Professor Steve Peters

I always have mixed feelings when reading self-help books. Their style usually grates on me, tending to be full of generalisations, anecdata, and cutesy graphics. My academic side wants citations to support each point and I grind my teeth at any lazy gendered assumptions. On the other hand, I know only too well that it's wilfully arrogant to dismiss the whole genre. Self-help books have been useful to me before. Indeed, if I'd been more willing to read them earlier in my life, it could have show more really helped my mental health. Thinking I was too smart and well-adjusted for such books was embarrassingly delusional. 'The Chimp Paradox' is nonetheless a special case, only read because a trusted friend recommended it so highly. I prefer my self-help books narrowly focused on something specific (anxiety or food issues) and rigorously backed by evidence, rather than making broad and dramatic claims. This book describes itself as, 'The mind management programme for confidence, success, and happiness'. It has been a particularly hard week, so my instinctive response to this was not so much scepticism as exhaustion: "I don't want confidence, success, or happiness. They sound tiring and I just need to survive work until the weekend." (I'm aware that's probably not a great mindset to have.) I started reading it this week simply because it was the easiest option on my library book pile, which is currently filled with books about genocide and war in central Africa, Millennarianism in the Middle Ages, and privacy in the digital age. I needed something less demanding, and 'The Chimp Paradox' is certainly accessible.

It took me a while to get into, though, both due to the writing style and content. Peters explains his model of everyone having a Human and a Chimp: the logical and emotional parts of the brain. The difficulty of tempering the Chimp's drives is framed as the main problem the book will tackle. I found the examples of this very hard to relate to. Indeed, in my tired and over-sensitive state, the descriptions of the Chimp made me feel alien, like I'm not a real person. Not that I don't have emotions, they just seem rather different to what is presented. As I persisted with the book, however, I found more personally relevant and useful material. To his credit, Peters states clearly that he is just presenting a much-simplified model of brain function and that it won't necessarily be appropriate for everyone. In my case, there are some parts that seemed helpful and others not at all. That is no more than one can expect, given the diversity of how we experience our internal lives.

I warmed up to 'The Chimp Paradox' as it brought in concepts familiar from cognitive behaviour therapy (CBT). I wasn't too keen on the use of 'gremlins' and 'goblins' to describe unhelpful behaviours and thought patterns, however I liked the concept of stored habits as a computer. The suggested process for removing gremlins is basically the same as in CBT. A specific point that I appreciated, and would do well to keep in mind, is replacing 'should' with 'could'. I am continually telling myself that I should do things, then feel guilty if I don't manage to do them. Using 'could' instead would be gentler on myself, yet probably no less effective for motivation. It sounds minor, but has the potential to be quite powerful.

I'm not wholly convinced by this, however, as it implies a level of self-awareness that surely isn't ubiquitous:

To work out who you really are as a person is easy to do. If you wrote a list of all the things you would like to be, you may write things like calm, compassionate, reasonable, positive, confident, and happy, then this is who you really are. Any deviation from this is hijacking by the Chimp.

It does make a strong point about potential for self-improvement, though. At the end of the chapter on personality, the book suggests getting a close friend to write down what they think your personality is like. Shit, who has the courage for that? As an aside, I think chimpanzees were somewhat impugned by this book. While I believe they are the more aggressive of the great apes, compared to say bonobos, labelling them with all humanity's worst impulses seems unfair. Chimpanzees have never dropped an atom bomb, made a hole in the ozone layer, or built a car dependent city.

I think 'The Chimp Paradox' is at its strongest when discussing how to deal with other people. Probably because that part most closely accords with how I already try to think and act, e.g, 'The easiest way to be tolerant is to have little, if any, expectation of the people that you meet but to just accept them as they are and to work with this'. Likewise, I try to be very controlled about how I communicate, especially in professional contexts, and tend to be quite measured and guarded in both verbal and written formats. Although inside I'm frequently angry, I attempt to project calm as much as possible. Although I've noticed evidence of this effort convincing people, I don't think it necessarily means I'm a calm person. Controlling anger doesn't make it go away, indeed it sometimes gets diverted into anxiety attacks. Nonetheless, these chapters seem sensible. It's even tempting to photocopy them for anonymous delivery to certain colleagues. Incidentally, I also agree with Peters that personal and professional relationships should be kept separate.

The chapters I hoped might be immediately helpful to me were about stress. I definitely find my job stressful, and it will be especially so for the next three months. I am instinctively drawn to approaches that involve plans and lists, so appreciated that the suggestions featured both. Still, there wasn't much there that was new to me. It mostly reminded me that to remove the main source of stress in my life I'd need to get a new job, something I've been trying and failing to do for several years. Presumably I need a new plan. The concluding chapters about success, happiness, and confidence seemed less relevant, although again I liked their project-management-esque structured approach. Given my low mood while reading, it was a nice lift to stop and think of ten things that would immediately make me happy (going to the library, catching up with a friend, having a lie-in...) The material in the confidence chapter was largely familiar from CBT and thus a handy reminder: just do your best, as you can never achieve perfection. I have to tell myself this a lot at work.

In short, there is a lot of sensible material in 'The Chimp Paradox', once you get past the style and twee illustrations. (Which some may like! They just aren't to my taste.) I can imagine why it is popular. Whether it looks familiar to you or not may depend on the extent to which you've encountered CBT. While it therefore didn't give me much that was new, the underlying ethos was soothing: that humans can be rational, kind, and polite if they put the effort in. I don't know how helpful this approach might be in achieving success, happiness, and confidence, which are all ambiguous and relative concepts in any case. Some statements seemed wise because I agree with them yet find them hard to implement, like acceptance of things you fear but can't change. It's unlikely to transform my life, but 'The Chimp Paradox' did lift my mood a bit when I was feeling down, so I'm thankful for that. show less

A pithy and readable account of your brain and how it makes decisions. Peters' postscript details what recent science has discovered in relation to how the brain makes crucial decisions. The rest of the book uses his own simplified model to demonstrate the science in a way that is easy-to-understand and totally relatable with many examples which will resemble your everyday life. At times, it was almost humorous how close it came to real life: my mother has broken her foot and we've had to show more cancel a family holiday, which took place just as I read about an 'uncontrollable chimp's' response to dealing with the exact same situation. The paradox, of course, is that the 'chimp' in our mind (our limbic system and emotional brain centre) can be our best friend or our worst enemy. The 'human' in our mind makes decisions which are far more logical and less emotional, and has to battle with our 'chimp' part of the brain to get its (usually) more compassionate and altruistic way. It makes compelling reading, and is accompanied by helpful, and often witty, illustrations throughout. Highly recommended. show less

I liked the concept and did find myself thinking about whether the chimp was in charge in my day to day life. I got a bit lost in some of the more detailed aspects but that was probably because I was listening to the audiobook. Print would enable you to reread and see the diagrams. Not sure I'll remember anything beyond the chimp idea in a few weeks but I did like the concepts.

First time on audio book, but I read this not long after it was published, so I knew what I was getting into. The basic premise for the Paradox has already had a big influence on me, and re-reading the text emphasised this. However, I still struggle to remember the various metaphors that Steve Peters uses for the more subtle development of the logic. In part this is because they just do not resonate with me at all.
Probably one to dip into again and again.