595: The Nervous System Tools That Help You Feel Calm, Safe, and in Control | Jonny Miller

Max Lugavere (0:00)

What's going on, everybody? It's episode 595 of The Genius Life. Let's rock.

The Genius Life.

What up, everybody? Welcome back to The Genius Life. I'm your host, Max Lugavere. Have you ever had one small thing go wrong? I don't know, a parking ticket, a tense conversation, a bad night's sleep, and felt like it hijacked your entire day? Well, today's guest, nervous system educator Jonny Miller, argues that we can get better at finding our way back no matter what the circumstances. Jonny shares practical ways to recognize when you're becoming reactive and use your breath, your body, and even your field of vision to regain a sense of calm. We talk about why conflict can make one person lash out while another shuts down, how to shorten the time it takes to reconnect, and why the goal isn't to never feel stressed, it's to have more choice with regards to what happens next. This conversation also gets personal. Jonny shares how losing his fiance led him to his work, and we talk about grief, including what caring for my body helped me get through when my mom was ill. It's a super thoughtful conversation about feeling what's hard without letting it dictate your whole life. If it resonates, please guys share it with somebody in your life who might benefit from it, pay it forward, and consider leaving a rating review on your podcast app of choice. I'll read them all, and they all mean a lot to me. Now with all that out of the way, let's get into it. Here's episode 595 Let's rock. Jonny Miller, what's going on? Welcome to the show.

Jonny Miller (1:33)

It's great to be here.

Max Lugavere (1:34)

Thanks for coming out.

Agency. I love the concept of agency. I love the concept of self-empowerment, and I'm excited for all that we're about to talk about. So thanks for coming out. I'd love to just dive right in. How do you shift from life is happening to me to recognizing the role that you're playing in your own experience?

Jonny Miller (1:54)

Yeah, totally great question. So I feel like for me, our nervous systems are the lens to which we experience reality. So depending on the state of our nervous system, it will actually change what we're paying attention to and what we actually experience.

And so for me, I'm generally in a higher place of agency. I can happen to the world when I'm in a place that is more spacious, more grounded and more centered. And versus, I think a lot of people feel like when they're having a challenging time or being reactive.

That is when the nervous system is in a defensive kind of contracted place. And there are different ways that our nervous system have learned to defend against our experience. But it's essentially a protective mechanism which reduces our options and narrows our experience and constricts our emotions and makes everything seem safer but actually makes it much harder.

Max Lugavere (2:53)

So is it just about like getting off on the wrong side of the bed in the morning? Like how do we set ourselves up to be less defensive over the course of the day and more, I guess, on the offense?

Jonny Miller (3:08)

Yeah, totally. So I actually see this as being a set of skills that we can cultivate.

The three main skills that I think are important are interoception, which is basically how aware of your body are you? How well do you notice when you're in these reactive places? Because if you don't notice, then you can be in that state for 10 hours and then look back and like, oh, today was terrible. The second set is self-regulation. So when I'm in that place, okay, what do I do to find myself again, to find my center, to ground myself? And that can be top down, bottom up, outside in. We can go into those. And then the third one is I call it emotional fluidity. And that is basically, how can I stop resisting experience? How can I stop resisting what I'm feeling? And that is another way that we kind of protect against things. So I think those three skills combined allow us to reduce this half-life of reactivity.

And so what I mean by that is we can shift from something happens, we get kind of frazzled and frantic and clenched, and then we can shift back instead of over like a day, it gets reduced down to like two hours, maybe even like two minutes.

Max Lugavere (4:12)

So how does that in practice, what might that look like? Say you, you know, say your day is, you're totally frazzled, maybe you didn't get great sleep, you woke up late, the alarm clock didn't go off, you're now showing up late to work, you go to work, you park your car, you come out, suddenly you've got a parking ticket on your window, and it just feels like life is happening to you, you've lost your sense of agency.