The Self-Driving You

What if most of your thoughts, emotions, habits, and behaviors were not chosen by you?

In The Self-Driving You, neurophilosopher Alan Bodnar introduces an original metaphor, explaining how we are the secondary driver of a self-driving-first system that generates most of our thoughts and actions. Our brain impartially forms patterns that, with repetition, become the automatic responses that drive us. We are born with some hardwired patterns, but experience does the rest.

A lifetime of experience wires our self-driving system, providing instant responses to everything we encounter, while we, as the driver, interact with the results. For most, our self-driving system becomes miscalibrated, producing chronic acceleration in the form of anxiety, depression, and self-blame. We often personalize these responses, feel helpless, and blame ourselves as we do our best to hang on.

There is good news: we are not powerless.

We are the driver.

Each of us has an executive driver inside who can take the wheel to override these automatic responses, but we rarely do because we have never been shown how. Most of us are asleep at the wheel, but deliberate attention is our secret power to wake our driver within and apply the brake when our vehicle accelerates.

In this book, you will discover:

• 80-95% of our thoughts and actions initially arise from the self-driving system, while we, as the driver, decide whether to go with them.
• We are asleep at the wheel, mindlessly associating with every self-driving response.
• Deliberate attention is the secret power that we can use, especially through practices like mindfulness, to wake our driver and wire our brain toward the life we want.
• The brain is an impartial network, and we are the drivers who can direct how it wires.
• With 10,000 hours of deliberate thought and action, any person can tune their brain to mastery in any domain of their choosing.

Blending neuroscience, artificial intelligence, and mindfulness, The Self-Driving You is both a scientific explanation of the brain and a practical manual for transformation. After more than a decade of research and personal experimentation, Bodnar offers a roadmap for waking the driver within to retrain the self-driving system to drive with greater balance.

We are not the broken; we are just asleep at the wheel.

It's time to wake up and take control.