Create the Conditions for the State
- Difficulty
- Easy
- Time to result
- ~weeks to results
- Steps
- 6
- Confidence
- —
Miller's mental model for states you cannot will into existence. His anchor example is sleep: nobody can do sleep on command, but you can reliably create the conditions for sleepiness to arise. He argues the same is true of creativity, forms of productivity, connection and enjoyment. The reusable question becomes how can I create the conditions for my desired state to arise, and the answer always splits into internal conditions and external conditions, both of which you can architect. In his own life the levers are location and environment, meaningful connection, and calendar design with deliberate spaciousness — plus the internal practice of noticing what enjoyment actually feels like in the body and amplifying it. He treats it as a weekly journalling question rather than a fixed answer.
Origin
Extracted from Deep Dive with Ali Abdaal
How to run it
- 1
Name the state you actually want
Enjoyment, creativity, connection, productivity, sleep. Miller's reframe is that you do not do these states; you create the conditions from which they arise.
Watch out Trying to force the state directly is like being told to sleep on command.
- 2
Set the external conditions — environment
Location and environment matter a lot. Miller and his wife moved into the countryside, into nature, living in a canyon.
- 3
Set the external conditions — connection
Prioritise meaningful connection with other people: starting a men's group, and attending events that are not easy to get to but where the reward in connection and enjoyment is worth it.
- 4
Design the calendar for spaciousness
Be intentional about how days and weeks are designed. Miller says if you bite off too much or cram too much in, it is very hard to find enjoyment without spaciousness.
Pro tip After three intense days of talks, he deliberately left two or three days of spaciousness to let the insights breathe.
- 5
Set the internal condition — feel the enjoyment
Come back into the body and ask what enjoyment actually feels like as a sensation, then amplify it. Miller says this can be practised during morning meditation or while drinking tea or coffee after journalling.
Pro tip Miller frames this as the missing half of feel-good productivity: there is an art to the feeling part, not just the checklist part.
- 6
Review the conditions weekly
Miller says the answer changes all the time and treats it as a great question to reflect on and journal at the end of every week.
In the wild
Abdaal described his default walk: audiobook at three times speed, dictating content ideas into a voice app, hitting 10,000 steps — the walk instrumented for business output. After a breath work session he found himself reaching for his AirPods, stopping, and instead feeling his foot on the ground and noticing what a nice day it was. He contrasted his usual intellectual appreciation of his life with this experiential version of the same thing.
→ The same walk delivers presence rather than only throughput, because the conditions changed rather than the activity.
Miller connected the model back to Abdaal's own conclusion in Feel-Good Productivity: focusing on enjoyment rather than optimising a metric produces the outcomes anyway, but by a different route and with a far more enjoyable process. His addition is that feeling how good it is in each moment — the beautiful location, the people you love — is the stage after ticking the boxes, and it is a lifetime's work.
→ The outcomes still arrive, and the process itself becomes the reward.
Common mistakes
Cramming the calendar and expecting joy
Miller is explicit that enjoyment is very hard to find without spaciousness. Booking every hour removes the condition that the desired state depends on.
Chasing peak experiences without integration
Miller warns it is easy to get hooked on retreats and plant medicine because peak experiences feel good, but if nothing rewires and nothing integrates, you can keep doing that until you die and nothing changes.
From the transcript
“it's really hard to actually do sleep but you can create the conditions for sleepiness to arise”
“really prioritizing uh meaningful connection with with other people I think has been a big one”
“if I try and bite off too much or or cram too much in it's actually very hard to find enjoyment without some spaciousness”
From the episode
How to Master your Nervous System for Productivity and Joy - Jonny Miller
Jonny Miller