by Virginia Palm | Augment Mind
It’s Me. Your Brain. is a neuroscience and psychology podcast about decision-making, stress, mental health, brain health, and thinking clearly in a fast-paced, AI-driven world. The show explores attention, emotional regulation, cognitive performance, and how modern work environments shape the way our brains function under pressure. Hosted by Virginia Palm, founder of Augment Mind. Grounded insights into the mind behind your choices - no hacks, no hustle culture.
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Publishing Since
1/24/2026
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June 24, 2026
<p>What's actually happening when you finally stop, and why your brain needs more than a holiday to recover from it</p><p>It's day one of your time off. The out-of-office is on, the laptop is closed. And then your hand finds your phone, not because anything's wrong, just to check. </p><p>You close it again, and nothing settles. That night you're lying in bed replaying something from weeks ago. Your body is somewhere with nowhere to be. Your nervous system hasn't gotten the message.</p><p>That's not a failure to relax. It's biology that hasn't caught up yet.</p><p>In this episode, Virginia Palm looks at why almost a quarter of people take no time off at all, and why, for the people who do, one break often isn't enough to undo what the year actually cost. </p><p><br></p><p>Drawing on Robert Sapolsky's research on allostatic load and a decade of evidence that the well-being benefits of a break fade within the first week back at work, this episode reframes rest as a frequency, not a once-a-year event, and explains why the guilt that follows you into a holiday is, neurologically, the thing undoing it.</p><p><strong>You'll learn:</strong></p><ul><li>What allostatic load actually is, and why it's a measurable physical cost, not a feeling</li><li>Why a single break doesn't "clear the balance" of a hard year, according to the research</li><li>Why guilt about resting activates the same threat circuitry as the overwork that caused it</li><li>A three-question recovery audit to use before, during, and after this break</li><li>Why frequency - not duration - is what actually determines whether rest works</li></ul><p>This isn't about trying to relax harder. It's about understanding why your nervous system doesn't believe you yet that it's safe to stop.</p><p>If you've ever come back from time off feeling like it barely happened, this episode explains why, and what would actually need to change.</p><p><br></p><p>To learn more about Augment Mind visit: </p><p>www.augment-mind.com </p>
June 14, 2026
<p>The strategy built in minutes. The brief drafted before the meeting ended. The answer retrieved before the question was fully formed.</p><p>Everything faster. Everything smoother. And somewhere in that efficiency, something quietly shifting.</p><p>This episode is about what happens to the brain when AI takes the cognitive load, what gets offloaded, what stops being encoded, and what leaders need to deliberately protect before they notice it's gone.</p><p>In this episode:</p><ul><li>What cognitive offloading actually is, and why the brain does it automatically</li><li>Why integrating AI changes not just how you work, but how you think</li><li>What most executives aren't asking when they bring AI in, and what that's costing them</li><li>The difference between retrieving intelligence and building it</li><li>What human judgement actually means when the tools get this good</li></ul><p>Virginia Palm's guest is Lucy Dinu, founder and managing director of KHAIO, an AI architecture firm that helps executives architect AI integration, building both the technical structure and the human judgement that decides whether the rest of it holds. </p><p>Her path runs from opening her own restaurant at 20 to over a decade leading global teams across 50 markets in pharma, finance, automotive, hospitality, and the public sector.</p><p>Originally from Romania, she has lived in the Netherlands, dreams of living in Japan, but currently calls Stuttgart, Germany home.</p><p><br></p><p>It's Me. Your Brain. | The mind behind your decisions.</p>
June 7, 2026
<p>Brain Capital - The Asset Nobody's Managing. Why the Most Important Asset in Your Organisation Is the One Nobody Is Measuring</p><p>Most organisations manage their buildings, their technology, their financial capital with rigour and intention. The cognitive capacity of the people doing the thinking, the brains running every meeting, every decision, every strategy, is largely unmanaged, often actively depleted, and almost never measured.</p><p>In January 2026, brain capital arrived at the main stage of the World Economic Forum in Davos. Not in the wellness tent. In the core economic agenda. The McKinsey Health Institute and the World Economic Forum published a landmark report arguing that in the AI era, investment in brain capital - brain health and brain skills, is not an optional wellbeing initiative. It is the most important infrastructure decision most organisations aren't making.</p><p>In this episode, Virginia Palm, breaks down what brain capital actually is, why the numbers demand a boardroom conversation, what is depleting it in most high-performance environments - including an AI paradox most leaders haven't seen coming - and what building it looks like at the level of strategy, team design, and individual leadership.</p><p>You'll learn:</p><ul><li>Why brain capital is defined as two interdependent components, brain health and brain skills, and why you cannot optimise one while neglecting the other</li><li>What $3.5 trillion, 12 billion working days, and 1 in 5 professionals actually tell us, and why these are economic figures, not health statistics</li><li>Why the AI era creates a paradox: human cognitive skills become most valuable exactly when the conditions of work are most reliably depleting them</li><li>What the five levers of brain capital investment look like at the level of a leadership team, and what most organisations are still missing</li><li>Why this is not a wellness conversation, and what it means to treat cognitive capacity as the strategic asset it is</li></ul><p>If you manage anything - a team, a function, an organisation - this is the conversation your strategy is missing.</p><p>🌐 <a href="http://www.augmentmind.de/">www.augment-mind.com</a></p>
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It’s Me. Your Brain. is a neuroscience and psychology podcast about decision-making, stress, mental health, brain health, and thinking clearly in a fast-paced, AI-driven world.
The show explores attention, emotional regulation, cognitive performance, and how modern work environments shape the way our brains function under pressure.
Hosted by Virginia Palm, founder of Augment Mind. Grounded insights into the mind behind your choices - no hacks, no hustle culture.
This podcast updates daily.
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