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my work now is helping people to optimize performance get a good relationship with themselves finding a
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peace happiness confidence professor steve peters he's a world leading psychiatrist arguably one of the most
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famous renowned and important of our time you will come out the other side much better people do recover from broken
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relationships people don't know what the next relationship will be not everybody is the same
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what tends to happen is people either don't recognize they're getting stressed and it becomes chronic and they've got
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these behaviors which are damaging to them as people think stress is where we're wringing our hands and panicking
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and that's not really true stress comes in all different forms and often isn't recognized
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even for people in a much more serious situation where they become suicidal you can tell them with honesty there is
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always a future and things do change and feelings do move and we have to accept that reality we
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cannot know everything about the person we're with and if our chimps which are panicky a bit and want guarantees and
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what then we're going down the wrong path and we have to tell our chimp you can't do this
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[Music]
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professor steve peters he's a world leading psychiatrist arguably one of the
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most famous renowned and important of our time he's also a doctor and a hugely successful author
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some of you most of you will know him from his best-selling book the chimp paradox which has sold millions of
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copies worldwide and that's a book that actually saved the lives of some people very close to me he's worked with elite
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level athletes including steven gerrard and the england football team and ronnie o'sullivan gold medal olympians like sir
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chris hoy and victoria pendleton as well as business leaders and ceos and he helps them overcome what he calls mental
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dysfunction he's helped them optimize for performance and he's really helped them get out of their own way and in
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many respects in life we're all in our own way steve's invented this groundbreaking concept called the chimp
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model and it focuses on how there's these kind of three parts to our brain the first part is called the chimp which
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is our sort of desire to be impulsive and irrational and emotional and short term the second part is what he calls
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the human and you'll hear him talk about this which is logical and rational and thinks in terms of facts and thinks
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things through in the long term and the third part is what he calls the computer which is our set of core values and
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beliefs steve's work focuses on how we can manage and control the interaction between these three parts of our brain
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and we all have these three compartments within our brains and if you can understand them if you can understand
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these three elements it gives you greater power to utilize them to be happy successful however you
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define it and to live a much more fulfilled life man this episode gave me so many
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personal epiphanies so many sort of penny drop moments and so many personal realizations it's one of the podcasts
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that i i know i'll reflect on going forward and i know for sure
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will change my life forever so this is one where i implore you to listen to the entire conversation because i think it
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will change your life too so without further ado sorry that was a very long intro i'm stephen bartlett and this is
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the direva ceo i hope nobody's listening but if you are then please keep this to yourself
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[Music]
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professor steve peters thank you for for joining me today i've been a big fan of your work as has a lot of people close
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to me in my life for a long long period of time um where i wanted to start with you is with a question which is
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how do you define yourself professionally and i've read you know i've read about the diverse amount of
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work you've done across multiple sectors with sports stars with leaders with with the nhs with the the fire service
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with um you know a broad spectrum of people but what is the sort of basis of your work and how do you define what you
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do okay well thanks for inviting me coming from medical background i define
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myself as a doctor who is specialized in the mental health area of medicine
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and then moved a little bit sideways into just mentoring and helping people to gain understanding and insights into
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the way that their mind functions and then applying that into whatever they take me so effectively i'm an
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educator um with a medical basis but i still have patients i would treat but
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the generally my work now is helping people to optimize performance or get a good relationship with themselves
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um finding a piece the kind of things people want happiness confidence or even things like high performing teams so a
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vast spectrum but the basis of all of this is do you understand what's going on inside your head to understand
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yourself and what's the because some people are easily confused between
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psychiatry and psychology what's the distinction as you see it well the distinction is that psychologists are
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experts in usually a specific area within psychology so educational psychologists would look at how we
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educate children and and adults and how they learn best whereas you might get a clinical psychologist or work with
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someone who's got maybe depressive illness and look at the cognitive aspects of that the way we think and
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behave um adult psychiatry is a medical doctor so we tend to treat mental illness as opposed
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to dysfunction so mental illness is where we know that the in simplistic terms the brain isn't
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functioning well something is going wrong often it's transmitter systems so we treat them
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when we might find as a psychiatrist that it's dysfunction so then we would do overlap work with what psychologists
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would do right got you um you your book the chimp paradox really focused on psychological dysfunction yes
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um and was that born out of your that was born out of your work in psychiatry yes i mean when i was in the nhs as a
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consultant for many years people come to the door who had mental illness which then we would treat and support and help
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and get them on their feet but also a significant number of people came through the door who didn't need
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treatment per se they they had the mind was fully functional and operating well they didn't know how to operate it so
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because they didn't operate well with the mind it was creating a lot of emotional distress
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and so they would present as if it were an illness but in my my book it wasn't an illness so i worked with that
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dysfunction and out of that work was born the neuroscience basis of the the
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chimp model to say look let's have a look at the brain and see what is the brain actually doing and how did it
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develop and how can we apply that to you today i want to go down those two paths so i
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want to go down the mental health path and then also the mental dysfunction path so if we start with the mental health path
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um there's this kind of prevailing narrative in culture at the moment that mental health disorders are on the
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increase and that people are getting more and more depressed and more and more anxious um in your view is that is
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that accurate this is a complex topic and the answer would be that we're more aware of it
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it's probably reported more but um mental illness per se
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will can sometimes be born out of mental dysfunction so if we get stressed in our
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work saying we don't manage it well or in relationships and we don't manage that well then we know that given time
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for many individuals the neurotransmitters in the brain start to malfunction right so we can create
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ineffectively an illness by not managing the mind well alternatively it can spontaneously
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malfunction so people can have a great life look after themselves yet still suddenly go into a clinical depression
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because the system has failed much like say a thyroid might fail they haven't done anything wrong it's just the system
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has failed and is the the changing world we live in the more sort of digitalized world where
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i don't know our lives are being i guess more optimized for i guess productivity and um
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optimized against things like exercise for example you know i can order my lunch by clicking a button now and i can
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meet dates just by swiping on my phone um is it your belief that that changed
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world a more digital world more social media-centric world the world we live in today is more conducive with mental
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illness i think again after talking broad terms everybody's unique which means that
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somebody will find that really advantageous to just press a button and the lunch arrives and they don't need
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that people interaction we're all on a spectrum the vast majority of us are built to interact we are gregarious by
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nature and we like people around us and we like to have relationships so clearly if somebody's isolated in an office or
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working from home then they will miss that aspect so if they don't actually compensate in some way which satisfies
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their need for this interaction then it's likely they will start to become distressed so in that sense i think
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because most of us are gregarious and we're more and more isolated if we don't make steps to change that
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round it's likely people will find they get more stressed and more anxiety will appear and more clinical depression may
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appear yeah i asked that question just because i'm i'm i'm unsure as you said at the start of your answer whether it's
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just because of awareness has increased around mental illness or if um the world
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we live in now is make is not uh meeting us i guess our fundamental human needs i
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think it's a bit of everything and i think therefore researchers will look at the idea that for example social media
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has a massive input which it wasn't there so we go back 20 years and there wasn't social media as such and now it's
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become very prominent in many people's lives and we know that most of us don't respond well to criticism and and if
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it's public criticism then we really don't respond well so that can be an extremely destructive force on people
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however if people use social media appropriately and and are able to block out any of these negative comments that
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people make then they'll probably find it an advantageous thing to actually communicate with friends and family so
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again it's it's not so much what's happening in society it's how we interact with it and learn what works
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for us as individuals so it's stopping and getting time to think what are my needs and a lot of people don't really
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know that you have to discover them and then how do i put them in place that work for me
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and on that point of needs as it relates to sort of mental good mental health um are you able to
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point at some fundamental things that we all need to have um or things that are most
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conducive tip generally broadly with good mental health yeah so if you came to me and you said
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right can we just do like a bit of a psychological profile let me have a look at my life and see how i'm going then
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often people are not what we call great historians they don't give me information i've got to sort of pull the information out with appropriate
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questions and the rare is yes i would touch on so first of all i would certainly look at the relationship you
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have with yourself what's your own self-image self-worth self-confidence i would like to see
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where you stand in those areas because we start with you if if someone's in a good place then it's likely they'll cope
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with the world but if someone's not in a good place with themself and within themselves then it's unlikely they'll
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cope with the world because your starting point is not good and when i've done that then we'll look at things like relationships so you want
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to see what kind of relationships do you particularly need or want at this point in your life and what kind of
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relationships have you got and are you maximizing them are they dysfunctional you know is it to do with the
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communication between you we look at communication but apart from that i'll go to fundamental drives
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you know do you recognize the drives you have and the obvious ones are eating drives um the drive for sex for security
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for territory we'll look at how you apply those because these are drives that all of us have to greater or less
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extend but sometimes it's hidden drives so one of the ones is a purpose
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uh recognition you know a feeling of value in what you do or who you are so these
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are drives we all have but often they get neglected because people don't recognize them and once you actually point them out and you say well how are
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you going to fulfill these then we can work on what works for you so i don't tell people i don't have like a recipe
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book i can't do that i know other people can i can't what i like to do is work with you as a team
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and you say to me this is what my needs are i challenge that to try and make sure it's really clear
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and then we'll look at what you think will work for you maybe i'll come up with ideas and suggestions or challenge
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beliefs you've got and then we work together to say what are your outcome objectives what do you want to achieve in the next three months
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six months 12 months and look what's realistic so it's it's quite a detailed
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almost like an mot on the person's mind make sure everything's up and functioning
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two things i was super intrigued there by is that the idea of self-image and what that really really means um because
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i've heard the term of you know self-image i guess that's how you see yourself um insecurities and all or is
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insecurities uh impact how you see yourself well this is where 20 something years ago now uh in the
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early 90s it struck me as a younger doctor that um
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the mind isn't one entity working so when i ask people about self-image i'm
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now going to split the mind a bit and say what is the self-image that you feel you would like to have
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and that you are aiming to to present to the world and what's the genetic
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self-image that your mind is giving you and the mind interpreting hence i started saying you have this circuitry
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which is rational logical looking at the facts and you have a circuitry which is emotionally based so it's not logic and
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emotion it's logically based with emotion and it's emotion based with logic
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and we don't control that so if i try and that's detail i should listen to that one again
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is what i'm saying is we have control over the circuitry which i call the human
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circuits and your self-image then might be that i'm a compassionate guy that i'm
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a trustworthy person that i always give 100 this is what your self-image could be when i discuss
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with you and your circuits are responding however if you've moved the blood supply and
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oxygen uptake into what i'm calling the chimp circuits circuits which are quite primitive but think you don't have any
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control over that so they will generate thinking and the chimp circus may give a
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very different answer because they're much more likely to be emotionally say how you feel about
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yourself rather than reality so the feeling could be the reality but it's it's likely not to be
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so we get two images from two different circuits and what is informing the champ
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right so the chimp when it starts off in life this is going heavy neuroscience as we develop in the fetus the the chimp
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circuitry which is the orbiter frontal cortex heads it up this is a part of our brain just above our eyes starts to
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think but it thinks in an emotional way so it it reacts to things it doesn't think ahead with consequence it reacts
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impulsively and it relies on the center of the brain the rest of the limbic system it's part of the limbic
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uh to actually store this our experiences memory so for example if the child gets told
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off at the age of two it's likely to be in circuitry then if it wants to avoid being told off
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again it will conceal what it does so if it's eaten a chocolate biscuit it'll just
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try and not get caught okay because the it it's imp impulse will to be eat the chocolate biscuit but then it will learn
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but if you do you can get caught you get told off so therefore concealer being caught so this is impulsive and not thinking of long-term consequences or
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values or because this circuitry just does impulsive how can i get what i want
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and get away with it with the least emotion and or painful emotion whereas
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what happens when we're around two as a secondary system the human circuits start to develop so these run from the
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top of our head almost like a vertical one down into the center of the brain and this part the dos lateral prefrontal
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cortex we have control of this is our active thinking conscious awareness of
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things like future time so we look at consequence if i steal the biscuit what will happen is there an alternative
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and now our values start to come into play it's not the right thing to do whereas the chimp bin doesn't work with
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values it has values but they're not our values so we then start having this battle in
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our heads but that circuit doesn't come into a two-year-old approximately so that's why
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we don't have memory before too because he's not actually functioning and it starts factual memory rather than
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emotional memory so when you say one in form to chimp the chimp has got all this intuition and
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intuition is previous experience of what happens so as he's going to take the chocolate biscuit
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the chimp's brain will remind it this may not be a good thing it's pleasurable but it may not be good so that generally
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the child now feels on edge they know what they want to do but they're on edge and they don't know why they're on edge
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until they have to think it through and then the chip will remind them you're getting this feeling because you could
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get caught so the way that system works it gives you a feeling you interpret the feeling and then you
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make a decision but it's based on feelings what was the prehistoric
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use case for the chimp well the chimp brain i mean i i use that because when i looked
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30 years ago i looked at the human brain and then compared it to the hominids and spoke to specialists in the hominid
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group who were saying that the chimpanzees brain is is almost the same as ours and these particular circuits so
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that's why we find them entertaining because they demonstrate what we do yeah you know and and they will be devious
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and they will be quite violent they're also compassionate but they're all impulsive and not thought through well
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and when i looked at that with the other great apes so the orangutang the bonobo the gorilla they didn't actually have
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the same circuitry as the chimp and i couldn't wait for the research i jumped the gun a bit and called it the
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chimp paradox because in the last two three years it's been published now to show that the chimp brain in our brain
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is closer than we thought in the way that we think with that particular circuitry
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so that's why i picked the chimp but it's seen in all animals and it's it's a defense mechanism to protect you so
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obviously eating the biscuits a good survival mechanism the fact you might get caught is incidental you hope you
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don't but you have to eat so these circuits are based to help us to survive so they give us all
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our drives but they also give us experience of what happens when we act in a certain way and if it doesn't work
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we change our reaction right and you said drives there that was the second point that i was intrigued by is
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how one goes about understanding their drives i think um when i in the world we live in especially you know the social media
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world it feels like our drives and our values are somewhat um sometimes handed to us and we don't even know that
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something isn't our true sort of intrinsic driver or values but because
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of i don't know a desire to be to fit in or to be to gain approval from people we
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take it up as a value of our own or or we say if we're asked that that's something that drives us but it's not so
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we might say we want to be we want a lamborghini or we want to be a public speaker or whatever but really probably
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underpinning that is our desire to be um to get recognition and to to be loved i don't know um but how do you go about
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understanding what your true drivers are in life and not the things that you say just uh
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yeah this is where when i looked at this as i said a long time back you start to
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see that if you ask people which is what i do to put away everything and just get a blank
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piece of paper that's why i start my starting point is always write down the perfect person you want to be
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because this now excludes any of the drives and a lot of what you're talking about is actually behaviors attached to
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drives they're not true drives drives are things like the need to eat the need to have security
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these are drives the need to be apparent and we have these compulsive driving forces within us that get us out
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of our seat and make us find something whereas gaining approval from people is actually based in the orbit of frontal
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cortex the chimp again where it's terrified have been excluded from the troops so a chimpanzee in the wild must
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be part of a troop otherwise the leopard's waiting so lots of eyes protect you so the chimpanzee has an
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inbuilt need to be with other chimps and in order to do that it must prove to the other chimps that it's worthy because if
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it isn't they could exclude it which would be death so we we carry that drive still that we need to be approved the
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problem is the chimpanzee's got it right we've got it wrong the chimpanzee recognizes it anyone only wants approval from its
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immediate troop whereas we actually try and get approval from the whole world you know so one person on social media
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tells the world that they're not like us and we can potentially fall apart instead of saying actually they're not in my troops it's not important
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so it's important this is an example of how giving insights people can start recognizing actually find your own troop
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because that's what you need to focus on not the rest of the world you'll never please them you know you're not part of that
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so drives you have to look at and we have i go through the list of this and then we say to you for example how strong is
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your troop drive we all have one that's the need to belong to a group of people or maybe just to one person
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but generally we like to have a number of people around us so it's looking and saying how strong is that drive now you
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full thing and fulfilling it correctly and and also when you've got your what i'm calling the troop of people around
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you are you actually looking after the troop and maintaining it and using it appropriately
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makes a lot of sense i've sat here with a lot of guests and some of them have tens of millions of subscribers and
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followers online and they still remarkably they still
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um pretty much i'd say 95 percent of occasions can have their day ruined by one comment
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on a youtube video or an instagram per post and it does it does like it does sort of blow my mind a little
00:22:15
bit that um such a big tribe and still won yeah i get that but if you think that um we
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society we're told basically to respect everyone which is correct from our human brain our chimps are actually saying
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just close in and get the people around you that matter and please them and look at their approval and that's what our friends do
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they'll be critical but it's it's very constructive and done with love so we accept criticism from friends we know
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they're on side but if you start expanding that inappropriately to the whole world then you're going to stress
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your chin to pieces because what you're saying is i think it's really important that that person approves of me as well
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so again i look at the reality of life and say let's just get in your factual memory
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some real truths of life and people may disagree but i ask them what do you believe because truths are relative to
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us so one of the things we know is and and give this statistic as a loose statistic
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eighty percent of people approve of us twenty percent love us
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sixty percent just to prove and twenty percent are just not pleasant people and if we go around believing
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that we're really going to make them into pleasant people or we're really going to please them you're going to lose so you
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have to step back and get that fact and then you don't worry if 20 of the people don't like you or make critical
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remarks you just dismiss it and look at the 20 who do love you who are going to give you constructive criticism
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and respect you so again it's that learning that your drive is out of control
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you're allowing your drive for the troop to extend to the world and that's not appropriate it never was meant to do
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that so it's an inappropriate use of this primitive drive we have so take me through that that process
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then so i get a blank piece of paper i write down who i want to be yeah um i would say things like i want to be
00:24:04
and correct me where i'm that's something wrong here okay because i won't be wrong but if i say i want to be
00:24:11
um i want to achieve great things is that a drive no that's not a drive that's something you hope for yeah okay so we
00:24:18
get the terminology right because if you hope for that but i accept it may not happen that you know you working with
00:24:24
the human circuit which is logical and rational so we hope to get like i work with elite athletes which is privileged
00:24:29
and they hope to get an olympic medal and they hope for that they accept you may
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not get this even if you're on form on the day some of you may be better or you may make an error so as long as you have
00:24:39
that then it shouldn't be stressing you okay it'll be okay but if you move into saying i have to get an olympic medal
00:24:47
we're now moving into the chimp circus yeah because that's not true yeah you don't have to you know you don't have to
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you know but if somebody absolutely says to me you don't get it if i don't get then life's not worth living
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i'm not going to argue what i'm saying is that's the choice you're making you must also accept the consequence
00:25:04
so i i can't put i can't change that so so when you start your list what i'm really asking for is you what are your
00:25:10
character traits so so discipline yeah i mean again i
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would test the water because i don't know what you're going to say here here in the spotlight i'll just do a quick one for you
00:25:21
do would you like to be a really nice good person or would you like to be successful you're going to be one of them which would you prefer um a really
00:25:29
nice good person right so i know where i stand with you now so we have to now make sure that you understand that's the
00:25:34
prime reason that we're going to do the work is to get you to be the person that you want to be
00:25:39
this is the good news if you write on a piece of paper the perfect person you want to be so give me
00:25:45
some more character traits all the things that come to mind are the impact i want to have on those that
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encounter me so right so you you want to be inspirational yeah yeah i guess that is
00:25:58
but also just like um empathetic and compassionate okay brilliant force you want to be an
00:26:03
empathic guy a compassionate guy inspirational you're probably going to add if we go through it's not time
00:26:08
honesty integrity trustworthy you know respectful when you've done all this this is really
00:26:14
crucial and it is a light bulb moment if you think about this that if you had
00:26:19
control of that part of your brain which you have and there was no interference from the rest of the brain then that's
00:26:26
exactly how you would be in life true that is you so what i'm saying is the reality is fantastic that is you it's
00:26:33
not all you hope to be it is you it's not a myth it's neuroscience it's you what
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we're now saying is that doesn't present to the world because now your chimp and the computer
00:26:45
system the backup to both human and chimp now impose other things and so the world might see
00:26:51
something different so you say to me i want to be compassionate and i walk in and say i had a really
00:26:57
long journey today all went wrong and you're busy and you just get irritated and say oh for goodness sake stop morning
00:27:03
and then afterwards you think well that wasn't very compassionate so i'm not compassionate but that's that's misunderstanding the neuroscience you
00:27:10
were always compassionate because your intention was always to say sorry steve that you've had a rough journey you know
00:27:16
because i was important otherwise i wouldn't be telling you i mean you still might want to say stop mourning after a while but it's done nicely but what
00:27:23
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 and
00:27:28
that'll stop him and there you see this immediate reaction without thought of consequence so then our paul fails a bit
00:27:35
because i think not nice guy this but actually when i understand the science i think he's probably a nice guy
00:27:42
his chimp wasn't very good there yeah that's very different to you going away at the end of the day thinking what's
00:27:48
wrong with me why was i lacking in compassion the answer was get the neuroscience right you've never moved
00:27:55
position you're always a compassionate guy who's trustworthy and honest and so on your chimp has interfered now it's
00:28:02
very critical i expand on two points here because the listeners are going to go up hang on
00:28:08
if this is not an excuse model 100 i'm tough on people it's not an excuse model your 100
00:28:15
responsible for managing the chimp so you need an apology so when you know the chimp's been a bit
00:28:20
brisk or rude you've got to stop and say i apologize you are responsible so i'm not saying blame everything on your
00:28:26
chimp i'm not saying that and the second point is you gave me an answer there by saying i want to be this
00:28:33
compassionate guy and people say surely everyone writes the same list absolutely not in the 90s when i started to really
00:28:40
pull this together and was looking at the new science clear as you probably know worked in the fields of forensics and if you take a
00:28:48
typical person so we'll take you as a typical person and we say what would you give you gave me the right list peaceful
00:28:54
calm you'd go through integrity honesty compassion that is really common on the list however
00:29:00
when you get to the psychopath they wouldn't put these and when i asked
00:29:05
them they did not put honesty they did not put compassion they were not relevant
00:29:10
they had a very different list of who they would ideally like to be and it wasn't pleasant
00:29:17
it was all about power it was all about ego these are what are in critical this what i'm going to be so actually the human in
00:29:23
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 humans
00:29:30
not so nice at all so it isn't a good guy bad guy that is not at all what the model is it's saying we all have these
00:29:36
systems let's find out who we are what kind of chimp we've got because they're spread and characteristic and then what
00:29:42
have we got on our computer i know this is really heavy going no it's not i hope this is no it makes
00:29:49
perfect sense it's my brain is spiraling off into loads of different examples whether that is true and the one of the
00:29:55
first ones that came to mind was about like leadership and in the in the business world and i was thinking about
00:30:01
the likes of steve jobs and you hear about these leaders that are maybe they appear to be led more by their chimp
00:30:08
because they are incredibly short all the time they are uh they seem to be
00:30:13
incredibly emotional however when you reflect on what they've achieved in their careers they also like even you
00:30:19
know sir alex ferguson's maybe an interesting example they appear to be um either using the chimp as a
00:30:27
intentionally yeah or out of control yeah i mean again there's nothing wrong with the chimp
00:30:33
people said to me um oh you you'd paint this picture of this like terrible being in our heads and i've never said this
00:30:39
and when i wrote the chimp paradox it's in the title i said it's your best friend you know my chimp is my best friend that
00:30:45
doesn't always agree with him and i always say to people i see him as this inept best friend who doesn't do the
00:30:51
best things for me at times but he means well so i know this part of my brain is a hundred percent on side it just
00:30:58
operates in a way that maybe i don't agree with at times but it does i learn to communicate with
00:31:03
it so that i can get it on side and harness its power so the chimp is the part of the brain it gives a sense of
00:31:09
humor the human doesn't possess that it's the chimp that recognizes anomalies and makes us laugh
00:31:15
it's the chimp that has intuition we haven't got that the chimp reads body language we haven't got that so human
00:31:21
circuits fail so this complementary circuit when it works together we know even if you go to the corporate world
00:31:27
that business decisions that are made with logic and emotion are the best decisions and that's emphasizing
00:31:33
neuroscience that we know decision making by both human and chimp circuits together are the best decisions
00:31:41
so you use your chimps intuition and its enthusiasm and its drives but you
00:31:46
harness them and you channel them so you learn which is what this is all about mind management so you start saying i've
00:31:53
got this amazing machine now but it's almost like a living machine i'm going to get it on side and help so i agree
00:31:59
with these people that chimps will drive them to be successful i'd like to think that my chimp's really very very strong
00:32:07
um but it's on board because i manage it and it knows i i'm not against my emotions and my more in my emotionally
00:32:13
based brain i'm not against them i use them i i think what's the message they're telling me
00:32:19
so any any emotions we get are messages they're not meant to be engaged with they're meant to be worked on so that
00:32:25
you actually use them quick one i talked to you guys about huel a lot so i'm going to do a quick intermission to tell you about a bit of
00:32:32
a change that's happened in the last two months in my life as you guys know my favorite heel product historically has
00:32:37
been the ready to drink which is these bottles here they are nutritionally complete however recently since huel
00:32:43
introduced the heel protein this now plays a huge role in my diet the salted
00:32:48
caramel flavor protein from hule which is only 105 calories and has 26 vitamins
00:32:54
and minerals and 20 grams of protein um serves two roles in my life now first thing i do when i wake up in the morning
00:33:00
is i have a glass and then at night time after i've been to the gym straight after the gym i have a glass it tastes
00:33:06
amazing if you're gonna try it follow my instructions here get a couple of cubes of ice put it in a blender put on the
00:33:13
salted caramel protein and it tastes like a delicious smoothie i've already
00:33:18
gone through one tub of this i'm actually on my second tub and i've got two more tubs to go before i'm gonna reorder more but genuinely the salted
00:33:24
caramel flavor maybe because i have a liking for salted caramel for me has been a game changer i wanted to talk about exactly that
00:33:31
topic which is like managing your emotional reactions across different facets of life and i
00:33:37
think um i'll go let me just give you an example of a situation that i went through that i've read about in my book so
00:33:43
i'm just gonna be completely honest because that's what i tend to do on this podcast um i broke up with a girl and um
00:33:48
like two days later i found out that she'd slept with somebody else and when i even though i'd broken up with her
00:33:54
when i when i read the message that she'd slept with somebody else my brain yeah
00:34:00
revenge message her to destroy her life that's what my brain said to me but i
00:34:06
um and and i'm at a place in my life where i feel quite secure in my self-image let's say i
00:34:13
don't feel particularly insecure i'm i'm i'm a confident person but even i
00:34:19
couldn't seem to get a grip of my own um desire to react emotionally in that
00:34:24
situation um and really interestingly as well it was actually my friend calling me i went
00:34:29
to the gym i thought maybe i'll go to the gym and that'll like clear my head it was my friend calling me and this i don't know where this fits in psychiatry
00:34:35
but my friend said to me steve just remember you broke up with her she's probably doing this to um make herself
00:34:42
feel better and to you know rebound or whatever but um that was one of those key moments where i was like god like
00:34:48
the damage you can do if you don't know how to control that like primitive urge to just bruh
00:34:55
okay you've covered a lot of ground yeah that could be an hour's working so i'm gonna take it back and try and go very
00:35:01
steadily to try and drive home there's a lot of areas one is first of all what would you expect somebody's mind to
00:35:08
do confronted with the same situation what would you expect them to do probably the same exactly so nothing
00:35:15
abnormal happened there wasn't a problem yeah you're saying this is absolutely healthy and normal but maybe not helpful
00:35:22
yeah and what you really said because you've told me this if it wasn't a problem to you you wouldn't have
00:35:27
mentioned it so clearly your human brain is saying i don't want to get revenge that's not what i want what i want is to
00:35:34
just be calm and collected accept the reality of it and move on
00:35:40
unfortunately we have to learn now how the mind works so it's like saying you went to the gym
00:35:45
so therefore you're a fitness man if i said to you right i've never been to a gym for 30 years i'm going to go tonight
00:35:50
and at the end of the day i'm going to be super fit and you laugh because that's ridiculous it's not the way the body works so we
00:35:57
have to now look at another aspect so now we know it's normal how does the mind work when we get a really nasty
00:36:03
shock and something which is devastating so the the reason that chimp is there
00:36:08
and the reason we're here is for us to be safe and present the next generation to the world that's what
00:36:14
the chimps agenda is so what happened there is the generation that you thought you were going to get was taken away
00:36:20
from you so this is devastating so we expect you to be devastated we also expect you to accept the mind is
00:36:27
going to now grieve and it will take approximately three months give or take you're talking about heartbreak here
00:36:33
yeah you've got to grieve yeah so the mind has a rule on the way it deals and processes grief i can't speed that up
00:36:40
so if some like if i meet you that night and i say right i'm going to get you out of it i'm going to fail because you have
00:36:46
to go through these ripples and and work it through so your human brain can do it in seconds because that's logic she's
00:36:53
gone she was dishonest it's a good thing she's gone now no more wasted time yep
00:36:58
that's easy but the emotional chimp brain has got to process it it cannot do it overnight so you've got to now allow
00:37:05
around a 12-week process and you're going to go through various stages of grief in the loss of what is a very
00:37:11
significant relationship and on top of that there was another insult it wasn't just she said it's not for me she slept
00:37:18
with someone else so that is really going to get your chimp you know we expect it now to be devastated and your
00:37:25
chimps reaction some people wouldn't but it's common that it wants revenge it wants to say right if you did this to
00:37:32
me you're going to suffer now in reality what you've just said by your nodding is that's not what i want i just
00:37:38
want to move on and accept it wasn't for me she did what she did that's her problem not yours
00:37:44
and what your friend did is start to try and turn it around with some facts to calm your chimp down and say because it
00:37:49
always looks to the computer let's look at reality and the reality is if i said to you um this girl is going to come
00:37:55
back into your life and they'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 no so you
00:38:02
did break it up yeah yeah you know so you just try and look at it in a different way and say let's
00:38:09
look at the reality and the facts of the situation but you cannot stop the grieving you can't stop the yearning or
00:38:14
the bargaining because guys in the opposition often go back and plead and then she'll say i made a mistake and and
00:38:20
then you have to make a decision you know and then they'll bargain again and then if you go through that you're
00:38:26
going to disorganize stage but this can all be circumvented if you suddenly met somebody new your chimp
00:38:32
might recover very quickly is that what tends to happen well unless we know this is the rebound right so this is never a
00:38:37
good thing okay i'm sure some of you listen to going i married the person i met on the rebound so of course it's all
00:38:43
probabilities but generally speaking you need time to get over this gather yourself so you're in a good place when
00:38:48
you do meet somebody else to have a good relationship that's interesting so it's quite complex the whole thing so yes rationally we can
00:38:56
pull you along but we gotta give you a lot of tlc and that should go through grieving don't be harsh on yourself and
00:39:02
what your experiences are totally natural unhelpful but natural so many people are going through a grieving
00:39:08
process in it could be a significant life event it could be the loss of a partner at the death order is there
00:39:13
anything in psychiatry from your experience that can okay that process is unavoidable but is
00:39:18
there anything that i can do to help that process be easier yes there is i mean one is understanding
00:39:24
it as you say if you start to go through this and say to people like this is how your mind has to do this
00:39:30
and like you tell me in the gym you laugh i can't do it in the night well how long and you still it's a bit of a piece of string but roughly speaking if
00:39:37
you keep going regularly two three times a week maybe three months six months you're gonna see a difference for sure
00:39:42
and it's the same with me explaining the mind i would explain to people that we go through a grieving process you are
00:39:48
likely to experience the following emotions or stages in the grief process but you are unique and everybody grieves
00:39:55
individually so it's very important as i said earlier i don't have a process uh you know like a recipe and say this is
00:40:01
what we're going to do i work with you as you grieve but i want you to get insights that's the key so the work i do
00:40:08
is giving understanding and insight and then applying this so you learn the skill of managing your emotions and the
00:40:14
skill of understanding the skill of mind management that's what i'm about teaching a skill base so you can be
00:40:20
independent of me but use me as a fallback on that on the point of rejection which
00:40:25
we talked about a second ago is it the stories that i then tell myself about myself which impact my self-image that
00:40:32
really hold that hurt me the most because it feels like when you go through emotional sorry romantic
00:40:37
rejection or heartbreak it feels like um even if you it's not the sort of like
00:40:44
front of your mind the fact that someone didn't want you or they were they wanted someone else
00:40:50
makes yourself tell yourself that you are not good enough not pretty enough not smart enough you you weren't enough
00:40:56
and it feels like so much of the hurt and the pain lives inside that story you're telling yourself about yourself
00:41:02
and again if you stop and we'd look at what you've said there are these factual
00:41:07
statements or are there impressions and feelings impressions and feelings so we know that the chimp brain is in full
00:41:13
flow now yeah so what we're saying is don't quench that it's not wrong it's expressing and it's like as i said
00:41:19
here you've got this best friend so if this happens to me i now said what is it you're telling me and you'll go through
00:41:25
all this you know it's the end of the world and you know clearly no one's ever going to love you and and then we sort
00:41:31
of counter it by saying well let's look at that so we start to rationalize and that can help the grieving process
00:41:36
because we start saying well let's not just sit there with these falsehoods let's challenge them and let's replace
00:41:42
them with truths not brainwash it's no good saying for example say i'm your best mate and you've just fallen apart
00:41:48
and you say it's because i'm ugly it's no good me said no you're really handsome that's not that's an impression again from me what
00:41:55
what i'd be saying is let's look at facts if we look at people in relationships do people find a partner
00:42:01
eventually and the answer is most people yes so the chances are very high and if
00:42:06
you can get through this will you eventually get back on your feet is there a future yeah yeah there
00:42:12
always is a future there always is a future even for people in a much more serious situation where they become uh
00:42:18
suicidal um and obviously as part of my work you can tell them with honesty there is
00:42:24
always a future and things do change and feelings do move so when you start
00:42:29
giving these facts and rationalizing the facts of the situation that is going to be powerful for starting to settle your
00:42:35
emotions but giving falsehoods you know i know you can do it or yo
00:42:42
that's not going to certainly trip the street wise yeah yeah so he'll just keep agitating whereas if we talk facts then
00:42:48
it'll settle but again there's a key point here we have to find the facts that resonate with you as facts
00:42:55
because if i said like i just did will you find another partner what's what's the general rule if you said to me yeah
00:43:01
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
00:43:07
that might resonate with you yeah such as if i go out and actually start socializing when i'm ready then the
00:43:14
chances are i'll increase my probability so that gives me a bit of hope you might work with that yeah
00:43:20
so you've got to find what resonates with the person and again that's why i don't have this
00:43:26
recipe i'm saying discover them but think around but you can offer common things yeah
00:43:32
super interesting and it again it perfectly explains why in that moment for some bizarre reason my friend
00:43:37
telling me being very sort of rational with me things that i genuinely did accept to be true
00:43:42
just completely diffused my brain because he's acting effective as you're human yeah that's what he's doing he's
00:43:48
coming in rationally and stepping back and saying let's look at the facts here yeah and he's hit some nails on the head where you think oh that's settled me
00:43:55
down a bit yeah so but what tends to happen is you tend to isolate yourself most people do this after this has
00:44:01
happened and they go within themselves and they engage these emotions which generates more and more falsehoods and
00:44:08
distorted ways of perceiving themselves and the world instead of being able to which is not
00:44:14
easy talk to themselves rationally and preempting things like you know let's work with reality it's not easy to
00:44:21
do that so when you can't do it it's not a failure you turn to your best friends and they'll do it for you
00:44:27
that's so interesting because i just i just realized um something that i've started doing in the last year and people i think are my
00:44:33
proper i'm a little bit strange for doing this but in those moments specifically as it relates to like romantic situations where i'm struggling
00:44:41
to get a to respond or act or behave in a way which i want to which is in line
00:44:46
with who i want to be i've got this habit now two things i mean just correct yeah sure yeah please who you are who i am not who you want to
00:44:53
be yeah that's so important because you know if you get that it's a light bulb moment to say you know you are this
00:44:59
really great individual and it's not just blowing small cup people people by and large 90 of people are great people
00:45:06
their chimps because they're not managed can create havoc or the computers can have beliefs in which caused them to act in ways
00:45:12
which are not helpful so they're the gremlins i talk about so when you look at that i'm saying you're always this
00:45:18
great person the world may never see it and my job is to help you to present yourself as you are to the world then
00:45:24
they will see who the real you is but that doesn't stop you seeing the real you you know when you get home at night look
00:45:30
in the mirror don't see your chimp looking back you know look at look and see the human in you're
00:45:35
looking back the real you and respect that because that's who you are so i've interrupted you no but please thank you
00:45:41
for doing that because it's important and i i realize that even the slightest like misuse of words can send you down a
00:45:48
different path exactly so i'm i'm very keen on making sure my terminology is right as i describe myself and others um
00:45:54
so if you see me doing that please do correct um i i again i write about that in my own book about how just like the
00:46:00
the misuse of like one or two words can completely send you down the wrong wrong sort of train of thinking yeah but um
00:46:06
what i'm saying is there's two things that i've started to do the first is i now write in the notes of my phone um
00:46:12
statements i know to be true yeah and the second thing is this is the slightly strange thing is i will
00:46:19
have a conversation out loud when i'm alone to try and rationalize against how
00:46:25
i'm feeling brilliant so i'm going to pick these both up because these are really key points and this is why it's going to
00:46:31
promote the book now i was saying that i wanted to share this these are common
00:46:38
features that we have and there's lots of them and one of the things you said scientifically really intrigues me so
00:46:43
you mentioned what i call the grade a hits the truth that resonate with you put them in your phone look at them and
00:46:49
they stabilize your chimp at any point so you have great air hits so we we touched on one for example not
00:46:55
everybody's gonna like you and there are nasty people in the world i'd like to add some positives there are some
00:47:00
fantastic people in the world and there'll always be people who love you you're never alone you just need to reach out so those are nice greater hits
00:47:08
if they resonate with you but a very important one when we looked at therapies and this has
00:47:13
been researched for the last 50 years we we're intrigued to know why do they work and i'm giving you the the model i
00:47:19
introduced uh to try and show the new science base um but the intriguing bit
00:47:24
was when you speak into the air effectively it's the chimp brain giving out its thoughts and feelings
00:47:30
and your humans listening so it actually rationalizes as you listen and it's not unusual in business
00:47:37
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
00:47:42
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
00:47:48
i've listened to myself it's crazy yeah yeah so it's very important that we do speak out and this is what the best of
00:47:54
therapies are that when we talk we start to listen to ourself and we start to understand and process but that's
00:48:01
because our human brain is actually now taking the lead and listening yeah
00:48:06
because it felt because there's been a couple of key moments where just context is i've been in quite a
00:48:11
challenging relationship where um my partner is going through a journey she
00:48:16
lives in indonesia a long way long long way away and she's going through her own journey and sometimes she's not always
00:48:22
communicating with me sometimes she can be unpredictable sometimes she can kind of go missing for a couple of days in terms of like being emotionally vacant
00:48:30
and throughout that journey i've tried not to like control manipulate impress myself
00:48:35
have high expectation and just kind of be yeah and let her do what she needs to do and obviously
00:48:43
my chimp brain will always be trying to jump to conclusions or trying to seek control or
00:48:49
to dominate or to force the outcome or you know to force expectations on on her or the situation
00:48:56
and my sort of human brain is um is wanting to be that compassionate and pathetic person who is understanding and
00:49:02
isn't trying to force an outcome out of somebody and so when i have that struggle it will be lying in a hotel room
00:49:08
somewhere at night my brain is going and then i have to speak out loud
00:49:14
to kind of calm myself again so i have to state what i know to be true yeah and i if you look at the notes of my phone
00:49:20
now it's not me just saying this there are a list of 20 things that i remind myself of that are like fundamental
00:49:26
truths and they calm me yeah and that's what i advocate and i like people to get me five yeah and then we
00:49:32
challenge to make sure they are really strong um and they apply generically through life yeah you know and and it
00:49:38
does settle our emotional mind down but having said that it's not a panacea it's not like it's
00:49:44
always going to settle sometimes we have specific experiences which can throw us and then we have to learn how to manage
00:49:51
these emotions so again when you say you're in the hotel room and your mind is spinning stop the battle and now to express your
00:49:58
mind so say to the chimp exactly what is it you're trying to tell me what are you worried about and we have to accept and
00:50:04
it's important that sometimes our relationships are based on trust and we have to accept that reality we
00:50:10
cannot know everything about the person we're with so clearly we'll ask questions and we'll
00:50:16
form a relationship get to know them but the end of the day any friendship or relationships on trust
00:50:22
and we must accept we will never know sometimes we'll never know and if our chimps which are panicky a bit and want
00:50:28
guarantees and then we're going down the wrong path and we have to tell our chimp you can't do this
00:50:34
the the biggest thing to follow on to that is as you've experienced and it almost universal you get your heart
00:50:40
broken it's extremely painful it can damage you and it often you lose confidence in all areas of your life so
00:50:47
it's time to just build back up and give yourself time but if you experience that and you go with the
00:50:53
floor not engage with it you will come out the other side much better much stronger and then you come in with the
00:50:59
factual evidence again that people do recover from broken relationships people don't know
00:51:05
what the next relationship will be not everybody is the same so you start like you're saying giving
00:51:11
all these greater hits to it i'm someone that tries things and and that was one of the things that i tried
00:51:17
um because it felt like the right thing to do when my brain was just losing a bit of control and it genuinely worked
00:51:23
so i carried on doing it um but it's good to understand the kind of basis in psychiatry um can i just follow that
00:51:29
through because i know people listening and when you um you said to me you know this my mind
00:51:35
spinning in a hotel room there's another really big truth i say to people your chimp cannot cannot deal with
00:51:42
uncertainty it's based on so it's never going to be happy and your job is to say
00:51:47
look we have to live with uncertainty you have to tell it that you cannot guarantee it it's a bit like going with
00:51:52
the elite athlete you cannot guarantee a gold medal so don't try because you're just going to stress yourself
00:51:58
you know except it's a throw of the dice in sport life is a throw of the dice all we can do is try and alter the
00:52:04
probability wait the dice but there's a big fact here the chimp can't deal with some outcomes you can
00:52:12
as adult humans we can deal with anything and that's a fact we can put in our
00:52:17
computer which will again for a lot of people settle down there's nothing you can't deal with you will deal with it
00:52:24
the chimp believes you can't deal with it and it doesn't look beyond whereas i'm saying look beyond and say whatever
00:52:30
happens in life you look back and think i did deal with life and maybe we can deal with it quicker if
00:52:36
we work with a mind and learn how to expedite things like this and and not sit with them as problems learn how to
00:52:42
move it forward and be much more positive uncertainty
00:52:48
stress one of the topics um you write about in your book a path through the jungle but
00:52:54
also i've been quite intrigued by over the years is the idea of stress i think it's been painted as a really negative
00:52:59
thing something to be for us to avoid at all costs but from what i've um understood that's
00:53:05
not necessarily the truth stress can be a good and a bad thing yeah i mean trying to just go the new
00:53:10
resilience again if we look at where stress comes from it's a good thing provided we act on it
00:53:19
if you have like gone a big dipper ride your brain releases a lot of noradrenaline
00:53:24
and we know this is a good thing you get a thrill from it but if you keep on being a stressful situation
00:53:30
noradrenaline stays high and that now becomes damaging to us and it's joined by the big one which is
00:53:36
cortisol and there are other negative hormones and transmitters and so these
00:53:42
when they're held at high levels become damaging right in short bursts they're actually healthy because they can wake
00:53:48
us up to saying right you need to act so we do have resilience hormones coming
00:53:53
in and they will then give us an opportunity as long as you recognize it to say stress is welcome provided i act
00:54:01
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
00:54:07
recognize they're getting stressed and it becomes chronic and they've got these habitual behaviors which are damaging to
00:54:14
them and they don't even recognize them and then they get symptoms of stress which they also not recognize because
00:54:20
people think stress is where we're wringing our hands and panicking and that's not really true stress comes in
00:54:25
all different forms and often isn't recognized so for example we know things like all your drives may
00:54:32
go out so your eating drive sex drives sleep drives these all start to falter
00:54:37
can change in any direction but also things like irritability suddenly finding got short fuse constantly being
00:54:44
tired this is this is using evidence of stress somewhere in your life um but even more subtle ones when you
00:54:51
get people with really bad anxiety so you have a generalized anxiety states gross anxiety
00:54:57
they can be appear selfish because suddenly they become so vulnerable in their own eyes and stressed they don't
00:55:04
actually pay attention to people around them and when we treat them and they get better they suddenly start engaging with people
00:55:11
again and show demonstrate respect and come and understanding and but while they're not well
00:55:17
they become almost selfish or appear that way so again you can get people who are stressed and appear to be very
00:55:23
self-interested and it's really vulnerability they're under stress and we misunderstand that
00:55:28
or misinterpret it and start thinking someone's a selfish person i mean they may be selfish but i'm saying it is one
00:55:34
of the hidden stress factors that can start appearing in terms of the causes of stress um
00:55:41
well i think one of the widely held beliefs is especially now as we think about mental illness
00:55:46
is that it's a lot of it's about sort of pent up unaddressed issues or us not releasing or expressing what
00:55:53
we're thinking or feeling is that accurate it is but then the etiology of the cause of stress is
00:56:01
multiple so again it could be for example you've got an ongoing problem somebody bullying you you know that's
00:56:07
stressful or you're lacking a partner and it really isn't working out and that
00:56:12
can stress you because you feel like it's never going to happen you know there's false starts and you start to become stressed by it or as you said you
00:56:19
could have experiences from way back which have never really been worked through or addressed and they therefore
00:56:27
keep surfacing they bubble under these emotions and that will definitely create stress
00:56:32
it tends to be they they don't present with stress as such they present with odd emotions so they translate into
00:56:39
things like irritability and and when you say well let's look at why you're being irritable it's
00:56:44
unaddressed issues that that you need to get up to the surface in the time you want to do it
00:56:50
and then clear the computer system as i'm calling it so you've processed these issues and sometimes an addiction and
00:56:58
addiction too well so um my business partner and he's talked about this very much openly at length
00:57:04
and he's actually come on this podcast and talked about this he obviously um he became a
00:57:09
alcoholic yeah um when we were growing the business and i i believe in his words because it
00:57:15
was incredibly it was incredibly difficult we were you know 20 years old we had you know hundreds and hundreds
00:57:21
and hundreds of employees all around the world and we'd never done this before and we were living together and i think the
00:57:27
pressure of the business um and the stress as he would describe it um
00:57:33
meant that he he was turning to alcohol to cope okay so two separate things again is
00:57:39
like i mean i don't know because i'm just giving like a little potted history so clearly um
00:57:45
alcohol is a coping strategy a very poor one that people use to get social confidence
00:57:51
for example or remove anxiety or even depression and generally it won't work out it will end up being a problem
00:57:57
within itself but alcohol disorders that then in in approximately one in eight people will change the brain in the way
00:58:04
it functions and they then get these cravings and addiction whereas a lot of people it's more a
00:58:10
behavioral addiction so it's a case of getting new behavior work out what's causing the problem and we sort it and
00:58:16
they can stop and drink alcohol socially but we have to accept that genetically
00:58:21
uh some people i'm going to my medical room here i worked with alcohol services for some
00:58:26
years and patients who are addicted mean they actually have a different brain system so we know that their brain will
00:58:33
cause craving and they will respond to certain medications that behaviorally drinking
00:58:38
people won't so again it's learning which group you're in and they have they must abstain because we know that if
00:58:44
they drink small amounts of alcohol it sets the system off again so we get this repeat behaving we have to say you know
00:58:51
unluckily it's about no different to someone who can't drink milk if they've got lactose intolerance the answer is
00:58:56
you can't drink milk um and if they've got an addictive genetic loading towards
00:59:01
alcohol then they mustn't drink that we're saying this is just a one-way street to disaster is that a thing oh
00:59:08
yeah yeah people are genetically predisposed so we know it runs in families and we know that people's brains react differently to
00:59:14
alcohol intake and there is a subgroup where we're changing the way that they operate in the brain so therefore we
00:59:21
know that as i said they will get that craving i mean there was once a group of guys in london early days when my career
00:59:28
in the alcohol services and these are all guys who had problems with alcohol and asked them i said look i've got the
00:59:33
medical knowledge and but you tell me the reality is what makes you think you're an alcoholic and they said
00:59:38
something interesting which rang true with the neuroscience later in my career they said
00:59:44
we know we're alcoholics because if we go to a pub and we ask for a drink it won't stop yeah whereas people who are
00:59:50
drinking for other reasons can stop whereas we immediately change wandering and we change yeah and that was such a
00:59:57
fantastic thing to get from these guys i'm indebted to them because it was almost a question i'd ask and it seems
01:00:03
to run through yeah nearly every case i know now we've got a problem whereas if people say no i could stop
01:00:09
and i don't you know bite my nails when i leave i just think okay have one today but someone has got
01:00:14
a true addiction a physical addiction they said their mind changes after one drink it's
01:00:20
just completely different and you can't stop the craving appears i i am i've
01:00:26
been saying um when i talk about my business partner dom and he doesn't mind me talking about because he's been as i
01:00:31
said he's been on this podcast but he's very very open and he's a big he's a big public speaker about the topic of alcohol and sobriety but um the way i
01:00:38
would describe my experience with him and my other friends is just as a graph so dom's drinking if he had and i'd say
01:00:45
this i've said this multiple times if he had one the graph would look the line of the graph would look like this
01:00:50
mine would be i could have three and then stop yeah so his was always like this so if he if he
01:00:56
went to the bar i knew the end of the night would be him falling over because there wouldn't
01:01:02
be the thing in his brain he can't stop and whereas i can have two and i'm like
01:01:08
oh that's me done or i don't need any more or you know i'm whatever and that's well interesting when i started looking
01:01:14
at this and we've detailed a bit the neuroscience behind it brought me back to the chimp model because we know that
01:01:20
we make decisions from either the chimp system or the human and when we drink alcohol it actually interferes with the
01:01:27
circuits of rationality so the human effectively gets disabled so now our chimp is fully in charge that
01:01:33
does impulsive things which the next day it may very well regret and that's because at the time the decision making
01:01:40
they've got is impaired so and you know most people say oh i'm better for a drink it's interesting that most
01:01:46
partners say no they're not they're not so we the brain actually fools itself so so there is a biological basis behind
01:01:55
the decision-making we get when these people have got addictive
01:02:00
uh genetic personalities so that they actually can't stop i'm conscious of um people thinking that
01:02:07
you know because we'll all know a friend like that yeah but it doesn't necessarily mean they're an alcoholic does it no i mean i don't i don't
01:02:13
personally like the term i think we just look at you know the fact that they're addicted to a substance of some kind or
01:02:19
they've got a craving i'd much rather give that terminology otherwise it feels a bit judgmental so i'm just saying you
01:02:26
know how do you use alcohol do you misuse it or do you use it appropriately where do you fall and if you've got an addiction to it then let's look at that
01:02:32
addiction and see whether it's a physical addiction or psychological addiction so again it's like going
01:02:37
through a grid to make sure we get the right thing for the right person quick one as many of you know i've been
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01:03:42
one of the things you talk about extensively is about forming habits and um a lot of people in my life recently
01:03:48
including myself have tried to be tried to form habits especially during the lockdown when so much of our lives was
01:03:53
um our habits were broken our cycles were broken because we were all trapped in our houses so whether we you know had
01:03:59
formed a habit of going to the starbucks then the gym in the morning or whatever we had our habits broken so i spent a
01:04:05
lot of time thinking about how i could form healthier habits in my life one of them was working out every day um but i
01:04:10
and one of the sort of i guess popular narratives is that if you do something for 21 days it becomes a habit
01:04:16
what is the truth about habits and how we form them i mean there's a lot of research on this and they're a little bit contradictory
01:04:23
so read and believe what you like but i mean the general fail is that if you look at why we form a habit
01:04:30
it's either consciously done with the belief system under or it's unconsciously done
01:04:36
we aren't thinking about it a common one for example a poor habit is and i use this a lot when i do keynote
01:04:42
speeches to say to people when you go home if you're with a partner that you love um how do you present to them when
01:04:48
you arrive and it's amazing how most people mourn which you know they've not thought that
01:04:54
what they don't want to see somebody morning you don't meet someone and say you could have this every day of your life i'll come back
01:05:00
you know so what you do is you walk in and think what habit would you like and the belief then is if i go in morning
01:05:06
they could leave me yeah this could damage now that's going to shift your habit so once you've turned the belief
01:05:12
around this you're unconsciously doing it without thinking this is damaging and so if you actually sit down and work
01:05:19
that out and put in your computer system then when the chimp gets through the door it's not going to mourn because
01:05:24
what the chimp has to do scientifically is consult the computer before it does anything it all happens in a tiny
01:05:30
fraction of a second but if the computer's programmed to say don't forget it will unconsciously remind the chimp
01:05:36
you need to be in a good place when you walk in because that's what they're going to decide on whether they're there the next night
01:05:42
so you start to re recognize that being someone who moans all the time or complains when you first meet someone
01:05:48
isn't ideal so we have these unconscious habits which we're not aware of which we
01:05:53
can bring to conscious by start to look at our life and say is this how we want to be but you have to ask the question
01:05:59
oh we have habits like we eat too much now these are different because the first one wasn't based on a drive it's
01:06:06
just based on a behavior that we've got into a pattern that the eating habit's much more
01:06:11
complex because now you've got not only a behavior that we've got into like eating too much or eating the wrong
01:06:18
things we're driven with an incredibly powerful survival drive to eat
01:06:24
so now we've we have to deal with two aspects one is what is it the habit that we want to get and what are the beliefs
01:06:30
we're going to underpin with it and how we're going to manage this drive how we're going to fulfill the drive in
01:06:35
a way that our chimp's happy that it's got its drive fulfilled and we're happy
01:06:40
so now you really have to look at that so that's a big battle that's not an easy battle but it can be one it can be
01:06:47
one so again habits are not straightforward they need to be subdivided and say let's
01:06:54
look at unconscious conscious whether they're linked to drives or they're linked to some really bad experience
01:07:00
sometimes we have a habit because we've got a bad experience it's like you explained that you went through a really bad time with this girl if it got
01:07:07
repeated god forbid if it got repeated three or four times you can see how your habit would be to distrust and it would
01:07:14
become a habit because your belief is that these women aren't trustworthy and suddenly generalizes all women are like
01:07:21
this and you hear guys saying this and clearly that's a song true you know and so with you i'd be looking and saying
01:07:28
when you meet this what are you looking for in the girl are you looking at physical looks are you looking at do
01:07:33
they make me laugh or are you looking at the values so we can actually start looking at how
01:07:38
are you choosing your partners and that might help you to avoid the behavior the habit of picking up
01:07:45
what you might then define as the wrong person and and worse even to blame yourself then instead of saying right
01:07:51
let's analyze this so again there's habits there where it's based on your
01:07:56
belief of what you've experienced or you're letting your chimp make decisions
01:08:02
instead of your human saying hang on can i make decisions from a more rational basis than just keep deciding on an
01:08:08
emotional basis there's a lot of reflective work that goes into being able to understand and kind of rewrite
01:08:14
those first like spot to understand and rewrite those um those those beliefs you have
01:08:20
what what is what is the path to what is the path to reflection for you know not everybody can go and see
01:08:26
yourself every day yeah i mean i'm going to be mentioning the vote now not trying to promote but
01:08:33
um obviously i help i've helped a lot of people it's been a massive privilege it's very humbling when people do do
01:08:38
well but one of the complaints people said is exactly what you said i can't work with everybody and i've got a team
01:08:45
so we'd run lots of stuff workshops and one-to-ones however for joe public some said i want to work
01:08:51
on my own and so i wrote this path with the junglers as a manual
01:08:56
with lots of diagrams lots of science references this time for people who want to follow them up um i hope it's really
01:09:02
readable and it starts from square one and says let's look at the structure and function in mind then it takes you
01:09:08
through this a journey almost through the mind saying let's look at how emotions work we talk about grief processes and relationships um talking
01:09:15
about interacting with others so i've done a lot and basically what it leads to is eventually you learn how to become
01:09:22
robust and resilient in other words get yourself into a great place uh and and this takes you with practical exercises
01:09:28
that you try out and find the ones that resonate with you across eight stages yes understanding your mind emotional
01:09:35
management working with emotions changing habits and managing life events the two main stability stabilizers of the mind creating a stress-free
01:09:41
lifestyle optimizing interactions with others and then stage eight is pulling it all together
01:09:46
one of the um the last thing i really wanted to to talk to you about was this um this idea of um fear of failure which
01:09:52
i think underpins so much of specifically for my audience um one of the big barriers in their life they're
01:09:58
i i get thousands of messages every week and it's people trying to take that step to to become to start their business or
01:10:04
to you know start that hobby or pursue that dream they have but there seems to be something holding them back okay
01:10:11
i mean i'll just take what you've given me there because it could be a multitude of reasons as i keep saying everyone is
01:10:18
unique and that's that's what's intriguing about working with people it's fantastic because every person is different
01:10:24
but you mention a fear of failure so i'm going to be controversial i don't there's no such thing in my book as a fear of failure what we're really saying
01:10:31
and it's really important subtlety as you said before about language your fear isn't failure it's fear of not
01:10:37
being able to deal with the consequences of failure now that might sound the same thing but
01:10:42
it isn't because if you fear failure there's nothing you can do with that because it's it could happen
01:10:49
so you're stuck with fearing failure whereas if you say i feel the consequences
01:10:54
of failure not been able to deal with them now you can do something because we can look at the consequences and address
01:11:01
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
01:11:07
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
01:11:14
to me particularly athletes i fear failure and i have to correct it and say that's not actually what the brain is
01:11:20
looking at it's saying i fear not being able to deal with the consequences of failure and that's something i can work
01:11:27
with there's just two other things before we round up that i was really intrigued by um and we might might have touched on
01:11:34
both in various ways throughout this conversation this idea that if you wake up in the morning and you set your state
01:11:39
just by saying to yourself i'm going to have a good day increases the chance of you having a good day yeah is that
01:11:46
well again i'm not into brainwashing but there is some truth in the sense that what you're really saying if you stop
01:11:52
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
01:11:57
perspective before i begin my day i do advocate this strongly because what you're doing is you're
01:12:02
actually saying to your computer system this day is going to be good so you've added a lot of underwritten beliefs now
01:12:09
which are things like i'm going to make the most of it i have no intention of dwelling on misery i've
01:12:15
no intention of being negative there's lots of things you've said in that one statement potentially and you've primed
01:12:20
your computer with that so when you go downstairs then and you get a letter on the doorstep that's got a bill
01:12:26
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
01:12:32
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
01:12:39
scientifically accurate that your chimp will stop and that gives you human chance to go it's only a bill
01:12:45
and connected to that my last point is about gratitude something you talk about it's well in the power of gratitude yeah this again the research uh shows
01:12:53
that people who are grateful for things in the life and again i do promote this and say let's look at what you've got
01:12:59
and let's look at what's really good things that have happened to you and there's so much we're grateful for the
01:13:04
evidence is overwhelming that people who are grateful throughout life have really good psychological and physical
01:13:10
good health so it affects the entire system just by being grateful and seeing life in a different setting rather than
01:13:17
constantly thinking what i like look at what you've got you can practice that and you can practice and that in
01:13:23
itself can become a habit that can be a habit there's lots of habits we can do i've offered some in
01:13:29
the book it's amazing and it'll help so listen this this book is um your first book was amazing because as you say
01:13:34
introduced the idea and the the sort of the model yeah but the what i think is so um
01:13:40
amazing about this book is how sort of inclusive it is and actionable and as
01:13:45
you said there's pictures there's diagrams it feels more like like a workbook you get when you're trying to um methodically work exactly
01:13:53
what it is and we're using it as a companion to the eight workshop series we do which runs through the eight
01:13:59
stages so you're absolutely right so this is for someone who really takes it seriously and they can dip in and out
01:14:04
but i'd advise them to to go through it steadily and apply maybe some of the themes every
01:14:10
week because i think that's how we get them into our life as as permanent habits as you'd say
01:14:15
um i can't recommend this book enough because your work has helped so many people and i i said to you before we
01:14:21
started recording my business partner was really struggling with um problems in his life and i said he doesn't read a
01:14:27
ton of books but the book that he did read was the chimp paradox and he evangelizes it and credits it with
01:14:32
helping him overcome his alcohol addiction but really kind of get his psychological sort of like his yeah psychological dysfunction in order and
01:14:39
for you to have then gone and created a book like this that is a methodical work book i think is really going to have
01:14:45
even more impact on people and i'd highly recommend anyone listening to this i'm not just saying this because he's sat here but um you really are an
01:14:51
author of our time that i think has um helped to shine a light on the most important
01:14:58
um thing in the world which is the human mind i think that is the center point of all of our decision-making control influence
01:15:04
love happiness fulfillment and i don't know a book or someone better to help us understand it than this book and you so
01:15:10
thank you very much but don't forget congratulate your colleague because i can only offer they do the work straight
01:15:18
yeah so he's the one who's managed it he's the one who needs to pat himself on the back same with everyone you know i
01:15:23
don't do it i just offer the tools that you can do you got to pick them up and do them so then congratulate yourself so
01:15:30
but thank you very much for inviting me thank you been an absolute pleasure thank you thanks
01:15:35
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you
