3 Tips For Dealing With The Inner Critic

We all have one: an inner critic. That voice inside our heads that is critical of so much that we do. That voice can become debilitating, if we let it. But when we apply what we know about the Three Principles of innate health, we can teach that voice to take a back seat, where it belongs. And, on a positive note, hearing the inner critic can even become an ally in helping us to practice stepping into a better feeling. You can listen above, on your favorite podcast app, or watch on YouTube. Notes, links, resources and a full transcript are below.Show Notes* A neurosurgeon’s explanation for the inner critic * A reminder about the purpose an unwanted habit is serving * How the feeling that comes with the inner critic alerts us to its falsehood * On the possibility of having a different experience at any moment * The beautiful feeling that’s always available to us * How our thinking can be like the grooves in a recordResources Mentioned in this Episode* Mind Magic by Dr. James DotyTranscript of episodeHello explorers, and welcome to episode 65 of Unbroken. I’m Alexandra Amor. I’m here today to talk about the inner critic or that negative voice that can dog us all the time. And this is a subject, particularly close to my heart. I feel like it’s something that I’ve wrestled with for a long time and for a long time, couldn’t see it. Years ago, it was invisible to me, even though it was going on. And then gradually, I became more and more aware of it, but didn’t know what to do about it. And then I came into this understanding, and I put it off to the side. But it’s come up in my awareness lately. And I’ll tell you a bit more about that in just a moment. I was reading a book recently about brain science, called I think it’s either called Mind Magic or Magic Mind by Dr. James Doty. And one of the things he mentioned in there was, how his approach to our inner critical voice or his understanding of it was really interesting. And it was about the evolutionary process that we’ve gone through, and how our brains are wired to look for danger.Given the society that we live in now and how generally safe we are – I hope I can say that about you – that the part of our brain that’s looking out for danger, even looks out for it in our own behavior. So it’s able to be critical of us, or it believes it’s being critical of us, in order to serve a purpose in order to keep us safe. I probably haven’t explained that, as well as he did in the book. But it got me thinking about the negative voice, the inner critic, that so many of us hear, and maybe don’t hear, that’s maybe silent. I find it at times just kind of running behind whatever else is going on, in my mind, and I’ll talk about in a minute how that doesn’t actually matter if we can’t specifically hear what it’s saying. So that’s some of the good news. Let’s jump in and talk about this. The reason I wanted to bring it up was that, in the past, we’ve talked about how unwanted habits are working in our favor, even though it might not look like they are. They are a solution, not a problem. And one of the metaphors I use is that unwanted habits are like the valve on the top of a pressure cooker. The habit itself lets off a bit of the pressure of what’s in the pressure cooker. So this got me thinking about how that inner critic, that negative voice is contributing to the load of what’s in the pressure cooker, it’s contributing to all the stirred up thinking that’s in there,