How to Temper Your Inner Critic

Estimated reading time: 7 minutes

We all feel critical of ourself at times, and while there’s value in self-reflection, self-criticism is an unserving behavior that you can change

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One of the most important life skills you can learn is to take charge of your self-sabotaging commentary continuously parading through your mind. This constant running monologue going on inside your head can either positively or negatively impact your mood, self-image, relationships, stress level and even your health.

You can get so used to the stream of self-limiting messages winding their way through your thoughts that they often go unnoticed. Yet the quality of this inner language directly affects the quality of your life.

It is estimated that we make about 50,000 self-talk utterances per day and the far majority is negative. That’s a whole lot of negativity! This is partly because we tend to judge ourselves more harshly than we judge others, especially when we make a mistake.

While you may assume being harsh on yourself will motivate you to shape up and do better, the research shows that’s a wrong assumption. The opposite is actually true. The kinder you are to yourself, the more productive you are.

What Are You Telling Yourself?

Your emotional state depends on what you believe and tell yourself. Your inner voice provides a continuous monologue that combines conscious thoughts with underlying unconscious beliefs and biases. Self-talk is learned from family imprinting and cultural conditioning. Your pattern of self-talk creates a groove in your mind, making it difficult to take a different route.

Catching yourself is the first step to breaking out of a destructive self-talk cycle so you can fill that space with kind, soothing thoughts. Any challenging situation you find yourself in is bad enough without adding the extra baggage streaming from your inner critic. If you change the way you communicate with yourself you can limit the amount of stress you create in your life. Once there is awareness, you can challenge a previously-accepted way of talking to yourself and decide you are no longer going to accept it.

The idea is to come to recognize when the voice in your head starts to turn sour before the harsh tone becomes downright cruel. By changing your self-talk early in the downward spin, you can interrupt the emotional spiral before it spins you out of control.

Cheryl Richardson, New York Times best-selling author of The Art of Extreme Self-Care: 12 Practical and Inspiring Ways to Love Yourself More, calls our tendency to get swept away and spin out of control “getting on the crazy train.” Her message is to catch yourself as you put one foot on the platform before you get aboard the crazy train. I love this image. I’ve found it helpful to tell myself “You’re about to get on the crazy train,” as a reminder to temper my critical self-talk.

Learning the Language of Self-Support

If you don’t learn to take steps to feed yourself a higher quality of self-talk you’ll come to accept a less than positive image of yourself. But you can retrain your brain to form a new pathway that eventually becomes your preferred route.

Our highly-skewed ratio of negative to positive self-talk can lead to anxiety, stress, worry or even panic. This self-defeating internal chatter takes an emotional toll. While occasional downbeat or judgmental self-talk has little impact on your state of mind, if it is an ongoing negative spiel it will have a dampening effect on your mood and, eventually, your overall outlook.

Our tendency for negative self-talk often leads to making sweeping generalizations like, “I can’t do anything right,” or “I’m never going to learn.”

When something happens, a common reaction is to overreact by making things far worse than they are. The event might be something relatively minor, such as a traffic jam, waiting in line or criticism from a friend, but you magnify it way out of proportion by telling yourself “It’s terrible,” or “I can’t take it.” You have to choose the words you use to talk to yourself mindfully because they become as real as the ground you walk on.

Only you can control the conversation going on in your head. You can make the conscious choice to talk to yourself with reassurance rather than reproach. When you learn to squelch the condemning critic and replace it with the accepting advocate you can transform your negative storylines to reduce the stress and emotional upheaval you experience.

For example, your condemning critic may be telling you “Nothing in my life ever goes right,” while your accepting advocate might tell you something like “My life has ups and downs just like everyone’s life and this will pass.” The moment you step out from under the weight of your condemning critic you’ll be able to defuse its power over you.

Your condemning critic can be challenged, deflated and sidelined when you change your internal conversations to become a compassionate ally to yourself. Supportive self-talk is a skill that can be learned.

4 Ways to Temper Your Condemning Critic

There are many strategies that can be useful for practicing a more constructive inner voice with a kinder tone. Here are four ways to try to rein in your condemning critic.

1. Shift to using “distanced self-talk”

Research shows that when you talk to yourself in what psychologists call “distanced self-talk” it fosters psychological distance and leads to better emotional regulation and self-control. Distanced self-talk is when you use words for yourself that are usually reserved for others — a name, and second- and third-person pronouns. These pronouns are you, your and he, him, she, her, they, them.

This subtle shift in language from using I or me in self-talk creates a distance from the self and its emotional intensity. By silently referring to yourself using your own name and non first-person singular pronouns you are better able to deal with negative emotions. When you talk to yourself this way it can instigate a shift in perspective away from an egocentric immersed point of view, to a more objective viewpoint. Besides maybe feeling a little silly, you’ve really got nothing to lose by trying to talk to yourself using distanced self-talk.

Mindfulness is at its core also rooted in creating distance between yourself and your thoughts, increasing the gap between an impulse and an action. So if you have been practicing mindfulness, this way of talking to yourself may come easy.

Here are two examples:

“Why is Barbara feeling like this?”

“You are blaming yourself for what she did.”

2. Lighten things up by mocking yourself

Another strategy to dispel your condemning critic is to try to lighten things up by lightheartedly mocking yourself. Such flippant self-talk can jolt you into a more realistic view of your competencies and worth. Instead of taking your thoughts seriously, you would mock yourself in an exaggerated way. Here’s an example:

“Yup, you’re a complete and utter failure because you messed up this time.”

3. Create a character for your condemning critic

You might also come up with a conspiring character. You can give the character a silly voice and a name that depicts a nasty character. Then you can visualize this character and hear its voice to remind you that your condemning critic is onboard. I’ve named my condemning critic “Ms. Meany.” If I can bring to mind a picture of her scolding me with her finger, it jerks me out of my critical tirade.

4. Address yourself using “terms of endearment”

The last way to be a kind voice in your head is to address yourself using “terms of endearment” — your nickname, honey, bud or whatever term connotes loving kindness. When you start with an endearing term it’s hard to follow up with something mean. For example, “Honey, you are taking this way too seriously.” Contemplate what term you might use for your accepting advocate. Was there a term your favorite aunt or uncle or grandparent used to call you that conjures up unconditional love?

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You may also enjoy reading Why You Should Cultivate and Practice Self-Compassion, by Barbara Bloom.