Because your Chimp is so much stronger than your Human, you can’t control it by confronting it head-on in a battle of wills. The reader is treated with respect and there is no dumbing down; the book exposes children to 'grown up concepts' but in a way that suggests 'I'm sure you can understand this'.

It advises children can give their chimp a name and 'Let your chimp know that you are in charge and you will say sorry. It jumps to a conclusion, thinks in black and white, is paranoid, catastrophic, irrational (sound familiar? Remember that the Chimp’s agenda is to survive, and the FFF response is designed to help ensure survival by enabling the Chimp to act immediately and without thinking. Is there a relation between the “inner child”, as described in recovery and trauma literature, and the concept of the “inner chimp”? If you try to simply ignore them, they will inevitably pop up and take control of you—for example, telling yourself before bedtime that you’ll get up early and exercise won’t prevent your desire for extra sleep from rearing up when morning comes around.

The importance of the Human part of the brain (the frontal lobe) is evidenced by what happens when it stops working properly. The stronger Chimp brain often wins, particularly in the moment as You, the human brain takes time to process information and to construct an intelligent and rationale response that considers all of the information available. Brain scans can detect blood flowing to one area over another depending on which is being used: If you’re having calm, rational thoughts, more blood flows to the frontal lobe—the Human area.

The bottom line is: when your Chimp and Human agree on what to do ‘no problem’, but disagree and Chimp wins as the most powerful and therefore ruler of thought and action.Taking this time might help you to tame your own inner chimp and focus more on positive human intentions and less on uncontrolled emotional responses that detract from your goals and objectives. His current and past experiences include: clinical director of Mental Health Services within the NHS at a district hospital, Consultant Forensic Psychiatrist and Undergraduate Dean at Sheffield Medical School. My Hidden Chimp is from the bestselling author of The Chimp Paradox and the creator of the chimp management mind model. My first comment is to explain to your daughter that what she is experiencing is very normal and healthy, even though this is unhelpful.

The cyclist Victoria Pendleton, who Steve worked closely with, reputedly asked how to go about killing her chimp! We need to develop the skill of handing over control of the computer to the rational human being inside our head. The illustrations show children with thoughts and faces which clearly reflect their feelings and which allow the children who read the book to feel that they are not alone - that other people have fears or get grumpy or tell lies. The Chimp’s reactions are more powerful: In nature, a chimpanzee is about five times as strong as a person.The laws of the jungle are also determined by drives, which are similar to instincts but are not triggered by specific events like instincts are; drives are always present, influencing our decisions. By understanding this we can start to see when our Chimp is over-reacting in an over-emotional way to things like tough feedback. If he goes to bed regularly at 8, without exceptions , then his biological clock will start setting this time for sleep. Exploring topics such as unconscious thinking, behaviours and habit formation; in an easy to understand way .