By Dr Steve Peters
Pub Vermillion Publishing
This self-help classic, first published way back in 2012, has sold well over a million copies and graces the shelves of the newest self-help junkies and hails itself as “The mind management programme for confidence, success and happiness”. Personally, I don’t see this as a programme – it doesn’t tell me what to do and when – but it certainly lets you see your own grey matter in a different light.
Who is it for?
Anyone who is interested in discovering why we often find our thinking often causes barriers rather than helping us and why we find it so difficult to manage our minds.
It’s written in a super-accessible way, with loads of cute drawings of chimps and brains littered through the book like chocolate bar wrappers on a windswept playing field.
What does it say?
The basic concept is that there are 3 main parts of the brain: the chimp, the human and the computer. The human is you, the chimp is the emotional part of the brain and the computer is the part that manages automatic functions and memory storage.
Peters focuses on the battle between the human and the chimp parts as these are the ones that most interfere with our thinking. If we can calm the chimp, who is highly emotional, who needs constant reassurance, but paradoxically, has our own interests at heart, then we will find our lives take on a zen-like sense of calm and everything gets easier by a magnitude.
The metaphor for our chimp like monkey mind is extended through the book, such as feeding your chimp bananas (distracting the chimp mind and rewarding it when it tried to help) to developing your own troop (your support network).
The second part goes into more detail about your computer, which can often be bedevilled by gremlins and goblins (removable destructive behaviours and fixed unhelpful automatic behaviours and beliefs respectively)
The whole book is about why the chimp and the computer get in the way of our human thinking and what we can do about it.
Throughout the book, there are loads of helpful analogies and examples of how this relates to you, the reader, and allows you to understand how we can overcome this raging battle that is being waged in the 6 inches between our ears!
Takeaways
- We are no longer living in the prime-ordeal jungles where survival was a foremost concern and where our ‘chimp’ was master and chief. So now, we need to manage this monkey chatter that drives us insane and makes us do stupid things like, really, really, REALLY want that doughnut when we’ve been doing so well dieting.
- Basically, we need to exercise or distract the chimp (eg. our yearning for doughnuts) by thinking of something else or box the chimp by allowing it to have its say and waiting for it to get bored of its own ranting and then rewarding it with a banana when it finally quietens down.
- Then it is explained why our computer mind sometimes glitches out with unhelpful beliefs and automatic behaviours and how we can address these to allow us to use our computer for what it was really designed for – keeping our helpful autopilot behaviours in the forefront.
- Finally, Part 2 is about our day-to-day functioning and how we can use this to help reach our long-term goals towards health, success and happiness (part 3)
This includes: dealing with failure to achieve goals we set, controlling our chimp in social situations and helping us to deal more effectively with stress amongst many other situations.
How this book might help you?
Pretty much the whole book is information that can help anyone. We all spend most of our time battling with demons and tyring to calm our monkey mind. This book goes deep into the reasons why we have these struggles and then sets our clearly how we can overcome them in an accessible and clearly though out, real-life situations (for example, how the fight, flight or flee response is triggered in social situations and how we can make peace with this.)
It helps you understand the functions of the three different brains and how you can use them more effectively to set and achieve goals and, more importantly, be prepared for possible road blocks your brain will throw up as obstacles that get in your own way – and how to deal with these.
It explains how your chimp mind, being primitive and poorly adapted to modern life, wants to win aggressively, dominate the troop and attack others if it feels threatened or loses face, even though your human mind is a little more sophisticated and may want to respond in a more appropriate and mature manner.
Now it makes sense: when we get panic attacks at the thought of going to a party, why road rage comes over the most placid of individuals when some bell-end cuts us up in their expensive Mercedes Benz and when we are consumed by emotional thinking rather than logical ideas. These are all the fault of our chimp mind and the disruptive beliefs and behaviour programmes that we are still unthinkingly.
By applying these techniques to your life, you may just find things get easier as waters are smoothed by our own understanding of how our brain is working.
What are some of your own takeaways from the Chimp Paradox? Share them with us below!