⚡ Rewire Your Neurobiology with evidence-backed protocols
👨🎓 This training will equip you with a personal toolkit to cultivate calm, upgrade resilience & increase aliveness
The Fall cohort has sold out — our next Spring cohort will run from April 1st — May 3rd, 2024. Apply below to secure your spot and receive an early-bird discount ($200)
“Nervous System Mastery felt like discovering the missing piece of the puzzle. I remember thinking ‘this is ridiculously effective’”
– Philip F, Design & Behaviour Change Consultant.
🙋♂️ Is This Course For You?
I’ve found the most motivated people who are willing to commit to this training fall into one of three categories:
- Execs, Team Leaders & Founders who have woken up to the non-negotiable work of taking responsibility for their emotional state.
- Creatives & Freelancers who wish to share their gifts with the world but feel over-stimulated and have been prone to burnout in the past.
- Executive Coaches & Clinical Practitioners who are curious to learn more of the neuroscience of stress and add tools to their toolkit.
👨🎓 What You Will Learn
- Explore how to self-regulate emotions + shift into states of calm as well as the underlying mechanisms that impact decision making.¹
- Increase your window of tolerance & stress resilience—as measured by your resting average 'Heart Rate Variability' (HRV) + ventral vagal tone to create more energy, deeper rest & heightened creativity.²
- Discover why the condition of your nervous system augments your experience of reality & how to use 'IF [THIS] THEN [BREATHE]' as a remote control for your state.
- Rewire maladaptive responses using research-backed protocols that also improve blood chemistry & nervous system wellbeing.
- Increase confidence in your ability to calmly respond in the face of stress and reduce the odds of being hijacked by your evolutionary fear-response.
- Break-free from an over-reliance on stimulants, invest in insurance against burnout and feel more fully alive.
¹'Heart Rate Variability and Decision-Making: Autonomic Responses in Making Decisions' by Forte et al 2021 (link)
²'Systematic Review of Associations Between Interoception, Vagal Tone, and Emotional Regulation' by Thomas Pinna et al 2020 (link)
👩💼 Join Alumni from These Companies
“NSM is a powerful tool in the personal toolbox. It helps me be more present, ground myself, and regulate my energy through the ups & downs of running a startup.
Best of all, I have lifetime access to the course materials which lets me visit (and revisit) lessons to better incorporate them into my daily life.”
– Ben Kellie, previously full-time Launch + Test Engineer at SpaceX, currently CEO at The Launch Co. a pioneering rocket ship launch startup.
🫁 Primer on Nervous System Literacy
🤯 My guess is that no-one ever taught you how your nervous system really works... let alone that with training you can learn to consciously control it.
- We live in a broken culture that traps us in co-dependant addictive cycles – meaning we are addicted consumers of various external substances, pills or products promising to change our state.
- Why are we trapped? Because no-one taught us the art & science of 'interoception' — meaning your capacity to experience our inner-landscape & consciously self-regulate.
- Worse still, prolonged periods of high-stress causes 'allostatic overload' to accumulate—this increases the fragility of our nervous system leading to anxiety, exhaustion & ultimately burnout.
- Walking this path of truly mastering your nervous system means feeling in total control of your internal fuel system — either pressing your foot on the gas pedal or recovering from intense output — whatever the moment requires.
“I can safely say this course is the single best investment I’ve made in my health and wellbeing. It almost feels like I’ve unlocked cheat codes for the game of life.
Nervous System Mastery has been life-changing for me. It’s equipped me with the knowledge and tools for regulating my nervous system, coming home to my body, surfing my emotions, and accessing my desired state of being ‘on demand’. The more I learn, the more I realise almost everything in life is connected to the nervous system and yet it took me more than three decades to learn how it works.”
– Jonathan Carson is an entrepreneur & writer, sharing ancient wisdom & modern science at the now.
👨🏫 The NSM Curriculum
The theory + protocols included in this training draw on quality research from quality peer-reviewed studies and have been distilled for ease of learning.
- Click on the ▸ button ▸ to expand each section below:
WEEK 1: Nervous System Fundamentals
🫁 What is Nervous System Mastery: an invitation to see your world and your relationships through an entirely new lens.
🔺 The ‘R-ISE’ Framework: the ‘R.I.S.E. out of Reactivity’ core framework underpinning your journey towards nervous system mastery.
🚦 Three Nervous System Operating Modes: seeing your world through the lens of polyvagal theory.
📝 Future Self Journal Prompt: a powerful journaling prompt to seek wisdom from your old self, get clear on your intentions and give yourself full permission to invest time into this exploration. Write this using Futureme.org
🫁 Revving the Engine // Experience + feel the difference in your body in the full spectrum of the nervous system.
WEEK 2: Interoception vs. Reactivity
🧠 Deconstructing Interoception: five ways to ‘taste your own inner landscape’ with somatic listening practices.
😡 Two Types of Reactivity: understanding what happens when our fight/flight response takes over and we fall into limbic hijack.
🐠 Somatic Freediving: exploring an experience in your life that brings you inside your body.
😠 What is Your Reactivity Costing You? // radical self-enquiry on how decisions made from reactivity are negatively impacting your life.
🦍 Guided A.P.E. Protocol // daily interoceptive practice for the first thirty breaths of your day after waking.
💢 Somatic Mapping: using a body-scan to track, sense + feel signs of reactivity, fear + stress in the body.
WEEK 3: Shift Your State
⚖️ Self-Regulation Strategies: exploring our tendencies for up + down-regulation of our nervous systems.
🪣 Three Ways to Shift Your State: learning the three ways in which humans shift their state: top-down, bottom-up & outside-in.
🌬️ How Your Breathe = How You Live: exploring how our breath shapes our endocrine system and our autonomic arousal levels.
📝 Self-Regulation Enquiry: exploring pattens + tendencies towards unhealthy or unconscious habitual self-regulation.
💡 Pre-empting Reactivity: in situations with high emotional charge, use the Three C’s to recognise ‘dorsal shutdown’ to cultivate greater agency amidst challenging situations.
🚨 SOS Button: Grounding intensity using ‘5-4-3-2-1’, posture shifts + the 'Physiological Sigh'
🚀 How to Human Manual: Ten Bottom-up Protocols for Self-Regulation to take with you in every-day life.
WEEK 4: Master Your Emotions
⛈️ Emotional Neuroscience 101: exploring the distinction between emotions vs. sensations and what we can learn from recent literature.
🙁 Exploring ‘Emotional Debt’: the consequences of building up too much ‘Allostatic load’ that causes nervous system fragility.
🚰 Un-kinking the Emotional Hosepipe: exploring so-called ‘negative emotions’ and the value in expanding our emotional literacy.
📝 What gets in the way? // choose an emotion to work with for the week and ask what gets in the way of inviting this sensation in?
🏄♂️ Somatic Surfing: self-guiding through expressing or feeling into stuck emotion
WEEK 5: Environment Redesign
〽️ The Flow of Your Day: Three things to implement every morning and evening to support nervous system flourishing
🏡 Sensory + Environmental Audit: setting up your home + work environment to be conducive for nervous system flourishing.
🪴 Redesign One Space: change one space in your home to be more aligned with your desired state.
👪 Support Structures: recruiting friends, family and mentors to support your learning.
VAULT: Bonus Content
📚 Bookshelf: curated reading + literature for those wishing to dive deeper and broaden their knowledge
📖 Glossary: defining useful terms often used in the neuroscience literature
🫁 Biological mechanisms: disproportionate benefits of building CO2 tolerance with walking breath holds and nose-breathing.
😋 Nutrition: recommended supplements & time-restricted feeding windows for enhanced energy.
☄️ Windows of Tolerance: Understanding principles of hermetic stress, titration, diaphragm mobility & expanding our capacity.
❓ Student FAQ: recordings of all Q&As to date
📝 Protocol Vault: research-supported protocols to support the core material
🎙️ Deep Dive Interviews with Experts: Interview Series: a growing archive of conversations with neuroscientists, breathwork practitioners
🧠 PLUS Weekly Expert Q&A Sessions // Previous guest speakers include: sought after executive coach Joe Hudson, Bodywork specialist Eddie Ulm, Neuroscientist & breathwork researcher Satori Clarke, Somatic Coach Conni Biesalski.
👨🏫 Meet Your Instructor
Jonny Miller, Nervous System Specialist.
In 2017, my fiancée suffered from an anxiety attack — the changes in her brain chemistry in that moment led her to the misguided conclusion that she needed to take her own life.
I believe that if she and others like her had known about and had access to self-regulation practices, these tragedies could be avoided.
In the years since I’ve co-authored the comprehensive Emotional Resilience in Leadership Report with Jan Chipchase, and spent thousands of cumulative hours researching, training & mentoring high-performers and professionals — from the CEO of a rocket-launch company to startup founders recovering from burnout as well as busy parents, early-stage solopreneurs & school-teachers.
Previous students of Nervous System Mastery have included professionals hailing from Slack, Google, Automattic, Facebook, Twitter, IDEO, Salesforce, Amazon, Polygon, Youtube, Meta, Microsoft, Apple, Paramount, Adobe, Calm Company Fund & Harvard Business School.
"I got 99 problems but learning to regulate my nervous system solved like 93 of them."
– Ella Cook, Women's Health Advocate & Marketing Consultant
"Nervous System Mastery opened a door to a space that I barely knew existed. And now that I do, my life is the better for it. This program is going to positively impact me for years to come.”
- Brian Portnoy, Founder of Shaping Wealth and author of ‘The Geometry of Wealth’
👨🏫 Meet the Guest Lecturers
All students receive lifetime access to the NSM community
Including bonus resources & 15+ hours of masterclass recordings from our previous NSM guest speakers below.
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🚀 What Past Students Are Saying
“Just wow. This course changed my life. Experiencing, first-hand, how the world shifts depending on the state of my nervous system was incredible. Why wasn't I taught this in school?!”
Learning I have the ability to change my nervous system, not through my brain, but through movement, and eating, and who I'm spending time with, and processing emotions. Fucking wild! I feel like I've been given a superpower.
– Brad W Morris, investor, thinker & community specialist
“One aha-moment for me was the differentiation between top-down vs. bottom-up processing. Never could I have thought that you can control your body/chemistry and therefore your thoughts...”
“...I have improved my sleep and decreased my symptoms of a dysregulated nervous system by a lot. I have learned to pay attention to my body much more than before, I have learned to break the cycle of stress activation where it arises, either in the thinking brain, or in the survival brain (neuroception). I have lost the fear of stress activation, since I can now interpret it and also regulate it.”
– Dimitris Kosmidis, Snr Product Manager, Amazon Alexa
“I feel like I finally know what it means to be present through the feeling of being in my body.
“…NSM is a practical course on how to live a fulfilled life by being more present with your thoughts, emotions and others.”
– Andrew Barry, Founder at Curious Lion Learning
This course is a gift that keeps on giving.
“…at the risk of sounding redundant, I’ll say it again and again. From the bottom of my heart thank you for putting this course on offer to the world.
– Christina Fedor, startup founder & writer
“Nervous System Mastery is the most powerful thing I've ever done for personal growth. I had previously explored breathwork, meditation, therapy, and other approaches, but always felt like something was missing...
...Nervous System Mastery connected the dots in a transformative way. It gave me the context I lacked to understand how these practices align with my experience of daily life. More importantly, it helped me build awareness for how to fully experience and transform the physiology of my body and emotional experiences. Can't thank Jonny enough for putting this out into the world in such an accessible manner.”
– Sam Sager, entrepreneur specialising in systems of self-renewal
“NSM will give you bite-size and actionable techniques for regulating my nervous system which I have consistently put into practice at least one 10-min-a-day since day one of the course. It’s like seeing the world in HD...”
“...I feel more connected and empathic towards others. I feel more grounded, I feel more in control of using the breath to calm myself down. NSM has essentially become the underpinning foundation for how I am redesigning my life around what I need as shown by how I feel. I would recommend it to everyone who is ambitious, who is leading teams, who wants to function well and who is interested in breathwork and the self.”
– Caryn Tan, learning designer + creator economy advocate
“This course should be a requirement if you are a human with a NS. It will peak your curiosity, give you lots to play with and transform your experience with their body in the world.
“My life is different now that I feel that I am willing to let my NS move through its full range without fear, knowing that I have tools to bring it into balance. Unexpected benefits might include shifts in perspective, improved emotional intelligence & a wider window of tolerance to stress. Life in general feels freer and easier to navigate with the NSM knowledge, protocols + better interoception.”
– Laura Karpinski, Founder of Align.Move.Breathe
It's the most wonderful, science-backed, practical course for learning how our nervous system works, and how we can get it to work with us, rather than against us.
Nervous System Mastery has been truly life-changing. I'm feeling much more at ease after the course, which not only feels great, but has a major, positive impact on my family, as well. I'm also more excited than I've been in years.”
— Rob Tourtelot, Co-Founder, Pump Audio (acquired by Getty Images)
“I might make Nervous System Mastery a requirement for my portfolio founders. I know I plan to recommend this to every founder and VC I work with.
This course is life-changing and the materials are so much richer than I could have imagined. It took me five years of therapy to realize the importance of managing my nervous system."
– Julie Fredrickson, Former founder & investor at Chaotic Capital
🎙️ Podcast Episode Primers
Listen to Jonny Miller speak with behaviour change expert Eric Zimmer on the award-winning ‘The One You Feed’ podcast.
They unpack terms like ‘emotional debt’, explore how physical sensations may correlate with certain thought patterns, discuss common barriers + protocols for emotional resilience & much more...
Or listen to this deep dive into emotional fluidity, polyvagal theory, breath-repatterning somatic experiencing and much much more — with host of the ‘Do Explain’ podcast Christofer Lövgren…
👨🏫 NSM Learning Philosophy
1. Knowledge is a rumour until it lives in the muscle
Passively consuming dense content is borderline useless. Put another way by Derek Sivers: ‘if more information were the answer we’d all be billionaires with six-pack abs’. The benefits arise from consistent repetition—based on neuroplasticity... which require reps to build new neural pathways.
2. Be a scientist of your own experience
We all have different bodies and different nervous systems and differing commitments — there is no one-size fits all approach. As such the outcome is to equip you with the tools to experiment with the protocols to determine what is best for your unique needs.
3. Learning is optimal when embedded within community
Genuine learning rarely happens in a vacuum but ought to be subject to cycles of feedback. There is strong scientific support for the benefits of having students learning and working in groups¹.
Even when we know the right things to do—learning together, sharing wins, insights and feedback has been shown to accelerate the learning process. We’ll be using Circle as our all-in-one community platform where you’ll meet and connect with a wide-variety of mentors, alumni and Nervous-System-Curious humans.
4. You learn best by teaching others
Leveraging the Feynman technique, in the final week, you will be invited to share what you've learned with a colleague or friend — this will help to identify gaps in your explanation and re-enforce learnings for yourself (as well as hopefully helping them out).
¹‘Group work as an incentive for learning – students experiences of group work’ by Eva Hammar Chiriac, 2014 (link)
"The state of your nervous system in each moment is a force multiplier for reaching your greatest potential.”
— Jonny Miller, NSM founder
📆 Course Logistics
The Spring cohort will run April 1st — May 3rd, 2024
⏳ Time Commitment
📹 30-minutes per week for core content + protocols + exercises via pre-recorded videos to engage with in your own time.
👪 60-minute live Zoom Sessions will be held weekly on Fridays at 10am PST / 6pm BST (attendance is optional and all calls are recorded).
⭕ Ideally, set aside some time to connect with fellow NSM students via the Circle Community.
We recommend signing up at least two weeks in advance to prepare appropriately and go through the pre-course assignments to hit the ground running.
💰 Financial Investment
The cost to enroll is 4x payments of $300 USD (or $1200 upfront).
This will also grant you lifetime access to the NSM Circle community along with our 750 alumni members, updates to all resources + protocols as well as the ability to join live monthly guest expert masterclasses and Q&As with Jonny.
Scholarship Places // in order to promote nervous system literacy amongst those who may need it most, a few generous scholarships are available for those who are experiencing financial hardship, healthcare workers or BIPOC individuals.
VIP Coaching Package // there are five seats available for an NSM deep dive that includes 1:1 coaching sessions and unlimited voice-memo access to Jonny, priced at $5,500 — mention this in your application if this is of interest.
“Getting the cost of Nervous System mastery reimbursed by my employer was super simple thanks to the approval email template & auto generated invoices.”
– Stiven Skyrah, interdisciplinary designer
❓ Hypothetically Asked Questions
Yes. Sometimes you need to see something before you can fully decide if it's the right thing for you right now.
With that in mind, if you decide NSM didn't deliver on its promise for any reason within the first week, just let us know and we'll refund your full payment, no questions asked.
Absolutely, many forward-thinking companies have budgets for personal development + training that increases wellbeing (not to mention helps to mitigate burnout).
Most large organisations, and many smaller ones, will reimburse tuition for professional development and you can use this proposal template to make the case to your team for investing in this training. (you might also consider sharing the Emotional Resilience in Leadership Report with them).
The weekly live calls with Jonny will take place on Fridays at 10am PST. Attendance is optional.
Roughly ~20% of past students are based in an Australian or Asian timezone and watch parties were arranged for the live session recordings.
Questions for the Q&A can be submitted ahead of time and all recordings will be shared so if you’re unable to attend it won’t have any detrimental impact on your learning experience.
We’ve curated some of the studies and literature reviews that have informed the Nervous System Mastery curriculum. Read here.
Whilst not essential, this is highly advised as heart-rate variability (HRV) is an excellent proxy measure for the resilience of your nervous system. In addition it is also helpful to gauge resting heart rate, respiratory rate and sleep quality.
So to enable more precise tracking of outcomes we recommend investing in one before the course — Whoop Band, Oura Ring (Jonny's personal preference), Heartmath & Apple Watch are all excellent for the purposes of this training.
Absolutely, this course has been designed after working 1-1 with coaching clients who have been recovering from varying degrees of burnout.
In the meantime, you might also find this Emotional Resilience Wiki to be a helpful resource.
Here are some words from Matt Goodwin, the founder of venture-backed SaaS startup.
"My coaching experience with Jonny has been an invaluable resource in getting past burnout, improving my work/life balance, and becoming an effective leader and business owner. The breathwork sessions ended up being important experiences in understanding the effect of burnout on my life, and in beginning to undo some of the bad habits I adopted that led to my mental and physical exhaustion." – Matt Goodwin, startup founder.
Yes, these are available on an ad-hoc basis as are custom workshops, please get in touch with Jonny here.
📝 Final Word From Jonny
Why This Is About Much More Than Productivity
The type of attention that we pay in the world is a profound moral act. Imagine listening to your nervous system, attending to your senses as if they were playing an exquisite piece of music.
The receptiveness changes the quality of the nervous system. This curriculum is based on a radical idea—that your experience of reality depends upon the quality of your attention.
And the quality of your attention depends upon the state of your nervous system, which depends on your ability to get out of your head and into your body. Why does this matter? Well many of us feel that that the world is fragmented and not exactly heading along the right track—but we rarely admit to our own role in this.
Whilst it is no-one's fault that there was a lack of societal education in our culture, what is clear is that the root cause of acting from unconscious anger, lack of empathy and all fear-based human behaviour (mine & yours) stems from a lack of collective nervous system regulation.
When both you and I feel empowered to own full responsibility for our emotional state, truly embody the practices that reconnect us to ourselves and tend to our neuronal hard-wiring – we are taking a meaningful step towards reconnecting society & healing our planet.
I hope you will consider joining me in this fascinating deep dive into our primal conditioning & explore who you might become on the other side.
–Jonny Miller
Top one
Bottom one
Onboarding
Essays
Resources
Alumni + Mentors
Breathwork
Add to protocol directory:
HELP ME TO…
😬 [Reduce My Anxiety]
💪 [Increase My Capacity]
💧 [Cultivate Calm + Relax]
🔥 [Increase My Alertness]
—> 🔥 Breath of Fire
🙇♂️ [Feel Stuck Emotions]
—> 🏄♂️ Somatic Surfing
Also add for each:
- when to practice (e.g. all the time, daily, weekly)
X,Y,Z
- the principles at play
