The Habit Mechanic - Unlock your Human-AI Edge

Master Your Brain Hygiene: Transform Happiness & Resilience with Habit Mechanic Games 🧠✨

• Dr. Jon Finn

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

Unlock the secrets to transforming your brain health and happiness with our enlightening episode on Habit Mechanic Games and the pivotal concept of brain hygiene. Imagine a world where emotional regulation and mental resilience are as routine as brushing your teeth. Together, we explore how targeted mental exercises, inspired by the powerful Habit Mechanic system, can foster a balanced brain state and elevate your cognitive performance. Our discussion shines a light on the hidden consequences of digital overload while addressing Australia's groundbreaking decision to curb social media use for teenagers. Discover how these changes reflect a growing awareness of the impact of today's fast-paced, information-driven society.

We also venture into the addictive allure of junk food and its ties to the tobacco industry, highlighting the relentless battle for our attention and emotional engagement. Maintaining meaningful social relationships amidst the noise of online communication is crucial, as we navigate the delicate balance between fleeting pleasures and long-lasting fulfillment. Through practical advice like taking regular breaks to avoid information saturation, we emphasize the foundational role of brain hygiene in achieving true happiness. Join us for this engaging journey, and equip yourself with simple yet effective strategies to enhance your mental well-being and lead a more fulfilled life.

Speaker 1:

Hello Habit Mechanics. It's Dr John Finn here. This is a live stream inside Habit Mechanic University and it's also going to go out as a podcast later. If you are watching this live stream, you get five points in the Habit Mechanic Games. Isn't that exciting? And we've now launched the inaugural Habit Mechanic Games and it's fantastic to see so many people engaging and practicing daily transformation as we like to think about it. So we've got people from across the globe participating.

Speaker 1:

A couple of shout outs Lizzie great to see you. Dawn from South Africa great to see you. We've had Matt join. We've had Lizzie great to see you. Dawn is from South Africa great to see you. We've had Matt join. We've had Matthew join. We've had Stephen join.

Speaker 1:

We've got some of our regular folk in as well. We've got Andrew, laura, catherine, susan Murray and I'm forgetting a few people. So I apologise, but what people are doing is they are not just. We got Tom from Oxford as well. Hey, tom, people are not just thinking about doing things differently, they are doing things differently and that might feel like a subtle difference, but it's the difference between thinking about doing a press-up and doing one and doing it consistently.

Speaker 1:

But the tools we use inside the habit mechanic system are not as general as a press-up or a sit-up. They are very specific. They look very simple, but they are designed to activate very specific regions of your brain. So, again, people talk about journaling or doing a brain dump. They're very vague tools. What we want to do is we want to target very specific regions of the brain and work them out, to strengthen them so that we are better at regulating our emotions. And if you want to get involved in the Habit Mechanic Games, you still can. You can get involved as a participant, play the games, get as high up the leaderboard as you can get in the mix for the points, or you can just do your own thing. As a minimal, I'd really encourage people to support others, to like their, like their posts, give them positive comment, because that helps you and it helps them and we might know what is a good idea to be doing and thinking every day, but people just don't do it because it's difficult.

Speaker 1:

And one of the things I want to talk about in this live stream is brain hygiene. That is not a term that you are hearing an awful lot about. In fact, I was just Googling that term earlier and I couldn't actually find anything on it. You hear mental health hygiene. When I say brain hygiene, I'm not talking about mental health hygiene. That is a connected idea. I'm talking about your brain as a system. It's a physiologically adaptive system and every day it is getting overloaded. And it's getting overloaded with things that it's biased to pay attention to. You turn the news on now and you are going to see some pretty horrific things actually, and your brain cannot help but pay attention to those things. It's getting overloaded by black friday deals, as a recent example. It's getting overloaded by chemicals that we're putting into our body that our brain doesn't really know what those chemicals are.

Speaker 1:

One of my um students, one of my trainee coaches, educated me last week by sharing some insights. He was saying that in the US, junk food in the US is far less healthy than in the UK, even though our UK junk food isn't particularly healthy. And he was pointing towards the amount of ingredients that are contained in junk food. And in the US apparently there's a lot more in junk food. And in the US apparently there's a lot more. And he was telling me that when the government clamped down on tobacco companies in the eighties, that the tobacco companies started to buy junk food companies and they understood addiction and they slowly but surely introduced more and more addictive substances into the junk foods. We are being addicted all of the time, and in the Habit Mechanic book and actually now in the app, we've put the full e-book in here as well, so you can listen to the audio book and read the e-book in the app.

Speaker 1:

I talk about the learning war. I first introduced the learning War in Chapter 6. We've got Andrew there saying he received 128 Black Friday emails last week alone. I mean, yeah, it's real, isn't it? And how much time does it even take just to delete those? We're maybe talking 20 minutes, half an hour, another 20 minutes half an hour to get over the um dealing with those things. We've got um, three in a sharing that breakfast, cereals and breads, yeah. So we've got to be just ultra cautious about what are we putting into our bodies Um, um, and that means reading the ingredients. The less ingredients there are probably, the better. It is for you.

Speaker 1:

But in the Habit Mechanic book we talk about the learning war and what we're getting at there is that we are learning all the time. That's what we're designed to do, but we are being very our attention has been and I'm actually taking a step back from that Our emotions are being deliberately gamified to get us to pay attention to things that big corporates want us to pay attention to. Essentially, that's what's driving the world. You know, australia took a big step last week to ban social media for all the 16s, which is a great example of. We're starting to wake up to the, to the, to the real problems of what has kind of polluted our brains and this idea of the learning wall. We're going to take a step further and we talk.

Speaker 1:

We're going to talk about brain hygiene and we want to talk about this invisible brain damage that is being inflicted on us on a daily basis and it's real. We are seeing this through big, compelling sets of data is that the modern world is changing our brain in a really unhelpful way. So we have to start thinking about our brain as a living, breathing thing, like we think about oral hygiene. You clean your teeth every day. The people are getting even savvier than that now. They're starting to recognize that there are, there are micro microbes living in their mouth, like they are in their gut, and they're starting to eat differently for that.

Speaker 1:

Well, think about your brain in a similar way and actually creating. Well, first of all, giving yourself a brain state score which is the whole point of the Habit Mechanic Games is to start to get a better understanding of where are your brain state balance throughout the course of a day, throughout the course of a week, how much recharge are you doing? How much medium charge, how much high charge? Start by thinking about your brain through that lens and then, every day, what we're doing in the games is we're doing more intelligent self-watching and more intelligent planning and really, for most people, what that is designed to do is it's designed to help them to do more quality recharge so that they're able to resist the temptation in their day-to-day to get sucked into that busy, medium-charge, mindless work the sort of work that is easier to fully automate than ever and then it allows us to get into those higher charge, what we call premium cognitive performance brain states. So what we're doing inside of the games and the app might seem pretty simple, but actually it's very sophisticated and what it's doing is it's giving your brain a better chance of being healthy so that you can be happy and be at your best is part of that.

Speaker 1:

You know, getting to the end of the day, feeling like you've achieved something, is a huge chunk of being happy, and the way I see happiness is a very simple equation. Part one is you've got to get your brain working well. That means good sleep, good diet, good exercise, good brain hygiene right. But that's harder than ever to do than ever before. And connected to that, the fourth ingredient for good brain health is what we call um, good social relationships. Right, and they're harder to do than ever because we're partly because we're communicating with people online in this way and it's just not the same as doing it face-to-face. Our brain works differently when we're communicating like this. So that's part one get your brain working well, get the brain hygiene sorted out.

Speaker 1:

The second part of the equation is having fun, letting your hair down, having some hedonistic experiences, and they're easier to do than ever before because big corporates have worked out that we get addicted to this fun pleasure. Dopamine hits. Dopamine is an anticipatory neurotransmitter, so we get dopamine when we expect the Black Friday deals coming in, when we expect how great it's going to be when we eat the donut even though it's never that great Within about five seconds it's well, that was it. How much better it's going to be to do this, this or this. So we're surrounded by hedonic experiences and positive psychologists would talk about getting on the hedonic treadmill. But we know that hedonism isn't enough. But actually what we've tried to do, what we're doing with the games, is we're trying to inject a bit more hedonism, a bit more fun and enjoyment, a bit more traditional gamification into using our habit mechanic tools every day. So we've got brain. Hygiene is one thing good sleep, good diet, good exercise, good social connectivity it's going to get your brain nice and healthy. Then you're going to have some fun and some pleasure. You're going to let your hair down. That's easier to do than ever before.

Speaker 1:

The third ingredient is what we call eudaimonic experiences. The third ingredient is what we call eudaimonic experiences. That is, to strive and delay short-term gratification and work in a meaningful way towards achieving your goals. So this is why we have tools like the FAM story, iceberg, why we have tools like the Willpower story. So Hedonic experiences are important but they often get in the way of having eudaimonic experiences because we get addicted to the short-term gratification. So it's harder than ever to engage in these meaningful bouts of work or meaningful, deliberately focused experiences, because we keep getting distracted. We keep getting sidetracked. Focused experiences. Because we keep getting distracted, we keep getting sidetracked, um, and we know that getting all three in balance is harder than ever before, all three of those ingredients, but ultimately, the sort of found of the foundation of the pyramid is is brain hygiene.

Speaker 1:

So I want to give you something really practical to do, well, off off this um, off this live stream, off this pod, and it's something that I've just done. So I'm currently in our work office, but I was working from home this morning and I was well, was I lucky, was I not lucky? I decide at lunchtime, um, that I'm gonna close my eyes for 15, 20 minutes, literally. If I'm in my office, which I am now, and so sometimes I'm here at lunchtime, I will turn off the light and I will. I'll just lie down. I'm, I'm serious, I will lie down and I might play some um, like some rain or something, just some background noise. Why? Why am I doing that? And if I'm actually at home, I'll do a full Winston Churchill and get into bed like I'm, you know, I'll take my clothes off and I'll get into bed and I'll close my eyes. I don't fall asleep.

Speaker 1:

But do you know what I think the key to that 20-minute, 15-minute period is. It's stopping any new information coming into my head. I'm not listening to a mindfulness track and really, really deliberately trying to focus on something. I'm just letting my thoughts wash over me, go in whatever direction that they want to, but I'm very deliberately not taking on board any new information, and I think that is so key. In the world that we live in, it's easier than ever just to be always on, whether it's listening, watching, scrolling, and just carving out the time where we don't take any information in and just be comfortable with our own thoughts. And actually, if we start to notice that some of our thoughts are not particularly helpful, we can directly address those using tools like the Wabba and expressive writing, et cetera. But often it takes those periods of quiet to start to recognize those things.

Speaker 1:

So what I'd recommend that you do today, if you do nothing else to supercharge your brain hygiene, is just sit for 10 minutes, 15 minutes, switch everything else off. If it's helpful, just play something uh, some sort of ambient sound in your ears whilst you're doing that. If it's difficult for you to do that, set a timer so that you know when the 10 minutes is up or the 15 minutes is up, and what we're doing here is we are deliberately reducing our activation levels and we're making it easier for ourselves to start getting high-quality rest. So that's all I wanted to share today. We've had some fantastic messages in the chat on the live stream. Messages in the chat on the live stream.

Speaker 1:

If you're listening to this on the podcast, remember, you can still join the games the Habit Mechanic games inside the Habit Mechanic University app. We know that this is going to increase your chances of achieving your goals, whether they're your goals for your uh, for your life in general, for your for at home, for your relationships, for your work goals. We know they're going to increase your chances of achieving those goals by, on average, 37.5 percent, and I will explain that number to you if you want me to, but that's what we see. So this is going to make it easier to for you to achieve your goals, to do the things that you need to do every day, that make it easier for you to get to where you want to get to. That's why we have this.

Speaker 1:

It's minimal effort to engage in the games. Remember, you don't have to compete in the games. If you don't want to. You can just do your own thing, and or you can like and support others, and it's minimal investment as well. It takes a lot of money to run this technology and we put a lot of time and effort into it, so we make it as cheap as we possibly can. But if you are interested in doing your best and being at your best, come and join us. The best thing is it's absolutely free for the first 14 days, so you don't even have to pay anything. It's completely no risk.

Speaker 1:

So thank you to everyone for joining us and um, enjoy your nap, or enjoy your um, your shut eye, as we would say um in the north of england. So thank you so much. I'll see you in the app later on when we're going to be doing our focus reflections. Also, to say we have two live sessions this week. Anyone can join who's a member of Habit Mechanic University. You can sign up to them. You'll see them at the top of the app. Those sessions are designed so we can have a conversation, we can learn from each other, we can share what's working for us, we can sort of speak to human beings, which is always nice in the world that we live in. So those sessions are taking place on Wednesday and Thursday, both at 2 pm UK time. Again, if you look at the sign-up forms, it will, I'm sure, translate that time into your time zone.

Speaker 1:

And Steve's saying thanks. I want to get back to the induction. So Steve's doing the onboarding course. Great to see you, steve. Back to the induction. So steve's doing the onboarding course. Great to see you, steve, in the onboarding course. Um steve is going to be looking at his brain state score, learning about activation levels and also learning how to create his first willpower story, an advanced willpower story. And that is the core vehicle we're using um to help people, to you know, have a 37.5 better chance of achieving their goals. So I'll let you get back to it. I'll let you switch off or do whatever you're doing. Enjoy the rest of the day and we'll speak to you soon. Bye for now.