Resetting Your Nervous System When You're Anxious, Hurting, or Just Powering Through | Johanna Franzel

Hey. Hey. Welcome to the 10% Happier podcast. I'm your host, Dan Harris. As somebody who's been dealing with, anxiety pretty much his entire life, I am very interested in how to regulate my nervous system, which seems to be on high alert all the time, mostly for no good reason. So I'm very excited to talk to my guest today who's an expert in this. Her name is Johanna Franzel, and she's the author of a book called Write Yourself Home. She's also a teacher and a somatic practitioner. I will let her describe exactly what a somatic practitioner is. Johanna, welcome to the show. Thanks, Dan. I'm delighted to be here. Why are our nervous systems on tilt so much of the time? You know, it just it feels to me like things can happen, and my body's reacting as if it's a life or death threat, but it's, you know, just a bad email? That's a great question. I had a teacher who liked to say, you can have lunch a thousand times, you get to be lunch once. You know, there is a kind of physiological disposition to scan for what is the threat out here. It really does take practice, I think, to cultivate the ballast, let's say, to be able to kind of move through that. And then we can throw in modernity and socialization and capitalism, right, an attention that is constantly splintered, ways that we're pulled in a million different directions. And so, our nervous system can end up feeling incredibly fractured. And, you know, the less regulated we are, sometimes, the more we're sort of like looking for strategies in the mind and trying to sort of analyze what's going on, and then we sort of lose touch with our ground. I know that certainly in my own past, I would have loved to have lived shoulders up in a way, and chronic illness absolutely interrupted that narrative, and maybe we'll come back around to that. But so, I kind of went kicking and screaming into learning how to manage my nervous system. But then, you know, you walk into the glass door of your strategies enough times, and then you you realize you have to find a different way in. Just to pick up on that term you you used, lose your ground, I think you're really talking about, like, the ultimate or one of the ultimate spiritual and contemplative cliches of, like, getting out of your head and into your body. And, it's there's a reason why it's become a cliche because it's a very powerful idea, and we've just wringed some of the meaning out of it through repetition. Part of the goal of this conversation is really to to revivify the concept. There's a a quote that gets used a lot by some of my meditation teachers from, I think, a Henry James novel where he's describing one of his characters, mister Duffy, as living a short …