The Self-Driving You (Part 1)

Welcome to Readers, the podcast for the lifelong learner. Join us on our weekly dose of wisdom where we talk about the real life lessons and applications of books. Enjoy. Welcome back to Readers, everyone. Today we're kicking off a brand new 3-part series on The Self-Driving You: Awaken the Driver Within to Rewire Your Brain and Transform Your Life by Alan Bodnar. Alan, welcome to the podcast. It's a blast to have you here.

Hey, Pruthviraj Chavda, thanks for having me.

Happy to be here. Absolutely. Yeah, I mean, you know, the core idea of this book here kind of seems like a lot of our thoughts, emotions, habits, and reactions seem to run automatically, right? Almost like a self-driving system. But Alan's argument here, right, and correct me if I'm wrong, but it seems like we're not stuck on autopilot and we can very actively become the driver, step in with awareness, and gradually rewire that system consciously, right? Now, obviously, I'm not the guy who's done all the research on this, so rather than me giving my short overview here. I'll let Alan tell the backstory. Alan, I'd love to, you know, I'm sure our listeners would love to hear a little bit more about you, the process of actually writing this book, what it is, what it's all about, and how they can apply it to their own lives.

Okay, sounds good. Yeah, I started when I was 30. I'm 41 now. And I started by listening to an audiobook a week. And at that point, it was more just to try to get in hours. So 10 hours a week of listening to an audiobook, and I was able to get through about one audiobook a week that way. And then after about 4 years, I decided to start writing because I was continuing to think and apply what I was learning to my life as I tried to wire my brain towards success and also just better balance. And what I realized was— or what I wanted to do was take what I was reading about mastery and apply that to one thing where I want to try to put in 10,000 hours into an idea. And it was this book. And I started writing, uh, again, same idea, 10 hours a week. And then as time went on, I started to invest more time. And What that did was that led to my framework, which is outlined in my book, The Self-Driving You. And what this framework is really all about is that, as you mentioned, we are this conscious driver of a self-driving vehicle. There's a few things that we're trying to do with this book is first provide one uniform story about what it is to be human, because there's so many great authors and books out there, but I found as someone who was trying to improve myself, it was difficult to find like the one cohesive story. So that's the idea of the book. And as you mentioned with the self-driving, a lot of times books will mention autopilot, but it's more like it's a, it's something that kicks on and kicks off. But the idea behind my book is it's always on. We are self-driving first.

Yeah.

This is founded in the systems and current or modern psychology says that within the brain, there's two systems that run everything. And this was popularized by Daniel Kahneman in his book, "Thinking Fast and Slow." And that's essentially what the self-driving system and the driver are. The system one is the self-driving system. And System 2 is the driver. System 1 is always on. It's always generating suggestions for everything we encounter, as you mentioned, behaviors, habits, thoughts. And then we have System 2, which is the conscious driver at the wheel. That is who we identify as I, and that is a slower system that kind of kicks on and off. As we're living our life. It's not always on, but what it allows us to do is to process the self-driving decisions and we can take corrective action. And that's where self-control comes in. So that's the general idea. Like, yeah, we can engage the driver at any time. I think it's more of a, a matter of becoming aware of our conscious ability to take the wheel and then use that strategically.

Yeah, yeah, makes a lot of sense, right? I think this first episode, for everyone listening, right, this is going to be the introduction through Chapter 7, right? Today we're going to be talking about that foundation of this self-driving car. We're building the whole metaphor from the ground up, right? That self-driving car itself, the two systems running the human vehicle, the conscious and non-conscious, System 1 and System 2, the goals and the feelings that steer us, the gas and the brake, and a quick tour of the brain hardware that it all really runs on, right? Now, Without further ado, Alan, if you're ready, let's dive right in.

I'm all ready to go.

Awesome. Well, you know, I think one of the details from this very first beginning of the book where you're talking about the self-driving car, this whole chapter, right? One thing that really stuck out to me was this part about the disengagement, right? The car is driving itself, it hits something it essentially can't handle, the human takes the wheel, and that moment almost becomes a lesson that retrains the whole network, right? Now, obviously, that may make sense to someone who studied neuro or someone who knows about the science behind that. But for all of us out here who are just wondering, what does that really mean? What is a disengagement? How does that kick in and how does that retrain a network? How directly does that really map onto us, right? When we catch ourselves mid-reaction and consciously choose something different, how are we literally creating this sort of disengagement that retrains our own self-driving system?

Yeah. Yeah, I'd say essentially what happens is experience. We are born with some hardwired patterns in the brain, but experience is what wires the rest of it. And throughout our early life, we are wiring the self-driving system. Everything that we place our attention on is now wiring patterns. And through repetition, these become the automatic behaviors, thoughts, habits that drive us. And then what happens is in adulthood, our self-driving system's making decisions. If it decides that I'm going to have a coffee, and as the conscious driver, I align with it, almost not even noticing it because I attach to it. And I don't know, most of us at least— well, for sure myself, before I was building up my ability to take the wheel with the driver, I didn't even realize there was a self-driving system. So with that, I'm just constantly doing the— my self-driving system is telling me to do something, and then I just go with it. I don't question it. When that happens, we're just letting the self-driving system go unchecked, so that response stays the same. As we continue to fire a response, we're just automating it further. But when I take the wheel with my driver, and instead of grabbing the coffee, notice, hey, my brain said, have a coffee. Why don't I just sit here? And there's a number of different strategies that I could deploy. But I can ask, like, what is this thought? What is this feeling? Go to my breath with mindfulness. And now I'm preventing that self-driving response to go do the habit. I'm preventing that from fully executing and I'm stopping it. But at the same time, I'm now going to my executive circuit. I'm putting my attention on not moving and the sensations or whatever it may be. But basically you're interrupting the self-driving system and you're firing a different pattern in its place. So you shut one off and you turn the other one on. And that maps to neuroplasticity. And with that, it's where attention goes, neural patterns grow. And also within that rule of plasticity is what we fire, we wire, and we— what we don't use, we lose. So if you're just always going with a self-driving system, you're letting that response fire and wire, and it's just going to continue to stay that way. But when you interrupt it and you provide an alternative response, then you don't use it. So then over time you can lose it. But the idea here with plasticity and rewiring self-driving responses is to understand that plasticity takes time. It took time to make these automatic and it's going to take time to rewire them as well.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I mean, I think like you, you introduce in a later chapter here how much we we actually unconsciously do, right? And like, it's insane to think about. Like, I don't know, I think when reading this book, I'm just thinking, you know, to myself like, oh, what is it really that unconsciously I do that actually has so much impact? You know, like you actually put a number to it. You say that the non-conscious self-driving system processes something like 11 million bits of information every second, which is crazy, right? And the conscious driver, what we think of as, you know, me, myself, Right, we ourselves consciously handle maybe 16 to 50. I mean, that's an insane ratio, right? Right off the bat. And I think kind of moving on, right, you write that a lot of the time that driver isn't actually the one making the decision, right? That self-driving system already made it, and the driver honestly just constructs an explanation afterwards so it feels like it's our choice all along, right? Talk to me a little bit about that, right? What are the implications of this Is this something that we need to be more consciously aware of each action, or are you saying we should make more of our habits go on autopilot? What does this really mean for our daily listener?

Yeah, within this framework is understanding, as you said, that 11 million bits of information would be what the self-driving system is processing, and the conscious us is about 16 to 50 bits. So again, So that goes back into System 1 and System 2. But when we're using stats, like, this comes from a book and that resonated with me when I read it, so I, I plugged it in here. But the idea is for us to understand that the self-driving system's doing all the work. The self-driving system, that is your System 1, that is processing all those bits of information, that's always on. The System 2 is the 16 to 50 bits, but that's on periodically. So that will— what roughly activates the driver is attention. So any time attention is engaged, that's when we would be at the wheel. But it's our choice to take corrective action or not. So in the book, we talk about if you're in a self-driving car, the car is going to do all the driving on its own. But there may be times when it gets stuck where I'd have to take the wheel and use my extra processing power to provide an alternative action. That's really what we're talking about. Because if the car gets my attention, but then I think, ah, it's fine, what it's doing is fine, I just leave it. Well, then I'm not correcting, I'm not doing anything. So nothing will change. Uh, but if I place my attention on what it's doing, and start to scrutinize. And I'm not attached to these, I'm just impartially looking at what it's doing and deciding, is this really the accurate decision? And that is the point there, is to understand that we are self-driving first. So we have this self-driving system that's processing information at all times and generating an instant response to what we encounter. And it also triggers the, the sympathetic accelerator, the human vehicle's gas, and the parasympathetic brake, depending on what it's processing. We're at the wheel, we experience the result. But if we go with it and we just— if I have a thought that is a fear response of just something saying, don't do this, like, you're not good enough, you're you're just— you have no business pursuing this thing. Like, we have these different thoughts all the time. Or rage when I'm driving and someone cuts me off and I get really angry. Well, what is that response? Do I need to yell? Do I need to honk my horn? Or can I go to my breath and relax and just be— just appreciate that, hey, I'm safe and I'm okay. So that's really what it is. It's not to say that all our self-driving decisions are incorrect. It's more actively engaging our driver and first becoming aware that we are self-driving and then learning how to actively engage our driver to question the self-driving responses to determine if they do serve us or not.

Yeah.

Like some of them may serve us. I had some wiring that was good. And then you, it's just about peeling the layers of the onion, becoming more aware, and then rewiring what may not serve you in a way that does serve you.

Yeah, I mean, moving on to the next chapter here, right? You talk about how that driver that we've been talking about all this time, that System 2, is barely developed at birth, right? And it isn't fully online until our mid-20s, which means that, you know, kind of the deepest beliefs that we hold about ourselves got wired in by System 1 while the supervisor was, you know, still asleep. That's where a lot of that kind of, "I'm not good enough," or, "I can't change," or, "This is my place in society," or, "Here's how I maybe interpret myself"— all of that programming really comes from, right? I want to ask you personally, Allen, right? When that clicked for you, obviously you wrote the book because it solved a personal problem for you, or it's a personal journey that you went on. When that really clicked for you, that realization maybe hit, did it change how you related to those old beliefs? Yeah. And more practically, how does someone begin to question that wiring that was laid down before they were even capable of really vetting it?

I think what it really helped me with was just to not personalize these automatic responses and emotions outside of emotions that I manually trigger. Like if I'm an actor, I can cry, I can laugh. Outside of that, all the emotions we feel come from self our self-driving system based on how we're wired. And then if we're talking about old beliefs, they could be anything like, I'm not good enough, or like, men don't cry, whatever that may be. But that's the thing, this is wired when we're growing up. Um, our driver circuitry is the executive control network. That's our executive circuits. So that's what allows us to take control and question these things. But yeah, that is That develops throughout childhood, and then it doesn't fully develop into our mid and late 20s. But the challenges, we agree, like we're aligned with it, where even as our driver circuitry is developing, it's playing a part in stamping it or placing its stamp of approval on what the self-driving system's doing. So together, they're navigating the environment and wiring what ends up becoming our self-driving system. So for me, it was more understanding that these responses aren't personal and I am self-driving. So as I move throughout the day, these responses may or may not serve me and I should question them. And I think the biggest wake-up call for me was when— It was about my first year in, but I was applying for this job as a trainer, and that was my biggest fear, speaking in public. And my immediate thought— someone told me I had to do an interview for it where I'd have to like speak and do a sample facilitation session. And my immediate thought was, you can't do this, you're not good enough, and just stop. Like, you're not good at public speaking, just withdraw your application. And then it was, wait, like, why? And why can't you just go home and prepare? and try and see what happens. And then I got the job. Not that it was this career-defining job, but these were the kind of little experiments that I was doing over time to challenge what I was reading. Because what I was reading, at first I didn't agree with it. And I'm sure with my book, a lot of the ideas people may not agree with could be because maybe it's not correct, but maybe it's also your self-driving system that is at odds with it, and maybe it is accurate. So like a lot of these ideas I heard multiple times and didn't agree with them at first, and then I had to apply them to my life to actually notice. And fear is— we have those survival circuits that— these are self-driving survival circuits at— they're the most fundamental circuits we have, like as far as relating to our goal of survival and procreation. And what they do is they provide automatic responses to defense. So that would be fight or flight, and also our responses to food and mating. So once we start to notice those, then it's like, oh, I am automatic. And I don't know, maybe I can challenge them and see what happens. But yeah, I think it's kind of like just experimenting and trying one behavior at a time and it takes time to build the awareness and then to see that there are possibilities of rewiring it.

I'm wondering, how does that rewiring work, right? Or what is the first step in that process? Obviously, in these next few chapters, kind of going forward, you talk a lot about that. But you clear here, right, that we're not born a blank slate. We come with these kind of flexible templates. And some of the strongest ones of those are social, right? We care a lot about what other people think. We want to outdo our rivals, our friends, our peers. We want to chase status and rank, right? A lot of the modern problems that, you know, a lot of our modern first-world problems that we face today comes out of those same, you know, ancient drives, if you will, right? And I want to ask, because, you know, it seems clear that maybe we can't delete those, but how do you work with them, right? What does it actually look like to notice that, okay, I see my old, you know, social rank wiring kind of firing or whatever you want to call it and not be run by it, right? When you notice that, okay, this is something I'm doing because this is a social, I don't know, template that I've kind of taken on, um, or that's just been wired into my life, how do we kind of go about rewiring that?

I think that is like the main point is we have this self-driving system and The brain is this network, and the way the network works, it is very aligned with AI in the fact that it— you put a bunch of nodes or neurons in place, and some of them are pre-wired, as we said. So those would be those templates that are passed down from the time of our ancestors through nature versus nurture. But then there's also the plasticity in the brain, and it's going to connect through experience. So part of the self-driving system is we have those templates that want us to outdo our rivals, and then we also— they come with the underlying goal of survival and procreation. So they help us, they help the network. Um, I also mentioned that we have like feelings as a point system that allow us— they tell us when something is good or bad in the name of the goal of survival and procreation. And these templates help guide the wiring. They're constraints that guide us towards that. So it's almost as though in later chapters I discuss that nature is like an AI company that programs us with this network, with that main goal. But at the same time, we are this conscious driver and we can set our own goals. Because of that executive circuitry, we are not bound to those goals. Of course, when that's not— like, that executive circuitry is developing throughout our life, and what is guiding us is that self-driving system with the underlying goals and drives. But as we develop our conscious driver, and with this conversation we can start to discuss, hey, we have this conscious driver. The conscious driver can set its own goals, and you can override your self-driving responses and take action that you don't want, or take the action that you do want and override the actions that you don't want. Uh, like, an example would be when I was writing the book. I don't know where this would fall with the underlying drives, but maybe with me wanting to write the book, that's part of me trying to gain social status, like, without realizing it. And as I'm doing that and I'm writing constantly, uh, there's also these ideas that pop in my head that you can't do this. You, like, you're not— why are you writing? You're not an author. You're like, you're a guy who read books. Like, you don't know, so don't do it. But then As the driver, all I could do is look at that and say, okay, these are the thoughts that are coming up. Um, at that point, I know that success is a process and the brain is an impartial network. So it's like, okay, just— That's okay. You had those thoughts, but now go write and just keep writing and keep writing and like depersonalize the story that these self-driving goals and drives may tell you, and then take the wheel with your driver and do the actions that you want.

Gotcha.

It's awareness. Like, we have to first build awareness, and then we have to learn how to use the driver to course correct and take the action we want. So it's just— it's a lot of work because we haven't been shown how to use our driver And then now we're saying, oh yeah, we have this driver and you can take the wheel and rewire your whole system. And it sounds so easy, but it's all easy in theory, but in practice it takes a lot of effort and course correction.

Now I think chapter 6 really brings us one of the first levers that we can actually pull on purpose, right? To get us back in a little bit of control or to bring us a little bit more awareness, right? And I think that one is is the breath. We can't just tell our heart to slow down or tell us to just calm down, but a long, slow exhale pulls that parasympathetic brake that you talk about and does that for us. It nudges the whole system back towards balance. I'm curious, just physically, what is happening in the body at that moment? And on a personal level also, what's shifted for you once you started using your breathing more deliberately instead of just leaving it entirely to this? self-driving system.

Yeah, and that's the biggest key because this is how we can regulate our self-driving system. So generally with the brain, it processes information, and all these self-driving circuits use the autonomic nervous system as our gas and brake. So our gas would be the sympathetic system, which excites us. And if you have fight or flight, that's the nerves you feel in your stomach— and that's all happening outside of our awareness. But what happens is early experiences like trauma and stress, growing up in an unstable environment, can wire or miscalibrate our brain to be prone to generating that acceleration while we're the driver at the wheel who experiences that acceleration. That's why if people complain about chronic stress and you go to the doctor, it's like, well, you're You're just stressed, stopping stress. That's easy to say, but all of that is being dictated by the self-driving system outside of our awareness. So then that's where it helps to understand that, okay, I have this driver. And with this driver, when I slow the breath, you— By slowing the breath, you slow the heart. When you slow the heart, you trigger the vagus nerve. And now you are using your parasympathetic system. It activates the parasympathetic system, and that triggers the rest and digest response in the body.

Got it.

So now your body is in like healing mode.

Sure. Now, kind of last question here, right? And this is a lot about the rewiring work that happens, you know, in your brain. And I think this is, this was just really interesting to me because it showed how much research really goes into creating habits, what really runs on autopilot, and how we can kind of change, right? You do this brain tour here kind of finally, right? And you describe the basal ganglia. I don't know if I'm saying that right.

Yeah.

You describe the basal ganglia as a kind of autopilot, right? It takes whatever we repeat the most and it automates it so it runs smoothly without the driver having to be involved. Right, now this is the machinery behind every habit we've got, the ones that serve us and the ones that don't, right? This immediately comes to mind, it's kind of funny because I remember some of the small things that I may be doing without even thinking about them, right? Like for example, definitely not a good habit, but like sometimes I'll sit down to work and like I'll open my laptop and then I'll just get right on my phone. Like that's just the first thing I'll do, even if I have absolutely nothing to do, even if I've been on my phone right before, like I'll just swipe through the main, you know, whatever Instagram messages. Things like that, and then I'll have absolutely no notifications 'cause I was just on it, but I'll do it anyway because I'm just so used to doing it. Now obviously that basal ganglia is kind of the autopilot that takes what we do regularly and makes it go on autopilot so we don't have to consciously think about it every time. But as we head toward the rewiring work that we're gonna talk about in the next few episodes, knowing that's how the autopilot forms, just as a final kind of note for all our listeners and readers of your book, right? Yeah. What's the most important thing for someone to understand about getting a new behavior to actually take or stick so that it can hand it over to the autopilot for it then to continue repeating, right? What does that process or even internal realization and process look like?

That's the thing. So when we learn something new, we're placing attention on it. When we place attention on it, a pattern forms. And as that pattern forms, eventually through repetition, it reaches this tipping point where it becomes automatic. And now the basal ganglia is what helps with the automation of that, but also once we automate it, then it's our self-driving system and driver can use a basal ganglia to retrieve it. So it, it's, it has connections to that part of the brain, and then it will retrieve that drinking coffee, riding a bike, whatever the pattern is that you've automated, and then you can use it. The challenge is that you're not alone with the cell phone thing. I've noticed that I wasn't really on social media until the last few years, and I find myself— you just check the notifications and then you check again for notifications. And the reason why that's happening is because our self-driving system works based on cues.

Mm-hmm.

So subtle cues in our environment are going to trigger, uh, specific survival and intuitive responses, and then our self-driving system is going to retrieve the associated behavior to that cue from the basal ganglia. So then it's up to us as that driver to notice that and to say, hey, I don't want that, maybe I want another behavior in its place. And then that's where we go back to interrupting it so that you don't fire it again. And then firing a new one, like going to your breath instead. And then eventually you can automate that behavior. But there are like habits seem like there's habits that are really easy to automate, like gambling.

Yeah. Coffee. Yeah.

Cell phones. And then there's other behaviors that even it doesn't matter how many times we do them, like exercising, it's still a conscious effort to go to the gym. But I exercised for 5 years and then it did get easier to go to the gym. But everything— I, I guess with the basal ganglia, like we can automate something in the basal ganglia, but that doesn't necessarily mean that the self-driving system is going to just happily use that instead of going to your phone. So there will always be this challenge of like us not going to our phone until—

Yeah.

Yeah. So it is hard to change a habit.

Yeah. I mean, I think that's also where like some of these things that we hear from like books like Atomic Habits come in, right? Where like, yeah, you can't automate the entire process of going to the gym and, you know, getting in the car, driving there, you know, doing your entire workout, cardio afterwards, all of that, right? But you can automate the first step in the process, right? Where like, as soon as you get home, you know, maybe your first instinct isn't to just sit on the couch. Maybe it's to like, I don't know, drink a warm glass of water and head right back out, right? Quickly change, leave your gym clothes on your bed, whatever that may look like, right? So essentially, I guess automating the first step in a process that can then lead you to hopefully more easy habit change. Going to the gym, maybe for some people, will never be as easy as it is for others. But you can make it a little easier, I think, by automating parts of that process, making it a little bit easier for yourself or a little more fun for yourself, whatever that may look like, right? And, you know, obviously I have a lot more questions about how we can actually go about automating that process, how the basal ganglia is even triggered, what makes some habits easier to form than others. I thought that last point you said was really, really cool. But unfortunately, we are out of time. So we'll have to bring this to the next episode. But with that, we will wrap up part 1. Alan, thank you so much for joining us today, man. I mean, this was an absolute blast.

Yeah, thanks so much for having me. I love talking about this.

Yeah, 100%. And you know, we'll obviously continue in part 2. Today, we talked about the foundation, right? We talked about this metaphor of the self-driving car. About the two drivers, the realization that most of what we do really runs on autopilot, and also the first hint to a lot of our listeners that just your breathing is the first and easiest way to grab the wheel, right? So to everyone listening, the core invitation, I feel like, of this stretch is simply just to notice, right? To catch how much of your day is being driven by a system you didn't consciously choose, and to realize there's a driver in there who can wake up.

Yeah.

Next episode, we'll get a lot more specific, right? We'll talk about the actual circuits of the self-driving system, survival, intuitive, and default mode. And we'll also be talking about the executive driver that can override them. And then we'll talk about the practical heart of the book, right? How you apply the brakes and how mindfulness lets you take the wheel. To everyone listening, thank you so much for tuning in to Readers. I'll see you in part 2. And until then, keep on learning, keep on changing, and keep on growing.