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

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 clip is from episode 569 of the podcast with Jonny Miller - founder of Nervous System Mastery, a 5-week bootcamp where he has taught over a thousand students how to cultivate calm, rewire reactivity and restore aliveness. In this clip he shares why learning to work with your body can change how you respond to stress, reduce reactivity, and help you move from overwhelm to calm. Thanks to our sponsor ⁠⁠⁠https://drinkag1.com/livemore Show notes and the full podcast are available at https://drchatterjee.com/569 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. DISCLAIMER: The content in the podcast and on this webpage is not intended to constitute or be a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Always seek the advice of your doctor or other qualified health care provider with any questions you may have regarding a medical condition. 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.

• 0:00Rangan Chatterjee?

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• 0:41Rangan Chatterjee?

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• 1:20Rangan Chatterjee?

  See all details at drinkag1.com/livemore. Welcome to Feel Better Live More Bite Size, your weekly dose of positivity and optimism to get you ready for the weekend. Today's clip is from episode 569 of the podcast with Johnny Miller, founder of Nervous System Mastery. In this clip, he shares why learning to work with your body can change how you respond to stress, reduce reactivity and help you move from overwhelm to calm.

• 2:01Rangan Chatterjee?

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

• 2:07Rangan Chatterjee?

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

• 2:43Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 2:43Rangan Chatterjee?

  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.

• 3:02Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 3:02Rangan 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?

• 3:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, that's beautifully said. I view the nervous system as a, as literally a lens through which we experience reality. And I think our state of our nervous system and the degree to which we're in a mode of reactivity completely dictates our experience of life. So, yes, I mean, it's like doing reps at a gym, right? It does take practice, but our nervous systems are neuroplastic, like along with our brain. And so with practice, we can rewire these maladaptive responses to stress.

• 3:43Rangan Chatterjee?

  What are some signs, in your view, that might indicate our nervous systems are a little bit out of whack, which may color the way we view the world and change the way we experience life?

• 3:57Speaker 01

  So some signs would include...

• 4:01Speaker 01

  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.

• 4:17Rangan Chatterjee?

  What, that we can't sleep?

• 4:18Speaker 01

  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 01

  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.

• 5:21Rangan 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.

• 5:35Speaker 01

  Totally.

• 5:35Rangan Chatterjee?

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

• 5:43Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 5:43Rangan Chatterjee?

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

• 5:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, beautiful. I I mean, anxiety, I think it's 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.

• 6:20Rangan Chatterjee?

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

• 6:24Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 6:25Rangan Chatterjee?

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

• 6:29Speaker 01

  Totally.

• 6:30Rangan Chatterjee?

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

• 6:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's kind of like a defensive strategy that our nervous system has to constrict against. 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.

• 7:11Speaker 01

  And it can just, if that system opens and they're kind of connected to the breath, then that it's really just energy, like energy in motion that's kind of moving through.

• 7:21Rangan Chatterjee?

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

• 7:26Speaker 01

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

• 7:28Rangan Chatterjee?

  Same tension.

• 7:29Speaker 01

  Mm hmm.

• 7:30Rangan Chatterjee?

  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.

• 7:40Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 7:41Rangan Chatterjee?

  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.

• 7:49Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 7:50Rangan Chatterjee?

  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?

• 8:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, totally. So I think about in the kind of journey of nervous system mastery of kind of working with with your nervous system, there's three kind of core skills that I think about. And the first is is what you exactly what you spoke to, which is kind of. Regaining sensitivity of our internal experience. So it's called interreception 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, uh, there's kind of three ways that I think about self-regulating.

• 8:50Speaker 01

  There's top-down approaches, which might be like cognitive reframes, might be, you know, positive affirmations, mindfulness is a good example. The second is bottom up, which is, this is my favorite, honestly. It's like working with the, or leveraging these levers in our physiology, things like the breath is a really common one, to literally shift our state and create that sense of safety. So bottom up techniques or practices would include things like humming is actually really effective. It increases nitric oxide by, I think, fifteen fold. And it's a vasodilator, which helps with eye strain as well, and helps us kind of downshift into that parasympathetic state. Other things would be long hold stretches, exhale emphasized breathing practices.

• 9:35Speaker 01

  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 kind of calming effect. And another one that you can do is a kind of playing with your awareness. And awareness is, again, something that a lot of people don't think about, but your awareness in any moment can be kind of expansive. You could be aware of like the space, the sides of you, the space above you, below you. Or usually when people get stressed or reactive, the awareness is almost like, it's like looking, experiencing life through a straw that's like just in front of you and very narrow. So you can be aware of the space like behind you, feeling your feet on the ground, attuning to like the sounds around you. And the more that your awareness is kind of expansive, I'm like doing a little bit right now.

• 10:20Speaker 01

  Like, or you can kind of put your hands out and then as you kind of move them behind you, you're kind of expanding your peripheral vision. And that has this kind of expansive effect. And it creates a sense of spaciousness in the system.

• 10:32Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah.

• 10:34Rangan Chatterjee?

  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, you move a certain way. And if you then tune into expanding your vision, softening it, making it more peripheral, your whole movement pattern changes. There's more fluidity, there's more flow. It really helps the way you move.

• 11:15Rangan Chatterjee?

  And we know that your vision is, you know, is super related to the state of your nervous system.

• 11:20Speaker 01

  Totally.

• 11:21Rangan Chatterjee?

  So those practices actually, yeah, they're really helpful to think about. I want to go into some of them in detail, right? But you mentioned this bottom up practices, okay? And before you mentioned top down. So it sounds like there's a variety of different body-based actions, practices that people can do. And is the suggestion for people to play around and experiment with curiosity a variety of these practices? And maybe choose a couple that they really like, that they can practice regularly, that allows them to train this skill of letting go. Is that a useful way to look at it for people?

• 12:06Speaker 01

  I think that's a really useful way to put it. And I think I really emphasize the experiment-based approach. I think in my experience, the bottom up is the most like underappreciated and kind of most ignored. And I do believe it's the most effective if someone is in a state of, their anxiety is ramping up maybe towards a panic attack or they're getting really stressed.

• 12:28Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah.

• 12:28Speaker 01

  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.

• 13:01Speaker 01

  You're not going to make progress over time because I view these practices as a purely a means to get back into our window of tolerance and then to allow the emotion to actually move through because if we're still moving through the world in a way that we are avoiding feeling sadness or anger or grief or whatever the thing is, then we will always be making these predictions that like, oh, that's bad. We're not going to go near that. And so the intensity of our, in which they present in our bodies will just get worse and worse over time and we'll have to do like more and more of these interventions in order to kind of self-regulate. And the third kind of pillar or category is emotional

• 13:43Speaker 01

  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, then the emotion can kind of come through. And it's actually, it's 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.

• 14:27Rangan Chatterjee?

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

• 14:34Speaker 01

  Which is wild, right? Because like.

• 14:35Rangan Chatterjee?

  It is wild.

• 14:36Speaker 01

  We don't think about that normally. And the other thing that I want to bring this back to is this idea of emotion or avoided emotions and specifically emotional debt. Because the more that we go through life and, you know, our nervous systems have this amazing capacity to buffer our emotional responses, which, you know, in many, many situations is super useful. Like, let's say. Someone on the street just like shout to me or I'm in a in a boardroom meeting and I get really angry. It's actually good for me to be able to like suppress that and kind of save it for later. But if I do that, you know, repeatedly over many days or weeks or months, that builds up this emotional debt is what I call it. And

• 15:19Speaker 01

  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 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

• 16:03Speaker 01

  responses, which is contributing to this sense of exhaustion and fatigue and low capacity, basically.

• 16:10Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah, I really like that idea of emotional debt. And this idea that we're not completing our emotional responses.

• 16:18Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 16:18Rangan Chatterjee?

  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 the lion and the impala. So maybe

• 16:29Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 16:29Rangan Chatterjee?

  perhaps use that as a way of helping people understand what it means to complete that stressed response fully.

• 16:36Speaker 01

  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 will have of discharging that intensity and that stress that it just went through. And Humans have kind of forgotten how to do that. There's definitely ways that you can, whether it's through breath work or whether it's through either practice, I call somatic surfing, or even just creating a sense of safety.

• 17:21Speaker 01

  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.

• 17:46Rangan Chatterjee?

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

• 17:55Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 17:55Rangan Chatterjee?

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

• 18:01Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 18:01Rangan Chatterjee?

  So we're feeling reactive over something. We can learn some top down practices or some bottom up practices to reduce that reactivity and perhaps reduce how much we react to that stimulus.

• 18:18Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 18:18Rangan Chatterjee?

  In the future.

• 18:19Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 18:20Rangan 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.

• 18:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 18:33Rangan 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.

• 18:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly.

• 18:46Rangan Chatterjee?

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

• 18:52Speaker 01

  Precisely.

• 18:52Rangan Chatterjee?

  So going back to your example about the wild and how mammals will complete that stress response. I'm guessing the impala, they've just got this intuitive mechanism that perhaps we have had before and we've lost, right? Of shaking it out of their system so that they're free afterwards.

• 19:13Speaker 01

  Right.

• 19:14Rangan Chatterjee?

  Makes you think of. This movement deprived Western world in which many of us live, right? And we talk about the benefits of physical activity for our hormones or our physical health. There's more talk these days about what physical activity does for our mental wellbeing. But as you were talking, I thought, do you think that one of the reasons why movement, whether it be walking or running or going to the gym, makes us feel so good? Is because it completes or it helps us complete a stress response that may have been left partially uncompleted within our bodies?

• 19:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, 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. 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.

• 20:18Rangan Chatterjee?

  Hope you enjoyed that bite sized clip. Do spread the love by sharing this episode with your friends and family. And if you want more, why not go back and listen to the original full conversation with my guest? If you enjoyed this episode, I think you will really enjoy my bite sized Friday email. It's called the Friday Five. And each week I share things that I do not share on social media. It contains five short doses of positivity, articles or books that I'm reading, quotes that I'm thinking about, exciting research I've come across and so much more. I really think you're going to love it. The goal is for it to be a small, yet powerful dose of feel good to get you ready for the weekend.

• 21:00Rangan Chatterjee?

  You can sign up for it free of charge at drchattity.com forward slash Friday Five. I hope you have a wonderful weekend. Make sure you have pressed subscribe and I'll be back next week with my long form conversation on Wednesday and the latest episode of Bite Science next Friday.