Jonny Miller: preference

Transcript context

…All right, this episode's already gotten very heavy and I'm sucked in. I'm excited to learn all these things that you've uncovered. So let's just get into the meat of it. Just talk about this kind of general method that you've found for how to help people become less nervous and anxious. So I find this top down, bottom up distinction to be incredibly helpful. Most people when they try to calm down, they use tactical reframes or maybe mindfulness or maybe reframing the situation in a positive light. There's lots of different practices that people use which do have some effect. 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. 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. 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. And so by learning how to pull on the levers of our physiology, we can rapidly change our state. And then from there, by changing our state, that impacts the thoughts and feelings that we have. 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. 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. And then I think of a reason. Oftentimes, I don't know why it gets nervous, why my body's starting to create this feeling of anxiety. 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." I often experience this where it's just like, "Oh, something feels nervous." And then, "Okay, here's the explanation." So maybe just along those lines, what else is there that might be helpful for people to think about in this context?…

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