Reactive, Burnt Out & Overstimulated? Here’s WTF Nervous System Regulation Really Means l EP. 55 l

 You’ve heard it before: “Regulate your nervous system.”
But what does that actually mean? 

In this episode, I break down nervous system regulation without the BS & jargon — what it is, why you keep reacting despite knowing better, and how to start rewiring your body to stop self-sabotaging your relationships, your leadership, and your peace. 

I cover:
 – The real reason you snap at your wife or kids
 – Why anger isn’t the problem — disconnection is
 – The 3 layers of nervous system regulation (and where most men get stuck)
 – How overstimulation, caffeine, and your identity are wrecking your calm
 – A blueprint for becoming unshakeable under pressure 

This isn’t about mindset hacks or being “more disciplined.”
 It’s about building a body and identity that actually feel safe in leadership, rest, intimacy, and growth. 

Because if you don’t regulate the body, your reactions will ruin the very life you’re trying to build. 

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Looking to fast track your growth with personalised support or a guided system to help you evolve out of the nice guy, rebuild your energy, presence, intimacy & become the grounded masculine man you are capable of, apply below. 

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Transcript

Harrison Orr (00:06.638)
If you've ever heard me or anyone else say the first step to evolving out of the nice guy is regulating your nervous system and thought what the fuck does that even mean? You're not alone and you may as well have just...

If you've ever heard me or anyone else say, first you need to do is regulate your nervous system. And you may have thought, what the fuck does that even mean? You're not alone. I may as well have just told you, stop being a nice guy or just be a better man. Cool, thanks for the pep talk, bud. So in this episode, I'm breaking it down. What it actually means, why it matters and what to do about it, starting right here, right now.

Harrison Orr (00:51.106)
You are listening to the Be Better podcast. I'm Harrison Norr and after coaching almost 500 men, one truth stands out. Your marriage, business and peace of mind all hinge on one thing, how grounded you are as a man. And so it's my endeavor in this podcast and in my coaching to help men evolve out of the nice guy, ground themselves into their healthy masculine so that they can have better marriages, better businesses and ultimately live better lives. And so.

If you don't know how to regulate your nervous system, you will live your life reacting to your wife's moods, to your kids' energies, to your own shame and guilt. And consciously, you'll probably know better, but you won't do better because your body is still running the show. You will be able to say, you probably get frustrated yourself. Why do I respond this way? Why do I get angry so fast? Why am I always so triggered?

because your nervous system is stuck in that fight or flight response and that is running the show. Now, I'm gonna do my best to break down some of these terms because I'm sure you've heard them a million different times, but might still be thinking, what the fuck does that even mean? First and foremost, the nervous system is a bunch of nerves within our cell, in our body, which...

For all incentives purposes, I'm talking about the autonomic nervous system, specifically here. There are other nervous systems within the body, but the autonomic nervous system is essentially what controls whether we are stressed, being in that fight or flight response, fight, flight or freeze. So that's when a event or something happens and we either go into freeze, you seize up because you don't know what to do and you just...

like a deer in headlights type response, you either fight, you get angry, you get aggressive, you get frustrated, you get that typical triggered type response or flight. Maybe you physically need to leave the environment, you mentally and emotionally, you disconnect and you just leave the room for all intensive purposes, but you're not there. You're operating off a survival mechanism. And that's essentially the part,

Harrison Orr (03:06.754)
the role of our nervous system and the part of our brain that regulates all this, it's not to keep us happy. It's not to keep us peaceful. It's not to keep us fulfilled or grateful or anything else other than breathing and alive. So how we get to a state of being reactive and being

using these fight flight freeze responses as our default response is because in some event in our life usually the first time we were faced with a certain stimulus a certain event maybe it was a certain embarrassment or situation our nervous system didn't know what to do so it threw one of those responses out there and that's what you acted from

And the fact that you're here to tell the tale was a big green tick to your nervous system to say, congratulations, job well done. Let's do that again next time. So as a child, if you were yelled at or you were punished for speaking up or for maybe being honest because you were too honest, you did something that you shouldn't have and you're honest about it.

And that response is now going to carry forward into your younger adulthood, into your fully adulthood and even into your marriage, relationships and life in general because it's still operating off that same default behavior. Now the other side of our nervous system, our rest and digest as it's commonly phrased is our chill state.

It's where our body does all the repair work. That's the state that we're in, where we're in a deep state of sleep. That's the state where we're able to choose how we respond to things because we're not in threat. We're not in danger in that space. So it's not life or death. That is the state that we ideally want to be in 90%, if not 95 % of our day.

Harrison Orr (05:11.17)
We save the other response for when we're training, if you do fights or BJJ or martial arts, anything like that, you save it for that. When you need an acute stress response to lift something heavy, to get out of the way of oncoming traffic, to oncoming traffic, I should say, and to save your life or your kid's life, that's when we want it. But we want to be able to go back to our rested and calm state as fast as possible.

that's where a lot of people get stuck is they can't go back down. Like they stay stuck in that stress response. But that stress response doesn't always come from a life or death situation. It might come from getting a nasty comment on social media, getting a testing email.

first thing in the morning, or you read something or remember something that you've done wrong, that you didn't do up to standard, that you should have done, that you didn't do, something else puts you into that state. And our brain, unfortunately, as long as it keeps ruminating on this same scenario, keeps us in that state. Think of this, like our emotions are chemical.

blends essentially within our body and our brain. Those chemicals only last about 90 seconds in our body. When you are feeling an emotion beyond 90 seconds, it's because there is a story that is running through our brain that keeps it alive. We are justifying it, are reliving it, we are keeping that story alive because we're feeding into it by giving it space. Now,

The end goal, the desired goal, at least in my perspective anyway, is not to just never feel emotions, because A, it's unrealistic, B, life would be pretty shit if you never felt anything. Just talk to anyone who's ever been on antidepressants. Sounds like it fucking sucks, to be honest. And so it's not to not feel those things, but to be able to witness them, feel them, but then not engage with any of those thoughts or that story that keep it lingering longer than it should.

Harrison Orr (07:24.652)
Like I spoke about in one of my previous podcasts about emotional regulation, my story for when I went camping, the depth of that emotion now serves as a reminder to remember all the sleeping gear needed, to remember the Eski, to remember everything else that I forgot. And we're going camping in a couple of weeks. So you can bet your ass, I'm going to double check that we have everything. I'm going to write a list the few days beforehand, make sure that everything is organized, is planned, is in the car. And it's going to be the most thought

camping trip that we've ever been on because of the emotion from last time but it also didn't ruin the trip last time because of the my ability to witness those things feel them but not engage

Now, you may have experienced this if you've ever said, I'm fine with a clenched jaw. You know, your partner or your kids or someone has said like, hey, like what's going on? And you are just tensing your jaw, trying to suppress whatever anger or frustration is there and swallow it down.

And that's not healthy either. But that reaction that is coming up there is that fight or flight response. Because especially as men, when we are unsure, like deep down when we're afraid or we're scared of something, that's a very vulnerable feeling. Because physically, what do you associate with being scared or afraid? Weakness. Yet, what does anger do?

anger and frustration, raises cortisol, it raises testosterone, and it fills us with what feels like physical strength. We have this aggression. So we almost have this ability to bully our way through whatever situation is in front of us to feel like we are in control, to feel like we are strong. And I used to believe when

Harrison Orr (09:36.759)
as a nice guy that it was bad to be angry. Like that you were, if you were angry, if you were aggressive, you were a threat. So I used to make sure that I was always calm. I would always suppress my emotions. I wouldn't yell, I wouldn't storm off. But my version of calm was actually disconnection.

I'd go quiet, I'd shut down, I'd go straight into fix-it mode or over apologizing or just disappear emotionally, like just complete checked out. And my wife could feel it. I wouldn't have to say a word and she's like, cool, he's not here anymore. But what shifted this and what was the biggest shift for our marriage, even in my wife's terms, was realizing that my nervous system's regulation isn't about not reacting.

It's about being able to feel that response, feel that emotion and still stay in the room. Like I feel that emotion coming up. I'm still present. I'm still here. And that's when my leadership changed. That's when our relationship changed and shifted massively for the better. So let's define what regulation is. Regulation isn't about becoming emotionless. It's about creating space between the trigger and the response.

It's the ability to witness the emotion, the thought, the sensation, and choose what you want to do next. You get to choose, how will I handle this? How will I behave? What words will I speak? What is the best approach, if any, that I need to do about this? Or am I simply here to feel this? Because not every emotion requires an attachment and a reaction, or even a response.

Sometimes it's just there to remind us that we are human and we have emotions. I like to think of emotions simply as feedback. If I'm feeling anxious, okay, anxious is just a level of uncertainty. Okay, but also so is excitement, very similar.

Harrison Orr (11:47.053)
If I'm feeling guilty or shame, what's out of alignment here with my values, with who I say I am, with my words and behaviors, what's misaligned here? If I'm confident, if I'm feeling proud, if I'm feeling grateful, amazing. What have I done that's in alignment with who I say I am, with my purpose and everything that I'm here to do? Amazing. It's just feedback.

doesn't always need action, but it's worth reflecting on what is evoked this emotion so that we start to learn from these. Because like I said, with some of the guilt and the shame and those types of emotions, often there's a deeper level of mismatch that can boil down to our self beliefs or our identity even, that is much deeper than just what you've done that day or haven't done.

And so I want to walk you through the three layers of regulation and simplify this as much as I possibly can so that you can take something away from this today and start to be more calm, more present and more in control of your emotions and how you move through life. And I just want to reframe calm there for a second because in the group call on the ground and man method today,

We were talking about breathwork and one of the guys was saying how he practiced this and he felt so much more focused and just ready to go on with his day. And he said that he used the calm one, the one that I had labeled as, you your calm breathwork. And I used to believe that calm was almost synonymous with docile, with lazy, with slow, with unproductive.

And I had a really negative connotation to that. I'm like, why the fuck would you want to be calm? Why? Like the ultimate stage is just go, just full send. That's why I was smashing 10 cups of coffee a day, overstimulated as hell, anxious as hell, guts were off, sleep was horrible, nice guy to the max and just all around just not a great, not a great time for me or anyone that I was with. And so I want to reframe that as to steady and focused.

Harrison Orr (14:07.97)
Because when we are steady and focused, we are then in control. What is in front of me, asking of me, if I'm with my partner, amazing. What does she need from me right now? Does she just need my presence? Does she need a solution? I might have to ask her for that one so that I don't give her unsolicited advice when she just needs an ear in my presence.

If I'm at work, I'm with a client, I'm creating something, what is the level of presence, of creation, of flow, of energy demands that's required for me right now? I then get to choose what that is and how I show up versus if we're just always on and stimulated to the eyeballs, there's just one speed and that's go.

That's where mistakes happen. That's where anxiety, reactivity and fried out nervous systems all combine to make a chaotic mess. And so these are some of the things that are keeping you constantly overstimulated, overstimulated and frying your nervous system and keeping you in that fight or flight response. Doom scrolling.

so much time on social media, not just for the blue light, which is ruining our circadian rhythm and our sleep, but the cheap dopamine and the stimulation that comes from that.

It just ruins our dopamine receptors. So dopamine is a reward chemical. So we get dopamine from cheap sources, from things like social media, from sugar, from alcohol, from porn, from gambling, if that's your flavor, anything like that. And so with all of those, there is not a very high barrier to entry. You can get any of those pretty much on demand. Healthy dopamine comes from the pursuit of challenge.

Harrison Orr (16:01.866)
or bigger tasks. And so when we're striving for bigger goals, whether it's personal development, a better marriage, a better business, or just like growth in any area of life, those things take time, take effort and take energy. And so when they require those things in order to get that dopamine,

Our brain is inherently lazy. So it thinks, why would I do that hard thing to get dopamine when I could just pick up my phone and either order food, scroll on social media, get up the tube or do anything else like that with little to no effort. So it wipes that desire to do hard things out and as a man consequently kills your testosterone too. The next thing overstimulating you is caffeine or stimulants.

whether it's caffeine, it's too much nicotine, it's too much pre-workout, it's too much of any of those stimulants, especially if they're later in the day, it's tanking your sleep, is making this so much worse. The next one is something that I didn't realize the importance of this, or the lack of this, I should say, until my son was born.

When my son was first born, we were living in an apartment. And if you've got kids, know that newborns, yes, they go, quiet sometimes, but he was an overly crier of a crying baby. He had really bad colic and reflux. So he was just always uncomfortable and just crying a lot of the time.

next door to us, they were also building a seven story high apartment block, which they were drilling three layers down into the earth. So 10 to 12 hours a day, there was drilling into rock going on next door. And then amongst that, and even through the night, there was a crying baby. So silence.

Harrison Orr (18:02.38)
was not something that I had the luxury of very often in that time of my life. So excessive noise causes a lot of stimulation too. And so you might think, well, I'm not near a construction site. I don't have a newborn. So like, I'm sweet. But think about how much, how often you actually sit in silence. If there is a bit of silence, be it at home or in the car, how quick are you to...

put on a podcast, put on the radio, put on some music, put on something else to feel that.

Maybe you're scared of the thoughts, the silence, but it's keeping that constant stimulation, which is not helpful. We need that downtime. And then the other things like tanking your sleep, high amounts of carbs or sugars, over-committing, people-pleasing, never resting. All those type activities are keeping you stimulated and on edge.

Ultimately, what we're doing here is running from discomfort, thinking that if you stay busy, you'll be able to outrun this pain, outrun the stillness because God forbid if we stay still or we slow down or we sit in silence for a couple of minutes, then I don't know if I'm gonna like that guy.

I don't know if I'm gonna like the part of me that isn't attached to providing, isn't attached to the money that he makes, isn't attached to all these external achievements because if I don't like me, fuck, is my wife still gonna love me? Are my kids even gonna like me? That's a big unknown. And so we like to feel it.

Harrison Orr (19:41.775)
We fill it with all the stimulation. We offer help before people even ask to make us feel like we're useful. But ultimately that none of that is coming from a place of love. Like when we ask for help or ask to help or to do these things to meet other people's needs, it's coming from a fear of not being good enough, a fear of not being needed, maybe even a fear of conflict too.

if you're trying to react to her moods and make sure that she's relaxed, she's happy, she's calm, she's okay. Feeling like you have to quell her moods. Like she's not allowed to experience these. And I promise you that's a surefire way to kill the connection in your relationship, but also kill her expression too. I've noticed this with kids too. I got told this.

must have been a couple of years ago and I've introduced it into my parenting and my son's only, you he'll be three next year so he's too young to tell but I've been very diligent in this. When he cries, not trying to stop him from crying. Like I won't run up to him like, it's okay, it's okay, stop crying like and try and settle him down. And you think, why not? What, you sicko? You like the sound of him crying? Of course not. But.

When we quell someone else's mood and their expression of their emotion, it's essentially saying that you shouldn't be feeling that way. Like you're wrong to feel that way. It's invalidating their experience. Instead, saying like, that would hurt. Like that would have hurt hitting your head on the floor. That makes sense that you're upset. Sure, you still ask if they're okay, but you let them have their moment.

when your wife brings her emotions to you, seeking to understand, that makes total sense why you'd be pissed off, why you'd be feeling this. I would feel the same too. Because put yourself in their shoes. On one hand, you've got someone that handles it like that, like, man, that makes total sense. Like I'd be fucking ropable as well.

Harrison Orr (21:52.717)
versus someone says like, nah man, you're overreacting. That's not how it happened. You're seeing it all wrong and like just downplays you. Essentially telling you that everything you're experiencing and feeling is absolutely wrong and you're wrong to feel that way. You shouldn't feel that way and move on. Look at it this way because this is the right way to do it. You don't feel very understood or very seen, you? That's what we're doing to our kids and our partner. Now, layer two of healing and supporting the nervous system. We've gone through...

what we need to get rid of, because I'm a big believer that the fastest way to get better at anything is to remove the shit that's making us worse. Layer two now is the regulation, regulating habits. Two things that our body is designed to do, which most people in the modern age do absolutely horrendously, is breathing and sleeping. And you're like, well, I'm still here, so I'm breathing to some extent and I sleep at least, you know, once a day. So it's not that bad.

Most people, when they breathe, will breathe through their mouth, short and shallow into their chest, and consequently that keeps them in that fight or flight response. Because an inhale uses the stress response, an exhale uses the relaxed response. So literally every single breath, we are balancing between stressed, relax, stressed, relax.

And so most people don't breathe evenly. Like if you breathed exactly four seconds in, four seconds out, four seconds in, four seconds out, you would be balanced. You would be in perfect harmony to then go about your day and be able to respond to things instead of reacting and not stressed and not overly stimulated or inflamed or any of the things. But most people breathe more on the inhale.

Harrison Orr (23:47.629)
and less on the exhale, which keeps him in that stress response. And so naturally, if you just want to flip this, make your exhales longer than your inhales. Breathe through your nose, down into your diaphragm, so into the back of your head, down all the way, expanding your diaphragm or your belly, below your rib cage, for four seconds in, six seconds out. That alone,

when you start to switch your default mode of breathing to your nose, four in, six out, will keep you in that calm, steady, focused state all day, every day.

And it's incredible the level of capacity you have both physically and mentally when that becomes your default state. When you breathe through your nose, when you are sleeping, the level and depth of sleep quality you get will be unmatched compared to if you breathe through your mouth. As a fun side fact for you,

they have actually found that I think it was like 99 to 100 % of cases of child ADHD are not ADHD. They actually have nothing to do with a chemical imbalance or anything malfunctioning in the brain. They simply are not breathing correctly when they sleep. And so you look at symptoms of ADHD, they are actually just symptoms of being tired. You're irritable.

you struggle to focus, you go from one task to the next and you never finish anything and you struggle to complete a task.

Harrison Orr (25:34.679)
very common for people that don't sleep very well, that are tired. When they found this out, they wanted to test it. So they helped the children to breathe properly. I'm not sure if they used either some mouth tape or sleep app machines, what they used in this test. If you wanna look into it, go read the book, Breath by James Nestor. And he talks about it in that book. And every single kid was cured.

just by improving their sleep, by improving in their breath. And so if you have sleep apnea, if you have shit sleep, highly recommend fixing your breath. You can use nasal strips to help expand your nose so you can get more oxygen in. You can use some tape over your mouth, which you can get for a couple bucks from any chemist. Just get the micro port tape so it doesn't rip your beard or your lip skin off and see what you notice.

just by fixing your sleep and your breath.

You can add in the bonus bonus tasks like getting time in the sun, know, a proper morning and evening routine, the same sleep schedules, like times of waking and sleeping and all that kind of stuff. I'm pretty sure I did, did a podcast a while ago on how to get the best sleep of your night of the best sleep of your life. Go back and watch that in depth. If that's something that you're struggling with at the moment, but that is a game changer for your energy, for your nervous system, which then correlates into your hormones, your digestion, your sex drive, your mental capacity, your physical

capacity, your emotional capacity, your empathy, your willpower, your discipline, literally everything in life. Maybe that's why we were designed to do it eight hours a day. I don't know. Just my uneducated opinion. Now the third layer. I hope this isn't dragging on too much because I, this is really interesting to me if you can't tell. So I hope this is being as, as

Harrison Orr (27:31.991)
informative and helpful for you. We're almost there. The third layer, which is the deepest layer, is not necessarily habit based. This is the part that was shaped when you were anywhere from two to seven years old. And when you only got love when you achieved something or when you stayed quiet or when you didn't upset anyone.

This is the stuff that people refer to as your inner child wounds or attachment trauma or mother and father wounds or safety patterning, attachment styles, all that type of stuff. It's essentially where your nervous system learned what safe meant. And that version of safe is what's now killing your presence as a husband and father. To be absolutely clear, this layer is intimate work.

This is what I do one-on-one with men. But if you ignore this, everything else becomes a performance layer on top of pain. This is where people self-sabotage because they make progress and they don't feel worthy or they don't feel safe. So they'll go back to this state.

I had an example with a client just the other week and he had this amazing weekend with his wife. They went away. had this like they were connected like they hadn't done in years. And then they came back and like on the weekend I was like, why can't we be like this all the time? This is amazing. I love it. I like, just loving this energy and this connection so much. And then I came back. Both of them instantly went into nitpicking and fighting over stupid things, stupid things that didn't even matter.

We realized they had spent so long in that dynamic of tension, of bickering, that that's what felt safe. So whilst they consciously said they wanted to have that free flowing love and connection all the time, there's an element of the unknown and the unknown is scary. There's no safety there yet, because there's no proof that if that's the new normal that will stay together, that things will be good.

Harrison Orr (29:44.791)
So they went back to the known because that's where they'd spent the last decade. And it's the same on an individual level. If we don't feel safe in certain areas, our nervous system will do its best to put us back in that situation. So it will, as a nice guy, people please over accommodate to everybody else.

not set boundaries or say no, because if everybody else is okay, then I'm okay. Like we've put this barrier to us being okay and creating the safety and support for ourself of somebody else having to be okay. When she's happy, I'm happy. When she's stressed, I'm stressed. And we become reactive to everybody else's moods. When as the man of the household, we're here to be the rock.

We're here to be the stabilizer, the thermostat, not the thermometer.

Harrison Orr (30:50.414)
And so with a regulated nervous system, you can learn the greatest masculine skill of all, which is the ability to feel without reacting, to witness a thought without chasing it, and to experience emotion without becoming it. You get to decide how you respond, what thoughts you engage with.

what feelings you embellish and savor versus which ones you witness, take a lesson and then move on from. And that is a magnetic power. It's the power of a man who is stoic, who is grounded, who is strong, who is certain in everything that he does because he has that ability. And now that's not something that you just...

can click your fingers and do it. Even with the most amazing daily routine of getting rid of all the things we said before and including all the things that we said to do, even by doing all those, it won't put you in that state. There is those self beliefs on that deep level, which if they're addressed, will still rear their ugly head.

And so that's the level that I aspire to to maintain as the default. That's the level that I work with men and clients to get them to. Because most of the guys that come to me have been in that place where their wives...

Set will say something and I'll just snap at her over nothing She's forgotten to message them back or she sighs when they walk in the room and boom They're tense. They shut down or worse. They get reactive. They get sharp They make a comment that they ultimately regret or even worse. They do this to their kids Five minutes later. They're just wondering like what the hell was that? Like that's not the father I want to be like I'm being my dad Who I said I never wanted to be

Harrison Orr (32:56.942)
And that wasn't logic, that wasn't communication, that was just their nervous system going into overdrive, going into that fight or flight response. That's a dysregulated nervous system. That's what essentially created the lack of safety in your nervous system. You're now passing on to your wife and kids. Yet the regulation is what creates the gap between the trigger and the response. Without it, you're just reacting to ghosts and hurting people that you love.

Harrison Orr (33:30.616)
Now that's a deep journey. This nervous system piece. Like there's those deep layers, the three layers, which you can implement some today. Start on that journey of identifying where these beliefs are. You can even look at the way that you've been self-sabotaging yourself up until this point in life and see where you are not feeling safe. You've blown some money. You've blown a deal. You've blown a level of success that you said that you wanted, but you didn't feel safe in.

because your nervous system could not handle that. Not, sorry, I'll rephrase. Not that it couldn't handle it. It didn't feel safe in it. It didn't feel worthy. It went against a self belief that you have deep ingrained. So if you take one thing from this episode, take this. Nervous system regulation is not bullshit. It's not.

emotional or fluffy, just spiritual bullshit. It's biological and it's foundational. If you want to lead your marriage, create safety for your family and show up as a grounded man, this is the work. The body first work. Not more consumption, not just mindset shifts. It starts with the presence. It starts with intention and then you build that capacity.

So it's not about eliminating stress. It's about building a nervous system that feels safe and resilient so that you can handle more. You can handle more capacity, handle more stress, handle more growth and still feel safe in yourself to not sabotage it and fuck it up.

If you want to go deeper into this, get support, reach out to me. And so with that, don't be sorry, be better. I'll see you guys soon. Bye.