Influence isn’t cognitive. It’s biological.

Every elite performer has two feedback systems running simultaneously (I call them the DualLoop):the biological loop (state control), andthe cognitive-narrative loop (signal control).

When there's a failure it's normally not in either loop—it’s in the desynchronisation between them.

The craft of influence is in synchronisation of those two poles: bringing physiology and communication into one coherent signal so the nervous system and the message reinforce, not compete.

This week, we’re focusing on the biological loop, with five actionable tips to improve your performance (read till the end for your mental hygiene playbook).1. Mental hygiene is critical.

Nobody would disagree that you need to take a shower every day, brush your teeth, and change your clothes, your underwear. These are things we take for granted as part of a daily physical hygiene routine. But what we don’t do is create a mental hygiene routine for our feelings, our emotions. We don’t have a way of processing through what happened to us that day, the frustrations, the fears, the anxieties. We don’t have a way of, so to speak, brushing the teeth of our minds in order to stop “smelling so bad” in a mental state.

And just like we would understand that a person who doesn’t keep up with their physical hygiene is not going to be pleasant to be around—they’ll smell, they’ll be dirty—the same thing is true with somebody with bad mental hygiene. They're jumpy, irritable, upset, rude. We’ve all met people like this, people who are needlessly aggressive, even towards people they haven’t met. Those are people with poor mental hygiene. So it’s very important to instill these mental hygiene routines throughout our day, in our week, in order to keep ourselves in a good state of mind, presentable to ourselves and to other people.2. Breath is the secret lever to control the body.

If there were one thing that was as close to a button in the human body to switch on and off certain states of mind, modes of being, it would be the breath. Breathwork is thought of in many circles as “woo” or too time consuming, or is just not well understood. But ultimately the breath is the fastest road to up or down regulate the nervous system. It’s so powerful. It can bring you into focus, out of focus. It can bring your adrenaline up or it can bring it down. It can calm you down or it can amp you up. Mastering the breath is the ultimate tool for affecting human physiology on a minute to minute basis.

As you’ll read in the playbook, ultimately what happens when your emotions and your feelings take control of your body is that, for whatever reason, the prefrontal cortex is being shut off. There’s some sort of threat response or some other amygdala-based signal that’s almost short-circuiting or going around the prefrontal cortex, and therefore your executive function, your thought, your ability to assess a situation with any sense of detachment is all gone. You’re deep into the sea of reactive chemicals, and that’s exactly where we don’t want you to be. Breathwork is an excellent way of pausing and reactivating that frontal cortex.3. Ground yourself

One of the craziest things I discovered as a parent is a grounding technique from the book What My Bones Know (excellent but heavy btw). It works unbelievably well with my little kids, and once we see why, we’ll see why it can help us too.

When someone’s in reactive mode, they can’t think consciously—the authors of The Whole-Brain Child make that clear—so talking to them then is pointless. They literally can’t listen. We need a way to recenter them. Breathwork helps, but another route is to ground back into the present: reconnect with body and surroundings.

The easiest method is to pick out five things of one colour in the room. When my kids are mid-tantrum and their executive function is gone, I ask, “Can you find five red things? Five green things?” That simple hunt re-anchors them to the environment and distracts their brains from the fight-or-flight spiral we all experience under stress.4. Learn to reframe your emotions

Your heart’s racing, you’re sweating bullets, you can barely catch your breath.

In one context, say you were sitting in your car in the middle of traffic on a Monday afternoon, this would be an incredibly worrying experience. But in another context, say at the gym, after a long day of work, when your trainer is pushing you hard, it’s completely expected and normal.

So what we understand is that the same state brings with it different interpretations depending on the context and how we relate to that state. If we’re expecting to be in a high-stress environment and we understand why we’re feeling the way that we’re feeling, and we reframe those as desirable feelings in our body, then we relate to them in a completely different way than if they suddenly happened upon us.

To add to this, another important thing to keep in mind is that emotions are label-less. The fact that your heart is beating fast could be excitement, or it could be fear. The ability to take an emotion and reframe it - I’m not anxious or nervous, I’m excited. The physiological reaction is the same but the mode of relating to it is very different, and that changes the entire experience.5. Run simulations

One of the coolest things you’ll see is a video online of the Blue Angels practicing their flight runs. What’s interesting is they’re not in an airplane. They’re not anywhere near an airplane. They’re sitting in a conference room, all in chairs, flying in their minds with incredible accuracy.

This works because the brain cannot tell the difference between neurons firing from imagined practice or actual practice. Visualising the environment you’re going to be in, the talk you’re going to give, taking time to invest in putting yourself into that circumstance, gives you extra reps you’d never have had access to before. By the time you step on stage, you’re already well familiar with that environment.Deliberate practice

Each of these five tips builds one half of the DualLoop, the system for high-stakes communication—internal stability feeding external precision. They turn “mental hygiene” into a biological discipline of signal integrity: the calmer your internal loop, the cleaner your external output, because remember, everything you do is a signal.

Your tone, your breath, your pacing, how long you pause before you answer — it’s all broadcasting your emotions and internal state, and it's that which people react to.

That’s why the work isn’t as simple as “staying calm.” It’s about being coherent. When your internal loop (biology) and external loop (communication) run in sync, you stop leaking like dear Liza’s bucket.

The playbook’s here if you want to build your own routine.