YouSaid · the spoken record

Jonny Miller

lines on the record: 77
first: 2024-01-28
most recent: 2024-01-28
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“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. I think that would be, and then tell me about it. That would be the greatest gift, I think.”
2024-01-28 · Lenny's Podcast · Managing nerves, anxiety, and burnout | Jonny Miller (Nervous System Mastery) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, well, this has been so much fun. I am very active on Twitter, or X. My handle is Johnny Miller, and it's J-O-N-Y-M-1 LLER. 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 slash lenny. I've created a custom page and there's a $250 juicy discount for listeners. If they want to sign up”
2024-01-28 · Lenny's Podcast · Managing nerves, anxiety, and burnout | Jonny Miller (Nervous System Mastery) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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. Basically giving myself permission to express frustration, not at someone, but like just allow it to be there. And then from that place 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.”
2024-01-28 · Lenny's Podcast · Managing nerves, anxiety, and burnout | Jonny Miller (Nervous System Mastery) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And then I think the other one, which I think about often is I say, I like to say make generous assumptions. And by that I mean in any situation, like what is the most generous story that I can tell of this person, of this situation, not kind of naively fabricating something, but like usually there's a spectrum of like 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. You know, 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.”
2024-01-28 · Lenny's Podcast · Managing nerves, anxiety, and burnout | Jonny Miller (Nervous System Mastery) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Because the Vegas nav goes through the right side of the neck. Same with pulsetto. And I'm really curious to kind of compare the effect of these versus say breath work, humming the other body-based practices. Obviously, you can do both at the same time, but I'm just interested in playing. So I wouldn't recommend them yet, but I think it's interesting that they exist.”
2024-01-28 · Lenny's Podcast · Managing nerves, anxiety, and burnout | Jonny Miller (Nervous System Mastery) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One is these blue blocking glasses. These are raw optics, blue blocker glasses. They block out 100% 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 like 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 neurosim. This one, I believe, is palsetto. And I think this is an 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.”
2024-01-28 · Lenny's Podcast · Managing nerves, anxiety, and burnout | Jonny Miller (Nervous System Mastery) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Stole this question from a guy Jerry Kelowna, who's here in Boulder. And the question is amazing. It's 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 like 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're like an active participant in creating these challenges in your life. And that's a really rich journal question or a question to explore with a friend, co-founder, colleague.”
2024-01-28 · Lenny's Podcast · Managing nerves, anxiety, and burnout | Jonny Miller (Nervous System Mastery) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“My wife and I love animations, and we saw Kubo and the two strings recently, which was fantastic. So, so great. And that and also Wolf Walkers, which was an Apple TV series. Yeah, those have been my two favorite movies I've seen recently.”
2024-01-28 · Lenny's Podcast · Managing nerves, anxiety, and burnout | Jonny Miller (Nervous System Mastery) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Recapture the rapture by Jamie Wheel. Big fan of Jamie's work, Jamie's writing. This is kind of three books in one. The beginning is like kind of 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 accessing your state of consciousness. And the third is ethical cult building, which I'll just leave that there.”
2024-01-28 · Lenny's Podcast · Managing nerves, anxiety, and burnout | Jonny Miller (Nervous System Mastery) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The first book is Consolations 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 is just, it just blows me away. I open this to a random page, read the definition, and it's just It's probably affected me more than any other book. 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 Deathma 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.”
2024-01-28 · Lenny's Podcast · Managing nerves, anxiety, and burnout | Jonny Miller (Nervous System Mastery) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Precisely, it's very much like building technical debt in the early days of a startup. It's worth doing, but just do it intentionally, like know that you're doing that. And that, so let's say you work really hard for eight months, you know, give yourself a month or two off to really downshift. And it's also really worth building that nervous system capacity. Like 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 that way of working can be sustainable.”
2024-01-28 · Lenny's Podcast · Managing nerves, anxiety, and burnout | Jonny Miller (Nervous System Mastery) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 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.”
2024-01-28 · Lenny's Podcast · Managing nerves, anxiety, and burnout | Jonny Miller (Nervous System Mastery) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 on a kind of from a like 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 like how much this cost your startup or business, what would you say? And the media response was $100,000, 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.”
2024-01-28 · Lenny's Podcast · Managing nerves, anxiety, and burnout | Jonny Miller (Nervous System Mastery) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The body is the score card in a way. I think that's kind of a slight reframe. And if you're interested in this, the work of Peter Levine, Waking the Tiger is kind of the seminal book on this mobilization reflex stuff that I'm describing.”
2024-01-28 · Lenny's Podcast · Managing nerves, anxiety, and burnout | Jonny Miller (Nervous System Mastery) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, it's a good book. It's by Basil van der Kolk, and there's another right. 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. Like 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 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”
2024-01-28 · Lenny's Podcast · Managing nerves, anxiety, and burnout | Jonny Miller (Nervous System Mastery) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 is. 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 much talk about it. And we've completely forgotten the body-based approaches. 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 like seeing through the nature of the self. Like that's a different kind of path in my opinion. But if you're looking to function more effectively and kind of 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.”
2024-01-28 · Lenny's Podcast · Managing nerves, anxiety, and burnout | Jonny Miller (Nervous System Mastery) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That is a big topic. I am an avid meditator that I've done many 10 day silent retreats. I was in a dark room for 10 days. With meditation, I think it really depends on what you're training. Like, it's like saying, you know, 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 interceptive practice, right? Where you're just moving your attention through different parts of your body over and over and over again for days on end in the case of a passenger 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”
2024-01-28 · Lenny's Podcast · Managing nerves, anxiety, and burnout | Jonny Miller (Nervous System Mastery) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 interception practice as well. So you're kind of getting two birds with one stone with that practice”
2024-01-28 · Lenny's Podcast · Managing nerves, anxiety, and burnout | Jonny Miller (Nervous System Mastery) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Somatic therapist is so life changing. I mean, I emerged a completely different human on the other side of the kind of 200 breath weight journeys. I have a different experience of life, basically, released so much time. Even my voice sounds different. Like if you listen to the podcast episodes I recorded four or five years ago, my voice is higher pitched. It's like it just sounds different. It has like a different resonant quality to it.”
2024-01-28 · Lenny's Podcast · Managing nerves, anxiety, and burnout | Jonny Miller (Nervous System Mastery) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 like the 448 breathing or humming, doing that in the morning for like just like two minutes, like 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 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”
2024-01-28 · Lenny's Podcast · Managing nerves, anxiety, and burnout | Jonny Miller (Nervous System Mastery) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, it's fantastic. I mean, most people, 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 Excel substances. And so NSDR is a really great way of strengthening that ventral vagal tone, which is our body's capacity to go from like on kind of go, go, 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.”
2024-01-28 · Lenny's Podcast · Managing nerves, anxiety, and burnout | Jonny Miller (Nervous System Mastery) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Great for improving interception. 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's just, 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.”
2024-01-28 · Lenny's Podcast · Managing nerves, anxiety, and burnout | Jonny Miller (Nervous System Mastery) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 interception. 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. 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 like relaxing music in the background. And by the end of it, you feel like you've had like a two-hour nap. Like it feels incredible. And particularly for people who like myself tend to get tired in the afternoons, if you kind of space this out, usually between like one and three p.m. for me, that will give you a second wind in the afternoon. And it'll mean you won't kind of end the day collapse on the sofa. So I think it's.”
2024-01-28 · Lenny's Podcast · Managing nerves, anxiety, and burnout | Jonny Miller (Nervous System Mastery) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so NSDR was a practice coined by Andrew Huban, who you mentioned earlier. And it basically, it's a more scientific lens on the practice of yoga nidra, which is kind of an ancient yoga practice.”
2024-01-28 · Lenny's Podcast · Managing nerves, anxiety, and burnout | Jonny Miller (Nervous System Mastery) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To be able to buffer intense emotions and say get through the meeting, get through whatever it is, that'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're going to be adding to this emotional debt over time. And as I mentioned, some people, they might be a year before there's some kind of breakdown burnout. Other people, it might be, it might be longer. And usually it's more unfortunate in the longer case because it creates like a long-term health crisis and then no amount of money or time is able to repair the damage that has been done, which is can be really tragic.”
2024-01-28 · Lenny's Podcast · Managing nerves, anxiety, and burnout | Jonny Miller (Nervous System Mastery) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, it's a good question. And some people do have a very high interceptive 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. 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, or maybe it's through gentle titration of stresses and then downshifting. Like that's actually really valuable. I'd also say that the ability to kind of function well or this applies to kind of like a lot of high functioning people, which is probably honestly a lot of your audience. It's very helpful in the moment to kind of, let's say something comes up, you want.”
2024-01-28 · Lenny's Podcast · Managing nerves, anxiety, and burnout | Jonny Miller (Nervous System Mastery) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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're, on the other hand, able to just like welcome and be with whatever emotions would arise on the other side of a decision, you're able to kind of decide clearly instead of being skewed one way or the other.”
2024-01-28 · Lenny's Podcast · Managing nerves, anxiety, and burnout | Jonny Miller (Nervous System Mastery) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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. Like he was unable to make the most basic life decisions. And it's because he didn't have access to that emotional center in his brain. 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're 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.”
2024-01-28 · Lenny's Podcast · Managing nerves, anxiety, and burnout | Jonny Miller (Nervous System Mastery) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so I think I read 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 I can say about this, but basically there was a landmark study by this guy, DiMasio, who's 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.”
2024-01-28 · Lenny's Podcast · Managing nerves, anxiety, and burnout | Jonny Miller (Nervous System Mastery) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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, like nothing good happens from that place. No great decisions were made from that place. So again, that's a place where having the interceptive awareness, oh, oh, this is what's going on, being able to then downshift your system, kind of access a sense of, oh, like I'm okay, that actually this isn't so bad. And then moving on from there is a profoundly practical and just useful skill.”
2024-01-28 · Lenny's Podcast · Managing nerves, anxiety, and burnout | Jonny Miller (Nervous System Mastery) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, for example, if you said something to me of, like, 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 kind of freeze, withdraw, shut down, and disconnect, and other people will become more aggressive, become bigger and attack and fight back. And kind of knowing which way you tend to orient, for me, it's usually shrink and freeze and shut down.”
2024-01-28 · Lenny's Podcast · Managing nerves, anxiety, and burnout | Jonny Miller (Nervous System Mastery) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so it's typically different forms of nervous system dysregulation. And that shows up as it could be someone's breathing pattern. Like 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 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 happening.”
2024-01-28 · Lenny's Podcast · Managing nerves, anxiety, and burnout | Jonny Miller (Nervous System Mastery) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, you can understand in precise detail about whatever the challenge was from 5, 10, 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 somatic 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 we slowly pay off that emotional debt. One process at a time.”
2024-01-28 · Lenny's Podcast · Managing nerves, anxiety, and burnout | Jonny Miller (Nervous System Mastery) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 are two modalities I'm a big fan of. 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 kind of show you what is ready to be seen.”
2024-01-28 · Lenny's Podcast · Managing nerves, anxiety, and burnout | Jonny Miller (Nervous System Mastery) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“These things that happened five, ten years ago, and my body would like it, it would either move a certain way or 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 like right relationship with my anger and my grief. And honestly, my shame as well, like giving myself permission to feel this like gunk that had been stored in my pelvis. So I'm not saying you have to go to bali and do 200 breath weight journeys. Like that's definitely not, I mean, that's a path. But first, it begins with, as I said, cultivating interception and even being aware that there is this tension, there is through these things in your body. Secondly, having the practices of self-regulation so that if these things come up, you don't.”
2024-01-28 · Lenny's Podcast · Managing nerves, anxiety, and burnout | Jonny Miller (Nervous System Mastery) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, well, that's a big question. I'm actually probably getting 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 kind of several hundred breathwork journeys where you kind of breathe in a certain way to get into an altered state. And then in that place, these memories would arise of these”
2024-01-28 · Lenny's Podcast · Managing nerves, anxiety, and burnout | Jonny Miller (Nervous System Mastery) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Or down regulate your nervous system at the end of a 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 depth.”
2024-01-28 · Lenny's Podcast · Managing nerves, anxiety, and burnout | Jonny Miller (Nervous System Mastery) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 kind of like keep building this up. And it becomes normalized to kind of live in a way where you're always on and never really relaxing or coming down or one really key sign actually is if you're not able to kind of naturally downshift.”
2024-01-28 · Lenny's Podcast · Managing nerves, anxiety, and burnout | Jonny Miller (Nervous System Mastery) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Or emotional debt, then over time it accumulates and it can also come out through kind of health crises, health challenges. It just gets basically progressively worse until that debt is paid off.”
2024-01-28 · Lenny's Podcast · Managing nerves, anxiety, and burnout | Jonny Miller (Nervous System Mastery) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so I'll tie this in with a concept that I call emotional debt, which is basically 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're 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 kind of relationships are often like especially intimate relationships are usually a place that this shows up or relationships at work. So those are kind of 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. Like it's great that our body can buffer this stress response because it allows us to function. But if we don't pay off that technical debt,”
2024-01-28 · Lenny's Podcast · Managing nerves, anxiety, and burnout | Jonny Miller (Nervous System Mastery) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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.”
2024-01-28 · Lenny's Podcast · Managing nerves, anxiety, and burnout | Jonny Miller (Nervous System Mastery) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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, a little bit maybe a little bit exhausted. The brick, you know, maybe you ignore that or you don't notice it. And then three or four weeks later, you have like 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 like a full-blown health crisis or you develop type 2 diabetes or there's a whole range of things or maybe you get fired. Like there's a bunch of different things that can happen. But normally depending on how attuned or depending on someone's interceptive 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”
2024-01-28 · Lenny's Podcast · Managing nerves, anxiety, and burnout | Jonny Miller (Nervous System Mastery) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 I 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 overcommitted myself for that week. Like I'd scheduled back-to-back podcast interviews. The podcast wasn't even the priority for kind of, you know, 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.”
2024-01-28 · Lenny's Podcast · Managing nerves, anxiety, and burnout | Jonny Miller (Nervous System Mastery) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, well, just to kind of piggyback on what you just said, if you're about to jump on a meeting and you're noticing that your stomach is clenched, that's actually really useful data to kind of be like, huh, like, why am I happening? Is it your intuition kind of saying that maybe you shouldn't do this deal with someone or maybe like something is off? And so it's a sign to kind of 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, like more information or something that you can reflect on or go into.”
2024-01-28 · Lenny's Podcast · Managing nerves, anxiety, and burnout | Jonny Miller (Nervous System Mastery) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 like 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? Like breathing without tension is ideal.”
2024-01-28 · Lenny's Podcast · Managing nerves, anxiety, and burnout | Jonny Miller (Nervous System Mastery) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, exactly. So, again, it can be something that you do kind of before you start your day, maybe with a cup of tea. I like to drink tea and just kind of do like a body scan essentially and just check each of those three areas. And it's really valuable, particularly if you're having racing thoughts or something doesn't feel quite right. Instead of just tackling the problem on the level of the mind kind of dropping down into the body and bringing that kind of into the picture as well, I find to be really helpful.”
2024-01-28 · Lenny's Podcast · Managing nerves, anxiety, and burnout | Jonny Miller (Nervous System Mastery) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And then emotion, which I include kind of 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 some heat in my belly, probably from the breathing. There's like a little bit of tightness in my lower back from working out yesterday. So just kind of sense mapping that landscape of sensation. And for most people, it's almost like it's like a terra incognita. You have those maps of Hibi dragons. And for a lot of people, there's just these big kind of blind spots in their body.”
2024-01-28 · Lenny's Podcast · Managing nerves, anxiety, and burnout | Jonny Miller (Nervous System Mastery) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 keep an example, like I could narrow my awareness and become kind of 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 like the space above me, the space behind me, the space below me and that is generally a kind of a calming thing posture is fairly self-explanatory, but again posture effects kind of how we feel shifting there.”
2024-01-28 · Lenny's Podcast · Managing nerves, anxiety, and burnout | Jonny Miller (Nervous System Mastery) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, exactly. And it has been studied 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 interception, as does if people have PTSD or trauma, again, interception is lowered. And I'd certainly say for myself, you know, 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, on like more intuitive decision-making, essentially.”
2024-01-28 · Lenny's Podcast · Managing nerves, anxiety, and burnout | Jonny Miller (Nervous System Mastery) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And kind of like 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.”
2024-01-28 · Lenny's Podcast · Managing nerves, anxiety, and burnout | Jonny Miller (Nervous System Mastery) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source