Managing nerves, anxiety, and burnout

Jonny Miller is a founder-turned-coach who teaches 'Nervous System Mastery' to tech professionals, drawing on breathwork, interoception, and somatic work after a personal loss pushed him into this field. The conversation covers bottom-up methods for calming anxiety (changing breath and body state before the story), practical breathing exercises, body awareness for catching burnout early, and the idea of 'emotional debt' in the nervous system.

01Key learnings

• Calm the body first: changing breath and physiological state tends to shift thoughts and feelings faster than trying to reason yourself out of nerves.
• Use a longer exhale than inhale (e.g., 4-4-8 breathing) to downshift; a longer inhale or energizing breath can raise activation when you need energy.
• Build a daily practice of two to five minutes in the morning so calming techniques come naturally in stressful moments, since people forget tools when flustered.
• Train interoception, your internal sensing, using the APE check (awareness, posture, emotion) to notice early warning signs before they escalate.
• Watch for 'feather' signals like unusual fatigue or irritability; adjusting early prevents the bigger 'brick' and 'dump truck' consequences of burnout.
• Treat unresolved stress as emotional debt; use practices like NSDR and, where helpful, somatic therapy to complete stress cycles rather than only talking through them.
• Experiment with practices and notice how you feel before and after, so you keep doing what genuinely works for you.
• Ask how you are complicit in creating conditions you say you don't want, a reflective question that surfaces your own role in recurring stress.

02Frameworks mentioned

Summary and takeaways written by PM Atlas; quotes are short excerpts. © the original author.