Do you have Goblins and Gremlins in your mind?

How can we learn to understand and improve our bad habits and unwanted thoughts, feelings, and behaviours?

Leonie Lightfoot – Psychological Skills Mentor

What makes us think this way?

We will often hold unhelpful beliefs about ourselves, other people and the world in general, so it can be helpful to consider what gremlins you can recognise in each of these areas. Once you start to become more aware of the beliefs that you may be holding, you will likely begin to notice the “gremlin twins” rearing their heads. The gremlin twins represent unhelpful and unrealistic expectations, often leading us to beat ourselves up and experience frustration with ourselves or those around us. Commonly these take the forms of “should” gremlins e.g:

• I should never make a mistake.
• I should always be on time.
• My partner should understand.

Our unhelpful behaviours are often poor habits we have formed without even thinking.

For example:

• Going to the fridge when we get bored whilst working from home.
• Moaning about the day when we get home rather than smiling and greeting the people you want to be with.

The good news is that our gremlins can be replaced once we have recognised them and identified a more helpful alternative. For behavioural gremlins, it can be helpful to consider, “what else could you do in this situation?”

For example, when I get home, I could smile and tell my loved ones how much I’ve missed them. This introduces us to a much more friendly character in our mind management team, the autopilot. Autopilots represent helpful or constructive beliefs and behaviours. The idea is that once we have identified our gremlins, we can think of autopilots to replace them with, and then repeat these new beliefs or behaviours until they become automatic. 

Whilst most unhelpful beliefs and behaviours can be identified and replaced in this manner, it’s important to understand that sometimes they can be more “hard-wired” into our brains. This is because they have been developed early in life, typically before the age of 8 or have occurred due to a traumatic experience. In the Chimp model, these are our Goblins. Goblins are also destructive beliefs or behaviours, however, these are very difficult or impossible to remove. They can be thought of as damage to the system. For example, having a turbulent childhood with some damaging experiences whilst the brain is developing, such as rejection by a parent, can lead to changes in the way the brain functions in later life. This could lead to a fear of rejection in future relationships which could be difficult or even impossible to change.

Rather than focussing on replacing them, our Goblins need to be recognised and contained. It is important to make the distinction between Goblins and Gremlins to stop us from trying to do the impossible and then feeling like we are failing. Often it can be necessary to seek professional support to help with this.

Both goblins and gremlins are stored in the computer, our mind’s “reference library” and therefore will become a source of information for the Chimp or Human when interpreting a situation or making a decision. They can therefore influence our behaviour and sabotage our functioning more regularly than we realise.

Often this is because we haven’t recognised that our Gremlins and Goblins are running or we are not challenging them. If you don’t give your computer some attention and spend time reprogramming it, you will keep noticing the same triggers and repeating the same unwanted behaviours. Our Chimps will keep adding gremlins throughout our lives so it’s important to regularly spend time reflecting on the day’s events. What Gremlins might the Chimp have added? What do you want to replace them with?

Maybe you delivered a presentation at work which hasn’t gone down as well as you would have liked. Your Chimp’s immediate reaction may have been “I’m just not good at public speaking” which if we are not careful might become a gremlin. The next time you are called upon to do something similar, this gremlin is likely to cause self-doubt and anxiety. To avoid this, we could engage our Human system to re-frame the day’s events. E.g. with competing priorities at the moment I did my best and got the key points across. The presentation didn’t need to be perfect.