Managing nerves, anxiety, and burnout

Miller surveyed startup leaders who had experienced burnout, asking them to estimate the financial cost to their company.

The median response was a hundred thousand dollars, which I imagine is more than most people would think. And most people aren't actively investing in burnout insurance.

Somatic therapy focuses on physical sensations and body responses rather than just talking. Mobilization reflex refers to the body's natural stress-response cycle that needs to complete.

I'm not a big fan of talk therapy alone or at least therapy that doesn't have a somatic or body-based component. What we need to do is create a certain sense of safety to kind of go into those buffered emotional responses and feel them all the way through and allow that mobilization reflex to complete.

The nervous system of an organization is a reflection of the nervous system of the CEO.

How are you complicit in creating the conditions that you say you don't want?

"That way" refers to breathing patterns that activate the nervous system, such as rapid, shallow breathing through the mouth into the upper chest.

We have a tendency to kind of confabulate or make up stories that match the state that we are in. And so that's kind of what happens when we're breathing in that way.

If you are avoiding feeling a certain way, let's say, that they don't enjoy feeling conflict or anger, then they will make decisions subconsciously to avoid feeling that way. And it becomes a huge bias and a huge problem because people make decisions because they're afraid of feeling a certain way.

I have this idea that I call the feather brick dump truck phenomenon, and basically what that means is when we are showing early signs of burnout, our body will give us feedback usually in subtle ways in the beginning. Ideally, you want to notice when it's the feather and then make adjustments or shift then and not have to wait until you experience the full-blown pain of the dump truck.

If you are not able to naturally downshift or down regulate your nervous system at the end of the day without something like wine or CBD or some kind of external substance, that's a sign that you kind of reached a certain threshold of emotional debt.

Most people when they try to calm down, they use tactical reframes or maybe mindfulness or maybe reframing the situation in a positive light. But in my experience, working with the physiology, using what's known as a bottom up approach, primarily using the breath, it's just such a rapidly more effective way of shifting your state.

Afferent neurons are nerve pathways that carry sensory information from the body up to the brain, while efferent neurons carry signals from brain to body.

There's four times more afferent neurons going from the body to the brain as from the brain to the body. 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.