It's Me. Your Brain. | The mind behind your decisions

About It's Me. Your Brain. | The mind behind your decisions

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.

Publisher

Virginia Palm | Augment Mind

Category

health & fitness

Language

en

Explicit

No

First episode

24 Jan 2026

Latest episode

17 Oct 2026

Latest episodes

33 episodes in the feed.

1. 

   17 Oct 2026

   The Pressure Paradox: Why Planning Season Kills the Ideas It’s Asking For

   The Pressure Paradox: Why Planning Season Kills the Ideas It’s Asking For Why the pressure to come up with something new is exactly what keeps new ideas away, in your own brain and in the teams you lead It’s the end of the year, and someone has booked the 2027 planning session. There’s a whiteboard, there are sticky notes, and the request is simple: bring your best thinking. Something new. Something better than this year. And what comes out is next year’s plan. Which looks remarkably like this year’s plan, with bigger numbers. In this episode, Virginia looks at why that happens, and why it isn’t a failure of imagination. Drawing on brain research into the “aha” moment and a study of more than 9,000 diary entries from real project teams, she shows how the pressure of planning season shuts down the very thinking it demands. She then sets out an audit to run before your next planning session, for yourself and for your team. In this episode: What happens in your brain in the second and a half before a new idea arrives Why the obvious answer shouts and the new idea only whispers, and how stress decides which one you hear The surprising finding about how creative people feel under deadline pressure, and what their diaries actually showed Mission, treadmill, expedition or autopilot: the four states of a team under time pressure Why most planning seasons are designed, without anyone intending it, as treadmills A pre-planning audit for you and your team, before the offsite rather than after it The pressure telling you to come up with something new is the same pressure handing you the old answer. Planning your 2027 offsite or leadership kick-off? Find out how we get your team’s brains in the right mode at ⁠augment-mind.com⁠ (www.augment-mind.com) Research referenced: Jung-Beeman et al. - Neural activity when people solve verbal problems with insight (PLoS Biology, 2004) Subramaniam, Kounios, Parrish & Jung-Beeman - A brain mechanism for facilitation of insight by positive affect (Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 2009) Amabile, Hadley & Kramer - Creativity under the gun (Harvard Business Review, 2002)

2. 

   4 Oct 2026

   Performance Is a Cognitive Sport. So Where's Your Coach?

   Performance Is a Cognitive Sport. So Where's Your Coach? Why the brain you lead with deserves the training, recovery and coaching athletes take for granted An elite athlete walks into competition with a coach on the sideline, a planned recovery and months of mental preparation behind her. A senior leader walks into a Tuesday of high-stakes decisions with a calendar, a coffee and the expectation that she should simply be able to handle it. Both are performing at the edge of their capacity. Only one of them works in a world that treats performance as something to be trained. In this episode, Virginia Palm looks at what sports psychology figured out decades ago about how high performance actually works, and why most workplaces still haven't caught up. Drawing on research showing that mental practice measurably changes the brain, and works best for tasks that depend on thinking and decision-making, she makes the case that leadership is a cognitive sport. She then sets out the signals that coaching yourself is no longer enough, for individuals and for organisations. In this episode: - Four lessons from sports psychology that most workplaces are still missing - Why recovery is part of the training, not a break from it - Why most leaders are learning their hardest skills mid-competition - What a classic piano study revealed about how rehearsal changes the brain, and what it doesn't prove - Why your brain is being trained every day, whether anyone is deciding what for - Four signals you've outgrown self-coaching, and four signals your organisation needs to rethink its training ground Research referenced:Pascual-Leone et al. - Modulation of muscle responses evoked by transcranial magnetic stimulation during the acquisition of new fine motor skills (Journal of Neurophysiology, 1995)Driskell, Copper & Moran - Does mental practice enhance performance? (Journal of Applied Psychology, 1994)Toth et al. - Does mental practice still enhance performance? A 24-year follow-up (Psychology of Sport and Exercise, 2020) Your brain is being trained every day. The only question is whether anyone is choosing what for. Find out more about brain coaching for leaders and organisations at ⁠augment-mind.com⁠ (www.augment-mind.com)

3. 

   27 Sept 2026

   Out of Rhythm: What Your Body Clock Is Actually Doing to Your Brain - Guest Episode with Dr. Antonio Di Mauro

   Coffee instead of breakfast. Lunch at the desk, or at four, or not at all. A late dinner, one last look at the inbox, and sleep that clocks the hours but never quite restores. Nothing on paper looks wrong. You're performing. And underneath it, a system that runs on timing is quietly falling out of sync. This episode is about the 24-hour biological clock that governs far more of your performance than most people realise. It controls when cortisol should rise and fall, when your body handles fuel well, and what the overnight window is meant to repair before you wake up. It's also about why the people who look most fine from the outside are so often the ones whose biology tells a different story. In this episode: What your body clock actually governs, beyond jet lag and feeling sleepy What a healthy cortisol rhythm looks like across a day, and what sustained pressure does to it Why when you eat matters as much as what you eat What the overnight window is doing hormonally and at the cellular level, and how high performers quietly cut it short Why generic advice like "eat better, sleep more, stress less" has limits, and what it looks like to actually know your own system Virginia Palm's guest is Dr. Antonio Di Mauro. Dr. Antonio Di Mauro is Research and Innovation Manager at Chenot corporate in Weggis, where he contributes to the scientific aspects of the company’s future endeavors. Over the past decade, he span across a bench-to-bedside approach in the field of holistic medicine, which is what both his academic path and personal interest is about. Originally from Rome, he lives in Switzerland since a few years where he already collected personal and professional experiences in both the German- and French-speaking regions, enjoying one of the best quality of life environments in the world. Linkedin: www.linkedin.com/in/antonio-di-mauro-2b410559 (http://www.linkedin.com/in/antonio-di-mauro-2b410559) It's Me. Your Brain. | The mind behind your decisions.

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