Nervous System Mastery: the art of interoception
a pre-requisite to being human
This essay is the first case study of the Call to Eudaimonia series, featuring a curriculum called Nervous System Mastery that teaches evidence-backed protocols on how to shift into states of calm, increase resilience, and cultivate aliveness.
To flourish is the act of coming home to ourselves. Taking responsibility of our inner conflict day in, day out and reconnecting with ourselves is the first step on the path towards flourishing.
Think about the last time you felt your heart beating. Where were you? What were you doing? How were you feeling?
Chances are you were in the zone mid-workout, not sitting at your desk answering emails.
What if you could harness that feeling of aliveness at any given moment?
In moments when we’re fully attuned to our bodies, we become cognizant of subtle internal shifts: our breathing intensifying, our heart racing, our hunger rising. While we tend to think these bodily functions operate automatically, in reality, they’re directly influenced by our emotional state.
In this piece, we’re diving into the physiological side of introspection. Where introspection is about tuning into our psychological and emotional state, interoception is about observing the internal state of our body. It begins with developing an awareness of the signals our bodies are sending us and making the subconscious conscious.
Today, we have far greater access to decoding what’s happening in our bodies than ever before. With the advances of health wearables and new levels of insight at our fingertips, it’s important to ask the question: what purpose do biotrackers serve in our lives?
These devices are equipping us with greater clarity on how we sleep, eat, move, and live, but to what end? Are we outsourcing our awareness to technology or learning to interpret the messages our bodies are sending us?
Oura, Oura on my hand, did I sleep as I planned
I first stumbled across the concept of interoception early in my wearables journey. I started using Oura Ring to track my sleep when the sleep revolution was still nascent. We were all still walking around saying, “You can sleep when you’re dead.”
My relationship with sleep was a black box. I decided to invest in an Oura Ring to see if there was any rhyme or reason to the unpredictability of my sleep — often, I’d find myself struggling to fall asleep for hours. The first step was gathering real-time biometrics to get to my baseline truth.
As I started using Oura, the first thing I’d do each morning was wake up and check how I slept. I learned that I’d been sleeping ~1 hour less than I’d thought for most of my life. I assumed if I went to bed at 10pm and rose at 6am, I was getting 8 hours of sleep. Turns out, time spent in bed doesn’t always translate to time actually sleeping. The reality was I was only averaging ~6-7 hours per night.
The more I learned, the more obsessed I became with optimizing my sleep. Over time, checking my data first thing in the morning became a crutch. If I woke up feeling refreshed, rather than trusting how my body felt, I’d check the app to see what the data said.
Failure mode began when I started placing trust in a wearable to tell me how I’d feel for the day rather than tuning into my body and using technology as just a data point to track my trends over time. When I outsourced my intuition, I found myself fixated on my sleep score rather than how my body felt, becoming more disembodied in the process. Without realizing it, I found myself battling performance anxiety when I couldn’t fall asleep, knowing that it’d tank my readiness score — all while forgetting why I’d started using Oura in the first place. There’s a danger in optimizing for a game we don’t even realize we’re playing.
And, thus began my journey in cultivating interoception. For the first time, I was seeing that the technology was meant to help me gather objective data and test hypotheses, not further numb my perception of what was happening internally.
Living in the land of the disembodied isn’t uncommon in modern-day society. Growing up, we learn to dissociate when we’re made to feel like our feelings are too big or that we’re too sensitive. As a defense mechanism, we numb out and minimize our emotions, operating from the neck up — thinking our feelings rather than feeling them. It’s hard to live in alignment with our truth when we’re out of touch with ourselves. As a result, we learn to look outward for direction.
Our culture wires us to focus on the external world rather than our inner landscape, starting with our education system. When we’re young, our curriculums place the lion’s share of the attention on how our outer world functions and the theoretical: how photosynthesis works, what a covalent bond is, how to calculate a slope and momentum. When we do learn about the human body in biology, we spend very little time understanding our relationship with our bodies and how it works.
Ask any high schoolers how their body functions at the practical level and it’s unlikely they have any idea how to self-regulate in moments of fight-or-flight or before a big test. For that matter, how many of us know how to adequately navigate the sensations arising in our body throughout the day?
We go our entire adolescence learning about things that become inconsequential to us as we splinter off into different careers. Why is it that we learn the language of other cultures when we don’t understand the basic language of our body?
We leave the most important subject up to chance, setting off into the world completely unaware of our bodies desperately vying for our attention.
Enter: Nervous System Mastery.
the space between stimulus and response
During the experimentation phase of my sabbatical last fall, I decided to sign up for a class called Nervous System Mastery, led by
. I’d come across his work online: Spiritual MBA, Somalist, The Operating Manual for Your Nervous System — and was intrigued.I’d begun working with a somatic coach and deepening my meditation practice several months earlier. Most of the work was spent un-numbing myself from the neck down and reconnecting with the wisdom from my body that I’d neglected.
It seeded realizations of just how many layers of numbness I’d developed to suppress inconvenient feelings that stood in my way as I’d tried to optimize my life over the years. I was turning my attention to the sensations in my body for the first time in a very long time. There was a lot of numbness that needed thawing.
It was amidst all of this thawing that I joined Nervous System Mastery. I understood intellectually why somatic awareness was so important, but grasped little of the underlying mechanisms of how our nervous system functioned. Rather than commit to just unnumbing myself, I wanted to get underneath what was happening when my body was stressed and better self-regulate from the get go.
Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.
— Viktor Frankl
Over the course of five weeks, the goal was to learn and practice a selection of actionable research-backed protocols that would enable us to create space between when we were stimulated and our response (or more often, our reaction).
Each week, Jonny shared a menu of techniques to support us in becoming more embodied in our most activated moments while sharing the mechanics of how our nervous system operated. We were joined by notable guest speakers, varying from experts in the Bio-Emotive Framework (a technique in deepening our emotional literacy) to circling (a relational practice rooted in communicating the sensations in our body) to psychedelics. The course was designed to empower us to choose our own adventure: to experiment and practice the protocols that most resonated as we gained the confidence to shift from dysregulated to embodied states.
bottoms up, bottoms up
Traditionally, practices for helping us self-regulate like cognitive behavior therapy (CBT) and mindfulness meditations are intended to help us think our way out of a stressful situation. In Nervous System Mastery, Jonny flips this approach on its head by inviting us to explore a bottoms-up approach where we put deliberate focus on changing the physiology of our body in order to shift our internal state then change our thought patterns.
From a neurological perspective:
Our nervous system consists of 80% of afferent neurons, which move from the body to the brain — in contrast to roughly 20% of efferent neurons, which run in the opposite direction, from the brain to the body. As a result…practices that leverage our physiology by consciously shifting our respiratory or visual systems — are 4x more effective at altering our blood chemistry and, therefore, shifting our state.
— Jonny Miller, The Operating Manual for Your Nervous System
Practically, this means that techniques like breathing exercises and body scans are far more effective than attempting to talk ourselves out of the negative stories that are running on loop. The stories aren’t true, but the feelings are and it’s in our power to change them.
Prior to somatic coaching and Nervous System Mastery, I dabbled in breathwork, but the primary way I initiated a change in state was by getting outside and moving my body. As I sat at my desk, I’d often notice how tightly I clenched my jaw and my stomach, but short of squeezing in a workout or pausing for a brief meditation, I didn’t have many other outlets to engage when I noticed myself feeling disembodied. Prioritizing movement allowed me to move through stale energy, but I only had so much time to get out for a run. More often than not, I’d continue to chug away at whatever I was doing — not realizing that there was another way.
Over the course of the curriculum, I found myself dropping into more moments of presence throughout the day. I became far more aware of the experiences that were numbing me out and activating me. Rather than suppressing them, I’d choose one of the 15+ protocols that Jonny introduced and practice expanding the gap between when I was stimulated to when I reacted.
Before cultivating the knowledge of how to meet myself in moments of stress, I’d find myself unintentionally reaching for distractions like social media or processed foods to numb out or spiraling into a pit of despair. With the right tools, I became much more thoughtful about how to resource and nourish myself.
Of the modalities Jonny introduced, my two favorites are non-sleep deep rest and somatic surfing.
non-sleep deep rest (NSDR)
NSDR, also known as Yoga Nidra, is a guided body scan that increases our interoception through inducing waking sleep and deep states of relaxation, slowing our brain waves. Research has shown that NSDR effectively reduces the production of stress hormones like norepinephrine, or adrenaline, and cortisol — both of which prevent us from tuning into interoception. During 15-minute sessions, I’ve personally observed my heart rate dropping as much as 10bpm.
I typically lay down for an NSDR session when I’m feeling tired in the middle of the day, need a moment to reset, or right before bed. Rather than stimulating myself by checking my phone during a break, I put on an NSDR session. In the evenings, I used to grab a book to distract myself as I fell asleep, but I’ve found reconnecting with my body at the end of the day to be a more restful way to drift off to sleep.
These are a few of my go to NSDR videos:
somatic surfing
How often do you find yourself (consciously or subconsciously) resisting feeling through an emotion that emerges in the middle of a busy day? For those of us who spend our days engaged with knowledge work, it’s far more common than we realize.
It’s natural to want to dedicate time to processing big feelings that come up, pushing it off to a more convenient time. The issue arises when we never make the space to feel it through after the fact. When we suppress “negative” sensations like anger, grief, or sadness, we accumulate “emotional debt,” inadvertently pushing us towards anxiety or disassociation.
Technically, this is known as allostatic overload.
One recent study found that allostatic overload causes a 60% increase in energy expenditure. This is energy produced by the body that is essentially wasted, like pressing your foot on the gas pedal without first removing the emergency brake. This excess energy often manifests in your body as anxiety or agitation.
— Jonny Miller, How to Pay Off Your Emotional Debt
When we give ourselves the grace to meet each emotion and make the space to move through it, we’re releasing the pressure valve and paying down our emotional debt. When we recognize, accept, express, release, and integrate our emotions, they no longer take up our life force and stagnate our energy. As we allow emotions to flow freely through us, we begin to develop emotional fluidity.
We see emotional fluidity at its finest in children. Think about how often babies move through their emotions — seemingly enraptured in giddiness one moment, wailing the next, then back to laughter within the span of five minutes.
In this video, Jonny breaks down the fundamentals of emotional fluidity, likening it to surfing.
As I deepened my authority in the practices, I found myself more in tune with my inner world and my surroundings. It’s only when I sat with the numbness that I could eventually invite sensitivity back into my body again. With that sensitivity came a renewed connection to my inner wisdom.
Externally, car horns and sirens that I’d never noticed before suddenly rose to the forefront as I walked the streets of San Francisco. Living in a city had desensitized me to all the chaotic energy around me — as I got more in touch with my nervous system, I needed to get a better handle on what energy belonged to me vs my external environment.
As I reconnected with parts of myself that I’d long numbed out, I found myself with more energy to consciously prioritize activities that nourished me longer term, like getting out for a walk in the neighborhood, over dopamine-fueled quick hits.
And now, instead of relying on my Oura ring to forecast how I’ll feel at the start of the day, I check the app once I’ve gone about most of my day. Cultivating my interoception has enabled me to zoom out of the daily data and focus on the weekly trends. I no longer sleep in pursuit of a high sleep score, I sleep to recharge my life force.
🫁 The next cohort of Nervous System Mastery runs March 25th – April 26th. I’m excited to join again to reimmerse myself in new protocols and expand my toolkit. If you’re interested in taking the 5-week course, apply here.
For a discount, use the code CISSY for $250 off. The deadline to apply is Friday, March 15th.
If you’re interested in experimenting with some of the protocols, I’d recommend:
Jonny’s free 5-day course to nervous system management on
’ Clues.Life featuring 7 minutes to calm, belly-stone breathing, a guided interoception practice (APE), and emotion mapping
Jonny’s podcast episode with
featuring exercises like 4-4-8 breathing, humming, and espresso breath
Thanks for reading! What questions do you have about your nervous system or Nervous System Mastery? Drop your comments below or say hi on Twitter :)
If you enjoyed this essay, check out:
Thanks to Ryan and Jonny for reviewing drafts on this essay.
"Failure mode began when I started placing trust in a wearable to tell me how I’d feel for the day rather than tuning into my body and using technology as just a data point to track my trends over time." << such a great insight Cissy. And truly appreciate you taking the time to share such a thoughtful essay about your experience with nervous system mastery!
Sounds an interesting course. I may give this course a try.