Imagine you had to spend a whole week – day in and day out – with someone really NASTY glued to your side. Every time you made a mistake, they called you names, let you know you really blew it and made you feel worse. Every time you looked in the mirror, they pointed out your flaws. Every time you wanted to try something new or strive for a goal, they told you not to bother because you’d probably fail or you’re not good enough. Every time you felt sad or low, instead of offering you comfort or support, they told you to get on with it and stop being so weak…

It’s pretty obvious that if you had someone like this following you around every day, you wouldn’t feel very happy, right? It certainly wouldn’t be easy to reach your true potential or feel good about yourself. In fact, it would be downright harrowing!

The sad truth is, for almost all of us, we DO walk around with someone like this, only it’s in our own minds – it’s called our INNER CRITIC and though you may not realise it because it’s been with you for so long, it’s doing untold damage to your psyche and robbing you of both your true potential and ability to be happy.

In fact, neuroscience has shown that self-criticism affects the brain adversely and stimulates the stress response, because to the brain – it doesn’t matter if it is you or someone else telling you awful things, it still perceives it as an attack, and so it goes into fight-or-flight mode. And people who suffer from anxiety and depression have been shown to suffer from higher levels of self-criticism than most, and these negative thoughts generate painful emotions such as frustration, shame, anger, contempt and hopelessness.

Thankfully, there’s a powerful antidote: we can practice self-compassion and break this negative mental habit, which can in turn send the body a signal of safety so that we can feel calmer and happier. Self-compassion has been studied a lot in recent years, and has been proven to reduce mental suffering, stress, anxiety and depression.

Over the next 4 weeks on this blog, I’m going to cover how you can get started with self-compassion in depth – but first, it’s important to really understand that hidden foe our ours, our inner critic.

WHY DO WE CRITICISE OURSELVES?

Neuro-science has shown that actually everyone to one degree or another has an inner critic, and that unfortunately our minds are wired to tend towards the negative rather than the positive, this is called the “negativity-bias”.

There’s a few reasons we humans do this…and partly it comes down to evolution. Because we are social creatures and our survival is dependent on other humans, our minds tend to be constantly checking (and picking on!) ourselves to make sure we fit in and are acceptable to the “tribe”.

But there can be cultural and environmental factors as well…often our inner critic can be an internalised version of a harsh parent, peer, teacher or religious teacher. It’s also been shown that women have higher levels of self-criticism than men, and this is in part due to the socialisation of women to be self-sacrificing, giving and putting themselves last.

For many people, it can also be tied to their beliefs about achievement and performance, for instance, thinking that if they’re not hard on themselves they’ll fail or succumb to laziness and not reach their goals.

THE EFFECTS OF SELF-CRITICISM

It’s important to realise that self-criticism is a real and serious form of ongoing stress for us. We can be exposed to both internal and external types of stressors. External forms of stress are things like having a tight work deadline, being stuck in traffic, moving house or a sick family member. Internal forms of stress come from within our own minds, such as self-criticism, having excessively high expectations of ourselves and not being able to offer ourselves support and kindness when we’re experiencing difficulty.

And internal forms of stress affect us the same as any other form of stress – lowering our mood; making us feel irritable, anxious or uptight; and affecting us physically with things like sleep issues, poor immunity or high blood pressure.

Thankfully, while some forms of external stressors are not within our control, internal stressors absolutely are! With practice and awareness, we can get that inner bully off of our backs and breathe a huge a sigh of relief. We can also develop the powerful capacity  to be our own best friend, and meet our suffering with kindness, support and compassion.

Next week, we’ll look at how we can begin developing self-compassion, but first some home-play for you! In order to gain some clarity around your own inner critic and how it’s affecting you, I’d love you to have a think about and share in the comments below:

How do you think it would feel, and what would you be able to do or achieve in your life, if you were less critical and judgmental with yourself?