Shownotes
Most of us believe we control our choices. On Wellness Reimagined, host Shreya sits with neurophilosopher Alan Bodnar, whose self-driving framework says most of our driving happens on autopilot, and that this is oddly freeing.
You will leave with a kinder relationship with your own mind, where you can pause between stimulus and response, take the wheel, and slowly rewire the patterns that no longer serve you.
About the Guest:
Alan Bodnar is a neurophilosopher and researcher who spent a decade studying over 500 books on neuroscience, behaviour, AI, and mindfulness. He is the author of The Self-Driving You.
Key Takeaways:
- Most of your thoughts run on autopilot. Seeing them as automatic, not personal, creates room for self-compassion.
- Consciousness is a supervisor, not a constant driver. It engages through deliberate attention.
- The pause is the point. A slow breath activates your brake before you react.
- Potential is not found, it is wired. Attention plus thousands of hours builds mastery.
- Do not stop. Change comes from staying with the practice until one insight reframes everything.
Connect With the Guest:
Website: https://theselfdrivingyou.com
Book: The Self-Driving You, available on Amazon and Audible
Instagram is the best way to reach Alan, and he is also on LinkedIn and TikTok
Episode Chapters:
[00:00] The myth of full control: you are more automatic than you think
[04:00] Why autopilot is always running in the background
[09:00] System one and system two: meeting your conscious driver
[14:00] The frustrated email: taking the wheel before you react
[19:00] Mindfulness as mental training, not mysticism
[24:00] Potential you cannot see until you wire it
[28:00] Staying on the path when it feels like nothing is changing
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Transcripts
00:00:08 Shreya: Welcome to Wellness reimagined. I'm Shreya, and today we are exploring a framework that might just change how you think about consciousness, behavior, and what it means to be fully in the driver's seat of your own life. My guest today has spent the past decade immersed in over five hundred books on neuroscience, behavior, AI, and mindfulness. And that depth of research led him to develop an original framework outlined in his book, The Self Driving You, which means being human as the conscious driver behind the wheel of a self-driving vehicle that does most of the driving. His goal? Self-Help with substance. So, Alan Bodner today, my guest. Welcome, Alan. I'm honored to have you on my show.
00:00:58 Alan Bodnar: Thank you for that great introduction. And I'm happy to be on Wellness Reimagined.
00:01:04 Shreya: Thank you so much for joining us. And just before we begin, a quick disclaimer for my listeners. Some statements reflect personal belief and experiences and are presented as individual views, not medical advice. Listeners should consult qualified professionals for medical conditions.
00:01:23 Shreya: and Alan, first of all, I'm really, really honored to have you here. And, uh, the self-driving metaphor is such a fascinating entry point. And I want to start with what most people get wrong when they think about being in control of themselves, because the metaphor implies that a lot of the driving is already happening without us. So what is the misconception about personal agency that you find yourself pushing back most?
00:01:51 Alan Bodnar: Yeah, I think it's that most of our decisions are conscious decisions and that we are the ones in control and that it's all personal. My framework is about depersonalizing what it is to be human and building an understanding on how automatic we really are. But also at the same time, there is a way for us to engage consciousness and take control and influence how the brain wires. But just as a general concept, we are. The design of the human system is to be self-driving first and then. Consciousness is a secondary type of processing that allows us to go with it or not.
00:02:52 Shreya: And so like when someone first encounters this framework, the idea that the vehicle is mostly driving itself, is that scary for people or is there actually relief in it?
00:03:06 Alan Bodnar: I think it could be both. It really depends on your perspective. For me, it was helpful because it can be difficult to be human, especially with the suffering that we all encounter or deal with either daily or weekly. And for me, thinking that a lot of my thoughts and feelings initially originate from this self driving system outside of my awareness makes it less personal and is more freeing for me, and it helps to depersonalize these thoughts. Where I feel if I feel frustrated or angry or depressed, that I'm able to get a little bit of separation from that and remind myself that it's not personal. I'm the driver, and then you strategies to try to take the wheel and influence it to feel a little bit better.
00:04:15 Shreya: I think that's the insight that unlocks a lot of self-compassion. Um, like if you, if you understand that your autopilot was built before you had a say in it, and you stop blaming yourself for patterns that are not personal failures, they're just old programming. And, uh, I want to go deeper in the neuroscience layer of this. Like you have spent years in and those five hundred plus books. What is the deeper pattern underneath human behavior that you think most wellness conversations completely miss? The root that's driving everything else.
00:04:53 Alan Bodnar: I think that a lot of it is there. It's just the framework helps us understand it a little bit better. So it's difficult because my framework comes from all the experts out there, and then me just synthesizing it into one message. So I think that that is likely what everyone's missing is just seeing the big picture. And we are looking at individual aspects of being human. But without this full picture, it's hard to really understand what it is to be human. And an example would be just autopilot in general. A lot of books, when they talk about autopilot, it's more of a system that is that comes on every once in a while. And a common example in books is when we're driving somewhere on the highway, and then all of a sudden we miss our exit or realize, oh, we just showed up. Like we just got there and we forget the whole journey. And then that's the example for our autopilot kicked in. But it's no, the autopilot is always on. It's just that's an example of when we were asleep at the wheel. But that autopilot is something that's always running in the background and driving us. It's just we're not aware. So yeah, it's not that it's anyone's getting it wrong. It's more just I think. Building this framework so that we can understand it as the full picture. And then to really get what a lot of the experts and all their research really says.
00:06:48 Shreya: So when you say consciousness is the driver, but not always at the will, what does it look like in practice when someone takes that driver's seat intentionally versus when they are just along for the ride?
00:07:03 Alan Bodnar: Yeah, a lot of that comes from the two systems way of thinking, which is that this was popularized by Daniel Kahneman in the book Thinking Fast and Slow. And it basically just says that we have this system, one that's always on generating our first response to everything, which makes up our behaviors, thoughts, beliefs, habits, opinions, etc. and then the system two, that's The person that we identify with I. This is the conscious driver, and that gives us our ability to plan, deliberate and exercise self control. That makes up our conscious driver. But that system two is not always on. It's intermittent. So system one is always on system two. This conscious driver is more of a supervisor. So to answer your question, it's a lot of times we as this driver agree with everything the self-driving system is doing. So we aren't fully utilizing or engaging consciousness or the conscious driver to question our automatic responses. And that's the challenge because we agree with everything the system one is doing for the most part. So we are generally disengaged and we let our self-driving vehicle drive unsupervised. And the way that we can engage consciousness, especially, or. Yeah, the way we engage consciousness is with deliberate attention, especially with exercises like mindfulness. So deliberate attention is basically how we take the wheel with our driver. That's how we engage our driver. And then exercises like mindfulness would be. An example of how we can take the wheel with our driver to question these automatic responses and override them when they don't serve us. And when we do that enough, we can rewire the self driving system with a lot of repetition over time.
00:09:27 Shreya: I think that word intentional gets used a lot, but what you were pointing to something more specific, like is the moment of noticing before you react the gap between stimulus and response, where the actual driver has a chance to show up. And let's make this real. Like, I want to bring your framework into a Tuesday afternoon moment. When someone is in a situation that's frustrating, they're about to react the way they always react, and the pattern is going to play out exactly as it always does. So what does the self-driving framework actually change in that moment?
00:10:11 Alan Bodnar: Yeah, that's a great example because yeah, we've all been there. And let's say even more specifically that we're at work and someone sent us an email and we're frustrated. And now we're about to send another instant email in response. So all of that would be self driving. And we are the driver that can, in that instance, go with it or take the wheel and stop that from happening. But this isn't suppression. This is, like you said, pausing in that moment. And we do that with or one approach. Deliberate attention is the way to do it. But there's many different ways to use deliberate attention with the strategy that I suggest. It's through mindfulness. And what that would mean is in that moment, before I hit send on the email, it's becoming aware of, hey, I'm really frustrated right now. I'm about to send this email. And then with mindfulness, it would be slowing your breath instead. So you go to your breath and you breathe in and breathe out really slowly. The first thing that that does is that triggers the vagus nerve, which activates the parasympathetic system, and it relaxes us. So that is the equivalent to the human brain. So really, every time we slow our breath, we are activating the brake. And that frustration is an example of our self-driving system triggering our sympathetic accelerator. So that's the fight or flight response, which has chemicals like adrenaline and cortisol that are associated with it. So we're in that moment, we're going to our breath instead of hitting send. And when we do that, we're going to start to get new insights. We might still send the email, but it's like you said, it's taking that pause and going to the breath instead. And that's what taking the wheel with your driver would look like.
00:12:38 Shreya: I, I think what you were adding to the mindfulness conversation is that like map, like mindfulness gives you the instruction to be present, but the self driving framework gives you a reason why a structural understanding of what presence is actually doing inside you. AM I right?
00:12:57 Alan Bodnar: Yes, exactly. and making mindfulness less of a mystical thing and making it more grounded in the way. I'm saying it wrong translates to mental training. So that's the idea around mindfulness, is that it's mental training and it's an exercise of deliberate attention. And that is just an example of how you would use it. But it's basically the whole concept is going to the breath or going to a repetitive word or a sensation in the body to impartially view these automatic responses and gain insights to see the truth. And we're basically just challenging their validity to determine whether they are right or wrong. And when we learn that a frustration response, like with the example we're giving in that moment. If you realize, hey, I don't need to send this email. This frustration isn't even real. I'm the problem because my self-driving system, seeing it this way, and I've had that happen so many times where I'm really mad. I go to my breath and then I realize that I'm the problem, like it's my self-driving system and that it's not even real. And then that's where the insights are. So yeah, mindfulness is the key. But really the core of mindfulness is deliberate attention.
00:14:34 Shreya: Yeah. That's beautiful. And let's talk about potential because that's one of the themes you wanted, uh, to explore today. So I'm like, most people relate to potential as something they haven't reached yet, something ahead of them. And you seem to see differently. Like what does unlocking potential actually mean through the lens of your framework?
00:14:57 Alan Bodnar: Yeah, I think for that, with my framework, it tries to explain or does explain the brain as a learning network. And once we understand what that means, then it kind of gives a new meaning to potential. Because to the brain, the way it works is what we place attention on wires, patterns, and with thousands of hours of repetition, we can automate a skill to an expert level. It doesn't matter who we are. It's all about using attention in the same way we do when we first learn something. So this is where with mindfulness, if we're doing this mental training, it doesn't happen overnight. It's thousands of hours. But the brain is an impartial learning network that wires patterns based on where attention goes. And after thousands of hours, some experts suggest ten thousand hours. We can wire mastery. Regardless of who we are, the challenge becomes with what we're talking about, where. For me, I wrote this book. I spent about ten thousand hours writing this book. More than that. Five thousand hours listening to audiobooks and another five thousand hours writing, and then a few thousand hours applying it to my life. But during that time, there were thoughts that were coming up saying, I'm not an author. You're not a writer. Don't. You can't do this. Don't do this. Those thoughts come up thousands of times. So because of everything I've learned, I look at success and potential as a process. So when those thoughts came up, it's like, what we're saying is you take a pause in the thought and you become aware of it. And then in my mind, I would just, okay, I'm going to go and write, eye. But if we listen to it and then we don't take action, then we can't wire that pattern. So that's the challenge, is when we attach to these thoughts, telling us that we cannot do something and then we don't do it. That's why we don't reach our potential. It's not because we aren't special and we can't reach our potential. It's because we're not using that impartial process of the brain to wire patterns for thousands of hours. So if we do that, instead of saying, oh, I can't do something and just think, well, what if I just go and do it? And then you do that for thousands of hours, then see where you end up. So that's why I like to think with potential. We don't really know what our potential is until we spend thousands of hours doing it. So rather than telling ourselves or listening to the self-driving system saying we can't do something, just go do it for thousands of hours and see what happens. That's the only time we'll know. Our potential is after we've spent thousands of hours deliberately using attention to do something.
00:18:13 Shreya: That's widely radical because I think it means potential isn't something you find outside yourself. It's something you access by getting out of your own way. I think that's a completely different relationship with growth and, uh. Well, one last thing that I want to really ask this, uh, you have done five hundred plus books of research. You have written your own framework. You have, you are clearly someone who thinks deeply about this. So what is the thing about being human that still surprises you, still catches you off guard, even after all of it?
00:18:51 Alan Bodnar: Yeah, It's it doesn't matter how much you know, you're still self-driving and automatic. So I'm still challenged with self-driving thoughts of anger, frustration, habits. And that's going to last a lifetime because the process of using deliberate attention with mindfulness to rewire your your vehicle, to regulate it and to wire it so it drives better is a life long endeavor. And I don't think it will ever be done. So everything we're talking about is great in theory, but the challenge is we're self-driving, so it's very difficult to put it all into practice and to try to Depersonalize the self-driving system and try to use your driver to rewire it, to take that pause and to rewire the vehicle. It's very, very difficult. And that's I'd say the learning is great, but it's like the first step, and then the rest is actually engaging consciousness to rewire the brain for thousands of hours. And that's what I like most about it. But it's also some days you feel like you're taking steps backwards and you haven't grown, but then again, you reflect and realize, okay, I have rewired a lot of behaviors. I have come a long way and I'm changing. And that's just the brain. And this will take the rest of my life. So I might as well, like you said, just try to be more compassionate about it and then curious and then just keep doing it.
00:20:53 Shreya: That's really wonderful. And for someone who feels like they have tried everything the books, the apps, the practices and still feels stuck in some the some same patterns. What is the most honest thing you can say to them?
00:21:09 Alan Bodnar: Yeah, I'd say. It would be that I guess everything that you've tried is great. And then just keep trying. Because when we stop, that's when if we stop or give up, then nothing will change. And that's the challenge. So it's continuing to stay on the path to find, try and find something that does work. And that does help, even though it feels like that may never come. And from there, I'd say also. Like I said, I don't know. For me, mindfulness is the strategy, but everyone may have their own different strategy. It's really just deliberate attention that that is how we wire the brain to regulate it and to wire skills to our potential. Um, but I'd say whatever it is. Maybe think of it as learning a skill to a master level. Like with mindfulness, it's very difficult. And then you may have a moment where you have that experience where it works. Like, I'll make it quick, but I always heard drop the storyline behind our thoughts and go to the energy, go to the sensation. And when you go to the sensation, everything lifts. I heard that so many times, and then I tried it and it just didn't work and I didn't understand it. And then one day I continued. And I tried it and it worked. And then I finally understood what that meant. So I guess my point is to just try to stick with it. And then eventually you may have an experience that opens things up and changes your way of thinking, because it's all about these little insights. And we only get the insights from the experience and from trying it. But it just takes one insight to kind of reframe your mind and then open it all up. But that only happens when we're we're trying and applying it to our life.
00:23:32 Shreya: And, um, if after this conversation, my listeners want to connect with you and want to learn more about you or about your works. Then what's the best place to find you?
00:23:43 Alan Bodnar: Yeah, I have a website, the self-driving, you dot com. It's all one word. And that will provide information about me and my book. And as I mentioned, um, the first part of the journey is the information. So everything that I've discussed is in my book. So that can be purchased using a link on my website or going to Amazon or audible. And my book is available in all formats in all marketplaces. Um, and then from there, once you read the book, then it's about putting it into practice and using mindfulness every day to try to rewire our brains and feel better. And then I'm also on social media, so LinkedIn, TikTok and Instagram. And if you want to message me, feel free to do that. And the best way to do that would be on Instagram. And that's it.
00:24:51 Shreya: Yes. And I'll make sure to attach all these details and links below in the show notes so that the listeners can find them easily and get in touch with you. And thank you so much, Alan, for bringing neuroscience into a space that's genuinely accessible and human. And to all my listeners, take the will. Not perfectly, not all at once, just a little more consciously today than yesterday. This has been the wellness reimagined. And until then, do not forget to hit the follow button. Subscribe and feel free to share your thoughts because your ears deserve premium content. Thank you.
