Professor Steve Peters

0:04Hello, Gabby here. Welcome back to The Midpoint. My guest today has been mentioned on this podcast before by none other than Sir Chris Hoy. Chris credited Professor Steve Peters with helping him achieve sporting immortality, but also with coming to terms with his terminal cancer diagnosis. He described Steve as a once-in-a-lifetime kind of person. Professor Peters is a consultant psychiatrist who's worked with some of Britain's top athletes, but also an array of people from all walks of life. Steve has also written four books, one of which is the UK's best-selling self-help book of all time, The Chimp Paradox.

0:40And over the course of his career, he's provided consultancy to over 20 Olympic and national sporting teams, including Liverpool FC, British Cycling and England Rugby. Some of you might recognise his voice from the BBC's Change Your Mind, Change Your Life, a groundbreaking show where viewers get the chance to listen in on people's therapy sessions. Now, I've been wanting to get Steve on the podcast for a long time because I know he's going to have a treasure trove of advice when it comes to better understanding and managing our minds to ensure we keep ourselves in good psychological health.

1:15Dr. Steve Peters, welcome to The Midpoint. Thank you so much for inviting me. Shall I call you Steve from now on? Yes. It is an absolute honour to have you here. I've been trying to get you on the podcast for a while. And I was prompted, even though I've known about your work for many, many years, because I did an interview with Sir Chris Hoy quite soon after his public kind of revelation of his diagnosis. And he told the story about how you were one of the first people he called and wanted advice from. And I thought, wow, that's an incredible relationship that you two must have and have forged because you came into his life as a professional, essentially, didn't you?

1:50To help him and lots of other athletes with their mindset. And that's how I got to know your work from the outside. And I think anybody who watched the 2012 Olympics will have seen Steve Peter's magic in action. Well, they all did the medals. I was in the background. I think, to be fair, there was a massive team. and I will say this my psychological input is one little bit of that and it varies terrifically from some people where it was a major input without that they would have faltered whereas others it was relatively minor you know so I don't want to be falsely humble but I'm being realistic that your input is no more so than say the physio or the doctor or the coach is even more important so I always had the model of coach and athlete whatever sport I work in has been a unit and the rest of us are the minions in support the team you're the team around exactly the supporting going back you're around 20 years or so older than me and when i was a gymnast and i was at school i told my careers teacher that i'd like to be a sports psychologist and i say i think it was the librarian who doubled up on thursday afternoons for half an hour and she said there is no such thing it doesn't exist it's it's not a it's not and i said well actually british gymnastics association have got this woman who talks to us when we go to training and and she said no it's not a thing so you as a as an 18 year old 16 year old definitely I don't think would have had that as a career path or an idea of a career so let's go back in your early kind of professional life obviously trained as a doctor but the mind for you was always the fascinating part of medicine it wasn't originally so I'll try and be succinct so I set off to be a GP my actual career started within general medicine general surgery it's a long time ago where it was a more fluid system for doctors to train so we could select different disciplines but after a while I decided to go back and think yeah definitely GP but in that rotation I did psychiatry so I wasn't a psych fan I didn't really appreciate why I was on the medical degree I thought this is not for us we're doctors but it blew me away when I did six months and I realized just how scientific it was how neuroscience based it is and how crucial it is to people because you suddenly i had this epiphany which is sad to say i had to have that that the psychological aspects were more important than the physical because we were getting people well but they were miserable and drive the point home to them being extreme but whereas when you get someone who's in a really good place mentally they can deal with all of this you know unpleasantness of being physically ill or struggling with a chronic condition so it just turned me on my heels to say wow this is real hard science it's not just like let's have a chat uh this is really going somewhere but i don't have the facilities that the other medical professions have with blood results we now have scans but even the scans are not that helpful in psychiatry you've got to work out what's going on at neurotransmitter level and hormonal level and there's so many variations so it actually drew me in i think the biggest thing which has pushed me as a career is I went into medicine to help people and I suddenly realized the most needy people I felt this is going back 40 years now had the worst deal and so I was on a mission to teach psychiatry to bring it up to standard but also reach the public.

5:07So when you had this epiphany and the mind suddenly became for you almost at the forefront of all the other things you were doing did you and you say it's it's not tangible in many ways in terms of you know bloods and sending somebody off and things I'm sure have developed exponentially since you first got involved was it with a view that you just wanted to make people's minds better and could you see then that there was something missing that you could do that you could add it came in stages but I think I was trained traditionally so it's basically medical model where you think right we can do cognitive therapies behavioral therapists but doctors we tend to go for medication we tend to look at strict illnesses i'd call them like psychoses whereas we wouldn't go for psychologically based illnesses we did do them but not to the same extent what struck me when i was a junior doctor working in the nhs is in the clinics i'm just saying giving figures off the top of my head half the people were what i'd call mental illness so i did need to get medication in because the transmitted systems are not working and whereas half of them didn't need drugs they needed to understand their own minds and what the mind was doing so that they can run what i now class as a machine and say if you realize how your mind is structured and the rules by which it works then you will do a lot better so i did have that epiphany moment which i could actually remember with a woman came in and we had a lot of time on our hands because the next patient cancelled so i said to her she was struggling a lot with depressive illness and she'd been through so many medications and I just felt like this isn't right to give another drug so I just said we've got time do you want to stay and tell me about yourself and that was a turning point in my career so as a junior doctor she came in and a lot of things just hit me that this is a lot of this is normal she doesn't know how to manage it a lot of things were her belief system so it came to life the idea of what cognitive behavioral work was but much more what Freud was talking about all the post freudians the unconscious brain that fascinated me so then i jumped to the functional mi scanners which had just come in so this is where we see the brain working in real time and that was an explosion of neuroscience research and from there i changed the way i approach people so i started thinking either they've got a mental illness or they're psychologically dysfunctional and i became in my opinion more of an expert in psychological dysfunction function in helping people to understand themselves and i saw massive results with that so how many so if you say 50 you're saying people that you're seeing really did need medication and those other people needed to understand their own brains yeah a few quite a few questions jumped into my mind when i was listening to you then but going back to kind of something you said early on do you think we perhaps need to be taught about our brains more as young people 100 i'm doing a lot of work at the moment in schools so we have a lot of schools that work with the model that i've produced and it's reaping fantastic rewards we're seeing this now so we will be doing some research on this to give evidence base because i'm an academic professor which means i want to see evidence you can't just say it works but it's based on neuroscience it's not likely it won't work it's not my work really it's neuroscience telling us how the brain functions so yes i think if you start with children and teach them which there's a lot of work going on from a lot of different researchers we can build resilience in children which will pay dividends 10 years later so the evidence is that we can start at a very young age around four or five and there are ways we can actually teach children to see their output their achievements differently do you think some people do that innately and naturally with their children and other people need to know that it's okay to do these things i'm going to be controversial and say i don't think we get it right naturally because naturally what we tend to do is we over protect children so primitively we don't allow them to take risks we don't allow them to almost have an opinion because we try and guide them by saying that's a really good picture you've drawn or that's not good to do that instead of asking them what do you think and if we start training them to use the parts of the brain which bit like muscles in the gym if you use aspects of the brain they will build they will be preferentially used so if we change to saying to children what do you think the consequence of doing that is we start to wake these parts of the brain up early rather than leave them to get to about 13 or 14 where they do get a measure of independence and then learn the hard way that there are consequences so impulsive thinking impulsive behaviors doesn't pay off because the teenage brain as i understand it i read a book about the teen um the teenage brain is is different yes to the child's brain and the adults very and so there's a lot going on a lot a rewiring going on at that point and so you think if they had those questions kind of planted almost earlier when they get into that rewiring they bypass some of those they will have a struggle but they'll understand it better so you're absolutely right we know that when the fetus is developing the brain is growing rapidly but not as much as when you get to around puberty so around 12 13 14 the brain goes explosively it's trying to find out now experimental which goes in what nature's doing that again i'm being simplistic up to the age of 12 we cling to parents and teachers of our role models and we look to them for protection we then flick over to the peer group and say right we disown these people now we know everything now and as a group we're going to find the world so your brain mirrors that it's partly the brain does it when makes you do that but also nature does hormonal kick in which means that the child now is vulnerable so it's got to experiment quickly to learn what works and what doesn't but that doesn't mean we can't influence that natural development so i always say to people it's predisposed to do this not predetermined so you're right in what you said earlier that some people are naturally adept at this and think so they use parts of the brain that reflect and think am i getting an outcome with this kind of behavior whereas other people operate the behavior then think well that didn't work i'll try a different one and so there is there are ways of doing it and if we offer teenagers those ways then yes i think we'd see a lot more stability in teenagers and going forwards from from the teenagers in fact people listening to this obviously in the midlife will have teenagers and it will probably be reassuring to know that their brains are going through this because you feel helpless at times don't you as a parent that you you can't influence in the same way and you you want them to to take risk because it's important but equally you know when they make continue to make some bad decisions i think yeah when we look at the teenage brain it speaks an emotional language it doesn't work with facts and logic so i i keep saying this and um maybe i'm wrong but i'm just going to keep saying it we try and teach them about the risks of drugs alcohol driving if they're at 17 and and they know all this they know more than us and they know the risk they know the consequence they know they don't speak logic and facts so we get parents speaking that to them and saying if we educate them the answer is they don't need educating they actually know this what they've got is they're trying to do with emotional language how do you feel when this happens what do you feel that's their language but we don't talk that generally we talk facts and expect them then to influence their behavior and that won't happen so the teenage brain doesn't work by being influenced on facts it's influenced on feeling so if you look at that and we start learning to speak a language of emotion to teenage then we'll succeed but all i ever see is people giving them facts which they know you know and and of course a lot of parents will recognize the the line it's different to the days that you were in it's different to your days and and because they do know a lot of stuff and they're being told that from many different voices so you're obviously you're fascinated by the brain at this point in your career and you're working in clinic with all kinds of different mental illnesses before we get onto your sporting kind of trajectory it feels now we we talk about mental health and we talk about the mind and the brain more than we ever have um and we hear so many kind of illnesses being talked about mental illness is being talked about than ever before are there more mental health issues than ever before are we just talking about it and did we not acknowledge before perhaps what people were going through i think we're aware whereas some people would slip through and so for example buzzwords at the moment and diagnosis of autistic spectrum adhd we hear these banded around and i've worked in these clinics so i did a number of years doing autism and adhd clinics in the national health service so i know what the reality is the problem is that some of us display similar symptoms because you could almost say we're all on the autistic spectrum but i don't want to say that oh we're all on it because when you get a child or an adult who has got autism and it's a struggle it's really hard work for the person and the people who are supporting them so what I do feel is we're probably jumping to diagnosis where we're saying actually most of us say run upstairs and forget why we went and then think I'm distracted or we get doing one job and then move on to another so with my small team I've got a small company I did it with my mentors and said we're going to do a screen for ADHD and if you go on a screening and ask questions 18 people were ADHD in the team now maybe they are but quite ridiculous but the questions are not useful unless you put it in the setting so as a clinician we're saying it takes quite a while to assess autistic spectrum and ADHD correctly and we're not just looking to answer questions and unfortunately now with the internet we tend to answer questions like do you find you get distracted watching a movie and forget what happened and that's normal that's not evidence of adhd however someone with adhd will say that because it is for them a struggle but when we look at things like detriment to your life detriment to your relationships that's more where you'll see adhd presenting and it's quite distressing when i've worked with adults who've got this because they're damaging their own lives they're sabotaging by so it is important to get that diagnosis if you very because you can actually then learn to cope and you can manage so we tend not to go to medication initially but we know that there are parts of the brain that appear to be dormant uh and the structure of the brain example in autism is different to a typical individual we can't sort of go and scan everybody's brain if we could then we'd get it and say right there's your connection so we know there's certain connectivity within regions that's not there whereas when you connect people who say i think i've got autistic inspection the regions are actually fully functional what we're now looking at is behaviors and saying can we adjust your behaviors and then we'll remove a lot of the things you're experiencing okay it's very complex yeah absolutely and and this audience that the kind of midlife audience we've had a few people come on who've had later life diagnosis and it's helped them to explain as you said um compulsive behaviors sometimes addictive behaviors and things that were damaging their life and that is that does seem to be really important to understand and i think you're right and i think perhaps but i would propose that we do this you're on a spectrum of this like autistic spectrum it can be severe it can be very mild so i think the same with adhd it can be that we have severe forms and a lot of us may have mild forms and it helps us to know that's my brain it's not me but i need to take responsibility and say, how can I manage that?

16:37And that's a different approach rather than saying, I've got ADHD, which is a little bit of a broad term. Yeah, people do use it flippantly, don't they, I think? I think it has been. But I understand why people want to try and understand why their brain is hijacking them, which is a different thing altogether. I think that is a normal thing. Have you seen a change in the way people are presenting because of mobile phones and their usage? Yeah, I mean, the social setting, I've seen the transition, because i'm old uh from right from the 1960s and it's culturally driven and we we can see this by looking at other nations where i'd have a very different culture so we see certain disorders or certain behaviors it's peculiar to nations and belief systems within that nation so the standard one was always um eating disorders more in young girls but some young lads um and then into older life that we rarely find that in certain nations whereas we find it predominant in the western and nations and we we don't know fully but people feel it's all based around potential role models expectations and it's ingrained and in terms of usage and the what what the phone is doing to to the brain in terms of scrolling spending hours i keep seeing these things being sent on my algorithm telling me kind of almost in a scientific way that every time you know you're scrolling it's it's killing off brain cells which i can't quite believe because you know if you watch tv for an hour you're pretty much doing the same thing you're kind of mindlessly disappearing somewhere but but would you say are we going to see in 10 or 20 years time the ramifications of what's happening now with phones i think well then there's a lot of pluses there's a lot of pluses that our communication is better i think the negatives are that um we're taking everything to heart and we're screening for everything and what we tend to do the natural predisposition of the brain is to look for the negatives so we emphasize the negatives and that's extremely destructive because sadly within society we know there are a lot of people who are malicious and unkind and we have to share our world with those people but if we can teach children about that and say look expect 10 percent of the write-up or more because they're the ones who are most vocal the quiet majority who are like the rest of us is saying let's just take life in our stride and get perspective won't say anything so you have to understand that social media is skewed to begin with and it's also this anonymous cowardice effectively of you can make really unpleasant remarks without having any accountability or even any thought of what you're doing to somebody else so i think it's a minefield it's new and i think we maybe should be doing a lot more work with children in schools centered around dealing with social media dealing with phones i'm because i'm before all this and it's all come in i don't do social media at all i refuse because everyone keeps telling me as you just said how much time you waste now i don't waste any time on it because i don't think it's going to help me perhaps i'm wrong i think it's if you take the phone out of it for the moment and say when you meet people day to day is the interaction with another human being constructive and helpful destructive and the answer depends who you meet and that's the same on the phone you've just changed it from face to face to the phone so you will meet a lot of destructive and if you focus on that then it becomes really a powerful choice in the flesh though don't you you do but we still meet unsavory people we have clashes on the road we have clashes in the supermarket we we know that you will meet these people so i agree it's like it is a bit different it's probably not a great analogy but i'm saying that if you're selective and think okay i'm just dismissing that you can get a lot of compliments constructive comments on social media i'm sure i mean i say i don't do it but certainly my niece does and she'll tell me things or my nephew does and he tells me things or some of the team do and then you look and i think there's some constructive things on it there's a connectivity there are groups for example of like-minded people there are walking groups that work on all right we're going to go here or you know social groups yeah that connectivity is definitely a positive it's a massive it's massive so people are not alone and you can reach out on appropriate websites you can reach out and make friends with people so we're not we're not we're not putting it to in the box in the room 101 and saying it's it's very bad for the, for the brain and the mind.

20:53It can be a positive. I think anything is like that really, you know, it's how you use something in life for the better or the worse.

21:16And some of the things you've said there, I'm hearing the chimp paradox already in terms of the way the emotional part of the brain so let's let's get on to your sporting kind of life if you like and when you started working first working with sports people and realizing how you could shift their their mindset their patterns of thinking to help improve performance where was the first connection the first connection was in 2001 that's Chris hi um I had some a couple of other people at the time it was by pure chance and what happened was bear in mind this was all the chimp paradox model or the chimp model for mind management was taught to medical students so I was at the time undergraduate dean at Sheffield Medical School I'm still there 30 years on and they wanted to understand neuroscience in their mind so I thought as doctors to be let me it's a tough profession it can be stressful but we have to deal with that so I said let's look how your mind works I created this model saying that effective you've got two decision makers a chimp and a human the chimp is a primitive machine which will think and act for you but you have an alternative way a different choice and then there's this computer backup and the students loved it so it was in operation 30 years ago when i went uh to british cycling one of my previous students took a job there as a doctor and asked for some help with the cyclist now as a doctor i can only give you the names of people who are public so i've worked with a lot of well-known people who don't want to be public which i understand so i went and i met chris hoy is one of them um and what chris said is he goes around the circle four times for a living which i found fascinating um and told him uh he's a he's absolute gem chris so we got on really well straight away and i asked people then which asked him in sport what is it you're trying to do and he said i need to focus he's very good in articulating exactly what i wanted from me my mind wanders so i said okay let me tell you how the mind works we're not actually talking jimpa yuma we need to silence them i'll show you how to do that what we're going to do is wake up a computer system but we need to program it heavily so that's what i did to him and then we practice this over and over to reinforce it so you myelinate the tracks which means you as you use a certain brain pattern like a habit it becomes normal and it acts so fast you do this habit without thinking and that's what i want him to i didn't want him to think at all in his event he didn't need to so i went to athens undercover i didn't want to be known i was working at that point in forensics see we're called psychopaths colloquially so it wouldn't be great for you to be have a public no you think people are going to wonder but uh yeah i went to athens because chris said i really wanted to go that was 2004 that was 2004 and it was my first experience of elite sport and the holding camps and all that went with it and as a psych entry in that world I really had to understand it and I found that tough because I've had the privilege now of 30 or more sports but every sport I need to understand and then the unique individual within it with Chris we went he went around the circle four times and he got his gold medal and I mean the stadium erupted and I always tell people I didn't and I thought I better jump up and down and uh And I remember Dave Rills with the head of cycling turning and saying, this is amazing, Steve.

24:29You could do this for a living. And I remember thinking, what an awful thought. I want to go back to the psychopaths. And it took them a year to convince me. But I think what convinced me is the pleasure that the nation got from sport and the fact that I started to get referrals from other sports. And these were people who were right in the public eye, but behind locked doors were falling apart. and the pressure that they were getting from being in the public eye and being assessed and judged, like you say, by social media in particular. And I got on a mission then to think, well, I've got to help these people.

25:02It's not just people coming through the door in hospital. Everybody needs to help. So I did then undercover work and the sport just expanded and expanded. Just going back on the people, what do you think comes first? Are certain people predisposed to deal better with the sporting pressure or do you think everybody needs a bit of help in that environment did you meet some people who just wow they that they have managed to kind of get their mind and brain trained yeah i guess i'd say let's i'll try and give an analogy where there are 10 sort of like trigger points for pressure and some people can manage nine but the one gets them and they would come to me and say everything else is fine this i can't do so they're quite a balanced individual but they know there's there's a potential weak spot under these circumstances for whatever reason i don't cope so it could be for example working with an elite footballer which i know i've worked with obviously and very publicly and they might say to me everything's fine steve what i want you to do is stop the anxiety if i make a mistake on the pitch because after that my behavior becomes erratic and i hide or they may come in and say no that's fine what i find is the crowd if the crowd boo i struggle and I try and overcompensate so I have to listen to the individual but some people would say the 10 there's eight of them that trigger me so they're now saying only two areas I feel comfortable with so what I'm getting at is I have to do an analysis of that person share what they're thinking is test it all out and find out what's happening and then find what it is they're doing which is not helping and then show them how they can turn that around so it's very individual there isn't really there's some generic processes but generally i have to say i work with individuals or teams the teams every team's different and they have to put the work in these are exercises they have to do they don't it's not just sitting in a chair chatting to you going away and feeling great no no i don't do that i give them homework i give them stuff and simply it doesn't work it's a team with me so they might say it's not working steve something else or i might say it would work if you do this because he said publicly share everything i wouldn't ronnie and so i've worked with for over 10 years and we're very close friends um and he knows he's got a massive chimp but he loves the model and it's a skill to manage it so the chimp is is his emotional emotional brain sorry for those yeah i'm just going back on the terms it's the primitive brain that we have to share our brain with and it will think and act for him so it's the bit that makes us eat too much yeah stops his training makes us lose confidence things that you think that's not very helpful it can be very helpful if we get on side but he did call me about two years into work with him and said it's not working it's not working and I did say to him have you done the work and he said no and I put the phone down he knows the rules and he rang me four days later and I said and and he said I'm in a great place and I said and why and he said I've done the work so I had specific things I wanted him to do because I knew it would stabilize him so you're absolutely spot on and I always say to people when you get the compliment that you said I was at London and you had a big input I did I I had an input, but actually the impact was the athletes.

28:12They did the work. So I always say to anyone, whether it's sport or outside, pat yourself on the back. I only give people the tools that you must use them and practice all the time. And like a coach in any sport, you watch your athletes and you keep correcting potential difficulties, the bad habits that come in, or you encourage them. That is my role mentally to say, hang on, your brain's changing all the time because you're maturing and life's throwing things at you. and so i say well how would you like to apply and i say no here's a different way of approaching that and they'll go yeah i'll say oh where's that belief come from that's the kind of what you're tidying the brain up a bit and and sometimes we don't know beliefs we've got until you uncover them and that can be transformational in somebody so when you get to this stage of life the midlife often people find they're being kind of pushed from both sides you've got teenagers you've got Older parents giving you issues.

29:06And previously you thought you could cope with lots of things, but suddenly it's all coming at you. So anybody who's listening and wants something that they can take away to practice and the homework, how would you give somebody? It's really hard because obviously when I say this, some things resonate and some things won't. They say throw it out of the rubbish. So my first suggestion would be wearing my hat as a psych. As a doctor, I'd be saying that one of the rules of the mind is you can't retain a lot of problems in your head. The mind doesn't like that. So what it does, it keeps going round and not solving anything.

29:38And that exhausts you. So I ask people to write it all out. Get a blank piece of paper and write down teenagers, job and what's happening, mortgage payments, relationship, any areas you think are important. And then when you've got them all out, people often think, gone forever. It doesn't normally. The most you'll probably get is 10. Most. Most people, it's about four. and you think right these are the areas i want to focus on just doing that can give a sense of relief that it's out there the mind likes to objectify a problem so we like to describe it once we've said this problem is frustrating me and this is once we give terms to emotion we can start to manage them so that's well researched this is the power of therapy so i would be saying if you're really struggling and get it out first of all but get somebody who's an expert so get a psychologist a therapist a counselor whatever you resonate with and say let me just use them as a sounding board because they can often be they do this work all the time and they can be very good at pointing something out that sparks you to think oh i never thought of that but getting it out even if some things are going to be tough can help a lot okay and in terms of an exercise that you can help to fortify your mind you talked about building resilience in kids what kind of things do you advise whether it's a sports person okay so dealing with disappointment yeah you for that i'm gonna again i'm just gonna have to use a sledgehammer uh together i would say get get perspective get perspective you know one things again because you give me permission chris hoy liked was when we looked at like going through sport is and life is where's my helicopter was the phrase as soon as something else where's my helicopter and what it was is the idea you go up in the helicopter and you look down on your life and you realize this is a tiny bit of my life you know get perspective and that resonated with him it may not resonate with people listening but it resonates with me get perspective another way of doing perspective would be say will this matter in an hour will it matter in a day will it matter in a year and in sports people particularly they often think a crisis has happened where they've had a really bad result and it was important at the olympics they might underperform and it may be the only opportunity they've got So I'm not saying you won't have disappointment and feel grief and upset, except that's going to happen.

31:58Just manage it, but contain it. You know, get some perspective. It's important to feel it as well. I think so. Again, I ask people, if it's important, then let's work through the emotion. Don't quench the emotion. I don't dismiss it and go, oh, get over it. That would be unkind. But I have people who say to me, come on, Steve, just, you know, tell me to get over it. And they work that way. Yeah. Yeah. Again, it's a point I'd like to make that I remember Dave Brosewell when we first started and he said, what do we say to them when they go in the Olympic final and they go out there? What do we say?

32:31And I said, I have no idea. And he was shocked. And he said, Steve, you're the psych. I said, well, let me tell you why I have no idea. Other people might. I want to know what that person will. We do this well before the day. What will help you on the day? so we had signals with the cyclists they had some signals to me they could be saying come in i'm in trouble but we knew what i was going to say i would have certain phrases certain set beliefs facts which stabilize them and so but if they said the thumbs across it meant just hover i'm okay but hover thumbs up meant go away thumbs down meant come over but when i came over we already had work things out for maybe 12 months before so one or two of them again i'm taking severe to drive the point home would say something like it doesn't matter whatever you do your parents still love you we respect you you did everything you could go and have some fun and they said that always helps me we practice this at world cups you know we didn't just do it on the day whereas other people would call up and they'd say what you have to say is stop being a wimp you know get up there and prove you point because they would then go into whack all the chimp mode and actually did help there's a risk in sport doing that because that system is very unstable necessarily because it's an emergency survival which means this is the explanation from the neuroscience bit for why we choke right because you flick systems into freeze mode and then you can't move or even flight which is worse and you can't manage sometimes those sports people that you can see perhaps are more tuned in to the to the chimp i mean you mentioned ronnie yeah are the ones we just gravitate towards because they seem so human don't they yeah and and they they they make mistakes yeah and then they show us on their face and we relate to it we relate to vulnerable people we don't relate actually to the superheroes we only do that when we're a child so you don't have people 18 wearing batman cape for lots of reasons but one is they don't want that anymore you want the role model because that's your security.

34:31That's who you're going to align to. As a teenager, you want it to be you now. So you get rid of this role model. It almost, you create your own. That's when we get into difficulties.

34:43I hope you're enjoying this episode of The Midpoint. If you are, it would be amazing if you could give us a review and subscribe. It really helps. I'll be back in a moment. And the satisfaction for you, you said it's about the nation being happy in 2012 for example but it must be enormously satisfying when you can see somebody who previously had a very negative or damaging mindset as a sports person change into somebody who becomes a gold medalist and understands their brain it's i think it's fantastic but uh i get the same kick about someone who's got a problem like alcohol and they overcome this and you think that's such an achievement you know and that's a massive kick someone's got depressive illness you work through with them you get them back on the feet or somebody's just got psychological problems like relationships or low self-esteem or lack of confidence anything like that it's a massive buzz but you're right in sport yes i tend to try and stay completely stable and emotionally neutral because it only helps did the chimp ever come out um was there a moment it never comes out in a negative way i think because just everybody's uh primitive system chimp system is different and my chimp system is far more compassionate i would say so there are one or two sports people i work with who it went wrong for and it really hurt because i knew how much they'd invested and i was going through this with them and then you realize that you can't do this you gotta step back because they may be coming to you in a minute it's gone wrong and that was yeah but then there's the successes and again i can talk about people who've been public i think one of them i mentioned before Oh, it's Karina Bryant, wherever you are, Karina, who tried for 16 years, had third Olympics and came to me in Beijing in tears.

36:29I didn't know, Karina. And she's judo. So I've just gone out the first round. She asked that you see Peters, will you work with me for London? And I did say to her, which, and this is your point earlier, I said, if we go to London in four years, Karina, and you say it's a waste of time if I don't get through, will you say that's it, it was a waste of time? Or will you say, no, I'm glad I tried? I said, don't answer until you think, because the answer is going to tell you. And she said, I'll say it was worth trying because I said, I'll work with you. I wouldn't have worked with her because I know I'm going to fail because anyone who says it would be a waste of time if I don't make it, you're constantly propping them up because they're constantly giving in.

37:04Whereas someone who goes, I'm up for the journey. It may not happen, but I'm up for it. And I'm pleased to say she meddled. So that was one where you think, yeah, my chimp was like, we did it. Yeah, a great journey to be on. But she worked very hard for that. And you've got your own sports journey, Steve, which I feel people need to know more about because in researching and kind of looking into you ahead of today, I was like, hang on, these times and distance, is this running? He's actually sprinting. So you are an over 70s sprint champion, basically. Is that the count? Is it 70 to 80? It's five year age groups.

37:38Right, five year age groups. Okay. Keep us coming back. Because in the early years, I didn't notice a lot of sprinting being mentioned in your life. I've hidden it because I shouldn't because all of the masters people say, you know, these leads. My opinion is where I'm going to get shot. Older people, older rather than old, having fun and keeping fit. And yeah, they take it very seriously. And I take my training seriously, but, you know, get perspective. It's for us. It's our world. I'm not assuming anybody's interested. So when you were a younger student, a younger medical student, what kind of sprinting were you doing at that point?

38:14I didn't sprint for a long time. And then I took it up in my medical student days again, but I never took it seriously. I didn't train per se. I just ran. So I did get a gold medal at the university's championships. And that was in the relay squad. And we set a record. Individually, I got to the 200 final. But it wasn't until I was 40. I helped out with an athletics team. So I credited the PE teacher, Beryl Huckley, who was at the school and said, you're helping with athletics. Why don't you put some shorts on? and she said stay back after school when the kids have gone and I'll tell you we're 100 meters now we're on a grass field and she she looked at the time and I could barely finish it I was so unfit and she said you do realize you've just run 12-0 on the back of nothing wow yeah so I started running and I got faster and faster I got down to 10-9 uh when I was over 40 but that wasn't my event I was 200 meter runner so I got into the 21s and that's when I really yeah I didn't realize that as an older man, I'm being cautious of my words.

39:14So now, what's your current PB fit? I'm still, I'm training this year at 72 now. I've just done, I've got 12.6 three times. So I'm trying to get down again. My 200 is struggling because you get week and week, you can't breathe. So yeah, but I think. How much training are you doing? I try, I've got a lot of work on, which I'm delighted with. So I try and get to training when I can. It's hard because I'm still full-time working. But I think it was a shock in the 40s when I started doing gym work for the first time. At 44, I ran in the 21s and got ranked nationally. And I got called for the Olympic squad.

39:50I got a letter through saying, you're third in the east of England. And I was up and coming to a young man. And I wrote back and said, I'm 44. So I declined to go to the training camp. But since then, it's been, age has got me, which obviously it's going to. Yeah, but I see stuff online, you know, people in their 90s doing sprinting. And so presumably you've been to some international competitions. I've won the world title many times now. But it's something that I think it stops me putting weight on because I know I would. And it keeps me fit and it's fun. And you meet a lot of nice people. The Italians have been overly friendly to me all the time.

40:26And so I actually went and stayed with them and they taught me Italian, which has been brilliant. So yeah, there's a lot of other side things. To me, I know a lot of people take it very seriously. I think it's fun for me. So yeah, I'm hoping to get the Triple European Championships this autumn. That's amazing. Hold on to my title. Are you doing weights as well? Very little, but I do some. I think track running is... And with your contacts and your address book, your phone book, you must have some pretty cool people you can call for sprinting advice. Who are you training with? Well, I train on my own, but I can say as a friend, and these are people who've gone public, Adam Jamili is being brilliant.

41:05I've worked with Adam for over 10 years. And we met not long ago. And he's such a genuine man. So obviously he kept saying, we've got to train together. And I thought, no, thank you. Not in a 9.9. I think I'm a bit beyond that. But yeah, I've trained with various athletes who I might be working with. That's incredible. It's incredible. It's good fun. Yeah. It's so important, I think, to, you know, as a role model for people to keep going. We talk about it all the time on this podcast, about pushing yourself and keeping. I can give a funny story that I use the chimp model on myself all the time because it obviously makes sense to me.

41:40It's neuroscience-based. And I use it in athletics. And people say, do you use it? Absolutely. Because I'd never be able to run a 400. Because every time I go out, I think, what are you doing this for? We know it's a man killer and it hurts, but I can run it and win the title. So I want to get the world title again. But when someone's friends had sat with me, and before the final of a 200, I actually brought the world record. And I was wittering away and they said, if people saw you now and they didn't understand the chimp model and it's important, I encourage people to do this, to witter and go, I can't do it.

42:14My legs are going heavy. This is what you need to do prior to this other rules of the brain work. You witter and give the negatives. Now, I know some spot psychologists are going to balk here. Stick with what works for you. It doesn't work for me. All I'm saying is the rules of the brain are you get all the worries out first. It's a principle in life. then the chimp settles the chimp brain will settle once it's expressed itself it doesn't need answers then i use the human brain which i did with his friends to say right within minutes to going to get ready for the call room now i switch systems now i'm saying right now i go logical and i give all my logic you've trained hard you've done the work you know and do your best doesn't matter at the end of the day so now i've got perspective it's all people having fun and finally on the lying you put your spikes on and your blocks are ready and they'll send your marks i'm in computer mode so i've learned i don't analyze or think at that point so i'm using the system so that this complaint at the beginning of i can't do this why am i doing this my legs and that is healthy and helpful in my opinion so when i work with elite athletes i train them to do this let's know what your chimp brain's going to say because we know it's not that clever it's wily but it will give the same things to athletes and so you get it out let it out and give it answers and once you've done that it will settle so we know if i look at a functional mri scanner that's what i'll see and that part of the brain has done its job now but we need to work through a system so my mental warm-up is following the neuroscience and that's what i do with elite athletes try and follow that neuroscience but again i have to temper it with saying if someone else says if i did that it would destroy me it would bring it to then i would say don't do it i would change i flex to the person if their chimp was too noisy and wouldn't let the human come in and there are i've got advanced lessons where i use in 400 meters where i say call on the chimp so in a 400 let's say for example i take me rather than somebody else and i get to say 250 we know that point your legs start to wobble we know you change from anaerobic to aerobic running and it's an uncomfortable moment and you can say to the chimp i can't do this because paradoxically the chimp brain is there to help you so once it's warned you of danger if you say we can't avoid it it will come in fight mode so my chimp will kick in so then i have to contain it not to go too quick and wind in so run my legs out so i'll work with it then and then it wins me the medal i didn't i would have given up as a human saying you're an idiot this age so the chimp paradox if anybody is listening thinking well i'm never going to run 400 meters of course you can apply all of that to so many different things in your life and if you haven't already got a copy of the chimp paradox in your house then you probably should just i've got another book which i the chimp paradox wasn't a brain thing but a lot of people did moan at me a long time 10 years so after 10 years i've written a book called a path through the jungle and the reason i'm promoting it more is this is a true course and it explains the science it's got references it's in color so if someone was serious to say i don't just want a few ideas i want to actually do a course where i build over a year say this is something it really is a self-help year course it's not something you'll do in an evening right so i think if they wanted to really change your path yeah this is the one uh that a lot of people say this has made a difference the the concept makes a difference if you can apply it but this is the devil in the detail to explain really what's going on yeah a path of the jungle if people resonate with it but if not i'd encourage people to do something mindfulness, hypnotherapy, anything reflective practice, just ask yourself about your psychological health, how important it is.

45:53And if it's important, do something about it. Find something that resonates with you. And finally, I know this is not your area of expertise, but how much of what you know and what you're doing for yourself right now, do you think from what you've read and the papers you've read in terms of things like dementia and Alzheimer's disease will help to ward off those kinds of degenerative diseases. Okay, and the evidence is that if you keep your brain going, the chance is that you may still get cognitive decline, but it does seem to stave this off. So if we can keep people saying, keep your mind active.

46:26So instead of just doing like, I'm going to do 10 minutes walking every day or half an hour's walking, say, right, let's do some mind games or let's do some activity. And I do encourage older people. I mean, it's great being an old person now because they can't say anything to me. I'll say, yeah, I'm 72. So the only ones that get me are 80. But everyone else say, come on, you know, learn a new language. Get your brain going, challenge it because the evidence is there that we can contain this and the decline is much slower. The higher you start with your intellect, the less you'll decline. For you, does that mirror, because it mirrors the body in some respects in terms of use it or lose it.

47:06Exactly, the two work together. I mean, as I said to me, when I specialize as a psychiatrist the brain is just like an organ like the heart if I was a cardiologist I'll tell you how to keep your heart healthy this is the brain I'm telling you how you can keep it healthy so exercise will help we know that they work together the right diet will help we know they work together but it will not suffice to do just those things you have to say let me challenge my brain in any way you want to whether it's crossword puzzles whether it's learning some new skill joining an intellectual group you know it doesn't have to be onerous you could join a book club where you read a book and discuss it that's the brain being active and we i read and see people talking about making yourself uncomfortable putting yourself into uncomfortable positions um which some people really like you know i i personally quite like that you know that feeling of slight being slightly scared because the situation is unfamiliar other people really don't like um is it important to try and kind of again i've worked with the individual if if you i've worked with you and you said i like that i'd say right tell me what it's going to be and then i push you a little bit i always push and i'd say if you achieve this will you be really pleased and if you said yes i'd say okay it's not enough give me another one that's even more where you go wow i would say um now i said that's what we're going to do because again evidence is the higher you set the bar provided it's attainable with a lot of work the more likely you are to get it so that's a paradox you set something easy you want however if somebody said to me steve i have such low confidence in everything i do i would say to them let's get the bar high but let's do tiny steps and let's celebrate each step because that would probably suit them so it's the motivating factor to get you there almost has to be has to match what satisfaction i want to know what it is that's going to drive you and think that would give me that i think that would class this probably it motivates me to get it I don't actually work with motivation with athletes I keep saying sorry out there in listening land if you really do work with it I don't find it helpful because it's chimp driven which means it's very up and down and it depends on how you feel and also you hear so many sports people and I'm only using sport because it's the area I work in you work in but it applies to loads of different careers that afterwards they go oh that wasn't exactly what I thought it was gonna yeah I had someone say to me I said it was I got the world record I said that's brilliant no it wasn't a good record for goodness sake but that's what the chimp brain does but what I do use is commitment and so if you use commitment use a different circuitry completely so the difference is for me uh simple on answering a lot of emails so let's say I've got 50 emails I've got to get through this weekend I really must and my chimp brain is negative because it's not motivated why would I want to do 50 emails and even if I say you'll feel good at the end of it says i won't feel good doing 50 so what i do is i break it down and then i say right we're not interested in your feelings it's what i have to do so i've learned as a skill i remove emotion say right set off so commitment is doing what i have to do and need to do not how i feel so i can remove all feelings so any job i've got to do i use commitment and that i find very powerful i don't say it's almost like an accountability to yourself then yeah and i'm i don't go on i'm in the right mood how do i i don't do whoever's in the right mood to empty their exactly so i just say let's go but i break my that time for me into 10 so and i'll say you have to do two long emails not cheat and then eight quick ones then have a coffee my chimp always likes coffee then i'll say right another 10 but then i might say oh i don't then i'll say i'm not interested in what you feel talk to my chimp we're doing it and i'll just start i blank out any thoughts so i just keep going and i found for me because that's how the brain tells us to work when we think something's important remove emotion remove any consequence logic any just robotic go into computer mode and just get it done and final final i keep saying final question final question because you keep triggering thoughts in my brain yeah we i mean from growing up i was told kind of by my parents the brain and the mind is stronger than you think your mind's stronger than you think, you know, I remember my dad was, no, that's not an answer.

51:12I'm not having no, you know, it's kind of that, that mindset of feeling your brain is capable and your mind is capable of more than you think. And I think through sport, actually, you often experience that, don't you? You think you can't do something. I'm never going to be able to do a half marathon. Oh, I've done it. Do you think that sport and exercise and setting physical challenges actually is a healthy thing in terms of understanding how powerful the mind is? because I think in day-to-day life sometimes it's hard to imagine that your mind can move in this plastic. Yeah exactly yeah we have neuroplasticity so we learn new things and we develop things and everyone can improve in almost anything we do including mind skills everyone and research emphasizes that so yeah we have a neuroplasticity.

51:57I think the biggest shock one is and I actually complied with the public saying we want to build resilience so I took a path of the jungle to build to resilience the reality is we are extremely resilient the brain is resilient to start with it's us that pull it back from resilience so if we have that concept that the resilience is there for you to deal with life to deal with anything that comes we're adults children are different we're adults there's nothing we can't deal with that's the reality that's a fact we can deal with anything it's our brain that reduces the resilience start saying i won't manage i can't call but like that's what the brain does to us whereas if we pause and think i'm an adult i can deal with it which i'm emphasizing sports people and others professionals then it's a different stance you're coming in with you're on the front foot now you're more proactive rather than defensive what a good way to finish we're on the front foot on the front foot and i've i've taken more time of yours than uh than i'm sure no thank you very much i really appreciate it it's been it's been fascinating and thank you so much for so many takeaway things there.

53:00I hope people liked it. I'm sure they did. Thank you so much.

53:10I'm genuinely so thankful to Steve for his time today and for sharing some of the wisdom he's gathered over the course of his 30 plus years experience in the clinical field of psychiatry. If you want to better understand how the mind works, you can get hold of a copy of his incredible book, The Chimp Paradox, or head to chimpmanagement.com. Huge gratitude then to Professor Steve Peters, to Spiritland Creative, and to you for listening. I hope you can join me again next Wednesday for another episode of The Midpoint. I'll catch you then.