Aug. 2, 2026
#5 Three Starting Points for Brain Fitness
Welcome to Episode 5 of Between The Ears. Host Arnold Beekes lays out three foundational starting points for making brain fitness a daily habit, just as most people already do with physical fitness. Arnold defines brain fitness as choosing your uniqueness, learning continuously, handling challenges well, and contributing to a better world for all, and walks through why so many people struggle with this given rising rates of anxiety, stress, and burnout. He covers why your current state isn't your fault but is your responsibility, introduces the idea that we function with three brains (head, heart, and gut) rather than one, and explains why shifting from external to internal control is essential for genuine wellbeing. The episode closes with the show's signature segment on everyday beauty, featuring a family of beavers that solved a persistent flooding problem in West London.
Topics Covered
- Defining brain fitness: choosing uniqueness, learning, handling challenges, and contributing
- Why rates of anxiety, depression, and burnout are rising globally
- Starting point 1: it's not your fault, but it is your responsibility
- Debunking the "chemical imbalance" narrative
- Starting point 2: we have three brains — head, heart, and gut
- What coherence means when all three brains work in sync
- Starting point 3: moving from external control to internal control
- How judgment from others (bosses, spouses, children) can quietly run your emotional state
- Taking back your power by focusing on what you actually want
- The show's closing theme of everyday beauty: beavers solving a flooding problem in West London
About Arnold Beekes
Arnold Beekes is the host of Between The Ears, a podcast built around the idea that your inner state creates your outer reality. Having lived in five different countries, Arnold draws on his own experiences to help listeners build a better life between the ears, one episode at a time.
Connect with Arnold Beekes
🧠 Inner Fitness for Modern Life: https://braingym.fitness/
🧠 Inner Leadership Training for Ambitious Leaders: https://www.brainathletes.club/
🧠 Innovation Mindset for Exponential Change: https://www.innovationathletes.club/
🤝 Join our free Brain Health community: https://www.skool.com/brain-fitness-7070
🔗 https://bio.link/beekes
🎙️ Edited and Produced by The PodFather Network LLC
🌐 https://roycoughlan.com/
#BetweenTheEars #BrainFitness #InnerState #PersonalDevelopment #ThreeBrains #InternalControl #MentalHealthMatters #Coherence #MoralBeauty #EverydayBeauty #PodfatherNetwork
Ep5 Between the Ears
Welcome, I'm Arnold Bekus and I enable you to have a better life between the ears. Why is that so important? Well, the simple reason with big impact is because your inner state creates your outer reality and that means we all need to continuously working on a high frequency in a state, in an inner state which is positive and constructive. Today I would like to start and share with you three starting points when you are hopefully starting to make your brain fitness a daily habit, a daily activity.
Just like everyone by now understands that you daily need to work on your body fitness, exercise, movement, everyone knows that's important and a lot of people are doing that actively a few times a week maybe each hopefully each day in a week and the same is something which you need to do for your brain fitness. But before we get there what are some crucial starting points because when we talk about our brain fitness, let's first start with my definition of brain fitness. Brain fitness is a state of psychological and physiological well-being in which a person chooses his or her uniqueness, learns continuously, deals with challenges and contributes to a better for all world.
In order to be able to do that and to work on your brain fitness which I would suggest is a daily activity, we are confronted with well most likely brain sickness. Our brains are sick. Look at the number of people who are labeled with mental illnesses, mental disorders or not even part of the official labeling discussion but who are having problems with their emotions, who are feeling stressed out or having burnout, people who have anxiety, depression, all these things are globally exploding.
Why is that? Because our brains are sick and in another podcast we will discuss the causes of that problem. But before we can start working effectively on our own brain fitness, we have to understand these three starting points. Number one, you have to understand it's not your fault but it is your responsibility.
What do I mean by that? It's not your fault in the sense that there's nothing wrong with you, there's nothing wrong with your brain either psychologically or physiologically. That's what they try to tell you is like oh there's a chemical imbalance and you should take a lot of medicine and then hopefully you will feel better. That's not true because there is nothing wrong and by the way that chemical imbalance doesn't exist.
So it's not your fault that you might feel anxious, depressed, stressed or any of these other states. It's absolutely not your fault and what I'm showing you in my trainings is that we are consciously being conditioned by people who are pulling the strings in our world to feel lousy, to underperform, to be totally obedient and not thinking for ourselves. And there's currently a lot of things which are being done to impact our brain health.
So all of these things means it's not your fault and there's nothing wrong with you. Still that's why the second part of the line which I said it's not your fault but it's your responsibility meaning that you are not feeling happy, healthy in every condition. That is not your fault but it is your responsibility to improve your brain health, to work daily on your brain fitness.
That is something you and I and everybody could do and I suggest you should do. So that's number one. Number two starting point.
We have to understand that we actually have three brains. Yes, you heard that correctly. Three brains not one brain.
That's what we all think. That's what we're taught at school. You have one brain which is a lump of fat under the skull in your head and that's what mainly does the thinking.
Yes, that is one of them but it's not. They're still too messy. There's your heart brain and there's your gut brain.
Your heart brain basically has actually the most influence on how you feel from a day-to-day basis but your heart brain knows a lot and your heart brain talks to you but because we don't know that there is a heart brain and that it can talk to you, you don't notice it. So you have to uptrain it to start listening to your heart brain. Your gut brain is around courage and intuition and understanding of what your body says.
Hey, should I do this or shouldn't I do this? There's your gut brain. When are you functioning at the I would say desired level is what they call coherence and coherence is a difficult word which says your head brain, your heart brain and your gut brain are in sync with each other. They support each other.
They make each other better and improve in the right way. So if you work on your brain fitness, it's not just making your thinking go better. Let me put it like that.
No, it's also starting to listen, starting to see, starting to understand your gut brain and your heart brain. The third starting point is that we need to move from external control to internal control. What does that mean? It means like I said earlier in a podcast about living your own life is that we are currently most people are living someone else's life so we have external control.
It's always how other people judge us, what other people say about us, opinions, comments, judgments from other people. That is how is the driving force about how we feel. Was my boss angry with me or was he satisfied? Did my wife like what I did or she doesn't like it? Are my children doing well at school or not? All these things is that you put the control outside of yourself.
That's why they call it an external control. How you feel is determined how other people relate to you. In essence what you're doing there is you're giving your power away.
You're giving your power to other people and what is really crucial for a brain fitness is that you take back control and that you focus on internal control. What do I want? How am I feeling? What do I really would like to do? What's something where I can really contribute? So to summarize the three starting points and they're very very important for your brain fitness, for everyone's brain fitness. Number one, it's not your fault but it's your responsibility.
Number two, we have three brains and number three, moving from external to internal control. Let's conclude today's session with an example of everyday beauty and it's an example where I read which which happened in the United Kingdom. What they did is they reintroduced beavers.
Yes, you heard that correctly. Beavers are very interesting animals and they have solved a persistent flooding problem in West London completely for free. They transformed these beavers, a flood-prone area near Greenford tube station, into a functioning wetland that has not flooded once since the family of five beavers arrived in 2023.
They basically said step aside humans and that is what the England's first urban beaver officer said. Isn't that a cool title on your business card? I'm an urban beaver officer but anyway, a natural solution helped prevent a flooding problem in West London. I think that's really great.
So remember, we need your uniqueness. Be a better maker for yourself, for others, for the world.
Welcome, I'm Arnold Bekus and I enable you to have a better life between the ears. Why is that so important? Well, the simple reason with big impact is because your inner state creates your outer reality and that means we all need to continuously working on a high frequency in a state, in an inner state which is positive and constructive. Today I would like to start and share with you three starting points when you are hopefully starting to make your brain fitness a daily habit, a daily activity.
Just like everyone by now understands that you daily need to work on your body fitness, exercise, movement, everyone knows that's important and a lot of people are doing that actively a few times a week maybe each hopefully each day in a week and the same is something which you need to do for your brain fitness. But before we get there what are some crucial starting points because when we talk about our brain fitness, let's first start with my definition of brain fitness. Brain fitness is a state of psychological and physiological well-being in which a person chooses his or her uniqueness, learns continuously, deals with challenges and contributes to a better for all world.
In order to be able to do that and to work on your brain fitness which I would suggest is a daily activity, we are confronted with well most likely brain sickness. Our brains are sick. Look at the number of people who are labeled with mental illnesses, mental disorders or not even part of the official labeling discussion but who are having problems with their emotions, who are feeling stressed out or having burnout, people who have anxiety, depression, all these things are globally exploding.
Why is that? Because our brains are sick and in another podcast we will discuss the causes of that problem. But before we can start working effectively on our own brain fitness, we have to understand these three starting points. Number one, you have to understand it's not your fault but it is your responsibility.
What do I mean by that? It's not your fault in the sense that there's nothing wrong with you, there's nothing wrong with your brain either psychologically or physiologically. That's what they try to tell you is like oh there's a chemical imbalance and you should take a lot of medicine and then hopefully you will feel better. That's not true because there is nothing wrong and by the way that chemical imbalance doesn't exist.
So it's not your fault that you might feel anxious, depressed, stressed or any of these other states. It's absolutely not your fault and what I'm showing you in my trainings is that we are consciously being conditioned by people who are pulling the strings in our world to feel lousy, to underperform, to be totally obedient and not thinking for ourselves. And there's currently a lot of things which are being done to impact our brain health.
So all of these things means it's not your fault and there's nothing wrong with you. Still that's why the second part of the line which I said it's not your fault but it's your responsibility meaning that you are not feeling happy, healthy in every condition. That is not your fault but it is your responsibility to improve your brain health, to work daily on your brain fitness.
That is something you and I and everybody could do and I suggest you should do. So that's number one. Number two starting point.
We have to understand that we actually have three brains. Yes, you heard that correctly. Three brains not one brain.
That's what we all think. That's what we're taught at school. You have one brain which is a lump of fat under the skull in your head and that's what mainly does the thinking.
Yes, that is one of them but it's not. They're still too messy. There's your heart brain and there's your gut brain.
Your heart brain basically has actually the most influence on how you feel from a day-to-day basis but your heart brain knows a lot and your heart brain talks to you but because we don't know that there is a heart brain and that it can talk to you, you don't notice it. So you have to uptrain it to start listening to your heart brain. Your gut brain is around courage and intuition and understanding of what your body says.
Hey, should I do this or shouldn't I do this? There's your gut brain. When are you functioning at the I would say desired level is what they call coherence and coherence is a difficult word which says your head brain, your heart brain and your gut brain are in sync with each other. They support each other.
They make each other better and improve in the right way. So if you work on your brain fitness, it's not just making your thinking go better. Let me put it like that.
No, it's also starting to listen, starting to see, starting to understand your gut brain and your heart brain. The third starting point is that we need to move from external control to internal control. What does that mean? It means like I said earlier in a podcast about living your own life is that we are currently most people are living someone else's life so we have external control.
It's always how other people judge us, what other people say about us, opinions, comments, judgments from other people. That is how is the driving force about how we feel. Was my boss angry with me or was he satisfied? Did my wife like what I did or she doesn't like it? Are my children doing well at school or not? All these things is that you put the control outside of yourself.
That's why they call it an external control. How you feel is determined how other people relate to you. In essence what you're doing there is you're giving your power away.
You're giving your power to other people and what is really crucial for a brain fitness is that you take back control and that you focus on internal control. What do I want? How am I feeling? What do I really would like to do? What's something where I can really contribute? So to summarize the three starting points and they're very very important for your brain fitness, for everyone's brain fitness. Number one, it's not your fault but it's your responsibility.
Number two, we have three brains and number three, moving from external to internal control. Let's conclude today's session with an example of everyday beauty and it's an example where I read which which happened in the United Kingdom. What they did is they reintroduced beavers.
Yes, you heard that correctly. Beavers are very interesting animals and they have solved a persistent flooding problem in West London completely for free. They transformed these beavers, a flood-prone area near Greenford tube station, into a functioning wetland that has not flooded once since the family of five beavers arrived in 2023.
They basically said step aside humans and that is what the England's first urban beaver officer said. Isn't that a cool title on your business card? I'm an urban beaver officer but anyway, a natural solution helped prevent a flooding problem in West London. I think that's really great.
So remember, we need your uniqueness. Be a better maker for yourself, for others, for the world.
