Resetting Your Nervous System When You're Anxious, Hurting, or Just Powering Through | Johanna Franzel

**Dan Harris** (0:03)
Hey, hey, welcome to the 10% Happier Podcast. I'm your host, Dan Harris. As somebody who's been dealing with anxiety pretty much his entire life, I am very interested in how to regulate my nervous system, which seems to be on high alert all the time, mostly for no good reason. So I'm very excited to talk to my guest today who's an expert in this. Her name is Johanna Franzel and she's the author of a book called Write Yourself Home. She's also a teacher and a somatic practitioner. I will let her describe exactly what a somatic practitioner is. Johanna, welcome to the show.

**Johanna Franzel** (0:37)
Thanks, Dan. I'm delighted to be here.

**Dan Harris** (0:39)
Why are our nervous systems on tilt so much of the time? You know, it feels to me like things can happen and my body's reacting as if it's a life or death threat, but it's just a bad email.

**Johanna Franzel** (0:57)
That's a great question. I had a teacher who liked to say, you can have lunch a thousand times, you get to be lunch once. You know, there is a kind of physiological disposition to scan for what is the threat out here. It really does take practice, I think, to cultivate the ballast, let's say, to be able to kind of move through that. And then we can throw in modernity and socialization and capitalism, right? And an attention that is constantly splintered, ways that were pulled in a million different directions. And so our nervous system can end up feeling incredibly fractured. And you know, the less regulated we are sometimes, the more we're sort of like looking for strategies in the mind and trying to sort of analyze what's going on. And then we sort of lose touch with our ground. I know that certainly in my own past, I would have loved to have lived shoulders up in a way.
And chronic illness absolutely interrupted that narrative. And maybe we'll come back around to that. But so I kind of went kicking and screaming into learning how to manage my nervous system. But then, you know, you walk into the glass door of your strategies enough times, and then you realize you have to find a different way in.

**Dan Harris** (2:06)
Just to pick up on that term you used, lose your ground. I think you're really talking about like the ultimate or one of the ultimate spiritual and contemplative cliches of like getting out of your head and into your body. And there's a reason why it's become a cliché because it's a very powerful idea, and we've just wringed some of the meaning out of it through repetition. Part of the goal of this conversation is really to revivify the concept.
There's a quote that gets used a lot by some of my meditation teachers from, I think, a Henry James novel where he's describing one of his characters, Mr. Duffy, as living a short distance from his body. And that just seems like how, I mean, I'll speak personally, even after all of these years of meditation, it's just a mode I fall back into.

**Johanna Franzel** (2:58)
Totally, that's beautifully named. But it's not really part of our early training. We're certainly not rewarded for feeling.
And then I think we're given the instruction, listen to your body, and we have no idea where to start. The two settings are like, I'm either fine or I hurt. A therapist had told me that I needed to listen to my body using a sort of low stakes decision. And so I was in the tea aisle at the supermarket absolutely freakishly, like holding up tea boxes to my sternum, being like, Tetley, okay, is this a yes or no? Celestial seasonings, like imagining.
I was like, expansion, that is yes. Like I had this very rudimentary idea of what listening to a body was. And I also think I regarded it at the time as a kind of parlor trick. Like I was calling it listening to my body, but what I really wanted was to get on with it so that I could manage my life better. And it took me a lot of practice and some of what's shared in the book to actually understand that listening to my body was not just like a parade or a trick. It was actually enough spaciousness, enough safety, we could call it, to be able to listen to something else that had a more nuanced signal.

**Dan Harris** (4:15)
Which tea did you land on after that supernatural, paranormal activity in the supermarket?

**Johanna Franzel** (4:23)
Dan, I wish I had a good answer. I mean, I really was like, would a cheaper option be a yes? Would it be more expensive? Like, how do I get in?