0:00
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.
Search this video
0:13
So the feather might be waking up in the morning and feeling a little bit tired, maybe a little bit exhausted.
0:18
The brick, maybe you ignore that or you don't notice it, and then three or four weeks later, you have a fight with someone or an argument, or you just feel frustrated and terrible and you lose your cool.
0:28
And then maybe the dump truck is a month later, or even a year later, there's a full-blown health crisis, or you develop type two diabetes or there's a whole range of things, or maybe you get fired.
0:41
Ideally, you want to notice when it's the feather and then make adjustments or shift then and not have to wait until you experience the full-blown pain of the dump truck, which unfortunately is what happens to a lot of people, especially when they experience burnout for the first time.
1:02
Today, my guest is Jonny Miller.
1:02
Jonny teaches courses and does one-on-one coaching with tech professionals helping them with something he calls Nervous System Mastery, which is essentially a set of tools and techniques for cultivating calm, upgrading your resilience, and increasing your aliveness.
1:18
If you can get better at dealing with stressful situations, avoiding burnout and being more confident in meetings and big presentations, it becomes a superpower and a huge advantage in both business and in life.
1:28
I actually read a post by Jonny about a year ago, and it totally changed the way that I think about nervousness and stress, and I still apply many of his lessons today.
1:38
In our conversation, we dive deep into Jonny's key insights.
1:43
We talk about why the best way to stay calm in stressful situations is to focus on the state of your body and not your mind.
1:49
How to create calm and confidence by changing the state of your body through breath.
1:54
Jonny shares a bunch of very specific breathing exercises for creating calm and also for creating energy that we actually try out on the podcast.
2:00
We also get into a bunch of advice for how to tell if you're seeing early signs of burnout, how to release emotional debt that you may be feeling.
2:11
Also, why feeling the feels gives you a competitive advantage in business.
2:16
Also, a practice called APE, which reminds you to focus on your awareness, your posture, and your emotions that have started practicing ever since our chat and so much more.
2:28
If you enjoy this chat, definitely check out Jonny's full course at nsmastery. com/lenny.
2:28
If you use that URL, you actually get $250 off the course.
2:40
With that, I bring you Jonny Miller after a short word from our sponsors.
2:42
This time of year is prime for career reflection and setting goals for professional growth.
2:45
I always like to spend this time reflecting on what I accomplished the previous year, what I hope to accomplish the next year, and whether this is the year I look for a new opportunity.
2:53
That's where today's sponsor Teal comes in.
2:53
Teal provides you with the tools to run an amazing job search with an AI-powered resume builder, job tracker, cover letter generator, and Chrome extension that integrates with over 40 job boards.
3:08
Teal is the all-in-one platform.
3:08
You need to run a more streamlined and efficient job search and stand out in this competitive market.
3:13
There's a reason nearly 1 million people have trusted Teal to run their job search.
3:17
If you're thinking of making a change in the year, leverage Teal to grow your career on your own terms.
3:21
Get started for free at tealhq. com/lenny. That's tealhq. com/lenny.
3:26
This episode is brought to you by Vanta, helping you streamline your security compliance to accelerate your growth.
3:35
Thousands of fast-growing companies like Gusto, Comm, Quora, and Modern Treasury trust Vanta to help build, scale, manage and demonstrate their security and compliance programs and get ready for audits in weeks, not months.
3:51
By offering the most in demand security and privacy frameworks such as SOC 2, ISO 27001, GDPR, HIPAA, and many more.
3:56
Vanta helps companies obtain the reports they need to accelerate growth, build efficient compliance processes, mitigate risks to their businesses, and build trust with external stakeholders.
4:07
Over 5,000 fast-growing companies use Vanta to automate up to 90% of the work involved with SOC 2 and these other frameworks.
4:13
For a limited time Lenny's podcast listeners get $1,000 off Vanta. Go to vanta.
4:17
com/lenny, that's V-A-N-T-A.
4:24
com/lenny to learn more and to claim your discounts get started today.
4:33
Jonny, thank you so much for being here. Welcome to the podcast.
4:37
It's great to be here, Lenny.
4:37
So I read this post that you wrote, I think it was over a year ago at this point.
4:40
It was called The Operating Manual for Your Nervous System, and first of all, blew my mind when I read it.
4:44
Second of all, I always think about it when I get nervous or anxious in a situation, it's really stuck with me.
4:55
And I know that people in the workplace often get nervous and anxious doing all hand presentations, meetings, performance reviews, all the things.
5:02
So I thought it'd be awesome just to dive into the stuff that you've uncovered about how we can become less nervous and less anxious.
5:07
Before we get into the meat of it, I'd love to just spend a couple minutes just getting a sense of why you got into this stuff.
5:17
What actually got you to spend so much of your energy and life force trying to understand how the nervous system works, how to get people to be less nervous and anxious.
5:27
My story starts in I kind of have a background in tech.
5:27
I had a startup, we went through Techstars back in 2012.
5:32
About five and a half years into that experience, I went through burnout, which is pretty common in the startup world, but that actually wasn't the trigger for me.
5:42
I find that usually people that get into this type of work, there's some kind of catalyst or some kind of challenging life event.
5:47
And for me, that was October 23rd, 2017, and my fiance at the time had an anxiety attack and she took her own life.
5:56
And that completely just destroyed me at the time.
6:05
destroyed me at the time. And I realized that I'd been so disconnected from my body and my emotions, and it sent me on this five plus year journey to discover all of this inner landscape that
6:21
I'd been numb from the neck down, and I went into breathwork meditation retreats, did hundreds of breathwork journeys, researched with a breath lab over in Bali, and basically just kind of directed all of my focus and attention onto understanding this inner landscape that I'd been pretty much oblivious to. And since then, I've been working with founders, executives, running courses
6:41
And since then, I've been working with founders, executives, running courses and teaching what I'm learning and hopefully still researching at the same time as well. Wow.
6:52
And I imagine the thinking was that if your wife had these skills, she would've had another path.
6:58
Yeah, that was definitely part of it, yeah.
7:03
And also just since realizing how many people are struggling with anxiety, depression, all of this kind of constellation of mental health challenges both in the workplace and at home as well.
7:10
And yeah, it's been a very rewarding journey.
7:16
All right, this episode's already gotten very heavy and I'm sucked in.
7:22
I'm excited to learn all these things that you've uncovered.
7:22
So let's just get into the meat of it.
7:29
Just talk about this kind of general method that you've found for how to help people become less nervous and anxious.
7:34
So I find this top down, bottom up distinction to be incredibly helpful.
7:41
Most people when they try to calm down, they use tactical reframes or maybe mindfulness or maybe reframing the situation in a positive light.
7:49
There's lots of different practices that people use which do have some effect.
7:53
But in my experience, working with the physiology, using what's known as a bottom up approach, primarily using the breath, although there's also other approaches that you can use, it's just such a rapidly more effective way of shifting your state.
8:09
And to give a little bit of context and maybe some science as well, we have what's known as afferent and efferent neurons going up and down our body, and there's four times more afferent neurons going from the body to the brain as from the brain to the body.
8:27
So you can almost imagine there's a super highway of traffic of information going up to the brain and four times less going from the brain to the body.
8:32
And so by learning how to pull on the levers of our physiology, we can rapidly change our state.
8:39
And then from there, by changing our state, that impacts the thoughts and feelings that we have.
8:47
So instead of trying to change the story or trying to fix something or trying to solve something, which is what most people do by default, myself included in the past, if you change your state first, then there's a cascading effect which changes your thoughts and your feelings. Okay, amazing.
9:06
Yeah, and just to share how I felt when I was reading this and try to understand this approach is whenever I get nervous, there's always this like, oh, my body's starting to feel anxious.
9:17
And then I think of a reason.
9:17
Oftentimes, I don't know why it gets nervous, why my body's starting to create this feeling of anxiety.
9:21
And then I often realize I'm just now trying to just explain why it happened, "Oh, I have this big meeting coming up, or I have this podcast episode I'm nervous about, or I'm not going to make a deadline for my newsletter."
9:36
I often experience this where it's just like, "Oh, something feels nervous."
9:36
And then, "Okay, here's the explanation."
9:40
So maybe just along those lines, what else is there that might be helpful for people to think about in this context?
9:44
I mean, I think it's helpful to understand the process by which, by changing the way that we breathe, for example, it shifts our physiological state and changes our nervous system.
9:58
So if you're listening to this, maybe you, Lenny, you can try this as well.
10:02
If you start breathing into your upper chest and shallow fairly, fairly rapid, maybe even through the mouth, that will then there's a part of your brain called the insular cortex, which is basically constantly spying on the way that we're breathing and it will register that change, it will then send information to activate the endocrine system, which then creates shift in our blood chemistry.
10:25
The sympathetic nervous system gets activated and that increase in adrenaline and cortisol starts to flood your body.
10:31
Everyone's probably very familiar with that feeling.
10:37
And then that will then have a cascading impact on the thoughts that you're having and the way that you feel.
10:42
And so you just shared, we have a tendency to kind of confabulate or make up stories that match the state that we are in.
10:48
And so that's kind of what happens when we're breathing in that way.
10:55
And then you can also consciously change your breath to breathe in a different way, which has the reverse effects, which I can go into, but I'll pause there. Yeah.
11:05
So I think one of the big actionable takeaways here is that instead of trying to convince yourself, "No, this talk is going to go great, I don't need to worry about how I'm going to look in this meeting."
11:14
Basically instead of going top down, trying to calm your body through thought, your advice is calm your body first because then your mind will notice, "Hey, I'm actually not as nervous as I thought.
11:24
Maybe things are going to be okay." Is that right? Yeah, precisely.
11:29
And I mean I've used this myself many times before presentations.
11:29
I gave a TEDx talk a few years ago and I was like my entire body, I was just terrified.
11:39
And I did in 15 minutes of this breathing practice before and walked on stage almost cool as a cucumber. It's very effective.
11:45
Sounds too good to be true.
11:45
But we're going to do some of these exercises for people.
11:49
Before we get into, why is it that breath specifically so powerful?
11:54
It feels like such a strange thing to work so well, just this idea of breathing in a different way.
11:59
You talked a bit about this, I forget what you called it, that kind of watches how you're breathing.
12:03
But I guess what else can you share about just why is breath so effective in changing our state? Sure.
12:07
Well, it's one of the few things which happens automatically, but we can also control it consciously.
12:12
And so what scientists have discovered that when the exhale is twice as long as the inhale, it has a calming effect.
12:19
And when the inhale is either more intense or twice as long as the exhale, it has an activating effect.
12:30
So you can kind of think of this as an up or down lever on the nervous system.
12:36
You also have this really clever way of describing this system.
12:36
You call it state over story, essentially focusing on the state of your body versus the story you're telling yourself.
12:44
Is that the way to think about it?
12:44
And can you just talk about that concept?
12:48
Yeah, so it's basically a shorthand for what we've just been talking about, which is most people tend to approach the problem or try to solve things on the level of story.
12:53
So there's multiple ways you can do that through the breath as we just talked about.
12:59
You can also defocus your gaze and kind of relax your eyes, and that has a similar effect.
13:04
It can expand your awareness and kind of bring your awareness to behind you and the sides of you and below you, or you can breathe in these ways which emphasize the exhale.
13:13
And so when we breathe in a way with say the exhale twice as long as the inhale, that part of the brain, the insular cortex then sends signals to the parasympathetic nervous system, which then has the cascading effect on our endocrine system and calms us down.
13:30
And what I usually find as well is that the kind of reactive thoughts and feelings that we have when we are in that kind of anxious loop, they can be self-reinforcing.
13:42
And so if someone has a thought of like, "Oh no, I'm nervous before this important presentation."
13:46
Then that exacerbates the breathing pattern and then the whole thing just goes into this spiral, which can end up in full-blown panic attacks if there's not an intervention of some sorts.
13:57
Yeah, that's what I find with my nerves.
13:57
I hate talking on stage.
13:57
I get nervous before every podcast.
14:02
This is not my natural state. Interesting.
14:05
Yeah, and I hide it well.
14:05
Is that still the case with podcast today? Absolutely.
14:09
And it's like different levels of nervousness, but it's always just like, "Oh, there we go."
14:13
I'm not a performer person.
14:13
Even I kind of push myself to do this podcast as a way to get better at this, to be honest.
14:19
So it's still a thing that I think about.
14:19
And what I find is the nervousness comes from exactly what you described is the nervousness of being nervous.
14:25
I don't know, there's no reason specifically to be anxious, but I don't know how I'll be once I do the thing.
14:31
So it's nervous of what it might look like or end up being like.
14:36
So that's exactly what I ran into. Yeah.
14:41
And there's obviously people say mindfulness, meditation, things like that, that can increase the psychological space between stimulus and response.
14:46
And that is something that obviously does help over the long term, but it's in my opinion, nowhere near as rapid and effective and efficient as just changing the way that you're breathing. Awesome. So let's get into it.
15:00
I know you have a couple exercises specifically for this, and then we'll go from there.
15:04
We can stack a few of the exercises and I'll try and keep it to a minute or so.
15:08
So yeah, if you want to get comfy in your chair and sit up straight, feel your butt on the seat, and I find it helpful to kind of be aware of the space behind you and above you as well, kind of expanding your awareness so that you are aware of the space behind to the sides and above.
15:26
And should we close your eyes?
15:31
Yeah, and close your eyes down.
15:31
If you're listening and driving, obviously don't do that.
15:34
But yeah, closing the eyes down for sure helps.
15:34
And now we're just going to do simple breath.
15:39
We're going to inhale in through the nose for four.
15:39
We're going to hold the breath at the top for four, and we're going to exhale for eight, and then we're going to repeat.
15:43
So let the breath go and inhaling through the nose.
15:48
Inhale, 2, 3, 4, hold the breath, 2, 3, 4.
15:48
And exhale, 8, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8.
16:02
Inhale, 2, 3, 4, hold the breath, 2, 3, 4, and exhale, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8.
16:24
And now you can let go of the breath completely and we'll end with one round of humming, which is surprisingly effect of it calming as well.
16:33
So take a full breath in and humming through the nose all the way to the end of exhale.
16:38
Let out a sigh if that feels good and open up your eyes. I feel extremely calm.
17:01
I should do this every podcast episode before we start. A note on the humming.
17:08
It also releases nitric oxide, which is a vasodilator, and that helps to create that kind of calming effect and it also reduces eye tension as well.
17:13
So I'll do it if I've been looking to screen for too long.
17:18
It's really good for kind of reducing eye fatigue as well.
17:23
And there's also a vagus nerve component to it because your body's vibrating, is that true? Yeah, precisely.
17:28
So it kind of tones or stimulates the vagus nerve, which stimulates the parasympathetic nervous system.
17:33
What's your advice for doing this?
17:33
Is this before you go into a big meeting or a presentation? How do you apply this?
17:42
I kind of like to share building a toolkit of different practices that are appropriate for different contexts.
17:48
So something like the 4, 4, 8 breathing, you could do pretty much anywhere without anyone necessarily noticing.
17:54
Humming is slightly more obvious, but if you're about to jump on a zoom or something, you can totally do it with your eyes closed.
18:01
Things like expanding your awareness or bringing your awareness down to your feet and your hands, which creates a kind of grounding calming effect that also you can do if you're in a busy room.
18:11
Maybe you have social anxiety, even orienting and labeling things that you are hearing and feeling, kind of bringing the awareness and attention back into the body that also has an effect.
18:17
And then there's longer practices for say, non-sleep deep rests, belly breathing, things that you can do if you have 10, 20 minutes and you're at home and you want a downshift.
18:30
So I like to kind of give people a big toolkit to see what works for them and then cherry-pick which ones are suitable to different situations.
18:36
And another way that I think about this is, I call it, if this, then breathe.
18:42
So it's like if I feel overwhelmed, then I do the humming.
18:48
If I feel anxious, then I do 4, 4, 8 breathing or alternate nostril breathing and kind of having my own little recipe set that I have for different context is really helpful and I work with people to kind of build those toolkits themselves.
19:01
This sounds like it needs to be a website where people can go with these lists of if this, then that is there a place that we could send people in the show notes and if not, you should make one before we go live. There is not currently.
19:13
It's part of the curriculum in the course that I have, but- Okay, great. ...
19:17
I can maybe see if I can spin one up as well, but yeah. Okay, cool.
19:19
We'll link to the course if nothing else. Amazing. Okay.
19:23
Along this line of calming breath exercise, Huberman also has a different version, which I've tried and I'm going to do both now.
19:29
You breathe in fully and then you breathe in a little bit more.
19:33
I imagine you've seen that piece of advice? That's also fantastic.
19:37
He calls it the physiological sigh, and it's both very effective, especially if you just have five seconds and you just take a full sigh, it's great.
19:45
I'd also add that the sigh happens naturally as a result of doing these downshifting practices.
19:56
So if you notice after you do let's say the 4, 4, 8 breathing, at the end, you might naturally just want to let out a sigh, and that's a signal that your body is naturally downshifting.
20:01
Or if you are with a friend and you feel just comfortable and relaxed, then your body might sigh.
20:06
And it's something that we do a lot and as you say, you can consciously do it and that will help as well.
20:16
That's another one of the practices. Awesome. So link to that.
20:16
And I think throughout this episode, as you said, we're going to give people a bunch of tools that they can use, and it feels like some are in the moment, "I need to feel calmer right now.
20:24
Here's a thing you could do."
20:28
And then there's things you can do ongoing that build...
20:28
I guess another way to think about it's just make your body more calm as a baseline of practice to work on there. Yeah, precisely. Awesome, okay.
20:38
I think the other breathing exercise we're going to do is the opposite.
20:41
Gets you all excited, is that right? Yeah, sure. We can do that as well.
20:46
I call this espresso breath. So this is the opposite. This is very activating.
20:51
I would only recommend this if you're feeling lethargic or maybe instead of drinking a coffee in the afternoon, you could do this for a minute or so.
20:56
In the scientific literature, it's bellows breath or breath of fire, and it basically looks like a series of rapid exhales through the nose.
21:07
I like to keep it through the nose only if you do it through the mouth, it can be very too activating and it can kind of overwhelm people.
21:12
Obviously, there's the Wim Hof practice that I'm sure many people are familiar with.
21:17
So this is a more gentle version of...
21:21
If Wim Hof is like Red Bull, this is kind of like a small coffee. I like that.
21:29
And you call it the espresso breath, espresso breath. Espresso breath, yeah.
21:33
So yeah, that's a good metaphor there. Yeah, yeah. So yeah, let's do it.
21:35
So again, kind of sit up straight, and this time you want to be pumping the breath from your lower belly and you pump the breath on the exhale.
21:42
So I'll demonstrate it briefly. It's like breathe in. Okay.
21:47
So yeah, take a full breath in and begin. And let go. And full breath in. And sigh on the exhale.
22:14
I already feel a little bit tingly. I'm energized. Let's do this. Go, go, go, go. That was great. Okay, look at that.
22:30
We're back to where we started with the full circle of energy. That was great. Up and down.
22:34
And then how long do you recommend doing that one for?
22:36
So it kind of depends on how activating you find it, but I usually find 30 breaths per round and then take a breath, have a long pause on the exhale, and then if you want to do another round or two. Amazing.
22:50
And the cases where this might be helpful is maybe you're about to give a big talk, I guess in a talk you both want energy and want calm, so that's kind of complicated.
22:59
Especially if you are meetings early in the morning and you haven't quite got going yet, you can do the espresso breath to begin with and that activates you.
23:03
And then do some of the downshifting practices to kind of ground and stabilize that aliveness.
23:12
Are there any other tactical breathing exercises that are worth doing real quick?
23:15
I know we'll get into some longer practices and deeper stuff, but is there anything else that would be helpful here?
23:19
No, I think we've covered the bases.
23:19
I don't want to overwhelm people too much.
23:23
Just as a takeaway, there's these two techniques.
23:27
One to help you get more calm when you need to be calm in the moment.
23:27
The other is to get energy.
23:34
And then I guess are these things that you recommend doing ongoing to build this muscle in your body or are these mostly for you need this now in the moment and it's not worth just doing a few times a day even when you're fine? Yeah, great question.
23:44
So I like to recommend both a morning practice, particularly to build the muscle of just doing it and getting used to it.
23:56
So maybe five minutes in the morning before you start work, before breakfast, something like that.
24:01
And then you are more likely to remember that you have access to that in the moment because usually the challenge is that when someone is in that flustered state, remembering to do the practice is often the last thing that comes to mind.
24:12
So by having a deliberate practice for at least 7 to 10 days and so that you get the hang of it, then it feels much more natural to do it when you're feeling.
24:23
That's kind of like playing the game on hard mode when you are really stressed and anxious, that's when you need it the most, but it's also when you're least likely to remember to do it. Awesome.
24:33
Okay, so the first exercise to calm you down is essentially breathe in four seconds, hold it for four seconds, breathe out slowly for eight seconds and do that for about 30 seconds, is that right? Or for a minute?
24:48
Yeah, I'd say for at least a minute or two.
24:48
We kind of did a shorter version.
24:48
I'll also add that the important thing is that the exhale is twice as long as the inhale.
24:53
So if exhaling for eight is too long, you could do 3, 3, 6 or even 2, 2, 4 or even 5, 5, 10 depending on your lung capacity essentially and your CO2 tolerance. Okay, good to know.
25:06
And then the espresso breath, when you need energy or you just kind of pump air out of your belly through your nose and you do that for how long would you recommend?
25:15
Two to three rounds of 30 pumps, yeah.
25:21
And again, the reason this is effective and powerful is coming back to your original big insight that our state is driven by what our body is doing and our mind often explains what we're feeling based on what our body's doing.
25:34
So that if you can change the state of your body and become less nervous in your body, your mind will be like, "All right, everything's fine." Yeah.
25:44
And maybe something that we haven't touched on yet, but I think is important to add in is this idea of interoception or somatic awareness.
25:47
And the reason I bring it in is because if you do this practice but you're not really aware of your body and how you feel, then it'll be less compelling to you.
25:59
But if you're kind of tuned into like sensations in your body, what's going on, you're more likely to notice the difference in the shifts. Great. So let's get into that.
26:09
That was something I definitely wanted to touch on here.
26:09
This awesome acronym to help you with this process of interoception.
26:13
So talk about what that is and then how to actually go about becoming better at being aware of what your body's doing. Yeah.
26:22
So it's this idea of interoception, which is known as our sixth sense, and basically it's our ability to sense, track and feel our internal landscape.
26:29
And I like to use the metaphor of a chef in the same way that you train your flavor palette for kind of sweet, spicy, umami, things like that.
26:41
You can also train your interoceptive palette and become more aware of the internal sensations, whether that's your breath, whether it's tension, whether it's moods and emotions, whether it's the quality of your awareness, the quality of your thoughts.
26:53
And the more kind of in tune with that you are, the more likely you are to notice the kind of early warning signs of something like anxiety.
27:02
Because usually, certainly a panic attack doesn't come out of nowhere.
27:02
There will be a kind of cascade of subtle things that happen in your body that eventually result in anxiety.
27:14
And so if you can catch those things early and kind of nip them in the bud and do one of these practices, then you can avoid the kind of 10 out of 10 worst case scenarios. Okay, awesome.
27:25
So I know that there's also specific things you recommend people pay attention to, to understand what their body is doing in this process of inter...
27:33
Interoception, yeah, Interra... Okay. What is it? Interoception. Interoception.
27:39
As opposed to exteroception, which is awareness of all the external stimuli. Got it.
27:44
I guess before we even get to that, so you mentioned that it's another sense we have, and I think that's a really important point that I think maybe people didn't catch.
27:47
So we have these five senses, obviously taste and smell and vision and touch.
27:51
But you're finding and research showed basically this is another sense people don't really know we have. Yeah, exactly.
28:02
And it has been studies quite a lot, especially in the last decade or so.
28:02
And there's a number of interesting findings from the research that I found.
28:07
One being that ADHD tends to correlate with low levels of interoception, as does if people have PTSD or trauma.
28:14
Again, interoception is lowered.
28:20
And I'd certainly say for myself, for the first 25 years of my life, I was fairly numb from the neck down.
28:27
I was not very aware to what was happening in my body in real time.
28:31
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.
28:42
And I think the thesis was that by tuning into what their body was doing in certain moments, they could pick up on things more intuitive decision making essentially.
28:53
So I think there's a specific list of things that you recommend people pay attention to, their posture, their breath, things like that.
29:02
What is that list and then how do we actually do this better? Yeah.
29:06
So I simplify this to APE, which basically is an acronym which stands for awareness, posture, and emotion.
29:12
So to kind of go through each one by one.
29:12
Awareness is, to give an example, I could narrow my awareness and become really focused and just you kind of tense up and it also is quite activating sometimes or you can relax and expand your awareness and be aware of the space above me, the space behind me, the space below me.
29:32
And that is generally a calming thing.
29:32
Posture is fairly self-explanatory.
29:37
But again, our posture affects how we feel.
29:37
You're shifting there now.
29:45
And then emotion, which I include somatic or body-based sensations which arise.
29:45
So both kind of what is the overall mood and the flavor or the texture that I'm feeling.
29:55
Like right now, maybe it's excitement, maybe there's some joy.
30:01
I'm noticing there's some heat in my belly probably from the breathing.
30:07
Yeah, there's a little bit of tightness in my lower back from working out yesterday.
30:11
So just sense kind of mapping that landscape of sensation.
30:11
And for most people it's almost like it's like a [inaudible 00:30:22].
30:19
You have those maps of [inaudible 00:30:25] and for a lot of people there's just these big kind blind spots in their body.
30:30
And the advice here is, so there's this acronym APE and the advice is think about these three things when you're feeling something that you may not, basically something's going on slash just often come back to this.
30:42
I imagine just whenever you can think of, "Oh, APE: awareness, posture, emotion." Is that how to use this? Yeah, exactly.
30:47
So again, it can be something that you do before you start your day, maybe with a cup of tea.
30:53
I like to drink tea and just do a body scan essentially and just check each of those three areas.
31:00
And it's really valuable, particularly if you are having racing thoughts or something doesn't feel quite right.
31:07
Instead of just tackling the problem on the level of the mind dropping down into the body and bringing that into the picture as well, I find to be really helpful.
31:26
Basically, as often as you can.
31:26
And generally when things are feeling all off, just remember APE, where's my awareness? How's my posture?
31:33
And then what am I feeling? Am I feeling sad?
31:38
Am I feeling happy, excited, angry? Things like that.
31:38
I think you also talk about breath, like you have a list you wrote about this of other things that you might want to pay attention to.
31:48
Actually finding paying attention to what my breath is doing is really powerful too.
31:48
So I'm going to try a BAPE version of this or I'm going to try to think about where's my breath coming from, what am I feeling there? Yeah.
31:59
So the breath and sensations are two other ones that are really helpful.
32:05
The breath in particular, often people will...
32:05
There's an idea of email apnea when people are checking their emails, they will, without noticing it, start to hold their breath, which is generally a very activating thing to do.
32:15
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?
32:26
Is it kind of into the belly and into the sides of the rib cage and does it feel easeful?
32:32
Basically, breathing without tension is ideal.
32:39
What I think about using this practice is if I were sitting in a meeting and just not feeling amazingly confident, I just come back to this acronym, BAPE or APE, whichever one you want to choose, just like how am I feeling right now?
32:50
Oh wow, my whole stomach is clenched.
32:50
I'm maybe nervous about what might happen or I'm not breathing at all, or my posture is really bad.
32:55
So I think in a meeting would be really helpful Here, maybe you're about to get on a zoom or an important call or something like that. Maybe a one-on-one.
33:04
Is there anything else, any other moments that kind of triggers for people of like, "Oh, I should really be aware of what's happening right now.
33:14
Let me do an APE exercise."
33:14
Yeah, well, just to kind of piggyback on what you just said, if you are about to jump on a meeting and you're noticing that your stomach is clenched, that's actually really useful data to be like, "Why is this happening?"
33:23
Is it your intuition kind of saying that maybe you shouldn't do this deal with someone or maybe something is off and so it's a sign to explore that more.
33:37
Or it could be that you've been triggered by something or something that someone said and you've only just realized it and then that's again, more information or something that you can reflect on or go into.
33:49
Is there anything in your life recently that is an example of this where you're feeling unsure and maybe you realize, "Oh, here's what my body's doing, maybe I should pay more attention to this."
34:03
Actually, last week I did a podcast conversation, so I have a podcast myself, and I got off the call and I remember I felt or got off the podcast and I felt pretty exhausted and I felt like there was this kind of tension in my chest.
34:15
And again, my breath was kind of all over the place and I realized that I had very much over committed myself for that week.
34:22
I'd scheduled back to back podcast interviews.
34:28
The podcast wasn't even the priority for what I'm focusing on in this quarter, so I then made the decision to just push back all my episodes until the summer basically. I love that example.
34:42
I know that feeling very well. I'm sure.
34:46
When you wrote about this idea of interoception, you connected it to burnout, and I think you talked about how this is one of the best tools to avoid burnout. Is that right?
34:56
Am I remembering that right?
34:56
And if so, how do you think about this burnout and avoiding burnout in general, something a lot of people experience?
35:08
Yeah, so I have this idea that I call the feather brick dump truck phenomenon.
35:08
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.
35:22
So the feather might be waking up in the morning and feeling a little bit tired, maybe a little bit exhausted.
35:27
The brick, maybe you ignore that or you don't notice it, and then three or four weeks later you have a fight with someone or an argument or you just feel frustrated and terrible and you lose your cool.
35:38
And then maybe the dump truck is a month later or even a year later, there's a full-blown health crisis, or you develop type two diabetes or there's a whole range of things, or maybe you get fired.
35:52
There's a bunch of different things that can happen, but normally depending on how attuned or depending on someone's interoceptive capacity, ideally, you want to notice when it's the feather and then make adjustments or shift then and not have to wait until you experience the full-blown pain of the dump truck, which unfortunately is what happens to a lot of people, especially when they experience burnout for the first time.
36:18
This is such an important point and such a good way of thinking about it.
36:18
It reminds me of Andy Johns and the episode we had there of just how long and willing to the episode there of just how all these little things came up along the way and then eventually just became incredibly unsustainable to live the life that he was living.
36:34
This episode is brought to you by Miro.
36:34
Do you ever feel like your projects aren't as organized as you like them to be or it's way too hard for people on your team to find all of the documents and files and context that they need for their project?
36:44
Miro helps you streamline your workflows, organize information, and get your whole team on the same page.
36:50
If you want to see what Miro can do for you, check out my Miro board that the Miro team helped me create, which includes all of my favorite plug and play templates, like a user journey map, my favorite one pager template plus a brainstorming guide.
37:05
My board also has a place for you to share suggestions for this podcast and also answer a question that I have for you.
37:10
You can then take my Miro board and easily create your own to see how it feels.
37:15
Make sure to check out some of my favorite features, like the sticky notes, the inline comments and charts, and also the really cool diagramming tools. Check it out at miro. com/lenny.
37:24
Your first three Miro boards are free when you sign up today at miro. com/lenny.
37:32
Find simplicity in your most complex projects with Miro. That's M-I-R-O. com/lenny.
37:40
What are some examples of this feather?
37:40
So your advice here is just pay attention to these little signs that you're not living a sustainable life right now.
37:43
What are some examples of these kind of feathery signs of like maybe I need to change something?
37:55
Yeah, so I'll tie this in with a concept that I call emotional debt, which is basically when our nervous system experiences stress, there's known as a mobilization cycle, and if that cycle isn't completed or we don't get to downshift or relax on the other side, that gets stored in the body as allostatic load, which I call emotional debt.
38:13
And over time, that creates fragility in the nervous system.
38:19
And so what that fragility can look like is anything from being impacted by small things in a kind of disproportionate way.
38:27
So noticing that you are more reactive than normal, maybe you're a little bit more snappy, maybe you get frustrated by little things, maybe your sleep isn't as good, maybe you wake up not feeling fully rested.
38:37
Maybe relationships are often, especially intimate relationships are usually a place that this shows up or relationships at work.
38:48
So those are the classic early warning signs.
38:48
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.
38:58
It's great that our body can buffer the stress response because it allows us to function.
39:04
But if we don't pay off that technical debt or emotional debt, then over time it accumulates and it can also come out through health crises, health challenges.
39:18
It just gets basically progressively worse until that debt is paid off.
39:25
I feel like a lot of people listening are like, "Yes, I know exactly what you mean."
39:30
How does one notice that you're building emotional debt and then how do you start to release this debt and pay off this debt?
39:35
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.
39:52
And at that point there's like a crash.
39:59
It's almost like the fuse switch blows and there's exhaustion.
39:59
Maybe there's complete inability to get up off the couch.
40:06
And for some people, people with large nervous system capacity, they can keep going for five years, maybe 10 years, and they can keep building this up, and it becomes normalized to live in a way where you are always on and never really relaxing or coming down.
40:26
Or one really key sign actually is if you are not able to naturally downshift or down regulate your nervous system at the end of the day without something like wine or CBD or some kind of external substance, that's a sign that you kind of reached a certain threshold of emotional debt.
40:47
And then how does one start to pay off this debt if you've spent years just working way too hard, you've had a relationship that just isn't working great, I don't know.
40:53
I imagine most people go to therapy and just talk through all these things and try to work through the challenges.
40:58
What do you recommend if you're just like, "Man, I feel like I have this, what should I do?"
41:08
Yeah, well, I mean that's a big question.
41:08
I'll probably get some pushback for this, but I'm not a big fan of talk therapy alone or at least therapy that doesn't have a somatic or body-based component.
41:21
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.
41:32
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.
41:45
And so to kind of give a personal example, when I was living in Bali, I did several hundred breathwork journeys where you breathe in a certain way to get into an altered state, and then in that place, these memories would arise of these things that happened 5, 10 years ago.
42:03
And my body, it would either move a certain way or the anger would come through.
42:09
Sometimes there would be sadness or grief.
42:09
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.
42:21
And so for me, it was a journey of coming into right relationship with my anger and my grief, and honestly my shame as well, giving myself permission to feel this gunk that had been stored in my pelvis.
42:32
So I'm not saying you have to go to Bali and do 200 breathwork journeys. That's definitely not... I mean, that's a path.
42:38
But first it begins with, as I said, cultivating interoception and even being aware that there is this tension, there are these things in your body.
42:51
Secondly, having the practices of self-regulation so that if these things come up, you don't get overwhelmed.
42:57
You're able to downshift and ground.
42:57
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.
43:07
And often it's very helpful to have a guide or a somatic practitioner, I like somatic experiencing, hakomi, the two modalities I'm a big fan of.
43:19
And yeah, that's the journey and a process and it depends how many years you've been operating in a slightly numbed way, and it's different for everyone.
43:31
But it begins by tuning into and listening to the body and then having honestly curiosity about what is there and just following that curiosity and the body starts to show you what is ready to be seen.
43:45
I love that it always comes back to the original place we started which is that the way we feel is a very bottom up body-based system, it's not we feel something and our body gets nervous.
43:58
It's our body gets nervous, and they're like, "Oh, here's why I'm nervous."
44:02
And your advice is just focus a lot on helping your body release the stuff that you've built up this debt.
44:07
And then also just when you're nervous in the moment, focus on getting your body to a state versus trying to convince your mind now everything's going to be okay. Exactly.
44:17
And specifically on the therapy route, just to touch on that, so your advice there is if you were to work with a therapist and you feel a lot of this stuff that we're talking about is focused on a somatic oriented therapy where it's body oriented, not just thinking about it and talking through stuff, it's actually convincing your body, "Here's a way to helping your body release this debt, essentially." Yeah.
44:40
I mean, you can understand in precise detail about whatever the challenge was from 5, 10 and 15 years ago, but if you're unable to connect it to the correlating sensations in the body...
44:48
Usually if say, I don't know, if I was to imagine someone shouted at me yesterday and I think about that, there's usually a correlating kind of sematic sensation.
45:01
The neuroscientist Damasio calls it a somatic marker.
45:07
So by tracking the somatic markers and then either on your own just kind of following that sensation and allowing whatever emotion was present at the time to complete that is the way that we kind of slowly pay off that emotional debt by one process at a time.
45:26
So maybe coming back to this question of say someone is listening and wondering, am I building emotional debt?
45:30
Am I ignoring things that are these feathers?
45:30
What are signs and just, I don't know, examples of emotional debt being built up of this trauma, whatever you want to call it, being built up in the body?
45:43
I don't know, is it just like anytime you feel really nervous, that's emotional debt?
45:48
Is it anytime you push something down that you are pretty sure you should deal with in the moment, that's emotional debt?
45:52
What are just some examples of what that feels like and looks like?