The Habit Mechanic - Unlock your Human-AI Edge

How Your Brain States will Shape Your Success in 2026

• Dr. Jon Finn

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In this episode, Dr. Jon Finn takes you behind the scenes of one of the most important breakthroughs in Train Your Brain for the AI Revolution: Brain States — the hidden driver of everything you think, feel, and do.

Jon shares the origin story of Brain States for the very first time, tracing the idea back nearly a decade to formative experiences teaching activation levels to schoolchildren, collaborating with Professor Jim McKenna, and realising that different tasks in life require completely different neurological settings.

You’ll discover:

  • Why Brain States are the foundation of all human performance
  • How understanding them transforms everything — from reducing overwhelm to achieving deep focus
  • The surprising link between Brain States and the behaviour of modern AI systems
  • The journey from early neuroscience insights to the clear, practical three-Brain-State model used in the Habit Mechanic® and AI-Era Performance systems
  • Why knowledge alone isn’t enough — and why Brain State habits are the key to lasting change
  • How helping others with their habits dramatically accelerates your own growth (and why this is built into the Certified Habit Mechanic Coach® programme)

Jon explains how the six Brain State Habits were created, why this time of year is pivotal for getting your Brain States right, and how one small Brain State breakthrough can meaningfully change the course of your health, happiness, and performance in 2026.

Whether you’re already familiar with Brain State Intelligence® or hearing this story for the first time, this episode will deepen your understanding of how your brain really works — and why you’re only ever one Brain State habit away from being who you want to become.

SPEAKER_01:

Hello, habit mechanics, it's Dr. John Finn here. I hope you're having a fantastic week so far. Today I want to talk about brain states. That is the thing that if we understand and if we get right, then it's the key to unlocking everything we are trying to achieve in our life. So our brain runs us, our brain is operating in brain states. Our um the way it's doing that is is driven by automatic uh semi-automatic behaviours, and we can learn how to mold and sculpt those behaviours into habits by becoming a habit mechanic. And then if we what really want to master that, we want to become a master habit mechanic, then we can learn how to become a certified habit mechanic coach because by doing that, you're gonna learn far more about helping yourself to be at your best than you ever will just by working on yourself. So I want to go back to the origins of brain states. It's coming up to about one year since I conceived the idea of writing Train Your Brain for the Air Revolution. I think I did that, it was the 17th of December last year, and I knew that I wanted to make uh brain states the centerpiece of the book, because that is what I've learned over 25 years, is that if you can help someone to understand their brain states, it is the absolute key to being at their best and achieving whatever they want to achieve, whether it's reduced overwhelm, increased focus, achieving any goal they want to achieve, whether that's uh getting great um GCSE or SATS results, or getting your degree, or getting your next job promotion, or creating a fantastic business, or being a great parent, or you know, whatever you want to be, brain states are the foundations. And I knew that what I was seeing with the emerging neural network AI technologies was that they were useless unless you could manage your brain states. Um and actually they were they were those technologies having used them quite a lot at that point. I I could see they were actually just mimicking certain brain states that that we already have, um, and therefore by understanding our own brain states more, we'd actually better understand AI. So that's why if you've read Train Your Brain for the AI revolution, you will have a really good understanding of the three brain states, and I'm gonna come on to talk about those. And if you've read The Habit Mechanic before that, then you'd also understand the brain states. But I want to go back to I suppose the origin story of brain states, certainly how as I remember it. Um I think there were lots of different pieces to the jigsaw puzzle of me coming up with uh not not the not the science of brain states that exist, and that that that's stuff that I've literally been studying for over 25 years, but trying to explain them in a in a digestible way so people can really understand them. And one striking moment I remember, and I think this was in about it was maybe 2015. Um, and what had happened was we had started to get quite a lot of coverage in the press for our work, and the Daily Telegraph had written uh it maybe even the Sunday Telegraph had written a big article about our work, like I think it was literally on the second page of their newspaper. That's quite a big thing. We didn't pay anyone for that, they saw what we were doing and got really interested in it. Um, and that generated quite a lot of inquiries from people that wanted us to go work with them. And one of the organisations that inquired were Robert Gordon's University, who are based up in Aberdeen, and they said we run a residential program every year for our PhD students, and we think that your tougher minds program would be really helpful for them. Is it something that you could cut you could come up to the residential and you could run the program you know over a few days to be the core thing that we focus on? So we said, yeah, sure. And um myself and Professor Jim McKenna, my uh good friend and a big mentor of mine, we went up together on the train actually to a beautiful place on the um the east coast of Scotland, not quite as far up as Aberdeen, but um probably about halfway between Aberdeen and Edinburgh, and it's called Montrose. Um beautiful place, you can get the train there if you've never been, and in Montrose or just outside, there is uh what is now it's it's an old stately home, it's called The Burn, and um it's now an educational residential retreat, or you can be hired out for private things like weddings, and it's a very sad story that the the owners of that home, um their son, I think their eldest son fought in World War One and he died, and um that was quite a um well understandably a very traumatic thing for them, and they ended up giving the burn over to Beuse to help to develop young people, and it's a beautiful place. Um, you know, it's got the salmon fish industry, uh the salmon in the river and all this kind of stuff. Fantastic. But how do how does this link back to brainstes? Well, Jim, Professor Jim McKenna, was it was basically four sessions we had to run over um one and a half over over um two half days and a full day. So we to we we got there, um you know we travelled up on the say Wednesday morning, we we did our first session on the Wednesday afternoon, um, and then we had all day Wednesday, sorry, all day Thursday, and then a bit of Friday morning. So Jim took the first session, so I was really nice a situation where you're getting paid um to sit and watch someone as brilliant as Jim McKenna talk to the PhD students really about getting their brains working really well, frankly, although doing it through the guise of exercise um and you know, behaviour change science for doing more bouts of moving around, you know, not just going to the gym but walking, etc., and and all these different things you can do to actually get your brain working really well. And that's what Jim is uh a world leading expert at it's behaviour change, uh behavioural science for for for exercise, one of the most difficult types of behaviours that um we struggle to get people to adopt. And as I was sitting there, one thing that so I was pretty familiar with Jim's work and his and his presentations, but one new thing I'd heard him say that I'd not heard him talk about before was this idea of of the kind of tasks that you have to do every day. Um, and he talked about you have these tasks where it's like you've got to shoot the elephant, um, and you have other tasks that are more like shooting a rabbit. So, quite provocative language for some people, the idea of shooting an elephant or even rabbits. I get that, but that's very deliberate to make them get your attention. But I thought that was very interesting, and the fact that you would need different brain states to do those things. So I I distinctly remember that. Um, and then that blends into another story that connects into brain states. The foundation of brain states are activation levels, which is basically the neurotransmitters that are running your brain. So your brain activity is generated partly by electric impulses and partly by chemical messengers called neurotransmitters. Um that's why we said your brain literally is like a battery because it's running on electricity and chemicals, just like uh traditional batteries do, you know. So you've got lots of neurotransmitters running around up there, things like glutamate and GABA and serotonin and um you know adrenaline and dopamine, and they've all got different uh roles and functions, and they help you to get into different activation levels. So some of those neurotransmitters make it easier for you to get to get to sleep, some of them make it easier for you to focus, and so on and so forth. I was so compelled by the power of teaching activation that I was trying to teach it to 11-year-old kids at the Monmouth schools where I was working as uh the haberdasher's um performance psychology fellow. So I was stood um in a gymnasium with a whiteboard with about 20 or 30 um 10 and 11 year olds, or maybe 11 and 12 year olds, sat around me, and I was drawing out on the whiteboard this line of activation, so it's like a continuum from zero to a hundred, and this was built on a lot of work I'd been doing in golf psychology before I took up that position and I created the pre-shot system, etc. And that's what we were actually teaching these um these young guys, and um we were building it into their P curriculum, but anyway, so when I'm delivering my work at this point, and this was the this was maybe three or four years after I was doing that work at Monmouth, activation was right at the front of my mind, and I think what Jim was talking about was this idea of um these different tasks that you're doing every day. That lit the spark for me about trying to instead of having activation just as a continuum from one to a hundred, or as well as having it as a continuum from one to a continuum from one to a hundred, so or from actually zero to a hundred, because it's zero on the activation dial, you're dead. Um I thought actually an interesting layer to put on top of that would be brain states, and I didn't magically come up with the three brain states, but I that was definitely the spark and thinking about how actually you need a different set of neurotransmitters, a different activation level if you're gonna shoot the elephant really effectively, um, and then you need a different um activation level to shoot the rabbits, and in fact, the language that emerged from that was building an ice sculpture um and freezing ice cubes. So building an ice sculpture was I suppose our alternative or refined uh way of thinking about shooting the elephant. I think building ice sculpture is a bit more constructive, but at a high level it's getting it, it's getting to the same point. Um, but yeah, it definitely is more refined. I think Jim would agree with that as well. They're building the ice culture. Um, but I think I probably had more time to think about it, and um, then you know, shooting the rabbits is us freezing the ice cubes. So that that story was really pivotal in the jigsaw puzzle of coming up with the brain states, or the the way of explaining brain states that I think is that so strongly resonates with people, and at that time, you know, Tough of Minds was getting lots of traction, and we were doing lots of live training. Um, and you know, the beauty of that is just get a chance to test out all these ideas, and you can say it one one way in one session and a different way in the next session, and it very quickly got to the three brain states and saw how well they landed. And I know that when people just understand their three brain states, that that self-knowledge, that brain state intelligence is significant in helping them to be healthier, happier, and at their best more often, um, and that's why you know we make it the centre of what we talk about because brain our brain does drive us, but just saying your brain feels a bit vague and a bit um intangible, when you start to break it into brain states and you can actually connect it to the different tasks that you're doing every day, everything from sleeping through to your highest focus states, then it starts to become more meaningful for people, and that's what training your brain for the air evolution is all about. But of course, just understanding your brain states isn't enough. That's why you need brain state habits, and that's why we created the six brain state habits, the six habits of high-performing high-era professionals is showing you how to build those six core uh brain state management habits, and we created a course for that, which is the six habits course. You can get that from our website. Um brain states again are the key, but we know that just knowing about something isn't enough for it to necessarily positively impact our behaviour, so therefore you need to be working and building these brain state habits, and by doing that, you're becoming a habit mechanic. So by understanding the fact that your brain is running in states and it's running on habits, and you're proactively trying to refine those brain states by building different habits, you're a habit mechanic. Um, but you know, what we've learned is, and the learning always starts with me. I've learned far more, significantly more by helping other people to be at their best about myself than I have from just working on myself. And there is that um old saying of um you know, you you you don't really know it until you can teach it. Um and that's that's so so true. You know, having been uh an academic lecturer, that's definitely if you don't if you don't really know it, you're not gonna be a very good teacher. Um but I think it goes much further than that when you're working on behaviour change, you just learn so much more about yourself by helping others than just working on yourself, and that's why um the certified mechanic coach training, it's not just about setting up a coaching business or being a formal coach, it's actually first and foremost about working on yourself. Um, so by helping other people with their brain state, so just even thinking about it through that lens, you you then can sort of get this third person perspective on yourself and your own behaviour that is much more difficult and I would say impossible to do when you're just thinking about it through your own eyes. Um so that's the journey, that's the journey that we're all on together. And I'm hearing lots and lots of really positive feedback at the moment about people just getting those brain state breakthroughs and just getting that one or two habits established that is that is making such an important um positive impact on their own life and on other people's lives. I think this time of year is so crucial in the rest of the year. So I think if we get this time of year right, so from going into the Christmas period now, um you know, into the new year, then we can really set ourselves up well for 2026, and we can have the best 2026 that we've ever had, however we want to measure that, whether it's the happiest um um year that we've had, or whether the healthiest we've had, or with the highest performing, or the families at its best, whatever it is, if you get those brain states sorted out, then things are gonna get much easier for you. So I'd really encourage you to be thinking about your brain states and where they're at and where you'd like them to be, and don't let the brain state habits get so bad that by the time you get to January the 1st, you know, you're gonna need three, four weeks to kind of undo all the things that you've done over the festive period. Um so you know, having uh time off from work, which most people do, gives you a chance to get high quality recharge, for example. Um only by understanding what high quality recharge looks like can you do it really well. It isn't binge eating and binge drinking and staying up too late and just doing what you feel like doing. You know, high quality recharge takes discipline, it takes willpower. Um, and it and there it's ultimately a series of habits that you can build around that. So that's the origin story of brain states, and it's the first time I've ever told that story um in the public domain. So I hope you found that interesting. I found it good to revisit, um, you know, net well you know, 10 10 years ago, um, it's amazing the journey that the Habermechanic approach has come on in that time, and we are so passionate about going even further and making it easier for people to be brain state intelligent. So if today what I said resonated with you, then you know tell someone else about their brain states. Some to train your brain for the air evolution. If you want to go further, um do some more in-depth training. Um, if you don't just want to do a course, we can offer coaching as well. If you want to go deep and get habit mechanic mastery, train to become a certified habit mechanic coach. Um, so we want to help you ultimately to to be at your best so that you can help others to be at their best. Because it's true, and I always I always say at the end of podcasts, but it's so true, you're only ever one brain step habit away, away from being whatever you want to be. If you can just often unlock one key brainstead management habit, then it's it's it's makes a striking difference in your life, and there are only six habits to unlock, right? So um it's a good problem to be working on because there are only so many solutions, and you you'll find the uh you'll find the one that works for you faster than you think. So thanks for listening, and I'll say it again you only have one brainst that habit away.