Non-anxious Leadership You've Been Missing | Dr. Nathan Brown
What if awareness doesn't start in your head?
Maya had been building her design studio for three years when her body started speaking. Loudly.
Her heart would race during investor calls. Her shoulders stayed knotted through weekends. She'd lost twelve pounds without noticing.
"I kept telling myself to stay present, to reframe my thinking," she says. "I was working on my mindset constantly. But something wasn't landing."
Maya had stumbled into what Dr. Nathan Brown calls "the awareness trap"—the belief that being conscious means thinking about your experience.
"We've been taught that awareness is cognitive," Brown explains, a clinical psychologist who has spent over 40 years studying how human beings actually function. "But your body is receiving and processing information long before your conscious mind catches up."
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MAGICademy Podcast (00:00)
The arousal curve represents about 120 years of research. The ability to be creative lives in that peak part of the curve. We evolved as cavemen and women to stay alive. If there's a saber-toothed tiger coming at you, you have a few seconds to decide whether to fight or flee. The ready state, sometimes the poised state, much like a cat who's looking at a mouse. Poised, not anxious, nimble, a light on its feet.
Jiani (00:31)
Welcome to MAGICademy podcast. Today with us is Dr. Nathan.
clinical psychologist and also the founder of True Bearing Academy. He has been spending over 40 years in clinical psychology, helping organizations and communities and people, most importantly, restore mental health.
Nathan Brown (00:42)
He has been spending the first 30 years in psychology.
Thank you.
Jiani (00:56)
actually takes a more integrative view of health and wellness.
he is currently living with his beloved wife who is a ballerina.
to talk about what Dr. Nathan called non anxious leadership.
We're going to take a pause on here. Non -anxious leadership.
Nathan Brown (01:14)
you
Jiani (01:15)
what does non -anxious leadership mean and how can everyone,
this holistic non -anxious
beep. In front of you lands a spaceship. Out walks a friendly, friendly alien. If you were to use one word, one sound, or one movement to introduce yourself, what would that be?
Nathan Brown (01:44)
So I have to tell you, I cheated a little bit on this. Johnny, you told me you might ask me this question. So I asked one of my grandkids what she would do. You know what she did? It was a gesture. It was just opening her arms wide in welcome and in vulnerability, really. As I thought about it, that's a very wonderful gesture to send to someone who doesn't know anything about us, that we're open.
and we're welcoming.
Jiani (02:09)
I think grandkids are great advisors for this particular question. Thank you Amy. Wonderful.
Nathan Brown (02:10)
I grandkids be great advisors. I learned a lot from Emmy. That's true.
Jiani (02:19)
Why non -anxious leadership?
Nathan Brown (02:21)
I'm a former professor, so I always have to step back and kind of give a little context. You know, we've been studying leadership and organizations for over 100 years, and it's kind of gone through fads almost. There were decades where the idea about leadership was there's a certain character trait, you know, that means leadership. Oddly, it looked a lot like John Wayne, know, kind of iron jaw and, you know, all of that.
Other times it's been certain skills, know, communication skills or organizational skills or something like that. But there's another way of looking at this. You you can see organizations in terms of an organizational chart. You can think about roles. You can think about power. You can think about communication. I'd suggest we look deeper and think about the fact that any organization is is made up of people. Right. And
human beings are in these bodies and we have these brains and we bring all of that with us when we come into an organization. And I find it helpful and this line of research and practice that I'm here to talk with you about kind of operates on the idea that human beings, one of the core experiences that we have is
arousal, I'll use the more basic term even than anxiety, right? We evolved as cavemen and women to stay alive. And, you know, if there's a saber tooth tiger coming at you, you have a few seconds to decide whether to fight or flee. And everything in our evolution has geared us to rapidly arouse, you know, to get active and get ready to either fight or flee. It's something that happens very quick.
It's a response in our body that is kind of amazing. You know, you hear stories about people lifting cars off of other people, you know, where there's been an accident. We can do incredible things in this arousal state. That's what we've evolved to do, right? Now that arousal state sometimes can feel like terror. Sometimes it can feel like joy, right? There's a very similar physiology between intense emotions.
Jiani (04:06)
you
Nathan Brown (04:22)
So it's helpful sometimes to think about emotions ranging from joy to anxiety to anger, all of those whole spectrum of things that people experience, that underneath that is this primal, primitive arousal state, right? That we either have too little of that can be an issue or we have too much of. So the idea of organizations being emotional systems is trying to go below the
org chart and that kind of thing. And consider that we are all operating on this
curve. We're either under aroused or over aroused or in kind of a peak state. And anxiety is good kind of catch all for what happens when people come together. You know, we have also evolved not only to escape saber tooth tigers, we also evolved to figure out how to do it together. We learned that it was good to stick together.
You know, we're human beings are not reptiles. You reptiles kind of is sort of a fin for yourself. There's some groupings, but it's not nearly the elaborate social systems that we have. We've learned to survive together. And I believe one of the things that's happened is we have learned to read each other's arousal levels. Right. And the shorthand we're using now is anxiety. You know, if everybody was always joyful, we wouldn't be having this podcast. Right.
Jiani (05:48)
Right, yes.
Nathan Brown (05:48)
but we get into groups
and organizations and we feel anxious about things that are happening. So the idea here with organizations being emotional systems is just simply the notion that we've evolved to face threats that we actually don't deal with so much today. We don't have saber to tigers. We have deadlines. We have irritating bosses. We have seats that are uncomfortable that we have to sit in for three hours, you know, in a meeting. We have a whole different set.
of stressors and challenges that are usually not life threatening. so we can often in organizations move through that organization.
experiencing anxiety that other people pick up. And so organizations often you see collections of people moving to lower the collective anxiety, to reduce the collective anxiety. I see this in meetings where perhaps there's one person in the meeting that is very upset. Something has happened. Imagine being in a meeting like that. know, people are coming in for a staff meeting. It's very clear that John over there is very upset.
What happens? We're not reptiles. We don't just go on as if nothing happened. We're concerned about that person. And so some people may respond to John's upset by asking about it. Other people might joke about it. Other people might ignore it. All of those are bids to lower anxiety. Does that make sense? They're all bids to kind of reduce anxiety.
Jiani (06:55)
Everybody's kind of soaking in that anxiety altogether.
Mm -hmm, mechanism.
Nathan Brown (07:15)
and you're going to potentially get people to cooperate with you. know, like everyone will agree, we're just gonna let John be alone, you know, and we're not gonna reach out, or maybe we all reach out together. The solutions are different, but it's a collective patterns of response, how we respond to arousal and upset in an organization. So I find that's something that's deeper than...
the org chart, you know, this is something that you can see people responding as human beings together in an organization in ways that are very important to understand. So now just to take the last step about leadership, you could think about a leader as someone who somehow ignores that, that John's upset, you know.
I would suggest that's probably not going to be very effective leadership over the long run to be a leader who ignores the emotional dynamics in a system. I would suggest instead that a strong leader is someone who is able to experience the anxiety in a system, be aware of it. I'll give an example in a moment, but make a choice about it, not react impulsively, but to make a choice about it.
Jiani (08:21)
acknowledge the emotions and then respond to it by acknowledging it and then probably provide some solutions to that.
Nathan Brown (08:31)
And it always starts inside of yourself. It always starts recognizing what is it that's driving my anxiety? You know, is there something about this situation that's making me anxious and constraining the way I might respond in this situation?
this is called the arousal curve. It's very simple. This represents about 120 years of research on the relationship between physiological arousal and performance.
It's very simple. It suggests that you can have too little arousal for effective performance. That's the low end of this. Then attention, interest, engagement, rise. You get to this optimal level of arousal. And then it begins to impair as you move off into arousal that's too high. That is very often associated with anxiety. So this curve applies to
literally hundreds of situations. For instance, the ability to be creative, that's an important topic here, is really lives in that peak part of the curve. When we tail off to the left, we tend to lose interest, we become under aroused, we lose our ability to be creative. When we move to the right, where we're getting more arousal, we're getting more anxious,
We lose our ability to think divergently, to think creatively, to think about alternatives. Just no different as if you're being chased by a saber -toothed tiger. You're not stopping to admire the sunset or think about something else. You are just running. And that's kind of the way we've been built. We've been built on survival mode. Everything about civilization and creativity and those kinds of things.
Jiani (10:10)
Survival mode
Nathan Brown (10:19)
lives in that high part of the arousal curve. So that's generally what we're aiming for is to be in that sweet spot because that is what in neurofeedback we refer to this as the ready state, sometimes the poise state, much like a cat who's looking at a mouse and the cat is poised. The cat's not anxious. The cat's ready to go any way the mouse goes. It's kind of nimble, light on its feet.
That's the mental state that is associated with creativity. It's associated with the ability to come up with alternative solutions. It's associated with ability to execute. This is true, by the way, physically as well as cognitively and emotionally. All of this is true for athletic performance and physical performance just as much as it is psychological and cognitive.
Jiani (11:09)
you
Nathan Brown (11:09)
Now, I just put this slide in to kind of show that different arousal curves are appropriate for different kinds of people in different situations. So you see those arousal curves both look identical. They're intended to be just like the previous slide. But imagine for a minute what the lifestyle and the day -to -day challenges for Louis Pasteur would be, who was a...
you know, a scientist back in the 1800s who discovered pasteurization. So he's a laboratory scientist who worked on his own, just a lot of working with test tubes and so forth. Gordo Cooper is an astronaut. He's, you know, kind of a rocket man, you know, very high driving. You see, they are two different kinds of people. Everything we know about Louis Pasteur is very much of an introvert and very much focused on that kind of inner internal
quiet laboratory kind of environment. And he gravitated to a job that really optimized that. Gordo Cooper, on the other hand, very strong extroverts, you know, kind of quick reactions, quick reflexes, that sort of thing. He's an astronaut. His general level of arousal is quite a bit higher than Louis Pasteur's would be. He gravitated to a
profession that worked for him. He started as a test pilot and then he became an astronaut because he liked being on that higher end of this scale. Okay, so what I'm trying to point out is that this arousal curve is not a one size fits all. It's something that can vary from person to person and situation to situation.
Jiani (12:42)
Different
people have different levels of the optimum, the poised state. And it can be an absolute value level. It can be high. It can be low. It's all irrelevant in terms of where one under stimulating, one is over stimulating. It's always the middle.
Nathan Brown (12:48)
100%.
100%.
That's right.
this is an image that comes from an MRI of the brain and it's been manipulated in such a way to really emphasize different circuits that are in the brain and how they interconnect across the brain. So what I want to focus on here is the green one. You've got that kind of green loop.
that goes basically from the front to the back to the front. And I want to just a bit of an oversimplification, but let's call that the limbic system. The limbic system and its interconnections to the rest of the brain. The core limbic system is really kind of the top center of that green loop, but it has interconnections, circuits that connect with the rest of the brain. Now, the way this works is,
In the back of the head, that's on the right here, that's the visual cortex. Let's just use our cave person example for a moment. If this is the brain of a cave woman and she's going down the jungle path and sees a saber -toothed tiger, it's the back of the head that is gonna process that image of a saber -toothed tiger. The back of the brain also has memory. And so there are two parts of the brain, the hippocampus and the amygdala.
Hippocampus has to do with memory. The amygdala has to do with the association of emotion to memory and events. Those two work together and basically come to the conclusion that is a saber -toothed which has been a threat in the past danger. And that immediately triggers an impulse going from this back right hand side, the back all the way up into the middle part of the brain. You see that top loop?
Jiani (14:18)
Mm
Mm.
Mm -hmm.
Nathan Brown (14:36)
And that part
Jiani (14:36)
Mm -hmm.
Nathan Brown (14:37)
of the brain talks to the body. And so within about two one hundredths of a second, you start to get physiological activation. Heart rate goes up. Adrenaline goes up. There are 2000 neurochemical changes that take place in the blink of an eye. Now, at the same time, that was the circuit going across
top, about two one hundredths of a second. The circuit going across the bottom, you see the green that goes all the way to the front.
It's going into this purple area in the left side of this image. That's the frontal lobes. That's where you're thinking. It takes an eternity. It takes about 10 one hundredths of a second for that signal to get from the back of the brain to the frontal lobe. And that's when you start thinking, ⁓ my gosh, it's a saber tooth tiger. OK, this is why if you're at a baseball game and a foul ball comes at you, first you flinch and then you go, what was that?
a split second later. That's because you have two circuits going in the brain. One is very fast. It's activating the body to danger. And the second is activating the front of the head and getting you to think about it. OK, so the limbic system regulates arousal and it's also a two way street. What I mean by that is that amygdala in the back can drive a strong emotional reaction.
And that will start to activate if you look at that bottom loop in green, that's going to activate the front of the brain. The brains, you know, we're going to start thinking anxious thoughts. This would be my executive director seeing the staff member talking to a board member out in the parking lot. And that triggers that stress response and it goes to the front.
Jiani (16:10)
Mm.
Nathan Brown (16:27)
And she starts thinking, no, I'm going to lose my entire career. OK, so that's what's happening there is you get a thought that is not necessarily true, but it's driven from that strong emotional reaction. And in turn, that thought, I'm going to lose my entire career. The circuit goes both ways. It's going to go to the back and increase that emotional reaction. So this is where you get kind of an emotional cognitive emotional spiral.
Jiani (16:31)
you
Nathan Brown (16:54)
It's this circuit kind of moving back and forth. And the more you think anxious thoughts, the more it makes you physiologically anxious and vice versa.
is a story about an executive director for a fairly large nonprofit down in Southern California that I worked with quite a while ago. It's a health advocacy group, She was very talented and she was in a good way ambitious. She wanted the best for her organization.
was kind of going places. She had a lot of talent and ability. And she had a fairly controversial plan in her nonprofit. We don't need to go too far into it, but it was basically the idea, this is very controversial in a nonprofit. Let's pay our staff what they're worth. Because they were losing people because the payroll was so low. And typically what would happen in an organization is the
You'd have other people in the system that would say, we can't afford to do that. You we can't afford to pay people higher salaries. Her response was to point out, look how much money we lose when people leave. You know, we have costs of turnover and so forth. It's both doing good and doing well if we pay people what they're worth. OK, so here she is. She has a good idea. She has a board she has to convince. And now here's the here's the hook.
There is a member of her staff
Going to the board saying, you know, this, she's going to drive us into the ground. You know, she's going to make us go bankrupt with this crazy plan that she has. Okay? So imagine if you're that executive director, let's make this really personal. You're that executive director, you're trying to do the right thing, but you have somebody who is
bad -mouthing you and your plan essentially to the board, to the people that actually hold the power.
She spoke with me, she said I could just feel myself getting constrained, right? Because it made me very anxious.
This is all happening behind her back. So she officially didn't know about this. She was afraid to confront this person at first because she thought it would get worse. She thought this person would go even more intensely to the board and maybe try and get her job taken away. OK. This this executive director had to go through a process that I think is really important in leadership.
And that is number one, recognize what is it that's making me so anxious? Now there's that arousal underneath it. You you could ask her, I did ask her, what does this feel like? Well, my heart beats, you know, when I see her coming down the other person coming down the hall or when we're interacting in a meeting, I can feel my heart race. I can get a little clammy. You know, my breathing gets shallow.
And I just start to lose my ability to be creative. All these things happen when we get too aroused. So she had to first of all recognize this is a situation that is causing anxiety in me and that is causing me to not actually have the full range of choices that I would like to have. Here's what she had to do. This is the second step. And by the way, these are not skills in the sense of like learning of
you know, learning to drive a car or something. These are inner work. She had to ask herself, what's the worst thing that could happen here? What is it that's causing me to flinch? Right. And when she realized that when she was really honest with herself, she said, you know, the thing that's causing me to flinch is this person has such an end with my board. I'm afraid if I push this, it's going to cost me my job. So that was the thing that kept her from actually addressing it.
Jiani (19:58)
and
Nathan Brown (20:21)
If that makes sense. Now, she had to do some work to get to this point, but here's what she did eventually, because this this other person was very adept at kind of working around the back corners and out in the parking lot, you know, kind of working against her. She called a meeting with the head of HR and with this woman, and she came in and she said to the woman, I understand that you believe that
Jiani (20:22)
Mm Mm -hmm.
Nathan Brown (20:46)
I what I'm doing is is bad for the organization and that I could drive us into bankruptcy. If that's true, I should be stopped. Right. If you're right about that, I should really be stopped. I should probably lose my job if that's if that's what's what's at stake. So what I've done is I'm bringing the HR person here. He has all the paperwork for filing a complaint and for documenting the problem that I've had. I'm going to leave.
Jiani (21:00)
Hmm.
you
Nathan Brown (21:11)
and I'm going to allow you to take care of this. Can you feel what that would have taken? Right. That's that's getting to the point where you've come to terms with your anxiety. You've come to terms with the worst thing that could happen. And once you've done that, once you're able to figure out, you know, if I lose my job, it'll be OK. You know, if I lose my job, I'll go into a different field or I'll find another job. She had to come to terms with it that way.
Jiani (21:14)
Woof!
Nathan Brown (21:35)
And as a result, she had great power in that situation. She was basically able to really just do the right thing, you know, put that woman with the HR person and let that happen. Now, what ended up happening is that woman actually left within about a month because she had no avenue anymore. The HR person talked to the board. The board now realized that she was undercutting the executive director and it kind of all resolved.
but it resolved in a way that that person ended up leaving. Okay. Doesn't always have a happy ending. Sometimes the thing that is the worst thing that could happen actually, you know, could happen. You know, we're often not imagining those things. It's just to say that we carry around often in our minds beliefs about what might happen if I do this particular thing. And if there's anxiety attached to that idea and we don't come to terms with it, we end up holding back.
we end up constraining ourselves.
Jiani (22:29)
Mmm.
Nathan Brown (22:30)
So that's one story about that.
Jiani (22:30)
And
yeah, I think that's kind of it's very interesting in a way that sometimes our biggest fear once we come into turn with that and accept that worst case scenario. And then you're actually in a very good place to to be.
Nathan Brown (22:44)
Mm
Jiani (22:50)
transparent objective and accept as things would come. And usually the nature or the working of things usually has a way to restore it to its balanced state,
Nathan Brown (22:59)
and you have the right to respond to it by this list.
Jiani (23:14)
in our previous conversation that you said an organization is an emotional system and the ability for us to acknowledge and recognize and come into terms with those anxiety triggers is the most important part. So in terms of like practical strategies and steps,
Nathan Brown (23:31)
So practical strength.
Jiani (23:35)
First is
to aware of what the trigger is to do the inner work. And then the second is to acknowledge the worst case scenario.
Nathan Brown (23:46)
Can I back you up a step? I think very often the first thing is to recognize what your body's telling you. Okay, because that's the physical piece of this. I should mention that all of this is rooted in what I and others refer to as a biopsychosocial model of understanding human beings and organizations, which is to say most patterns that we run into that are problematic.
Jiani (23:48)
Yes.
Nathan Brown (24:10)
There's a biological piece as well as a psychological piece, as well as a social piece. there is this thing called an arousal curve. I'll show a picture of that in a moment. We have 120 years of research on this that suggests that there's a, you can have too little arousal for effective performance. You can also have too much arousal for effective performance. There's a sweet spot in the middle.
that we want to get to, right? If we have too little arousal for effective performance, picture somebody in a job that's very boring, they're very under -stimulated, it's not meaningful to them. That would be an example of under -arousal, right? You you're falling asleep, you don't really have enough energy to really care about that job. On the other hand, you can have too much arousal.
So in the case of the woman I'm describing, the executive director, she was in a situation where she's constantly perceiving this threat, right? Because she came to understand that this individual was talking about her behind her back and actively recruiting the board against her. So that's a threat just every bit as much as a saber -toothed tiger coming at you, right? Except at least a saber -toothed tiger, you can see it, you can fight it or flee.
What do you do in a situation like this? Right. It's more vague. You need more creativity. And we don't get creativity by becoming more anxious, more aroused. We become creative by becoming by hitting that sweet spot. Right. So it's kind of the goal here is to think about the idea that the first step is to listen to what your body is telling you.
The body's
like a warning light going off to pay attention. Doesn't automatically tell you what the problem is when you experience anxiety. It tells you that there is a problem. Then we get to the step you're talking about, which is asking, well, what is it I'm seeing or experiencing that is associated with this anxiety?
Well, I see this woman out in the parking lot and I know she's talking to the board member, right? And so that's, you know, that's the, there's a belief there. I have a belief that turned out to be true that this woman is a threat to me. That's gonna cause that warning light to go off. That's gonna cause that physical piece to go off, if that makes sense. Yeah. So I think the second step really has to be to ask, you know, what is the belief I have about this situation?
In the case of this executive director, and she was very honest, she said, I'm ambitious. I want to have a national voice in the things that I care about. This is a job on the way to that. I can't afford to have this go wrong. That's kind of what was really at the heart of it. And can you feel how that took some honesty for her to kind of get to that? Once she realized that, that's the thing I'm afraid to threaten.
Right? I'm afraid that if I address this directly, it's going to threaten my ambition. And she had to come to terms with that. You know, maybe it will mean I lose my job. Does that mean I have no choices going forward? No, it doesn't. She had to she had to kind of get to that place.
Jiani (27:11)
Beautiful. And the social piece comes in when she addresses that in relation to the whole group.
Nathan Brown (27:12)
Thank you.
Just kidding.
Yeah, and I would say each of these categories, there's a lot of different things involved, but the social piece would be, well, what am I going to do? How do I communicate? She communicated very well. She could have gone into that conversation accusing, making a lot of you statements, and being very not appropriate. She called the right meeting with the right people. She didn't bring in a lot of allies. She just kind of made it exactly what she needed to do.
She was careful about the way she communicated and all of that was important. The other thing she did before she ever got to that point is she sought help and getting appropriate social support often is part of it. She ended up coming to me because she had friends who were really giving her good emotional support, but it took somebody who is neutral to be able to kind of get at what is really eating at you here.
And for her to get to that piece, it's, it's, I'm afraid that I'm not going to, that my career will be over. Right. And once she was able to articulate it, she realized that's actually not true. It's just the belief I've been operating on. Sometimes we don't know those things until we say them out loud with somebody else.
Jiani (28:25)
to hear that from the outsider's perspective once the word is out.
Nathan Brown (28:29)
Yes.
Jiani (28:30)
that's all come back to the focal point of this conversation, the non anxious leadership, whether you're the talent or you're the leader. think the core message here is to be aware of the non anxious leadership, because sometimes if we over activate, if we over activate that green circuit, it's going to interfere with our decisions and with our abilities to
Nathan Brown (28:34)
Yeah. Yes.
Jiani (28:54)
to make wise decisions, be productive, to be imaginative, to be creative and to be social. And that could be a kind of like a bad, bad noise. So one of the most important responsibilities is to try to keep the green circuit in personally optimal.
Nathan Brown (29:01)
you
That's right.
Thank
Jiani (29:15)
intensity Love it.
we've been focusing on the non -anxious leadership and Dr. Nathan showed us a graphic in helping us to, from the visual perspective, understand what really happens when our body got triggered with anxiety and how that anxiety can really impact our
Nathan Brown (29:22)
or
Jiani (29:39)
abilities to decide to think, to create and to relate with each other. And he also explored the possibilities of integrating digital health tools to help ourselves get insight into the current state of our brain and to create a reference point and help us to always return back to the
the optimum
And we also talked about different ways that we can manage the non -anxious part. The first one is not awareness, believe it or not. The first one is actually to feel in your body. And did your body cringe? Did you feel smaller? Did you get tense?
Nathan Brown (30:05)
Yeah.
.
Jiani (30:23)
Did your heart beat increase and all that kind of like the bio signals then step two is then coming to your frontal lobe and start to think about, okay, all right, so I'm going to try to identify what are some triggering points and incidents and details that creates this biological nervous responses.
Nathan Brown (30:25)
Yeah.
you
Jiani (30:46)
And then the next step is to come into turn with that and then start to work it out
Nathan Brown (30:48)
to conclude science.
Thank
Jiani (30:53)
we move into the magic piece of our conversation, what did you enjoy creating so much when you were 11 years old or even younger, whichever?
Nathan Brown (30:57)
Thank
When I was 11. What's
interesting, you had mentioned 11. I'll just be, I'll answer that directly. When I was 11, I was fairly introverted when I was growing up and I really liked kind of creating things. And what I actually got into was breeding fish. And my first experience was I bred a bunch of fish and then another bunch of fish and I put them in an aquarium and they all ate each other. It was terrible.
It was terrible. They all went away. And I kind of thought that was a challenge. How do I get these carnivores to live together? Right. And so I got kind of interested in in raising different kinds of fish that could live together and not eat each other. Right. Or maybe have different parts of the aquarium, you know, that kind of thing. So I was pretty, pretty absorbed in my little fish world when I was 11.
Jiani (31:38)
Yeah.
I love that. And did you figure it out as a result?
Nathan Brown (31:57)
Pretty much, yeah, pretty much I did. You there's some fish that like betta you know, they're beautiful, betta fish, fighting fish. They're beautiful, but they're just kind of mean. You have to kind of keep them somewhere else, at least to keep them separated. But I did learn which ones lived with each other and, you know, were able to work well together.
Jiani (32:08)
you
You're taking like a scientific mindset even from an early stage. That's your lab. That's kind of your first clinical lab. I love that.
Nathan Brown (32:21)
I think I probably did. I probably did.
My
father was a theoretical physicist, so I kind of grew up with that kind of view.
Jiani (32:34)
I love it. Yeah, sometimes the family does kind of influence us and you know in a way What role does childlike wonder play in your professional careers life?
Nathan Brown (32:46)
What role did Wonder play?
Jiani (32:47)
Mm -hmm.
Nathan Brown (32:48)
Yeah, I would just broadly say if it's, if it doesn't feel like play and wonder, I don't want to do it. I, I, I, I'm one of those people that, you know, it's kind of a, an old saying, but you know, if you enjoy what you're doing, you don't work a day in your life. This has always felt like playing to me. I was actually on my glide path to retirement when these neurofeedback and biofeedback tools, the, the,
the technology evolved to the point where you could do it remotely. And I just couldn't retire at that point. I needed to be able to get this word out because I do believe that these tools have an opportunity to dramatically improve the way we live our lives, either in a counseling, psychotherapy, mental health context or in a performance enhancement context.
And I've been waiting 40 years to be able to share this with people. So I'm happy to be able to do that some today.
Jiani (33:43)
I love that the new research questions emerge. How can we integrate digital health tools such as biofeedback remotely to enhance treatment and healing process? I don't want to mention the word treatment feels like some like not empowering, healing.
Nathan Brown (33:44)
you
Yeah, yeah, it's actually technically
we refer to it not as treatment but as training. Doing neurofeedback or biofeedback is much more like going to the gym than it is going to see a doctor or a psychotherapist. Yeah, yeah, it's going to the gym for your brain.
Jiani (34:04)
training.
I love that.
Yeah. And sometimes I'm sorry, I got so excited. And I think everybody should like, even regardless of, know, if you feel anxious or not, really, everybody should have this like mental gym that's accessible and they can always train. And the more, the faster that they can return to their, ⁓ optimal state, the more resilient.
Nathan Brown (34:28)
Mm
Yeah. Yeah.
Jiani (34:37)
they will be,
I mean, things will still happen, but it's going to take less stress and waste of valuable energies before they at the conclusions and solutions.
Nathan Brown (34:38)
Yeah. Yeah.
Mm -hmm.
That's right.
Again, up until maybe six or seven years ago, you'd have to go to a neuro therapist office and you'd have to do it in their office. Now you can have it with you. The executive director I'm talking about, she has a neurofeedback device that you can fit in a baseball cap. And she goes into her office early to get some work done and she spends 20 minutes doing her neurofeedback before her day starts. So she's getting a bit of
Guided down regulation before the day even starts and just integrates that into everything else. She's Happy to
Jiani (35:20)
I love that. We should definitely talk more on that as well.
Wonderful. So what do you think over all is your magic then?
Nathan Brown (35:28)
What is my magic? That's a great idea. Well, I'm going to refer back to my father. My father was a theoretical physicist, and his great gift was making very complicated ideas simple. I remember sitting at the dining room table, and he held up a pencil, and he said, Nathan, is this longer this way or this way? And there is a right answer. And I had no idea. Well, it turned out it was longer if it was north and south than east and west.
because of the rotation of the earth and relativity. Relativity, when you go, things go faster, they get smaller. And so he was able to explain, at least that was a door into explaining a very complex concept, relativity, using a pencil. And I would say if I have any kind of gift like that, I'd like to be like him. It's making complex ideas more accessible and more like play.
Jiani (36:16)
That's beautiful. Thank you, Dr. Nathan for sharing with us your wisdom, your research over the past 40 years and your magic, your wonder with us and also sharing with us a possible future that where a healthy mental state and high level of resilience is readily accessible to everyone.
Nathan Brown (36:27)
Thank you.
So thank
Jiani (36:44)
That's beautiful. It's beautiful. Thank you very much.
Nathan Brown (36:45)
Thank you, Johnny. It's a pleasure being with you.
Thank you.
You're welcome.
Two-Hundredths of a Second
Here's what most people don't know: Your body responds to what's happening in two one-hundredths of a second. It takes ten one-hundredths of a second for that signal to even begin to reach your frontal lobe—where thinking happens.
Those eight one-hundredths of a second represent a different kind of knowing.
"Inside your brain, there's a network called the limbic system that regulates arousal—your body's readiness to respond," Brown explains. "Think of it as a dial. Too low, and you're disengaged. Too high, and you lose creativity, strategic thinking, the ability to see possibilities."
There's an optimal range in the middle. Brown calls it "the poise state"—like a cat watching a mouse, alert but relaxed, ready to move in any direction.
"That's where innovation happens. Where you can hold complexity. Where you have full access to your capacities," he says.
But here's the challenge: We evolved to respond to immediate physical threats. Predators in the wild. Now our systems respond the same way to looming deadlines, difficult conversations, and overwhelm.
"Your limbic system doesn't distinguish between a physical threat and a psychological one," Brown notes. "It just registers: danger. And it responds."
When Maya's heart raced, when her shoulders tensed, when sleep became elusive—her body was speaking. Not malfunctioning. Speaking.
She just hadn't learned to listen.
Bio → Psycho → Social: A Different Order
Brown works from what he calls a "biopsychosocial" framework. The order matters—especially for anyone trying to live and work more consciously.
First: Biology (The Body's Voice)
"Start by listening to what your body is telling you," Brown says. "That's the physical piece. When does your heart race? When do your shoulders tense? When do you feel yourself contract or expand?"
Your body is an information system. It doesn't tell you what the problem is—it tells you there is something worth attending to.
This isn't about analyzing sensations. It's about recognizing them as data.
"We evolved for hundreds of thousands of years to read our environment through our bodies," Brown explains. "That capacity hasn't gone anywhere. We've just learned to override it."
Second: Psychology (The Story Underneath)
Once you feel it in your body, then you can ask: What am I believing that creates this response?
Brown uses a simple but powerful question: "What's the worst thing that could happen here?"
Not to catastrophize, but to excavate. What underlying belief or fear is activating your system?
When Maya finally sat with her racing heart and asked that question, the answer surprised her: "If I slow down for even a moment, everything will fall apart."
That wasn't a fact. That was a belief. And beliefs can be examined.
"Once you can name it, once you say it out loud, you often realize it's not actually true," Brown observes. "And that shift—from unconscious belief to conscious recognition—that's where choice enters."
Third: Social (How You Show Up)
Only after you've listened to your body's signals and examined your underlying beliefs can you respond effectively in relationship to your team, your work, your life.
"We often want to jump straight to fixing the external situation," Brown says. "But if you haven't done the internal work first—the biological and psychological pieces—you're just reacting from old patterns."
Maya began using her body as a compass. Projects that made her chest tighten? She questioned whether they were truly aligned. Conversations that created shoulder tension? She prepared differently or delegated them. Her body became a decision-making tool, not something to power through.
Training, Not Fixing
Brown makes an interesting distinction: This isn't about "treating" anxiety or "fixing" stress. It's about training.
"Think of it like going to the gym, but for your nervous system," he suggests. "Your brain has evolved over hundreds of thousands of years to seek balance—what we call homeostasis. That optimal state of poise? Your system actually wants to be there. Sometimes it's just temporarily lost the pathway back."
This reframe matters. Your body isn't broken. Your nervous system isn't defective. You're not trying to transcend anything.
You're learning to work with how you're actually designed.
The Practice: Start With Sensation
Brown's approach is remarkably simple:
Notice when your body speaks.
Not your thoughts about what's happening. Not your interpretation. The actual physical sensation.
The jaw clenches before opening your inbox. The breath that shallows in certain meetings. The way you physically expand or contract when making decisions.
"That's your system communicating in two one-hundredths of a second," Brown says. "By the time you're thinking about it, your body has already responded. The question is: Can you learn to hear it?"
Because consciousness—true awareness—doesn't start in your head.
It starts eight one-hundredths of a second earlier.
In the wisdom your body has been speaking all along.
Note: Maya is a fictional character harnessed to illustrate and explain the concept. In the podcast, Dr. Nathan Brown shared a particular case study.
Inner Atlas: Rediscover Your Body's Wisdom
⭐ Connect with Dr. Nathan Brown
Dr. Nathan Brown has served as a clinical psychologist in the clinical, organizational, and community mental health fields for over 40 years. Throughout his career, he has been drawn to the wisdom and power of an integrative view of human beings. In addition to his clinical practice, Dr. Brown founded TrueBearing Academy to train clinicians and coaches worldwide in using neurofeedback and other digital health tools to foster resilience and well-being. He lives in Seattle with his favorite ballerina-- who happens to be his wife.
Nathan’s MAGIC
Dr. Brown's father was a theoretical physicist who could explain relativity using a pencil. That gift—making the complex feel simple—runs in the family.
"I'd like to be like him," Brown says. "Making complex ideas more accessible and more like play."
Whether explaining how the limbic system responds in two one-hundredths of a second or the arousal curve that governs performance, Brown translates dense neuroscience into wisdom you can actually use. It's not dumbing down—it's opening up, making what lives in academic journals available to anyone present enough to hear what their body has been saying all along.
Creative Process
Discuss Potential Outlines: human + ai
Create Initial Drafts & Iterate: human + ai
Ensure Guest Alignment: Dr. Nathan Brown
Ensure Final Alignment: Dr. Jiani Wu
Initial Publication: Oct 12, 2025
Disclaimer:
AI technologies are harnessed to create initial content derived from genuine conversations. Human re-creation & review are used to ensure accuracy, relevance & quality.
