Managing nerves, anxiety, and burnout | Jonny Miller (Nervous Systems Mastery)

Jonny Miller: I have this idea that I call the feather brick dump truck phenomenon, and basically what that means is when we are showing early signs of burnout, our body will give us feedback usually in subtle ways in the beginning. So the feather might be waking up in the morning and feeling a little bit tired, maybe a little bit exhausted. The brick, maybe you ignore that or you don’t notice it, and then three or four weeks later, you have a fight with someone or an argument, or you just feel frustrated and terrible and you lose your cool. And then maybe the dump truck is a month later, or even a year later, there’s a full-blown health crisis, or you develop type two diabetes or there’s a whole range of things, or maybe you get fired. Ideally, you want to notice when it’s the feather and then make adjustments or shift then and not have to wait until you experience the full-blown pain of the dump truck, which unfortunately is what happens to a lot of people, especially when they experience burnout for the first time.

Meet the Guest

Lenny: Today, my guest is Jonny Miller. Jonny teaches courses and does one-on-one coaching with tech professionals helping them with something he calls Nervous System Mastery, which is essentially a set of tools and techniques for cultivating calm, upgrading your resilience, and increasing your aliveness. If you can get better at dealing with stressful situations, avoiding burnout and being more confident in meetings and big presentations, it becomes a superpower and a huge advantage in both business and in life. I actually read a post by Jonny about a year ago, and it totally changed the way that I think about nervousness and stress, and I still apply many of his lessons today.

Jonny, thank you so much for being here. Welcome to the podcast.

Jonny Miller: It’s great to be here, Lenny.

Why Study the Nervous System

Lenny: So I read this post that you wrote, I think it was over a year ago at this point. It was called The Operating Manual for Your Nervous System, and first of all, blew my mind when I read it. Second of all, I always think about it when I get nervous or anxious in a situation, it’s really stuck with me. And I know that people in the workplace often get nervous and anxious doing all hand presentations, meetings, performance reviews, all the things. So I thought it’d be awesome just to dive into the stuff that you’ve uncovered about how we can become less nervous and less anxious. Before we get into the meat of it, I’d love to just spend a couple minutes just getting a sense of why you got into this stuff. What actually got you to spend so much of your energy and life force trying to understand how the nervous system works, how to get people to be less nervous and anxious.

Top-Down vs. Bottom-Up Approaches

Jonny Miller: My story starts in I kind of have a background in tech. I had a startup, we went through Techstars back in 2012. About five and a half years into that experience, I went through burnout, which is pretty common in the startup world, but that actually wasn’t the trigger for me. I find that usually people that get into this type of work, there’s some kind of catalyst or some kind of challenging life event. And for me, that was October 23rd, 2017, and my fiance at the time had an anxiety attack and she took her own life. And that completely just destroyed me at the time. And I realized that I’d been so disconnected from my body and my emotions, and it sent me on this five plus year journey to discover all of this inner landscape that I’d been numb from the neck down, and I went into breathwork meditation retreats, did hundreds of breathwork journeys, researched with a breath lab over in Bali, and basically just kind of directed all of my focus and attention onto understanding this inner landscape that I’d been pretty much oblivious to. And since then, I’ve been working with founders, executives, running courses and teaching what I’m learning and hopefully still researching at the same time as well.

Lenny: Wow. And I imagine the thinking was that if your wife had these skills, she would’ve had another path.

How Breathing Shifts Your State

Jonny Miller: Yeah, that was definitely part of it, yeah. And also just since realizing how many people are struggling with anxiety, depression, all of this kind of constellation of mental health challenges both in the workplace and at home as well. And yeah, it’s been a very rewarding journey.

Why Breathing Is So Effective

Lenny: All right, this episode’s already gotten very heavy and I’m sucked in. I’m excited to learn all these things that you’ve uncovered. So let’s just get into the meat of it. Just talk about this kind of general method that you’ve found for how to help people become less nervous and anxious.

Jonny Miller: So I find this top down, bottom up distinction to be incredibly helpful. Most people when they try to calm down, they use tactical reframes or maybe mindfulness or maybe reframing the situation in a positive light. There’s lots of different practices that people use which do have some effect. But in my experience, working with the physiology, using what’s known as a bottom up approach, primarily using the breath, although there’s also other approaches that you can use, it’s just such a rapidly more effective way of shifting your state.

And to give a little bit of context and maybe some science as well, we have what’s known as afferent and efferent neurons going up and down our body, and there’s four times more afferent neurons going from the body to the brain as from the brain to the body. So you can almost imagine there’s a super highway of traffic of information going up to the brain and four times less going from the brain to the body. And so by learning how to pull on the levers of our physiology, we can rapidly change our state. And then from there, by changing our state, that impacts the thoughts and feelings that we have. So instead of trying to change the story or trying to fix something or trying to solve something, which is what most people do by default, myself included in the past, if you change your state first, then there’s a cascading effect which changes your thoughts and your feelings.

State Before Narrative

Lenny: Okay, amazing. Yeah, and just to share how I felt when I was reading this and try to understand this approach is whenever I get nervous, there’s always this like, oh, my body’s starting to feel anxious. And then I think of a reason. Oftentimes, I don’t know why it gets nervous, why my body’s starting to create this feeling of anxiety. And then I often realize I’m just now trying to just explain why it happened, “Oh, I have this big meeting coming up, or I have this podcast episode I’m nervous about, or I’m not going to make a deadline for my newsletter.” I often experience this where it’s just like, “Oh, something feels nervous.” And then, “Okay, here’s the explanation.” So maybe just along those lines, what else is there that might be helpful for people to think about in this context?

Live Practice: The 4-4-8 Breath

Jonny Miller: I mean, I think it’s helpful to understand the process by which, by changing the way that we breathe, for example, it shifts our physiological state and changes our nervous system. So if you’re listening to this, maybe you, Lenny, you can try this as well. If you start breathing into your upper chest and shallow fairly, fairly rapid, maybe even through the mouth, that will then there’s a part of your brain called the insular cortex, which is basically constantly spying on the way that we’re breathing and it will register that change, it will then send information to activate the endocrine system, which then creates shift in our blood chemistry. The sympathetic nervous system gets activated and that increase in adrenaline and cortisol starts to flood your body. Everyone’s probably very familiar with that feeling. And then that will then have a cascading impact on the thoughts that you’re having and the way that you feel. And so you just shared, we have a tendency to kind of confabulate or make up stories that match the state that we are in. And so that’s kind of what happens when we’re breathing in that way. And then you can also consciously change your breath to breathe in a different way, which has the reverse effects, which I can go into, but I’ll pause there.

Building Your Personal Breath Toolkit

Lenny: Yeah. So I think one of the big actionable takeaways here is that instead of trying to convince yourself, “No, this talk is going to go great, I don’t need to worry about how I’m going to look in this meeting.” Basically instead of going top down, trying to calm your body through thought, your advice is calm your body first because then your mind will notice, “Hey, I’m actually not as nervous as I thought. Maybe things are going to be okay.” Is that right?

Physiological Sighs and Up-Regulation

Jonny Miller: Yeah, precisely. And I mean I’ve used this myself many times before presentations. I gave a TEDx talk a few years ago and I was like my entire body, I was just terrified. And I did in 15 minutes of this breathing practice before and walked on stage almost cool as a cucumber. It’s very effective.

Lenny: Sounds too good to be true. But we’re going to do some of these exercises for people. Before we get into, why is it that breath specifically so powerful? It feels like such a strange thing to work so well, just this idea of breathing in a different way. You talked a bit about this, I forget what you called it, that kind of watches how you’re breathing. But I guess what else can you share about just why is breath so effective in changing our state?

The Espresso Breathing Technique

Jonny Miller: Sure. Well, it’s one of the few things which happens automatically, but we can also control it consciously. And so what scientists have discovered that when the exhale is twice as long as the inhale, it has a calming effect. And when the inhale is either more intense or twice as long as the exhale, it has an activating effect. So you can kind of think of this as an up or down lever on the nervous system.

An On-the-Go Breath Toolkit

Lenny: You also have this really clever way of describing this system. You call it state over story, essentially focusing on the state of your body versus the story you’re telling yourself. Is that the way to think about it? And can you just talk about that concept?

Jonny Miller: Yeah, so it’s basically a shorthand for what we’ve just been talking about, which is most people tend to approach the problem or try to solve things on the level of story. So there’s multiple ways you can do that through the breath as we just talked about. You can also defocus your gaze and kind of relax your eyes, and that has a similar effect. It can expand your awareness and kind of bring your awareness to behind you and the sides of you and below you, or you can breathe in these ways which emphasize the exhale. And so when we breathe in a way with say the exhale twice as long as the inhale, that part of the brain, the insular cortex then sends signals to the parasympathetic nervous system, which then has the cascading effect on our endocrine system and calms us down. And what I usually find as well is that the kind of reactive thoughts and feelings that we have when we are in that kind of anxious loop, they can be self-reinforcing. And so if someone has a thought of like, “Oh no, I’m nervous before this important presentation.” Then that exacerbates the breathing pattern and then the whole thing just goes into this spiral, which can end up in full-blown panic attacks if there’s not an intervention of some sorts.

Interoception: Your Sixth Sense

Lenny: Yeah, that’s what I find with my nerves. I hate talking on stage. I get nervous before every podcast. This is not my natural state.

Jonny Miller: Interesting.

Applying APE in Daily Life

Lenny: Yeah, and I hide it well.

Interoception and Its Link to Burnout

Jonny Miller: Is that still the case with podcast today?

What Is Emotional Debt?

Lenny: Absolutely. And it’s like different levels of nervousness, but it’s always just like, “Oh, there we go.” I’m not a performer person. Even I kind of push myself to do this podcast as a way to get better at this, to be honest. So it’s still a thing that I think about. And what I find is the nervousness comes from exactly what you described is the nervousness of being nervous. I don’t know, there’s no reason specifically to be anxious, but I don’t know how I’ll be once I do the thing. So it’s nervous of what it might look like or end up being like. So that’s exactly what I ran into.

Jonny Miller: Yeah. And there’s obviously people say mindfulness, meditation, things like that, that can increase the psychological space between stimulus and response. And that is something that obviously does help over the long term, but it’s in my opinion, nowhere near as rapid and effective and efficient as just changing the way that you’re breathing.

The Role of Somatic Therapy

Lenny: Awesome. So let’s get into it. I know you have a couple exercises specifically for this, and then we’ll go from there.

Jonny Miller: We can stack a few of the exercises and I’ll try and keep it to a minute or so. So yeah, if you want to get comfy in your chair and sit up straight, feel your butt on the seat, and I find it helpful to kind of be aware of the space behind you and above you as well, kind of expanding your awareness so that you are aware of the space behind to the sides and above.

Signs of Accumulating Emotional Debt

Lenny: And should we close your eyes?

Jonny Miller: Yeah, and close your eyes down. If you’re listening and driving, obviously don’t do that. But yeah, closing the eyes down for sure helps. And now we’re just going to do simple breath. We’re going to inhale in through the nose for four. We’re going to hold the breath at the top for four, and we’re going to exhale for eight, and then we’re going to repeat. So let the breath go and inhaling through the nose. Inhale, 2, 3, 4, hold the breath, 2, 3, 4. And exhale, 8, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8. Inhale, 2, 3, 4, hold the breath, 2, 3, 4, and exhale, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8. And now you can let go of the breath completely and we’ll end with one round of humming, which is surprisingly effect of it calming as well. So take a full breath in and humming through the nose all the way to the end of exhale. Let out a sigh if that feels good and open up your eyes.

Emotions and Decision-Making Ability

Lenny: I feel extremely calm. I should do this every podcast episode before we start.

The Cost of Emotional Buffering

Jonny Miller: A note on the humming. It also releases nitric oxide, which is a vasodilator, and that helps to create that kind of calming effect and it also reduces eye tension as well. So I’ll do it if I’ve been looking to screen for too long. It’s really good for kind of reducing eye fatigue as well.

Lenny: And there’s also a vagus nerve component to it because your body’s vibrating, is that true?

Non-Sleep Deep Rest (NSDR)

Jonny Miller: Yeah, precisely. So it kind of tones or stimulates the vagus nerve, which stimulates the parasympathetic nervous system.

The Minimum Viable Daily Practice

Lenny: What’s your advice for doing this? Is this before you go into a big meeting or a presentation? How do you apply this?

Jonny Miller: I kind of like to share building a toolkit of different practices that are appropriate for different contexts. So something like the 4, 4, 8 breathing, you could do pretty much anywhere without anyone necessarily noticing. Humming is slightly more obvious, but if you’re about to jump on a zoom or something, you can totally do it with your eyes closed. Things like expanding your awareness or bringing your awareness down to your feet and your hands, which creates a kind of grounding calming effect that also you can do if you’re in a busy room. Maybe you have social anxiety, even orienting and labeling things that you are hearing and feeling, kind of bringing the awareness and attention back into the body that also has an effect. And then there’s longer practices for say, non-sleep deep rests, belly breathing, things that you can do if you have 10, 20 minutes and you’re at home and you want a downshift.

So I like to kind of give people a big toolkit to see what works for them and then cherry-pick which ones are suitable to different situations. And another way that I think about this is, I call it, if this, then breathe. So it’s like if I feel overwhelmed, then I do the humming. If I feel anxious, then I do 4, 4, 8 breathing or alternate nostril breathing and kind of having my own little recipe set that I have for different context is really helpful and I work with people to kind of build those toolkits themselves.

Understanding Meditation and NSDR

Lenny: This sounds like it needs to be a website where people can go with these lists of if this, then that is there a place that we could send people in the show notes and if not, you should make one before we go live.

Jonny Miller: There is not currently. It’s part of the curriculum in the course that I have, but-

The Body Keeps the Score

Lenny: Okay, great.

Jonny Miller: … I can maybe see if I can spin one up as well, but yeah.

Some Counterintuitive Viewpoints

Lenny: Okay, cool. We’ll link to the course if nothing else. Amazing.

Jonny Miller: Okay.

Lightning Round Q&A

Lenny: Along this line of calming breath exercise, Huberman also has a different version, which I’ve tried and I’m going to do both now. You breathe in fully and then you breathe in a little bit more. I imagine you’ve seen that piece of advice?

Jonny Miller: That’s also fantastic. He calls it the physiological sigh, and it’s both very effective, especially if you just have five seconds and you just take a full sigh, it’s great. I’d also add that the sigh happens naturally as a result of doing these downshifting practices. So if you notice after you do let’s say the 4, 4, 8 breathing, at the end, you might naturally just want to let out a sigh, and that’s a signal that your body is naturally downshifting. Or if you are with a friend and you feel just comfortable and relaxed, then your body might sigh. And it’s something that we do a lot and as you say, you can consciously do it and that will help as well. That’s another one of the practices.

Favorite Products and Tools

Lenny: Awesome. So link to that. And I think throughout this episode, as you said, we’re going to give people a bunch of tools that they can use, and it feels like some are in the moment, “I need to feel calmer right now. Here’s a thing you could do.” And then there’s things you can do ongoing that build… I guess another way to think about it’s just make your body more calm as a baseline of practice to work on there.

Jonny Miller: Yeah, precisely.

Words to Live By

Lenny: Awesome, okay. I think the other breathing exercise we’re going to do is the opposite. Gets you all excited, is that right?

Jonny Miller: Yeah, sure. We can do that as well. I call this espresso breath. So this is the opposite. This is very activating. I would only recommend this if you’re feeling lethargic or maybe instead of drinking a coffee in the afternoon, you could do this for a minute or so. In the scientific literature, it’s bellows breath or breath of fire, and it basically looks like a series of rapid exhales through the nose. I like to keep it through the nose only if you do it through the mouth, it can be very too activating and it can kind of overwhelm people. Obviously, there’s the Wim Hof practice that I’m sure many people are familiar with. So this is a more gentle version of… If Wim Hof is like Red Bull, this is kind of like a small coffee.

What Makes Jonny Uneasy

Lenny: I like that. And you call it the espresso breath, espresso breath.

Jonny Miller: Espresso breath, yeah.

Where to Find Jonny Online

Lenny: So yeah, that’s a good metaphor there.

Jonny Miller: Yeah, yeah. So yeah, let’s do it. So again, kind of sit up straight, and this time you want to be pumping the breath from your lower belly and you pump the breath on the exhale. So I’ll demonstrate it briefly. It’s like breathe in.

Okay. So yeah, take a full breath in and begin.

And let go. And full breath in. And sigh on the exhale. I already feel a little bit tingly.

Lenny: I’m energized. Let’s do this. Go, go, go, go. That was great. Okay, look at that. We’re back to where we started with the full circle of energy. That was great.

Jonny Miller: Up and down.

Lenny: And then how long do you recommend doing that one for?

Jonny Miller: So it kind of depends on how activating you find it, but I usually find 30 breaths per round and then take a breath, have a long pause on the exhale, and then if you want to do another round or two.

Lenny: Amazing. And the cases where this might be helpful is maybe you’re about to give a big talk, I guess in a talk you both want energy and want calm, so that’s kind of complicated.

Jonny Miller: Especially if you are meetings early in the morning and you haven’t quite got going yet, you can do the espresso breath to begin with and that activates you. And then do some of the downshifting practices to kind of ground and stabilize that aliveness.

Lenny: Are there any other tactical breathing exercises that are worth doing real quick? I know we’ll get into some longer practices and deeper stuff, but is there anything else that would be helpful here?

Jonny Miller: No, I think we’ve covered the bases. I don’t want to overwhelm people too much.

Lenny: Just as a takeaway, there’s these two techniques. One to help you get more calm when you need to be calm in the moment. The other is to get energy. And then I guess are these things that you recommend doing ongoing to build this muscle in your body or are these mostly for you need this now in the moment and it’s not worth just doing a few times a day even when you’re fine?

Jonny Miller: Yeah, great question. So I like to recommend both a morning practice, particularly to build the muscle of just doing it and getting used to it. So maybe five minutes in the morning before you start work, before breakfast, something like that. And then you are more likely to remember that you have access to that in the moment because usually the challenge is that when someone is in that flustered state, remembering to do the practice is often the last thing that comes to mind. So by having a deliberate practice for at least 7 to 10 days and so that you get the hang of it, then it feels much more natural to do it when you’re feeling. That’s kind of like playing the game on hard mode when you are really stressed and anxious, that’s when you need it the most, but it’s also when you’re least likely to remember to do it.

Lenny: Awesome. Okay, so the first exercise to calm you down is essentially breathe in four seconds, hold it for four seconds, breathe out slowly for eight seconds and do that for about 30 seconds, is that right? Or for a minute?

Jonny Miller: Yeah, I’d say for at least a minute or two. We kind of did a shorter version. I’ll also add that the important thing is that the exhale is twice as long as the inhale. So if exhaling for eight is too long, you could do 3, 3, 6 or even 2, 2, 4 or even 5, 5, 10 depending on your lung capacity essentially and your CO2 tolerance.

Lenny: Okay, good to know. And then the espresso breath, when you need energy or you just kind of pump air out of your belly through your nose and you do that for how long would you recommend?

Jonny Miller: Two to three rounds of 30 pumps, yeah.

Lenny: And again, the reason this is effective and powerful is coming back to your original big insight that our state is driven by what our body is doing and our mind often explains what we’re feeling based on what our body’s doing. So that if you can change the state of your body and become less nervous in your body, your mind will be like, “All right, everything’s fine.”

Jonny Miller: Yeah. And maybe something that we haven’t touched on yet, but I think is important to add in is this idea of interoception or somatic awareness. And the reason I bring it in is because if you do this practice but you’re not really aware of your body and how you feel, then it’ll be less compelling to you. But if you’re kind of tuned into like sensations in your body, what’s going on, you’re more likely to notice the difference in the shifts.

Lenny: Great. So let’s get into that. That was something I definitely wanted to touch on here. This awesome acronym to help you with this process of interoception. So talk about what that is and then how to actually go about becoming better at being aware of what your body’s doing.

Jonny Miller: Yeah. So it’s this idea of interoception, which is known as our sixth sense, and basically it’s our ability to sense, track and feel our internal landscape. And I like to use the metaphor of a chef in the same way that you train your flavor palette for kind of sweet, spicy, umami, things like that. You can also train your interoceptive palette and become more aware of the internal sensations, whether that’s your breath, whether it’s tension, whether it’s moods and emotions, whether it’s the quality of your awareness, the quality of your thoughts. And the more kind of in tune with that you are, the more likely you are to notice the kind of early warning signs of something like anxiety. Because usually, certainly a panic attack doesn’t come out of nowhere. There will be a kind of cascade of subtle things that happen in your body that eventually result in anxiety. And so if you can catch those things early and kind of nip them in the bud and do one of these practices, then you can avoid the kind of 10 out of 10 worst case scenarios.

Lenny: Okay, awesome. So I know that there’s also specific things you recommend people pay attention to, to understand what their body is doing in this process of inter…

Jonny Miller: Interoception, yeah,

Lenny: Interra… Okay. What is it?

Jonny Miller: Interoception.

Lenny: Interoception.

Jonny Miller: As opposed to exteroception, which is awareness of all the external stimuli.

Lenny: Got it. I guess before we even get to that, so you mentioned that it’s another sense we have, and I think that’s a really important point that I think maybe people didn’t catch. So we have these five senses, obviously taste and smell and vision and touch. But you’re finding and research showed basically this is another sense people don’t really know we have.

Jonny Miller: Yeah, exactly. And it has been studies quite a lot, especially in the last decade or so. And there’s a number of interesting findings from the research that I found. One being that ADHD tends to correlate with low levels of interoception, as does if people have PTSD or trauma. Again, interoception is lowered. And I’d certainly say for myself, for the first 25 years of my life, I was fairly numb from the neck down. I was not very aware to what was happening in my body in real time. I was also reading a book recently called The Hour Between Dog and Wolf, which looked at Wall Street traders and they correlated higher degrees of interception with basically making more money and making better decisions. And I think the thesis was that by tuning into what their body was doing in certain moments, they could pick up on things more intuitive decision making essentially.

Lenny: So I think there’s a specific list of things that you recommend people pay attention to, their posture, their breath, things like that. What is that list and then how do we actually do this better?

Jonny Miller: Yeah. So I simplify this to APE, which basically is an acronym which stands for awareness, posture, and emotion. So to kind of go through each one by one. Awareness is, to give an example, I could narrow my awareness and become really focused and just you kind of tense up and it also is quite activating sometimes or you can relax and expand your awareness and be aware of the space above me, the space behind me, the space below me. And that is generally a calming thing. Posture is fairly self-explanatory. But again, our posture affects how we feel. You’re shifting there now. And then emotion, which I include somatic or body-based sensations which arise. So both kind of what is the overall mood and the flavor or the texture that I’m feeling. Like right now, maybe it’s excitement, maybe there’s some joy. I’m noticing there’s some heat in my belly probably from the breathing. Yeah, there’s a little bit of tightness in my lower back from working out yesterday. So just sense kind of mapping that landscape of sensation. And for most people it’s almost like it’s like a [inaudible 00:30:22]. You have those maps of [inaudible 00:30:25] and for a lot of people there’s just these big kind blind spots in their body.

Lenny: And the advice here is, so there’s this acronym APE and the advice is think about these three things when you’re feeling something that you may not, basically something’s going on slash just often come back to this. I imagine just whenever you can think of, “Oh, APE: awareness, posture, emotion.” Is that how to use this?

Jonny Miller: Yeah, exactly. So again, it can be something that you do before you start your day, maybe with a cup of tea. I like to drink tea and just do a body scan essentially and just check each of those three areas. And it’s really valuable, particularly if you are having racing thoughts or something doesn’t feel quite right. Instead of just tackling the problem on the level of the mind dropping down into the body and bringing that into the picture as well, I find to be really helpful.

Lenny: Basically, as often as you can. And generally when things are feeling all off, just remember APE, where’s my awareness? How’s my posture? And then what am I feeling? Am I feeling sad? Am I feeling happy, excited, angry? Things like that. I think you also talk about breath, like you have a list you wrote about this of other things that you might want to pay attention to. Actually finding paying attention to what my breath is doing is really powerful too. So I’m going to try a BAPE version of this or I’m going to try to think about where’s my breath coming from, what am I feeling there?

Jonny Miller: Yeah. So the breath and sensations are two other ones that are really helpful. The breath in particular, often people will… There’s an idea of email apnea when people are checking their emails, they will, without noticing it, start to hold their breath, which is generally a very activating thing to do. Or as I mentioned earlier, if your breath is through the mouth and shallow and into the upper chest, that will also be very activating versus is your breath through the nose? Is it kind of into the belly and into the sides of the rib cage and does it feel easeful? Basically, breathing without tension is ideal.

Lenny: What I think about using this practice is if I were sitting in a meeting and just not feeling amazingly confident, I just come back to this acronym, BAPE or APE, whichever one you want to choose, just like how am I feeling right now? Oh wow, my whole stomach is clenched. I’m maybe nervous about what might happen or I’m not breathing at all, or my posture is really bad. So I think in a meeting would be really helpful Here, maybe you’re about to get on a zoom or an important call or something like that. Maybe a one-on-one. Is there anything else, any other moments that kind of triggers for people of like, “Oh, I should really be aware of what’s happening right now. Let me do an APE exercise.”

Jonny Miller: Yeah, well, just to kind of piggyback on what you just said, if you are about to jump on a meeting and you’re noticing that your stomach is clenched, that’s actually really useful data to be like, “Why is this happening?” Is it your intuition kind of saying that maybe you shouldn’t do this deal with someone or maybe something is off and so it’s a sign to explore that more. Or it could be that you’ve been triggered by something or something that someone said and you’ve only just realized it and then that’s again, more information or something that you can reflect on or go into.

Lenny: Is there anything in your life recently that is an example of this where you’re feeling unsure and maybe you realize, “Oh, here’s what my body’s doing, maybe I should pay more attention to this.”

Jonny Miller: Actually, last week I did a podcast conversation, so I have a podcast myself, and I got off the call and I remember I felt or got off the podcast and I felt pretty exhausted and I felt like there was this kind of tension in my chest. And again, my breath was kind of all over the place and I realized that I had very much over committed myself for that week. I’d scheduled back to back podcast interviews. The podcast wasn’t even the priority for what I’m focusing on in this quarter, so I then made the decision to just push back all my episodes until the summer basically.

Lenny: I love that example. I know that feeling very well.

Jonny Miller: I’m sure.

Lenny: When you wrote about this idea of interoception, you connected it to burnout, and I think you talked about how this is one of the best tools to avoid burnout. Is that right? Am I remembering that right? And if so, how do you think about this burnout and avoiding burnout in general, something a lot of people experience?

Jonny Miller: Yeah, so I have this idea that I call the feather brick dump truck phenomenon. And basically what that means is when we are showing early signs of burnout, our body will give us feedback usually in subtle ways in the beginning. So the feather might be waking up in the morning and feeling a little bit tired, maybe a little bit exhausted. The brick, maybe you ignore that or you don’t notice it, and then three or four weeks later you have a fight with someone or an argument or you just feel frustrated and terrible and you lose your cool. And then maybe the dump truck is a month later or even a year later, there’s a full-blown health crisis, or you develop type two diabetes or there’s a whole range of things, or maybe you get fired. There’s a bunch of different things that can happen, but normally depending on how attuned or depending on someone’s interoceptive capacity, ideally, you want to notice when it’s the feather and then make adjustments or shift then and not have to wait until you experience the full-blown pain of the dump truck, which unfortunately is what happens to a lot of people, especially when they experience burnout for the first time.

Lenny: This is such an important point and such a good way of thinking about it. It reminds me of Andy Johns and the episode we had there of just how long and willing to the episode there of just how all these little things came up along the way and then eventually just became incredibly unsustainable to live the life that he was living.

What are some examples of this feather? So your advice here is just pay attention to these little signs that you’re not living a sustainable life right now. What are some examples of these kind of feathery signs of like maybe I need to change something?

Jonny Miller: Yeah, so I’ll tie this in with a concept that I call emotional debt, which is basically when our nervous system experiences stress, there’s known as a mobilization cycle, and if that cycle isn’t completed or we don’t get to downshift or relax on the other side, that gets stored in the body as allostatic load, which I call emotional debt. And over time, that creates fragility in the nervous system. And so what that fragility can look like is anything from being impacted by small things in a kind of disproportionate way. So noticing that you are more reactive than normal, maybe you’re a little bit more snappy, maybe you get frustrated by little things, maybe your sleep isn’t as good, maybe you wake up not feeling fully rested. Maybe relationships are often, especially intimate relationships are usually a place that this shows up or relationships at work. So those are the classic early warning signs. And then as that emotional debt threshold increases in the same way that say with technical debt, if you’re building a product in the beginning, it’s fine, and in fact it’s even necessary in the beginning. It’s great that our body can buffer the stress response because it allows us to function. But if we don’t pay off that technical debt or emotional debt, then over time it accumulates and it can also come out through health crises, health challenges. It just gets basically progressively worse until that debt is paid off.

Lenny: I feel like a lot of people listening are like, “Yes, I know exactly what you mean.” How does one notice that you’re building emotional debt and then how do you start to release this debt and pay off this debt?

Jonny Miller: What I’ve seen with some of my founder clients and in the research that we did where we interviewed 260 leaders, what can often happen is that emotional debt will increase and increase and increase until it gets to a point where we are well outside what’s known as a window of tolerance. And at that point there’s like a crash. It’s almost like the fuse switch blows and there’s exhaustion. Maybe there’s complete inability to get up off the couch. And for some people, people with large nervous system capacity, they can keep going for five years, maybe 10 years, and they can keep building this up, and it becomes normalized to live in a way where you are always on and never really relaxing or coming down. Or one really key sign actually is if you are not able to naturally downshift or down regulate your nervous system at the end of the day without something like wine or CBD or some kind of external substance, that’s a sign that you kind of reached a certain threshold of emotional debt.

Lenny: And then how does one start to pay off this debt if you’ve spent years just working way too hard, you’ve had a relationship that just isn’t working great, I don’t know. I imagine most people go to therapy and just talk through all these things and try to work through the challenges. What do you recommend if you’re just like, “Man, I feel like I have this, what should I do?”

Jonny Miller: Yeah, well, I mean that’s a big question. I’ll probably get some pushback for this, but I’m not a big fan of talk therapy alone or at least therapy that doesn’t have a somatic or body-based component. And from my understanding of the nervous system and how we store this stress, just talking about things and keeping things on the level of the intellect doesn’t actually address the root of the challenge. What we need to do is create a certain sense of safety to kind of go into those buffered emotional responses and feel them all the way through and allow that mobilization reflex to complete.

And so to kind of give a personal example, when I was living in Bali, I did several hundred breathwork journeys where you breathe in a certain way to get into an altered state, and then in that place, these memories would arise of these things that happened 5, 10 years ago. And my body, it would either move a certain way or the anger would come through. Sometimes there would be sadness or grief. Often there’s a lot of stored emotion that’s held in our body that just needs permission to kind of be felt through and be released. And so for me, it was a journey of coming into right relationship with my anger and my grief, and honestly my shame as well, giving myself permission to feel this gunk that had been stored in my pelvis.

So I’m not saying you have to go to Bali and do 200 breathwork journeys. That’s definitely not… I mean, that’s a path. But first it begins with, as I said, cultivating interoception and even being aware that there is this tension, there are these things in your body. Secondly, having the practices of self-regulation so that if these things come up, you don’t get overwhelmed. You’re able to downshift and ground. And then thirdly, it’s the practice of what I call emotional fluidity, which is basically creating the conditions of welcoming the full spectrum of emotions as they arise. And often it’s very helpful to have a guide or a somatic practitioner, I like somatic experiencing, hakomi, the two modalities I’m a big fan of. And yeah, that’s the journey and a process and it depends how many years you’ve been operating in a slightly numbed way, and it’s different for everyone. But it begins by tuning into and listening to the body and then having honestly curiosity about what is there and just following that curiosity and the body starts to show you what is ready to be seen.

Lenny: I love that it always comes back to the original place we started which is that the way we feel is a very bottom up body-based system, it’s not we feel something and our body gets nervous. It’s our body gets nervous, and they’re like, “Oh, here’s why I’m nervous.” And your advice is just focus a lot on helping your body release the stuff that you’ve built up this debt. And then also just when you’re nervous in the moment, focus on getting your body to a state versus trying to convince your mind now everything’s going to be okay.

Jonny Miller: Exactly.

Lenny: And specifically on the therapy route, just to touch on that, so your advice there is if you were to work with a therapist and you feel a lot of this stuff that we’re talking about is focused on a somatic oriented therapy where it’s body oriented, not just thinking about it and talking through stuff, it’s actually convincing your body, “Here’s a way to helping your body release this debt, essentially.”

Jonny Miller: Yeah. I mean, you can understand in precise detail about whatever the challenge was from 5, 10 and 15 years ago, but if you’re unable to connect it to the correlating sensations in the body… Usually if say, I don’t know, if I was to imagine someone shouted at me yesterday and I think about that, there’s usually a correlating kind of sematic sensation. The neuroscientist Damasio calls it a somatic marker. So by tracking the somatic markers and then either on your own just kind of following that sensation and allowing whatever emotion was present at the time to complete that is the way that we kind of slowly pay off that emotional debt by one process at a time.

Lenny: So maybe coming back to this question of say someone is listening and wondering, am I building emotional debt? Am I ignoring things that are these feathers? What are signs and just, I don’t know, examples of emotional debt being built up of this trauma, whatever you want to call it, being built up in the body? I don’t know, is it just like anytime you feel really nervous, that’s emotional debt? Is it anytime you push something down that you are pretty sure you should deal with in the moment, that’s emotional debt? What are just some examples of what that feels like and looks like?

Jonny Miller: Yeah, so it’s typically different forms of nervous system dysregulation and that shows up as it could be someone’s breathing pattern if they’re constantly in this sympathetic or hypervigilant state, if they’re always tracking for things, looking for the worst case scenario. Another common one, and this is particularly true in the tech sector, is being very much in the head and living in the thoughts and the mind the entire time. And there’s a form of disassociation that happens as a kind of protection mechanism essentially because it’s uncomfortable to be with the sensations in the body. And because our society tends to reward people for solving problems and being in their mind, that is a pattern that continues for many, many years or even decades.

Other ones are, I think the most obvious one for people is emotional reactivity, where your response to a certain situation is disproportionate to what’s happened. So for example, if you said something to me of that doesn’t make any sense, and I was like, I freeze maybe… And this is another important point that most people have two versions of reactivity. Some people will freeze, withdraw, shut down and disconnect, and other people will become more aggressive, become bigger and attack and fight back. And knowing which way you tend to orient, for me, it’s usually shrink and freeze and shut down, knowing what your pattern is and also knowing what the sensations are when this happens, it’s really helpful for you to be like, “Oh, that thing’s happening.” My priority now is to downshift and kind of find a sense of safety basically in the body and then interact, then make the decision, then have the conversation. Because if you can keep going from that place of reactivity, nothing good happens from that place. No great decisions were made from that place. So again, that’s a place where having the interoceptive awareness to know, “Oh, this is what’s going on.” Being able to then downshift your system, kind of access a sense of, “Oh, I’m okay, actually this isn’t so bad.” And then moving on from there is a profoundly practical and just useful skill.

Lenny: Kind of along these same lines, you wrote somewhere this idea that you have a big competitive advantage if you feel the feels is the way you described it. Does that ring a bell? And if so, what can you share around that, just why this is so powerful, especially in the workplace?

Jonny Miller: Yeah, so I think I wrote about this in one of the Every essays. I think the title was The Best Decision-Making Is Emotional. And I basically wanted to kind of poke at the phrase, I think I saw someone on Twitter say, “Fact over feelings, like don’t let emotions ruin good decision making.” And yeah, there’s so much that I can say about this. But basically there was a landmark study by this guy, Damasio, this kind of famous neuroscientist, and he studied a patient called Elliot. And Elliot had a tumor in his brain that was removed and it basically meant that he was unable to feel emotions. So his entire emotional capacity was removed. And Elliot went from being a successful married businessman to divorced, broke and unable to choose what he could have for lunch. He was unable to make the most basic life decisions, and it’s because he didn’t have access to that emotional sense in his brain.

And so our brain is like a prediction making machine, and as I mentioned earlier, there’s this highway of sensory data that’s coming up through the body. And if we don’t listen to that when we are making decisions, then we’re losing out on a lot of information. And what tends to happen, I see this in clients that I work with, is if they are avoiding feeling a certain way, let’s say, that they don’t enjoy feeling conflict or anger, then they will make decisions subconsciously to avoid feeling that way. And it becomes a huge bias and a huge problem because people make decisions because they’re afraid of feeling a certain way. And if you are on the other hand able to just welcome and be with whatever emotions would arise on the other side of a decision, you’re able to decide clearly instead of being skewed one way or the other.

Lenny: Easier said than done.

Jonny Miller: Yeah.

Lenny: Do you find there’s ever a downside to being too in touch with what you’re feeling? I actually not a feeler of what I’m feeling kind of person. I’m pretty stable, partly because I’m not super in tune with what I’m feeling a lot of times, and maybe this is a huge problem that I need to deal with. But I don’t know, it’s worked out okay so far. I guess, do you ever find that sometimes it’s okay, sometimes you don’t need to know exactly every moment anything that’s hurting you or causing you pain?

Jonny Miller: Yeah, it’s a good question. And some people do have a very high interoceptive capacity, and that can be overwhelming. In which case I would recommend focusing on the breathing practices to build that capacity to downshift, so you’re able to just function. And there’s definitely people who are overwhelmed by the stimuli of day-to-day life being out in traffic, like they’re very easily overwhelmed. And for those people working on increasing nervous system capacity to kind of hold that amount of stress, maybe it’s through sauna and cold plunge, maybe it’s through gentle titration of stresses and then downshifting, that’s actually really valuable.

I’d also say that the ability to function well, this applies to a lot of high functioning people, which is probably honestly a lot of your audience. It’s very helpful in the moment to, let’s say something comes up, you want to be able to buffer intense emotions and say, get through the meeting, get through whatever it is. It’s a very helpful skill. But if you don’t, then give yourself spaciousness afterwards to downshift and allow yourself to feel whatever was brought up by that experience, you are going to be adding to this emotional debt over time. And as I mentioned, some people, it might be a year before there’s some kind of breakdown, burnout. Other people, it might be longer. And usually it’s more unfortunate in the longer case because it creates a long-term health crisis and then lower amount of money or time is able to repair the damage that’s been done, which can be really tragic.

Lenny: My chat with Andy Johns is a great example of that happening.

Jonny Miller: Yeah. And Andy’s a superb example, and I love his vulnerability and honesty in what he’s been through.

Lenny: Yeah, I think if you’re interested in this topic, definitely watch that episode. Another exercise that you talk a lot about is this idea, it’s called NSDR, I think. Talk about that and when that might be useful, how to go about using this tool.

Jonny Miller: Yeah, so NSDR was a practice coined by Andrew Huberman, who you mentioned earlier. And it basically, it’s a more scientific lens on the practice of yoga nidra, which is an ancient yoga practice. But I am a huge fan of it, and I do it myself most days for 15 to 20 minutes. Basically what it looks like is you lie down, put on an eye mask or a blindfold, and you listen to a guided audio. I’ve recorded some myself, so I can share these in the show note links.

Lenny: Your voice would be so good for these, by the way. You found your calling.

Jonny Miller: Nice, yeah. It’s really fun for me to do. But basically what it involves is a guided body scan. So this is also a great way to practice interoception. It’s something that I didn’t mention earlier was that when there’s cortisol present in our body, the cortisol basically acts as a numbing agent, so it’s much harder to kind of tune into those sensations. But using this, I think it’s a 14-minute guided NSDR practice, you’re basically lying down, there’s a guided body scan, there’s relaxing music in the background. And by the end of it, you feel like you’ve had a two-hour nap. It feels incredible.

And particularly for people who myself tend to get tired in the afternoons, if you space this out, usually between 1 and 3:00 PM for me, that will give you a second wind in the afternoon and it’ll mean you won’t end the day collapse on the sofa. So I think it’s great for improving interoception, it’s good for allowing your body to downshift and relax instead of being in that kind of high tone sympathetic state all throughout the day. So it gives your body a break, and it just feels really good. Honestly, it’s probably my most played practice of everything that I teach, just people listen to it every day. So I’ll share that in the show notes as well.

Lenny: And I imagine if you feel like you’ve built this emotional debt, this would be a really good exercise to start to do, is that right?

Jonny Miller: Yeah, it is fantastic. I mean, there’s some people who struggle with having enough energy to kind of get out of bed and function. But again, I imagine listeners to your show, people that live in Silicon Valley, their challenge is the downshifting without external substances. And so NSDR is a really great way of strengthening that ventral vagal tone, which is our body’s capacity to go from on kind of go, go, go to then relaxing. There’s a quote from Kevin Kelly that I interviewed recently, and he said, “If you have a great work ethic that needs to be matched with a great rest ethic.” And I think that kind of piece of actually training our capacity to downshift after stress is just completely missing from most people’s playbooks.

Lenny: I think with a lot of the sort of advice, if you listen, Tim Ferriss and Huberman and everyone’s got this stuff you should be doing every day list and it ends up being so long and there’s so many things to do, cold plunge, sauna. What is it that you practice or come back to slash what would you recommend people try to do daily that is most impactful of all this stuff we’ve talked about?

Jonny Miller: First experiment with a bunch of different practices and see which you enjoy and notice how you feel before and then how you feel afterwards. That’s kind of the key because once you know that it feels good, you’re not going to have to force yourself or motivate yourself to do it. You’ll just do it naturally because you know you’ll feel great afterwards. I would recommend starting really simple, so starting with the 4, 4, 8 breathing or humming, doing that in the morning for just two minutes, two minutes in the beginning is enough. And I would also recommend listening to the NSDR practice at least once or twice. If you work from home, it’s pretty easy after a lunch break, something like that could also be in the evening when you get home as well. Some people use it to help fall asleep.

And then the final thing that I would recommend is if you have the resources and you have access, finding a somatic practitioner or somatic therapist is so [inaudible 00:57:03]. I mean, I emerged a completely different human on the other side of the 200 breathwork journeys. I have a different experience of life basically released so much time. Even my voice sounds different. If you listen to the podcast episodes I recorded four or five years ago, my voice is higher pitched. It just sounds different. It has a different resonant quality to it.

Lenny: Wow. Okay, awesome. So you’ve kind of summarized, I was going to try to summarize all the advice you’ve given, but if you were to do the bare minimum next steps based on this advice, try this 4, 4, 8/3, 3, 6/2, 2, 4. Does 2, 2, 4 work too if you just go real fast I guess?

Jonny Miller: Yeah.

Lenny: Yeah.

Jonny Miller: Okay.

Lenny: Okay, perfect. Okay, so do that for a couple mornings. See how that does try this NSDR practice. We’ll link to a recording of how to do that and then was there something else you recommended? Oh, somatic worker, basically maybe a therapist, maybe not someone that helps you with your body.

Jonny Miller: Yeah, and I’d add in the eight practice for even 15 seconds before the breathing in the morning and after, just so that you notice the difference. And if you do the NSDR, that is basically a 15-minute interoception practice as well. So you’re kind of getting two birds with one stone with that practice.

Lenny: What’s your perspective on meditation? Does that fit into this? Do you find the NSDR replaces the need for meditation?

Jonny Miller: That is a big topic. I am an avid meditator as what I’ve done many 10 day silent retreats. I was in a dark room for 10 days.

Lenny: Wow.

Jonny Miller: With meditation, I think it really depends on what you are training. It’s like saying what’s your opinion on exercise? Well, are you training mobility or stamina or strength? It’s the same with meditation. You could be training loving kindness. You could be training your focus and attention. You could be training spacious awareness. So I’m a big fan of embodied meditation practices. So this is often the classic vipassana body scan is a good example. Again, I mean that’s basically interoceptive practice where you are just moving your attention through different parts of your body over and over and over again for days on end.

In the case of vipassana retreat, meditation is helpful for the specific skill of increasing the psychological space between a stimulus and your response. So if you have some degree of meditation practice instead of getting wrapped up in a certain emotion or we’re even believing a certain thought pattern, there’s usually an ability to kind of step back a little bit and see if what it’s, so there definitely is a place for meditation. But my viewpoint is that we’ve kind of over-indexed for mindfulness and meditation in over the last 20 years. There’s so many apps, there’s so there’s much talk about it and we’ve completely forgotten the body-based approaches. So I’m not saying don’t meditate. I think meditation for sure has its place, especially if your goal is more of the traditional waking up and seeing through the nature of the self, that’s a different kind of path in my opinion. But if you’re looking to function more effectively and be more in tune with your body, then there’s a whole different category of practices in this bottom up variety that we’ve touched on today.

Lenny: On the topic of bottom up, I imagine you’re a big fan of this book that everyone always talks about, The Body Keeps Score, I think it’s called. Would you recommend that book? Is it connected in a large part to the stuff you talk about? What do you think of that book specifically? Because I hear about it all with him.

Jonny Miller: Yeah, it’s a good book. It’s by Bessal van der Kolk and there’s another writer I think Peter Levine says, “The issues are in the tissues.” Is basically the concept. And this is the idea that we have these incomplete mobilization reflexes that are stored in our body and often held as tension. It’s not strictly true to say that the trauma is in the body. It is actually a cortical map in the brain which kind of tracks these things. But for kind of practical purposes, it looks and feels as if there is stored grief in my right hip or anger in my solar plexus, that’s the experience that we have. And the more that you become aware of these sensations and start to develop emotional fluidity essentially, the more that tension is released and the less reactive you become and the more emotional debt you pay off. So I think The Body Keeps The Score, I think a more accurate way would be the body is the scorecard in a way. I think that’s kind a slight reframe. And if you’re interested in this, the work of Peter Levine, Waking the Tiger is the seminal book on this mobilization reflex stuff that I’m describing.

Lenny: I never need that part of it. And basically it’s actually kept in the brain, but it comes across as somewhere in the body.

Jonny Miller: Yeah, exactly.

Lenny: Fascinating. I want to spend a little time on a new segment that we have in this podcast that I call Contrarian Corner. So let’s visit Contrarian Corner, I feel like you’ll have something interesting here. So the question is there something that you have a very contrarian opinion about, something that you believe that a lot of other people really don’t believe?

Jonny Miller: We’ve already touched on I’m not a big fan of talk based meditation, which will probably get me some comments I would imagine. I’d say the other one that’s worth mentioning is I think that we vastly underestimate the impact of burnout, particularly from a bottom line perspective. There was a research report that I did a couple of years ago where we interviewed these leaders and they’d all experienced burnout of some degree. And we said, if you were to estimate how much this costs your startup or business, what would you say? And the median response was a hundred thousand dollars, which I imagine is more than most people would think.

And most people aren’t actively investing in burnout insurance. Like it’s not something that’s on many people’s radar besides meditation practices and things like that. And I think part of the reason that the cost is higher is because there are these second and third order consequences of talent attrition, of opportunity costs, lost productivity, you lose great leaders, make shitty decisions in the run up to the burnout itself. There’s also this idea of emotional contagion, which there’s some research from Wharton I believe, and they show that the leader or the CEO has a disproportionate impact or their emotional state has a disproportionate impact on the people in their team. So something I’d like to say is the nervous system of an organization is a reflection of the nervous system of the CEO. And so I think that’s just something which I would like to see talked about more.

Lenny: Just on this idea of burnout, I don’t think you’re saying don’t work really hard If you want to work really hard, it’s that you need to maintain your body and mind and nervous system if you’re working insanely hard. If you’re working long hours, feel free, but just know there’s debt you’re building up and you need to be doing things to pay off that debt as you’re doing that.

Jonny Miller: Precisely. It is very much like building technical debt in the early days of a startup. It’s worth doing, but just do it intentionally. Know that you’re doing that and that. So let’s say you work really hard for eight months, you give yourself a month or two off to really downshift. And it’s also really worth building that nervous system capacity. It’s great to be able to push it really hard and focus and then combine it with that rest ethic as well. So do NSDRs, kind of find a way to downshift so that way of working can be sustainable.

Lenny: Jonny, we reached our very exciting lightning round. Are you ready?

Jonny Miller: Let’s do it.

Lenny: First question, what are two or three books that you’ve recommended most to other people?

Jonny Miller: I actually had a sense this question was coming and I have the books with me here. The first book is Constellations by David White. This is the book that I’ve gifted most to friends, I think more than any other book. And he basically has 52 definitions of words like ambition is I think the first word. And his writing, it just blows me away. I open this to a random page, read the definition, and it’s probably affected me more than any other book. So that’s one that I love. 15 Commitments of Conscious Leadership, which is I imagine has come up before in your podcast. This is by Jim Dethmer and Diana Chapman. They have the Conscious Leadership Group. And this is basically, in my opinion, it’s the best leadership book that I’ve come across and it combines practicality with a lot of great theory. So this is awesome. And then finally, this is a bit out there, but Recapture the Rapture by Jamie Wheal, big fan of Jamie’s work, Jamie’s writing. This is kind of three books in one. The beginning is addressing the meta-crisis and a lot of the craziness that we’re seeing in the world. The second chapter is very related to what we’ve been talking about, he calls it Hedonic Engineering and it’s basically practices for shifting your state of consciousness. And the third is Ethical Cult Building, which I’ll leave that there. [inaudible 01:06:22].

Lenny: Do you have a favorite recent movie or TV show you really enjoyed?

Jonny Miller: My wife and I love animations and we saw Kubo and the Two Strings recently, which was fantastic. Just so, so great. That and also Wolf Walkers, which was an Apple TV series. Yeah, those have been my two favorite movies I’ve seen recently.

Lenny: If you like animated content, check out the Scavengers Reign on HBO. I’ve mentioned it on this podcast before, but it’s incredible. It’s a TV show on HBO. So I usually ask, do you have a favorite question you like to ask candidates you’re interviewing? But I know you coach people, so to kind of turn this question a little bit around, do you have a favorite question you like to ask executive coaching clients that you work with?

Jonny Miller: I stole this question from a guy Jerry Colonna who’s here in Boulder, and the question is amazing. It is so good. It’s basically, how are you complicit in creating the conditions that you say you don’t want? And so the word complicit there is key because it’s not saying in what ways is it your fault, but it’s like in what ways were you complicit in creating the conditions for anxiety, for building up emotional debt? And just the question kind of opens up the door to ways in which you are an active participant in creating these challenges in your life. And it’s a really rich journal question or a question to explore with a friend, co-founder colleague.

Lenny: I remember him sharing that on the Tim Ferriss podcast many years ago and it stuck with me and I often think of it, but I never am complicit of anything that goes wrong. It’s never my fault. He has nothing on me. Just kidding.

Jonny Miller: Excellent.

Lenny: Do you have a favorite product you’ve recently discovered that you really like?

Jonny Miller: One is these blue blocking glasses. These are raw optics, blue blocker glasses. They block out a hundred percent of blue light and they are a lifesaver if I’m ever going out of the house basically after dark, I’ll wear these to drive. I’ll wear these to even dinners with friends sometimes. And it basically means that I’m able to then sleep well that evening. So that’s one.

And then the other thing I’ll briefly share, this came through the other day, you mentioned the vagus nerve earlier and that device, I have three devices here that are all vagus nerve stimulation devices. This one is called Neuro Sim. This one I believe is Pulsetto, and I think this is a Apollo Strap. I haven’t used them that much yet, but they basically work by sending low level electrical stimulation directly to your vagus nerve. So this clips on your ear because the vagus nerve goes through the right side of the neck. Same with Pulsetto. And I’m really curious to compare the effect of these versus say breathwork, humming, the other body-based practices. Obviously, you can do both at the same time, but I am just interested in playing. So I wouldn’t recommend them yet, but I think it’s interesting that they exist.

Lenny: How cool would that be? We just put these things on, we don’t have to do anything else. We just get up, slap on our device and life is amazing. Don’t have to meditate, don’t have to breathe in a different way. I’m going to need to do this while I’m on the podcast just wear all these devices, see how that goes. Awesome. Well, I guess somehow report back to us how these go because that feels really great. Next question, do you have a favorite life motto that you often come back to share with friends, either in work or in life?

Jonny Miller: State over story would be one which we’ve touched on.

Lenny: State over story.

Jonny Miller: And then I think the other one, which I think about often is I like to say, “Make generous assumptions.” And by that I mean in any situation, what is the most generous story that I can tell of this person, of this situation? Not kind of naively fabricating something, but usually there’s a spectrum of I can assume that they’re a bad person and they did this thing out of spite, or maybe they had a bad day, maybe they have a lot of emotional debt. There’s there’s many stories that can be told. And I usually try to have a practice of telling the most generous story that I can.

Lenny: I like that a lot. Another way of describing that is just assume good intentions, which I often think about.

Jonny Miller: Exactly.

Lenny: Final question. You seem extremely calm always, and very centered and stable. What still gets you rilled up and unsettled, and what do you do when that happens?

Jonny Miller: Well, I was nervous before this podcast, so I did some breathing practices and some stretching and some humming before jumping on here. I still at times notice ways in which I’m conflict avoidant. I’ve been working on it actively for a while, but there’s a part of me that can sometimes avoid conflict. And so I’ve actually noticed how there’s a relationship between that and having a healthy relationship to anger. So basically giving myself permission to express frustration, not at someone, but just allow it to be there. And then from that place set better boundaries with my time with what I’m doing, saying no to certain things. I think that’s the practice that’s most alive for me right now.

Lenny: Jonny, you are awesome. Two final questions. Where can folks find you online and explore the things that you offer? I think you teach a course, whatever else you offer, talk about that and then how can listeners be useful to you?

Jonny Miller: Yeah, well, this has been so much fun. I am very active on Twitter or X. My handle is Jonny Miller. It’s J-O-N-N-Y-M-1-L-L-E-R. And yeah, if this was interesting or listeners would like to dive deeper, I teach a course. Our next cohort is running in the spring, the end of March. Applications are now open, and the website is nsmastery.com/lenny. I’ve created a custom page and there’s a $250 juicy discount for listeners if they want to sign up.

Lenny: I got to sign up for this myself. I didn’t know you’re going to do that. That’s awesome. And NS Mastery stands for Nervous System Mastery.

Jonny Miller: Exactly.

Lenny: Amazing. Anything else? And then the second question of how listeners can be useful to you.

Jonny Miller: Well, firstly, if any of this resonates, I’d love to hear from you on Twitter or email me as well. I can pass over my email and I would just love it if you experiment with this stuff. I love this idea of just being a scientist of life. So if anything that we’ve talked about resonates or any of the practices you want to try, just go out and try it and see how it feels and then tell me about it. That would be the greatest gift I think.

Lenny: And the best way to tell you about it is tweet at you or is there something else?

Jonny Miller: Tweet at me or my email is jonny@curioushumans.com. So feel free to email me as well.

Lenny: All right, I’m going to use all these things. Jonny, thank you so much for being here. You’re awesome. I am excited for the show notes we’re going to have to give people actual tools to use to become less anxious and nervous in their work and life. Thank you again for being here.

Jonny Miller: Amazing. Thanks so much, Lenny. This was super fun.

Lenny: Same for me. Bye everyone.

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