The Grumpy Coder Who Became a Habit Mechanic

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In this episode, Dr. Jon Finn shares a powerful story about a senior coder who became unexpectedly angry — because a simple Brain State insight transformed his performance overnight.

This real-world example reveals:

• why your Brain States determine how you think, feel, and perform
• how one small daily habit can shift you into a high-charge Brain State
• why the AI era makes Brain State management more essential than ever
• how Habit Mechanics adapt, learn faster, and thrive under pressure
• why building Brain State Habits is the foundation of lasting mastery

If you want to perform at your best in a world where AI is accelerating change, this episode will help you understand why you’re only ever one Brain State Habit away.

Have questions? Send them in — and Dr. Jon will answer them in future episodes.

Chapters

• 0:00 A Grumpy Coder’s Confession
• 4:08 BDNF And Movement Explained
• 7:21 From Skepticism To Peak Productivity
• 9:38 Enter The AI Era Challenges
• 13:14 Faster Clients, Overwhelmed Professionals
• 15:46 Why High-Charge States Matter Now
• 18:31 Mastering Three States, Six Habits
• 20:29 Your Questions And Next Steps

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 1:23

Hello, habit mechanics. It's Dr. John Finn here. I hope you're having a great week so far. I want to tell you a story about a grumpy coder who was very cross at me because I helped him to do better. I helped him to understand his brain states. So this may have been about 10 years ago, and I was working for a technology company that worked with elite sports teams, and I knew the owners of this company. Um it's subsequently been sold for quite a lot of money, but I would go and work with their staff individually and collectively just to help them to be at their best. The the owners of the of the business of seriously high-performing people, uh, you will know their names if you're into high performance sport. Um and one day I was at their offices and I was just there doing one-to-one sessions that day. So anyone could book a slot and come do a one-to-one session with me. And it was in the afternoon, and I'd had some really good sessions in the morning, and I would was hearing some great feedback about what people had been working on, and felt quite pleased that I'd been help uh able to help some people overcome some of the some of the new challenges that were emerging for them. And then for my next session, the door opened, and I was confronted by quite a grumpy looking uh guy who's actually quite big, and um he declared that he was a bit angry with me, and um he took me back slightly, and I was saying, Okay, well, you know, sit down, let's explain to me why you're angry with me. So he went on to tell a story that a few weeks previously we'd been doing some uh workshops with the teams, and in that workshop, one of the things we've been talking about was BDNF, um, brain derived neurotropic factor, and this is the neurotransmitter slash protein that is released into our brains when we exercise and when we move around. And neuroscientists would call it they'd say it's a bit like um miracle grow for your brain or like fertilizer for your brain or for your neurons. And the neurobiological explanation of this is that we're designed fundamentally, human beings, Homo sapiens, are designed to move around and solve problems. So when we move around and solve problems, problems relating to getting food, we're hunter-gatherers, right, getting some uh tracking down some prey so we can uh frankly kill it and eat it for our evening meal, or just pick some nice berries, etc., or avoid predators in the wild ourselves, you know, this is what we're designed to do. When we move around, our brain starts to get smarter, and this is if we think about brain states, you know, fundamental in shifting from sort of medium charge brain states into higher charge brain states, and this doesn't mean you have to go to the gym, literally walking, because again, we're designed to walk, so the anthropologists would would say that human beings look like they're designed to walk about 12 miles per day, so we're designed to be moving around. Um, you know, if you go back to London in the like 100 years ago, people literally were walking like 10 miles a day. Now, some people don't even leave the house in a day, right? But why the coder was angry at me was, and this is this there's a senior guy in the team, so you know, I was quite keen to impress him, so I was a little bit anxious that he was um showing that he wasn't happy with me. He said that after the last session, we'd had the workshop where he'd learned about BDNF and um how exercise impacts brain function and brain states that he didn't believe what I was saying and it couldn't possibly be right, and to prove me wrong the next day he cycled into work to show that this possibly could not be true, and on arriving at work, he described that he had the most productive morning he had ever had, and he was annoyed because he'd learned that actually it was a really good idea for him to do some exercise before or on his way or on his way into work, and he didn't like the idea of that, he didn't like the idea that he was gonna have to, if you really wanted to be, you know, the role model to his team and to actually perform to his potential, that was gonna involve it him moving around in the morning before he came into work, you know, not just getting out of bed, getting in the car, parking the car, sitting at his desk and expecting his brain to be in fantastic form that he was gonna have to work out how do I start building some exercise into my pre-work routines. So, of course, he wasn't um deeply angry with me. Um I think he was just a little bit of a character, and he was um just demonstrating that point to me that actually you know, being at your best and actually doing the things that you need to do to be healthy and happy doesn't always feel great in the moment, but if you do those things, you get the longer term wins. So, you know, by the end of the morning, he felt really good about himself and really proud of himself that he'd had such a positive impact on the work that he was doing, and that he was able to model better behaviours to um to his team members, and by doing that able to get more out of his team so that they could um they could um do more impactful work and and move the the the project forward faster. And I think that this story is really interesting as we come into the AI era. This was a technology company, and they were building literally a a tech product from scratch, so you know they were designing it and building it as they went. These were not people that had learned their jobs and they were just coming in and doing their jobs day after day. The same thing, they got good at it, they'd learned the skills, and they just came in and did what they uh they'd always done. They were facing new challenges and new problems every day because you know they were getting feedback from clients and from the product managers and the relationship managers about what needed to be improved in the product, how could it become better, etc. You know, the business is trying to raise money as well at the same time. So this is really insightful because it shows us why brain states and managing brain states is more important than ever before. Because of the velocity of change in the AI era. So one of the when when I first started learning about neural network AI, the from the the godfather of this work, Jeffrey Hinton, and reading about his life's work, there are a few things that came in into my mind, which was well, this is gonna overwhelm people because it's gonna just speed up change. So before that, we were speaking about the VUCA world, the volatile, uncertain, complex, ambiguous world. At that point, we kind of had the VUCA world plus the post-COVID world, and then it was very clear that if we had a technology that could literally do many of the things up until that point in history, only human brains could do that it's going to speed everything up, just like the industrial revolution sped up the production of products and making things because we didn't have to rely on only human physical effort and energy anymore. We could we could do the same things humans have been doing, but with machines, and those machines could run 24-7, and they could lift and lift heavier things than a human could, and they could do things at s at the speeds at faster speeds than humans could. And essentially, neural network I is just the cognitive equivalent of that. So I knew that people would be getting more overwhelmed. Um I knew that uh people were gonna have to uh learn skills faster, uh in the sense of the what I what I've learned to to make me really good at my job today probably isn't gonna be the same things that I need to be really good at my job in in 12 months or even six months. And technology has been bringing that style of disruption for the last um 15 plus years, but not at the pace like neural network AI is so you know, people have had to make a transition to learn how to use PCs and then their phones and then different sales and marketing systems and you know just adoption to different ways of working. We had the agile workflows, we had the hybrid workflows, got to learn how to get on with uh younger colleagues from different generation, whatever. And so this is this has been going on, but not at the intensity that the AI world is bringing. Um one thing that I didn't think about at the time, but it's become very, very evident now. When I was speaking, I was at um an AI dinner just with uh very senior leaders talking about how AI is impacting their workforces, and there was a very senior solicitor, um essentially the managing partner at the firm, and she was describing how one of the surprising impacts that AI is having on their people is the volume, the sophistication, and the speed at which their clients are now able to reply to them. So if you're um engaging with a solicitor to write you a contract, um because you're going into a partnership deal with someone or you're employing someone, or whatever you need a solicitor to write you a con contract for, you know, in days gone by, you as the client would have to, once the solicitor had given you what they're the document they created for you, which would have been largely sort of a developed document anyway, that they're just sort of tweaked for your very specific needs, maybe even just change the name and address on it. Um I'm being unkind to and our solicitors do much more than that, but um that you as a client would have to read the the contract, read the clauses. Are you happy with everything? That is a massive high high charge brain state task. But now people can just feed those contracts into generative AI. The generative AI, like once you trust it, once you've seen it actually working, and they do, will tell you exactly what they think about the contract, and they'll write the reply for you back to the solicitor about the things that you'd like them to change, reposition. And people can do this in one-tenth of the time, probably much faster than that, and it would have previously taken them. And of course, previously they would have probably procrastinated on reading through the document because it can be slavish. But essentially, what the the managing partner, the in other words, the CEO of the firm was saying that the solicitors are just overwhelmed, they've just never seen clients respond so quickly, so thoroughly, and you know, then putting the the ball back in the solicitor's court and expecting them to reply again quickly. So AI is changing the world, and that makes brain states more important than ever because we need our high charge brain state more than ever. What the high charge, what the AI era is forcing us to do is to learn more things, is to use that prefrontal cortex, that scarce cognitive energy that we have more and more, if in order just to do the basics. So you've got to learn the new AI tool that that you know you need to use, and when you use it, it makes you so much better. You've got to get in the habit of doing that, you've got to process um the increased volume of things that are coming into your inbox, but all the time you've got to manage your stress levels and your overwhelm and that nagging doubt in your head saying, Am I gonna be able to do this? Am I still gonna be relevant? Is my job gonna be here? And what about the kids? Is what they're learning at school relevant? What are they gonna be doing? So you've got this um cacophony of noise going on inside of our heads and around us. So, therefore, getting into our high-charge brain states consistently is more difficult than ever before, but more important than ever before, and again, that's why we need to understand our brain states, and what the story I started the podcast with shows is that the all the three brain states, the high charge, the medium charge, and the recharge, they're interconnected. You don't just magically get into high charge brain states at will, you've got to put the foundation blocks in place. So it's not only about mastering your your understanding of your brain states and getting you know brain state intelligent in relation to what you need, it's also about building the habits that allow you to get there. So that that is key, and and that's why I am absolutely compelled that the most important thing that any of us can can learn and to get better at and to work on every day is building better brain state habits. And remember, there are only six habits that we need to get right. Um, so this is not like an endless list of things that we need to do, and just by building one of those uh six habits, you're gonna be able to function cognitively much, much better. So the story is very simple. If we want to thrive in the AI era, it's about brain states, and there are only three brain states. So we've got to master those three brain states, get the right balance, and we do that by learning and building the six uh brain state habits. And what just just by starting to do that, we become a habit mechanic. That's what we're doing, because we're working on ourselves in a very articulate way. You know, we're not talking about something woo-woo here, we're not talking about um you need more motivation, or or you need you need some therapy, or you need some um some you need to change your mindset. We're talking about understanding and refining and tuning up the the the the driver of all of our behaviour our brain and the fact that our brain operates in states, and if we understand those states and we can build the habits to help us to optimise them, then the world is literally our oyster.

SPEAKER_01: 19:08

So that's the key.

SPEAKER_00: 19:10

Um that's why we always say you're only ever one, register habit away. I just want to finish by saying one other thing. If you have any questions, you listen to this thinking, well, what about this, John, and what about that, just send them in to us and we'll happily answer them in the podcast. Um, what we're doing or some things that you don't understand, then just let us know. Because that's what we're here, we're here to help you be at your best, and we know the the way to do that is to actually um understand your brain states and um and build better brain state habits, and in other words, become a habit mechanic, and as many people are doing actually to master that skill, become a habit mechanic coach, even if you're just using the skills for yourself. So we're here to help you. So, any questions let us know, um, and we will we'll answer you directly, or we'll pick up those questions in the podcasts. If you want to ask a question, but you want to be anonymous, just say that and we won't reveal your name. Um, so yeah, we're here to help. And as overwhelming as it might ever feel, the good news is you only ever one brain state habit away.