The Habit Mechanic - Unlock your Human-AI Edge

Science-backed tools to quickly give you an EXTRA 3 hours of Peak Cognitive Performance DAILY

• Dr. Jon Finn

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The Habit Mechanic Games (Part 4) - how to use powerful Habit Mechanic tools like the Will Power Story to quickly and easily deliver EXTRA hours of Peak Cognitive Performance every day.

Anyone can easily join The Habit Mechanic Games by downloading the app and enjoying a 14-day free trial here.

Dr. Finn reveals how spending just five minutes each morning and evening on focused activities can shift your brain state, allowing you to earn points, climb leaderboards, and enhance your overall living quality. With the Games set to run from Dec 1st to 19th, you stand a chance to win substantial prizes, including personal coaching sessions.

Curious about how to get started? Find out more here.

Whether you're an existing member or entirely new to the platform, the Habit Mechanic University Games offer a welcoming entry point. Dr. Jon Finn explains how anyone can easily join by downloading the app and enjoying a 14-day free trial. It's a perfect opportunity for those who have signed up but haven't yet engaged or for newcomers ready to embark on a transformative journey. 

The Games are designed to be flexible and accessible, making it simple to enhance both individual habits and team dynamics. Tune in to uncover practical strategies for leading a balanced and fulfilling lifestyle, regardless of life's challenges.

In this episode, we discover the Will Power Story, an innovative Habit Mechanic tool that enhances self-awareness and intelligent planning. Dr. Finn shares insights on structuring your day to enhance both work and brain recharge, aiming for peak cognitive output. 

Speaker 1:

Hello and welcome to the fourth in a series of podcasts about the Habit Mechanic University games which take place in the Habit Mechanic University app. We're joined by Dr John Finn, who's the creator of both. He's going to talk us through everything we need to know. We've been talking all about the games in previous podcasts how they'll make it easier for us to change our behavior and achieve extra hours of peak cognitive performance, and also understanding much more about that idea, that concept, and how we can specifically work to begin improving it. And on this podcast, john, we're going to talk about putting everything into action, being practical, which is, of course, a great feature of the habit mechanic approach and has been consistent throughout all tougher minds work. Um, so the habit mechanic university games, via, via the tools in the habit mechanic university app, they, among many other things, ask us to deploy what we call activation and use a tool called the will power story. Uh, let's start with activation. How can we understand that? To help us do more, achieve more every day yeah.

Speaker 2:

So one of the the things that we know is central for being at our best in healthy, being happy, is managing stress and, academically, the I suppose the measurement of stress is talked about as anxiety and we can have what we call somatic anxiety, which is physical. We can have cognitive anxiety, which is psychological, and the problem with the word anxiety is people just see it and the word stress is people see it as a negative off the bat, but it's not. It can be facilitative for performance as well. So we can have facilitative anxiety levels and we can have debilitative anxiety levels. Now, the reason I went into that detail is because I was trying to work out I need to explain this concept to some 11 year old kids. How do I do it? And that's why I created the concept of activation and I created this activation dial to say, well, this is, let's just think about it in a really simple way. So, instead of and I study with those some of the guys that created the very complex um activation models like lou hardy, because in sport professor lou hardy used to be at bangor university, pretty famous sports psychology god. Um, he was also a big into imagery, which is which is why I spent a bit of time with him, but these are quite complex ideas but they're so central for understanding ourselves and every moment of every day.

Speaker 2:

We are at an activation level and the trouble is that we're not always at the activation level we need to be at to do the thing that we need to do. So the way that we talk about activation is it's on a scale from 0 to 100. So you can imagine like a speedometer, and if you're at 0 on the scale, it means you're dead. That's the starting point. If you're at 1 or a 2, two, you'll be in a deep, deep sleep and then as you wake up, you get a little bit higher. So you might wake up when you're at a 10. As you get out of bed and move around, you might go up to a 20 or a 30 and essentially, the more activated you get physically and mentally, the higher you go. So when you're at 100 on the scale, your heart is beating as fast as you can. You might be laughing your head off or you might be the most stressed that you possibly could be, because it kind of looks the same in your body. Yeah, so what we want to help people to do is to understand activation and the different levels of activation they're currently at in a normal day or on a work day, you know, sort of a day off versus the optimal activation levels they'd like to be at. So everything that we do every day has an optimal activation level.

Speaker 2:

So if you want to get a good night's sleep tonight, you don't want to be getting into bed having just checked your emails or checking your emails in bed where you get one of those emails where all of a sudden you're quite calm and relaxed but you got really stressed by an email you saw. So now your activation is up at a 60 or a 70 and you need to be down at a 5 to go to sleep. So there's a mismatch. So you're basically in bed wasting your time. So that might result in a poor night's sleep. So you get up the next day and you you're sitting at your desk trying to do some clever work because you didn't sleep very well last night. Until you do the clever work, you need to be maybe a 60 on the activation dial, because you didn't sleep very well last night. You're only at 30 and you're just sitting there sort of staring into space or everything's taking you twice as long as it should do, because you're not at the right activation level and we can actually place very precisely different brain states across the activation continuum.

Speaker 2:

So for me, if I want to do high quality recharge, I need to be about a 20 on the activation dial and if I want to do high quality sleep, I need to be, you know, five and below on the activation dial, so we can think about having two optimal activation numbers for our recharge. We've got sleep recharge and non-sleep recharge. In the same way, if I want to do high charge, high impact, peak cognitive performance work that's on myself I'm building a new habit. I'm resisting having lunch at lunchtime because, um, you know that's not good for my afternoon performance. Or I need to create a new proposal for a client, or I'm writing another chapter that have mechanic, or I'm innovating the design and have mechanic games, whatever it is, then I need to be about a 60 on the activation dial to get into those high charge performance states and the same with medium charge.

Speaker 2:

So what we want to help people to do is to create an understanding of themselves that is sophisticated but simple, and we want we want them to have an understanding that they can use to actually manage their activation levels throughout the course of every 24 hour period.

Speaker 2:

That is the whole premise of being a habit mechanic.

Speaker 2:

We want to help people to become expert self-coaches and when you go on this journey, what you start to learn is that actually every super habit you build is really about activation management. It's designed to actually help you to improve your activation level, increase your activation level or reduce it. So in the morning I go for a run to increase my activation level so that when I get to my desk I can focus properly. At the end of the day, I go for a walk. I do a written reflection and I go for a walk to reduce my activation level and what you start to see is is that what we're doing across this piece? We can make it all sound very simple and it is to implement, but what we're doing is quite sophisticated, is we're helping you to build super habits and super habit routines to replace your destructive habits that make it easier for you to consistently match the right activation level to the right task now that that is something that, um, as you say, sounds simple for people, and it's.

Speaker 1:

It's brilliantly simple as a concept, john, I think. I think that's why it's so successful, but a key element of of deploying that concept in practical terms is a tool that you have that helps us cope with or manage effectively, navigate these fluctuations throughout the day, and that's the willpower story. Tell us now how that fits into this idea, then, of moving through your day effectively in terms of your brain and your cognitive performance.

Speaker 2:

Yeah. So Willpower Story is a very fine-tuned what we call intelligent self-watching and intelligent planning tool, and it has three core ingredients. So it's like a. It's a timeline of a 24-hour period and there are three core ingredients that go into it. One is an understanding of what you need to get done today, and we split that work into either easy things that you need to do, which we call ice cubes that could be jobs at work. It could be jobs at home. It could be things in your life that you need to do. They're fairly habitual, automated things. They're the things that will increasingly be replaced by AI. And then we have other tasks which are more mentally complex. They need more focus, they need more concentration. We call them building ice sculptures. That could be working on building a better sleep habit. It could be working on a new client proposal. It could be innovating a new solution. Working on a new client proposal. It could be innovating a new solution. It could be studying the chapter 18 of the habit mechanic book to learn about the action factors.

Speaker 2:

So the first thing we want to think about in our willpower story is well, what are the things the ice cubes and ice sculpture tasks that we're doing in a 24-hour period, and. And. Then we can list those down, we can put a time commitment next to each one, we can put them in a priority order and we can start to place them on the timeline. But before we do that, we need to consider how we're going to manage our brain states across the 24-hour period. So we know that we need to spend some good quality time recharging. That might be 10, 11, 12 hours of good quality recharge. We need to factor that in. We want to be spending four or five hours doing focus, high impact work, so we might block that throughout the course of the day. So we might do a three hour block in the morning and then a two, two hour in the afternoon, however we want to do it, or a one hour one in the afternoon, however we want to do it, or a one-hour, one-hour, one-hour, however you want to do it. And then we've got the ice cube jobs in between. So we need to consider what brain states the ice cube jobs need and the ice sculpture jobs need and also factor in enough recharge time. So the ice cube jobs are going to be medium charge jobs and the ice sculpture jobs will be high charge jobs.

Speaker 2:

So one of the things I do every morning is I go for a run. I actually do my tea plan, I go for a run and then I do a willpower story when I get to my desk. That's a little super habit routine so that I can get my and that's built on a good night's sleep so I can get my activation level up to a high enough level to get into the high-charge brain state so I can build my eye sculpture. And again, I added myself there slightly, because the third ingredient is activation level. So you're then going to consider which activation level you need to be at in each brain state and before you do your willpower story, you'll do an activation review where you map out your, your normal activation throughout the course of the day and then your optimal activation level. So that allows you to makes it easier to complete your willpower story.

Speaker 2:

So I may be making that sound over complex, but it's not. It's very simple. You timeline your day, you map out your ice cube jobs and your ice sculptor jobs, you consider which brain states you you need to be in during the course of the day, including your recharge brain states, and you think about what activation levels do I need to get up, get into, to get to those brain states. So it's one of those tools where you spend five minutes and it literally saves you hours and it unlocks hours and hours of extra peak cognitive performance so you can actually get to the end of the day and feel good about yourself yeah, I think it's worth saying, john.

Speaker 1:

I've, of course, had the opportunity to see the willpower story simple in terms of, perhaps, how it looks to some people, but it's underpinned by extremely sophisticated science to make it so powerful and so effective. And, of course, it is part of the Habit Mechanic University app and hence, the Habit Mechanic Games. Thanks for talking to us in such great depth about this new, exciting idea of the Habit Mechanic Games, which has already started by the time you listen to this podcast. But don't worry, you can still get involved. If you're already a member of Habit Mechanic University and you haven't seen the interactions in the community, well, we'll have a closer look and get involved.

Speaker 1:

If you've signed up to the app the Habit Mechanic University app but haven't used it yet, the games give you a great platform to start and go forward on. And the games give you a great platform to start and go forward on. And if you're hearing this podcast perhaps for the first time and you haven't yet downloaded the Habits Mechanic University app, just go to your app store, download it and there's a 14-day free trial so you will be able to take part in the Habit Mechanic games. And there's a link in the description of this podcast, you'll be able to find out more. Um. So, john, um, we'll see how the games take shape as uh, as the month moves on, and see who engages in the community in the different ways they can, using tools like um the willpower story, and perhaps sharing their approach to doing that with other people which might help others. Um, what are your hopes, if you like, then for the habit mechanic games? What will you be looking for as as the weeks unfold?

Speaker 2:

I just want people to use the tools to consistently create a willpower story, because I know the power of that when people do it. Um, andrew foster was actually just telling me the day about one of these clients just saying but just doing this every day, and it's so good and it's so powerful. And the interesting thing is that client is a 11 year old kid who is who is using his planner every day, who's on one of our school programs, something, something Andrew is very passionate about. But we know we've got judges, barristers, lawyers, young professionals and everybody in between you know, using these tools. So we just want to make it.

Speaker 2:

We know that people agree and think it's a good idea, but it's making it easier for people to use the tools. So that's what the community is all about and you know, for some some people the points will be interesting, for others, the prize will be interesting, but others just helping others do better will be interesting. So I'm really excited and I just know it's going to change many, many more people's lives. So we want to help over a million people in the coming years to just be doing this regularly. So this is a good way to start moving towards that target.

Speaker 1:

Well, John. Thanks for sharing your insights. Thanks for talking to us. People can find out more about the Habit Mechanic University Games on the Tougher Minds website, toughermindscouk, and there is a link in the description of this podcast. Once again, thanks very much for listening and bye for now.