I am lazy. I’m a slob. I’m [something that can’t be printed]. These are the thoughts that pop into my head when I’m scrolling senselessly on the sofa, or after finding another bag of withered salad in my fridge, forgotten thanks to the takeaways I chose to have instead of preparing my own healthier options. I’m gross. I’m unhealthy. I’m a stupid, ugly [expletive].
You’re probably all these things too – at least according to your inner critic.
That demeaning and derogatory little voice in your head is so universal that it’s been widely represented in pop culture, from Radiohead’s ‘Creep’ and TLC’s ‘Unpretty’ to Rick Dalton (as played by Leonardo DiCaprio) in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.
“What the f— was that?!” Dalton rages after forgetting his lines on set. “Embarrassed yourself like that in front of all those goddamn people!” He is, he decides, a baboon.
undefined
But why do so many of us have these negative thoughts?
It’s tempting to think that the things our inner critics say have value – after all, I really do have too many takeaways and I really should do something more productive than endlessly scrolling through social media on my sofa. So should we try to silence the voice that demeans us? And if so, how can we actually do that?
Before we can answer those questions, however, we have to ask another: how is it that we evolved to bully ourselves in the first place?
“In most social hierarchies, and when animals work in groups, they have to have a way of regulating their competitive behaviour with each other,” says Paul Gilbert, a professor of clinical psychology at the University of Derby in the UK whose research on self-criticism encompasses both neuroscience and evolutionary psychology.
Gilbert says that for these hierarchies to work, “our brains are designed to submit when we’re under attack from a dominant other.”
Social attacks can feel similar to physical attacks because we have evolved to seek status – in hunter-gatherer societies, it had to be apparent what we could bring to the group.
According to Gilbert, when people don’t live up to these expectations and become self-critical, they stimulate the same areas of the brain that fire up when we’re under attack from others – the anterior cingulate cortex and the amygdala, the brain’s threat system. For this reason, Gilbert prefers to describe self-criticism as “self-attacking”.
The shame game
Of course, despite our shared evolutionary history, some of us think more negatively about ourselves than others.
Daniel Kopala-Sibley is a psychology professor at Canada’s University of Calgary who researches the role of developmental experiences on mental health. Kopala-Sibley has found that people with self-critical personality styles have often experienced shaming, expectations of high performance and excessive criticism from others in childhood.
“Experiences of one’s parents being critical, uncaring, controlling or maltreating are robustly associated with high levels of self-criticism [in] adulthood,” Kopala-Sibley says. His research has also found that young adults who recall being bullied or excluded are also more self-critical.
When negative self-talk is so ingrained, it can be hard to convince people that it’s a bad thing – Gilbert has found that people can even fear losing their demeaning inner voice. “Some people say self-criticism is really trying to help you,” he says. “No, it’s not.”
While reflecting on your mistakes isn’t a problem, Gilbert says, it’s the “hostility” of self-criticism that does the damage. He explains that just as your body releases hormones when your mind drifts to sexual thoughts, it also responds physically to self-critical thoughts, with spikes in the stress hormone cortisol, which can lead to health problems.
What’s more, researchers have now repeatedly demonstrated that self-criticism can be fantastically unhelpful.
In 1992, academics at the University of Montreal asked 46 students to play darts. Students who were asked to repeat ‘positive verbalisations’ between throws improved faster than a control group who simply rested between throws. Students who were asked to repeat ‘negative verbalisations’ performed the worst of all.
Further studies have replicated these findings and in 2013, Japanese sports psychologists found that swimmers who engaged in positive self-talk swam significantly faster than those who didn’t.
So is that the solution? Run a bubble bath, relax into an evening of self-care and tell yourself you’re fabulous? Actually, it’s a little more complicated (and more scientific) than that.
Read more:
- 'Forest bathing' is a simple, free way to better physical and mental health. Here's why
- What's the best comeback to an insult?
- 6 simple science-backed ways to boost your attention span
Show some compassion
Gilbert has developed techniques known as compassion-focused therapy and compassionate mind training (CMT), psychotherapeutic approaches that help people develop self-compassion. “The first thing is recognising the harm you’re doing to yourself as a person,” he says.
Gilbert works with patients to help them understand the origins of their critical voice – are they really speaking to themselves, or are they hearing the echo of an abusive parent?
By examining exactly what the self-critical voice is saying, Gilbert will also help patients understand that it’s not trying to be helpful. “It’s not asking you, ‘What’s the problem? Why are you struggling?’,” he says. “It’s very hostile: ‘Why are you so stupid? What’s wrong with you? You’re just lazy!’”
This is where the compassion comes in. Gilbert helps patients practice compassionate voice tones – you could start off by imagining that you’re supporting a friend who is struggling with the same frustrations that you are.
Using brain scans captured via functional magnetic resonance imaging in 2010, Gilbert and his peers were able to find that self-reassurance was associated with the same areas of the brain as being compassionate to others.
“So, you know how to be compassionate,” Gilbert tells his patients, “What is it that stops you from using those same ways of dealing with disappointment on yourself?” If that seems like a hard place to start, psychologists at the University of California have found that being compassionate to others can actually increase our self-compassion – they called it “activating the inner caregiver”.
Another CMT exercise involves unmasking the critical voice – Gilbert compares it to pulling back the curtain on the Wizard of Oz and finding an ordinary man. “You imagine the critic in front of you and then get round the back of the critic to see what they’re really worried about,” he says, arguing that most self-criticism is based on an underlying fear, be it of rejection or failure.
Gilbert says that once people identify that underlying fear, they can become more compassionate about it.
The psychologist also believes that we must use our bodies to support our minds. Breathing techniques can help stimulate the vagus nerve, a part of our parasympathetic nervous system that can calm us down by slowing our heart rate and neutralising our fight-or-flight response.
“People who are very self-critical are often not so good at stimulating the vagus,” Gilbert says. He advises breathing with your diaphragm – inhaling for five seconds and resting for two seconds, before breathing out for five seconds.
Just as self-criticism has physiological effects, so does self-compassion.
One 2021 study by neuropsychologists at the University of Coimbra in Portugal found that two weeks of CMT exercises improved people’s heart rate variability, which is associated with resilience to stress. That same year, a meta-analysis of 20 self-compassion studies also found that these interventions produced a significant reduction in self-criticism.
Self-compassion has even been found to help us in the same way that we assume self-criticism does – in 2012, psychologists at the University of California discovered that being accepting of yourself after making a mistake increases motivation.
Give it a name
Self-compassion isn’t the only antidote to self-criticism – alternative schools of thought are also emerging. Prof Golan Shahar is a clinical health psychologist and author of Erosion: The Psychopathology of Self-Criticism. He believes that curiosity is key.
“If [you’re] really self-critical, why would you allow a compassionate voice to diffuse your self-criticism?” he asks. Instead, Shahar believes self-criticism is motivated by a desire for self-knowledge.
“Understanding ourselves and the world is paramount for us in order to survive. It’s an evolutionary dictum,” he says, “So the other school [of thought] that I’m trying to advance that is alternative to self-compassion is curiosity.”
Shahar believes that we need to understand our self-critical voice in order to undermine it – “understanding like in espionage, where you understand the enemy”. Trying to understand it, Shahar says, “invokes curiosity – and by invoking curiosity, you distance yourself from the voice and start to observe how it essentially ruins your life from afar.”
Shahar has developed an intervention known as ‘multiple-selves analysis’, which he has been practising with his patients, although it hasn’t yet undergone clinical trials.
This method involves characterising your inner bully – firstly, by coming up with a name for it (some people choose the name of an ex-partner). Shahar encourages people to recall their first encounter with the voice and assign it a colour and sound, usually a type of music they associate with the way the voice talks (often, this is heavy metal).
Shahar colours in one segment of a pie chart to represent the voice and to demonstrate to patients that the self-critic is only one aspect of their inner world. He then uses the same techniques to help people find other, non-critical voices within themselves – firstly, by coming up with another element of their personality, for example their love of fun, before similarly assigning that voice a name, colour and sound.
“We repeat the cycle and we come up with five voices,” Shahar says. Everyday, patients are then asked to enlarge or decrease the size of the coloured segments to record which voice is more dominant.
“So people really see what is affected when the self-critical voice is increased,” Shahar explains. Gradually, patients discover that their self-critical voices aren’t consistent with the voice’s professed goals – I don’t actually get off the sofa and prepare a salad after being berated.
Shahar stresses that his method is not a one-size-fits-all cure for self-criticism, but is simply one intervention that’s part of a wider journey. Other researchers have, however, demonstrated the efficacy of similar tasks.
Express yourself
In 2012, psychologists at the University of Hertfordshire split 46 people into two groups, asking the first group to write about their life goals and the second to review a film or book.
In a two-week follow-up, they found that participants who wrote about their goals had reduced levels of self-criticism, although those who used prescriptive words such as “could”, “would” and “should” were least likely to have experienced a decrease. Based on this, it seems, that expressive writing can help us to reassure ourselves and, in practice, that writing could be a simple diary entry.
The ‘two-chair technique’ is another method for diminishing your critical voice. Patients move between two chairs to encourage a dialogue between two aspects of their selves – in the critic’s chair, the harsh inner voice speaks freely before the patient switches to the other chair and expresses how it feels to be criticised.
In this chair, patients may grow angrier and more assertive towards the critic, while the critic may become more compassionate as it hears from a voice pleading, “Stop attacking me.” Studies have found that this technique effectively reduces self-criticism as well as depression and anxiety symptoms, while simultaneously increasing self-compassion and self-reassurance.
Still, we can’t just look for magic bullets.
David Zuroff is a psychology professor at McGill University in Canada, and an expert in self-criticism. He notes that a temporary “state” of self-criticism is not necessarily maladaptive, but that things become problematic when it’s a habitual “trait”.
Similarly, so-called behavioural self-criticism – “Why did I do that stupid thing?” – is less troubling than “global” self-criticism, whereby people degrade their entire selfhood.
“I believe that brief laboratory or internet interventions are unlikely to produce lasting change in self-criticism,” Zuroff says. He argues instead that “any of several forms of psychotherapy is likely to be more beneficial for the severely self-critical”.
And – no matter what the voice in your head says – this is an issue worth tackling. Zuroff’s longitudinal studies have found that high levels of self-criticism in people aged 12 predicted dissatisfaction and maladjustment by the time they’d reached 31 years of age.
“You can hardly name a human problem that hasn’t been empirically linked with high levels of self-criticism,” he says – giving examples from depression to gambling addiction.
In short, Zuroff says, when it comes to berating and bullying yourself, “It would be a good thing for people who do it a lot to do it less.”
About our experts
Paul Gilbert is a professor of clinical psychology at the University of Derby in the UK. His research on self-criticism encompasses both neuroscience and evolutionary psychology. You can find his work published in Integrating Psychotherapy and Psychophysiology, British Journal of Clinical Psychology, and Mindfulness.
Daniel Kopala-Sibley is a psychology professor at Canada’s University of Calgary who researches the role of developmental experiences on mental health. His work has been published by Personality and Individual Differences, International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, and Journal of Abnormal Psychology.
Prof Golan Shahar is a clinical health psychologist and author of Erosion: The Psychopathology of Self-Criticism. His work has been published by Journal of Consulting & Clinical Psychology, Psychodynamic Psychiatry, and Developmental Psychology.
David Zuroff is a psychology professor at McGill University in Canada, and an expert in self-criticism. He has been published in International Journal of Cognitive Therapy, Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology, and Journal of Abnormal Psychology.
Read more: