Who would you be without your inner critic?

how neuroscience explains your inner critic and how to reshape your relationship to it

I heard once that if you were given a book with the names of every person who has ever said anything bad about you, it would be a big book, but maybe not for the reason you think. When you open the book and start to flip through the pages, the name you see the most is your own.

I think this is true, but this also makes it sound like you are to blame when you struggle with self-criticism. We see it as weakness or failure on our part, and that, I don’t believe is true.

Our inner critic exists due to a combination of our brain’s tendency to avoid uncertainty and its innate negativity bias to protect us from threats, as well as from the voices we heard when we were younger. Think: parents, grandparents, siblings, teachers, coaches, etc. who were hard on us or criticized us. These were the people we often relied on to keep us safe, validate us, and help us discover parts of our identities. Because of this, I picture my inner critic as little Kristine.

Some of the questions I get most as a coach are How do I silence my inner critic? How do I stop self-criticism from happening? I understand why these questions are so common - the constant barrage of self-criticism can be debilitating. I think it’s less about silencing the inner critic and more about understanding why it’s there. Once we learn to understand it, it becomes quieter. Research actually shows that when we try to suppress a thought, it gets louder. The real question is: how can we live alongside our inner critic without letting it control us? How can we listen to it without it being the loudest voice in the room?

When I picture my inner critic as younger me, I’m not wondering how to silence her… I want to understand why she’s saying what she’s saying. The role of the inner critic is to protect us, so when self-criticism pops up, you can become curious and ask: What is this thought trying to protect me from? I’ll share a personal example, which is a thought that pops into my brain every time I write here on Substack. It often shows up before I begin writing and before I hit publish once I’ve finished writing. Inner critic: No one cares about this topic, especially not when you write about it. No one will even read this. Ouch. These thoughts are not fun, and they can definitely get in the way of actually writing and putting myself and my work out into the world. So, what are these thoughts trying to protect me from?

What comes up for me is rejection and a fear of being perceived. If I don’t put myself and my writing out there, I get to stay safely where I am. No one will reject me because they won’t have the opportunity to. To our brains, staying the same is often the choice it prefers because it’s safer than the uncertainty of change or growth. Our brains care much more about our safety and survival than they do our joy, happiness, and fulfillment.

I also mentioned our innate negativity bias, which is our brain's tendency and preference to look for negative information over positive information. It’s why we dwell on the negative, and it’s one way our brains protect us from harm. In the past, consistently scanning for threats (negative information) was a matter of life or death. Those who paid more attention to the dangers around them were more likely to survive, passing this trait down to future generations like us, even though we don’t have to worry so much about being mauled by a lion in the wild. Wouldn’t it be easier if we could just turn the inner critic off with a switch?

A neuroscientist named Jill Bolte Taylor experienced this for herself. After a stroke shut down the left hemisphere of her brain, the stream of thoughts that usually filled her mind disappeared. In her TED Talk, she shared that her brain chatter had gone totally silent. At first, this quiet felt freeing. In her book My Stroke of Insight, she wrote Imagine what it would feel like to lose 37 years of emotional baggage! Sounds a lot like Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless mind, right? I can imagine people lining up for this.

The silence also came with a cost. Without her inner voice, she lost the ability to plan, to remember, to organize even the simplest tasks. She could not tell time, recall phone numbers, or manage her basic needs. The very part of her that narrated who she was and helped her make sense of the world was gone. What had felt peaceful at first also left her exposed and profoundly vulnerable.

Reflecting on her recovery, she reminds us of the responsibility and opportunity we do have, that we have the power to pick and choose who and how we want to be in the world. The inner critic is not separate from the inner voice. They are two sides of the same coin, and to silence one completely would be to silence both. While the critic can be harsh, the larger system of the inner voice is essential for us. Silencing the critic entirely would mean losing the broader functions that make us who we are, like:

• Holding and rehearsing helpful information

• Weighing consequences

• Making decisions

• Reflecting on our feelings

• Reminiscing on the past or planning for the future

• Keeping track of goals (and why they matter to us)

• Generating ideas

• Telling stories

Just to name a handful.

Artist: Karborn

It’s estimated that we have 6.5 new thoughts per minute (roughly 6,000 thought transitions per day while we’re awake). The mind never fully stops generating thoughts, so negative thoughts are bound to show up. That doesn’t mean we’re powerless against them. In fact, the questions I’ve received about this show just how much we want to reshape our relationship to those thoughts:

Do you have any tips that help enable the process of re-wiring your brain away from negative self-talk?

We have the ability to rewire our brains to focus more on the positive, without suppressing our inner critic, due to the brain’s ability to reorganize and form new neural connections, called neuroplasticity. By practicing new ways of thinking, we can weaken old, unhelpful thought patterns and strengthen new, positive ones. When we choose to focus on the good, we actually strengthen the brain’s positive pathways. This is known as positive neuroplasticity. It’s like training a muscle: the more you practice thinking in kind, constructive ways, the easier it becomes. Little by little, your brain starts making the positive path the default.

One way to practice this is to notice when things are going well by taking in the good. This is a practice coined by Dr. Rick Hanson (shoutout to my old boss!) that involves savoring positive experiences for a sustained period (10-20 seconds) to allow them to leave lasting neural and emotional imprints (basically committing them to memory). By consciously focusing on the positive, feeling them in the body, and allowing them to sink in, you can challenge the negativity bias. Over time, your brain will naturally start to notice the positive more often (even noticing when our thoughts are neutral will help, especially if focusing on the positive feels like too big of a leap at first). If you’d like to listen to a positive neuroplasticity practice, here is a quick one I recorded for you:

We also have something called the confirmation bias, which is our tendency to interpret, search for, and recall information to confirm our beliefs or values. If we hear our inner critic say things like You’re not good enough, and we believe it, our brains will search for evidence that this is true. If you challenge the thought, maybe even saying something to your inner critic like I know you’re trying to protect me, but I’ve got this. I am enough, regardless of the outcome. Instead of suppressing the thought, you’re hearing it, acknowledging it, and then challenging it. You can also actively start looking for evidence against the negative thought. For me, for example, I might remind myself that people have responded well to my writing in the past. I have friends and family who love and support me. Most importantly, I’m writing about this because I love it. That’s good enough. This takes practice!

How do I tell the difference between real, tough love for yourself and just unhelpful criticism? How do you draw the line between helpful and unhelpful self-criticism?

Ask yourself, Is this thought helpful? Does it offer feedback I can work with? For example, if you make a mistake, an unhelpful thought might be I’m such a failure. I’m never doing that again. This doesn’t give you much to work with and just leaves you feeling worse. Real, tough love that involves self-compassion might look like: Yikes. That didn’t feel good. Oof. Everyone makes mistakes sometimes. What can I learn from this and do better next time? Is there anything I can do right now to move through this?

I love this quote from Psychology Today:

There's one thing the inner critic doesn't offer: Room for growth. All too often, it sends us back to a zone where we find ourselves safe, but also stuck.

How do I catch myself in those thoughts and unravel/clear them out?

Notice the thoughts with curiosity and start to label them. Oh, this is my inner critic speaking. This is just a negative thought. Labeling our thoughts decreases activity in the amygdala (the brain’s threat defense system) and increases activation in the prefrontal cortex, which supports rational, logical thinking. In other words, labeling a thought makes it less emotionally overwhelming for us. Start to practice naming and labeling thoughts when you’re not in a spiral to help build the muscle.

Funny thing is, I can tell when I’m in negative self-talk, but I can’t get out of it. It almost feels satisfying in the moment, but later I’m like… yeah, that wasn’t helpful. Curious how you’d approach that.

Like scratching an itch, negative self-talk gives a quick emotional release. But later it rebounds and can leave us with more self-doubt than before. It can also give us an illusion of control… like if we punish ourselves, we’ll prevent failure or rejection from happening. In actuality, negative self-talk doesn’t usually help us. It keeps us from doing the things we really want or going after the things we care about. Noticing the self-criticism with curiosity and then moving into a practice called self-distancing can be helpful in switching your brain into a space where it can think more logically about what steps you can take to move forward. Basically, self-distancing involves stepping back and observing the thought as if it’s happening to someone else, which creates just enough psychological space to reduce its sting and see it more clearly. In the book Chatter, Ethan Kross shares a few ways to practice self-distancing:

One way to practice self-distancing is by shifting the way you talk to yourself. Instead of using “I,” try using your name or “you,” which helps quiet the parts of the brain tied to rumination. For example, instead of thinking, No one cares about this topic, especially not when I write about it, I might say, Kristine, you seem really worried that no one will care about this or even read it. Why are you worried about this? You can also imagine what you would say if a friend came to you with the same fear and then offer yourself that same compassion. Another approach is to pull back and put the thought in a larger frame, asking how you might feel about it in a week, a month, or a year, or zooming out as if you were a fly on the wall watching the scene unfold. Sometimes even picturing the thought drifting away like a leaf in the wind is enough to create a little space and loosen its grip.

You can’t change something you don’t notice. Hopefully now, you are able to actively notice when your inner critic is being loud, lean in with curiosity, and use these new tools to understand why it’s there and help quiet it down.

Thank you to everyone who sent over questions on the topic! If you want me to share more on this topic or have any additional questions, please leave a comment!

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