10 Tips To Have A Healthy Mind

Psychological health and happiness in the long-awaited follow-up to his bestseller The Chimp Paradox.

- Brigid Moss

If you want to master your mind, then Professor Steve Peters is the mastermind. You may have heard of his work with Olympic athletes – British Cycling credited him for multiple Olympic medals – but he’s also worked with Liverpool and England football teams. Peters’ first book, The Chimp Paradox (Vermilion), spent seven years near the top of the nonfiction list, selling more than a million copies. It explains the Chimp Model, an unpicking of the mystery of our intelligent minds: why we don’t do what we want, why we fail, falter, get overwhelmed by stress or spiral into negative thinking – and how to solve this.

When I went to see him speak four years ago, most of the audience in the 1 000-seater auditorium looked as if they’d breeze through a triathlon. Lean and rangy with grey hair, Peters himself, now 65, is a record holder in his age group for the 100m, 200m and 400m. He speaks, his teaching skills honed from years of practice.

But Peters’ work isn’t just for the sporty, it’s for anyone who has ever struggled with intrusive thoughts, stress, underperformance or psychological ill health. That is, well, all of us. ‘My intention is always the same. It is to help people to get the best out of themselves. My way of working is to try to give them an insight into what’s actually going on in the mind in an easy and accessible way,’ he tells me. Starting out as a teacher, Peters trained in medicine and worked as a consultant psychiatrist for 20 years. It was while teaching medical students in the 1990s that he came up with the Chimp Model.