How To Take Full Control Of Your Mind: Prof. Steve Peters, The Chimp Paradox
Guests: Steve
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Professor Steve Peters. He's a world-leading psychiatrist, arguably one of the most famous, renowned, and important of our time. He's also a doctor and a hugely successful author. Some of you—most of you—will know him from his bestselling book, *The Chimp Paradox*, which has sold millions of copies worldwide.
He’s worked with elite-level athletes, including Steven Gerrard and the England football team, Ronnie O'Sullivan, gold medal Olympians like Sir Chris Hoy and Victoria Pendleton, as well as business leaders and CEOs. He helps them overcome what he calls mental dysfunction. Steve's invented this groundbreaking concept called the Chimp Model.
It focuses on how there are three parts to our brain: The Chimp (impulsive and emotional), The Human (logical and rational), and The Computer (our set of core values and beliefs). This episode gave me so many personal epiphanies. I know for sure it will change my life forever. I’m Stephen Bartlett, and this is *The Diary of A CEO*. I hope nobody is listening, but if you are, then please keep this to yourself.
Professor Steve Peters, thank you for joining me today. I’ve been a big fan of your work for a long, long period of time. Where I wanted to start with you was with a question: How do you define yourself professionally? I’ve read about the diverse amount of work you’ve done across multiple sectors, but what is the basis of your work?
Coming from a medical background, I define myself as a doctor who has specialized in the mental health area of medicine. I then moved a little bit sideways into mentoring and helping people to gain understanding and insights into the way that their mind functions. Effectively, I'm an educator with a medical basis.
Generally, my work now is helping people to optimize performance or get a good relationship with themselves—finding inner peace, the kind of things people want: happiness, confidence, or even high-performing teams. The basis of all of this is: do you understand what's going on inside your head to understand yourself?
Some people are easily confused between psychiatry and psychology. What’s the distinction as you see it?
Psychologists are experts usually in a specific area within psychology. An educational psychologist would look at how we educate children and adults and how they learn best. A clinical psychologist might work with someone who's got depressive illness and look at the cognitive aspects of that—the way we think and behave.
A psychiatrist is a medical doctor, so we tend to treat mental illness as opposed to dysfunction. Mental illness is where, in simplistic terms, the brain isn't functioning well—something is going wrong, often with transmitter systems. When we find as a psychiatrist that it’s dysfunction, then we do overlap work with what psychologists would do.
Your book *The Chimp Paradox* really focused on psychological dysfunction. Was that born out of your work in psychiatry?
Yes. When I was in the NHS as a consultant for many years, people would come through the door who had mental illness, which then we would treat and support. But also, a significant number of people came through the door who didn't need treatment per se. Their mind was fully functional and operating well; they just didn't know how to operate it.
Because they didn't operate well with the mind, it was creating a lot of emotional distress. They would present as if it were an illness, but in my book, it wasn't an illness. So I worked with that dysfunction, and out of that work was born the neuroscience basis of the Chimp Model to say, "Look, let's have a look at the brain and see what the brain is actually doing."
There's a prevailing narrative in culture at the moment that mental health disorders are on the increase and that people are getting more and more depressed and anxious. In your view, is that accurate?
This is a complex topic. We're more aware of it, so it's probably reported more. But mental illness per se can sometimes be born out of mental dysfunction. If we get stressed in our work and we don't manage it well, or in relationships, then we know that given time for many individuals, the neurotransmitters in the brain start to malfunction.
We can create effectively an illness by not managing the mind well. Alternatively, it can spontaneously malfunction. People can have a great life and look after themselves, yet still suddenly go into a clinical depression because a system has failed, much like say a thyroid might fail. They haven't done anything wrong; it's just the system has failed.
Is the changing world we live in—the more digitalized world where our lives are being more optimized for productivity and optimized against things like exercise—more conducive with mental illness?
Everybody's unique, which means that somebody will find that really advantageous to just press a button and the lunch arrives. But the vast majority of us are built to interact. We are gregarious by nature and we like people around us. If somebody's isolated in an office or working from home, they will miss that aspect if they don't actually compensate in some way.
I’m unsure whether it's just because awareness has increased around mental illness or if the world we live in now is not meeting our fundamental human needs.
I think it’s a bit of everything. Researchers will look at the idea that, for example, social media has a massive input which wasn't there 20 years ago. Now it’s become very prominent, and we know that most of us don't respond well to criticism. If it's public criticism, then we really don't respond well. That can be an extremely destructive force for some people.
However, if people use social media appropriately and are able to block out any of these negative comments, then they'll probably find it an advantageous thing to actually communicate with friends and family. It’s about stopping and getting time to think: What are my needs? A lot of people don't really know that; you have to discover them.
Are you able to point at some fundamental things that we all need for good mental health?
If you came to me for a psychological profile, I would first look at the relationship you have with yourself. What's your own self-image, self-worth, and self-confidence? We start with you. If someone's in a good place, then it’s likely they'll cope with the world. But if someone's not in a good place with themselves, then it’s unlikely they'll cope because your starting point is not good.
Then we look at things like relationships. What kind of relationships do you particularly need or want at this point in your life? Are you maximizing them, or are they dysfunctional? Is it to do with the communication between you? Apart from that, I'll go to fundamental drives. Do you recognize the drives you have?
The obvious ones are eating drives, the drive for sex, for security, for territory. We'll look at how you apply those. But sometimes it’s hidden drives. One of them is a purpose, recognition, or a feeling of value in what you do or who you are. Often they get neglected because people don't recognize them. Once you point them out, then we can work on what works for you.
I don't tell people what to do. I don't have a recipe book. What I like to do is work with you as a team. You say to me, "These are what my needs are." I challenge that to try and make sure it's really clear, and then we work together to say: what are your outcome objectives? What do you want to achieve in the next three months, six months, 12 months?
Two things I was super intrigued by there: the idea of self-image and what that really means.
In the early 90s, it struck me as a younger doctor that the mind isn't one entity working. When I ask people about self-image, I'm now going to split the mind a bit and say: what is the self-image that you feel you would like to have and what's the genetic self-image that your mind is giving you?
You have a circuitry which is rational and logical looking at the facts (The Human), and you have a circuitry which is emotionally based (The Chimp). It’s not logic and emotion; it's logically based *with* emotion and it's emotion-based *with* logic. We don't control that.
Your self-image might be that I’m a compassionate guy, that I’m a trustworthy person, that I always give 100%. This is what your self-image *could* be when I discuss it with you and your human circuits are responding. However, if you’ve moved the blood supply and oxygen uptake into what I’m calling the Chimp circuits—circuits which are quite primitive but think—you don't have any control over that.
They will generate thinking. The Chimp circuits may give a very different answer because they're much more likely to be emotional and say how you *feel* about yourself rather than the reality. So we get two images from two different circuits.
And what is informing the Chimp?
As we develop in the fetus, the Chimp circuitry, which is the orbitofrontal cortex, starts to think. But it thinks in an emotional way, so it reacts to things. It doesn't think ahead with consequence; it reacts impulsively and it relies on the center of the brain—the rest of the limbic system—to actually store our experiences as memory.
For example, if a child gets told off at the age of two, it's likely to be in Chimp circuitry. If it wants to avoid being told off again, it'll conceal what it does. If it's eaten a chocolate biscuit, it'll just try and not get caught. Its impulse will be to eat the biscuit, but then it will learn that if you do, you get caught and told off. This is impulsive and not thinking of long-term consequences or values.
Around age two, the Human circuits start to develop. These run from the top of our head down into the center of the brain. This part, the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, we have control of. This is our active thinking conscious awareness of things like future time. We look at consequence: if I steal the biscuit, what will happen? Is there an alternative? Now our values start to come into play.
The Human stores factual memory rather than emotional memory. When you say what informs the Chimp, the Chimp has got all this intuition. Intuition is previous experience of what happens. As it’s going to take the chocolate biscuit, the Chimp’s brain will remind it that this may not be a good thing. So generally, the child now feels on edge.
They know what they want to do but they're on edge and they don't know why until they have to think it through. The Chimp will remind them: you're getting this feeling because you could get caught. The way that system works is it gives you a feeling, you interpret the feeling, and then you make a decision. But it's based on feelings.
What was the prehistoric use case for the Chimp?
I used the term "Chimp" because the chimpanzee's brain is almost the same as ours in these particular circuits. That’s why we find them entertaining because they demonstrate what we do. They will be devious, they will be quite violent, they're also compassionate, but they're all impulsive and not thought through well.
The Chimp brain and our brain are closer than we thought in the way that we think with that particular circuitry. It's a defense mechanism to protect you. Obviously, eating the biscuit is a good survival mechanism. These circuits are based to help us to survive, so they give us all our drives, but they also give us experience of what happens when we act in a certain way. If it doesn't work, we change our reaction.
You said "drives" there. How does one go about understanding their drives? In the social media world, it feels like our drives and our values are sometimes handed to us. We might say we want a Lamborghini or to be a public speaker, but really underpinning that is our desire for recognition or to be loved.
This is where I start with a blank piece of paper and say: write down the perfect person you want to be. This now excludes any of the drives. A lot of what you're talking about is actually behaviors attached to drives; they're not true drives. Drives are things like the need to eat, the need to have security, the need to be a parent.
Gaining approval from people is actually based in the Chimp again, where it's terrified of being excluded from the troop. A chimpanzee in the wild must be part of a troop, otherwise, the leopard's waiting. So the chimpanzee has an inbuilt need to be with other Chimps. In order to do that, it must prove to the other Chimps that it's worthy. We carry that drive still—that we need to be approved.
The problem is, the chimpanzee recognizes it only wants approval from its immediate troop, whereas we actually try and get approval from the whole world. One person on social media tells the world that they don't like us and we can potentially fall apart, instead of saying, "Actually, they're not in my troop, so it's not important." Find your own troop, because that's what you need to focus on, not the rest of the world. You’ll never please them.
That makes a lot of sense. I’ve sat here with guests who have tens of millions of followers online, and they still—95% of the time—can have their day ruined by one comment on a YouTube video.
Our Chimps are actually saying: just close in and get the people around you that matter and please them and look at their approval. That's what friends do; they'll be critical but it's very constructive and done with love. But if you start expanding that inappropriately to the whole world, you're going to stress your Chimp to pieces.
I ask people: what do you believe? Because truths are relative to us. 80% of people approve of us—20% love us, 60% just approve, and 20% are just not pleasant people. If we go around believing that we're really going to make them into pleasant people or we're really going to please them, you're going to lose. You have to step back and get that fact. You’re allowing your drive for the troop to extend to the world, and that's not appropriate.
So I get a blank piece of paper and write down who I want to be. I would say things like, "I want to achieve great things." Is that a drive?
No, that's not a drive; that's something you hope for. We get the terminology right because if you hope for that but accept it may not happen, that you're now working with the Human circuit which is logical and rational. I work with elite athletes and they hope to get an Olympic medal. They accept that they may not get this. As long as you have that, then it shouldn't be stressing you.
But if you move into saying "I *have* to get an Olympic medal," we're now moving into the Chimp circuits because that's not true. You don't have to. What I'm really asking for is: what are your character traits?
So, discipline?
Would you like to be a really nice, good person or would you like to be successful? If you could only be one of them, which would you prefer?
A really nice, good person.
Right, so I know where I stand with you now. Give me some more character traits.
I want to be inspirational, but also just empathetic, compassionate, and a positive force.
Brilliant. You want to be an empathetic guy, a compassionate guy, inspirational. You're probably going to add honesty, integrity, trustworthy, respectful. When you've done all this, this is really crucial. If you had control of that part of your brain and there was no interference from the rest of the brain, then that's exactly how you would be in life. That *is* you. It's not who you hope to be; it is you. It's neuroscience.
What we're now saying is: that doesn't present to the world because now your Chimp and the Computer system (the backup to both Human and Chimp) now impose other things. So you say to me, "I want to be compassionate." And I walk in and say I've had a really long journey today and you're busy and you just get irritated and say, "Oh for goodness sake, stop moaning."
And then afterwards you think, "Well, that wasn't very compassionate, so I'm not compassionate." But that's misunderstanding the neuroscience. You were always compassionate because your intention was always to say, "Sorry Steve that you've had a rough journey." But what happened is your Chimp is saying, "I don't need to deal with this, it's doing my head in, so I'll just have a go." There you see this immediate reaction without thought of consequence.
But actually, when I understand the science, I think: he’s probably a nice guy, his Chimp wasn't very good there. That is very different to you going away at the end of the day thinking, "What's wrong with me? Why was I lacking in compassion?"
This is not an excuse model. You are 100% responsible for managing the Chimp. So you need an apology. When you know the Chimp's been a bit brisk or rude, you've got to stop and say "I apologize." I’m not saying blame everything on your Chimp.
You gave me an answer there by saying "I want to be this compassionate guy." People say surely everyone writes the same list. Absolutely not. When I worked in the field of forensics and if you take a typical person, they'll give me the right list—peaceful, calm, integrity, honesty, compassion. However, when you get to the psychopath, they wouldn't put these. They did not put honesty, they did not put compassion. It was all about power, it was all about ego.
So actually, the Human in that person is not the good guy. I used to say it's often the Chimp in them that's the nice guy; the actual Human's not so nice at all. So it isn't a good guy/bad guy thing. It's saying we all have these systems. Let's find out who we are, what kind of Chimp we've got, and then what have we got on our Computer.
One of the first ones that came to mind was about leadership. I was thinking about the likes of Steve Jobs. You hear about these leaders that appear to be led more by their Chimp because they are incredibly short all the time. They appear to be incredibly emotional. Even Sir Alex Ferguson is maybe an interesting example. They appear to be either using the Chimp intentionally or out of control.
There's nothing wrong with the Chimp. People have said to me, "Oh you paint this picture of this like terrible being in our heads." I've never said this. I said it's your best friend. My Chimp is my best friend. That doesn't mean I always agree with him. I always say to people: I see him as this inept best friend who doesn't do the best things for me at times, but he means well.
I learn to communicate with it so that I can get it on side and harness its power. The Chimp is the part of the brain that gives us a sense of humor. The Human doesn't possess that; it's the Chimp that recognizes anomalies and makes us laugh. It's the Chimp that has intuition; the Chimp reads body language. So our Human circuits fail.
This complementary circuit, when it works together—we know even if you go to the corporate world that business decisions that are made with logic and emotion are the best decisions. You use your Chimp's intuition and its enthusiasm and its drives, but you harness them and you channel them. You start saying, "I've got this amazing machine now, but it's almost like a living machine, and I'm going to get it on side."
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I wanted to talk about exactly that topic, which is managing your emotional reactions across different facets of life. I’ll give you an example of a situation I went through. I broke up with a girl, and like two days later I found out that she'd slept with somebody else. Even though I had broken up with her, when I read the message that she'd slept with somebody else, my brain said: Revenge. Message her. Destroy her life.
I’m at a place in my life where I feel quite secure in my self-image, but even I couldn't seem to get a grip of my own desire to react emotionally in that situation. It was actually my friend calling me and he said to me, "Steve, just remember: you broke up with her. She's probably doing this to make herself feel better and to rebound." That was one of those key moments where I was like, God, the damage you can do if you don't know how to control that primitive urge to just... *raar*.
Okay, you've covered a lot of ground. I'm going to take it back and try and go very steadily. One is first of all: what would you expect somebody's mind to do confronted with the same situation?
Probably the same.
Exactly. So nothing abnormal happened. There wasn't a problem. This is absolutely healthy and normal, but maybe not helpful. Clearly your Human brain is saying, "I don't want to get revenge." What I want is to just be calm and collected, accept the reality of it, and move on.
We have to learn now how the mind works when we get a really nasty shock and something which is devastating. The reason the Chimp is there is for us to be safe and present the next generation to the world. So what happened there is the generation that you thought you were going to get was taken away from you.
So this is devastating. We expect you to be devastated. The mind is going to now grieve and it'll take approximately three months, give or take. Heartbreak... you've got to grieve. The mind has a rule on the way it deals and processes grief. I can't speed that up. Your Human brain can do it in seconds because that's logic: "She's gone, she was dishonest, it’s a good thing she's gone now, no more wasted time."
That's easy, but our emotional Chimp brain has got to process it; it cannot do it overnight. So you've got to now allow around a 12-week process and you're going to go through various stages of grief in the loss of what is a very significant relationship. And on top of that, there was another insult: she slept with someone else. So that is *really* going to get your Chimp.
Your Chimp's reaction—but it's common—is that it wants revenge. In reality, what you've just said by your nodding is "That's not what I want. I just want to move on and accept it wasn't for me, she did what she did, that's her problem not mine." What your friend did is start to try and turn it around with some facts to calm your Chimp down.
Let's look at the reality. If I said to you: this girl is going to come back into your life and she'll bring all that pleasure you used to have, but she's going to have affairs every few weeks. Is that what you want?
No.
So you did break it off. You try and look at it in a different way and say: let's look at the reality and the facts of the situation, but you cannot stop the grieving. You can't stop the yearning or the bargaining. Guys in your position often go back and plead. And then she'll say "I made a mistake," and then you have to make a decision. This can all be circumvented if you suddenly met somebody new; your Chimp might recover very quickly.
Is that what tends to happen?
Well, this is the rebound. So this is never a good thing. Generally speaking, you need time to get over this, gather yourself so you're in a good place when you do meet somebody else to have a good relationship. So yes, rationally we can pull you along, but we've got to give you a lot of TLC and actually go through grieving. Don't be harsh on yourself; what your experiences are is totally natural.
Is there anything in psychiatry from your experience that can... okay, that process is unavoidable, but is there anything that I can do to help that process be easier?
Yes, there is. One is understanding it. If I said to you with the gym, you laugh, "I can't do it in a night." "Well how long?" and you say "Well, it's a bit of a piece of string, but roughly speaking, if you keep going regularly two, three times a week, maybe three months, six months, you're going to see a difference, for sure."
It's the same with me explaining the mind. I would explain to people that we go through a grieving process. You are likely to experience the following emotions or stages in the grief process. I want you to get insight; that's the key. Then applying this so you learn the skill of managing your emotions and the skill of mind management.
On the point of rejection, is it the stories that I then tell myself about myself—which impact my self-image—that really hold that hurt the most? The fact that someone didn't want you makes yourself tell yourself that you are not good enough, not pretty enough, not smart enough. It feels like so much of the hurt and the pain lives inside that story you tell yourself about yourself.
Are these factual statements or are they impressions and feelings?
Impressions and feelings.
So we know that the Chimp brain is in full flow now. So what we're saying is: don't quench that. It's not wrong; it's expressing. If this happens to me, I now say to him, "What is it you're telling me?" and he'll go through all this, "You know it's the end of the world and clearly no one's ever going to love you." And then we sort of counter it by saying "Well, let's look at that."
We start to rationalize and that can help the grieving process because we start saying: well, let's not just sit there with these falsehoods, let's challenge them and let's replace them with truths. Not brainwash. It's no good saying, for example, "No, you're really handsome." That's an impression again from me.
What I'd be saying is: let's look at facts. Do people find a partner eventually? The answer is: most people, yes. So the chances are very high. Is there a future? Yes, there always is a future. Even for people in a much more serious situation where they become suicidal, you can tell them with honesty: there is always a future, and things do change, and feelings do move. Talking facts settle your emotions.
Giving falsehoods—"I know you can do it"—that's not going to settle your Chimp; they're streetwise. So he'll just keep agitating. Whereas if we talk facts, then it'll settle. We have to find the facts that resonate with you as facts. If you said to me, "Yeah but I don't believe that everybody does," there's no point me forcing this truth onto you. I’d have to look for others that might resonate with you.
My friend telling me things that I genuinely did accept to be true just completely diffused my brain.
Because he's acting effectively as your Human. That's what he's doing. He's coming in rationally and stepping back and saying "Let's look at the facts here," and he's hit some nails on the head where you think "Oh, that's settled me down a bit." But what tends to happen is you tend to isolate yourself. Most people do this after this has happened, and they go within themselves and they engage these emotions, which generates more and more falsehoods and distorted ways of perceiving themselves and the world.
That's so interesting because I just realized something that I've started doing in the last year. In those moments where I'm struggling to respond or act or behave in a way which I want to—which is in line with who I am—I've got this habit now: I now write in the notes of my phone statements I know to be true. And the second thing is I will have a conversation out loud when I'm alone to try and rationalize against how I'm feeling.
Brilliant. These are really key points. You mention what I call the Grade A hits—the truths that resonate with you. Put them in your phone, look at them, and they stabilize your Chimp at any point. Not everybody's going to like you, and there are nasty people in the world. I'd like to add some positives: there are some fantastic people in the world and there'll always be people who love you. You're never alone; you just need to reach out.
When we looked at therapies and this has been researched for the last 50 years, we're intrigued to know: why do they work? The intriguing bit was: when you speak into the air, effectively it's the Chimp brain giving out its thoughts and feelings and your Human's listening. So actually, it rationalizes as you listen.
It's not unusual in business meetings I've seen it, where I've worked with corporate teams and said: just speak what you think but don't judge them. They let their Chimps out and at the end I say to the person, "What do you think about that?" and they'll laugh and say "I don't agree with any of it because now I've listened to myself, it's crazy." It's very important that we do speak out. When we talk, we start to listen to ourselves and we start to be able to understand and process.
Context is: I’ve been in quite a challenging relationship where my partner's going through a journey—she actually lives in Indonesia a long way away—and sometimes she’s not always communicating with me, sometimes she can be unpredictable. My Chimp brain will always be trying to jump to conclusions or trying to seek control or to dominate or to force the outcome.
My Human brain is wanting to be that compassionate, empathetic person who is understanding and isn't trying to force an outcome out of somebody. When I have that struggle, I have to speak out loud to kind of calm myself again. I have a list of 20 things that I remind myself of that are like fundamental truths and they calm me.
And that's what I advocate. I like people to get me five, and then we challenge them to make sure they are really strong. But having said that, it's not a panacea; it's not like it's always going to settle. Sometimes we have specific experiences which can throw us. Stop the battle and either express your mind—so say to the Chimp exactly what is it you're trying to tell me? What are you worried about?
We have to accept, and this is important, that sometimes our relationships are based on trust. And we have to accept that reality: we cannot know everything about the person we're with. If our Chimps which are panicky a bit and want guarantees and want... then we’re going down the wrong path and we have to tell our Chimp: you can't do this. You come in with the factual evidence again that people do recover from broken relationships. People don't know what the next relationship will be. Not everybody is the same.
Your Chimp cannot, cannot deal with uncertainty. It's never going to be happy, and your job is to say "Look, we have to live with uncertainty." You have to tell it that you cannot guarantee it. Accept that it's a throw of the dice. Life is a throw of the dice. All we can do is try and alter the probability—weight the dice. There's nothing you can't deal with. You *will* deal with it. The Chimp believes you can't deal with it and it doesn't look beyond, whereas I'm saying look beyond and say whatever happens in life, you'll look back and think "I did deal with life."
Uncertainty, stress. One of the topics you write about in your book, *A Path through the Jungle*, is the idea of stress. I think it's been painted as a really negative thing, something to be avoided at all costs, but from what I’ve understood that's not necessarily the truth. Stress can be a good and a bad thing.
Stress is a good thing provided we act on it. If you have gone on a big dipper ride, your brain releases a lot of noradrenaline. And we know this is a good thing; you get a thrill from it. But if you keep on being in a stressful situation, noradrenaline stays high and that now becomes damaging to us. It's joined by the big one, which is cortisol.
In short bursts, they're actually healthy because they can wake us up to saying "Right, you need to act." So we do have resilience hormones coming in. They will then give us an opportunity, as long as you recognize it, to say stress is welcome provided I act to remove it. There's something I need to do whatever's causing me the stress.
What tends to happen is people either don't recognize they're getting stressed and it becomes chronic and they've got these habitual behaviors which are damaging to them and they don't even recognize them. Then they get symptoms of stress which they also don't recognize because people think stress is where we're wringing our hands and panicking, and that's not really true. Stress comes in all different forms and often isn't recognized.
For example, we know things like all your drives may go out: so your eating drive, sex drive, sleep drives—these all start to falter. But also things like irritability—suddenly finding you've got a short fuse, constantly being tired—this is usually evidence of stress somewhere in your life. Even more subtle ones: when you get people with really bad anxiety, they can be appear selfish. Because suddenly they become so vulnerable in their own eyes and stressed, they don't actually pay attention to people around them.
When we treat them and they get better, they suddenly start engaging with people again and demonstrate respect and compassion. But while they're not well, they become almost selfish or appear that way. So again, you can get people who are stressed and appear to be very self-interested, and it's really vulnerability. They're under stress and we misinterpret that or misinterpret it and start thinking someone's a selfish person.
In terms of the causes of stress, I think one of the widely held beliefs is that a lot of it's about sort of pent-up unaddressed issues or us not releasing or expressing what we're thinking or feeling. Is that accurate?
It is, but then the etiology or the cause of stress is multiple. So again, it could be for example that you've got an ongoing problem—somebody bullying you, that's stressful. Or you're lacking a partner and it really isn't working out, and that can stress you because you feel like it's never going to happen. Or as you said, you could have experiences from way back which have never really been worked through or addressed and they therefore keep surfacing.
They bubble under these emotions and that will definitely create stress. It tends to be they don't present with stress as such; they present with odd emotions. So they translate into things like irritability. And when you say, "Well let's look at why you're being irritable," it's unaddressed issues that you need to get up to the surface in the time you want to do it and then clear the computer system.
And sometimes addiction too? My business partner, he became an alcoholic when we were growing up the business because it was incredibly difficult. I think the pressure of the business and the stress as he would describe it meant that he was turning to alcohol to cope.
Alcohol is a coping strategy—a very poor one—that people use to get social confidence, for example, or remove anxiety or even depression. Generally, it won't work out; it will end up being a problem within itself. But alcohol disorders are then in approximately one in eight people; it will change the brain in the way it functions and they then get these cravings and addiction.
Whereas a lot of people, it's more a behavioral addiction. So it's a case of getting new behavior, work out what's causing the problem, and we sort it and they can stop and drink alcohol socially. But we have to accept that genetically, some people have an addicted genetic loading towards alcohol. They mustn't drink. They actually have a different brain system.
We know that their brain will cause craving, and they will respond to certain medications that behaviorally drinking people won't. So again, it's learning which group you're in. And they must abstain because we know that if they drink small amounts of alcohol, it sets the system off again. So we get this repeat behavior and we have to say: this is just a one-way street to disaster.
Is that a thing? People are genetically predisposed?
Oh yeah, yeah. People are genetically predisposed. So we know it runs in families and we know that people's brains react differently to alcohol intake. There was once a group of guys in London in the alcohol services and these were all guys who had problems with alcohol. And I asked them: tell me, the reality is, what makes you think you're an alcoholic?
They said something interesting which rang true with the neuroscience later: "We know we're alcoholics because if we go to a pub and we ask for a drink, it won't stop." Whereas people who are drinking for other reasons *can* stop. Whereas we immediately change—one drink and we change. That was such a fantastic thing to get from these guys. In nearly every case, I know now we've got a problem. Their mind changes after one drink; it’s just completely different and you can't stop.
The way I would describe my experience with him and my other friends is just as a graph. Dom's drinking—if he had one, the graph would look like this. Mine would be I could have three and then stop. His was always like this. So if he went to the bar, I knew the end of the night would be him falling over because there wouldn't be the thing in his brain that stopped.
Well, interesting. When I started looking at this, the neuroscience behind it brought me back to the Chimp Model because we know that we make decisions from either the Chimp system or the Human. When we drink alcohol, it actually interferes with the circuits of rationality. So the Human effectively gets disabled. So now our Chimp is fully in charge, so it does impulsive things which the next day it may very well regret.
One of the things you talk about extensively is about forming habits. A lot of people in my life recently have tried to form habits, especially during the lockdown where so much of our lives was... our habits were broken. I spent a lot of time thinking about how I could form healthier habits. One of the sort of popular narratives is that if you do something for 21 days it becomes a habit. What is the truth about habits and how we form them?
If you look at why we form a habit, it’s either consciously done with a belief system under it, or it’s unconsciously done. A common one, for example, a poor habit is—and I use this a lot when I do keynote speeches—to say to people: when you go home, if you're with a partner that you love, how do you present to them when you arrive? And it’s amazing how most people moan.
They've not thought that they don't want to see somebody moaning. So what you do is you walk in and think what habit would you like? And the belief then is: if I go in moaning, they could leave me. This could damage... now that's going to shift your habit. Once you've turned the belief around, you're unconsciously doing it without thinking.
If you actually sit down and work that out and put it in your Computer system, then when the Chimp gets through the door, it’s not going to moan because what the Chimp has to do scientifically is consult the Computer before it does anything. It all happens in a tiny fraction of a second. But if the Computer’s programmed to say "Don't forget, you need to be in a good place when you walk in," it will unconsciously remind the Chimp.
So we have these unconscious habits which we're not aware of, which we can bring to conscious by starting to look at our life and say: is this how I want to be? Or we have habits like we eat too much. Now these are different because the first one wasn't based on a drive. The eating habit's much more complex because now you've got not only a behavior that we've got into, we're driven with an incredibly powerful survival drive to eat.
So now we have to deal with two aspects. One is what is the habit that we want to get and what are the beliefs we're going to underpin it with? And how are we going to manage this drive? How are we going to fulfill the drive in a way that our Chimp's happy that it's got its drive fulfilled and we're happy? So that's a big battle. It can be won, it *can* be won.
Sometimes we have a habit because we've got a bad experience. Like you explained that you went through a really bad time with this girl. If it got repeated three or four times, God forbid, you can see how your habit would be to distrust. And it would become a habit because your belief is that these women aren't trustworthy.
Suddenly your Chimp generalizes: all women are like this. And clearly that’s so untrue. So with you I’d be looking and saying: when you meet this girl, what are you looking for? Are you looking at physical looks, do they make me laugh, or are you looking at their values? So we can actually start looking at how you're choosing your partners. And that might help you to avoid the behavior—the habit—of picking up what you might then define as the wrong person.
There's a lot of reflective work that goes into being able to understand and kind of rewrite those... first spot, understand, and rewrite those beliefs you have. Not everybody can go and see yourself every day.
I've helped a lot of people and it's been a massive privilege. But one of the complaints people said is exactly what you said: "I can't work with everybody." So I wrote this book, *A Path through the Jungle*, as a manual with lots of diagrams, lots of science references this time for people who want to follow them up.
It starts from square one and says: let's look at the structure and the functioning of your mind. Then it takes you through this a journey almost through the mind saying: let's look at how emotions work, we talk about grief processes and relationships, talking about interacting with others. Basically what it leads to is eventually you learn how to become robust and resilient.
The last thing I really wanted to talk to you about was this idea of fear of failure, which I think underpins so much of... specifically for my audience, one of the big barriers in their life. I get thousands of messages every week and it's people trying to take that step to become, to start their business or to start that hobby or pursue that dream they have.
I’ll just take what you've given me there because it could be a multitude of reasons. Everyone is unique. But you mentioned a fear of failure. I’m going to be controversial: there's no such thing in my book as a fear of failure. What we're really saying—and it's really important, the subtlety as you said before about language—your fear isn't failure, it's a fear of not being able to deal with the consequences of failure.
Now, that might sound the same thing, but it isn't. Because if you fear failure, there's nothing you can do with that because it could happen. So you're stuck with fearing failure. Whereas if you say, "I fear the consequences of failure and not being able to deal with them," now you can do something. Because we can look at the consequences and address them and get people to be able to say, "I can deal with it."
Whatever happens, I can deal with it. So the fear of not actually succeeding disappears because they've got this: "I'm aware I've got a plan." So I meet a lot of people who say that to me, particularly athletes: "I fear failure." And I have to correct it and say that's not actually what the brain is looking at; it's saying "I fear not being able to deal with the consequences of failure." And that's something I can work with.
This idea that if you wake up in the morning and you set your state just by saying to yourself, "I'm going to have a good day," increases the chance of you having a good day?
There is some truth in the sense that what you're really saying if you stop—and I do advocate people sit on the end of the bed when they get up and say, "Let's just reset and get some perspective before I begin my day." Because what you're doing is you're actually saying to your Computer system: this day is going to be good. So you've added a lot of underwritten beliefs now, which are things like: I'm going to make the most of it, I have no intention of dwelling on misery.
You've primed your Computer with that. So when you go downstairs then and you get a letter on the doorstep that's got a bill, your Chimp will immediately go to react, but it has to look to the Computer. And if you've already said it's going to be a good day, it will remind the Chimp. There's no point in stressing; it's going to be a good day. And it can therefore be scientifically accurate that your Chimp will stop. And that gives your Human a chance to go, "It's only a bill."
And connected to that, my last point is about gratitude. Something you talk about a lot as well.
The research shows that people who are grateful for things in their life—and again I do promote this and say: let's look at what you've got and let's look at what good things have happened to you. There's so much we're grateful for. The evidence is overwhelming that people who are grateful throughout life have really good psychological and physical good health. It affects the entire system just by being grateful and seeing life in a different setting rather than constantly thinking what I lack. Look at what you've got.
And you can practice that.
And you can practice that, and that in itself can become a habit. That can be a habit. I can't recommend this book enough because your work has helped so many people. For you to have then gone on and created a book like this—that is a methodical workbook—I think is really going to have even more impact on people. You really are an author of our time.
That's very kind, but don't forget: congratulate your colleague because I can only offer, they do the work. So he's the one who's managed it and he's the one who needs to pat himself on the back. Same with everyone. I don't do it; I just offer the tools that you can do it. You’ve got to pick them up and do them.
Thank you so much for joining me. It's been an absolute pleasure.
Thank you.
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