And I, and I said to myself, like, if I don't move towards this grief, I will end up like those like husks of human beings. And so I kind of turned towards it and went like, really leaned in. In the beginning, it was meditation retreats, breath work, um, all, all this kind of stuff. And like learning how to, how to feel the grief essentially. And there was one moment that I, I just like really, really remember.

• 1:22:19Speaker 00

  I was kind of approaching her memorial bench in this, this place called Leover Sands. And every step I took towards it, there was this like, this like intensity building in my system. And it just felt like, felt like the grief was like a tidal wave that was like moving through me. And as I got closer and closer, it.

• 1:22:40Speaker 00

  It felt like it almost just like, it was like more than I could take and it almost just like obliterated me. But what was so shocking was that if I let go of the story about having this tragic loss, it actually felt beautiful. It felt like it was like the energy of love, like the energy of like deep connection and like rawness. And that was such a, that was, it was just, it was confusing in the beginning because I was like grief is meant to be this like hard, challenging thing, this terrible thing happened to me and to her. But it was, it was beautiful and it felt almost like deeply joyful in a way. And that just, and at that point I was like, okay, I, everything I thought I knew about emotions is clearly like, I have more to learn here.

• 1:23:24Speaker 00

  And so that kind of set me on this path, which eventually, eventually landed in the nervous system work and kind of teaching this stuff. Yeah.

• 1:23:35Rangan Chatterjee?

  Many people struggle with death. They don't know what to do when a loved one dies.

• 1:23:44Rangan Chatterjee?

  And I once heard you say that you believe that the five stages of grief might well be the five ways in which we try and resist grief.

• 1:23:57Rangan Chatterjee?

  Which is really powerful, it's very thought provoking. And it kind of fits with an idea that I think is probably been sitting on top of everything we've spoken about today, which is this idea that, you know, what we resist persists. Yeah. So this idea that actually we live in the world, we interact with the world and we're going to feel certain emotions. And as long as we feel that emotion, process the emotion and then move on from the emotion, in many ways it doesn't stay stuck within us. It doesn't cause that emotional debt that you were talking about earlier.

• 1:24:38Rangan Chatterjee?

  And I think people can get their head around that with the boss who maybe talks to them badly at work. Okay. But when it comes to death and grief, I think people then think, well, this is a completely different scenario. So you've obviously been through some incredible grief and thank you for sharing certain elements of that story. It's very, very powerful.

• 1:25:07Rangan Chatterjee?

  What would you like to say to someone who's listening right now, who is really struggling with grief? They're overwhelmed and they don't know what to do and they're feeling stuck.

• 1:25:20Rangan Chatterjee?

  What would you say to them?

• 1:25:22Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, I would say there is a

• 1:25:29Speaker 00

  there is like a healthy denial, I think, that happened in the beginning. Like, for me, there was almost this like overwhelmed numbness. It was almost like too much to process, I think, and that's just part of the process. I think that at some point, I had this idea of this mantra in my mind of like, I am willing, was like the phrase that I said to myself. And it almost felt like being willing to be obliterated by this like tsunami wave of grief and intensity that felt like, it felt like too much to too much to experience. And I think parts of my, parts of my identity had to die.

• 1:26:11Speaker 00

  Like, the future vision I had of our relationship and of having a family and of, you know, the life that I had imagined for us together, that had to die. And I think that's what, that's what grief is. Like, we experience it with changes in location and not only losing loved ones, but it happens all the time. And I think it's, it's allowing parts of our identity to literally be obliterated. And that in the beginning feels initially painful, but my, my experience was that it was almost like it deepened my capacity to love over time. It was almost like hollowing me out. And yeah, I felt on, in many moments, this, this raw aliveness.

• 1:26:59Speaker 00

  And again, you know, this is, it's kind of exemplifies many of the themes we've talked about of there is this like innate intelligence in me, like my, my body, my nervous system knew how to feel and process the grief. I just had to show up and be willing to let it move through me in all the ways that it did. And, and to the, to the idea of like the five stages of grief being the ways that we resist it. I think that it's almost like the ways in which that grief gets, gets like kinked in our system. Maybe we, we blame the circumstance for what happened, or in, in the beginning, there was part of myself that like I blamed myself for not doing more and for not, you know, spotting it in, in these things.

• 1:27:40Speaker 00

  And it would have been very easy for me to get almost like stuck in that endless loop and that endless Eddie. But for whatever, you may be good fortune, maybe good luck. I was able to just like allow it to keep on moving and keep on unfolding. And, and this is again, kind of coming back to the, the nervous system. Dysregulation is just when we get stuck. It's, it's, it's when we don't allow the kind of natural cycles to complete.

• 1:28:10Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah.

• 1:28:10Speaker 00

  It doesn't mean we don't experience enormous intensities of emotion. And I think grief being like a particularly vivid and extreme example that people can, can relate to.

• 1:28:22Rangan Chatterjee?

  You said the cold helped you start to face that grief and feel it.

• 1:28:28Rangan Chatterjee?

  The cold is a, is sort of a mechanism that kind of forces people to be in their bodies.

• 1:28:35Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:28:36Rangan Chatterjee?

  Right? You can try not to, but you know, depending on how cold it is, you're gonna ultimately end up there. So let's just really unpick that. So you're struggling with grief or someone is struggling with grief. How might a cold shower?

• 1:28:54Rangan Chatterjee?

  Help them start to feel that emotion.

• 1:28:58Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, so I'll use the example of when I was I was swimming in the cold. But it could apply to a shower as well, like in the beginning, there is that bracing, that kind of like defending against the cold. And with, you know, after maybe thirty seconds, maybe a minute or so, that intensity starts to starts to die down. And I I almost imagined like letting the cold in. And I felt in my body, there was like less tension, less bracing. And it's also at the same time, it stops being uncomfortable. And at a certain point, the cold actually fuels, there's like heat gets generated in the body. And it feels good, it feels amazing.

• 1:29:37Rangan Chatterjee?

  When you start resisting.

• 1:29:38Speaker 00

  Yeah, exactly.

• 1:29:39Rangan Chatterjee?

  Like that for anyone who's done a cold plunge or a cold shower, like, once you start resisting, before you know it, you feel totally relaxed.

• 1:29:45Speaker 00

  Exactly.

• 1:29:46Rangan Chatterjee?

  But you feel like you're holding, oh, it's cold, you're tight, you're tight, you're holding on. But we don't realize you just need to let go and actually.

• 1:29:53Speaker 00

  Exactly.

• 1:29:53Rangan Chatterjee?

  Lean into it and actually it gets a lot more comfortable.

• 1:29:56Speaker 00

  So it trains that move of of letting go. And I think that's the that's the thing that we that's the rep that we need to do in order to practice.

• 1:30:05Rangan Chatterjee?

  I love that. It sounds like it's not the it's not that you had decided, right, I need to process my grief. And so I'm going to go into the ocean to help me process it. It sounds like it was subtly different, which is when I'm in the ocean, it allows me to stop resisting. And as you say, let go. So the skill that I'm practicing in the cold water then is a universal skill that I am naturally starting to apply to every other element in my life, including my ability to not resist the grief.

• 1:30:42Speaker 00

  Exactly, yeah, exactly.

• 1:30:44Rangan Chatterjee?

  Right.

• 1:30:46Rangan Chatterjee?

  Which I guess in many ways speaks to this wider concept of bottom up practices. Okay. Taking this out of grief.

• 1:30:58Rangan Chatterjee?

  You offer people, and we discussed a few of them, and I know on your website, on your course, you offer way more, right? But it sounds like there's a variety of different body-based actions, practices that people can do. Breathwork, cold shower, progressive relaxation, the APE, Awareness Posture Emotion, you know, expanding our awareness, whatever it might be, for some people it'll be yoga, right?

• 1:31:30Rangan Chatterjee?

  And is the suggestion for people to play around and experiment with curiosity a variety of these practices? And maybe choose a couple that they really like, that they can practice regularly, that allows them to train this skill of letting go? Is that a useful way to look at it for people?

• 1:31:50Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think that's a really useful way to put it. And I think I really emphasise the experiment-based approach because everyone is coming to this work from a different place. Like, some people might be experiencing anxiety, some people might be experiencing grief, some people might be burnt out and just really stressed. And there's gonna need to be a different approach or a different kind of prescription for everyone, depending on where they're at. And, you know, for some people, maybe just practising interception, that's often a really good starting point for a lot of people, is just gaining 10% more awareness of their internal state five times during the day.

• 1:32:26Rangan Chatterjee?

  And again, you have mentioned a few things, but how can somebody do that, quite simply?

• 1:32:31Speaker 00

  Yeah, so I mean, I recommend either kind of setting a little timer or doing it first thing after you wake up in the morning, and then a little, a time during the day when you have a transition moment, and then to help downshift or to kind of transition at the end of the day, maybe after a workday or something.

• 1:32:49Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah, I find on a personal level that...

• 1:32:53Rangan Chatterjee?

  You know, so many of us store tension and stress in our pelvis.

• 1:32:56Speaker 00

  Yeah, completely.

• 1:32:57Rangan Chatterjee?

  And so one thing I find quite useful is, you know, at various points of the day, I'll just stop and make sure I'm taking some big, whole-body breaths into my lower abdomen, really focus on my diaphragm and my pelvic floor and how it's moving. And, you know, I think those things, we just don't realise how powerful they are. But instead of then that tension building up and you not doing that, so it just keeps accumulating, keeps accumulating, keeps accumulating. So you think, you know, you think it was the email at 5pm that bothered you. No, it wasn't the email at 5pm that bothered you, it was the fact that you were just accumulating stress, stress, stress, emotional depth. So by the time you read that email, you were past your window of tolerance.

• 1:33:39Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, it's funny, as you were saying that, I like, I kind of, even without thinking about it, I noticed I brought my awareness down to my pelvis and I felt it's like, oh, there's like, I was holding tension in my, in my low back, like even just, just from this.

• 1:33:49Rangan Chatterjee?

  And also, something that people don't like to talk about is, cosmetically, we have been taught, whether consciously or unconsciously, to hold our tummies in.

• 1:34:00Speaker 00

  And to have a flat belly, yeah.

• 1:34:01Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah, so people are walking around, terrible for movement, terrible for your pelvic floor, terrible for stress. But I think people have been conditioned, myself included, for many years, so much that we don't even realise when we're doing it. So we need to bring this kind of conscious awareness to, don't hold your belly in, don't hold your belly in, you know, do you know what I mean? It's, it's everywhere. It's like, you know, you mentioned top-down, bottom-up, but also the environment. Well, that's the environmental conditioning, teaching so many of us to hold tension in our bodies by holding our tummies in.

• 1:34:33Speaker 00

  No, completely. And there's also another kind of interesting, like anecdotal correlation I've noticed is, once people start to be able to bring awareness and breath down into the pelvic floor and in the bellies, there's a sense of, there's a, like an embodied sense of safety, which doesn't make sense unless you've actually experienced it. But there's something about releasing tension there and bringing breath and like, and presence down there that creates a sense of, I think it's like a sense of grounded safety that people self-report. And then from that place of safety, you can move through the world, making less, less fear-based kind of predictions and decisions.

• 1:35:10Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah. I love, Johnny, observing societal trends. And trying to sit back and go, what does this societal trend tell us about the state of society? Okay. So I've got a couple of questions that have just come up for me that I wanna put to you.

• 1:35:34Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 1:35:35Rangan Chatterjee?

  About what these trends tell us about the state of our nervous systems.

• 1:35:38Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 1:35:39Rangan Chatterjee?

  Okay. There's more and more people now intentionally embracing the cold, right? Cold plunge, cold showers, we've spoken about that today a little bit, okay? What do you think that growing trend of cold plunges tells us about the state of societal nervous systems, if anything?

• 1:35:57Speaker 00

  Hmm. Yeah, interesting. If I was to kind of hazard a guess, I think there's a lot of people that feel in some way like numb to their lives and to the world. And my guess is that many people are looking for experiences that help them to feel alive. And I think that freezing cold water is a incredibly efficient mechanism for creating a like undeniable sense of aliveness in the body, even if it's only for a short period of time. And my guess is that that would be, that would be part of it, you know, beyond the

• 1:36:38Speaker 00

  kind of health benefits and, you know, there's a kind of like bravado and like kind of power that comes from it as well. But I think, I think for me at least, this part of the draw is there's a sense of aliveness and also a sense of, of like empowerment. I think a lot of people feel like they are, going back to what we were talking about earlier, they're kind of victims of the world, of reality in different ways. And by learning how to overcome the intensity of the reaction to the cold and to be able to sit with it, if they can do that in the cold, then they can do it in other areas of life as well. And so I think there's probably a combination of those two.

• 1:37:19Rangan Chatterjee?

  The growing rise of coffee shops and cafe culture.

• 1:37:25Rangan Chatterjee?

  What does our caffeine consumption say about the state of our nervous system?

• 1:37:30Speaker 00

  Yeah, I love the taste of coffee myself and I've so I have nothing against coffee. But I will say that when there's caffeine in our system, it creates, it releases hormones, which actually make it more difficult to feel our interoceptive sensations. There's a way in which the adrenaline and the cortisol and things, they numb our bodies. And so my sense is that as well as the kind of drive towards productivity and getting stuff done and all the reasons people take coffee, I think that there's a, there's a way in which it also numbs us somewhat against what we're experiencing moment to moment. And people will, will notice that like if maybe if they stop taking coffee, they might

• 1:38:12Speaker 00

  start to feel things again that maybe they've been not wanting to feel for a while.

• 1:38:17Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah, it's interesting. I love a cup of coffee as much as the next person. But if I'm drinking too much, I just feel it all going up into my head, not the coffee. I feel I experience the world much more through my head and I'm less grounded.

• 1:38:33Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:38:35Rangan Chatterjee?

  And I think, I could be wrong, maybe it's my childhood memory, but I don't think there was this kind of epidemic of coffee shops. Now, to be clear, I love a coffee shop as much as the next person, right? At the same time, I do think it says something about the state of society, you know, go, go, go, productivity, you know, no resting, pushing through. And then what I also think many of us do is that we lean on epidemiological studies showing that coffee consumption is associated with lower risk of Alzheimer's and, you know, a whole host of other things, lower risk of type 2 diabetes. And for many people, that is a license to drink more than actually is good for us and our nervous system.

• 1:39:19Rangan Chatterjee?

  So I, whilst I acknowledge those studies, and I don't inherently think there's anything wrong with caffeine, in balance with the rest of your lifestyle and your nervous system, I do think for many people, they've got fried nervous systems, they're not resting and switching off enough, they've accumulated a ton of emotional debt, right? They don't feel their emotions and they're using caffeine to allow them to keep going.

• 1:39:47Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's that, and I would add something else to this as well, which is that.

• 1:39:52Speaker 00

  People learn to feel safe in that stimulated state.

• 1:39:56Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah.

• 1:39:57Speaker 00

  And that actually, starting to rest and downshift feels unsafe in their system. And often, when they begin to, it will start to bring up some of those, again, like, things that don't feel good, or, and then they will find another way to kind of stay stimulated, to avoid actually deeply resting.

• 1:40:15Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah, I mean, I'm experiencing a version of that at the moment, right? I'm on the back of a, you know, a busy and outward focusing six to eight months with book launch and national tour. It's all been great, right? I want to experience life and see how I respond in different scenarios. At the same time, I would say one of my crutches, when I've got a lot on, tends to be coffee. If I'm being completely honest with myself, I know that my intake has just crept up a little bit over the last few months in a way that's not fully in balance with my nervous system, or, nor is it in balance with the person I want to be.

• 1:40:56Speaker 00

  Hmm.

• 1:40:57Rangan Chatterjee?

  And I'm, it's funny, when you said that, I think sometimes, I can totally recognize that where you have it, and then you, you feel a bit more stimulated, you're like, oh, this is my safe space, because this is where I've been for the last few months.

• 1:41:09Speaker 00

  Yeah, totally.

• 1:41:10Rangan Chatterjee?

  And it's almost leaning into that discomfort of going, no, well, yeah, you might feel a bit fatigued.

• 1:41:15Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:41:15Rangan Chatterjee?

  But that's okay. You don't necessarily need to caffeinate your fatigue every time. It's okay to experience tiredness, right? And not be in that stimulated state, which, I don't know, I find it quite interesting.

• 1:41:27Speaker 00

  Yeah, no, I think it's fascinating. And the key thing that I want to kind of, maybe for listeners to take away is, it's great to be in those states. I mean, you've just done like a UK tour, you've been on stage, like, that is kind of the peak of, I'd say like a healthy sympathetic state, where you need to be activated to be on stage and to give a performance. But what is key is, So we haven't really talked about this, but I think about capacity and resilience. Capacity is how grounded can you stay even when there's like intensity moving through your system? And being on stage and doing a live show is a good example. But then resilience is how efficiently, how effectively can you downshift?

• 1:42:09Speaker 00

  And that's the skill that I think most people are missing and kind of need to actively train. And so I'm a big fan of NSDR, which Schubertman has popularized, non-sleep, deep rest, Yoganidra. There's many different ways of doing it, but learning how to go from that activated state. And it's almost like the more activated you are, you need to be equally deeply resting. So if you've been go, go, go for kind of like two or three months, you'll, you'll need to have a period of time where you're like deeply resting and recovering for almost an equal period of time. Cause we're like cyclical beings and it's great to be able to kind of show up with that intensity. But if you don't also rest with that same intensity, it will become burnout over time.

• 1:42:53Speaker 00

  I just, an image popped into my mind of the Olympic athlete who was on the horse. And before he went to perform and won a gold medal, he was literally asleeping, like minutes before he was about to perform. And we, we think about like athletes know that recovery is just like crucial to their, their performance. But we don't really think about it as like cognitive athletes or, or podcast hosts. Like we need to prioritize recovery as much as we're prioritizing performance.

• 1:43:20Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah, it's so interesting. Just to make it really practical for people though, who maybe don't have as much autonomy with their life or their job. Right? This is what Sundays used to be for people.

• 1:43:31Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:43:32Rangan Chatterjee?

  Right?

• 1:43:32Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:43:32Rangan Chatterjee?

  Sundays before all the shops were open, before internet shopping.

• 1:43:36Speaker 00

  Or social media.

• 1:43:37Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah, you know, Sundays, I remember, I'm sure it's the same for you growing up as a kid. You know, Sundays, nothing much happened. There was Formula One on the television. It was like, it might be a football match of the day special, like.

• 1:43:48Speaker 00

  Go for a walk in the park.

• 1:43:49Rangan Chatterjee?

  Supermarkets were shut.

• 1:43:50Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:43:51Rangan Chatterjee?

  Like you couldn't do, there was enforced family time and chill out time into that seven day cycle. I think that's one of the most toxic things about the modern world is how those, those natural rest periods have just been obliterated.

• 1:44:06Speaker 00

  I mean, coming back to societal trends, I think that the.

• 1:44:11Speaker 00

  The ability to set boundaries is now such an essential skill because you need to now actively design that into your life because if you're just passive and you don't have some degree of intentionality, you will just be in this perpetual like go, go, go activated state because there's always going to be more stimulation coming towards you. You really have to kind of protect your spaces, your time on an hourly level, daily level, weekly, monthly level. It's a practice on all scales of time, I think.

• 1:44:39Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah. Jonny, I love talking to you. I really think what you're doing is incredible. I think you've got a very unique take on the nervous system and how we can start to tackle it. You've got two things, don't you, out there for people? You've got the nervous system mastery course, that five-week course, and you've got the NSQ, the nervous system quotient, right? Can you just talk us through what those things are and how people who want to learn more from you can access them?

• 1:45:06Speaker 00

  Yeah, totally. So the NSQ was basically my attempt to design a self-assessment that gives people a sense of, like benchmarks of where their nervous system is at in these kind of four categories that we've been talking about.

• 1:45:18Rangan Chatterjee?

  So like a score for your nervous system?

• 1:45:19Speaker 00

  Yeah, you literally get a score. You get a score out of a hundred in these different areas. And some are green, some might be orange. And then we've designed it so that you'll get kind of practices designed to help improve the lowest areas through kind of email. And it's all totally free as well.

• 1:45:33Rangan Chatterjee?

  So how can people do that if they want to do that?

• 1:45:35Speaker 00

  So if they go to, the website is ns mastery.com.

• 1:45:39Rangan Chatterjee?

  So NS standing for nervous system?

• 1:45:40Speaker 00

  Exactly.

• 1:45:41Rangan Chatterjee?

  Okay, ns mastery.com.

• 1:45:42Speaker 00

  And in the top right, I think, is the self-assessment button. And then if people are interested, there's more information about the five-week cohort of nervous system mastery that's when we go into all the stuff we've been talking about, interceptions, self-regulation, emotional fluidity, in a kind of community-based approach. So there's live cohorts, live sessions, guest speakers as well. And yeah, it's my attempt to really like distill all of the practices we've been talking about in a kind of actionable, kind of condensed way that is also compatible with people's busy lives. So we have like founders, CEOs, parents, you know, all kinds of people from all over the world take it.

• 1:46:23Rangan Chatterjee?

  I mean, who doesn't want a better nervous system, right? A more balanced nervous system?

• 1:46:27Speaker 00

  I'm biased, but I would agree.

• 1:46:29Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah, it's kind of a universal skill, I think. Most of us would like to master at some point. I, you know, if you really think about life and the nervous system,

• 1:46:41Rangan Chatterjee?

  you know, it really is the master control switch of how we view the world, how we experience the world, isn't it?

• 1:46:46Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:46:47Rangan Chatterjee?

  And I guess not enough people are paying attention to what their nervous system is doing, so they feel in that reactive mode all the time, thinking that that's the only way to exist.

• 1:46:57Speaker 00

  And I mean, we just weren't taught these things growing up. Like, I wasn't, you know, I only found out about it in the last like 10 years or so. But I mean, imagine if these practices were in schools or taught by parents or taught by young people, there'd be less like unlearning that has to happen.

• 1:47:13Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah, well, I think what you're doing is incredible.

• 1:47:17Rangan Chatterjee?

  You know, for someone who has been listening to this conversation, Johnny, and they're like, okay, I'm not really paid much attention to my nervous system, but I'm definitely someone who's stuck in my head. And when I first heard Johnny say, where am I feeling that in my body? I didn't have a clue what he was talking about, right? Hopefully, they understand it now. You've mentioned a variety of different practices, but for that person who's never felt what it's like to be in their body and they want to start, what would you say to them?

• 1:47:50Speaker 00

  Yeah, I would say just start super simple.

• 1:47:55Speaker 00

  Kind of first thing in the morning before, before you check your phone, kind of some time between waking up and leaving the house, just set a timer for five minutes and do what I call an interceptive weather report. So just, just like an internal check in of like, how is my mind? Busy thoughts, like stories about things? How is my awareness? How is my posture? Do I feel tired? Do I feel energized? And then like, what is the kind of, what is the mood? Is there like an emotional tone? Am I noticing any sensations? And even just that kind of brief check in on a daily basis will compound over time. And you will start to gradually be more aware of what is happening internally

• 1:48:40Speaker 00

  when you're going about your day, maybe when you're stressed out, maybe if challenging things arise. And it really just is a practice that gets way, way, way easier over time.

• 1:48:52Rangan Chatterjee?

  What's interesting for me is that you don't actually have to do anything

• 1:48:57Speaker 00

  No.

• 1:48:57Rangan Chatterjee?

  with the things that you notice, you're just noticing.

• 1:49:01Speaker 00

  Exactly, yeah.

• 1:49:02Rangan Chatterjee?

  And I think that's, I think that's quite a key, key point

• 1:49:08Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:49:08Rangan Chatterjee?

  for people to really understand it's okay if you're feeling tired or you're feeling sad, but what you're asking people is to train the awareness that that's what's coming on.

• 1:49:19Speaker 00

  Exactly, exactly. And, and this is, we haven't talked about this distinction, but there's this idea of self-unfoldment versus self-improvement. And self-improvement often comes from this premise of there is something in me that is broken or that needs fixing. Whereas self-unfoldment is, is like the impala. It's just like allowing whatever is coming up to be there. And I really think like having this frame of self-unfoldment is so, so helpful for people because you know, things like this check-in, it's just, it's just welcoming and allowing whatever is arising. Maybe you're tired, maybe you are angry at something, maybe you are frustrated, maybe the sadness and that's like, that's all great, that's all welcome.

• 1:50:01Speaker 00

  But the more that you can tune in and listen to the, the feedback and the data of your body, the more in tune you can be and the more regulated and intentional you can kind of show up for what's important to you.

• 1:50:14Rangan Chatterjee?

  Helping us all experience the full breadth of human emotions.

• 1:50:17Speaker 00

  Exactly.

• 1:50:18Rangan Chatterjee?

  Jonny Miller, thank you so much for coming on the show.

• 1:50:20Speaker 00

  Thank you so much. This has been, it's such a pleasure.

• 1:50:27Rangan Chatterjee?

  Really hope you enjoyed that conversation. Do think about one thing that you can take away and apply into your own life. And also have a think about one thing from this conversation that you can teach to somebody else. Remember when you teach someone, it not only helps them, it also helps you learn and retain the information. Now, before you go, just wanted to let you know about Friday 5. It's my free weekly email containing five simple ideas to improve your health and happiness. In that email, I share exclusive insights that I do not share anywhere else, including health advice, how to manage your time better, interesting articles or videos that I've

• 1:51:09Rangan Chatterjee?

  been consuming, and quotes that have caused me to stop and reflect. And I have to say, in a world of endless emails, it really is delightful that many of you tell me it is one of the only weekly emails that you actively look forward to receiving. So if that sounds like something you would like to receive each and every Friday, you can sign up for free at drchatge.com/friday5. Now, if you are new to my podcast, you may be interested to know that I have written five books that have been bestsellers all over the world, covering all kinds of different topics: happiness, food, stress, sleep, behaviour change and movement, weight loss, and so much more. So please do take a moment to check them out.

• 1:51:52Rangan Chatterjee?

  They are all available as paperbacks, ebooks, and as audiobooks, which I am narrating. If you enjoyed today's episode, it is always appreciated if you can take a moment to share the podcast with your friends and family, or leave a review on Apple Podcasts. Thank you so much for listening. Have a wonderful week, and please note that if you want to listen to this show without any adverts at all, that option is now available for a small monthly fee on Apple and on Android. All you have to do is click the link in the episode notes in your podcast app. And always remember, you are the architect of your own health.

• 1:52:33Rangan Chatterjee?

  Making lifestyle change is always worth it, because when you feel better, you live more.