It comes as the Dubliner plays the final round of the Open in St Andrews today only two shots off the lead held by Irish amateur Paul Dunne, South Africa’s Louis Oosthuizen and Australia’s Jason Day.

Professor Steve Peters also said that snooker legend Ronnie O’Sullivan has done some “amazing things on his own mind.”

In an interview broadcast last week, the sports psychiatrist revealed how his Chimp Model was created to make “life easier to understand what’s happening in our heads.”

Speaking on UCC 98.3FM’s The Health Zone, Dr Peters said essentially the “Chimp” destroys what we want to do. It is regarded as the impulsive and the self-sabotage part of ourselves.

“In sports the method can be used to help sports people to deal with the stresses of trying to achieve their goal,” he said.

“Typically people in sport can be waiting to compete in the dressing room. What the Chimp brain can be doing is panicking, saying ‘this is going to be an all or nothing event. It will weigh me up...people will judge me. I am terrified of failing’.”

Dr Peters said that the main reason people do not achieve their goals is because “we don’t recognise that we are being hijacked by the part of our brain that is trying to help us but isn’t appropriate for the situation we are in”.

He said the first way to deal with an agitated Chimp is to express it and let it out.

He said: “As we express how we think and feel, we suddenly gain perspective.”

Talking about snooker legend Ronnie O’Sullivan he says, what he finds “difficult at times is getting into these competition things, where his Chimp tries to hijack him and starts worrying about results, and he might fail and if he does a bad shot”.

He says he has worked for more than four years with O’Sullivan and who has done amazing work on his mind.

Prof. Peters said: “Some days he may get it wrong, but most of the time now he gets it right.

“It is self evident, that when you are enjoying something you are more likely to succeed.”

He said that some of the most gifted sports people he has worked with have been professional golfer Padraig Harrington; Olympic, European and Commonwealth champion track cyclist Victoria Pendleton and British track cyclist, Chris Hoy.

He said: “I look at somebody who is gifted as naturally and emotionally skilled, loves to work with other people, gets on with other people, deals with emotions in themselves.”

Dr Peters, the author of ‘The Chimp Paradox’ and the creator of the Chimp Model, also highlighted the importance of focusing “on the process of winning, (because) winning is just an outcome.”

In dealing with setbacks, he said that “you are better to pre-plan, and if setbacks happen, most of them can be foreseen, so that you are not caught off-guard.”

When achieving goals, he said “get someone to work with you, because whenever we work with someone, its more likely to work than if we work alone. It’s quite difficult to do things alone, for most of us.”

He also said having a sense of humour and a laugh can be a great way to “disempower the chimp within us”, and said that “people deserve to look after themselves. It is sad to see people not getting the best out of themselves”.

You can listen to the full interview here.

The Health Zone is produced and presented by Micheál O’Mahony, with a focus on health and wellness. It airs every Thursday between 8am and 9am and repeats between 5pm and 6pm on UCC 98.3FM. You can listen to previous podcasts of the show here.