How To Stop Feeling So Frustrated All The Time - Jonny Miller
20 Aug 2024 (1 month ago)
Emotional Numbness and Its Origins
- Jonny Miller realized in adulthood that he had been emotionally numb for much of his life, particularly during his childhood.
- Emotional numbness often stems from childhood experiences where expressing emotions was not met with safety or acceptance, leading to repression.
The Impact of Emotional Repression
- Joe Hudson believes that repressing emotions like anger can lead to passive aggression, while expressing them aggressively towards others is another way to avoid truly feeling them.
- Goggins' approach of pushing through emotional resistance, while effective in the short term, can lead to emotional debt and increased fragility in the nervous system over time.
Understanding and Managing Emotions
- While emotions themselves have a short lifespan, the stories and narratives we create around them can prolong and intensify their impact, as illustrated by the example of anger and resentment.
- Sam Harris uses the phrase "reducing the half-life of reactivity" to describe progress in self-work, meaning that reactivity lessens over time rather than disappearing completely.
- Approaching personal growth as a series of self-experiments, similar to a scientist, can be beneficial. This involves setting hypotheses, trying new practices like breathwork or somatic experiencing, and reflecting on the outcomes to determine effectiveness and areas for improvement. (00:24:49)
- Breathwork can be used as a tool to regulate emotions, but it can also be misused as a way to avoid dealing with them.
- While mindfulness and meditation can be helpful for managing emotions in the short term, they can also be used to suppress emotions, which prevents individuals from addressing the root causes of their emotional responses.
The Importance of Nervous System Regulation
- The principles of nervous system regulation are that you do not get stuck in any one emotional state, such as anger or sadness.
- There are two typical human responses to stress: hyperarousal (frustration, anxiety, aggression) and shutdown/freeze.
- People who are high achievers should prioritize down-regulation and treat themselves like cognitive athletes, ensuring they incorporate adequate rest and recovery after periods of intense effort.
Developing Interoception for Self-Regulation
- Developing interoception, the awareness of one's internal state, allows for a deeper understanding of emotions and their associated physical sensations, which can be used for self-regulation. (00:14:51)
- Improving interoception involves checking in with oneself at least once a day, assessing awareness, posture, and emotions/physical sensations.
Breathwork and its Benefits
- Breathwork is particularly useful for introspection because it allows individuals to compare their mental and emotional states before and after the practice. This emphasizes the tangible benefits of such practices and encourages continued use.
- There are two breathing exercises that can help someone to downregulate: a 4-4-8 breathing exercise (4 seconds inhale, 4 seconds hold, 8 seconds exhale) and a humming exercise.
- Facilitated breath repatterning is a modality of breathwork that suggests emotions have corresponding breathing patterns.
- The speaker's hypothesis is that a period of “downshift time” or a deep parasympathetic state is needed after an emotional release for neural rewiring to happen.
- The speaker finds that during facilitated breathwork sessions, huge emotional processes can surface with no associated story, suggesting a possible preverbal experience.
Somatic Practices for Emotional Regulation
- Softening the body can help regulate intense emotions.
- Humming, especially the Bee Breath technique, can release nitric oxide, which is a vasodilator that promotes calmness.
- Breathing into the belly while lying face down on a hard surface can help release air from the lower diaphragm, which can be very calming.
- To integrate a deregulating experience, first someone should use a top-down, bottom-up, or outside-in practice to downregulate.
- Once someone feels present in their body, they can use a practice called somatic surfing to process the experience.
The Importance of Emotional Fluidity and Authenticity
- Allostatic load is a term for the wear and tear on the body caused by accumulated stress.
- Emotional fluidity is the welcoming of the full spectrum of human experience, including emotions that are often avoided.
- Being kind can involve setting healthy boundaries and giving genuine feedback, even if it might initially be perceived as hurtful, while being overly nice can lead to a lack of boundaries and authenticity.
High Agency and Intentionality
- High agency is about being intentional and following through with your intentions.
- Reactive tendencies, such as anxiety or shutting down, can hinder intentionality and, therefore, high agency.
Jonny Miller's Personal Journey
- Jonny Miller was engaged to a junior doctor named SF SP who had been diagnosed with bipolar disorder.
- SF SP died by suicide after having an anxiety attack on her first day back at work after a holiday.
- To cope with his grief, Miller quit his job and spent a year processing his emotions through activities such as Vipassana meditation, plant medicine, breathwork, and visiting places that held significance to their relationship.
The Pitfalls of Optimization and the Need for Self-Acceptance
- People who are driven to optimize their lives often approach relaxation techniques with the same intensity, turning them into another area to "win" at, which can be counterproductive.
- Ross Edgley, an endurance athlete, believes in "suffering strategically managed," acknowledging that while intense emotions like anger and resentment can be motivating in the short term, they are not sustainable for prolonged periods.
- Reducing reliance on negative emotions like bitterness and resentment is crucial for long-term well-being and personal growth, as these emotions can be detrimental to relationships and mental health.
- Miller believes that worldly success achieved through personal misery is pointless, as it sacrifices inner peace for external validation.
- The self-help industry often operates on the flawed premise that individuals need fixing, as opposed to a perspective of self-unfoldment where the present moment is accepted as okay.
- A better framework for self-improvement is to ask, "What if nothing needed fixing?" and to realize that change and growth happen naturally.
Anxiety and Emotional Openness
- Jonny Miller and George discussed if one's mind works for or against them, noting that Miller's mind often works against him with a critical inner voice.
- Miller's "neuro aperture hypothesis" suggests that anxiety is a constriction of other emotions, and increasing emotional openness can transform anxiety into joy.
Embracing the Transient Nature of Emotions
- Sadness, or any other emotion, is a temporary state and not a permanent one.
- Resisting emotions, rather than experiencing them, is the source of discomfort.
Recommended Practices for Self-Exploration and Growth
- Recommended practices include non-sleep deep rest (NSDR) and focusing on awareness, posture, and emotion (APE) throughout the day.
- Exploring somatic-based therapies like in-person breathwork, somatic experiencing, or Hakomi is also recommended.
- There is a limit to how deep self-exploration can be in an online environment, but core protocols can be shared as a foundation for deeper dives in a one-on-one context.
Questions for Reflection
- Jerry Colona, who lives in Boulder, poses the question, "In what ways are you complicit in creating the conditions you say you don't want?"
- Another question to consider is "What is the feeling or experience that you have been running from?"