Shownotes
You've tried to change something and slipped back into the same loop. You concluded you lacked discipline. Alan Bodnar's work says that conclusion is the mistake, and that it's costing you more than the loop is.
Most of what you do isn't chosen. An automatic system is generating your first thought, reaction, and assumption about everything you meet, and you're the conscious driver making sense of it afterward. This conversation reframes change from a battle of willpower into something quieter and more workable: noticing, then choosing where your attention goes. You'll leave with a way to see your own behavior without the shame attached, and one concrete thing to do the next time you catch yourself mid-loop.
About the Guest:
Alan Bodnar spent a decade researching over 500 books on neuroscience, behavior, AI, and mindfulness, testing each idea on himself, and distilled the result into an original framework in his book The Self-Driving You. His aim is self-help with real substance: making the question of who we are genuinely understandable and usable.
Key Takeaways:
- Two systems run you. The automatic one is always on and produces your first thought, reaction, and belief. The conscious one flickers on intermittently. You identify with the second, but the first does most of the driving.
- The autopilot isn't the enemy. It usually does its job well. The work is noticing when it's stuck and offering an alternative.
- It's not personal. You didn't fail at willpower. You attached to an automatic response and assumed it was true.
- It all comes down to attention. The brain wires patterns impartially through what you repeat. Deliberate attention is how you take the wheel.
- Slowing your breath applies the brake. Alan's framing: the stress response is the accelerator, the parasympathetic system is the brake, and breath is how you reach for it mid-loop.
- Rewiring takes years, not a weekend. Five years in, Alan is less reactive but hasn't changed everything. He says so plainly.
Connect With the Guest:
- Website: https://www.theselfdrivingyou.com
- Book: The Self-Driving You: Awaken the Driver Within to Rewire Your Brain and Transform Your Life, on Amazon and Audible
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alan-bodnar-21bb2513
Episode Chapters:
[00:00] Welcome to Mind Over Matter: the self-driving you
[02:02] Who's Actually Driving: the two systems behind every decision
[06:51] It's Not Personal: why willpower was never the problem
[08:10] 500 Audiobooks and a Fear of Public Speaking: Alan as his own test subject
[11:58] Always On: the autopilot in an ordinary day
[13:06] Deliberate Attention: finding the brake mid-loop
[17:36] Mindfulness as Mental Training: rewiring over years, not weekends
[22:10] Where to Find Alan and the Book
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Transcripts
00:00:08 Archita: Welcome to Mind over Matter, I am Markita. This is the show about what we are truly capable of when we stop fighting ourselves and learn to work with how we are actually built. Today we are exploring a fascinating idea the self driving you. The relationship between your conscious self and the automatic mind that does most of the driving. By the end, I think you'll walk away with a genuinely new way to look at your own behavior and some real tools for taking the wheel. My guest has spent a decade building toward this. Alan Bodner has researched over five hundred books on neuroscience, behavior, AI, and mindfulness, and distilled it into an original framework in his book, The Self Driving You. His goal is self-help with real substance, making the question of who we are genuinely understandable and usable. So, Alan, welcome to the show. I have really been looking forward to this one. And yeah, I'm really excited for this conversation. I, I, I'm sure the listeners are as well.
00:01:18 Alan Bodnar: Me too. Thanks for having me here. And thank you as well for that great introduction.
00:02:02 Archita: I'm really thankful that you took the time out to be here because I believe this question, uh, that who you truly are. And, uh, you know, can you take the driver's seat of your own life? That's, that's a really important question. And a lot of listeners will be able to resonate with this as well. So I hope this helps them. And, um, now, uh, without wasting any more time, let's dive into the conversation. Alan. Um, I love the metaphor at the center of your work. So let's start there. You know, uh, the self driving you. Uh, so I think there's a misconception that gently corrects because a lot of people believe they are consciously in control of most of what they do, when the reality is quite different for someone hearing this idea for the first time. What do you most get wrong about who's actually doing the driving in our daily lives?
00:03:01 Alan Bodnar: Yeah, and I think for this, it's important to understand the systems way of thinking. So in psychology and in the book, these Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman, he popularized the idea of these two systems. And that's really what my metaphor of humans being the supervisor or driver in a predominantly self driving vehicle. That's where that idea comes from. So system one is. Always on and automatic. And it accounts for our first thought behavior, habit, emotion and opinions and beliefs to everything we encounter. While we are the conscious driver, the one that we identify with as I. That is system two and system two is not always on. It comes on intermittently and that function is consciousness. So our executive control network, which gives us the ability to plan, monitor, deliberate and where self-control comes from. And that is what makes up the driver. So it's all based on those two systems. It just the metaphor allows us to understand those better. But what that is saying is system one is always on and it's making our decisions while we're that conscious driver who is basically making sense of what system one is doing. And our role as that conscious driver is to be able to take the wheel when it gets stuck and provide an alternative Of response. But the challenges we've grown so, so accustomed to this automatic system that we almost don't even notice it's there. And we attach to all of its responses as true. And we almost asleep at the wheel, not engaging our driver as much as we can to challenge these automatic responses and then drive the self-driving vehicle in the direction we want.
00:05:50 Archita: To understand the system first. And, um, honestly, uh, there's just something so powerful in that because you're not seeing that the autopilot is the enemy. You're saying it's doing most of the work, uh, often. Well, um, and the goal isn't to fight it, fighter, but to understand your relationship to it. And I think a lot of people listening have blamed themselves for behaviors they felt they couldn't control. And you have just offered a far more useful way to look at it. So thank you so much for that. And, um, now let's go underneath the surface. Uh, so when people try to change and can't, uh, when they fall back into the same loops, despite their best intentions, they usually conclude they lack the willpower or discipline. But your framework points somewhere deeper. So what's really going on beneath the surface when the conscious self and the self driving part of us are working against each other?
00:06:51 Alan Bodnar: Yeah. And I like how you phrased that. So it's not personal, but what's happening is our self driving system is very powerful. So it provides that first thought behavior emotion. Habit and belief that we have. And we're just so accustomed to attaching to it that that's what we do. And we look at it as true and forget or don't even realize that it may not be true. It. And this is the whole idea that it is creating these automatic responses. But they don't have to be true or they're not always accurate. And then that's where our role is to try to engage our consciousness more often and challenge these thoughts. And that can provide some freedom from them. And so yeah, it's not personal, but we have grown up personalizing it. And that's what the challenge is.
00:08:10 Archita: Uh, so that also makes me curious. Alan, uh, was there a moment in your own journey when you saw this play out in yourself?
00:08:20 Alan Bodnar: Yeah, thousands of times. And this is the whole idea is I was listening to over ten years, a book a week, so about five hundred audiobooks. And then I was applying them to my life. So I was acting as my own test subject. And that's why I'm convinced that it's true. And I'm continually working with it each day and challenging these thoughts because yeah, like even I've noticed if I sit down to do something like write within thirty minutes, my mind will come up and say, get up, go have a shower, go have water, go do something. It's always at this thirty minute mark. And then I've challenged myself to say, what if you sit for five more minutes? Or like if you're walking down the street, every person we see, we have instant thoughts and assumptions about them, but that comes from the self-driving system. And generally we don't question it. But this is what it's all about, is trying to be curious about it and not take it personally. I had a lot of fear and anxiety up until I was thirty, and then until even now, I like it doesn't completely go away, but there are strategies to help understand it. But before I turn thirty, I was afraid of public speaking. I had that fear. And for me, I just basically in my framework, that is an experience that was wired to our survival circuitry, which produces fear. And then I attach to it. So I avoided public speaking forever. And then I started listening to audiobooks and thought, why don't I challenge it? And then now I'm able to have this conversation in front of you because of challenging it over and over and over again and realizing, oh, it's a skill that you can learn. And then you rewire that fear. So it's doing that with everything I mentioned. But that's the challenge because you almost have to peel all the layers of the onion and look at each thought, behavior, emotion habit that we have. And that's why I like to try to say to be curious with it because yeah, I also took it personally for a long time, even up until the last few years, but it is more helpful to just look at it as impersonal and then, okay, why don't I experiment and see if there is an alternative response, see if this is an accurate automatic response or not.
00:11:04 Archita: Wow. I think a lot of listeners will be able to resonate with that. And, you know, I love that because the way you describe the brain as an impartial learning network, wiring itself based on what we repeat and not on what's good for us. I think that stays with me. And I think that's the piece most people miss because we keep framing change as a battle of willpower, when it's really more like learning to read, retrain the driver. And that reframe takes the shame out of it so that that totally makes sense. And, um, now let's bring this into the everyday life. So Alan, for someone listening right now, where does the self driving part of them most obviously take over in an ordinary day? The small automatic moments that we barely even notice we are not choosing.
00:11:58 Alan Bodnar: This is the thing. It's always on and it's always generating suggestions to everything we encounter. And even when we're just sitting and we're idle and we're not really paying attention to anything, it's generating wandering thoughts as well. So it provides our first response to everything we encounter, but it's also responsible for daydreaming. And half the time we don't even notice when our mind's wandering. And that's what becomes challenging, is because we are so accustomed to this. We're so attached to it. But most of these thoughts, this system, one is always on. So the self driving system is always on and it's always generating these responses.
00:12:43 Archita: So we don't even realize that it's happening. And I think that's, that's the part that makes it the most hardest for us to overcome it because we don't know how to identify these moments. Exactly. So, uh, Alan, what's in those moments? What's one small way someone can bring their conscious self back to the wheel, even briefly?
00:13:06 Alan Bodnar: Well, the strategy in my book, and I think the strategy in general with what mindfulness and all of these behavioral ideas are trying to accomplish is using deliberate attention. So it all comes down to attention. The brain wires patterns impartially through attention and with repetition. These become the automatic patterns that drive us. But a lot of that is controlled by our self driving system. It can direct our attention. So a lot of times it is choosing what we pay attention to. But we also have this executive driver at the wheel who can direct attention. So we can choose what we pay attention to. And that's deliberate attention. And by doing that, that's how we can engage the wheel and take control from the self-driving system and interrupt what it's saying. The strategy that I like for that is mindfulness. And mindfulness comes in many forms. You can go to your breath, you can do visualization, you can do repetitive words. But essentially what's happening is if I'm sitting on the couch and going back to that example from earlier, if I am writing and then have the thought, oh, go get up. But I don't want to, I want to continue sitting. If that urge is so powerful, the first part is becoming aware of, okay, I'm having that thought. So that's the challenge is the awareness. But once we have the awareness, then I can go to my breath. And when you slow your breath, you apply what is like the parasympathetic system. So that's rest and digest. I call that the brake. So I can now place my attention on my breath instead. Instead of getting up and I can apply the brake and now I'm slowed down. So instead of moving, now I'm staying unmoved. And then from there, through mindfulness, there's also strategies around paying attention to the sensations behind that. And again, it allows you to detach or depersonalize that automatic response and get a new perspective. And then from there, that's where the change happens. That's where you've taken the wheel and you've overridden the self-driving response. This is helpful with like habit, energy, anger, frustration, any emotion really that if we feel like the emotions overpowering at any time, we can use deliberate attention to go to the breath or really put it on anything neutral or positive. And that's how we can disrupt the self-driving system and direct our attention on what we want. And then that is how we start to wire new patterns in the brain that can, in theory, replace that original self driving response.
00:16:12 Archita: Yeah, that truly lands because, Alan, I think you're describing the small stuff and the automatic reach and the reaction before the thought. Uh, also the loop that we slip into. Yeah. Without deciding to.
00:16:31 Alan Bodnar: Yeah, exactly. It's that action before the thought. No, just as you said it, it's that pause. And then what you do during that pause. And then that is where I would say deliberate attention. Yeah.
00:16:44 Archita: Yeah, exactly. And I think that's, that's a great advice. Uh, and, and, you know, what you're offering isn't to white knuckle it, but to bring a moment of awareness in it and that that feels genuinely doable. And it's exactly where. Real change seems to start. So I'm really glad you shared that with us, and I think it's going to help a lot of listeners out there who are still figuring out on, you know, how to do that. So thank you for that, Alan. And now, uh, I want to slow down here because this is the heart of your work. Not a quick hack, but an actual method. So you talk about taking the wheel and wiring your brain in a way that serves you, but for someone who wants to do that, to consciously, consciously shape their automatic self over time, what's the approach you point them toward?
00:17:36 Alan Bodnar: I think it's similar to what we were just describing, but. The idea is deliberate attention and. But then a lot of it, from my experience reading mindfulness and applying it to mindfulness in whatever form that may be of mindfulness. It's it's basically a mental training exercise for attention. So I think that the answer lies in there because it teaches us every time we go to place our attention on something like our breath, we're strengthening our attention. So we're strengthening our ability to take the wheel. But then once we're able to do that, and then we start to pay attention to the like, we go to mindfulness and we're paying attention to the sensation behind these thoughts. Then that is where the insights come from, and that's where the change comes from. And change is not going to happen overnight. We're rewiring the self-driving system that's been wired through a lifetime of experience. And now, for the first time, or maybe not the first time, at least for me, it was I'm taking the wheel and I want it to drive differently. So that's not just going to happen. We have to continually interrupt it through mindfulness to do that, and I've been doing it for five years, and I've definitely changed behaviors like I've been doing it with mindfulness for that amount of time, and I've changed behaviors, but I haven't changed everything. Um, but I'm definitely noticing that I am less reactive. The habit energy is more challenging for me, but I am still gaining an edge on that and have seen a lot of improvement in that front as well. So I think it's figuring out how you want to use your deliberate attention. Like what do you want that thing to be? And for me, I chose mindfulness. I think that helps. And then with mindfulness, when it comes to starting to use it strategically to rewire the self-driving system, there's a number. Well, I guess two main ways where you can practice formally for a fixed period of time. And the other option is informally throughout your day as these automatic responses occur, becoming aware of them and then trying to use mindfulness to apply the brake because a lot of times these self driving thoughts are they trigger the body's sympathetic accelerator. So the stress response and they will activate adrenaline and cortisol. So most well not it depends on experience, but our self driving system can become miscalibrated and accelerate outside of our awareness to much of what we encounter. And that's where if we do mindfulness throughout the day, then like and use it to interrupt these thoughts, then we can apply the brake. So it does allow us to gain control. If our self driving systems prone to this sympathetic acceleration, the stress response, and a lot of people, that's a common thing. I was stressed. You go to the doctor, they say, oh, you're stressed, but a lot of that stress is originating from the self driving system. So we're not even aware that we're stressed, but we're stressed. How do we stop that? By interrupting it throughout the day as it's happening. And mindfulness provides a strategy where you can go to the breath, slow your breath, and apply the brake anytime our vehicle accelerates. But again, it's all easier said than done. We have to build an awareness and then build the practice of being able to do that and then do it throughout the day.
00:21:18 Archita: Great advice, and I think that really reframes it for me because you're describing change less as a one time act of force and more as patiently teaching the driver new routes over time through repetition and awareness. And I think there's real hope in that because it means anyone can begin and the brain is genuinely capable of learning a better way. So I hope that this conversation made a lot of listeners feel less alone in their journey of getting back into the driver's seat of their lives, because that was what this entire conversation was for. And I think you've helped them a lot with that. So thank you so much for that. And now for everyone who wants to go deeper with the self driving you and your work, where's the best place for them to find you?
00:22:10 Alan Bodnar: Yeah, I like that because yeah, this would definitely be the surface. And my book provides a guide that explains everything in a way. It's only four hours long. It's meant to be short and accessible, but it does provide all of this in the same type of tone that I've been providing. But it will provide all the information you need to get started. But again, the book is more of like the the first one percent of the journey where it provides you the information and the rest of it is applying to your life over years. And the I have a website, the self self-driving. You. All one word dot com. And that's a landing page and it will from there give you information about me and the book and also a clickable link where you can go to the book, or you can just go to Amazon or Audible and buy the book. The self-driving you there as well. And I'm on social media. And if you want to message me and ask me questions, you can do that through LinkedIn. On my handle is the self-driving you from there. And if you look up on the other social media platforms, you would see me through the same handle.
00:23:27 Archita: Amazing. Elon, thank you so much for sharing that. And we will make sure to include all those details in today's show notes. So that is just one click away for, for our listeners. So, um, to our listeners, if there's one thing to take from today, let it be this. You may not control every automatic part of you, but you can learn to take the wheel again and again and slowly steer the self, driving you toward the life you actually want. Once again, thank you so much, Alan. There's something genuinely empowering about a framework that helps people understand themselves without judgment, and then gives them the tools to change. And that's exactly what this show is about. And to you listening, sometime tomorrow you'll catch yourself mid loop reacting on autopilot before you even choose to just notice it. And that noticing is you taking the wheel even for a second and every second counts because that's how the driver learns. I am a cheetah and this was mind over matter. Take good care of yourself
