Dhru Purohit Show - The Hidden Nervous System Patterns Behind Anxiety, Conflict & Burnout And How to Rewire Them with Jonny Miller

Episode Date: July 22, 2026

This episode is brought to you by One Skin, Fatty15, Our Place, and Branch Basics. Today, more people than ever are feeling overwhelmed, anxious, emotionally exhausted, or disconnected—yet few of us have ever been taught how our nervous system actually works. Understanding how to regulate it may be one of the most important skills for improving our mental health, relationships, resilience, and overall well-being. Today on The Dhru Purohit Show, Dhru sits down with Jonny Miller to discuss why so many of us feel stuck in cycles of stress, anxiety, emotional overwhelm, or numbness, and how learning to regulate our nervous system can transform the way we show up in every area of life. Jonny explains how our nervous system shapes our thoughts, emotions, relationships, and resilience, why reactivity isn't a personality flaw but a biological pattern, and the practical framework he's used to help thousands of people cultivate greater calm, emotional flexibility, and aliveness. He also shares his own journey through grief, the hidden cost of people-pleasing, and the simple daily practices that can help anyone build a more resilient nervous system. Jonny Miller is the host of the Inner Frontier Podcast and the founder of Nervous System Mastery, a five-week bootcamp where he has taught more than a thousand students—from the CEO of a rocket-ship company and burned-out startup founders to busy parents and elite performers—how to cultivate calm, rewire reactivity, and restore aliveness. In this episode, Dhru and Jonny dive into:  (00:00) Introduction (1:29) Understanding Your Reactive Patterns (6:07) Measuring Nervous System Health (7:19) The Three Pillars of Nervous System Mastery (13:18) Grief, Healing, and Emotional Growth (17:55) Why We Numb Our Emotions (24:33) The Feather, Brick & Dump Truck Framework (28:15) The Dangers of Too Much Interoception (30:55) Rebuilding a Resilient Nervous System (37:12) Where to Begin with Nervous System Regulation (45:48) Dealing with Unexpressed Anger (54:03) Dhru's Personal Practices for Emotional Regulation (58:19) Why Men Struggle with Positive Emotions (1:00:18) Relationship Check-Ins That Actually Work (1:11:36) Jonny's Core Frameworks for Living Well (1:27:30) Where to Find Jonny's Work Also mentioned in this episode: Nervous System Mastery Bootcamp Take Jonny's free Nervous System Assessment Nervous System Regulation Protocol Cards   For more on Jonny, follow him on Facebook, Instagram, X/Twitter, or visit his Website. This episode is brought to you by One Skin, Fatty15, Our Place, and Branch Basics. Right now, One Skin is offering my community 15% off; just go to oneskin.co and use the coupon code DHRU to save 15% and give your skin the scientifically proven, gentle care it deserves. Fatty15 is offering an additional 15% off its 90-day subscription Starter Kit. Go to fatty15.com/dhru and use code DHRU to replenish your C15 levels for long-term health. Reduce your toxic load by upgrading your cookware! Go to fromourplace.com today and use promo code DHRU at checkout to receive 10% off any order. Branch Basics is now available nationwide at Target and Target.com. Shop their lineup of safer cleaning essentials including laundry detergent, surface cleaners, dishwasher tablets, and stain remover during your next Target run or at branchbasics.com Sign up for Dhru’s Try This Newsletter Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Johnny, I want to start off with the question that people often ask themselves at their worst moments. When something bad happens in your life, you snap at your partner, you've been procrastinating so long that maybe you lose an opportunity. When you try to show up and something doesn't go the way that you want to, people often ask themselves these questions and these questions sound like. Why do I keep showing up this way and repeating this pattern? What's wrong with me? That's a big one. Why am I broken? That's another one.

When people ask themselves these questions, the answer that their body often responds with or their mind is some version of, well, you're lazy. That's why if you're procrastinating, you're broken. If it's a pattern, you keep on repeating. It's obviously clear. It's you're broken. That's the answer. Or they tell themselves the kindest version of that is this, it's just this is who I am. This is what I'm like.

And that's what they're left with when they're repeating these patterns. And today's conversation, if anybody has resonated with this in their life and has felt at any point in time, they've asked themselves these questions and had these very unsupportive answers that end up leaving them in a place where they just repeat the patterns again. again, this conversation is for you. And I'd love to start off with, instead of that person leaving themselves with the idea that they're broken, they're lazy, they're just like this, I think you have a different possibility, a different vision, a different framework as to what might actually be going on. My work, I think, comes from the premise that the state of our nervous system is the lens through which we experience life. And so many people just live in

in their minds and they try and use their minds to influence their state and how they feel. And for me, that is actually, you're kind of fighting in an upper battle and often you can just make it worse. And so what I study, what I research, what I teach is this journey. I call it nervous system mastery, but it's basically the journey of reducing the half-life of reactivity. So the things you mentioned when someone snaps at their partner, when they're beating up on themselves, our nervous system is in a reactive state in that point. And there are skills you

can cultivate to reduce the amount of time that you spend in that state. And for me, that is the probably the most empowering piece of all of this. Because instead of the narrative of like a fixed mindset of like, oh, I'm broken, this is just how I am. I'm screwed. Like, there's nothing I can do. there are actually quite easy to cultivate skills that allow you to notice that state, to shift your physiology, maybe feel some emotions, and then come back to living more intentionally.

And I think that for me is why I'm so passionate about this is because on the other side of this, we can live with greater intentionality. And I think that's what your question was speaking to. Let's talk about reactivity for a second. What percentage of their life actions How they show up in a day-to-day is based on reactivity versus choosing how they want to show up. What's your thoughts about that?

I would say a lot of people are living from reactive tendencies and patterns. I mean, what's your answer to that? Like, how do you answer that? Yeah, I think whether people know it or not, I think that it's definitely more than 50% of their day. It's just reacting to stuff instead of saying, like, how do I actually want to show up? What do I want to do? Sometimes that's reacting to the news. That's reacting to social media.

They don't realize it. They're doom scrolling. They see that somebody, you know, made a lot of money from launching a business, and it's kind of in the back of their head, and they've been procrastinating on something that they've been doing. And without even realizing, they're making their coffee in the morning and just feeling bad about themselves. And they're not sure why. That's a reaction. I would say most people are probably living at least 50%, 80% in some situations of their life in a reactive state.

And there's actually two modes. of reactivity as well, there's something not a lot of people know, but there's one mode which is hyper arousal, which is basically when there's too much energy in the system and it takes you out of your, what's known as your window of tolerance, which is basically your, the amount of stress in your system that you can stay present, grounded, centered, kind of connected to yourself. And when you go beyond that, some people go up into this hyper arousal, which is basically maybe anxiety, frustration, anger, maybe over, overwhelm and it's the sympathetic system going outside of this this wind this capacity basically and then

for other people which is actually harder to spot uh going down into the parasympathetic system the secondary active state called hypo arousal and this looks like um letharry withdraw like disassociation numbness maybe kind of procrastination laziness and so and Both of these modes are as easy to see them as, oh, these are bad. Like, we want to avoid these. But they're actually, they're just protective strategies that the predictive processing of our nervous system has learned to keep us safe. And so once you kind of see that of like, oh, this is just my nervous system is,

is outside of my capacity right now. I just need to come back into the window and then, and ground. And for me, it allows, it allows you to have more compassion for yourself. Because instead of beating yourself up when you're in that state and you're reacting in a way that you're not proud of, you can just be like, oh, my system just needs a little bit of grounding right now. And you kind of come back in. So again, it's a more, it's a more empowering narrative for why we're doing what we're doing. You have this idea that the way to measure your harmony in your nervous system is the degree of reactivity you have in your.

your life. Yeah. What do you mean by that? I think the ultimate litmus test for how regulated we are is the quality of our relationships. And one of the best metrics of the quality of our relationships is how much time do we spend in reactivity? What is the half life of our reactivity? So from the moment where you're you're triggered, you're reactive, you're in this state where you're defending something, how long does it take you to go from that state back to grounded, calm, yourself, present, connected? And for a lot of people, that might be days, weeks, months if something happens. And they can spend, you know, weeks ruminating about this thing and never really like come back. And what I what I care about, what I teach are these skills that allow us to notice that state.

and then to come back down to a grounded center and show up for the people we care about in a place that we can be proud of. Start us off at the beginning. When you say nervous system, what do you mean? And what's the framework of how you look at the nervous system so that our audience can start to build us up from a first principle standpoint?

Any practice, breathwork, meditation, nervous system protocols can be used to self-regulate away emotion. And I think of this as the self-regulation paradox in that there are certain situations where that is healthy, adaptive and useful. Like if you're in a boardroom meeting or you're with your kids, you might not want to go, you might not want to express the emotion in that way. So being able to meditate, downshift, relax is super useful. But if you do that over and over again, over a period of time, it compounds this, what I think of as emotional debt, where that emotion, it doesn't just go away, but it gets like stored somewhere and then comes out later.

And so I think it is, it's kind of an important nuance in this nervous system regulation work, because the idea is not to be perfectly regulated, like 100% of the time, because there will be things that throw you off. The long-term goal is feeling safe enough to welcome the emotion. as they're arising, as you mentioned. I know you've had Joe on. He talks about emotional fluidity. That to me is actually the long-term goal of this.

But going back to your question of how do I see the nervous system? I like to talk about it in terms of three stages or three skills to cultivate. The first skill is the technical term is interception, but it basically means your ability to notice and be curious about your inner experience. So what sensations are there? Temperature, tightness, contraction. What are you feeling? And for me, for a long time, I had no idea.

Like, I was just relatively numb. And I compare it to a chef. Like, you can go to culinary school and you can improve your taste palette where you can notice the subtleties of the flavors in wines or foods. And it's the same with, like, everything down here. Like, you can tune in and bring your awareness and tension to your body. and over time you can build this more refined palette of your internal sensations. And that's useful because whenever you're approaching a reactive state,

there are signals and feedback that your body is giving you. So there have been studies that have shown that panic attacks don't come out of nowhere. Like if a dog is around someone, they can predict when a panic attack is going to happen. And often there are signs coming from the body 30 to 45 minutes before. And so if you can be attuned to those early kind of warning signs, the like canary in a coal mine, you can be like, oh, I'm noticing that I'm getting to the edge of my window of tolerance. Let me change my environment. Let me downshift.

Let me, let me regulate. Let me see what's here before it gets to the 10 out of 10, like breathing into a paperback. So that's the interception piece. I'll briefly mention the other two skills that we can go into are self-regulation, of which. there are kind of three buckets. The first bucket is top down or mind-based, which you mentioned earlier, maybe it's meditation, maybe it's cognitive reframes, maybe it's affirmations. These can be helpful to some degree, but I don't think there is effective as the bottom-up interventions which would be things like various forms of breath work, extended exhales,

478 breathing, humming, long holes, stretches. All of these change our physiology, which shifts our blood chemistry, which then sends different signals to our brain and our brain predicts more safety. And so the natural kind of like defense mechanisms, the threat response gets down regulated. So if the goal is to, I just want to feel better and more calm in the moment, the bottom up strategies is just way more effective. And then the third area is I think it is outside in. So it's changing your environment, changing the people, with and co-regulating with a more relaxed to create a more relaxed nervous system. So like we're co-regulating right now.

Like my nervous system is reading your cues, reading your facial expressions, it's taking in the lights, the sound, all of that is making a real-time prediction in my subconscious of how safe I am. And so by, you know, changing your environment from a busy LA street into a kind of quiet, grounded room, that will also have an effect on you as well. Or maybe it's like hugging your dog or being around your kids or playing. Like those things are also very effective self-regulation strategies. And then the third one, which again, we can we can go into more detail is the emotional stability piece. And this is honestly where I think so much of the work ends up in. It's also

the hardest. It's it's basically having courageous curiosity to get curious about and and explore and maybe welcome the feelings instead of being like nope, not going to not going to do with that. I'm just going to clench my way through until it goes away. So yeah, we can we can go into any those areas. But that's the that's the journey that I see because without the interception, the self-reg you won't even know when you need to self-regulate. And you also, won't be able to connect with the sensations which are necessary for feeling the emotions. If you're just playing a story like over and over again, the emotion won't complete. You actually have to be in touch with the physical sensations moving through your body

for the emotion to move through and reach a point of relief and ease on the other side. You mentioned for a long time you felt numb. Before all this work that you were doing in this space, let's make it personal. Tell us a little bit about your story. What were the situation, circumstances that contributed to that? How did you ultimately break free? Like most people that come into this kind of work, it was through personal suffering. In my case, I was a startup founder for six years.

I went through burnout. That sucked. It wasn't terrible. But then a few years later, I was teaching entrepreneurship in London. And my fiance at the time, her name was Sophie, had bipolar disorder. and when I was traveling in Portugal, she went back to work. She was working as a junior doctor.

And she had an anxiety attack because of some feedback she received at work. And she cycled home and overdosed on her own medication and ended up taking her own life. And that's completely broke me. Initially, I think there was just a, there was like a shock. there was a like I was in a bit of a haze um but I'd seen adults after or there's older individuals

who'd lost someone close to them and they hadn't metabolized that grief they hadn't um they clearly hadn't processed it and there was this this like deadness behind their eyes that I saw that I was kind of terrified of and I was like I I don't want to end up like that and so I think partly out of that fear I was like, okay, I'm going to turn towards this and I'm going to do what I can to feel, to feel this. Because if I don't, it's going to mess me up later. I took time off work. I did a meditation retreat. But actually, one of the things that helped the most was going, I went cold water swimming in

the sea in Brighton, where we lived. And there was something about learning to unclench. You know, when you get in the cold water and people can imagine. with a cold shower. The first moment you get in, your body will just like tie in against the cold. It's like, no, I don't want to do it. But as you spend more time in there, you can begin to kind of relax and soften,

and like unclench and like let in the intensity of the cold. And it's kind of the same with, for me, it was the same with grief. It was learning to like allow the intensity in and realize that it was, it won't destroy me. It'll destroy parts of my identity. It'll the part of my identity that had a 10-year plan of what our life was going to look like that thought I knew, you know, all these things.

And ultimately, in that process, there was, I was just able to connect to the deep, deep, deep, deep well of love that I had for her, like on the other side of the grief. And for me, why I think people should, struggle with grief, they're not actually struggling with the grief. They're struggling with their fear and resistance to feeling the grief. And when it actually lands and hits you, it's like, it feels, it's just like intense love. It's like heartbreakingly intense love. And when I realized that, I think it just completely changed how I view all emotions. And I do believe that there's no such

thing as a negative emotion. It's only our fear and resistance to feeling it that is shitty and the cause of the reactivity. So that's how I, that's how I came into this nervous system stuff. A heartbreaking story and so challenging I can imagine on so many levels. You know, maybe our audience hasn't gone through that exact version, right? But we all can relate to the idea of losing something, someone, something not working out the way we want to. being disappointed, a whole host of things that could put us in a place in life where we are at this intersection of, do I shut down? Or do I go down this path that's kind of scary, which requires me to open up a little bit and let in something different? And it can be a scary,

scary thing to do. And oftentimes for people, there's not the tools or resources, and they don't even know that they are in a numbing situation. If there's people listening today to our conversation, they're like, I'm not sure if I'm suppressing or numbing stuff that I've gone through the past. Is there anything that they could be asking themselves to check in on that? Is it even worth it to do that sort of exercise? If they're thinking like, I don't know, have I dealt with that properly? Did I let myself feel fully? Did I not let myself feel fully? What would you want to say to them. You know, as we age, some of our skin cells stop functioning the way that they should be functioning. Longivity researchers call these zombie cells, and they contribute to fine lines,

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And you don't have to start with the, you know, with the big loss or the big, whatever the thing is, you can start small with, you know, everyday heartbreaks or disappointment or things that don't go your way. You can kind of titrate your way to some of the biggest situations. Generally having someone who cares about you, it might be a friend, might be a therapist, might be someone that can kind of be with you through that also goes a long way. I think of co-regulation is basically you're like loaning nervous system safety, which allows you to it gives your nervous system greater permission to feel the stuff that otherwise would be really scary to do.

In the same way as you don't just decide to sleep. You don't just like lie down and like and do sleeping. But you do create the conditions for sleep to arise. So you have a dark room, you kind of wind down, you maybe do some stretching, etc. And then sleep just happens. It's the same with feeling. You create the conditions for your nervous system to feel safe. So, and those conditions are inner and outer or set and setting, as they say in psychedelic work. The setting is the environment, the people around you, the, you know, is it a quiet space? I'm not in a busy street, you know, in a busy street on a subway, probably not ideal. And then internally, the set part or mindset is honestly so much of it is just, giving yourself permission. And I work with very successful leaders, podcasters, folks who have

done very, very well. And it's amazing how much guilt or shame they feel when some of these emotions arise. And that often causes a distraction of more work, which then creates conditions for burnout, which then means these emotions come up to the surface and there are these cycles. But it's really about asking yourself, what are the, what are the conditions and the inner conditions? The one that I mentioned that I think is the biggest one is courageous curiosity. It's the ability to willingly move towards something that is somewhat challenging or painful. And really, like sometimes, you know, maybe the story or the image will come to mind, but connecting to the sensation, that is like 80% of the game. And there were various modalities from Hacomys, somatic experiencing, there's a whole bunch of them.

And they basically, they come down to bringing attention, awareness, curiosity to parts of the body and just exploring. And the emotions, once those conditions are in place, the emotions naturally come through. And so, and then it's just, it's doing reps, it's just practicing. I'm not trained in this world like you are, but I like to read about it. I like to pay attention. I like to listen to people like you. I want to get your thoughts on something. There's a couple phrases that are often to me,

tiny little flags that somebody in my life who I love, I care about, I've probably even said these phrases at some point in time, might, if I hear them repeatedly, might have something that needs a little bit of like, like, hey, you need a little bit of a massage in your nervous system, right?

Sometimes you actually need a straight-up massage, or sometimes there's actually something that might not be expressed or work through. So here are these phrases, and I can be completely wrong with these, okay? But if I hear these regularly, the first one is, I'm fine, I'm just busy. So if I hear that regularly, right, for my wife, my friends, anybody, my family, I'm like, okay, I'm just paying attention to that. The other one is, I'm fine, I'm just tired.

And if I hear that regularly, and it continues to show up, and it's there, especially after something that might be like a big situation, something that happened, a loss. You know, I had a friend recently that lost a father. And I heard a version of this phrase a few times, you know, when I was just checking in on a brother-to-brother level. And it made me think that, okay,

this person might need a little bit of support, but might not know how to work through these things. And again, I've said these phrases before. What are your thoughts when you hear those two phrases? Are those flags? Are they not flags? I'm giving too much attention to this thing? Yeah, well, I mean, it's funny you chose those because they map perfectly onto hyper and hyper arousal,

where the hyper arousal is, I'm just busy, I'm going to kind of over-stimulate myself to somewhat numb the feelings. And the tired is the hyper arousal, which is I'm going to kind of withdraw and my energy is going to go down again so that I don't have to feel the thing. So they're both reactivity in two different directions. Exactly. Depending on how someone's nervous system was wired, generally. which relates to what they learned when they're growing up from their caregivers, essentially. In terms of what can be done, I call it feather brick dump truck where feather, feather brick dump truck.

So some people, for whatever reason, whenever they're like tickled by a feather of discomfort, that's enough for them to be like, to kind of check in and be like, okay, what do I need? For other people, it's a brick. That might be they feel exhausted when they wake up in the morning. it might be they lash out at someone. And for other people, it's a dump truck. And that might be a full-blown, full-blown health crisis where they literally can't get out of bed for months. Or it's a really bad breakup or something catastrophic that happens that forces them to get curious about their internal landscape.

And realizing that the way they've been orienting through the world, mental models that something needs updating. And it kind of depends on how, frankly, how stubborn someone is. And also, I think, the support they have around them. So you mentioned before we started recording that you're in a men's group. And I think groups like that where there are folks who know you well enough to pick up on those cues, you know, maybe if you have a friend who says that four or five times, you might be like, is there something like underneath that? Like, how are you really doing? Like, what's the answer that's below the surface. And that is often a huge gift that you can give someone.

And if you have friendships that are deep enough where someone can see that in you, that can be really, really helpful. Is there any danger to too much interoception? Is there a concept of too much interception, being hyper-aware, over-analyzing yourself, over getting caught up with, you know, where you are in the moment and is that a danger at all and is that a thing yeah yeah definitely i mean

i was reading some of mark andresen's tweets a rate was more introspection but um i'll say two things firstly there's a big difference between interception in the body versus introspection and self-awareness and rumination in the in the mind so kind of separating those two self-awareness is is obviously really helpful but if you're if you're just looping that's not really productive so it's like self-awareness fantastic yeah interception strong interception great yep and those are very different than overthinking yes and with the interception piece um some people are they're just so sensitive they have really sensitive nervous systems that um if the if their level of interception isn't matched by a sufficiently um high capacity nervous system, they can cause challenges because they will just be little stimuluses,

little stresses will just ping them kind of up and down. It'll be really, really hard to function as a human. And so for these people, actually tuning into extra reception, tuning into their senses can be really helpful. So noticing, noticing sounds, like expanding their awareness outside of their body and getting really good at the self-reception. regulation practices so that their high interception, which is a superpower, so that it doesn't become a curse because they know that when they go outside of their window of tolerance, they have tools to kind of come back down again. And that can be the breathwork.

It can be non-sleep deep breast. It can be humming is a really simple one. So for the guys who are super or girls who are super sensitive, having a really strong toolkit of ways to be with the intensity is really helpful. Almost take you out of your body and into, well, take you into the world through your senses. Yeah. Yeah. And you're living more in your body and you're kind of out of your brain. Yeah. Yeah. Or even, I mean, like right now, if someone's listening, you can just bring your awareness to your feet on the floor. Feel the ground and maybe feel your hands and that is inherently

inherently grounding. What were some of the first tools you use? to rebuild after so much loss in your life, the death of your fiance. What were some of the first things that you were doing to bring you back into your body and to increase your own interception and step back into your nervous system so that it's working for you and not against you? So I took a slightly unconventional path. I went deep into free diving, actually. And interestingly, I didn't realize this at the time.

but in hindsight, free diving, which is where you take a big breath of air and then you dive underwater as deep as you can without breathing, that was actually training my interception and my self-regulation because it's essentially high-stakes meditation. Like if you freak out when you're 35 meters underwater, it doesn't end well. And the, when, as you dive deeper, you have to equalize. And if there's any tension in your body, the equalization is really, really hard to do. you get, you just get stuck. And so my, I was basically training my ability to intercept, to notice subtle tension that had accumulated because of the ocean pressure and also my fear, to relax that

and then equalize and then I could go deeper. And without realizing it, that was actually a beautiful training ground for these skills, which I then applied in breathwork trainings, which were again, when you're kind of circular breathing, you're activating your nervous system, you're creating an altered state, and you're increasing your ability to be with intense emotions and also to use the breath to down, regulate or upregulate, depending on what is appropriate. And I think that is also a key part of this is that what you really want is a nervous system that shows up appropriately to the situation. So you don't, like, there are some moments where being really, really activated, if you're like running for your life is really helpful.

And you also want to be able to downshift and relax and unwind at the end of a day. So it's really in training the range that's really important. And modalities like breathwork, maybe certain forms of meditation, just being in a long-term relationship or a marriage is another great arena. Being a parent is another great arena where you're basically, you're going to be meeting your edges on a fairly regular. basis and viewing these different arenas as business as well as training grounds for noticing where you get into reactivity and then cultivating the skill to come back into a

more intentional place. I had a mentor many years ago and he was the first person in my life that would talk about how he wasn't using the word reactivity but he were talking about the inertia and the momentum that, you know, human beings are some of the only animals that will take what happened in the previous situation and they'll drag it along with them into the next situation. So for example, you're in a meeting,

you're trying to pitch somebody on a project or an idea, you're trying to get a book deal, whatever it might be. It doesn't go well. You get rejected. That rejection, you know, might be playing out in your body.

It's in your nervous system. It's being kept alive by the story that's there. And if we don't have a vehicle, we don't have a tool, we don't have the ability to see even just you know how we feel about it and and that we're okay and just kind of breathe through it then we'll go into the next situation and we'll take all the momentum of that rejection with us it could affect our confidence could make us more snappy at somebody your child asks you for something and you're like

what so many people can relate to that and i thought about that because when i was prepping for your podcast when we originally connected a few months ago you talk about this idea that that in nature, animals who go through really stressful situations. They don't do what we do as human beings. They don't just continue on. They actually do something else, which is directly connected to their nervous system and how they process.

Talk about that for a second. Yeah, there's actually a really, it's quite a moving video, honestly, on YouTube people can find. If you search for Impala being chased by Lion, and this Impala basically is in the literal, grips of a lion's mouth and somehow it like wriggles and it makes his way out and it and it runs away and it's safe and then the camera pans to this is a few minutes later where this impala is

crouched behind a bush on the floor and it just kind of does what you mentioned it pauses and then its whole body just start shaking it's just shaking and shaking and shaking for somewhere between like three to five minutes and when it's done it kind of shakes itself off it's hands up and it walks away. And all mammals, humans included, have this innate ability to discharge stress. And if that stress isn't discharged, it adds to the pile of what I think of as emotional debt, which can be measured as allostatic load. And if you want to get technical. And I think as humans, we've lost that innate capacity. It's still very much within us. And if you create the right conditions, the shaking, the processing, the unfolding, the unwinding definitely happens. But animals,

animals haven't lost touch with that. And so I think if we had a culture where that kind of emotional discharge was accepted and welcomed, like I think of during the war, Finnish cultures, used sauna as one of the ways, one of the places where the intensity of being in a wartime situation could be processed and it was done with others in community. And I think we've lost, you know, men's groups are maybe one of the few exceptions where this is also welcome to some degree. But we've really lost that capacity and I think it's very detrimental to our culture as a whole. You know, you laid out a whole series of different tools that could be helpful. to take us into a place where we can start to both increase interception,

but also process and step into some of these emotions. Did I get that right? And it's a basket of these different tools that are there. How does one who's listening today saying, you know, hey, listen, there are times, I'm a human being where I numb stuff, I don't feel it fully, or I'm noticing this loop that you're talking about, I keep on thinking about this situation, this rejection, this thing didn't go. right, this person that I'm angry at, this person that wrong me, whatever the loop is,

it's a continuous loop that's there. So that's an indication that something hasn't been worked through, right? Because if it was worked through, then you'd be like, okay, that happened, that person did the best they could, they didn't show up in the way that I wanted to or I was rejected, that hurt, but it's fine, I'm just going to continue on because I still believe in this idea, whatever it is. You process it, you move on with your life, right? But if it's looping, that's the greatest indication that it's like, you haven't worked

through this thing. And even if you think you're not thinking about it, oh, I don't want to think about it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Right? It's going to make you feel bad. Well, you don't have to think about it. Your nervous system is keeping it alive, right? It's still alive in the nervous system.

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target run. So whether you're just getting started with the healthier home swaps or looking to upgrade your current products, branch basics makes it simple. Find branch basics today at any target and target.com. The first is, you know, the practice you just shared that you're meant to shared with you. That's, that is a beautiful starting point. Creating little pockets of spaciousness in transition points during the day to just check in without an agenda. We spend so much of our time managing ourselves and overriding ourselves that any signals or any data that's coming up just gets just gets lost. So three to five minutes in the morning, maybe around lunchtime and then before the work day ends, that in itself, just pausing and listening and tuning in to what is what is some of the signals or feedback coming from your body is a beautiful starting point. In addition to looping thoughts, the other great kind of wedge in the door is looking for tension or clenching in the body.

So when I do breathwork with people one-on-one with clients, I'm reading their breath pattern and noticing where the breath is uneven and treating that as a signal that there's some tension being carried in the body somewhere. and what I see over and over again in myself and in clients is that when awareness and presence and sometimes breath is brought to that tension it usually kind of thaws into some kind of emotion it's it's the tension is some kind of protective response that is saying okay it's not it's not yet safe to go into and feel this thing but if you bring enough presence to it and sometimes even like manually kind of adding pressure to it it often results in sometimes intense emotional experiences. So being a kind of like taking an inventory of tension in your body is another really great way in.

And for people who are maybe more intellectual who are like, I don't even know how to begin with that. Just asking yourself, which emotions do I feel comfortable with? And what I noticed is that most people are comfortable with either anger or sadness, but rarely both. I led an anger workshop on a retreat last week for a bunch of AI lab employees. And it was incredible how many of them said that they hadn't felt anger or expressed anger in years, you know, sometimes decades. And again, creating a space where you can just just do. give yourself permission to even even faking it in the beginning you can kind of fake being angry

but giving yourself permission to express in some way what that is like you're kind of retraining the system that's that the anger is safe so again it all comes back to the safety piece and for many people with anger specifically they learned from their caregivers they learned from maybe teachers that when they were expressing anger that was wrong that was bad they were hurting people, they got punished for it. And so they're nervous of them learned that when that happens, it's not safe, it needs to get pushed down. And so gradually creating spaces where it is welcomed and viewing anger,

saying with anger as an example, as a gift where anger allows you to set boundaries. It allows you to say no. And if you can't say no, people don't trust you. like if you can't say no to someone they'll just walk over you and they won't trust you so seeing it as like healthy anger as a gift as opposed to something that needs to be meditated away or something that is a sign of weakness again it's a skill and you're retraining the nervous system that this is actually welcome and that it's actually a gift you know it's super interesting because I think a lot of people who feel that people are taking advantage of them oh, my family takes advantage of me or my coworkers take advantage of me or just my friends take advantage of me.

They're walking all over me and they take my kindness for granted. Those people often deal with, you know, some element of people pleasing. They're inviting that opportunity, maybe even some part of their identity. Yeah. Is around the person that, oh, I do it.

I take on extra stuff. Yeah, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'll do it. This was me for most of my 20s. Yeah. And. what it's connected to it seems like from what I'm hearing from you is that this person could also have this just whole wellspring of anger that's not being expressed yeah and then if there's not awareness of it it's being blamed on the world when really we might be inviting it in talk talk about your story

in relationship to to that people pleasing anger and and this feeling that everybody's you know taking advantage of me. Yeah. So, I mean, I was a pretty, I was kind of the classic, like, nice guy, so to speak. And it was actually in one of the breathwork trainings that I did that's, my, one of my mentors, Ed, he said to me, you are loved in your anger. And at that time, this was after a breathwork journey, it just kind of broke me open. And I realized that I just, I hadn't, I'd never felt safe to express anger without some kind of shame. And after that, in kind of the weeks that followed, I realized that there was this enormous amount of rage that I'd been carrying, like to kids that had bullied me at school to stuff that had happened when I was young.

And connecting to that, there was this sense of, like a real sense of, like, power and like aliveness and strength. and care. There was like a deep sense of care beneath that as well. And it was something I kind of went deep into, you know, did a bunch of men's retreats and men's work and that stuff. But I now just see it as honestly such a gift. And it's also worth mentioning that if you're someone who you don't think you're angry, two ways of repressing the anger.

One is complaining or resentment or passive. aggressive where it's not obvious that you're angry, but there's just like a kind of little dig or a little criticism that comes out. Or the other side is, is aggression where you're, like you said earlier, you're like projecting it out and you're blaming someone for your anger without actually owning it yourself. And both of those are just strategies of avoiding feeling the actual anger. That's a really important thing to mention because we are so good at tricking ourselves into thinking that something is not an issue. Especially the more you learn about the space,

you know the right things to say to yourself or say to other people to basically hold it all together barely enough, but you're not feeling well, right? But you can project that out to other people like, no, no, everything's okay, like these phrases that I was sharing earlier, like, oh, I'm just busy, I'm fine,

or I'm just tired, I'm fine. And so two new flags, just like you were talking about the clenching, body clenching being another example, right? If you find tightness in your jaw, in your stomach and other parts of your body, that can be an indication that something's going on.

So if you find yourself complaining about the world, that's one that you're sharing now, that that's an indication. Hey, it's a smoke alarm. Something is going on. There's a fire somewhere, most likely. We gotta pay attention. We gotta give a little bit more love to this space.

So complaining was one, and what was the other one that you mentioned? Resentment. Resentment. If resentment is building up? resentment. So resentment and then also passive aggressive comments, right, which those two things can be linked if you find yourself passive aggressively letting somebody know. Often it's the people that we love the most in our lives. Kids, partner, you know, your husband, wife, that's each other gives

the brunt of that to each other, especially in stressful situations. Yep. And then there's the aggressive side as well. So typically it's almost like like a volcano where someone's like, like, Like, I'm fine, I'm fine. And then it like explodes out. And that explosion then reinforces a story of, oh, my anger's bad. It hurts people. It's not welcome. And it kind of creates that loop, basically.

Yeah. So those are good indications. If you notice that these things are happening at any degree of frequency, that is an indication that there's probably some bubbling anger that has not been addressed. Yeah. So starting with that is the approach of notice at first. and then choose the appropriate tool in the toolbox. Do you find sometimes people are so good at sort of covering their anger

that's often better just to have a regular practice because sometimes you don't even know why or that you are angry and it doesn't come up until you're doing some sort of breath work? What are your thoughts about that? I'm a huge fan of having scheduled time maybe once every week or two to just almost like emotional hygiene especially people that have busy lives, unless you carve out this,

a little bit of spaciousness to tune in and be like, is there anything that I'm still holding onto from this last week, from this last month, whatever it is, it can be so easy to brush it under the rug and not notice it. In the beginning, anger can be a great one to work with, honestly. Creating, like, whether it's in your bedroom or a private space or some people in their car, again, connecting to the sensation.

and there's actually quite a few failure modes with anger where if you just, if you're just in the story while you're being angry, it will almost, it's like a bottomless, well, it'll just feel like it'll keep going. But if you can connect to the sensation,

maybe it's like tightness in your chest and then express the anger from that place, not at someone, but just in your car, into a pillow, into a forest or whatever it is, then it just moved. and it very quickly is replaced by this relief and this ease and it's like,

there's like a sigh that comes on the other side. And yeah, I mean, for a lot of people, it might take a bunch of sessions to kind of pay off that debt that's probably accumulated over a long period of time if they haven't been in touch with anger. And in the beginning, it might feel awkward. It might feel kinked. It might feel like, what am I doing? People will be really self-conscious.

I feel like a crazy person. It's like welcome that to you. That's like, everyone feels that way to some degree in the beginning. And then I don't know. I also find it helpful to find other people that are exploring this work as well. Who can hold you accountable, who can give you reflections, who can, something that's really helpful. And I did this on the retreat recently is if you can be making eye contact with someone

who is kind of in connection with you while you're being angry. that's retraining the system that, oh, this is, I can be angry and still be in connection with someone. Laying that out a little bit. We all deal with anger. We all deal with unexpressed anger. You know, there could be things that people can do on a daily basis. So I'll come back to that in a bit that are just part of this regular emotional hygiene, daily, weekly basis, an opportunity to check in with yourself, checking with others to really see, like, what's going on? Is there something going on that maybe I haven't said out loud to myself, but I feel inside?

then obviously you know you can work with somebody who's trained like yourself you know you work with different clients out there there there's retreats that are out there that you know people can can look at whether it's uh you know men's retreats women's retreats other stuff but i'll come back to the first one because i'm sure a lot of people that are listening this podcast are thinking about things they can do themselves i'll share from my perspective and then maybe if you have any things that you want to add on so the one thing that i've seen i notice whether it's frustration anger and sometimes the anger doesn't always have to be you know if you're a nice guy, and I definitely have been one of the, you know, a nice guy in my life, if you're a spiritual

person, but you're sort of masking anger, that often will be anger at yourself. You can be angry at yourself. I should have done better. I should have known better. Why am I doing this? Why am I doing that? You know, there could be a loop that's there. And that creates depression. It creates the inner critic, because you're being angry at yourself, which reduces your energy and aliveness. And ultimately, I think, creates a depressed state. Totally, totally. So there are times where I can notice that that's a pattern. And that pattern increases. If I have a week, let's say I'm not great at being somebody who likes to work out on my own. I love the gym.

I love weight training. I love doing different things. I love playing sports. But I'm not the person that naturally gravitates towards doing it myself. And so if I'm left to my own devices without having things on my calendar of pickleball or going and lifting weights with my friends or working with my trainer, shout out to Mark. he's great, I could find myself in a place where I'm a little bit more sedentary. I'm good at walking, but I'm not good at doing a lot of other things myself. And I noticed in the weeks where I don't have that movement, I think a lot of people can

relate to this. I'm like, dude, I just feel more stale. I'm probably not moving my lymphatic system as much. And I just feel stagnant. And then so all of these negative emotions that might be there, frustration towards others, frustration towards myself, are all heightened. So I know for myself when I'm moving, even if I'm at the gym

and I'm a little pissed off at something that happened, that's tiny that I haven't worked through, I might be working out and the thought comes. And I'm just like, you know what? I'm going to move through it through this heavy dead lift that I'm doing. And it may not even be more complicated than that.

Sometimes it's like, I'm pissed off about something. It's not something that has a big story around it. I just didn't really deal with, I was really crazy that that person cut me off while my kid was in the car and I didn't react then

because I'm not somebody who really reacts all the time to those situations but it still was very upsetting and I didn't really deal with that and I thought about it and I might have been running a loop like who the fuck is this person

who do they think, don't they know this is crazy LA is going to shit you know whatever whatever the emotions are that you're having and I'm in the gym and I'm just doing a tough weight and I'm moving through it and I legitimately feel better.

Yeah. Right? Yeah. I notice more sedentary, more anger. Less sedentary, less anger. That's there. So that's number one for me. Number two, every so often, I'm not great about doing it all the time.

But I do try, especially as a new father. And congratulations to you as a new father to a baby girl. I notice that I want to make sure that the inertia of the day in whatever meetings went well, didn't go well, being too high, being too low. is not brought into the house. So when I park in my garage downstairs, before I go in, because there's always things to deal with,

oh, can you take him or this is going on to that? My wife is amazing and, you know, does a really incredible job, but, you know, it's crazy when you have a baby around, right? So as soon as you step in, it's chaos, can be, can be. Things are going on. So I like to center myself

before I step into the house and just check in. So I'll do a little falling still practice that's there. Every Thursday morning we pick a spot in LA. There's a captain in the month and the captain shows up and there's a question of the day. And we ask that question and we do a little bit of a walk and talk. I'm bringing these couple things up. Exercise, falling still, having a group on a regular basis that, you know,

it's this opportunity to, you know, check in with. These are all little small things in my life that I try to do on a regular basis to even see like, what the fuck is going on and what do I feel? And a lot of times I don't even know what I feel, but can I have some sort of outlet that's there for me to figure it out and even if it looks a little messy, that's okay. A couple things that comes to mind. We've talked a lot about anger and grief and the like challenging emotions, but actually many people, maybe guys especially, struggle to feel joy and celebration. And it's actually the positive emotions that are even more scary to feel for more than a few seconds.

Yeah. So I think that's an interesting. Why is that, by the way? Because they might go away. And there's a inevitable heartbreak where the joy that you're feeling will end. And it's safer to not feel it at all in the first place. And it's vulnerable to be witnessed in like kind of pure joy or pleasure, things like that. like it's a really vulnerable state.

And then the other thing I wanted to mention is, I love the sound of what you described. And I'm actually free tomorrow morning, so I'd love to come. And it reminds me of my wife and I every weekend, and we've kept this going even with a baby, with a newborn, is we do a little, we call it a partnership check-in. And the format we have is gratitude. What are we grateful for for each other in life?

And then we do do-overs. So playing back the last week, where will we slightly out of integrity? And what does it do-over? that if we could go back in time, we would change. And then the third is grievances or clearings. And this is where being in touch with with a healthy anger is really helpful. But it's like saying, okay, hey, when you said this thing,

I was actually a bit hurt by that. And I just wanted to just want to mention that. And that kind of weekly routine has allowed us to, I think, do a pretty damn good job of not having accumulate over time. And I think it's been, like I joked that it's, you know, especially earlier on in our relationship, it probably saves our marriage, like, at least a handful of times. And what do you guys call this? We just call it a relationship check-in, partnership check-in.

Check-in. So it's a check-in. Let's break it down a little bit because I think this could be a great tool for a lot of people who are listening. Cool. What are the best practices around, especially as a new parents? What are the best practices of when to do it and break that down a little bit? reoccurring event on your calendar. How do you guys know? How do you make sure that, you know, it's not punted into the next week. We're so busy. We're not going to do it this week.

Yep. You know, give us some of the some of the do's and don'ts around how to make it just the habit of it happening regularly and not getting removed from the calendar. Yes. So it is a recurring calendar invite every Sunday, every Sunday morning. It's funny. We noticed that the weeks that we missed it, there would almost inevitably something, some kind of stickiness or like emotional challenge that we would navigate the next week as a result of having not done a check-in. So after missing, I don't know, however many times it took us to really realize this and be like our lives are so much better and flows so much more easily when we do this check-in, when we set aside somewhere between like hour and a half to a couple of hours, which sounds like a long time.

but it just makes everything else in the following weeks so much easier and we feel so much more connected and any slight resentments just get addressed. So we just have this weekly recurring calendar invite and now we have a newborn so sometimes she'll be feeding while we're doing a check-in or maybe Ellie will be sleeping and we kind of do it like whispering. But we just we just find a way to make it work because it's it's completely it's just it's it's just it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's It's essential, honestly. Yeah. I can imagine, even for people who have a healthy process of checking in, there are going to be moments where something comes up that needs more time. Hey, you really heard my feelings last week when you said this.

And the person says, okay, listen, I'm sorry. But also, you know that that was because, you know, this happened. And then it's a this and this and this, you know, that's something that needs a little bit of unpacking. Or there ever times we say, okay, we're just going to table this for an appropriation. That's the other thing to be able to get into. Is that if something comes up that feels like it's small, but you don't really want to,

it doesn't really feel like the right time to bring it up. Maybe your partner's super busy or you're stressed or just all the kids are doing something crazy. You know that you can talk about it in a few years time whenever the, whenever the check in is. And so that creates this like ease in my system that it's okay. I don't need to hold on to that because I can just like make a mental note and we can talk about it on the weekend.

There's always a time and place to be able to be able to be able to. to talk about. Yeah. Yeah. That we don't have to deal with this just right now. I'm imagining that that in particular, just super generalizing. I can imagine that, you know, there's this challenge in relationships where you have, you know, the female often is coming from a place of wanting love and connection. And the male is often wanting a sense of sort of respect, which shows up in different sorts of way. It could be, you know, a tranquil environment or whatever might be respect for me, acknowledgement of what I'm doing. I think there's even been books that have written on this dynamic of like love and respect and the tension that comes in between them. Or the classic sort of like,

you know, men are from Mars, women are from Venus, whatever it might be. But women often, again, generalizing will feel a sense of like they feel their emotions and it needs the opportunity to come out now because I'm not going to hold on to it. That's not who I am as an individual. And there are practical times in life where not everything can be addressed in this situation, but it needs a container. So I can imagine that this feels really good, especially for a lot of the wives, girlfriends, women that are listening because it's like there now is an appropriate time for us to deal with it and go into it a little bit deeper and for me to at least voice my things from my perspective

where often it can feel like, well, if I don't deal with this right now, I don't tell you exactly how I feel and all the different angles of it, when are we ever going to be able to talk about this again? Totally, totally. And the crucial difference as well is that you're both coming in in a grounded, regulated place, as opposed to often when these things come up in the moment, there is a level of spikiness, there's a level of reactivity.

And particularly if both partners are in a reactive state, the odds of you reaching a generative conclusion are basically close to zero. Yeah. It's too heightened. It's too heightened. Both of you are kind of defending something. Maybe one of you both think you're right in some way. But if you come together, you choose to come together and you start off with a self-checking,

you start off with maybe a gratitude practice, which we do to create that sense of ease and connection, then from that place, you can bring up the thing that is sticky and challenging. and it won't immediately be met with, like, defense. Yeah. And so you can be on the same side of the table in that and realize that, like, you're both probably seeking some form of connection. Yeah, and when a fight happens in real time, it's not just your, it's actually, it's your nervous system and your thinking mind are all sort of working against you.

You'll have less blood flow to the brain, right? Because your, your heart is pumping because your blood pressure is going up because you're basically getting ready for a small act of war against your husband or wife or whatever it is, your boyfriend, girlfriend, and you're not even thinking clearly. Right?

You just literally don't have as much blood flow going to the brain. You're not thinking clearly. You're hyper reactive. You know, Byron Katie, she had this great quote, which a lot of people didn't really understand. She's like, you know, defense is the first act of war.

Right? You're highly defensive and you're like, we're going to war, right? Or now it's you versus me and every couple's been there before and really the key and this is what this conversation is about is shortening that time of reactivity

right catching yourself early and then when you start with gratitude you're relaxing your nervous system you know this makes me think of they've been a guest in this podcast they've been a big part of my wife and I's work in our own relationship we did this premarital counseling

through the Gottman Institute John and Julie Gottman if you're familiar with their work and they have this whole thing where they've studied the most successful relationships over time and what they found is that, it's not about not getting into fights. Oh, no.

In fact, some of the most successful, happiest, most content partners and relationship, they fight pretty frequently. Totally. And that's the anger. That's the healthy anchor. That's the healthy anchor. But what they do do is they have this five to one ratio

when it comes to expressing gratitude, positive signals, even sometimes physical touch, So five positive expressions of those things to every one negative. And a lot of times you'll have a couple that doesn't fight that often. Maybe both partners are a little bit more stoic, so to speak. And people from the outside are like, well, you guys never fight. You must be sympathico and so many different things. You're on the same page.

But they also don't have a lot of positive things that are being expressed. A lot of gratitude, affection, little sort of calls, putting your hand on your wife's back, and just a little look in the eye and saying, you know, thank you, like a meaningful thank you, thank you, when she might make you a cup of coffee or you might make her a couple, like these present moment opportunities to really show the person that you acknowledge them and see them. And sometimes it's with words and sometimes it's without words. They might have one of those in a day, but then they also have one negative thing.

And now you've basically canceled them out. You actually need five expressions, right, of these gratitude, these moments. these tiny little recognitions for every one negative. And if you don't, your relationship just gets consumed with the inertia of all the that we're all dealing with on a regular basis, especially as your family grows. And then you worry, you wonder, like, why are we disconnected and we've been disconnected for such a long period of time? You know, your day is missing those connection opportunities, which are so tough.

and why I like this weekly check-in of yours is that it's an opportunity to also say like at the end of the week like here's what went you know here's the gratitude so it's it's gratitude for each other do-overs and then clearing and any kind of clearance grievances it also sets the tone for the week ahead

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That's exactly what, so we have topics afterwards, and that's where we deal with the practical logistical things, but often those logistical things will come from the first section where we're like, oh, shit, we're actually pretty, pretty freaking tired. Like, let's, let's have a nanny so that we can have, have a date night or so that we can catch up and sleep or whatever it is. So those, once the emotional pipes have been cleared, you can make clear decisions again, and you can think clearly, and you can both be on the same side of the table, both be on the same team and the choice is made from that place much much better something i've noticed

is that when we start off with the gratitude piece if one of us is struggling to access gratitude easily that's usually a really good indication that there's some emotion that got caught that hasn't been felt through that there is a kind of undercurrent of reactivity and so when that happens we actually instead of forcing the gratitude and just like saying things from our mind whoever whoever between us has more nervous system capacity they will basically just just get curious and be like like hey like hey what's up is there anything here that you want to voice or that you want to feel and that is often you know you mentioned that it's not until you say the thing out loud that you realize oh that's actually a big deal it's is when the gratitude isn't on the surface when it's when i i struggle to

think of something I'm grateful for, then it's like, oh, what's in the way? And then you turn your attention to whatever, whatever is in the way. And then it will become clear, whatever the thing is that you've been kind of like harboring or holding onto. And likely, because you're, you started off in connection, your partner will just, will just be like, hey, like, like, what do you need to say or feel like, well, like, what do you need right now? What can I do for you? And then once that moves, then the gratitude is so much more available. And you're just like, you suddenly you're able to list off like 20 things. But when your nervous system is in that state of protection, the gratitude and the joy and the reaching out to people is so much harder to access. So I just

want to say that because some people might be like, well, whenever I try gratitude, it's really, really hard for me. So instead of forcing it or like mentally being like, well, I should be grateful for these things, instead just turn your attention to like, well, what's in the way? What is this an invitation for me to explore and maybe feel? You have a couple banger quotes that I want to kind of go through. And some of them we've covered, some we haven't, but I feel like sometimes you hear a quote and all of a sudden, so much of what we've been talking about, maybe you missed one thing, the person who's listening and you hear a quote, put succinctly, you write a lot, you write on Twitter, X a lot, Twitter a lot. You know, it can hit you in a way. We're like, ah,

I got it. Right. So I'm going to read a couple of these out to you, and you're going to give us the director's cut behind the scene of like, what do you mean by this? Okay? Fun. Yeah, let's do it.

All right. The emotion last 20 seconds. The avoidance last 20 years. That's your quote. The motion last 20 seconds. The avoidance last 20 years. What do you mean by that? Yeah.

It's exactly what we've been talking about, that when the emotion comes through without resistance, it so I see this with with with my daughter eliana like she can be in an intense crying hysterics and literally 20 seconds later be smiling and laughing and happy and chill and I think kids have that inherent emotional fluidity but because we have the resistance and tension it just takes a lot longer to move through that and to be clear like a healthy emotional experience can last quite a bit longer but if you're not in the story and you're not constantly just like looping and you're feeling the thing, the emotions complete relatively quickly.

This idea that, you know, an emotion has to live with you forever, it's not true. Unless if you want to keep it alive, you know, you have to keep it alive. And we've had a psychologist from Pepperdime University, Dr. Joan Rosenberg, her thing is that emotions live in the body for 90 seconds. And then after that, if they're going to continue, it has to be kept alive. And so what are we doing to keep those emotions alive? And what are we doing from her own framework to sort of work through them and process them? I like that.

Okay, so here's the next quote. Your nervous system is making your decisions before your brain gets a vote. I'll say that one more time. Your nervous system is making decisions before your brain gets a vote. Break that down. Our nervous system will respond before it reaches the level of thought. And often I think of our brain and our mind is almost like a PR agent. Like it's just reporting on stuff that happens after the fact.

So if we're in a triggered reactive state, we will then sometimes even confabulate or come up with a justification for why we're in this state. And so this is why that if you can intervene on the level of the nervous system, then the mind will catch up. It kind of goes back to this idea that it's easy to lie to yourself and lie to others, that you're not upset, you're not angry, you're not hurt, you're not sad, you're just tired, busy, or thinking about something else, when really the best indication is that, something is going on is the fact that we've tensed up, we've clenched our breath, we're just feeling this sense of a knees or a pit in our stomach, that's a big one

that a lot of people realize. I remember this phrase between that Eckartoli said years ago when I was at one of his talks here in Malibu, said if there's ever a disagreement between your body and your brain, is your body that's most likely telling the truth. Right? If your brain is telling you that, hey, this is not a big deal, but your body is telling you through these hidden cues that we're been talking about today, your body is almost always right. There's actually, there's four times more afferent neurons or four times more efferent neurons than afferent neurons. And efferent neurons are going up from the body to the brain, afferent going from the brain to the body. And so we have this like super high wave of neurons going up, like one single lane of traffic going down.

So even just the amount of bandwidth of data is biased towards body to brain. Yeah. I like that. I like that. All right. Next quote we have here. You can't think your way out of a state. You have to feel your way through.

You can't think your way out of a state. You have to feel your way through. Break that down. Thinking is often a defense mechanism from feeling. And so whilst it might be able, be a good entryway if you don't then go into the interoceptive piece if you don't if you're not in your body while this is moving nothing will change you'll just keep looping or you'll keep coming up with even more elaborate narratives about why the world is fucked or why whatever this person said is is bad

um so it's really the the the Jedi move is dropping from the head into the body and then trusting whatever, getting out of the way, basically, like allowing the mind to get out of the way. There is a way that particularly anything, not just thoughts, but when you are looping thoughts or when you're when you're a thoughts about thoughts about thoughts that isn't in a productive way, it's just, it's just mental. It's not getting you anywhere. It's not getting you anywhere. That that is in the same way that we're now beginning to think of social media or these

things as addictions. They're basically distractions from feeling. Distractions from feeling the uncomfortable thing or doing the uncomfortable thing or saying the uncomfortable thing. And the more that you can retrain your habitual response to the doing and the feeling, the less that the addiction of thinking happens. And you know, you can, an extreme version of this is if you go on a meditation retreat teaching last week, you can just sit with your, sit with your mind for five, ten minutes and just watch the, watch the addictive patterns kind of looping. And initially you might be like, like, holy shit.

It's crazy to be in here. And actually one side effect of having, I think, cleared off a bunch of my own emotional debt over the last five or ten years, I used to have a really strong inner critic and a lot of inner monologue. And that has, I would say, reduced by 95 to 98%, where it's just a lot more spacious. It's almost like I was with a friend he described as like the thoughts are happening in another room. They're not like happening to me all the time. They're just there and I can engage if I want, but they're not like intense. And I think that is downstream of there's just less clenching now in my system that creates those addictive thinking loops. It reminds me of a story that I think I heard Ram Dass talk about, the spiritual teacher Ram Dass.

It might have been him. It might have been somebody else. But they were talking about Ramanamaraashi, the spiritual sage from India and, you know, beginning of meditation and, you know, all these different practices, breathwork. And then one time his student had asked him is that like, oh, Guruji, right? Like, Guruji just means teacher, right? You're saying like, oh, Guruji, like, how do we actually measure our progress spiritually? Like, how do we actually know if we're making progress?

Because it's so easy to lie to ourselves or to think or whatever. And he replied back and he said, degree of thought you have. And when I think about what you said is that the more harmony that there is with the nervous system, the more the general sense of so many of our thoughts during the day are negative, even if there's small little micro thoughts

towards ourselves towards other people. And if a lot of that just subsides, you're just thinking less. You're not trying to. If you try to think less, you're going to think more. If you go to a meditation retreat and somebody tells you you just don't think, you're going to be thinking all day long. That's not the purpose of meditation.

But actually just through having a little bit of a calm nervous system, being more present in the moment, noticing the sun, even sitting down with another human being. This is what I love podcasts is how often in a week do you actually sit down with another human being and you get to look them in the eye, be present, be fully here. And then also catch yourself when you're thinking about something else like, oh, what do I have to do later on today?

And then bring yourself back to the conversation is that, you know, you just, think less when there's more harmony and not because you're forcing it. It's just a natural by-pot product of living more in congruence with yourself and your nervous system. Yeah, there's a sense of the way I think about it is there's a sense of inner integrity and all of the, all of the parts. And I'm a fan of internal family systems as an approach, but there's less inner conflict. So often the thought loops and the challenges come when people like, well, one part of me thinks and feels this, but then another part of me thinks and feels this.

And that creates this tension, which feels like it can't be resolved. And the more that emotions can be welcomed, those inner conflicts get resolved. There's so much less of those addictive thought loops, inner criticisms, all of the things that people struggle with. And then the more that we feel also a sense of integrity and a sense of I feel like I'm in alignment. I don't feel like I'm sat down. sacrificing or I don't feel regret about this thing. And there's a sense of ease. It's almost like,

I think about the nervous system as being like an instrument. Like we have a human instrument. And it's almost like bringing yourself back into tune. Like you're kind of tuning the different strings on a guitar so that they are in a sense of integrity so that they're in tune. And that is what I think, the work that we've been talking about, this conversation, that's kind of what it comes down to is like retuning yourself so that there is a sense of integrity. All right. One more quote for you. A regulated nervous system isn't a calm one.

It's one that can go anywhere and come back. A regulated nervous system isn't a calm one. It's one that can go anywhere and then come back. Yeah. Yeah. Regulation is, I think, range. You feel comfortable. feel safe going into the full spectrum of emotions and then coming back down to a grounded center.

So it's about how effectively can you can you downshift? Can you welcome? Can you unclench so that you're no longer in that reactive place? It comes back to the half-life of reactivity. As opposed to someone who is maybe on the surface, like appears very calm, very stoic, but there's still this inner conflict or tension or looping thoughts that happens. other people don't see, but there's that inner conflict that they're not showing. Yeah, I think about that in the health capacity.

I think about HRV, heart rate variability. A great heart rate variability is one where your heart rate has the ability to go up and go down appropriate to what the situation might need. That if you are doing something challenging like a workout or even going up the stairs really quickly or walking fast, your heart rate should be able to rise to the occasion and show up And then when you're not doing that, your heart rate should be able to do the opposite, not work too hard to be calm, to be centered, to be chill, doesn't need to work hard. And obviously that relates to as a proxy of how much training has your heart gone through

on both sides. Number one, has it had deep, safe rest as an opportunity to repair the body and the brain that allows it to show up the best the next day, but also has it been challenged enough that it has exercised and worked its muscle as a heart, including your endothelium and your blood vessels and everything, that they are elastic but strong enough to not have your heart overwork.

And if your heart can't do that, and it's always at this sort of more fixed area, It's like, okay, your heart has to work a lot harder than other people because it can't rise to the occasion and it can't calm down when it needs to calm down. In that same way, we want to make sure we experience the full range of motions and put ourselves in a situation in life. You know, you said this earlier, but becoming a parent, you know, that's a great way to see all these ideas that you had as this. I'm a single guy, right, who's out there training people and doing good work. All right, let's really put it to the test. Let's throw a baby in the mix.

Or let's do this with a partner, a loved one, a wife. You know, what part of you is full of shit? What part of you is real? That's a great way to see it. Same thing in business. Business is actually a vehicle to practice these things, to put yourself into tough situations to try. Meet your edges. And if we look at life in that capacity that a lot of,

of new experiences can be that opportunity for us to learn. I had a mentor many years ago from the Jain tradition. His name is Guru Dev Chitra Banaji. And he was the first monk in the Jain tradition to leave. Back in the day, monks were not allowed to leave India. If you were part of the Jain tradition, this philosophy, way of life religion from India, they were worried that you would succumb to the sort of the desires of the West. And so you weren't allowed to travel and leave and other stuff. But he said, no, I want to bring these teachings to North America. He got an invitation to Harvard's Divinity School

and he brought a lot of these ideas of meditation and other things back in like the 60s to America, you know, from his perspective. And, you know, he would talk about this idea and his lectures, and I'm paraphrasing here, he would say, you know, there's a reason why, take relationships and finding the one and career and money, these can be the biggest and best teachers in life.

And the reason why is that society tells us, that when we finally find the one, or when we finally have achieved career success or notoriety or made that money in the way that we need to, then everything will be okay. Then you'll be safe. Then it'll be fine. And it's like, I wish for everybody to go through that

and have some degree of version of that because you realize it's not. And now, you know, the work can begin. Exactly. You know, some of my clients have had very successful exits and they get that like nine figure amount in their bank account and the next day they are in a deep depression because they don't feel any different to how they felt the day before but they'd been grinding and pushing themselves under this narrative that when I have X I will I will be okay

I will be safe I will feel a sense of belonging but it doesn't come and so that that safety blanket of like in the future things can be different gets pulled away and initially it feels like falling into an abyss but that's actually a very generative time because it it creates the conditions to look inwards and to um to explore and do the work to uh create those feelings themselves instead of thinking that when the world is different i will feel okay johnny a two-part question here as we're winding down. Number one, always like to create the opportunity to provide you as the guest with, is there anything? And we could probably record for another six hours and still barely touch the world that you explore. But is there anything topical right now for this conversation that

you feel that we didn't touch on that you want to touch on? And then for people that want to go deeper after this conversation, you know, what are the options that are there from them that are available that you want to highlight, whether it's, you know, books that have inspired you, work and offerings that you have, retreats that you might know of, whether it's you or other people that are out there in the world that, you know, has been impactful. So yeah, two-part question. Anything that we didn't cover that you want to cover? And number two, if people want to go deeper, of course, they can follow you, they can subscribe to the great work that you put out on a regular basis on social media, online, your newsletter. But what else is available for them? Yeah, totally.

you. The first one, I mean, we've covered a lot of ground. This has been great. You mentioned HRV just in passing at the end there. And I think something that's interesting is that just having a high HIV isn't necessarily, it's not automatically a great thing. So I've worked with some clients who've been in a freeze response in that hyperarousal response. And that can show up as very high HRV. And so they see this and they're like, oh, great, like I'm super regulated. But actually it's a, it's the parasympathetic system in a kind of intense freeze response. So just mentioning that as a caveat that no metric is a replacement for tuning in and seeing how you actually feel.

These are all proxies. These are all things that kind of are signpost and there's nuances and the devil's in the details. Exactly. Yeah. So I wanted to mention that. And then in terms of diving deeper, yeah, there are, there's so many jumping off points. I would say that for folks listening, if you enjoyed this, one of the best places is I've created a nervous system assessment, which is, asks a bunch of detailed questions about all areas of your life and gives a regulation score, but then more specifically, scores in these different skills that we've been talking about. So interception, self-regulation, emotional fluidity, and then creates a personalized protocol for over 30 days that allows you to improve those various skills.

So that's at nsmastery.com slash assessment or just nsmastery.com. And you can find the link on there. And then in addition, I would say, I would say A, see if you can find a men's group, a group of people, folks that you feel like you can go to some slightly more tender, vulnerable places with. That is amazing because this work really requires consistency. Like you don't transform in a week. You can make a lot of progress, but it doesn't, it's unlikely to change your life long term.

And then I'm a big fan of, I just got back from a journey retreat, J-H-O-U-R-N-E-Y. It's a meditation retreat, but they're basically teaching emotional fluidity. Art of accomplishment, who I know you've had Joe and I'm a big fan of their work. Joe Hudson. Joe Hudson. We collaborate. And just run experiments for yourself. I think that's my biggest kind of suggestion to people is treat yourself as an end of one, as a scientist of your own experience.

And I can give you a bunch of, I do a five-week cohort training called nervous system mastery where we give people experiments to run and encourage people to come up with their own experiments to design their own edge challenges where you pick something, maybe it's like asking the girl out, but you pick something that's on your edge, maybe it's a difficult conversation, maybe it's, publishing a blog post you've been writing, whatever the thing is. Maybe it's talking to your parents for the first time in a long time. And in community, having the courage and confidence to lean into those edges. And doing that over time creates transformation. And so I would really encourage people to, A, check out the assessment. But think of like, what is one experiment I can run this week and then review yourself at the of the week like how did it go what did i learn what would i do next week and just that that never

ends yeah that's beautiful brother i'm so glad that we got a chance to get uh connected shout out to our friend uh tom and also rungin a couple people that have talked about your work over the years and uh that's the beauty you know social media the algorithm gets a lot of uh shit these days but the beautiful part about it is that there's a whole bunch of people that I've connected with that I would have never connected with it. It wasn't for the power of the internet, including the audience that's listening today. And that's the bright side of this. And then we can all use these tools, lessons, insights, quotes to empower us. Maybe remove a little bit of resistance so that we can give love and attention to everything that we

care about in life and also be a little less hard on ourselves. So thank you for showing up today for recording with me in person. It's always a different conversation in person and painting a different vision for people who are stuck with some less empowering answers to questions when things go wrong and painting a different possibility

of what happens when we live in harmony with our nervous system. Beautiful. Thank you so much. This has been such a pleasure. Hi, everyone, Drew here. Two quick things. Number one, thank you so much for listening to this podcast. If you haven't already, subscribe, just hit the subscribe button on your favorite podcast app. And by the way, if you love this episode, it would mean the world to me. And it's the number one thing that you can do to support this podcast is share it with a friend. Share with a friend who would benefit from listening.

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