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

So, everyone's talking about EQ, but I don't know if anyone knows what it even means, so can you explain what does EQ really mean?

“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 idea 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. 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, so we are justifying our emotions, not the other way around.

“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.

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 explain something a little bit different here and I thought it was a great perspective. You know some things, yes, leg hammering and one of those rooms and joking, but and then I proceed to say, well, the good thing about being frustrated and the good thing about anger is that it lets you know about bringing us to be set.

And that's where emotional intelligence comes into place because we think as business owners entrepreneurs, high-chairs leaders, we say so in our intellect that we bypass our emotional experience all the time and we're failing. We're failing at at what we're doing and we're stressing ourselves out even more because we are not listening to ourselves, your body is giving you a very sitting, such thing, you, hey, I'm maybe taking it 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 boundaries need someone needs to pay up.

It's definitely, I've struggled with this, I have struggled, I'm not going to 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're mentioning high achievers see sweet everyone's talking about burnout, but when they talk about burnout, I find that they mentioned productivity hacks kind of is where it goes, but you focus more in the nervous system.

Can you teach a nervous system reset or something that every CEO can do when they're in that moment.

“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's going to do it because one.”

We're inundated with information all the time, we're in information overload and all of us high achievers and founders and leaders are just onto 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. And so when something feels off and there's exhaustion, irritability, decision fatigue, we assume the solution is to think more.

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 say regulate the body so that the brain can think clearly again. And when your nervous system is in low grade fighter flight and most leaders are living in this, your sub cortical brain, which just means that involuntary part of the brain takes the lead and starts to scan for threats constantly.

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. We have become so disconnected from our body. We don't even know when we're stressed out.”

We don't know when we're losing access to our decision making and rational thinking. So are you aware that when someone says and does certain things you get that twingenier 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 interception there's the actual name for it and it's the ability to be aware of your physiological cues 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, you know, not paying attention to some of my 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 pops 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 and normal. And so we don't have anything about it.”

You 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 shut down and we don't do anything about it still a year from now people 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 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 down to my feet.”

Yep, you just have 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 the taking a deep breath in through your nose for account 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. 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. It does a version of this a lot but essentially and people can can look this up online. It's really quick breaths into the nose and out. Like that sounds really weird but you do have for 30 about 30 breaths really fast. You have field this little twin just a light head itness and you feel the surge of energy and it gets that oxygen going to your brain to wake you up right.

So there's so body awareness using breath and then bilateral stimulation and I'm sure we'll get more into the the app but bilateral stimulation is something that's been in the neuroscience role for decades. That left to right movement helps calm the brain down people walking by lateral 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.

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 etc etc but there are great things that AI technology wearables IoT that these when you bring these all together they can do something amazing.

“And I've been using so free which is the app that you all just released can you explain more about about this the science behind it and go more in depth than I guess where you were about to go.”

Sure yeah absolutely so.

So free is a neuroscience base system regulation app that my brother and I built and we we built this after the loss of our brother when we lost him on Thanksgiving day of 2022 and.

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.”

That doesn't have a time line there's no good stress never happens at times when we wanted to happen I mean that life is so hard and so complicated and we need 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 with within 60 30 seconds or less so I know it works and I want to run one day as I why is this not been combined with our technology.

And my bilateral stimulation does as it makes the left side of the brain talk to the right side of the brain back and forth and it pulls you out of a stress response very quickly.

“There's so there's real neuroscience to walking it off that's why we can go and walk think a little clear feel a little better and.”

You know that that helps is why when you go to doctor's office and they go to take your blood pressure if your legs are arms across over your midline they make you uncross it because it shows a drop in your heart rate which is bad for an accurate heart reading straight 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 and you know and I kept thinking why does someone have to wait until.

You know there therapy appointment on Tuesday at 3 p.m. to have access to something like this when they they need this at 2 17 right before they're about to go into a meeting with. So they're they're board members or in the or at 11 30 at night when they can't sleep or whenever it is and so so free is built to help you shift out of fight or flight and. Bring your nervous to some back into balance and it does it in under two minutes. 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'd be the therapy then you don't need it.

So it's great to see technology being used because I I'm such a huge proponent of helping this mental health crisis we seem. 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 text me in like two or three years there no longer on this planet so and I didn't even know it's really really scary. And you know from your experience so 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 everything you may do so.

Yeah absolutely so you can go to get so free S o F r e e dot 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. The proprietary technology we are in beta testing and so I 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 so we're not projecting our stress on to everyone so much.

Thank you thank you for having me on and thank you for doing what you do with the show. 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.