Overcome your Inner Critic with this Super Helpful Tool

Turn down the volume on your inner critic

If it feels like you can't do anything without some critical voice in your head chirping about how you’re probably gonna screw up, or embarrass yourself, or ruin everything and be doomed to a life of misery and loneliness, it’s a safe bet that you’re probably over it.

And who can blame you? If that critical voice were a real person following you around, you probably would have called the police or stuffed them in a dumpster by now, but that’s hard to do with something that lives inside your head.

Well fear not, because by the end of this post you will have levelled up your understanding of what the heck that critical voice is, where it comes from, and how you can turn down its volume so you stop feeling like shit all the time.

Why you have an inner critical voice

It’s super easy to take this for granted, but have you ever noticed how most of the conversations you have in a day actually take place in your own head? If you stop and pay attention, you’ll notice that you’re constantly chatting with someone in your mind, sometimes with yourself, sometimes with one of the thousands of people you’ve cloned and internalized, but always with someone inside. And no, you’re not crazy! This is totally normal.

A lot of those conversations may be neutral, but some of them are not so nice, and they tend to stick out like a sore thumb.

Your inner critic draws your attention to the things you’re sensitive or insecure about, particularly things that you’re scared people will judge your ass for. All of this understandably makes you feel stressed out, anxious, hopeless, or depressed.

Now, you’re probably thinking that the very existence of your inner critic is totally f’ed up and dysfunctional, like your brain wasn’t wired right in the factory. This may be an unpopular opinion, but the fact that you have an inner critic isn’t exactly a bad thing. Even though that critical voice doesn’t exactly make for a fun time, it does serve an adaptive purpose, which we’ll get into. But first, it’s story time.

So, I used to truly believe that I hated myself. Puberty hit me hard. I remember scribbling away in my diary in grade 5 boasting about how I was the most popular girl in my class (I wasn't) and was so so cool. Fast forward only one year later and it was the complete opposite. “Dear Diary, I hate myself so much. I am so ugly and fat and disgusting and no one likes me”. I wrestled with this nasty, mean voice for almost 20 years. And I tried everything - all the self help books, all the hypnosis, all the CBT, all the positive affirmations. And it would work, sort of, for a short period of time. Fake-it-til-you-make-it wind in my sails. But that nasty critical voice with all its hurtful words would always sneak back in and make me believe that I was the worst human being alive. And this voice had a lot of evidence to prove that I wasn't worthy of love - from myself or anyone else. I was single, I was broke, I was chubby, I engaged in binge eating and spending money I didn't have, I escaped with a cocktail of weed, food, wine and my favourite tv shows. Then I felt like even more of a loser for relying on those things. A lot of people might think the way I overcame this was by changing the behaviours and proving to myself that I was worthy of loving myself. But it actually wasn’t. Through helpful conversations and learning more about the human condition, I came to realize that I wasn't broken and that I didn’t need to be fixed, but that I had found very creative ways to survive and resist feelings of insecurity and fear. And that's exactly what we’re here to teach you how to do too!

Making sense of your inner critic through evolutionary psychology

Ok, so let’s get back to the crazy idea that the critical voice that lives in your head isn't actually the enemy. I know, I know, it’s hard to believe, but it’s actually there to protect you.

To make sense of this, we need to look back in time about 100 thousand years. Back when we used to live in caves and didn't have the security of modern day life, with running water, electricity, and grocery stores, it was imperative for us to get along and work together to get our next meal and fight off whatever animals wanted to make us their next meal. Because of this very primitive need to belong to a group, we developed an innate fear of rejection and exclusion.

Why? Because if we got kicked out of the group, we dead. And I mean real dead. And whether or not we belonged depended on how closely we lived up to the group's rules and ideas of what it means to be a decent cave person. So if the group rule is that everyone takes one serving of woolly mammoth before going back for seconds, and Fiona gets cocky and grabs two meaty mammoth ribs, you better believe it’s over for her. And those sabre tooth kitties are going to be feasting on Fiona's succulent bones with the quickness. Okay, that got a little dark. This is where the social anxiety and feelings of insecurity make total sense. Clearly our species has not lost that instinct for inclusion. This survival instinct fits hand in glove with human insecurity, which set the stage for the critical voice. If Fiona felt insecure and afraid of getting rejected, she would feel on alert and have that little voice saying “don't be bad, don't be greedy, don't go for seconds, Janet and Janice would rat you out and then you dead, girl.

The critical voice is a response to and representation of our fear and insecurity, and parrots the values and rules of the group. Today, the list of rules and expectations can seem endless. That's why it can feel like we fully hate ourselves. Because we can't actually be everything that our society expects of us. We gotta be wealthy, have just the right body, be educated, have a well respected job, own a home, have two cars, two kids, and go on vacation multiple times a year. And on top of all of that we have to be fucking confident!

All of that is to say that we are vulnerable to judgment, exclusion, and rejection, and there’s a long list of ways we can be judged, excluded, and rejected. Your critical voice is like your radar for the things you are aware of that could end with you being seen by others in a bad light.

How to silence your inner critic

I’m going to give you a strategy that’s not only helped me, but tons of my own clients in therapy over the years. Like so many problems in life, you need to start with awareness and challenge yourself to notice your critical voice when it pops into your head. I know, I know, this is likely the last thing you want to do. It can be uncomfortable to acknowledge and engage with that voice. It's in our nature to want to avoid anything that feels shitty, so you're probably pretty good at finding ways to distract yourself from really facing your critical voice.

Despite not wanting to engage, the first step in changing your relationship to your critical voice is to notice it and name it. When an unkind thought crosses your mind, acknowledge to yourself, “that bitch right there, that’s my critical voice”.

Why do this? First, it allows you to have more of an arm’s length relationship with your inner critic, rather than feeling consumed by it and responding reactively.

Secondly, it’s an acknowledgment that although it’s a thought that you’re having, you don’t have to agree with it. We’re taught all sorts of nonsense over the course of our lives, and it’s not like we just erase old, outdated perspectives and beliefs from our memories when we form new ones that we prefer. We intentionally choose to disregard them.

Take prejudice for example. A lot of people learn some sort of prejudiced or discriminatory ideas while growing up, and then hopefully arrive at the conclusion that they’re stupid and whack as they get older. You may very well still have prejudiced or discriminatory thoughts cross your mind because you've been taught to think that way, but you become able to privately respond to them like, “Nah, that’s not cool”. The same is true of your critical voice. Just because you're thinking something doesn’t mean you’re down with it.

After acknowledging the presence of your critical voice, it can also be helpful to remember the fact that as a human being, you have an evolutionary need to belong, and that even though it’s not super obvious, the fear you feel around rejection or exclusion comes from a place of care for yourself. Remember: fear of rejection and judgment, and feelings of insecurity are normal. They are there to protect us so we don't die on this crazy, dangerous planet. And while they may be normal and understandable because we're human, the messaging that can go along with them is likely not totally fair or accurate.

If you do the first step, then you’re well on your way to the second, which is all about emotional regulation. A common reason why the critical voice is often a problem for people is because they deal with it through avoidance, and that avoidant behaviour creates other problems in their life, that just gives the critical voice more ammo. Among the most effective and destructive avoidance strategies are addictions to things like alcohol and other substances, gambling, shopping, or even food. Insecurity and fear feels bad, so we do things to feel good. Unfortunately, despite your best intentions to protect yourself from hard feelings, numbing out your critical voice means you fail to deal with it, and you become dependent on things to regulate your emotions, which only compounds the problem and makes you feel even shittier about yourself.

We’re all about self-empowerment, and so even though it’s harder in most ways, we strongly encourage you to face your hard feelings, to build trust that you ain't going to die from feeling them. For example, if your critical voice is saying “You're an idiot, you can’t do anything right, and no one is ever going to like you, let alone love you”, take a deep breath and do something to bring you back to the present moment. What can you see in front of you? What can you feel? What can you hear?

Tools to silence your inner critic

When you're feeling emotionally clear enough to think, it’s time to explore why your critical voice is showing up when it is. If you’re a pen and paper kind of person, grab a journal and flesh out the who, what, where, when, and why of the situation. You’ll find a reflection exercise in the description down below, but for now, some questions worth answering are, what happened, and specifically, what the heck were you doing before your critical voice piped up? What was it about that particular situation that makes sense for your critical voice to make an appearance? Keep in mind all of the daft rules and expectations our society has for us, and how they are likely part of the equation. Like maybe you struggle with the expectation that you need to come across as über successful in order to have any worth as a person. You can ask, are there any particular insecurities or fears that tie in to the message of your critical voice? For example, if you have an insecurity around success, even small, everyday mistakes, like spilling your coffee, can have your inner critic all like, “You idiot! How are you ever going to make something of yourself if you can’t even keep from spilling a cup o’ Joe?!”. If its goal is to protect you from shame or embarrassment or rejection, what could be shameful or embarrassing about what you were doing?

This is also when empathy and emotional validation for yourself is your BFF. If it's too hard to provide this to yourself, because your critical voice doesn’t make it easy, imagine a friend experiencing something similar and how you would feel for them. Why is it understandable for you (or them) to feel insecure or fearful of rejection? Why does it make sense to be critical about this particular subject? Are there any experiences you’ve had that have taught you to be on high alert for times like this?

What we’re basically encouraging by laying out this approach to dealing with your critical voice is a radically different way of handling insecurity. Because running away from it, creating a facade to conceal it, or living life on defensive mode don’t work. In fact, they usually make your insecure feelings and the prevalence of your critical voice worse. Instead, mindfully acknowledging the presence of your critical voice and reminding yourself that it exists to help you avoid the pitfalls of social alienation can help make it feel less distressing when it shows up.

The final step is to then assert your own preferred, more fair and realistic message over the one that your critical voice carries. Let’s say, like me, your critical voice says “you look fat today” and I feel insecure and shameful hearing this message. Part of me would love to escape feeling this way because it fucking suuuuucks to have these feelings. But because I’ve trained my emotional muscles, I would then acknowledge to myself, “I feel insecure right now and it’s showing up with this old story that I should feel ashamed of my body because I’m not a size 0, and society celebrates and values this body type more than mine. And I don’t agree with society’s rule that in order to have value as a human being, a body has to be a certain size. I’m having this hard feeling, but I don’t agree with it.” And I can then focus my attention on how to nurture or care for myself while this feeling is here, and trust that it will eventually ease.

Because you don’t need a Darwin Award on your mantle, remember that fear and insecurity are there to help keep you alive! These feelings have been part of our species’ survival, so we cannot expect ourselves to think our way out of having them. Instead, we have to accept that fear and insecurity are part of our human experience, and it's all about dealing with them effectively.

Even though it may sound ass backwards, the idea that your critical voice is there to help you survive makes sense. By following the steps we laid in this video, you can expect that the intensity of your critical voice will decrease over time. By mindfully holding your critical voice at arm’s length and remembering its purpose, you can feel less distressed and discouraged when it pipes up.

Social Anxiety: Is it Really about Low Self-Esteem?

If you or someone you care about struggles with social anxiety, you’ve probably heard the idea that it’s caused by having low self-esteem. In this video Will Bratt explains how that perspective misses the mark, and offers some other ways of looking at it that can help you deal with your own social anxiety!

Transcript

If you or someone you care about struggles with social anxiety, you’ve probably heard the idea that it’s caused by having low self-esteem. In this video I explain how that perspective misses the mark, and offer some other ways of looking at it that can help you deal with your own social anxiety. Keep watching to learn more!

Hi folks, I’m Will Bratt from Heart & Oak Therapy, supporting better, brighter lives. We’re therapists who do regular videos on mental wellness, and give practical ideas and tips to address your problems and make your life happier – so hit the subscribe button to keep in the loop!

There’s a really popular idea out there that the reason people feel anxious in social situations is because they have low self-esteem. This perspective assumes that because you fear rejection, exclusion, judgment, and other negative social responses, you must not feel good enough about yourself, because if you did, those things wouldn’t matter to you.

 As a therapist, I talk to a lot of folks about social anxiety, and its relationship to self-esteem almost always comes up. But when we take a close look at that perspective, its faults start to become clear. In this video I share how the idea that social anxiety is caused by low self-esteem doesn’t hold much water, as well as some more context-based observations that better explain social anxiety.

 Let’s start with what social anxiety is, and how most people experience it.

As an emotion, anxiety is often about anticipation. In general, it is the emotional response to anticipated negative experiences. When we throw the word “social” in front of “anxiety”, we’re talking about the anticipation of negative social responses or experiences. I talk more about this in our video “How to Address the Fears Behind Social Anxiety”, which you should check out after this one.

If you’ve ever dealt with social anxiety, you’ve probably experienced it as fears and worries around anticipated judgments, rejection, exclusion, or even as a lack of safety in groups or crowded spaces. Common responses to these fears include avoidance of social circumstances, being quiet and careful with what you say, verbal diarrhea – where you fill the air with words and have a hard time reigning it in, and even feeling physically ill with nausea, vomiting, rapid heart rate, and fast, shallow breathing. 

With all that said, people often assume that if only you had more self-esteem, confidence, or thought more highly of yourself, you wouldn’t have these feelings in the first place. Let me explain why this assumption is generally not all that useful.

1.     It’s an overgeneralization

First, and perhaps foremost, it’s often a hasty overgeneralization that your feelings of anxiety around social situations are caused by having low self-esteem. The mental health field is full of hasty assumptions and generalizations just like this, which fail to take the context of your life and lived experience into account. Assumptions like these jump the gun and provide easy answers that lack real insight into your actual lived experience.

What I mean here is that human lives are complex, and our responses, like fear and anxiety, are typically not black and white issues. They’re nuanced and intricate, and they often come to be for a host of intersecting reasons.

When we make the assumption that someone’s social anxiety must be attributed to their low self-esteem, we fail to take these nuances into account and run the risk of choosing easy answers over potentially more accurate ones.

2.     It assumes social fears are necessarily connected to self-esteem

The second problem with the idea that social anxiety is totally due to low self-esteem is that it is an absolute and therefore potentially ill-fitting assumption. When we think that way, we put all our eggs in that one basket, and close the door on more contextually correct possibilities.

As a therapist, I’ve had way more conversations about self-esteem and social anxiety than I could possibly count. I can say that it is simply untrue that all people who fear receiving negative social responses like rejection, exclusion, or judgment, do so because they don’t like themselves enough. In fact, more often than not, the fact that someone wants to avoid negative interpersonal experiences is more of an indicator that they esteem themselves quite highly.

If that last point has you scratching you head, let me explain. If someone fears judgment, exclusion, or rejection, that tells me they care about how they’re treated. Caring about yourself in this way goes hand in hand with how you value or esteem yourself. So if you read between the lines, the fact that someone is anxious about being on the receiving end of mistreatment is more a sign that they esteem themselves highly than that they don’t value themselves much at all.

If you truly didn’t care about something, you wouldn’t feel anxious about how other people treat that thing. So when someone feels anxious about how they might be treated by others, that can be an indicator that they do indeed care about themselves – and caring about yourself goes hand in hand with self-esteem.

3.     Past Experiences

The third way this notion misses the mark is that it doesn’t account for people’s past experiences.

Everything makes sense in context, and people’s past experiences are a totally relevant part of the context around present circumstances. We can’t divorce ourselves from the past, or live like goldfish with no long-term memory. When things happen, we learn from them, and adjust our expectations and actions accordingly.

For example, we might assume that a 21-year-old who was bullied throughout high school, and who has social anxiety around meeting new people, has those fears because the bullying caused them to have low self-esteem, which causes them to feel socially anxious. But what if, having lived through that bullying, they developed a radar for mistreatment, which their social anxiety is a testament to? So instead of the anxiety being caused by not liking themselves, it could actually be attributed to learning that sometimes people treat others in really unkind ways, and their anxiety is part of their resistance to that happening further.

These are three ways in which social anxiety can be about so much more than low self-esteem. Now we’d like you to chime in with your thoughts and perspectives! Your ideas could be really helpful to the Heart & Oak community! Aside from it being all about low self-esteem, what are other ways you make sense of your own social anxiety? Are there some points from this video that ring true for you, or maybe some that we didn’t touch on at all? Leave your response in the comment section!

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Take care until next time, and keep doing the things that help you live a better, brighter life.