Rewire Your Habits: How To Take Control Of Automatic Behavior

How much of daily life is actually being chosen and how much is happening automatically?

Author Alan Bodnar joins Mr. Whiskey to explore the ideas behind The Self-Driving You, a framework for understanding habits, emotions, beliefs, cravings, and automatic behavioral patterns through the lens of dual-process theory. Mr. Bodnar explains the distinction between fast, automatic responses and the slower, more deliberate system people can use to pause, evaluate, and override those reactions.

Mr. Bodnar break down what this looks like in real life: anger in traffic, anxiety, fear, cravings, ingrained beliefs, emotional reactions, and habits that can feel almost automatic. Rather than trying to eliminate those first responses entirely, Mr. Bodnar argues that the goal is to become more aware of them and deliberately “take the wheel” before they dictate what happens next.

The conversation explores mindfulness, deliberate attention, breathing, prayer, emotional regulation, and repetition as tools for interrupting automatic patterns. Mr. Bodnar also shares how his own struggles with low self-worth, anxiety, fear-driven behavior, and chronic marijuana use pushed him into more than a decade of self-directed study and eventually led to writing The Self-Driving You.

Mr. Whiskey connects the discussion to a larger idea he regularly returns to: sometimes adulthood requires unlearning what was absorbed during childhood. Beliefs about identity, emotions, success, relationships, and behavior can become deeply ingrained simply because they were repeated often enough—not necessarily because they were accurate or healthy.

Mr. Bodnar also discusses neuroplasticity and why repeated thoughts and behaviors can strengthen certain patterns over time. The conversation examines how intentionally practicing different responses may gradually weaken old habits while reinforcing new ones. Mr. Whiskey and Mr. Bodnar emphasize that this is not a quick fix; changing long-established patterns requires repeated effort, awareness, and the willingness to keep intervening when old responses resurface.

They also explore how artificial intelligence can serve as an analogy for understanding learning networks and pattern formation in the brain. Rather than treating AI as the central topic, Mr. Bodnar uses it as a way to make complex ideas about learning, repetition, and neural patterns easier to visualize.

For anyone trying to understand why they repeatedly react, think, or behave in ways they no longe