Treating Your Inner Critic Like a Bad Habit

A healthy inner critic helps you recognize where you’ve gone wrong and what you need to do to set things right. If you are like me, the inner critic goes way overboard: scolding, shaming, nit-picking, and faultfinding. No wonder we believe that something is wrong with us.

Reflection

Take a moment to reflect on your good qualities.  Sit with this for a minute or two. Notice whether your inner critic kicks in and tells you that you aren’t really that good.  

Chances are your inner critic ridiculed any attempt to look on the bright side of things.  Our inner critic encourages imposter syndrome, that sense of feeling fake, with an accompanying worry that people will find out we are not really that good. Our inner critic would make Einstein look dumb and Mother Theresa look selfish.

“It is your critic who feels you are rotten to the core. It is your critic who feels you must never let anyone know who or what you are because you are a mistake; you are a flawed, an evil, possibly even a dangerous, creature. It is your critic who fears that others will find you disgusting and possibly horrifying and that they will hurt or reject you.” Hal & Sidra Stone

We can’t make our inner critic go away, but we can reduce the power it holds over us by using the three gears of habit change as described in Judson Brewer’s book, Unwinding Anxiety.

1. Mapping your mind
2. Updating your brain’s reward value
3. Finding the bigger, better offer

Mapping Your Mind

To map your mind, you need to begin with intellectually knowing where your inner critic comes from. It represents all the critical, disappointed voices from your childhood. The inner critic played a role in your childhood to allow you to control the more wayward forces of anger, rage, greed, and selfishness, often by using shame. The inner critic kept us safe and secure, keeping us from unskillful actions that would cause us to be rejected by our family or our community.

You invite your inner critic when you hold yourself to a high standard of perfection. When you fail to meet that impossible standard, you hear the same words repeatedly – “I’m not good enough,” “How could I be so dumb, or “I never get it right.” When we believe what our inner critic says, we can waste our whole life trying to prove ourselves to the world.  We hunger for approval from others so that we can feel better about ourselves.

For most of us, our inner critic has lived past its sell-by date, we no longer need that harsh voice haranguing us at every turn.  We can employ reason, reflection, and compassion to navigate the challenges of our lives. 

You’ll recognize the critic by its harsh and demeaning tone.  When your critic is in control, you may notice your voice gets higher, and you talk faster or louder. You may notice your heart is racing or that you are breathing faster.  If you scan your body, you are likely to feel contraction or tension. 

You’ll also recognize the message of your inner critic:

• You have no business doing that
• You should be perfect at all times
• Normal people wouldn’t do this
• You only have problems because you are bad, there is something wrong with you

When you become aware of your inner critic haranguing you, the questions Judson Brewer suggests that you ask yourself are:

“Why am I doing this? What triggered the behavior? What reward am I really getting from this? Do I want to keep doing this?”

Example:

• Trigger: You make a mistake
• Behavior: Inner critic berates you by saying, “I’m not good enough,” or “How could I be so dumb.”
• Reward:
  • I criticize myself before others criticize me.
  • The harsh voice will motivate me to do better.

Updating Your Brain’s Reward Value

Your inner critic will keep haranguing you as long as your brain feels there is a reward for that behavior. Fighting the inner critic doesn’t quiet it. Sometimes you feel like you deserve to be berated when in reality, you made a mistake and deserve to be corrected. You can’t just use grit to silence your inner critic.  You need to change the reward value in your orbitofrontal cortex (OFC).

Example:

• Trigger: You make a mistake
• Behavior: Inner critic berates you by saying, “I’m not good enough,” or “How could I be so dumb.”
• Perceived Reward:
  • I criticize myself before others criticize me.
  • The harsh voice will motivate me to do better.
• Actual Rewards:
  • A distorted view of who we are, feeling rotten to the core.
  • Encourages us to give up control.  “You will never be good enough, so why even bother.”
  • Our body contracts so we can’t see all the possibilities there are.  We just see the problems; we don’t see the solutions.

To change the reward, experiment with talking to yourself in useful, more self-compassionate ways:

• “This criticism has a grain of truth in it, but everything else is exaggerated or untrue.”
• “This is what ____ used to tell me; it was wrong then and it’s wrong now.”
• “This is not helping me, and I don’t have to listen to it.”
• “I made a mistake; I will do better next time.”

Remember, you are allowed to make mistakes just like every other person. It does not make you less worthy, or dumb.  One way to get past the negative conditioning is to actively develop self-compassion by learning to accept yourself and to be a good friend to yourself. Compassion is the best antidote to the inner critic’s poison. 

As you do this pay close attention to the positive or negative rewards that come from talking to yourself in useful ways.  And compare it to the rewards that come from your inner critic berating you. Some things to watch for are:

• Does the way I talk to myself make me lash out? 
• Does the way I talk to myself make me close-up?
• Does that reaction move me toward the future self I want to be?
• Or does it move me to do something I am going to regret?
• Does the way I talk to myself allow me to see my inner goodness?
• Or does it encourage me to give up because I am no good?

This is not a one and done.  You don’t do this once and your inner critic becomes quiet.  Your inner critic has been telling untrue stories for many years. Your brain believed those stories as it thought they benefitted you. To take those stories off your top ten list, you must provide your brain with a bigger, better offer, a reason to replace the story with a more accurate one. You must do it over and over, each time the untrue story arises. 

“Awareness helps you get up-to-date and accurate information so that you can trust the new data that are coming in, rather than dismissing them as erroneous. You can probably see the irony here—old habitual behaviors are based on outdated data, yet because they are old, they are familiar; and because they are familiar, we trust them (change is scary).” Judson Brewer

Bigger, Better Offer

Third, for lasting habit change, you must find a bigger, better offer that is more rewarding and doesn’t simply substitute a different behavior. You need to experiment with talking to yourself in a self-compassionate way and pay attention to what happens.

Research shows self-compassion is strongly linked to well-being.  It brings a reduction in anxiety, depression, stress, perfectionism, shame, body dissatisfaction, and disordered eating.  Self-compassion is linked to more life satisfaction, more happiness, and more optimism.  Thus, it is a powerful way to achieve emotional well-being and contentment in our lives. By giving ourselves unconditional kindness and comfort while embracing our difficulties, we avoid destructive patterns of fear, negativity, and isolation. 

Just reading about the research does not change the reward value in our OFC.  We actually have to experience the rewards repeatedly in order for our brains to update the reward value.

A healthy inner critic helps you recognize where you’ve gone wrong and what you need to do to set things right. But for most people, the inner critic goes way overboard, throwing dart after dart of scolding, shaming, nit-picking, and faultfinding. No wonder we believe that something is wrong with us. If you can throw away your inner critic’s rawhide whip and wrap the blanket of self-compassion around your shoulders, you will find yourself better able to handle life’s ups and downs. 

This meditation will help you to update the reward value of your inner critic. I recommend doing this meditation daily for a couple of weeks so your orbitalfrontal cortex gets the message the the reward value needs to change.