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You have a chimp living rent-free inside your mind.
Clearly I don’t mean the hairy, adorable version. This chimp drives your emotional engine.
If you aren’t careful, the chimp can take over.
Do you ever notice a voice in your head that questions you? That’s your Chimp.
Do you ever act reactively and immediately regret it? Your Chimp.
Do you ever hold yourself back from doing something that will benefit you?
Chimp.
But it’s not all doom and gloom. Give me 5 minutes and I will show you how to become buddies with your chimp.
The book ‘The Chimp Paradox’ by Steve Peters opened my eyes.
He combines this powerful metaphor of managing your own ‘chimp’ with neuroscience to create a simplistic playbook to living a happier and healthier life.
Let’s break down how the brain works in super simple terms:
Your mind switches between 3 separate systems.
The Human Mind - (pre-frontal cortex) - this is you.
The Chimp Mind (limbic system)- this is your primitive, emotional and instinctive brain.
The Computer (parietal lobes) - this system acts like a machine which has been programmed based on what your human or chimp believes.
When you are completely calm, the brain will revert to saving energy and go through life in computer mode.
This system is lightning fast but acts only on the pre-programming given by your other two competing minds.
Welcome to the jungle
Here lies the challenge.
You have two different systems with two very different agendas, wants and needs.
Chimp vs Human.
A battle for the ages. Tyson vs Holyfield, Joshua vs Klitschko, Rocky vs Creed.
Let’s break down this fight.
Your Human mind is driven by logic and reason. Its primary agenda is to help you make rational decisions, solve problems and achieve your goals. It wants you to achieve long-term satisfaction and well-being whilst helping others to do the same.
Your human wants to feel calm, confident and avoid conflict.
Your Chimp brain is driven by emotions and impulses. It works on impressions and feelings. It is therefore more erratic and irrational.
Its primary agenda is to protect and defend you from threats or challenges.
It is heavily driven by a desire to procreate and is often motivated by instant gratification and pleasure.
Your chimp is YOLO. Playing the short game. Very much in the here and now.
They are not concerned about your purpose or long term fulfilment.
So who wins?
Think of a time when someone really pissed you off.
Or you felt incredibly anxious.
Despite your best efforts to 'just let go' or to think calming thoughts, the emotion so often remains.
That is because the chimp (your emotional thinker) is incredibly powerful.
Just as a chimpanzee is much stronger than a human so is your chimp mind.
The chimp is driven by survival instinct and will:
1) Act 4 x more quickly than your human mind
2) Overpower your human mind
So without taking steps to manage your chimp, they can end up undisputed champion of your mind.
Why is this a problem?
Having a runaway chimp in your mind can be a big problem.
The bigger problem is that most people have no idea they are being hijacked.
This can negatively affect all corners of your life.
1. Relationship with self.
Your chimp is on the look out for danger.
Sadly your chimp is not good at separating 'actual danger' from 'perceived danger'.
This is why you get anxious before giving a presentation despite having prepared to the best of your ability.
Your chimp’s thoughts sound and feel very much like your own. Despite often being negative or unhelpful, it is important to recognise they are part of healthy chimp behaviour.
Your chimp is trying to keep you alive.
In this example, a chimp may say things like:
'But what if you forget what you were going to say? That would be embarrassing. Maybe we should call in sick?'
The trick is to separate these chimp thoughts from who you are. This negative self-talk can spill into your day-to-day life causing which can be disastrous for your self-esteem and mental health.
2. Relationship with others.
Your chimp is quicker to react than your human mind.
Being an emotional thinker, it makes snap judgements on a situation.
In other words, your chimp is not only reactive - it is also highly sensitive.
There is a reason for this. The chimp operates your 'fight or flight' response. It needs to be quick to ensure that we act to escape danger if it arrives.
Is your overly-sensitive and reactive chimp in the driving seat? Do you have control over your emotions?
(Maybe you do - but someone else springs to mind as you read this?)
If not managed well, this chimp dictates your relationships with others.
In particular, you struggle with conflict and find that you regret your behaviour afterwards.
Are you someone to beep your horn and swear angrily at the driver in front when they cut you up?
Only to realise the utter insignificance afterwards and to feel a sense of shame.
The good news is that this is not actually YOU. It is your lovable (but often very naughty) companion.
3. Relationship with life.
Suffering is the difference between your expectations and reality.
You as a human have a set of core values that dictates your actions, dreams and desires.
Your chimp, on the other hand, is far less concerned with these values.
Let's take a common example to see how this plays out.
You are a fit and healthy person who likes to exercise regularly. This is your belief. You tell yourself you will exercise after work.
Work is tough and you get home feeling exhausted and stressed.
Your chimp is active after a stressful day. When you go to leave for the gym, your chimp pops up. 'You've had a hard day. Let's stay here and relax on the sofa. You deserve it'.
The chimp isn't being unreasonable. And sometimes this may be the right thing to do. Over time, however, this becomes problematic. Your fitness saps away and you move further away from your core values.
Expectation moves further from reality. Suffering ensues.
This disparity between what you want and what your chimp wants spills over into all areas of life. An unmanaged chimp affects your ability to make decisions, problem solve and learn from previous experiences.
Ultimately, you struggle to achieve your goals and find fulfilment.
It's not all bad
‘The chimp is neither good or bad - it is simply a chimp’ - Dr Steve Peters
The behaviours of the chimp are healthy and normal. You do not get to choose what your chimp thinks or feels.
You do get to choose how you act on those.
The chimp has a number of advantages over you as a human. When you understand and work with your chimp, you can harness its powers to make it your new best friend.
This is the Chimp Paradox.
Key Benefits of Managing Your Chimp
1. Emotional Intelligence Being your emotional brain, the chimp controls your emotional intelligence. It reads body language and helps us to feel empathy and compassion for others.
2. Supercharge Creativity The "chimp" can drive our imagination and inspire us to come up with new and creative ideas.
3. Trust your gut. Your chimp makes decisions based on instinct and intuition. It becomes far easier to trust a gut feeling when your chimp is happy and well-mannered.
4. Improvise & Adapt The chimp helps you to respond quickly and adapt to changing circumstances. A key skill in this ever-changing world.
5. Keeps you breathing. A happy chimp is more likely to react appropriately if faced with actual danger. This is always a good thing.
The power of this metaphor lies in how it allows us to more easily identify thoughts or behaviours that are unlikely to positively impact us.
More often than not, these thoughts or behaviours come from our erratic chimp.
By understanding that we have two competing minds you can bring separation between who YOU really are and YOUR misbehaving chimp.
The idea that you are not your thoughts falls at a wonderful intersection of spirituality and neuroscience.
When that voice in your head tells you that you’re going to bomb that presentation - that’s your chimp acting out of fear.
When you reactively shout at the car in front for cutting you up only to later feel shame about your outburst - that’s your chimp acting out of anger.
It suddenly becomes much easier to identify and address these thoughts, feelings and behaviours. Now with this new found understanding, it is important you do not relinquish responsibility of your actions.
It’s not wise to go around explaining to people that it was your chimp that misbehaved and not you.
Understanding your chimp is like owning a dog. You aren’t the dog but it is your responsibility to make sure that the dog does not go around biting others.
Managing your chimp
‘That’s all well and good Dr Cox - but how do I go about getting my chimp in line?’
Do not fear. I’ve boiled things down with a handy framework.
This framework can improve every area of your life but let’s focus on managing unhelpful thoughts and behaviours:
1. Build self-awareness - become aware of how and when your chimp acts.
Make a note every time you notice a chimp thought as well as how you behaved in response to the thought
Look out for times when you feel an emotion, act impulsively (& then regret or doubt yourself), resist change, overreact or think in all-or-nothing terms
2. Reflect - zoom out on the thought and decide if it was helpful or unhelpful.
Did the thought affect your behaviour?
Was there a reactive or automatic response? Were you able to manage the behaviour appropriately?
Are you happy with how you behaved?
3. Practice self-compassion - forgive yourself and your chimp.
You do not control your chimp and its thoughts are not you
Guilt and shame are powerful emotions that block behaviour change
Be kind to yourself and take a few moments to try and let go
4. Challenge the chimp - present evidence for and against the chimp’s thought.
Now the emotion has settled, write down reasons for and against the original thought.
Is the thought based on truth and logic or impression and conjecture?
How to challenge the chimp: Example: you are giving a presentation. Thought: ‘I’m going to bomb this and everyone will laugh at me’ Evidence For: ‘It is possible’, ‘I feel nervous’. Evidence against: ‘I have fully prepared’, ‘never happened before’, ‘I am a confident and capable person’
Being literal, logical and objective we can show the chimp that the negative thought is unlikely & unhelpful.
5. Reframe the chimp - replace the thought with a more helpful one.
Write down the negative thought.
‘I am going to bomb this presentation’
Replace this with a helpful thought.
e.g. ‘I am pushing myself out of my comfort zone and therefore learning’
It can help to make a list of your negative thoughts and write down your helpful counterparts.
Thanks to our good friend neuroplasticity, this will become easier with practice.
Good example of reframing here from Ben Meer:
6. Weaken the chimp - use helpful language to weaken the power the thought has on you.
The chimp thinks in absolutes.
Watch out for thoughts that include ‘must’, ‘should’, ‘need’, ‘will’ and ‘ought to’.
When you notice a thought like this, we can weaken the hold it has over us by replacing with phrases like ‘would like’, ‘can’ or ‘might’.
How to weaken the chimp’s hold on you: ‘I will fail this presentation’ becomes ‘I might fail this presentation’ ‘I need to go to the gym today’ becomes ‘I might go to the gym today’ ‘I should have done better’ becomes ‘I would have liked to have done better’
7. Exercise the chimp - allowing your chimp to fully blow off steam, accepting that life isn’t fair and then drawing a line in the sand.
Sometimes your chimp will be right. Often it will not be ready to let go.
At times like this, it pays to exercise the chimp to tire it out.
Either on your own, or with a trusted person, let your chimp speak its mind.
Once you feel like your chimp has gotten things off its chest, its time to say ‘thank you - that will be all’ and move forward
Refer back to the other steps to get back on track.
To Round Off
Brains are complex but we can break the way they work down simply into 3 systems:
The Human - logical & rational
The Chimp - emotional & instinctive
The Computer - automatic & habitual
You may not realise but your chimp mind may be dominating the other two systems.
The chimp is strong, quick to respond and activated under stress.
A deadly combo in this fast-paced modern world we live in.
With practice you can start to notice when the chimp is active. With more practice you can manage how you respond to the chimp’s often erratic and emotional thinking.
The benefits of this are endless. Not only for your happiness but also for physical health, quality of relationships and chances of success.
With knowledge is power but with the application of this knowledge lies self-actualisation.
- Mark Cox
If you enjoyed the read, please feel free to drop me a DM or share with someone who doesn’t know about their own Chimp mind.
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