The brains behind our mind games

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13 April 2012

I am sitting on a blue sofa where Sir Chris Hoy and Victoria Pendleton, among others, regularly discuss their innermost feelings and, one assumes, fears in the build-up to London 2012.

Outside, the door to the room has just one word, psychiatrist, to the side of it. Moments before I knock, a cheery Pendleton virtually skips out of the door before turning back and saying "thanks for that".

Once inside, the room is sparse. In one corner is a desk with an opened laptop while a whiteboard with a blue armchair beneath it are right opposite the sofa where I am sitting.

The man seated there is a young-looking 58-year-old with short grey cropped hair and a kind face, a person who it soon becomes clear Hoy correctly describes as "the voice of reason".

Dr Steve Peters is the psychiatrist and head of medicine for British Cycling and Team Sky. But the former maths teacher from Middlesbrough is much more than that.

He is more commonly known as the 'brain mechanic' and is working with a host of British athletes who will compete at next year's Olympics. Among the 2012 hopefuls he has helped are Taekwondo world champion Sarah Stevenson, judo player Karina Bryant and swimmer Lizzie Simmonds.

The Olympics aside, he is also credited with bringing Ronnie O'Sullivan back from the brink of retirement by the player himself.

There are many other sportsmen and women Peters has had sessions with but he chooses not to name them unless they are happy to talk about it.

Quite how he has got to this position, he is rather unsure. He grew up the son of a Teesside docker. By his own admission, he was never very academic - "I've only ever done enough to get through" - but he was still the first member of his family to attend university.

"I was never really interested in the mind," he admits. "I thought I either wanted to be a teacher or a vet."

He opted for teaching and, after his mathematics degree, taught for seven years. But while working in the community, he decided he wanted something else and, in his late twenties, went back to university to train to become a doctor with the view to becoming a sports surgeon or a GP.

When I ask if that wasn't a gamble having already settled into one career, he quips: "It's not a bold move if you're crazy."

He then explains: "Why not take risks, I was in a position to do so. I decided to have a go at psychiatry but only to get out of the heavy on-calls back in those days - psychiatry didn't have so many. Then I realised how important the human mind is so I decided I wanted to specialise in that."

His work saw him deal with every walk of psychiatry from young to old to a stint at Rampton high security hospital with people suffering serious personality disorders.

"In the end I went down the academia route," says Peters, who still lectures at the University of Sheffield when his busy schedule allows. "I only came into the sport side of things rather circuitously. I had a colleague who asked me to do a favour in 2001 and work with a cyclist."

The turning point was the start of a friendship with British Cycling performance director Dave Brailsford. "Dave had a psychology degree but was sceptical - he said it didn't work. I explained to him what I did and he said 'sounds good to me'."

Among the first athletes he worked with were Hoy and Pendleton, both of whom he describes proudly as brilliant pupils, and he still meets the pair regularly 10 years on.

Initially there were sceptics and there still are, not that Peters is surprised or put out. "When I first came to British Cycling, a lot of people were like, 'Why do I need to see this guy' and it was a bit like if you came to see me there was something wrong with you," he says. "Now, it's such common practice that it's almost as if there's something wrong with you if you don't come to see me."

So what exactly does Peters do? "Think of the mind as a machine," he says by way of an explanation. "You need to find out what works and what doesn't. You need to analyse that machine, work with it and fine-tune it.

"Getting an athlete to do that is a skill, an emotional skill. Some are better at it than others but it's a skill for them to recognise what's happening and recognise what you can do about it.

"Everyone is different but there are common problems. Anxiety is a big one when it comes to competition. It's my job to challenge that, to change that."

Despite being the interviewee for once, such is his day job that Peters cannot help but turn attention back on the person on the sofa, namely me. Seemingly out of nowhere, he asks: "What's your sport, what do you play?" I tell him it's five-a-side football and he says: "Okay, imagine you didn't play or train for 12 months, you're going to be rubbish.

"It's the same with mind skills. If you don't use them, you lose them. It's something you have to progress regularly. You have a baseline but you need to work on it."

When he first meets an athlete, he has a two-hour session to, in effect, get to know the person and the mind he is working with. "It has to come from them, I ask them what they want to achieve, what's stopping them and how we deal with that," he says.

Peters makes the workings of the mind seem almost simple thanks to his ability to break down the science around it and put it into layman's terms.

One of his favourite talking points is "chimp and gremlin control", to help describe the two sides of the brain that work independently of each other. The emotional, irrational part is the chimp while the gremlin is the negative belief or behaviour which has the potential to inhibit performance.

He challenges athletes to control the chimp and remove the gremlin altogether.

While the idea of Hoy battling with his inner chimp and gremlin might seem laughable to some, Peters's approach to psychiatry has clearly done the trick judging by the number of athletes queuing up to work with him. But at the same time, he is keen to down play the importance of what he does without belittling it.

"I'm a minion who is just oiling the wheels while the athletes and the coaches are the ones at the coal face in this," he says.

While the pressure is on the athletes and coaches heading to 2012, one assumes the same applies to Peters but he laughs at the suggestion he may also be feeling the heat given the number of athletes he is working with.

"It doesn't matter to me," he says. "This might come out wrong but it's just a game, it's just sport. It's not like in the world of surgery that if someone makes a mistake someone dies.

"Saying that, it's important to me. I'm here because I want Britain to excel and win medals. But whatever the outcome is at the Olympics, I know I will have given my best, the coaches will have given their best and the athletes. It's a dream of mine to get these medals - I want them - but I can put them in perspective. It's not life and death."

He also shrugs off the suggestion that the weight of expectation will get to the athletes ahead of the biggest event of their careers on home soil.

"There's simply no pressure as they can't do better than their best which is what they'll do,"
he says. "Anyway we never say they should win medals just that they could."

Sessions with his athletes can last from just a quick chat to an hour-and-a-half meeting and he also sets his charges homework to improve the mind, which is different for each of them.

The advent of Skype has made his life easier particularly with Team Sky. "It means the athletes always have access to me if they need," he says.

What's ironic considering the role he has played behind the scenes at British Cycling is that he doesn't even cycle. He has been on the track at Manchester Velodrome but prefers running.

In 2009, he won the Masters World Championships over 100metres, 200m and 400m but was unable to defend his titles at the biennial event this year because of work commitments.

It's something he describes as fun but, when it isn't going well, I ask who he turns to for mental guidance. "A lot of people ask me that," he says smiling. "I've got one or two friends I turn to if I need to."

One of his most recent pupils is snooker star O'Sullivan. Peters will travel to York next month to watch him compete in the UK Championship.

Peters talks about the sometime troubled cueman like a proud teacher. "Ronnie is one of the most amazing pupils I've had," he says. "He can see it, works hard on it and comes back and challenges him and me. He's not just saying help me but help me to help myself. He knows when to shout for help. He's just a brilliant pupil and he's looking fantastic."

Peters's likeable approach to the mind, a subject that many people even in this day and age are not willing to openly discuss, is admirable.

"There has been the perception since Freud that a psychiatrist is for off-the-wall and crazy people. That's clearly not the case at all."

As for Peters, he has no idea where his extraordinary, undulating career path will next take him. "I'm not sure how I got here," he admits. "What surprises me is being a hospital doctor and then ending up in this role."

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