Befriending Your Inner Critic (Ciera)

For many of us it comes in waves. You can be going about your day, flitting from one task to the next, when suddenly your mind begins to dip into stagnation. There is a pause as you feel yourself losing focus on the present and suddenly fixating on the overdrive of voices in your head.

“You’re not good enough”. “You will definitely screw that up”. “Your hard work won’t pay off in the end”. “You’re going to be stuck in this rut forever”.

It’s horrible and irrational and loud, and even if in the moment you know that you’re flooded by irrationality, it can feel impossible to keep swimming against the current.

You are far from alone in these feelings, and if your feelings are different in this situation to those felt by others that doesn’t make your experience of self criticism any less valid. What matters the most is that we can find ways to keep reminding ourselves that our brain, when operating like this, is wrong. It is lying to us, it is beating us down, it is belittling all of the strength and amazingness and life and potential that we hold inside of us.

Reframing: Visualizing self criticism internally

Someone once said to me to imagine that my brain is split into many different segments, which immediately made them laugh when I said my brain then felt like an orange. There’s a segment that loves to be creative, a segment that tries to process technical things, a segment that adores music. And then there’s a segment which likes to criticize.

Nobody is perfect and, in line with that, our brains are not either. Sometimes when we try to dip into one segment, we may trigger another that doesn’t best align with us. We could be in the middle of doing something we love and accidentally hit the critical segment at the same time, thus ruining our joy and focus in the present.

It can be helpful to remind yourself that no one’s brain is perfect and that it’s a process to work through feelings that misalign. The key emphasis here, though, is process: as no one is perfect these misalignments will likely happen for the rest of our lives, but what we can control is how to react and respond to that misalignment.

Befriending your inner critic

As much as you may immediately wish that you didn’t have an inner critical voice, it’s actually an incredibly powerful resource if you know how to use it correctly. Think about it. This voice, ultimately, is a voice that is seeking to make you better and improve you which, unfortunately, just seems to go about it in completely the wrong way. It is trying to push you by bringing you down: when it tells you that you aren’t good enough, that is your brain poorly communicating its desire to do better, which is a great source for motivation and self awareness.

These voices can often stem from anxiety, and in many people’s cases anxiety can have a root cause. Are you anxious about that test and your brain is telling you that you are going to fail? That may be your brain’s way of trying to ask you to study a little bit more or through using a different learning method to put it at ease. Are you nervous about going to a new restaurant and liking nothing on the menu, so your brain says you’re going to be embarrassed and look stupid? Your brain may be asking you to mitigate by perhaps looking at a menu online in advance.

The next time a critical voice pops up into your head, perhaps try writing down what it is saying and then taking some time to deconstruct past its surface level. Admittedly not all feelings will be there seeking to serve us for some greater good, but before accepting what your critical voice is saying as fact, try to remember the segments – the orange in your head – is more than capable of being wrong. Your thoughts are not you. They are inside of you and a part of you, but they are separate from you and come from you.