Big Idea: Lizard, Puppy, Monkey
A way of thinking about how we respond to our world.
We’ve all heard the nature vs. nurture debate: are our behaviors and choices the result of our DNA and evolutionary wiring, or the result of our experiences and upbringing? While scientists and philosophers continue to debate, I can confidently say “all of the above, and then some”. Part of my education in martial arts has included extensive training in how to shape my own behavior. That process relies on understanding why I behave as I do in a given situation. Am I acting rationally? Am I blindly responding to my past experience? Am I acting on instinct?
Instinct, conditioned behavior (past experience), and rational thinking all factor in to our behavior. In martial arts, I learned a mental model called “Lizard, Puppy, Monkey” to identify and shape these types of thinking and behavior. I don’t know the source of this model: it’s been around so long and has passed through so many teachers, essays, and books that I couldn’t hope to guess its origin. Here’s my best description…
We’re each living with three minds.
These don’t map to physical regions of the brain, but they do map to types of thinking that tend to compete within the brain, so it can be a useful way to understand behavior and shape our own.
The lizard brain
The lizard brain is the mind that was handed to us by evolution. It is our autonomic nervous system, the tendencies easily explained by evolutionary psychology, the things that come from our DNA. The lizard brain is very basic, and can only do a few things. It can barely be influenced (as with combat breathing to slow the heart rate and ease a stress response), but it cannot be summarily changed at will. The lizard evolves, but it doesn’t really learn.
This can make the lizard a real pain in the butt sometimes, because it isn’t well-tuned to the modern world. It will respond to a highly attractive, healthy person nearby whether or not that attraction is appropriate. It makes us afraid of the dark as children, because back in the cave man days, an unfamiliar cave probably belonged to something that wanted to eat us. The lizard brain is always eras behind reality.
The lizard is also stable and reliable. It’s why I can count on the fact that dilated pupils and increased heart rate indicate fear or shock. It’s why I know that I child having a tantrum can’t actually hold his or her breath long enough to die. Lizard brain doesn’t screw around…it’s there to keep you alive when the lions come. Nature made sure of that.
The puppy brain
When people talk about nurture, what they mean is what we martial artists call the puppy brain. The puppy is very reactive, for better or worse, to the past. The puppy brain can be very much like an actual puppy, which responds to its training and its traumas, whether or not that’s what’s best in the moment.
The puppy brain is why childhood favorite foods comfort us in adulthood, and why childhood trauma can impact an individual for so long. It’s why people from dysfunctional families often repeat those patterns. The puppy brain is the part of us that sees a pattern, and expects to see it again.
Like its companion the lizard brain, the puppy brain can help us or trip us up. The puppy brain makes what we are accustomed to feel safe, and change feel scary, even when change is good for us.
Unlike the lizard, the puppy can be trained, or rather conditioned. Each of us has a puppy brain who is the sum of our past experiences, and each time we have a new experience, the puppy changes a bit. Martial artists learn to systematically provide themselves with experience that change puppy brain reactions in ways they want. We call this conditioning.
For example, martial artists train to fall safely, thousands of times over. Our bodies trip, are thrown, and go down in other ways time after time while we roll and breakfall. From these shaped experiences, our brains are conditioned to respond to the feeling of falling in a specific way. Once the puppy brain is conditioned to do that, we will react that way without having to consciously think about it. It becomes hard to fall incorrectly.
The monkey brain
The monkey brain is the only one that can reason. The monkey brain is the part of us that can think about the future and make conscious decisions. The monkey brain has free will.
If we have free will, then, why do so many people have stories that include the phrases “it just happened” or, “I can’t believe I…”? Why do we procrastinate? Why do we chicken out of things we really want to do? Why do we act against our own best interests sometimes?
The quality of any particular monkey has a lot to do with its training, and the monkey isn’t always the animal in charge.
How can a monkey run the zoo?
The usefulness of this particular mental model is that it gives us a framework for how to shape our own thinking and behavior, over time, into something we like better.
By using conditioning techniques to modify the puppy’s reactions to stimuli, so that when the puppy is in control, it’s more likely to choose behaviors for us that we won’t regret.
By improving the quality of our monkey’s analysis and decision-making through study, training, and rehearsal.
By understanding that stress responses—including positive stress, such as strong sexual attraction, or excitement—can drive us “down the stack”. The monkey has the most, easiest control when we are least stressed. High stress levels will hand over control first to the puppy, and eventually to the lizard. The better we prevent, manage, and handle stress, the more we keep the monkey in charge.
The answer is that we all have nature, nurture, and free will: we call them the lizard, the puppy, and the monkey. The most successful people have all of these things just as much as the least successful people do. The difference is how well we train our monkeys, and how well we condition our puppies, so the zoos in our heads stay well-run most of the time.
The first step toward freedom is to know what animal you are thinking with.
There’s that moment…I’m in a martial arts class or a dance class, and suddenly I feel a rush of endorphins. The man I’m working with smells just right, moves just right, I feel his breath on my skin and and WHO LET MY LIZARD OUT OF ITS CAGE?!? The lizard brain is wired, among other things, to ensure that the species procreates. A smart person doesn’t react, let alone think they are in love, every time the lizard gets itself excited. When you recognize the lizard has gotten out of its cage, you have a chance to stop and think…let the monkey decide if it’s a good idea to go forward or not.
Whether the lizard is afraid, horny, angry, anxious, or something else, he’s doing it because evolution said so, whether or not it’s appropriate right now, in the 21st century, in the situation at hand.
It’s not always the lizard who escapes, of course. Sometimes, it’s the puppy.
I was down with a knee injury recently, for a very long time. I was only able to walk with the assistance of a cane for a bit over two years. Just after I gave up the cane, I found myself struggling to walk steadily on ice and other slick surfaces, even though all the evidence said that it should have become easy. I soon realized that I’d fallen so many times when I was hurt—with mixed ability to execute rolls and breakfalls due to my knee injury—that I was tensing up and expecting to fall. THAT was making me unsteady. My puppy had gotten too used to falling, and I had to spend some more time on the ice to retrain the puppy. It got better once my monkey brain realized what the puppy was up to, and then much better once I got out on the ice, over and over, carefully giving my puppy brain new experience to show it that I didn’t have to fall.
Step two is training your monkey.
A monkey is only as good as his or her training.
What you need in order to start thinking better depends a great deal on where you are right now. There will be plenty here at Working Man’s PhD…that’s what this project is all about! Some other things you might enjoy are:
To catch yourself in bad habits, or introduce your children to better thinking, check out Your Logical Fallacy Is and Your Cognitive Bias Is.
The Daily Stoic gives a very beginner-level introduction to Stoic philosophy, a way of thinking that stays out of the ivory tower and instead investigates how we can make ourselves better.
I really enjoy The Knowledge Project, a podcast by Farnham Street, but it can be a little too dense if you are new to mental models and tuning your thinking.
It’s important to understand, though, that you don’t get better thinking just by reading or listening. We need practice to get better. I read a lot more slowly than many of my colleagues: on the order of 20-30 books per year compared to their 50. Some of that is how many articles, essays, and short-form pieces I read. However, a lot of it is *how* I read. I write as I read, or I pause in reading a book to experiment with its concepts in my life. My monkey is always working to apply things, or to find out that they don’t work out the way they sounded in theory, so I end up with a smarter monkey.
Step three is improving how you deal with stress.
Your monkey is only in charge when your stress level is low enough to keep him in charge. “Low enough” varies from person to person, but you can improve the situation by improving how you cope with stress.
There are some communities where we train to deal with stress, and make decisions well under stress. I received much of this wisdom during my time volunteering at a counseling center that specialized in trauma, and in my search-and-rescue training. In those communities, we have a collection of techniques for “baselining” or “raising your stress floor”, that is, techniques to help increase the amount of stress it takes to make you feel stressed out.
All stress is relative. That’s a wonderful thing, because in my day job where something like 25% of my fellow CISOs are said to have serious stress problems, I’m having an easier time. Why? When all the servers are on fire and everybody’s panicking, I’m thinking “Hmm, nobody’s intestines are on the floor, nobody’s pointing a weapon at innocent children, no problem. I’ve got this.” 17+ years of search-and-rescue have left me with a very high stress floor. Information security incidents very rarely raise my heart rate.
Ready to raise your stress floor? I’ll do an exhaustive post on this at some point, but the basics are:
Take good care of your physical body at all times. Any physiological stress you are under pushes your stress floor down. This means:
Get enough sleep.
Don’t drink alcohol or use other intoxicants.
Stay hydrated.
Exercise.
Eat well.
If you are sick or injured, don’t play tough: treat it.
Keep your life in order. Despite what the movies say, strung-out alcoholics with falling-apart marriages don’t perform well under fire. You bring that stress with you into whatever acute stress situation you’ve got. People who perform best under acute stress are highly functional in day-to-day life, and have great social support structures around them. Remember: whatever chronic stress exists in your day-to-day life is going to take away from your ability to deal with new stressors.
Raise your stress floor through conditioning. Everyone gets stressed out. We become less easily stressed out as we become accustomed to dealing with stress. This comes in two forms:
General rehearsals: practice getting stressed out, then doing things that require thinking and acting. In martial arts, we did an exercise called the “bear pit” where a blindfolded trainee stood in the center of a circle, and they didn’t know where the next attack was coming from as the instructor silently directed one or more training partners to attack. My army buddies decided that, since I was terribly afraid of heights, the best stress drill for me was to bring a huge, rickety ladder to the firing range, make me climb up and down it repeatedly, then have me do a target shooting drill for time and accuracy. The idea is that you practice with different tasks and stressors to raise your capacity to cope with stress generally.
Specific conditioning: if you need to cope better with a specific source of stress, then start practicing with that stressor, first a little then a lot. Every time you have an experience with the stressful thing and you don’t die, that experience helps convince your puppy brain that the thing shouldn’t cause so much stress. So, just start as small as you need to but keep giving yourself those experiences.
Step four is conditioning your puppy.
Sometimes, your puppy brain is just going to run the show. That’s the way it is. Sometimes, your stress level is too high for the monkey to run the zoo. Sometimes, things happen too fast—thinking is slow—and the puppy takes over. Whatever the case, you’ll be better off if your puppy brain is conditioned to do something you actually want it to do.
This is a crucially important point: too many people act as if the “nurture” part of us means we are at the mercy of our history. Your puppy brain is always learning. You can provide it with new conditioning at any time.
In martial arts, we start with teaching. When you go in on the first day, you’ll be told where and how to stand. You’ll throw your first punch or your first kick. Soon, you’ll get some blocks and falls. Your monkey brain—the rational thinking part of you—is taking in lots of useful information. In those first few weeks, it’s unlikely that if you were ambushed in the street you’d do anything more useful than before you began studying martial arts. Why?
An ambush is fast. Too fast for conscious thought. In an ambush, you either run on instinct (the lizard brain) or conditioning (the puppy).
The good news is that once you’ve trained for a while, the repetition will get into your puppy brain. We call this conditioning. You’ll no longer stop and think about what punch goes with which block, or how to tuck your shoulder for a rolling fall. Once you have done martial arts long enough to be conditioned, your puppy brain will do something useful in an ambush, when it’s too fast for your monkey brain to think.
Falling is my favorite example. I think everybody should learn rolling falls and breakfalls, even if they don’t wish to learn the fighting parts of martial arts. Everyone falls at some time in their lives, and falling is dangerous. Wouldn’t it be great if falling didn’t hurt you?
When I fall down, I don’t think. I just fall correctly. I’ve done it so much, I don’t think my body knows how to fall wrong any more. In one instance, I had left my car for a repair and was walking through blistering cold along an elevated walk near a busy road to go get some food. I remember thinking “why is my phone flying in the air?”. Then I vaguely realized I’d thrown it. I was still wondering why on earth I would throw my cell phone when I came up from a perfect rolling fall, looking down at the cars rushing by below. Instead of slipping into the road and getting run over, I’d emptied my hands, rolled to safety, and come up on my feet ready to move before my conscious mind had processed the fact that I’d slipped on the ice. That is the power of conditioning.
It’s the same reason that I never wander into a board meeting in a crisis without a pen. I am conditioned to touch my pockets whenever I walk through a door that is an exit from a vehicle or building. I check: keys, wallet, phone, pen, multitool, work badge. On the rare occasions that I wear a dress (no pockets, so I have to carry a purse or impose upon the pockets of a male companion), you can watch me twitch slightly as I exit buildings.
Take the time to condition yourself to do things that you need to always do, and you’ll always do them. It is incredibly powerful to do the right thing without thinking. Not only will you be more likely to do the right thing, but you have removed some decisions you might otherwise have to make.
Tips and Tricks
Just breathe.
“Combat breathing”, controlled breathing, meditative breathing, call it what you like…
Any time we consciously control our breathing, we take some conscious control over the lizard brain. Breathing is the only bodily function that is part of the autonomic nervous system (ANS — the part we don’t consciously control) and able to be consciously controlled at a rational, monkey brain level. The ANS is made up of two parts: the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems. Don’t feel that you need to learn all the details now, just understand this: by breathing in a slow and steady rhythm, you can cause your nervous system to move out of “fight or flight” mode and toward a calm and restful state.
I learned Breathe-in-1-2 / Hold-1 / Breathe-out-1-2 / Hold-1 …and repeat, but honestly any pattern works just as well as any other. The idea is to take control and slow yourself down. Very well-conditioned first responders and martial artists can measurably lower their heart rates with just two combat breaths.
Remind yourself who’s in charge.
Just recognizing that a reaction you’re having (like my first lizard-brain attraction example) isn’t a rational one is a great start. Thinking “lizard, get back in your cage” is enough to let me concentrate (mostly) on what I’m doing, instead of an inappropriate reaction.
Prevent decision fatigue.
Rational analysis and decision-making can be tiring, but doing it under stress can deplete our reserves extremely quickly, causing us to become more susceptible to stress and pushing us out of monkey brain to the puppy or lizard brain modes.
One way to improve your performance in life is to reduce the number of decisions you have to make, and further reduce the number of decisions you have to make under acute stress.
Think about it: you don’t get up each morning and decide how to brush your teeth, do you? You probably have a routine of some sort. Great, you did the analysis, chose something that worked, and now you repeat it. You may revisit and change that routine occasionally, but you don’t decide every time: you’ve saved yourself effort and stress by deciding once and repeating.
Most humans don’t realize just how often they can apply this approach. Do you send your boss a weekly update by email? Make a template. Do you need to make security decisions under pressure? Make all your stakeholders agree to a list of priorities before there’s an emergency, so that you can do on-the-fly decision-making without wondering how they will react to your choices. Do you regularly have to travel on short notice? Keep a bag pre-packed with toiletries and other essentials, so all you need to do is add an outfit or two and go.
On a diet? In a rush? I have Amazon deliver the protein shake mix and bars that work for me on a recurring schedule. They’re always stocked in my kitchen, so it’s easy to grab the right thing, and I never stand at the store staring at the wall-of-choices or in my kitchen staring at my teenager’s stash of junk food. When my bars are there, it’s easy to jam the right thing in my bag without thinking and get on with my day.
Recognize that we revert to habit under stress, and cultivate good habits.
I watch many of my fellow human excuse poor behavior during times of low stress, because they can “afford it” at the moment. Go ahead and get tipsy, because not much is happening this weekend, or neglect a relationship because nothing stressful is going on. The thing is, once you become stressed, if that’s what you’ve been doing, you won’t correct your behavior, you’ll do it more.
Remember how I said that the monkey brain gets less control when we are under stress? That means that less of your behavior is a result of reasoned, rational thought. When nothing is going on is exactly when you should be most mindful, because that is when you are conditioning your puppy.
Have you ever seen an actual puppy who tries to steal everyone’s food at a picnic? His owner said he’d teach him to behave at meals “eventually” until it was too late. It’s impossible to introduce that lesson now, in the chaos of a crowd full of strangers and countless delicious smells.
On the other hand, while some people completely neglect their bodies in times of stress (compounding the stress), those with steady exercise, sleep, and diet routines tend to be mostly okay. They had a strong base to begin with and they probably do 80% of the right thing on autopilot when they aren’t trying, which is a lot better than the alternative.
Expect this to be a long-term process.
This post has only scratched the surface, there will be more to come. However, I hope that thinking in terms of the lizard, puppy, and monkey brains will help you understand your behavior better, and shape it. Next time you see someone who seems to be able to accomplish more than you’d imagine yourself able, try to identify how their lizard, puppy, and monkey are getting along. I bet they have a very harmonious zoo, led by a well-trained monkey.