Burnout Is a Nervous System Problem Not a Productivity Problem | Ep. 323 with Mandy Morris Executive Psychology Coach and Co-founder of SoFree

0:00Daniel Robbins:Capital One's tech team isn't just talking about multi-agentic AI. They already deployed one. It's called Chat Concierge and it's simplifying car shopping. Using self-reflection and layered reasoning with live API checks, it doesn't just help buyers find a car they love. It helps schedule a test drive, get pre-approved for financing, and estimate trading value. Advanced, intuitive, and deployed. That's how they stack. That's technology at Capital One.

0:34so mandy everyone keeps telling me that eq in the future might be more important than iq

0:41Daniel Robbins:with the ability to get information from ai and ai is basically already telling us everything about everything and i don't know how much intelligence we will personally have in the future but so everyone's talking about eq but i don't know if anyone knows what what it even means So can you explain what does EQ really mean?

1:01Mandy Morris:Yeah. So emotional intelligence, it's really misunderstood a lot because when I work with executives and leaders and we get on this EQ topic, they're always like, I don't want to talk about feelings and I don't want to change my, how I deal with emotions. And everyone's missing the point in this because we are not thinking beings that feel, we are feeling beings that think. And if we understand how the brain works, we're going to understand that the first thing that lights up in your brain and my brain whenever we have an interaction or experience is the emotional center part of the mind. And then the thing that justifies that emotional experiences is then going to be part of the brain where we do all of our rational thinking and decision making.

1:45So we are justifying our emotions, not the other way around.

1:49Mandy Morris:So emotional intelligence is the ability to use, manage, and perceive emotions in yourself and in someone else. And so it's my ability to stay attuned to your emotional landscape and my emotional landscape and see how that is affecting you and affecting me so that we can be as productive as we need to be.

2:16Daniel Robbins:And you were telling me something earlier. I was explaining a recent situation. I think most entrepreneurs or founders, they've dealt with this. A client doesn't pay you. You get upset or they're not paying in time or maybe they're not responding when it comes to something around payments and you get really upset with them. And you explained something a little bit different here. And I thought it was a great perspective.

2:39Mandy Morris:Yeah. So when we were talking and you were saying how frustrated you were and I was like, well, well, maybe we should just get in one of those rooms and just throw some things, get a sledgehammer and get one of those rooms. And I was joking. And then I proceeded to say, well, the good thing about being frustrated and the good thing about anger is that it lets you know a boundary needs to be set. And that's where emotional intelligence comes into play is because we think as business owners, entrepreneurs, high achievers, leaders, we stay so in our intellect that we bypass our emotional experience all the time and we're failing.

3:17Mandy Morris:We're failing at what we're doing and we're stressing ourself out even more because we are not listening to ourself. Your body is giving you a very succinct cue. Hey, I may be being taken advantage of. Someone's not doing their job. There's a problem. And so I'm feeling all this pressure inside because some sort of boundary needs to be sent. Someone needs to pay up.

3:46Daniel Robbins:It's definitely I've struggled with this. I have struggled. I'm not gonna lie, where I was not good at setting boundaries, even going back to when I think of when I was in a corporate job, I think I was held back in my career because I wasn't really good at setting boundaries, among other things. But this this was a big issue for me. And so I'm glad that you bring that up. And rolling it to burnout, burnout seems to be like the thing that everyone's talking about. You were mentioning high achievers, C-suite. Everyone's talking about burnout. But when they talk about burnout, I find that they mentioned productivity hacks kind of is where it goes.

4:24Daniel Robbins:But you focus more on the nervous system. Can you teach a nervous system reset or something that every CEO can do when they're in that moment?

4:35Mandy Morris:Sure. Yeah, absolutely. And before I share a hack, I think it's important that people understand why this is important because if we don't understand what's happening then no one no one's going to do it because one we're inundated with information all the time we're an information overload and all of us high achievers and founders and leaders are just on to the next thing so the most founders and leaders and high achievers are solving the wrong problem because they're trying to think their way out of something that is happening in their body. And this is where the problem lies, is that most high achievers live in this top-down strategy, living in optimization in their cognitions.

5:27Mandy Morris:And so when something feels off and there's exhaustion, irritability, decision fatigue, we assume the solution is to think more. Let me try to problem solve this even more. And that's a problem. So we try to get better systems in place or better habits or delegate frameworks, but burnout isn't a thinking problem at all. It's a nervous system problem and a belief system problem. And so there's a difference between top down and bottom up approaches. And so top down says, change the thought, fix the behavior. Bottom up approaches just say, regulate the body so that the brain can think clearly again.

6:11Mandy Morris:And when your nervous system is in low-grade fight or flight, and most leaders are living in this, your subcortical brain, which just means that involuntary part of the brain, takes the lead and starts to scan for threats constantly. And so the part of your mind that's responsible for all the decision-making and that handles nuances and creativity and long-term decision-making, that has less access. So you don't lose intelligence, but you lose clarity for sure. And that's the dangerous part. And so to get to the hack part of it, one of the first things that is crucial is to create body awareness.

6:53Mandy Morris:We have become so disconnected from our body, we don't even know when we're stressed out. Therefore, we don't know when we're losing access to, you know, our decision making and rational thinking. So are you aware, you know, that when someone says and does certain things, you get that twinge in your chest and you get that hot feeling because that person just said or did something on that call that, you know, made you frustrated. And now you're in this sort of physiological response. And so it's called interoception. There's an actual name for it. And it's the ability to be aware of your physiological cues.

7:33Mandy Morris:And this is important because this is your instincts. This is your body trying to give you data. And when we ignore this, I heard this described once, and I love this analogy as the feather brick dumpster effect. It starts off as a, I'm just a little stressed out. Maybe I'm not paying attention to some of my stressors, like this phone call that I had that I don't like how people are being. And now I'm just going to go on about my day. And then the next thing falls up and it's compounding. So maybe I'm losing a little more sleep than normal. Maybe I'm noticing there's a little more tension in my body than normal.

8:12Mandy Morris:And so we don't do anything about it. A few months down the road, now we're having a huge stress response or anxiety attack for the first time. Or now we're getting sick. Now our immune system is shut down. And we don't do anything about it still. A year from now, people are finally paying attention because they're in a major health crisis. And that's the dumpster, right? And so this is the importance of paying attention to it. So first step is to create awareness in your body. So one of the things I tell my executives and leaders to do is after every phone call, you can take 30 seconds. It's not going to ruin your day.

8:50Mandy Morris:is to do a body scan. I can be sitting with you right here right now and be scanning in my body from my shoulder, top of my head, all the way down to my feet. Yeah, you just sat up a little taller and see where am I holding tension and just breathe, right? And just breathe. And take those breaths. There's different types of breathing we can do. If you are stressed and need to relax. Taking a deep breath in through your nose for a count of four and holding for four and releasing through your mouth for eight. The longer exhale out that calms the nervous system. That is super helpful and just a quick little reset doing that a few times.

9:41Mandy Morris:If you're on the fatigue side and you don't have energy. And instead of pumping your body full of caffeine, there's something called the breath of fire. And Winhom does a version of this a lot, but essentially, and people can look this up online, it's really quick breaths in through the nose and out like that. It sounds really weird. But you do it for about 30 breaths really fast. You feel this little twinge, this lightheadedness. You feel the surge of energy, and it gets that oxygen going to your brain to wake you up, right? So body awareness, using breath, and then bilateral stimulation. And I'm sure we'll get more into the app, but bilateral stimulation is something that's been in the neuroscience world for decades.

10:36Mandy Morris:And that left to right movement helps calm the brain down. People, you know, walking is bilateral. Parents who hold their babies and they naturally sway left to right, there's a reason why that's self-soothing. There's actual neuroscience in that. So, you know, in my office with clients, I tell them to just tap like this. You'd be surprised how quickly that gets someone out of anxiety response. But now we have technology for that as well.

11:09Daniel Robbins:I'm trying it right now. There's so many great things. We talk a lot here about how AI is going to take every job and et cetera, et cetera. But there are great things that AI technology, wearables, IoT, that when you bring these all together, they can do something amazing. And I've been using SoFree, which is the app that you all just released. Can you explain more about this, the science behind it and go more in depth and I guess where you were about to go.

11:39Mandy Morris:Sure. Yeah, absolutely. So SoFree is a neuroscience based system regulation app that my brother and I built. And we built this after the loss of our brother, when we lost him on Thanksgiving day of 2022. And after that happened, we, we'd already been talking about building this app. I had this idea on a run one day and in the, in the wake of the, the devastation of this loss and the stress that we were going through, we, we really needed this for ourselves. Wanted to do it for him, But also, you know, stress doesn't have a timeline. There's no good. Stress never happens at times when we want it to happen.

12:34Mandy Morris:I mean, life is so hard and so complicated. And we need relief in really odd times sometimes. I mean, I love meditation. I love breath work. I love all of that. And sometimes it's not really practical. And when I'm in a therapy session, because my background is in therapy, one of the techniques I would use with my clients is this bilateral stimulation technique. And I can get clients out of an anxiety attack, stress response being flooded within 60, 30 seconds or less. So I know it works. And on a run one day, I was like, why has this not been combined with our technology? And what bilateral stimulation does is it makes the left side of the brain talk to the right side of the brain back and forth.

13:18Mandy Morris:And it pulls you out of a stress response very quickly. So there's real neuroscience to walking it off. That's why we can go on a walk, think a little clearer, feel a little better, and, you know, that helps. That's why when you go to the doctor's office and they go to take your blood pressure, if your legs or arms are crossed over your midline, they make you uncross it because it shows a drop in your heart rate, which is bad for inaccurate heart reading. It's great for stress and anxiety. And so, you know, in my clinical work using bilateral stimulation, it's to help get people out of anxiety and overwhelmed.

13:56And, you know, and I kept thinking, why does someone have to wait until, you know, their therapy appointment on Tuesday at 3 p.m.

14:05Mandy Morris:to have access to something like this when they need this at 2.17 right before they're about to go into a meeting with, you know, their board members or 11.30 at night when they can't sleep or whenever it is. And so SoFree is built to help you shift out of fight or flight and bring your nervous system back into balance. And it does it in under two minutes.

14:30Daniel Robbins:I mean, I've used it. And I was telling you, you know, the last few couple months ago, I started having panic attacks a few years ago is really when it started and then it went away. And like you said, when you're in that moment, you need the therapy then you don't need it when you got to like make an appointment later. So it's great to see technology being used because I'm such a huge proponent of helping this mental health crisis. We see. I mean, it's great. Like I keep hearing about people that we are losing. I just heard about one a few days ago. I'm like, no wonder they haven't texted me in like two or three years.

15:08Daniel Robbins:They're no longer on this planet. So and I didn't even know. And it's really, really scary what's going on from your experience. experience so if people want to get in touch with you they want to download the app i'm sure that i mean who doesn't need this not from just executives and ceos but like every feed can

15:27Mandy Morris:they do so yeah absolutely so you can go to get so free s-o-f-r-e-e.com and you can download it there's a link from our website you can find out more from the website or just go right to the app store and put in so free, reset your stress and you will see it. It is free right now for people. So there is a patent pending on the technology. This is proprietary technology. We are in beta testing. And so it won't always be free, but for the next several months, it's going to be because we want testers and users. I want to share this with the world. So I hope people will use it, share it with others and hopefully make the world a little better place.

16:10Mandy Morris:So we're not projecting our stress onto everyone so much.

16:13Daniel Robbins:I love that. I mean, so free is literally free right now. I mean, there's no reason not to test it out. I personally experienced it and I'm very passionate. But Mandy, thank you so much for all that you are doing you and your brother. I hope that the world is a better place because of you two. So thank you for that.

16:33Mandy Morris:Thank you. Thank you for having me on. And thank you for doing what you do with the show.

16:37Daniel Robbins:If you like the show, please take a moment to rate, review, and subscribe. It really does help the show to grow. Thank you for listening.