The Ledger, the Noise, and the Hum — Turn Down the Noise with Sonja Irina Johansen
Episode Transcript · Recorded live on the opening night of The Quiet Season
You were never broken. You were biological. I'm Sonja Irina Johansen, and for decades, I believed my struggle with food was a character flaw, until I learned the science that said otherwise. This is Turn Down the Noise, the show about why we really reach for food and the gentler way through.
I want to ask this question, and I want you to think about it from a multiple, from multiple perspectives. But do you have a way of eating you've trusted before? A plan, a program, a rhythm. Has it been on your mind this week, or maybe just in the last 24 hours when you signed up for this and go, "What am I doing?"
Have you thought of it fondly, guiltily, or not at all? Every answer is data. How we're approaching these things is what I really want to get at. So said plainly, while you settle whatever relationship you have tonight with the plans you've tried, missing one, fighting one, finished with all of them, never had one, bring it in with you.
It all counts here
So welcome to the first evening of the quiet season. And if you wouldn't mind, I really need this, so I'm going to ask everybody if you could take a breath with me. Take an inhale quickly and an exhale out slowly. I like to use straw breathing. There's another kind where you inhale quickly and then take another inhale, 'cause there's always more room, and exhale out slowly
And I don't know if you noticed, but maybe you came from some places that were crazy. Maybe it's been a long day already and you're tired. But that very basic move calms our nervous system, tells our nervous system everything is fundamentally well for even a hot second. It actually expands your heart rate variability.
When you in... When you breathe in quickly, your heart rate goes up, and when you exhale slowly, your heart rate goes down. And that variation is what tells your brain that everything is fundamentally well. You cannot have a calm system and being chased by a lion. It's impossible. So your brain gets it.
It's really helpful. Okay, so look around this room for a moment, and some of you walked a shorter version of this work. I introduced this concept seven or eight weeks ago to to my advanced recovery program and also to the magic to get an idea about whether or not my crazy cartoon curious brain was making any sense for anybody else but me.
And so some of you walked a shorter version of it the first, I think, six weeks, individually mostly, because we didn't do this on a planned basis every week, and over the summer. And some of you arrived this very week. Some of you came today. So I just want to say how beginnings work in my house. I'm actually in Patricia's house.
The morning messages began at dawn this morning, so if you were with us at dawn, you've already touched day one. If you joined after the sun this morning, yours begins tomorrow. You'll be getting an email every morning, and if you've... and you've missed nothing. As a matter of fact, all the emails are compiled at the end of each week.
They're already there for week one. You can see every single email you're going to get if you're curious. But I just want you to hear that there's a reason and a method to the madness of this process. It is designed to rewire your neural pathways, to shift and calm you, to lower the temperature and the noise.
So there's going to be 14 Tuesdays, mostly Tuesdays. That's the shape of this, 14 evenings in this room, one small message in your inbox every morning, and a practice so light you can carry it through a hard week in 30 seconds. That's the whole architecture for the quiet protocol. Nothing else is required of you.
If you choose to dive deeper into your food plan, that's where the second piece comes in, which is the quiet food walk, which I'll be talking about ad nauseam for quite a while because it's fascinating to me. But some of you know me well As well as you can know anybody, I guess. And then Zoom. Many of you don't, though.
So before we walk anywhere together I just want to give you a little bit of a background for me, just a tiny one. I'm Sonja, and I come from where many of you come from. I spent most of my earlier life significantly overweight. I called it uber fluffy. I much prefer... Words are matter to me. I much prefer to call it something that makes it a little bit easier to carry, and in a world that has loud opinions about that.
Not the uber fluffy, the significant weight. I did the programs, so many programs. I kept the ledger faithfully. I started over on more Mondays than I can count, and I was certain the way you can only be certain of something you've been told your whole life, that the problem was me. You'll hear pieces of that story all through this evening at the moments they belong, and I'd rather show you where it turned than summarize it here.
But there's a thing about me that turned out to matter more than any of that. I am curious to my bones. I started reading detective fiction. The first book I picked up was one of those little Scholastic scholar- you guys know what I'm talking about, the Scholastic Book Club. I cannot stop wanting to understand.
And when I finally went looking for real answers, I found something that honestly shocked me. Almost nobody was researching us. We all know this, right? The science on food struggles like ours was very thin. So I stopped waiting for someone to study my problem, and I went looking else- elsewhere. Stress science, the nervous system, how brains actually learn and change, trauma recovery, attachment, other people's fields, other people's puzzles.
And because I had lived this, I could feel which of their findings rhymed with ours. I connected dots that weren't supposed to belong to each other, and it became a wealth of information, years and years of it. I've published one book. You may have it Thinking Outside the Box: A Revolutionary Approach to Food Dysfunction, and I've actually written two others that I'm hoping to get published soon.
One is called The Missing Peace, P-E-A-C-E, and one is aptly called The Quiet Protocol. I've also worked on several courses, and with my dear Patricia we have... We worked on The Art of Recovery I don't know how many times. Four, four or five different courses on that. We... I had a course on the willpower instinct and I'm currently doing a course on my book that is working through this year.
Everything I've found, I tested, first on the one subject I had complete access to, me, and then alongside my clients for years. What held up is this season. That's who's walking with you, someone who lived it and who cannot stop being curious about it. So I want to say this real clear. This is and, not instead.
So before we go one step further, I want to address the worry that may be sitting at this table. Some of you are here with something that works, or something that worked, or something you think that should work. I'm not doubting any of that, until it didn't maybe. And you like that plan, a plan you trusted, a program that carried you through a hard chapter of your life, a way of eating that took you years to find, that you fought for, that holds you or held you for a while.
I'll tell you what I started the latest journey on my food was in November of 2016 when I got diagnosed with type 2 diabetes and high cholesterol, and I started w- working on figuring out how to shift my food to counter that, because I'd already healed my asthma 15 years earlier by changing my food.
So I knew food was a big component of this, but I never thought I could lose any weight. I'd stopped. I felt like that ship had sailed. So I want to... I want you to understand that there may be some quiet bracing here, and I want you to notice it. I'm not saying it's wrong. None of that, the reactions that we have are wrong.
But when we start noticing them, they become so interesting, and I say that with all love I believe another approach that's going to tell me everything I built was wrong. I'm not g- I don't want to hear that anymore, and I'm not going to tell you that. So let me say this as plainly as I know. Nothing in this season asks you to give up what works.
Nothing. This is and, not instead. If you have a plan that serves you, keep it. If you have a structure that steadies you, keep it. I'm not here to take a single working thing out of your hands. I would never. What we do here happens at a different layer entirely. The nervous system underneath the eating, which is also can be very scary.
We're numbing. We're soothing. Food is incredible. But the part that decides whether your plan feels like a home or a cage on any given Tuesday, that's the part that your nervous system is involved with, the part that reaches before you've had a single thought. Your plan and this season are not rivals.
One is the house, and the other is the ground it stands on So for those of you who arrived here with no plan at all or with a pile of plans that each worked until they didn't, the same promise turns toward you. You will not be handed a new set of rules tonight. There's no food list in this season. There never will be.
You're not here to be corrected. You're here to be heard and to listen to yourself maybe for the first time ever I want to start with something you probably already know, even if you've never heard it said quite this way. If you've been doing food work for any length of time, diets, programs, recovery approaches, even just trying to eat differently than you used to, you've been trained, often without realizing it, to keep a particular kind of ledger.
It's a ledger of debits.
You record what went wrong. I'm going to say something really quickly. I'm going to use food words, and I want you to think about it like Voldemort and Harry Potter. The more Harry said Voldemort, the less power Voldemort had. I'm not suggesting that you have to white-knuckle your way through every conversation with me, and I don't spend an awful lot of time talking about this, but I do want to say I say words, I ask you questions about what you actually ate.
I want to know. So the crackers that vanished while you stood at the counter reading the mail, the bowl of ice cream after the house finally went quiet, the drive-through you swore off on Monday and found yourself in on Thursday, those moments get magnified, replayed, examined. They become evidence of your weakness, your brokenness, your failure to be the version of yourself you keep almost being.
This is basic humanness. We must keep everything aware. We must not do anything that will kick us out of community
The ledger of debits. What about the credits? They disappear. The debit column does to us, notice what it does to us the moment something lands in it. The shame arrives, and the shame has exactly one move. Shove it down. Tomorrow's another day. Forget it. Start over. It feels like mercy in the moment. Start over tomorrow.
Forget about it today. But look at what gets thrown out with it. The reflection, the pause, where we might have asked what that moment was trying to tell us. The luscious part, the learning, skipped entirely every single time. The ledger doesn't just shame us, it costs us the lesson The pot of soup you made on Sunday because future you would need it.
The vegetables that actually got eaten this week. The night you came home tired and hungry and still put real food on a real plate. The birthday party where you had your slice, enjoyed it, and simply stopped. Nobody witnessed it, including you. The water before the coffee, the early night you chose. All of that gets erased, not because it didn't happen.
Erased because the ledger you inherited doesn't have a column for it That's where we're starting this season because before anything else, before the practice I'll show you tonight, before 14 weeks unfold, we get to name the lens you've been looking through, and then gently we're going to put it down
I don't know if that scares you when I say that. Holding you. Here's what that kind of attention does to a nervous system. A nervous system trained to scan for slip-ups stays braced. It stays vigilant. It stays slightly activated all the time in low-grade alarm that the next failure is coming. I know you get this stuff, and that bracing is exhausting.
But more than that, and this is the part most food work has missed, that bracing makes the very thing you're trying to change harder to change. A nervous system in chronic alarm reaches for the fastest relief it knows. The bakery bag riding home in the passenger seat after a hard afternoon. The freezer door open at ten o'clock, spoon already in hand after the phone call you'd been dreading all week.
The office candy dish that only calls your name on deadline days. So the ledger doesn't just record those moments. The ledger helps cause them
There is another way. Doesn't change anything about the food or the choices. It's how you look at it. You were never broken. Your nervous system was working. It was doing exactly what nervous systems do under sustained watch, protecting you with the tools it had. Guess what the best tool on the planet is?
Yeah. The stuff we reach for
Okay. I'm going to ask you a question
I want you to put a number in the chat thread, just a number. How old were you when you started keeping the ledger?
A best guess is perfect, or may, you may know exactly. I do. Kindergarten, first day of school, I was twirling in my beautiful new dress, and the neighbor boy called me a whale Another big one, fourth grade when they lined us up and weighed us one at a time on one of those scales with the sliding 50-pound weight.
The weight they had to move when I stepped up, no one else's turn needed it, just little me
And I look at those pictures Oh, that's when my ledger opened up. When did yours?
Oh, we got a lot of people from all over. 13, 8, 16, 8, 7, 13, 12, 6, 15, 10, 18. We are not supposed to be worrying about this at that age. Fifth grade, 12, five, maybe younger. Before awareness, I was hiding food, I think, and the food was not scarce in my house.
14, 8 to 10, fourth grade, 20, 18. Oof
Not one of us chose this ledger. We were handed it before we could read the fine print. So whatever you've been calling failure all these years, I want you to consider calling it inheritance instead. And inheritances can be set down Because maybe it was never failure at all. Maybe we were just so busy calculating the wrongs, the ones that might get us cast out, the ones that seemed to prove we were bad or worthless or just plain weak, that we never noticed we were children doing arithmetic we never asked for.
Righteous indignant part right here. So I want to give you some new language. Just like we talked about this being an inheritance, let's talk about two words, and we'll use them all season, and I think they'll change how you talk to yourself about food long after this season ends. The first word is the Noise, capital N, always with a.
The Noise is the reactive reach, the unconscious grab, the cheese eaten standing in the light of the open refrigerator while you decide what dinner should be, the grandkids' leftovers finished on the walk from table to sink, the handful from the trail mix jar every single time you pass it, trips that would ne- that were never about hunger.
It's never about hunger. The Noise is what happens when your nervous system is activated or depleted or tender, and food is the regulator that's mostly reliably available. The Noise is the static that drowns out your body's actual signals. The Noise is not a moral failing. I want to be really clear about that.
The Noise is a nervous system event, a body doing what bodies do when they're trying to take care of themselves with the tools they have. The fact that the tool is food doesn't make it a character flaw. It makes it biology. Seriously. The Noise is what we're working with this season, not fighting, not eliminating.
Need you to hear this. We're not going to fight at all. We're working out, loosening, quieting, making room around
And the second word is the hum, also capital, also always with the. The hum is the easeful infrastructure of nourishment that runs without deliberation because it's been built into the rhythm of your life. Instead of defining it, let me just show you mine. Some of you have known me for years, and some of you met me this week, so hello.
Here's what the hum looks like in one actual life. On Sundays, my kitchen counter turns into a little assembly line of bagged salads. Yes. I am the bag salad lady, but that's a whole 'nother, that's a whole 'nother topic. But I do own it completely. By Sunday evening, they're lined up in the fridge, and for the w- rest of the week, I'm nourishing...
a nourishing lunch requires exactly zero decisions from me. I don't summon willpower at noon on a Wednesday. I open the refrigerator, and the decision was already made by a calmer version of me days ago. That's the hum. It works for me, and I appreciate it. My breakfast has been essentially the same for years.
My body trusts it before I'm fully awake. I couldn't tell you the last time I deliberated about it, and that's the point. That's the hum. Every morning, nine rescue pigeons get fed at my house. Prince supervises, on my head. You might have seen the video. Nobody has to motivate me. There's no pigeon-feeding discipline program.
It's just the rhythm of the morning, and it runs. Care that runs without vigilance. That's the hum, too, and noticing it there taught me to notice it around food. Notice places where your care, where you care. How about the woods walk? The water that goes where I go. The fifteen or twenty minutes of deep rest I take most afternoons.
That catches me before the tired turns into something else. None of it's impressive. All of it's quietly load-bearing. As a matter of fact, I used to think it was awful because I didn't have a morning and evening checklist I used to say, "I suck at that."
Each of us is unique. Each of us is interesting and different. But here's why I trust the hum enough to build a whole season on it. I did not come factory-installed with one. For most of my earlier life, food ran the show, not me, and I kept the debit ledger as faithfully as anyone in this room. The way I eat now, I've lived for 10 years, and every piece of that hum was built one unremarkable brick at a time, which is exactly how I know yours can grow.
I'm not describing a gift I was given. I'm describing a wall I built, and I remember laying every brick. And don't get me wrong, the noise still visits me. Oh, yes. It was crazy today. There are still days it shows up, clashing with the delightful sublime of an, an ordinary afternoon, and here is the surprise of my life.
When it comes now, it's a gift. It's a gift because it's a messenger, not a verdict. It gives me a moment to pause and ask a few kind questions. Have I had enough care today? How was my sleep? What has my stress been carrying? The noise used to be evidence against me. Now it's information for me. That's the whole turn this season makes.
Do you see that there's no difference in the plate here? It's just how you're looking at it
So I'd like you to name your bag salad. Name one unglamorous thing that quietly holds your week, food or not, meaning the boring thing that just runs. The Sunday soup pot, the same water bottle you refill without thinking, the dog's evening walk, the Crock-Pot that go-- that does Mondays for you, the friend you always call from the car.
Small, unimpressive, load-bearing. That's the species. Name yours. I'm real curious. If you can even think about this, it's important to recognize and start listing all of the things you're already doing. Every single one of these is the hum already running in your life, and I bet not one of them has ever been allowed on your ledger Why would we list the water bottle that gets filled?
Why would we list the dog walk? Because it matters. Now look at your own life the same way. The supper you can cook without a recipe because your hands know it. The kettle that goes on at the same hour every evening. The fruit bowl that stays filled without a decision ever being made. The Saturday market loop.
The neighbor you walk with. The porch. The puzzle. The phone call that steadies the day as its edges, at its edges. And listen, for some of you, the plan you walked in here with, the one I just promised you could keep, that plan is part of your home. It runs. It holds you. It doesn't cost you willpower anymore.
That's not a rival to this work. That's this work already underway in your life. It's just being aware of it Somebody today posted that they'd been clean for 48 days, and now they were starting back at day one. And I asked a simple question, "I'm curious what was going on today, and what grade would you give your best friend in that day?"
Turns out she was watching four grandbabies I don't know about you, but that feels a little chaotic, a little noisy
My morning habits. Water bottle. Same breakfast for four years and I still love it. Morning habits, coffee and crosswords. Steamed veggies. My daily calls to Linda and Don. Water bottle daily. My morning supplements and protein shake. Make breakfast after I eat breakfast. Make groats for a week. Yes. Bright breakfast.
Water bottle for sure. 7:30 PM walk with Pippi. I love Pippi. Food prep. That friend I can text and call. Roasted sweet potatoes. Amen, sister. Three years old, but not about weight, more about satiety. Oh, three years old, that was the previous question. I love this stuff Okay. So most of you, if you stop and look, already have parts of the hum running.
That's what we said, right? You've- but you've never been allowed to count them. The diet ledger doesn't have a column for what's working, so the hum has been there doing its quiet work while you've been keeping a tally of everything else. So part of what we're doing this season, maybe most of what we're doing, is letting you finally see the hum that's already there and then helping it grow.
I'm not even going to tell you not to keep a ledger of all the things that you think belong in the noise. I'm not even going to tell you not to do that, but I would like you to think of it differently and give the grace of the possibility that shifting your perspective is going to make huge changes to your stress level.
It's just kinda common sense. So here's where this gets interesting and where most food work has gone wrong for a long time. The noise and the hum are both automatic. Both of them are the brain doing what brains do: running patterns. Neither one requires deliberation, and neither one is a conscious choice in the moment.
The noise is reactive automaticity. The hum is easeful automaticity. Same coin, two sides. This matters because most food work has assumed that automatic equals bad, that the goal is to become a person who deliberates over every bite, as if the destination is permanent vigilance. It isn't. That's still the diet ledger, just dressed up in l- nicer language.
There is an automaticity around our food that can be just lovely. We just said it. Breakfast, pr- prepping vegetables, eating a delicious dinner that's already been prepared. The work of the season isn't to eliminate automaticity, no, absolutely not, but it's to shift which automaticity gets to run, to turn the volume down on the reactive pattern so the body's actual signals can come through, and to build slowly the easeful infrastructure that runs underneath.
That's why this is called the quiet season. The whole work in one sentence is this: turn down the noise so you can hear yourself
Everything we do across these 14 weeks comes back to that sentence. Turn down the noise so you can hear yourself. Keep your plan.
Keep your practitioner. Keep your medication. This is company, and not instead. Thanks for walking with me today. Everything I make lives at transformwithsonja.com. Until next time, with love and light, Sonja.
