Nervous system mastery: Interview with Jonny Miller

How to manage anxiety, burnout, feeling numb, and more.

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Jonny Miller is the expert I look up to for all things nervous system regulation. Jonny is the founder of ⁠Nervous System Mastery⁠, a course that has helped hundreds of people cultivate calm, reduce nervousness, enhance resilience, and elevate their sense of aliveness. Anecdotally, friends dig the shit out of it and so I’ve been looking forward to having Jonny on here for a minute. 

What dysregulation looks like

Bowman: What are the top symptoms you see in folks who would benefit from better nervous system regulation?

Miller: There’s so many. I think the things that typically are present in the people that I see through Nervous System Mastery tend to be

• High anxiety, which is a whole tangent that maybe we can go down.

• Burnout, for sure - a lot of Type A overachievers who go hard and then hit a wall and crash.

• Emotional reactivity, which often also presents as a challenge in intimate relationships

• More broadly, a sense of being out of control or disassociated from one's own life.

So it really depends on how the dysregulation presents in the person. But those are some of the broad sweeping symptoms.

Bowman: I'm curious about that, especially dissociation. What does that look like in somebody? How do you see that?

Miller: Maybe part of it is that quite a few men have been rewarded in certain situations for what can come across as stoic calmness. When in reality, they are numb inside and very disconnected from their internal experience. But in some cases, they’re still able to function highly with that default pattern.

I think that a lot of men are afraid of expressing anger as well. It's almost swung the other way from the '60s. An adaptive response could be that more dissociative way of dealing with intensely stressful situations.

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How to feel

Johnny: For someone who is feeling dissociative or feeling numb, how do you help them with that?

Miller: I think of that as being three distinct pillars. Those three pillars are:

1. Interoception, which is our capacity for self-awareness to sense, track, and feel our own internal landscape.

2. The second is self-regulation, which is when there is energy or sympathetic activation running - how can we be with that or downshift effectively?

3. And then the third, which is really the crux of all of it, is emotional fluidity, which is how can we welcome the full spectrum of our human emotional experience? Emotional fluidity requires that we both are aware of it and we can feel the somatic sensations associated, and that we're also able to be with that without getting overwhelmed or being outside our window of tolerance, which typically leads people to either getting angry or anxious or shutting down and disassociating if it's too intense.

Bowman: In terms of helping folks become aware of those emotions, what are the tools that you utilize in your work to help dudes do that? Is this where your APE framework comes into play?

Miller: Yeah. So APE stands for awareness, posture, emotion. It's basically something that can be done really at any point during the day, when you're working out, when you're going for a walk, when you're meditating. It's like:

• How is my awareness right now? Is it expansive and wide and broad, or is it contracted, narrow?

• How is my posture?

• And then how is my emotion or what sensations are present inside my body?

And just asking that question a few times a day leads to pretty big shifts, or at least can help people realize that there is much more going on from the neck down than they otherwise would have been aware of.

How to change how you feel

Bowman: I'm curious about how you teach people to change their state. Let's say I've discovered I am feeling anxious. I now want to feel creative and energized. How would you recommend I go about doing that?

Miller: There's basically three approaches for changing your state, and then I'll mention a fourth at the end as well. But the three ways that I think about it are top-down, bottom up and outside in.

1. A top down approach would be some cognitive reframe where you might say, “Oh, this sensation I'm feeling, I'm actually feeling it because I'm really excited about what I'm doing, and it's just energy that I get to pour into this creative thing.” Sometimes those reframes can actually help shift how we feel, or at least how we're orienting to the feeling, which influences how we're feeling.

2. The bottom up approach is basically the body-based approach I often teach -mostly breathwork-type practices. Also, humming is very effective.
   One approach there might be spending 3 minutes doing 5 rounds of alternate nostil breathing and then 4 loud single-breath hums. Basically, inhale through the nose and then hum all the way to the end of exhale. Doing even 5 or 6 of those, you will notice that your your body will start to ground and become more regulated. That's one of the more popular practices in what I teach.

3. The third approach is outside in, which is basically changing your environment. We are constantly co-regulating with, attuning with the people and the places around us. If you were in a busy café with bright lights and street noise outside, then moving to, say, a quiet bedroom with nice lighting and maybe a dog in the corner, you’re going to feel more grounded and that anxiety is going to go down.

Those are the three pathways for shifting your state. You can play with those levers to whatever degree is appropriate and based on what you have access to.

Then the fourth one ties in with the emotional fluidity piece, which is where there's an invitation to, as I'm sure you know from the men's work that you do, of just welcoming the sensations that are present with the anxiety and riding that wave through. And what's interesting about anxiety in particular, but all emotions really, is their life cycle is between 10 to 30 seconds. That’s the typical length of an emotion.

It is the resistance or the story that fuels the emotion, which keeps it perpetuating. So if it's safe and appropriate to do so, sit down and be with the sensations—welcoming and exploring them with a curious, loving presence is, I think, the best description of how to go about this.

Emotions as decision making requirements

Bowman: One thing that you've mentioned that piqued my interest is how emotions are requirements for decision making, as opposed to hindrances. Can you just speak to what's led you to believe that?

Miller: The original source was Damasio's study where he had this patient who'd had the emotional centers in his brain removed during a surgery. He went from being a successful businessman, married, etc, to his business collapsed, he divorced, and he was unable to make even a decision about what to have for lunch or what color pencil to use.

Damasio used this to argue that all decisions are emotionally-driven decisions. One of the things that I like to share, and I've also learned this from working with Joe Hudson, is that our decisions are often biased by emotions that we don't want to feel. If I am afraid of feeling failure, then I will make different and often not great decisions in life because I want to avoid that fear.

Where to find Jonny

Bowman: Where can people find your stuff?

Miller: I'm pretty active on Twitter. If people want to learn about Nervous System Mastery, the website is NSMastery.com. I also have a podcast called Curious Humans, where I have lots of conversations with wonderful folks like yourself, a whole range of topics. If you have read this, then they might be of interest as well.

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