Book: Taming Your Gremlin

Taming Your Gremlin (Amazon) is basically Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) – and I much preferred The Happiness Trap because I found the cutesy “gremlin” metaphor really annoying.

Basically: the voice in your head that tells you what’s wrong with you and what you need to do, that’s your “gremlin”. And you don’t have to pay attention to it. You can give it a name and notice the way it is, which kind of reminds me of disarming bogarts in Harry Potter.

Anyway, I was kinda “yeah yeah whatever” on it, because I know the drill – unhelpful thoughts, don’t have to pay attention to them, notice them, get on with life. For me, I tend to channel those kind of thoughts into some kind of productive action.

But then I was reading it, whilst I was eating lunch (so: no productive action was immediately available), whilst I was having some kind of… well let’s call it “gremlin attack”. I don’t recall what the voice was saying, but suffice it to say, it was some kind of damning indictment of me, my capabilities, etc. And then I was like – OHHHH.

I don’t know if the Gremlin idea goes further than ACT or if I had just been labelling vicious self talk as accurate. Probably it was just a matter of timing. I wouldn’t say I became a fan, but I did stop being quite so annoyed with it, and I concede the utility of some kind of shared language – my coach asked me to read this, so this was a way for us to have that.