The Habit Mechanic - Unlock your Human-AI Edge

AI And The Brain: From Busy Work To Better Lives

• Dr. Jon Finn

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In this episode, we explore how neural-network AI pairs with Brain-State Intelligence® — the foundation of Human-AI Performance Psychology — to help you outsource busy work, focus on high-impact thinking, and build habits that actually stick.

You’ll hear practical frameworks, real-world examples, and a clear path to becoming healthier, happier, and more effective in the AI era.

What You’ll Learn:

• Why habits fail without Brain-State awareness
• Recharge, Medium-Charge, and High-Charge explained
• Agentic AI vs. LLMs — and when to use each
• How to outsource Medium-Charge tasks to reclaim energy
• Accelerating High-Charge work with AI co-working
• Real gains in productivity, cost, and effectiveness
• A 30-day plan and daily strategic ritual
• Future roles: Innovators, Automators, and AI Performance Coaches
• Where to start and how to build momentum

🎧 Listen now to discover how Human-AI Performance Psychology can help you think better, perform smarter, and thrive in the age of AI.

📘 Learn more at tougherminds.co.uk
— and get your copy of Train Your Brain for the AI Revolution for just $1, plus details on our Certified Habit Mechanic® Coaching Program.

SPEAKER_01:

Hello, Habit Mechanics, Dr. John Finn here. I hope you're having a fantastic week so far. I've been busy guesting on quite a few people's podcasts in the last few months, so I'm gonna release a few here. So this is an interview that I did on the Lifeblood podcast a couple of weeks ago talking about AI and brains, my speciality. Enjoy.

SPEAKER_00:

John Finn is the founder of Tougher Minds. He is the creator of the field of AI human performance psychology. He is, of course, a best-selling author. Welcome back to the show, John.

SPEAKER_01:

Hey George, thanks for having me.

SPEAKER_00:

Great to be back. Excited to have you back on. Refresh our memories. Tell us about your personal lives, more about your work and why you do what you do.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, well, I don't have much of a personal life to be honest with you, because I I just blend, I just love what I do, so it all blends together. But um the last time I was on, we were talking about becoming a habit mechanic because we know that knowing what to do to be at our best is useless unless we build habits to automate um the things that we know we need to be doing, everything from better sleep, diet exercise to stress management, how we build confidence, how we focus, how we stay productive, how we lead, how we parent. So we know that building habits is the key because our brain is designed to save energy. So it turns everything it can into an automatic or semi-automatic thinking and doing process. And then since then, we've got this new technology called Neural Network AI that is the first time we have a technology that is specifically designed to work how our brain works. So this was obviously very interesting to us. So over the last maybe 18 months or so, we've been really playing about with the tools that are available, and then maybe about 12 months ago, we were so compelled about the potential of this technology for helping people to really outsource the stuff that they don't want to be doing, what we call medium-charge brain state work, but also to go faster with the high impact, high charge, complex problem solving, strategic thinking, the kind of thing that we need to do to move our lives forward, to move things we're doing at work forwards. We can use AI to help us to do that stuff faster, more efficiently, more effectively. So we decided to really embrace the AI, and our mission is to become the world leading uh thinkers in human AI performance psychology. We have invented that field, so we are currently at the head of the curve. But we want to equip people with the skills. Well, the knowledge, first of all, not to be scared of AI, because I think if we get it right, it can be a hugely beneficial thing. But also the skills to be able to build it into your daily workflows so that you can outsource more of your medium charge, habit-based, busy work and free yourself up to do more of your high charge, high impacts, things that make you feel good about yourself at the end of the day, make you feel good about yourself at the end of the week. And that's why I wrote Train Your Brain for the AI revolution, and it's why we're also training people to become um certified habit mechanic coaches, which I think is the essential skill for being successful in the AI era. And it's not necessarily about coaching other people if you don't want to go there, it's first of all about coaching yourself so you can actually move from knowing to building the habits that allow you to be healthy, happy, and at your best in the AI era. So that's what we've been working on, George. So we've been pretty busy.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, I can only imagine. So how do you how do you suss out what is a good opportunity versus what is a, I don't want to say bad, but I'm sure that there's so many different new AI things that are popping up, probably right, probably several just just just just kind of popped up.

SPEAKER_01:

Do you mean for uh for our own business?

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, well, just for sure. I I I suppose for all of it, because I'm sure most of it's probably noise.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, I think we need a framework to think about AI and how it can help us. And the way that we think about this is in the context of how our brain works. So our brain is the most complex thing in the known universe. So we don't want to get bugged down in all the micro details of brain function, but a really helpful way to think about our brains and how they work is that our brain is a bit like a battery and it only has so much charge in every 24-hour period, and you know, neurobiologically, it literally is like a battery, it runs on electricity and chemicals, neurotransmitters, and in every 24-hour period, people typically operate in three core brain states. So the first brain state we call recharge, and we that could be sleeping. We can also do non-sleep recharge like switching off, etc. The second brain state is medium charge. This is where we're on, we're probably busy, we're not really thinking too much, we're just on habit mode. Um and that's where our brain likes to be because it's kind of on doing something, getting some short-term gratification hits, but it's not spending too much energy. And then we have the high charge brain state mode. This is where we're doing our complex, clever, high-impact thinking, doing, learning. It's a brain state we need to be in if we want to build better habits, like better sleep habits. It's a brain state we need to be in to be thinking at our best. And we can think of AI in relation to those three brain states. There are two broad types of AI. One is agentic AI, which is becoming more visible every single day, and we can use agentic AI, and just one simple example of that is how I booked on this podcast. I used your um booking app, I thought I can't remember what it was, but maybe it was Calendly. So instead of us going back and forth to trying to find a date, and then you sending me an invitation manually, I just go into your system and I book it automatically. That's that's a version of agentic AI, but agentic I is getting much more sophisticated than that. It's able to do tasks on your behalf. Um, so we can use agentic AI to outsource more of our medium charge, busy work. The stuff that might make us feel good in the moment, but we don't typically enjoy doing for long periods of time. And then the other type of AI is LLMs, large language models, things like Chat GTP, Claude. Increasingly, there are more uh context-specific versions. We can co-work with LLMs to get our high-charge tasks done faster. So instead of it instead of taking you a full day to write a new proposal for a client, you could maybe do it in one hour. Because it's like working with um a co-worker who's an expert and it's on demand and it's really cheap. So instead of paying a consultant a lot of money to co-work with you, you can use these LLMs. So if I'm looking at new AI tools, I'm thinking, where do they sit in this continuum? Is it a Gentec or is it an LLM or is it a hybrid? And what kind of tasks am I doing right now? Could I use the AI to either automate or to speed up? And that's all the tech is. It's just a tool we can use to get us the stuff that we need to get done every day done faster. So that's how I'm thinking about it. And then we're using what we call the AI edge success cycle to help people to build habits to allow them to seamlessly integrate these new tools into their daily workflows, which I can speak more about if you want me to.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, I've definitely um maybe we could fit in what what do I stand to gain? Is it knowable? I can increase my productivity by 1%, 5% kind of stuff, or and maybe what do I stand to lose if I don't do this? Am I going to get left behind?

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, I think we've come through or we're coming through a period where the sort of naysayers about the potential of AI in terms of how it can help people every day. Um those the stories about why it can't help us are being um proven wrong, for want of a better term. Because as people use the technology, they're seeing how powerful it is. So we're moving to a world where AI is not just a nice thing to have, it's an essential part of workflows. If we look at businesses, their fiduciary responsibility is to make money for shareholders, whether we think that's good or bad, that is how our society is set up. So everyone's looking all the time, how do we do things more efficiently and more effectively? So, what businesses have been doing is they've been testing out different AIs, they've been building their own, and they've now got lots of valuable case studies that show if they use AI in the right way, they're able to get things done faster, more effectively, cheaper. So we're making this transition from teams of humans to teams of humans that are co-working with AI, both agentic and LLMs. And that's just going to be the reality of the world we live in. Here's a really interesting uh story, hopefully. So I was watching at the weekend a documentary about Led Zeppelin um from the late 60s, and the very interesting thing about Led Zeppelin is they went from not being a band to being one of the biggest bands ever within 12 months. And part of how they were able to do that is because Jimmy Page and John Paul Jones, they since they were being since they were left school, so since they were 16, they were working as session musicians for some of the biggest bands in the world, on some of the biggest uh movie soundtracks in the world, working in these London studios like Abbey Road. By the time they formed Led Zepp, they were probably 24, 25. So they had this immense knowledge, not only of how to master their own instruments, but how to use music technology to make things sound in a very specific way. What I found really interesting about watching that documentary was how many people were involved in making music, and how now, if we fast forward to today, you can do the same thing with an app. So we stripped out the maybe 30 people that we needed and the tech, and we can just do it in an app now. Now, the music technology is a very niche sector, so in the UK is a very London-centric thing. Uh, in the States, you've got probably Los Angeles, New York, right? What the AI, neural network AI, does is it scales that same basic idea of it used to take lots of people to do this, and now we can do it with just a few people and some very cheap technology, it scales that into everybody's jobs, so that's what's happening. Um but so it's not going away. Should I use it, should I not use it? You're gonna get left behind if you don't start learning how to use it. And what we're seeing is is when you start to build it into your workflows, it's the foundation for being a healthier, happier, higher performing you because it makes it easier to do the kind of thinking and the kind of stuff in your life that makes you feel good about yourself. So by outsourcing more of the medium charge, busy work, and by getting the high charge, high impact stuff actually done and done faster, it means we got more downtime, more free time for ourselves to sleep better, to eat better, to exercise like we want to. Um, we're not spending all day on, on, on busy, busy, busy, busy, never getting anything done, never getting actually to that project or the thing I want to do in my life that makes me feel good because I don't have the cognitive capacity to do that. AI changes that. So I'd really encourage people to not be scared of the tech, to try and test some things out and test that out within the brain state framework we've created. And in Train Your Brain for Their Revolution, it's not a book that has 10 chapters repeating the same idea with different contexts. It's a self-help, self-guide to understanding your brain states where they're currently at, creating a long-term strategic plan, and then focusing that on the next 30 days, thinking about what are the kind of high charge tasks I need to get done in the next 30 days, what are the medium charge tasks and where might AI come into this? It gives you then a daily strategic tool so you can plan properly. It's called the willpower story, and then we give you a habit building process so you can actually build the habit of using your daily strategic tool and actually not just knowing about what you need to get done or what AI tools it might be helpful to start using, but building the habits of doing that. And we're seeing, and you can learn that in under three hours. And we actually just made the book available for one dollar on our website. But then in 30 days, we're seeing people make really significant progress in their own lives. Um so whether we like it or not, this tech is not going away. So my my advice would be to start using it. And what why the tech's so interesting to me is because I see it, it's an accelerator for changing any behavior that we want to change in our life, whether that's building better sleep habits, managing stress better, being a better parent, being a better leader, being more focused and effective. The technology helps us to speed up behavior change. Because instead of having to do it all ourselves, we can outsource elements to the AI. Just in the same way that we would have previously outsourced it to human beings. Um, we can now do it to a technology that's cheap, that's ever-present, and that can be our companion as we go on our journey to achieving the things that we want to achieve in our lives that actually make us feel good about ourselves.

SPEAKER_00:

Well, I think it's really exciting the way that you've laid it out and the Led Zeppelin story is perfect because I think a lot of us feel, and I certainly have felt in the past, oh, I'm overwhelmed, and it's it's it's it's too late, I'm not gonna be able to get this done. And you go from not being a band to the biggest band in 12 months, is is that thing exciting? And you're talking about how it's gonna free us up, new technologies, AI, it's gonna free us up to do more of what we really want to do. So I think that that is a really exciting thing. Um and human nature is is such that even though we know something's a good thing, doesn't mean we're gonna execute on it. So do you have you've you've now made these resources. You've you've created this field, you've you've written a book, several books, and a new book about this. You you also have a course that that people can access. But we need to do it and not just think about it. Talk to me a little bit about that.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, so the tech is frightening. It's inherently frightening. You know, technological change has always been difficult. Uh, you know, I know people that only started checking their emails, you know, 10 years ago, even though they've had access to them for 20 years, right? Um, but the AI tech is faster and in terms of how it's coming at us, it's had the most invested across any technology. Already it's over, it's probably moving towards 2 trillion of investment. Just go to the um the SP 500 or the Nasdaq, look at the top companies in terms of value, they're all AI related. Um, so we have to go we have to understand that this is not going away. Um, and that if we start to use it, it's gonna make our life easier. Um, so I would say that the first thing I would do is I'd get a copy of this book because I've I've written it to help you to move from knowing to doing to habit. Um, and you can get through the book in as little as four hours and you can learn the system in three hours. So that starts to take care of the why, but also gives you some very practical things you can be doing very quickly to start integrating these tools into your daily workflows. And then as soon as you do that, you see the benefits, and it's by seeing the benefits that creates forward momentum. Um, but I also think that there is a I think that um people who are experts in human AI performance, not teaching people how to use Chat GTP, but getting humans and AI working really well together, you know, it's almost like learning how to drive a Formula One car really well. People who are experts at helping others to do that are going to be one of the most in-demand group of professionals on the planet. So there's a huge opportunity to establish um another string to your bow or even an entirely new career for yourself in this field. And that's why we're training people to become certified coaches so they can really start to understand how to use these tools for themselves, but also how to help others to use them. And I think going forwards, I'm not sure how far into the future this will be, but there will be three core professional groups. One will be the innovators, people who spend their days innovating what the future will look like. How do we cure X disease? How do we create an education system that actually works? How do we build buildings that actually absorb CO2 instead of kicking it out? So people that are going to spend all day long working, co-working with AI to solve these huge, endless, complex problems that we need to solve as humans. And there'll be another group of people called the automators. They'll be the people who figure out how do they build the hardware and the software to get the stuff done that the innovators have worked out the solutions to, um, whether that's building these buildings faster or changing the education system faster, whatever it is. And the third group will be the human AI performance psychology coaches, people that are helping the automators and the innovators get really good at managing their brain states. So we think that brain state intelligence is going to become the most important form of intelligence for helping people to be at their best. You know, the tech's quite easy, George, because it's had so much invested into it. What many people don't recognize is that just the free version of Chat GTP or Claude is like it's had about$400 million invested into it and it's available at your fingertips for free. Um so they're easy to use, they don't come with an instruction manual, it's just about you use it, you know, you learn how to use it by using it essentially. But um building the habits of using it really well, so people can get good at almost using it like a Formula One car. Um, people are gonna need help with that, and it's not so it's not help learning the tech, it's help building the habits. So, yeah, so I think there's a really exciting um future for people who get good at building these AI tools into their workflows, especially if you understand it through the lens of Brent State intelligence.

SPEAKER_00:

Well, it's exciting, and I'm certainly grateful that you and your team have invested the time to help figure it out and and to break it down into a way that's consumable and learnable and actionable. I think that those are the all the bulls that I can think about for right now. So, John, thank you so much for coming back on. And and again, thanks thanks for all the work. Where can people learn more? How can they engage? Tell us about the book and the courses and and and everything else you're working on.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, so if you go to tougherminds.co.uk, that's where you can get the book for one dollar. And then you can also learn more about our coaching certification and the other things that we're doing. I'm on LinkedIn at Dr John Finn, J-O-N-F-I-N-. Um and yeah, they're just the two main places that I'd go. And the key thing is is just to give it a go. Don't be scared of it. It's natural to be scared, but we're gonna be we're gonna overcome that fear by trying something out, seeing the results we can get. And this is the transformational, not just to get work done faster, but to improve how we sleep, how we eat, how we exercise, how we look after our brain, how we manage stress, how we build our confidence up, how we perform under pressure, how we become more focused and productive, how we become better leaders, better parents, better human beings. I really believe it allows us to just be better versions of ourselves because we can outsource brain power basically in a very cost-effective way. And we unpack all of that inside of um train your brain for the AR evolution and the habit mechanic as well, if you haven't already read that.

SPEAKER_00:

Excellent. Well, if you enjoyed as much as I did, show John your appreciation. Share today's show with a friend who also appreciates good ideas. Go to tougherminds.co.uk. Yes. For uh just all things, Dr. John Finn, and you can get your copy of Train Your Brain for the AI Revolution there. And certainly if you've not read the Habit Mechanic, pick up your copy of that as well and get started figuring out how you can. Well, probably it's probably a nice thing and a very kind thing to do to our brains to allow them to focus on the things that it really wants to focus on and take some of the other stuff off the brain's plate.

SPEAKER_01:

I don't know if that's a good way to describe it or not, John, but well, thrive in the AI era because you know the world is increasingly getting complicated. So it's you know, it's harder and harder to be at our best. So we've got to start ingraining those habits now. So that as even more furious levels of change come towards us, um, we've got some really good foundational habits, behaviors that stand us in good stead. Because I think whatever change we've seen in the world before is gonna be a tiny compared to what's coming. Um, and what's coming we can use to our advantage to propel ourselves and our lives forwards, or you know, we can potentially get crushed by it. Um, so that's why the habits are so key.

SPEAKER_00:

Love it. Well, thank you again, John. Thank you, George. It's been a pleasure. And until next time, remember do your part by doing your best.