Six Ways To Silence Your Inner Critic

As we all know, we have two sides or voices inside us—one that is fostering and the other one is critical. One lifts you up, and the other weighs us down. Our inner nurturer voice brings encouragement and self-compassion, and while the critic side helps you highlight your wrong decisions and what you need to do right now. Our inner voices have a big role to play.

But some people over-analyze a situation and go way overboard with self-criticism. You are throwing darts of scolding, nit-picking, and shaming, and fault-finding. Your thoughts are influenced by how you feel, which can be negative and self-destructive.

It is important to silence your inner criticism sometime and balance your thoughts. Here’s how you can do it.

1. Be Aware of your Thoughts 

Our mind is filled with our own narrations and often we’re sending messages to ourselves subconsciously.  Pay close attention to your thoughts and understand your thoughts aren’t always true. In fact, sometimes they’re completely opposite of reality. Sometimes, your thoughts are biased, exaggerated, and disproportionate. Making unfair comparisons will ruin your confidence, motivation, and self-worth. You may judge yourselves on every unfair comparison, which indirectly pushes you on the brink of losing your direction in life and a healthy self image. Try to stop playing a dialogue in your mind of the things that keep happening around you. Give yourself a break with the mind-chaos that you help create. Avoid calling yourself out, such as “You’re a bad person,” “You should be ashamed.”

2. Stop Recreating And Replaying

Do you keep thinking about a scenario such as- when you make a mistake or had a bad day? You re-play events, again and again, to point out your mistake, finding embarrassing incidents, and looking for another conclusion to the situation. This way, you allow your inner critic to bash your thoughts with negative and make you feel worse. This won’t help you solve the problem at hand. It will hurt you deeply, avoiding you take the risk. For instance- during a Q&A session with your teacher, answering the wrong question won’t hurt you and but saying it loudly in front of class might be an embarrassing situation for you. This is because we judge ourselves very easily based on outside behavior. Stop ruminating things that you don’t have control over. Relax and let the moment pass. 

3. Talk To Your Inner Nurturer

Inner nurturer is the critical support system that encourages and protects you when everything is critical around you, things are disappointing, stressful, or terrible. It’s your source of confidence and strength. Our inner nurturers are influenced by our teachers, parents, and older children. When you analyze a scenario, find the positive and negative titbits, take your negative approach for improvement, and later for appreciation. When you learn how to appreciate a tough situation, your inner critic can relax for a while.

4. Argue

What’s the common phrase you say to yourself? Like “You always fail,” “You always messed up,” or “It’s all my fault.” Write these lines down and keep arguing with your inner critic what makes you feel that way. Why do you put yourself down with this talk? Always remember, a negative thought will break your confidence down. Think as if you’re talking to your inner critic as an analyst who is judging and analyzing every claim your critic is pointing. Talk to yourself as if you’re looking for truth, not over exaggerating scenario.

5. Shut Down Judgment

 Let’s say you had a bad day at work. Don’t just straight for self-judgment. Understand what went wrong and write down if there’s an improvement. There’s no winner in judgment. It makes you unhappy and depressed. We all hate judgments while we allow our inner critic to judge us left and right. Don’t transform your inner critic into a punishing entity. You paid a heavy price when you left judgment to affect your mind, feelings, and behavior. Bitterness build over time is tough for your mental health.

6. Change the Character Of Your Critic

Whenever you think of an inner critic, you think of him as harsh and vulgar. Someone with an authoritative voice, making you feel insignificant. You can transform the situation 360 degrees. How? For example, you can change the pitch of the voice. You can make the voice sound gentle or funny. You can imagine any character you like. The goal is to make your inner critic become a negotiating power, not the overbearing one. If the voice adjustment isn’t right for you, then think of inner critic as a bratty child. How do you deal with a bratty child? Discipline, ignore, try to cool him, or keep him busy with fidgeting. Try to do that with your inner critic. The goal is to envision your critic as a person who clears the point out without beginning judgmentally.

Your inner dialogue is your decision-making framework. It’s your thoughts that you collect every day, and inner critic helps you to recognize the bad and good from a scenario. Have a pep talk with yourself, but don’t get negative because that will affect your performance and reduce your chance to reach a goal. Coach your inner critic in a productive manner instead of silencing it out.

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