Allow me to introduce you to the practices that are the bedrock of this process and that are at the heart of our journey of transformation: mindfulness and self-compassion. Let’s learn what makes these two approaches so incredibly effective in our efforts to banish the Inner Critic, and then practice them with our first Creative Doses.
Become Full of Mind
“The gift of mindfulness, then, is that by accepting the present moment you are better able to shape your future moments with wisdom and clarity.”
— Kristin Neff, Self-Compassion: Stop Beating Yourself Up and Leave Insecurity Behind
Let’s be real: having a full-blown Inner Critic episode can be pretty awful. You feel vulnerable and unsure of yourself. (Even if it’s just under the surface, it’s still there.) Despite feeling as though a giant hole is about to suck you down to one of the nine levels of the Inferno, outwardly you not only need to appear as if nothing is wrong, but you’re also somehow still supposed to produce. Yikes!
The Inner Critic encourages something that Kristin Neff, the author of the book Self Compassion calls “over-identification,” which is “being so carried away by our personal drama that we can’t clearly see what is occurring in the present moment.”19 In the midst of over-identifying, it’s nearly impossible to realize that your self-critical thoughts are not an accurate reflection of reality. We’re so used to being caught up in our ingrained self-critical stories the Inner Critic is telling us that we can’t see they are just that: stories.
But without a tool to use or practice to put into place, gaining perspective is easier said than done. We need an approach that acts as a counterbalance, a methodology that will get us out of our internally focused self-critical thought loop, providing the mental distance to not only see the situation and ourselves clearly, but also perspective so that we can make better choices about where to direct our attention and place our focus. And in particular, we need a way to respond more evenly to the times our Inner Critic rears up and self-critical thoughts paralyze us, leaving us feeling vulnerable and defensive. Enter mindfulness.
What is mindfulness? It’s the basic human ability to be fully present, aware of where we are and what we’re doing, while not being overly reactive to or overwhelmed by what’s going on around us. It’s a form of meta-awareness: being aware of being aware. Imagine standing outside of your own mind, observing your thoughts and feeling as if they were happening to someone else. You’re fully aware but impartial, and therefore not caught up in the story that your mind (or Inner Critic) is spinning about the situation. This is being mindful.
In terms of disrupting our inner critical thoughts, mindfulness is an ideal tool. When we are mindful, we clearly see and accept what is happening in the present moment without reacting with judgment, reflection, or internal commentary.20 Mindfulness gives us the opportunity to respond rather than just react, and we can move to a place of more balanced and clear thinking. From this place of more balanced and clear thinking, we can acknowledge self-critical thoughts objectively. What’s more, regularly practicing mindfulness positively transforms the emotional mind by establishing emotional balance21 and raising our baseline level of happiness.22
Because mindfulness is about attention and focus, it plays well with neuroplasticity. Being mindfully aware of the Inner Critic helps us focus our attention on other thoughts. Then intentionally redirecting attention and focus will decrease the activity of our self-critical thought circuits, so they will eventually be pruned away, eventually altering our brain circuitry for the better. To start banishing the Inner Critic, mindfulness fits our needs perfectly.
Typically, when we want to change something, we think that it involves force and effort. Your inclination may be to try to alter your behavior by actively working to “change” your self-critical thoughts: to tell yourself, “Stop thinking that way!” and then reprimand yourself when you think those thoughts again anyway. Sound familiar? Thankfully, mindfulness is the opposite of that.
The best thing about starting to practice mindfulness is that it’s not about making yourself do something. It is more about acceptance and shifting focus. In a lot of ways, it’s about giving yourself permission to just sit and look at things without having to think about, process, analyze, react, or respond to them. Doesn’t that sound like a refreshing change? It’s like giving your brain a vacation!
In using mindfulness to see the Inner Critic’s messages as an outcome of it trying to protect you, you can begin to be more impartial. Even more importantly, you begin to instill the practice of not reacting to self-critical thoughts by instead realizing that these thoughts are merely a habitual reaction to a stimulus. Ultimately, you don’t have to believe what your Inner Critic is spouting, which gives its messages less weight and validity.
Here’s the best part: mindfulness is something we all naturally already possess! However, it’s more readily available when we practice it on a daily basis, and gets stronger by exercising it regularly. As it is one of the core practices of our work, let’s start building our “mindfulness muscles” right now.
Purpose: To learn to accept thoughts instead of reacting to them
Instead of believing everything that passes through your mind, practice observing your thoughts instead. Here are three methods for
using mindfulness to become more impartial and less reactive to the thinking reflex that is the Inner Critic.
Part 1: Mindful Thought Disbelief
Thoughts, emotions, and perceptions aren’t necessarily reality. Choosing to believe thoughts is what gives them power, even though it frequently doesn’t feel that way. Remember thoughts aren’t facts. There’s a fantastic bumper sticker that reads, “Don’t believe everything you think.”
Rather than trying to force yourself to think positively, do this:
Accept that your mind will produce negative thoughts, which you don’t have to believe.
When you’ve done that, your mental follow-up to inner critical thoughts could be “Thoughts are not facts” or “I can watch this thought without having to respond to it.”23
By creating the extra buffer of the awareness of choice, we maintain better control of where we focus our mental energies, and therefore, what we think and consequently, believe.
Part 2: Acknowledge and Observe
Instead of trying to ignore, fight, suppress, or otherwise control your thoughts and feelings, use mindfulness and look at them as if you were looking at the thoughts and feelings of another person outside
of yourself.
Ask yourself these questions:
Would you react the same way to your own thoughts and feelings?
Would you judge those thoughts or feelings or be more objective about them?
Acknowledge your thoughts and feelings, but instead of getting wrapped up in them, look upon them with calm interest.
And then, with the same level of detachment, watch as they pass on and others take their place.
Part 3: The Inner Critic is a Brain Event
Research shows that when patients viewed disordered thinking as “events of the mind” rather than as truth, a different region of the brain fired up, which reduced the risk of relapse.24 We will do the same with inner critical thoughts: we will think of