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

Episode Date: March 13, 2026

Daniel Robbins interviews Mandy Morris about emotional intelligence, boundaries, burnout, and the neuroscience of regulation for founders and leaders. Mandy breaks down why executives often avoid EQ because they think it means talking about feelings, when it actually means managing emotional data so you can lead with clarity and steadiness. Key Discussion Points:Mandy explains that the emotional center of the brain activates first and the rational brain often justifies what we feel, which is why EQ is about managing and perceiving emotion in yourself and others. She reframes frustration and anger as signals that a boundary needs to be set, especially in situations like clients not paying on time. She argues most leaders are solving the wrong problem by trying to think their way out of exhaustion and decision fatigue instead of regulating the nervous system. She shares fast regulation tools from the conversation, including a thirty second body scan after calls, longer exhales to calm the system, breath of fire for energy, and bilateral stimulation tapping to reduce anxiety quickly. Takeaways:Burnout is not a willpower issue, it is often low grade fight or flight that reduces access to clarity, creativity, and long term decision making. The earlier you notice stress cues in the body, the less likely you are to reach the “feather brick dumpster” breaking point where health and performance collapse. Simple practices like breathing patterns and bilateral movement can shift state fast and create immediate space for better decisions. soFree was built to make these tools accessible in real time, not only in therapy sessions, helping people regulate in under two minutes when they actually need it. Closing Thoughts:Founder’s Story captures a critical modern leadership shift: the leaders who win long term will be the ones who can stay regulated, set boundaries, and keep their nervous system steady under pressure. Mandy Morris leaves listeners with a practical message that EQ is not soft, it is operational, and it starts in the body. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

So Mandy, everyone keeps telling me that EQ in the future might be more important than IQ 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. 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. 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 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. set a 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. 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. Yeah. So when we were talking and you were saying how frustrated you were and I was like, well, maybe we should just get in one of those rooms and just throw some things. Yeah, sledgehammer and get one of

those rooms and was joking. But and then I proceeded to say, well, the good thing about being frustrated and And a good thing about anger is that it lets you know a boundary needs to be set. And that's where emotional intelligence comes into place because we think as business owners, entrepreneurs, high cheerers, leaders, we say so in our intellect that we bypass our emotional experience all the time and we're failing. We're failing 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 succinct cue, hey, I may be taking a bean ticket 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. 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 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 mention productivity hacks kind of is where it goes. ghost, 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 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 and their cognitions. 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. 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, 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 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. 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 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 interception. There's an 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 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 in 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 and normal. And so we don't do anything about it. 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 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 exam, executives and leaders to do is after every phone call, you can take 30 seconds. It's not going to ruin your day. It's 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 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. 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 Winham does a version of this a lot.

But essentially, and people can look this up online, it's really quick breaths into 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, just a lightheadedness, and you feel the surge of energy, and it gets that oxygen go into 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 app, but bilateral stimulation is something that's been in the neuroscience role for decades, and that left to right movement helps calm the brain

down. People, you know, walking's 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. 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 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 and I guess where you were about to go? Sure. Yeah, absolutely. So, So So Free 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'd already been talking about building this app. I had this idea on a run one day. And in the wake of the devastation of this loss and the stress that we were going through, we really needed this for ourselves. I wanted to do it for him, but also stress doesn't have a timeline.

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 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 I want to 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, 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 clear, 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 an accurate heart reading. It's great for stress and anxiety. And so, you know, in my clinical work using bilateral simulation, 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, their therapy appointment on Tuesday at 3 p.m. to have access to something like this when they they need this at 217 right before they're about to go into a meeting with, you know, their board members or 1130 at night when they can't sleep or whenever it is. And so So Free is built to help you shift out of fighter flight and bring your nervous system 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 a 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 it's great to see technology being used because I 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

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. They're no longer on this planet. And I didn't even know. And it's really, really scary what's going on from your, you know, from your 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 fee, can they do so? Yeah, absolutely. So you can go to get. So free, S-O-F-R-E-E-D-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's 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 and 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. 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 too. So thank you for that. Thank you. Thank you for having me on. And thank you for doing what you do with the show.