Why Stress Is a Brain State Problem (And How I Learned to Coach Myself Out of It)

In this episode, Dr. Jon Finn shares the single most important thing he’s learned about managing stress — not from theory, but from coaching himself over many years.

We live in a world of constant transition: post-COVID disruption, rising uncertainty, and the accelerating AI era. Yet most traditional approaches to stress were never designed around how the brain actually works. The brain doesn’t run on information — it runs in Brain States, driven by habits.

Dr. Finn explains why stress is fundamentally a disconnection of meaning in the brain, how these stress responses silently drain hours of cognitive energy every day, and why so many people become stuck in unhelpful thinking loops without even realising it.

He also shares why the real breakthrough came when he stopped trying to “think his way out” of stress and instead learned how to coach himself using the same approach he now uses with clients. The episode explores why focused reflection is one of the most powerful habits for reprocessing stress — and why learning to coach others is often the fastest route to mastering your own brain.

If you’ve ever felt overwhelmed, distracted, or as though you don’t have time to work on stress, this episode may help you see why you don’t have time not to.

Chapters

• 0:00 Framing The Stress Problem
• 3:23 Why Old Methods Fail The Brain
• 5:01 Brain States And Habit Groups
• 6:26 Coaching Yourself By Coaching Others
• 7:36 What Stress Really Is
• 9:44 The Lighthouse Brain And HUE
• 11:46 Disconnections Of Meaning Explained
• 13:56 Life Transitions And Constant Change
• 16:26 Modern Stressors And Brain State Drift
• 18:51 Hidden Time Costs Of Stress
• 20:43 Reprocessing Stress With Focused Reflection
• 22:51 Coaching Others To Strengthen Self-Coaching

Transcript

SPEAKER_01: 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 how I've learned to coach myself to get better at managing stress. I want to share with the with you the one thing that not only makes the biggest impact on how I deal with stress, but also the thing that I see having the big pack biggest impact on the people that I have the privilege to work with every day. But I want to go back to the basics. So we live in a world where it's more chaotic than ever before. It's the VUCA world, but it's also the VUCA world plus the post-COVID world and COVID and what happened in that period, you know, is still having a huge impact on society. And then we're in entering the AI revolution where we've got this fastest pace of technological integration into our work lives and our daily lives than we've ever seen before. And we know that the thing that is running our life is our brain. And we have all these different approaches that we've been told about that were in a very well-intended way, designed to help us to be at our best and to deal with things like stress. But turns out 99.9.9.9% of those approaches, when they were designed, they didn't consider how the brain actually worked. Um, and therefore, what we're seeing more and more is that those approaches are failing to actually help us to do better because they're largely based on the idea that if we could just get people to know what they need to do differently to be at their best, then they'll be able to do it. But of course, that's not how humans operate because it's not how brains operate. Brains run in states, and there are three core brain states, and those brain states have been driven by habits, and we might say there are six core habits or groups of habits that are that are really important for driving our brain states and helping us to get our brain states to the place that is most helpful for us, and in order to understand those habits and put them into practice every day. What what I've been doing and my colleagues at tougher minds is we've been training people to become habit mechanics, but we know that the true test of knowing something is being able to teach it to somebody else, and therefore, in more recent years, we've been training people to become habit mechanic coaches, and it's more important than ever before if you want to function really well, to not only understand your brain states, not only understand the habits you need to get your brain states working well, but to be able to manage and change your own behavior. So that is to coach yourself. Um, and some people are able to do that just by becoming a habit mechanic, but most people need, and this is includes me, they need to learn how to coach others in order to really understand how to help themselves, and that is my own story. I would be nowhere near as good at helping myself be at my best if I wasn't coaching other people, because by coaching other people, it makes me better understand what I need to do to be at my best, and it makes me um refine and practice the things that I need to do more consistently. So because of the conditions of the world that we're living in, it's easier than ever to become stressed, and to understand that we have to go into the foundational understanding of well, what is stress? Our brain is old, it's old technology, and it has some primary operating rules. It's designed to help us to stay alive, so it's a survival brain. It it it tries to do that in the most energy efficient way possible because for most of our existence, energy's been a scarce resource, and what our brain is doing constantly to help us to survive is it's scanning, so our attention is scanning, it's scanning the present, and this is happening silently, but it's aware, and it's like when you hear a bang before you know it, your attention is on it, you feel it in the gut, right? You quickly switch your attention to that thing because your brain is silently scanning the environment, looking out for threats and problems and worries, but it's not just doing it for the present, it's also doing it for the past and for the future, and that's because our brain is a survival problem-solving machine. The way that we make this really easy to understand is by talking about the lighthouse brain. So it's like you've got this lighthouse in your brain and it's scanning the environment. This lighthouse, a beam of light, but not just the present, it's also the past and the future, worrying about past mistakes, worrying about what might go wrong in the future. What are the threats? Um, not just to your physical being, but to your social status. And that that lighthouse beam is run by Hugh, horribly unhelpful emotions. And neurobiologically, when Hugh sees something or just detects something um that doesn't feel quite right, or it knows there's a problem, a problem with maybe how you behaved, or how you might potentially behave in the future, what you said to someone, uh what you didn't do, what you did do, it creates what we call a disconnection of meaning systems. So, what that basically means is that you you your hue subconsciously spots something that has either happened or is happening or might happen that doesn't align with what it expects to happen. So that's what we mean by disconnection of meaning systems. So you can just think of this very simply. Um, you got an email from your boss this morning, and the tone of the email wasn't what you expected. That creates a disconnection of meaning systems. You were following your colleague in the office, and you expected them to open the door for you and they didn't. That creates an ex uh they you expected them to hold the door open for you, and they didn't, they'll let it shut in your face. That connects a disconnection of meaning systems. You were sat on a train and someone was playing their music really loudly, and you don't you expect people to respect other people's privacy, that create connect creates a disconnection of meaning systems, and a disconnection of meaning systems is what we call a stress response. So you get this disconnection between what you're expecting to happen versus what should happen, and you get a stress response. And the first thing that happens in a stress response is your um the fight and flight system kicks in, so your body physically starts to get ready, even if it's not a a situation where you need a physical response, your body starts to get ready. Um, and then broadly your attention, that spotlight of attention from a lighthouse brain gets magnetized onto the threat, the problem, the worry, and you know, and all of this happens literally in the snap of a fingers, so that fight or flight system is kicking in before you've even recognised it. And the world we're living in, there are more of these disconnections than ever before. So, in um stress theory, um the or let me say this another way there's there's a science around transitions, the kind of transitions that people have in their life. Some transitions are very normal, like um I I transition from being a child to a teenager or a teenager to an adult, or I get married, or I buy my first house, or I get my first job, whatever it is. Um there's these very normal transitions that we have in our life all the way through to I eventually retire. There's also non-normal transitions, which are oh I broke my leg on a ski trip, didn't expect that to happen, or I was ill uh when I at the worst time possible because I had a really important thing going on at work, or um, I get sacked, whatever it is. But in transition literature, all the transition is it's a heightened period of stress responses. So uh transitions just mean that there are lots of different disconnections of meaning systems around you, so different stresses, so your brain is get getting propelled into this kind of fight or flight um perpetual cycle. And the reason I'm saying this is because a big chunk of my own PhD research is in transitions, and I think for most people, if not everybody, that's the best way I can explain what is going on in the modern world, is that it's like we've all been propelled, catapulted into this perpetual transitional state where there's just so much change going on, nothing feels settled anymore. There's just this continual churning of things changing in our lives. You know, we saw it in an exaggerated way during the COVID period where you know, for many people they were told they had to stay at home, um, kids couldn't go to school, uh, had to get a vaccination, um, you know, and so on and so forth. And then after that period, we've had the energy shock where energy got much more expensive, so everybody's bills went up. We've had massive inflation, and then we've got um lots of societal problems that have stemmed out of the COVID period. Now we've got this emerging neural network technology called AI that is potentially threatening our jobs, or um, best case, it's dramatically changing uh many people's jobs, and these are all disconnections of meaning systems, they're all stress responses. So we live in a world where we're more stressed than ever before, and this has seismic impact or a seismic impact on our brain states. So if you are in a heightened state of stress, you will not be able to get it'll be much more difficult to get high quality recharge. It and therefore it will be much more difficult to do high-quality, high charge thinking, and you end up getting stuck in this uh kind of unfocused, distracted, medium-charge brain states where you're just stuck on these unhelpful thinking loops where you spend most of your day distracted by thinking about the stresses and the stresses that are going on in your in your life, and you can't get your attention away from them, and it's real, and it drains people's time. One of the main things that I hear people say who are who are struggling, and I know that if they're struggling, what they really need is they need a human to support them, they need coaching, is they'll say, I don't have I don't have enough time for coaching. Wow, the amount of time we will be wasting and that is being drained from our life if we are in these states, it's unreal. Well, you might be talking four, five, six hours a day when you start to um add up the the poor sleep quality, uh the time you waste trying to do a task, but you just can't focus on it, and it goes on, uh, then you end up getting ill and having to take off, you know, uh, or just being functioning at a reduced capacity. So this silent change that is going on in all our life is creating these disconnections of meaning systems in our brains that is creating these stress responses, that is creating these fight or flight responses, that is really messing up our brain states. Um, and I'm I'm not immune to this. I live in the world as well, and so do the people that I coach, so the people that my colleagues coach. And having done a PhD in partly in stress response and um what I called emotional regulation, I've got more experience than most, and not only the science that sits behind why stress happens and how to manage it, but actually putting it into practice, and one of the hidden things that uh I don't really hear spoken about when it comes to stress is the need to reprocess the stress response, and this is one of the six habits that you hear me talking about. Because if you have a set of worrying thoughts in your head that are just whirling round and you can't get them out of your head, but you keep paying attention to them, and the straw the thoughts become stronger and clearer because actually you're developing more wires in your brain for those thoughts. You can't just uh breathe them away or meditate them away, you need to deal with them and tackle them. And the number one thing that I've learned is the bet the absolute best way to do that is what I call broadly this is an umbrella term, is focused reflection. And there are lots of different ways you can do focus reflection that I'm not going to get into today, but essentially it's about taking those unhelpful, worrying thoughts out of your head, putting them down on paper, and then structuring them in very specific ways so that you can actually see them, actually start to control them, and actually start to reframe some of those unhelpful framings that your hue brain, the limbic regions, your horribly unhelpful emotions, is is putting around those thoughts. And one of the things that I found so helpful by becoming a coach, a certified habit mechanic coach, as well as I am the original certified habit mechanic coach, is that by teaching other people these uh techniques, they're in mind me to do them as well. And they remind me to stay on top of my own stress management. And the number of times in a coaching session, I've just shown one of my clients a very, very simple um focus reflection technique. Let's say the the um what what we call the wabber, which is the written it brain argument. What I see is literally in minutes people are able to process a set of unhelpful thoughts they may have been carrying around for weeks, and people will say that, they'll say, I can't believe I've been worrying about that for a week. That has wasted so much of my time. We don't do a time analysis on how often we're thinking about worries, doubts, unhelpful thoughts, but it can be an awful lot in the world that we live in because there's so many of these disconnections of meaning systems, and by doing that, what we're actually able what we're what we're doing is we're calming the subconsciousness, and we're priming a new set of neurobiological connections, or in other words, we're priming a different story for Hugh, and this is where that Hugh willpower coaching relationship comes in in our lighthouse brain model, where you've got Hugh who's running the the um spotlight of attention, but you also have Willa Willamina power there or willpower that can come in and actually coach and mentor Hugh, and that's what we're doing there, and it's like we're coaching ourselves. But my experience has been that I could only get really good at coaching myself by coaching others and learning how to coach others because there's that old saying, you know, you don't know it until you can teach it, and actually by teaching it whether it's formally or or informally, you are refining your practice, you are actually trying and testing ideas in a way that you you're not able to just when you're working on yourself. So that's why I see that becoming a habit mechanic is great, but actually, the if you really want mastery, then becoming a c a habit mechanic coach is the key for thriving in the world that we live in. And no doubt, as you're seeing, it's not only You that feels overwhelmed, it's people around you, and they need this support as well. So, by learning how to coach yourself, then you can use the exact same techniques to coach them. Imagine being able to just show someone a really simple technique that you know is about helping them to manage their brain states and build better habits, but they just see it as like a as an exercise where they can where they say to you, I can't believe I've been worrying about that for weeks, and all you've shown them to do is a really simple uh process. So that's why I wanted to share with you. We live in a world where we are overwhelmed and it's really messing up our bread states, getting that right balance between recharge, medium charge, and high charge. But it doesn't have to be that way. We can be proactive in how we spot the stresses when they emerge, but also in how we reprogram the stresses and very deliberately process out the stress. Um and that's something I'm really passionate about, and it's been a huge chunk of my work over the last uh 25 years actually helping people to get better at doing that. So I hope that's got you thinking. And however bad it feels, or however um overwhelmed you might feel at any one point, or however you might feel that I've tried everything. Literally, when you start to understand brain states and you start to build the habits to help you to make it easier to manage your brain states, just one of those, just one habit, getting one habit in place, and it might be that re stress reprocessing habit, can make a seismic difference in your life. And that's why we always say you only have a one brain state habit away.