Habit Mechanic: Performance Psychology for the AI Era
Habit Mechanic is a performance psychology podcast for the AI era — for professionals, teams and leaders who want to stay irreplaceable as AI reshapes the work humans get paid to do.
Focus, decision-making and mental energy are becoming the real constraints on performance. Each episode explores how to optimise your brain's natural energy patterns — what I call Brain States — so you can do high-value work, work effectively with AI, and sustain performance without burning out.
I'm Dr Jon Finn. I hold a PhD in performance psychology, I've spent 25 years working with professionals, leaders and elite performers across business and sport, and I'm the author of the bestselling books The Habit Mechanic and Train Your Brain for the AI Revolution.
Try the Habit Mechanic system — your personal performance psychology team — at https://habitmechanic.ai?src=podcast
Habit Mechanic: Performance Psychology for the AI Era
Stop Training the Wrong Brain Network
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Text us a question and we'll answer it on the podcast...
Start free: build your Brain State Tracker at 👉 habitmechanic.ai (and see the network maps: which loop each brain state runs on, and which network each of your coaches activates.)
You're training your brain right now. The problem is what you're training.
In this episode, Dr Jon Finn explains why overwhelm, poor focus and "no discipline" aren't personality traits — they're the result of which brain networks you practise activating. The modern world (and much of the internet, by design) has you strengthening your Medium Charge network all day: busy, always-on, never enough energy to focus properly. And here's the AI-era problem — that's exactly the work AI does faster and cheaper than you.
Jon covers: the neuroplasticity research that started it all 25 years ago
· why crossword-puzzle "brain training" got it wrong
· the three brain states and the network each one runs on
· why the effortful fixes never stick (willpower is a scarce resource)
· and how to use AI as cheap brain power — offloading Medium Charge work while deliberately strengthening your High Charge and Recharge networks.
The practical move: a four-minute session with your Daily Performance Coach at the start of the day, and a few minutes with your Recharge Coach at the end — the two members of your performance psychology team designed for daily use. Both activate the networks for you, and both are free to try.
Why Brain Training Matters
SPEAKER_00Hello, Habit Mechanics, Dr. John Finn here. I want to talk about why we need to train our brains and specifically our brain states in exactly the same way we train our body in principle.
The Neuroplasticity Wake Up Call
SPEAKER_00So about 25 years ago, I was sitting in a UK research facility, a five-star facility where I was studying, and it's a place where they were undertaking research for organisations such as NASA, helping them to figure out how they could keep their astronauts healthier in space. These were the people that were teaching me. Um, and I was reading a peer-reviewed research paper that was possibly the first to use the term neuroplasticity. So this was a paper that had come out of France, and it was by some French neuroscientists, and they'd been using this new technology called functional MRI scanners to look inside brains in real time. And at the time, France was a leading nation in terms of having lots of functional MRI scanners for whatever reason the French government had invested into that technology. So we were reading lots of research from French scientists, but this was a new insight at the time. The idea that our brains are not fixed, they don't um become rigid and unchangeable when you stop growing, like all the leading scientists thought at the time. The research was showing that brains are malleable, they're changeable. And this I this word neuroplasticity just means that the neurons in our brain, of which we have about 100 billion, they're like plasticine, neuroplasticity, and it means they can be re-remoulded and reshaped. And I talk a lot about this in the Habit Mechanic, and I start going deep into the idea of neuroplasticity and then epigenetics in um chapter five.
Overwhelm Is A Brain State
SPEAKER_00And the reason I want to talk about this is that I feel like we're living in a world where we're constantly being told that if you're overwhelmed, if you're unfocused, if you're stressed because of AI, um, if you just lack discipline, if your personality just is what it is, then that's just me, that's just how I am. But that's simply not true. How overwhelmed you feel, how focused or unfocused you feel, how stressed you feel, how much discipline you might have or not have is actually driven by your brain states, and your brain states are reprogrammable depending on what you practice. Now, the term train your brain or brain training got quite a lot of bad press probably ten years ago because um things like crossword puzzles were being um trumpeted as being a cure for any type of brain issues, um but they're not a cure for all any type of um issues that emerge from your brain, like being overwhelmed or being unfocused or whatever it is. Doing crossword puzzles is great brain practice for doing crossword puzzles. But if you want to get better at managing overwhelm and stress and better focus, then you need to practice, you need to activate the networks in your brain that are responsible for those things. And we've had to figure out what those networks actually are, but now we understand what they are and we understand how to train them. So when I talk about train your brain, I'm not talking about something woolly and fluffy, I'm talking about activating the neural networks in your brain that are responsible for whether you are at your best or not at your best. And the surprising thing is we're training those networks all the time. But most of us, most of the time, have been training the wrong type of network.
Recharge Medium High Charge Explained
SPEAKER_00We've been training and strengthening our medium charge brain state network. So, in case you don't understand uh brain states, we have three. We have the recharge brain state, we have the high charge brain state, and we have the medium charge brain state. And if we zoom out from that, we can think of our brain as being a bit like a rechargeable battery. There's only so much charge in every 24-hour period, and our brain operates in three charge states. Recharge is sleeping, relaxing, switching off, medium charge is doing autopilot busy thinking.
SPEAKER_01Um the the sort of work that we don't have to spend too much brain power on.
SPEAKER_00High charge is real focus, and it's hard to do, and each of those states operate on it on its own network. Yeah, there's some overlap, but there's a network that runs each of the brain states, and the modern world has conditioned us, and it's actually large parts of the modern world, like social media, like many parts of the internet, have been designed to hack into your uh medium-charge brain state network and to strengthen it, so you spend more of your time feeling busy, always on, never enough time to rest, never enough mental energy to focus properly. You're always on, you're always busy, and you're always going, and that's become the habit, and that's what we're training, but we're not training it deliberately, it's just happened.
How The Internet Trains Busyness
SPEAKER_00So if we wanna be at our best more often, if we want to thrive in the AI era, we've got to stop ourselves from doing that, we've got to do something different, and we first of all got to recognise that as well as being in the medium charge brain state too often each day, as well as that's bad for our for our mental health, for our physical health, disruptive for us feeling good about ourselves, disruptive for us performing to our potential. The medium charge tasks that we are spending our time doing in those brain states, in that brain state, the medium charge brain state, are the ones that AI is exceptional at and that AI can do. Many of those tasks that humans have only ever been able to do much faster and much cheaper than humans can. So, humans, us, we're going to be valued less and less for spending time doing those tasks at work or in our own business because they can be outsourced to technology. So, what do we need to do instead? Well, we need to very deliberately chart uh train up and activate our high charge network and our recharge network. And I appreciate you're probably thinking, well, how do I even where do I even start to do that? Well, the good news is you don't have to think too much about it. The biggest barrier to training, deliberately training any of your networks is that you need high-charge brain power, you need mental energy, you need what we call willpower. Willpower is a scarce resource. So even if you have done some things in the past that have made it easier for you to sleep well or to focus how you want to each day, those things are probably effortful. They're like getting down on the floor and doing press-ups or sit-ups. I don't mean literally, I just mean in the same, it takes effort, right, to do those things. Um course, press-ups and sit-ups get easier if you practice them because they become habit, but in the first instance, they're effortful, and you might start doing them around the new year, but then you give up, they fall by the wayside. Well, that's what happens to the kind of things that we do to activate our high charge and our recharge networks, and they fall by the wayside, and what becomes constant is that we're constantly firing and strengthening our medium charge brain states, and that's why I've been so excited about AI and have been talking about it a lot over the last two years, and even wrote a best-selling book about it, Train Your Brain for the AI revolution, because I recognized that we could use AI to start to help us to um manage our brain states in simple terms. So
Using AI As Cheap Brain Power
SPEAKER_00AI really is just cheap brain power, that's all that it is, and if we harnessed it in the right way, we could use it as a tool to one offload lots of our medium charge tasks so we don't have to do those anymore, but two, make it easier for us to activate our high charge networks and our recharge networks, and that's why I created Habit Mechanic AI, which essentially gives everybody who wants one their own performance psychology team, and there are two members of that team that are designed to be used every day, and if you just use them every day, they activate directly, and when you're working with them, they they activate these for you, um, but then they give you a much better chance of activating these brain states when you're not working with them, is they make it much easier for you to activate your high charge network and your recharge network. And the best way to understand what I mean by this is just having a go and they're they're free to use. Uh so habitmechanic.ai has a free level, anyone can go in there and start using it, and we give you 10 credits to start with, and you can continue using it for free if you want, or you can upgrade. But if I was coaching my own clients, okay, what do what do I need to do to be at my best more often?
Daily Performance Coach Routine
SPEAKER_00The number one thing I'd want them to do is at the start of the day would be to work with what we call the daily performance coach, go and use that for free, and that's gonna help you to one understand your brain states better, but two, it's gonna make it easier for you to get do more high charge thinking every day, activate that network more every day and strengthen it, and also do more recharge every day, and that's the coach that builds what we call the brain state tracker, but it does lots of other things as well, and just within about four minutes, you complete a session, and you've got a much better chance of activating the brain states that you want to activate that day, and just by using the coach, you'll be activating your high charge brain state more, strengthening that pathway.
Recharge Coach For Switching Off
SPEAKER_00And then at the end of the day, I'd ask my clients to work with the recharge coach. The recharge coach is it's a high charge tool that's designed to make it easier to switch off and get into recharge brain states. Umy of you will have used the three-to-one reflection before, and some of the tools that I talk about in the Hobbit Mechanic and train your brain for the air revolution. This is the best um recharge stress processing tool we've ever created because you've got an intelligent system that's working through your day with you. It takes about two, three, four minutes, depending on how deep you want to go. And again, it helps you to activate your your high charge network just for a little while, just for a few minutes, so that then for the rest of the evening and into sleep, it's much easier to activate your recharge network.
Recap And How To Start
SPEAKER_00So, to recap, how we feel isn't driven by us just being how we are, by our personality, or by having too much work to do, or by the AI era, it's driven by the how we train our brain, and to be more accurate, it's driven by the neural networks that we are practicing activating. The modern world has made it really easy for us to practice activating our medium charge network. To balance that and to actually be more successful, we need to get much better at activating our high charge and our recharge networks, and that's exactly why I created Habit Mechanic AI, which you can start using for free. Um, it's one step at a time, there's no magic, but it's like getting down on the floor and doing one press up or one sit-up, and the benefits quickly accumulate. Um, and that's all I wanted to say today, and I'm gonna be coming back and talking about these things in much, much more detail. But if you want to be at your best, if you want to feel healthy, happy, like you're achieving what you can achieve and more, you've got to think of training your brain like you train your body, because literally our brain is the same as our body, as our muscles, in the sense that it's a physiologically adaptive system, but we need to be really deliberate in how we're wiring it up.
Explore The Network Maps
SPEAKER_00And if you want to go, if you're thinking, what is John talking about here? If you go on to habitmechanic.ai, we've mapped out all the different networks, you can see um the loop that your recharge brain runs on, the loop your medium charge brain runs on, your high charge, and you can see how all the different members of your performance psychology team, how each one activates a different network. That's the level of detail that has gone into um this program. Um, so again, that sounds interesting to you or to your team or to your clients if you're a coach, just go check out habitmechanic.ai. You're seeing the link below. Um, enjoy the rest of the day, and I'll speak to you again soon.