How I use A.I. to rewire my brain and destroy bad habits (steal my formula)

If you are trying to make any transformational change to improve your life, and you are not leveraging the power of artificial intelligence, then that might be the critical error that is keeping you stuck.

"With AI, we can finally build systems that nudge people toward healthier, more fulfilling lives—rather than stealing their time."– Aza Raskin

Hold that thought for a minute, but first I’m going to give you a bit of context and then I promise to come back to explain where A.I. fits into the picture.

I used to be the most undisciplined person.

I was skinny fat because I drank a lot of alcohol and ate out at restaurants literally every day.  I was chronically depressed because I had endless negative thought loops. And I was financially insecure because I developed spending habits based on the notion that a young and successful person was supposed to have a fancy car, go on expensive trips, and spend their money on nice things.

Despite this, I was also ambitious. I aspired to eventually leave the rat-race and become an entrepreneur, to have the freedom to live in a different country and basically turn the world into my playground, and to be an all-around healthier, more fulfilled person who exists in a state of abundance.

Fast-forward to today and that’s exactly what I did. I spent years experimenting with different philosophies and mindsets, and over time I went from being very unhealthy to being in the best shape of my life. I went from being fully immersed in the corporate rat race to becoming a solo entrepreneur. And I went from being tied down to my home in Chicago to living in Portugal and having the flexibility to be anywhere that I want at basically any time that I wish.

Of course, my life is not perfect by any stretch of the imagination, but I can say it is unquestionably better now than it was before.

I don’t wake up on Monday mornings resenting the fact that I have to go into an office, or log into a remote job that I feel wholly disconnected from. I don’t feel the same FOMO or social pressures that a lot of 30 or 40 something year-old mid-career professionals experience.  And I don’t have any major health concerns from stress, or being too sedentary, or eating the standard American diet.

To create this life for myself I had to aggressively eliminate the personal habits that were holding me back from building a lifestyle that was more aligned with what I wanted.

“It is more important to prevent bad habits than to cultivate good ones.”— Warren Buffett

Through this experience of designing my lifestyle I learned that the quickest pathway to solving most problems in life is not necessarily by doing more, but it’s actually by doing less.

The most transformational changes in your life will come from aggressively removing the self-destructive habits.

So if you find yourself trying to transform any area of your life but feel stuck or as if you keep running in circles but not gaining any traction, it’s probably because you haven’t done enough to address the habits that are misaligning you with your goals. 

Unfortunately, squashing bad habits is much easier said than done, but the good news is that this is not only possible, but also with the help of A.I. we can cut through the noise and get straight to the point with actionable information that will help you change your life so fast people will think you used a cheat code… and in a way you did.

I believe in the power of systems and process, so whenever I do anything to great success, I look backwards at what worked and what didn’t, and I create a system that I can follow to replicate that success in the future, and that’s what I’ll be sharing with you in this article.

If you continue reading then you’ll not only learn exactly how I use artificial intelligence to transform my life by overcoming self-destructive habits, but also you’ll get an A.I. workflow that you can use to target and kill the habits that are holding you back from radically transforming your own life.

Honestly, I used to keep these things to myself but now that I’m spending the time to write these articles I want you to steal my formula. If you don’t have a structured and proven system in place for breaking bad habits then there’s no need to re-invent the wheel, you can literally just copy me and save yourself a lot of time and energy.

With that said, killing bad habits is the lowest hanging fruit on the problem tree. It’s the most accessible option that both can be implemented immediately and is fully within your control.

So for any major life transformation, whether it’s becoming financially independent, becoming healthier, becoming more attractive to improve your dating life, you’ll get the highest return on your energy investment by focusing on the process of elimination before you add new layers of complexity to your life. 

"Elimination is the highest form of mastery."– James Clear

"The best way to improve your life is to stop doing what’s making it worse."– Shane Parrish

Eliminating your counterproductive habits is THE most important and highest-impact thing you can do to solve whatever life problem you’re with now.

I think a simple analogy for this is for those who want to achieve financial freedom.  Before you start putting energy into making more money, first you need to eliminate poor spending habits.

But what most people do is hustle to make more while never addressing the counterproductive habit of impulsively spending beyond their means, and so we end up in a reality where half of all Americans making over $100k a year, and 1/3 of all Americans making over $200k a year are still living paycheck to paycheck.

This is because they’ve overlooked the part where they’re supposed to fix their excessive spending first, before increasing their earning, and the result is that even many high-earners don’t build wealth.. or at least not the life-changing wealth that unlocks a life of freedom and autonomy.

The same goes for so many other aspects of life.  You can’t out-exercise the habit of eating a bad diet. You will never see transformational fitness results if you try to do it this way.

The fastest way to cure performance issues in the bedroom, which an uncomfortably high number of men in their 30s and 40s are experiencing, is to kill the habit of watching adult entertainment and scrolling on social media where beauty standards are through the roof.

The quickest path to geographic autonomy where you can live or travel anywhere at any time lies in eliminating the habit of accumulating things that keep you tied to one location.

I think you get the point, so I won’t continue to drive it home.

But when I started coaching people in their transformation journeys, what I quickly realized is that while people can be moderately successful with starting new habits, most people REALLY struggle to break out of their bad habits.

They end up trying to make a seismic shift in their lives but with limited success because they didn’t really zero-in on managing their older self-destructive habits.

The reason why you might struggle to create the change in your life that you want is likely because you’re focusing on all the other things, but you haven’t fully broken the habits that are actually preventing you from moving forward.

I don’t think it’s useful to just tell someone that they need to break bad habits. If it were that easy then everyone would do it, but you can make doing such infinitely easier for yourself if rather than approaching it haphazardly, you make the time and energy investment into building a structured, methodical, and intentional system that re-wires your brain to be reflexively averse to the self-destructive habits that are holding you back.

I call this The Anti-Desire Protocol, and fortunately, with the help of A.I. its easier than ever to create a system for re-wiring the brain and building anti-desires that will make you intuitively avoid self-destructive habits.

"The same algorithms that addict us can also help us evolve—if we use them consciously."– Tristan Harris

I like to keep things simple.  I don’t buy a million different productivity tools. I like to be resourceful and stick with the basics so for this I just use a paid version of ChatGPT along with a basic scheduling app.

You may notice here that I’m using a tool called Cerebrum-X which is a customized A.I. coach powered by ChatGPT that I’ve been working on for the past few months.  I use this personally for all of my self-development work so the responses that you’ll see here are much more pointed than the more generic responses you’ll get from the standard ChatGPT. 

So if you’d like to get the higher-quality and more refined responses, then I did just make the Cerebrum-X Accelerator publicly available so you can click here to get it.

Firstly. I use A.I. to craft my anti-vision, vision, and values.

I’ve mentioned many times in previous articles that before you can transform your life you need to first know the direction that you what to take your life. 

And you do this through creating an anti-vision, then taking the opposite of your anti-vision to produce your vision, and then establishing your core values around that vision.

I start out by instructing A.I. to help me do this.

You can create your own prompt if you’d like, but I already did the work for you so you can just use the prompt that I’ve provided here….

This directs me to create a recurring calendar event with a link to the chat that I can reference for future use, which is really important because building a system is not something that’s done in a day. Using this process it’ll actually take several days of interacting with A.I. before it starts to output actionable information.

So once I create my recurring calendar event I will begin my 7-day journaling process that collects valuable information from me so that it can create a customized plan that’s specific to my needs.  I do 7 days because it’s difficult to come up with all of the important personal information all at once. Over the course of days, my mood will fluctuate and I’ll be in various states of mind. 

After 7 days of journaling through the A.I. interface, I automatically get a summary of my anti-vision, my vision, and my values which you can see here. (fyi for this demo I’m using a dummy scenario of wanting to be physically and mentally healthier)

This is obviously not the final cut. A.I. is just a tool, and it therefore cannot completely replace my thinking. So I’m going to read through this output and fine tune it from here. I’m going to manually make changes to make sure that it is fully aligned.

Second. I use A.I. to help me zero in on the self-destructive habits that are most out of line with my vision

I think most of us have plenty of bad habits that we know we should work on, but staying true to Pareto’s principle, I direct all of my energy to the few habits that are the biggest drivers towards my anti-vision, thus holding me back from living my ideal life.

"The majority of your problems come from a minority of your habits."– James Clear

"If you want to change your life fast, find the 20% of your behavior causing 80% of your problems—and eliminate it."– Tim Ferriss

I do this through continued journaling to feed ChatGPT more information that’ll help me quickly hone in on the habits that are most likely to have the most transformational impact if I do successfully eliminate them from my life.

To do that I use this prompt which gives the A.I. instructions to provide me with a few journal entries over the course of 4 days and then output a list of counterproductive habits along with a prioritization and a ranking of the top three most self-destructive habits that I should focus on. 

The benefit here is that artificial intelligence can pick up on patters that we are not privy to and it can relate my personal situation to the collective experiences of the population, and draw insights that I’m unable to produce in isolation.

Just as I’ve mentioned before I’ll refine this list if I need to, and then once I feel good about what I have here I’ll move to the next step.

Third. I use A.I. to connect my self-destructive habits to my anti-vision

In my experience the fastest way for me to build an anti-desire towards something is to change the way my brain processes information around that thing.

"What you read, watch, and listen to will determine what you think about—and what you think about determines who you become." – Robin Sharma

"You become the books you read, the people you listen to, the media you consume." – Tom Bilyeu

To intentionally change the way my brain processes information and to effectively reprogram my brain, I need to immerse myself in the right information environment.

With enough time consciously consuming information that directly connects my bad habits to my anti-vision, my brain begins to build a more vivid understanding of the consequences of those habits.  The consequences become more real, thus I begin to build an anti-desire around those activities.

I can spend ages trying to curate the optimal information environment for myself, but fortunately, I’ve provided A.I. with enough information that I can save a lot of time by prompting it to instantly curate an information program based on my specific situation.

As you can see, this gives me an arsenal of information in different formats that I can fully immerse myself in to alter my reality and my behaviors in a way that makes me averse to self-destructive habits.

(below are just a few screenshots, but the full output includes much more info)

So I can follow this exact program or I can tailor it a bit, but I now have a concrete foundation for receiving the information inputs necessary to make a tangible change.

Lastly. I use A.I. to create an automated system

At this point I’ve done the work to figure out my anti-vision, my vision, and my values.  I’ve identified my highest-impact self-destructive habits.  I’ve curated my information diet to build an anti-desire around those bad habits.

And now all that’s left is pull everything together into a system.

“Systems allow ordinary people to achieve extraordinary results.”— Michael Gerber

At the end of the day, all change comes through actions, and the experience that comes from those actions.

The system is what gives me the structure, the repetition, and the consistency necessary to carry out the daily actions that will re-wire my brain and build those anti-desires one neuro-connection at a time.  

So I provide A.I. with instructions to lay out a workable system that I can follow.

This gives me a suggested format that I can build from instead of operating haphazardly with no plan or structure.

As you can see here it’s literally telling what to do every day and when to do it, it’s giving me some things I can do whenever I come across something that triggers the urge to engage in the bad habit, as well as a syllabus of sorts for consuming the resources that I previously identified as part of my information immersion program.

(below are just a few screenshots, but the full output includes much more info)

And with enough time of following this system, a critical mass of neuro-connections in my brain are either created or altered resulting in my brain being physically re-wired to no longer want to in engage in the bad habit that removes me farther away from my ideal life.

I said it before, if you are trying to fundamentally change your life, and do it FAST, then you need to focus on getting control over your self-destructive habits to drive serious and lasting change. And if you happen to be one of the many people who approach it without any structure or a plan, then there’s no need to reinvent the wheel.

You can literally just copy this formula.  Create your own prompts or use the ones I’ve provided you in this article, plug it into A.I. to create your anti-vision, vision, and values, and let it create a system for you.

And by having a system, you are far more likely to be successful in changing your life because most people are not very intentional with how they do things. So you’ll be operating on a different plane than most, which means you will likely see above average results compared to the amount of effort that you put in.

If you want a copy and paste version of my prompts along with exclusive access to the Cerebrum-X Accelerator that I used in this article then you can find it by clicking here.

And as always, if you’re ready to seriously start making moves then pick up a copy of the “Self-Reinvention Cheat Code Field Manual” which will guide you through a process of structuring a 60-day transformation in any area of your life. So not only will you break bad habits, but you’ll also build good habits for a stronger body, a sharper mind, a more fulfilling life…. Or anything else that you want to radically improve for yourself.