Is Your Inner Critic Too Loud? Tune It Out!

“Choice of attention – to pay attention to this and ignore that – is to the inner life what choice of action is to the outer.”
— W. H. Auden, poet

In the past, the Inner Critic may have seemed like a huge, intimidating presence in your mind, with your stringent self-criticisms appearing as if they are the sole truths about you. However, now that we’ve started becoming more aware of the mistaken beliefs that underlie our strongest self-criticisms and are regaining the power that we’ve given up by believing them, we start to see through the Inner Critic’s thin veneer and perceive its lack of substance and dimension. In his essay “Against Self-Criticism,” psychologist Adam Phillips eloquently and accurately describes the Inner Critic: “…the self-critical part of ourselves…has some striking deficiencies: it is remarkably narrow-minded; it has an unusually impoverished vocabulary; and it is, like all propagandists, relentlessly repetitive.”

When we are being overly self-critical and falling prey to the Inner Critic’s worst messages, it often feels like the Inner Critic takes over our entire awareness. Like being at a party stuck listening to the most self-absorbed, tiresome guest in the room, giving too much attention to the Inner Critic in the form of High Self-Criticism is a misappropriation of your valuable mental resources and time.

To get a handle on our thoughts and emotions and to take back the power of our time and attention, we need a way to put high self-criticism into perspective. Again, managing our attention and making use of a built-in tendency of our brains comes to the rescue.

Speaking of parties, you know how when you’re at a party and you’re so absorbed in a conversation with someone that you really only hear what that person is saying and none of the other conversations around you – but if you wanted, you could tune into the other conversations around you? Humans have the impressive ability to be able to focus on one voice amid countless others, regardless of the environment. This phenomenon is referred to as “selective hearing,” also known as “the cocktail party effect.”

One of the aspects of the cocktail party effect that we’ll make use of is this: while our brains are outstanding at honing in on the one conversation that we’re engaged in, we absorb little to nothing of the ones that we decide to ignore.60 Perfect! We’ve already heard enough of what the Inner Critic has to say and know the list of self-criticisms by heart. Once you’ve learned what the Inner Critic is ultimately trying to protect you from, there’s precious little to be gleaned from continuing to listen to its self-critical diatribe.

Using the power of attention and focus and choosing where to place them, combined with a commitment to mindfulness, we’ll practice the internal equivalent of the cocktail party effect. The same mechanism is at work here, except instead of tuning in to someone’s voice externally, we will choose which of our thoughts we listen to. By shifting to other more relevant “conversations” in our heads, we’ll begin to break our habit of generating so much self-criticism. The circuit and the broadcast will grow weaker – and the Inner Critic will lose its audience.

Creative Dose: Turn Down Da Noise, Turn Down Da Funk

Purpose: To choose other thoughts over the self-critical voice of the Inner Critic

Here are three ways to shift your focus to other messages that have been getting drowned out by the strident droning of the Inner Critic.

Option 1: Tune Out

The Inner Critic can be a lot like a parrot on your shoulder, sitting there chirping away, droning on about all of the reasons why your work is allegedly no good. Here’s how you can use the cocktail party effect to your advantage.

Imagine that, just as if you were at a party wrapped up in a conversation with someone fascinating, the annoying voice of your Inner Critic starts to fade into the background. It’s still there, and if you decide you want to tune back in to it, you can whenever you want.

But instead of listening to your dull Inner Critic, who tells the same stories all of the time, you’re attending to the far more interesting perspective of your Creative Self.

Option 2: Tune In

Imagine that your brain is like a radio. You’re currently on WHSC – the high self-criticism channel, nothing but self-criticism all day and all night, and advertisement-free to boot. But good lord, what a boring station! All it plays is oldies in the form of criticisms you’ve internalized from what people have said to you in your deep past. Isn’t there something else you could listen to?

Imagine turning the dial, pressing buttons, or swiping left to find and pick up a new station, for instance, one that broadcasts accurate messages about who you are as a person and about your abilities.

There is even a station that broadcasts messages of comfort and kindness as well.

You have a choice of where to put your listener support. Which station will you tune in to?

Option 3: Inner Critic Shrinky Dinks

When I was a growing up, there was a wacky toy called Shrinky Dinks. It was special plastic that you could either draw on yourself or use preprinted designs, put in the oven, and with heat shrink them down into smaller plastic pieces that you could turn into pendants and other things. (Yes, that’s a form of creativity: someone thought of that idea, pitched it to an exec at a company, they marketed it, and people bought it. Wild, isn’t it?!)

Close your eyes. Imagine your Inner Critic in as much grandiose detail as possible, passionately recounting all of the ways in which you are falling short, slacking, and being a disappointment.

Then imagine your Inner Critic slowly but surely shrinking. You could even imagine putting it in an oven or a really hot room like a sauna, or melting like the water-soaked Wicked Witch of the West in the Wizard of Oz.

It is shrinking, shrinking, shrinking, and its voice is getting smaller and more difficult to hear — until it is so small that it can fit in the palm of your hand.

What is your Inner Critic like now? Is is as scary as before?

Can you even hear what it’s saying to you without bending down to listen really closely? Can’t hear that self-critical voice anymore? Great! Now you can go and get into your creative groove.

This post is an excerpt from book Banish Your Inner Critic, under the chapter heading “Tune In to Tune Out”. Reprinted with permission.