"Why Am I So Hard on Myself?" Learning to Respond Differently to Your Inner Critic

One of the striking things about listening to people describe themselves in clinic is how differently they sometimes speak about themselves compared with everyone else.

A friend makes a mistake and they think:

"Everyone gets things wrong sometimes."

They make exactly the same mistake and the response becomes:

"I'm useless. Why can't I do anything properly?"

Someone else needs a day off because they are struggling and they would tell them to look after themselves.

When they need the same thing, they tell themselves they are lazy.

This kind of self-criticism can become so familiar that people stop noticing it. It simply becomes the voice in their head that narrates everything they do.

And because it comes from our own mind, we can easily assume it must be telling us the truth.

Self-Criticism Can Feel Useful

People are not usually hard on themselves for no reason.

Often, somewhere along the way, they have learned that criticism keeps them functioning.

"If I'm not hard on myself, I'll become lazy."

"I need pressure or I'll never get anything done."

"If I expect more from myself, I'll perform better."

Sometimes self-criticism does create action.

Fear of failure can make someone work extremely hard. Perfectionism can produce excellent results. Worrying about disappointing people can make somebody remarkably reliable.

The difficulty is the cost.

A strategy can produce achievement while still damaging the person using it.

Notice the Difference Between Accountability and Attack

There is an important distinction between recognising that something went wrong and attacking yourself because it went wrong.

Suppose you forgot an important appointment.

A useful response might be:

"I forgot the appointment. I need a better reminder system so this doesn't happen again."

Self-criticism sounds more like:

"I'm completely hopeless. I always mess everything up."

Only one of those responses actually helps solve the problem.

Accountability looks at what happened and asks what can be learned.

Self-attack takes an event and turns it into a judgement about who you are.

This distinction can be surprisingly powerful.

Watch Out for "Always" and "Never"

When people are upset with themselves, their language often becomes absolute.

"I always get things wrong."

"I never finish anything."

"Everyone else manages this."

"Nothing I do is good enough."

These statements can feel completely true in the moment.

But they usually take one experience and expand it into a conclusion about your entire life.

If you notice yourself using words such as always, never, everyone or nothing, it can be worth becoming curious.

Is this an accurate description of what happened?

Or is it the language of frustration?

You don't need to replace it with forced positivity.

"I'm amazing at everything!" is unlikely to feel believable.

Aim for accuracy instead.

"That didn't go the way I wanted it to."

That is very different from:

"Everything I do goes wrong."

Ask What You Would Say to Someone Else

This is a familiar strategy because it is often useful.

Imagine that somebody you care about came to you with exactly the same problem.

What would you say?

You probably wouldn't tell a friend who was struggling with depression that they were pathetic.

You probably wouldn't tell an anxious teenager that they needed to stop being ridiculous.

You wouldn't usually tell someone who made a genuine mistake that the mistake proved they were worthless.

Yet people can speak to themselves in precisely these terms.

The aim isn't to pretend that mistakes don't matter.

It is to respond to yourself with the same combination of honesty and humanity that you would usually offer another person.

Self-Compassion Isn't Letting Yourself Off the Hook

This is where some people become uncomfortable.

They hear the phrase self-compassion and imagine making excuses for everything.

"It doesn't matter that I didn't do it."

"Nothing is ever my responsibility."

"I should just accept everything about myself and stop trying to improve."

That isn't what I mean.

You can be compassionate and still have standards.

You can acknowledge that you behaved badly and apologise.

You can recognise that you didn't prepare sufficiently and decide to prepare differently next time.

You can accept responsibility without deciding that the mistake defines you as a person.

In fact, we often learn more effectively when we are able to look at mistakes clearly rather than becoming overwhelmed by shame about them.

Be Careful With Comparison

Self-criticism often becomes louder when we compare ourselves with other people.

The problem is that these comparisons are rarely fair.

We compare our internal experience with somebody else's external appearance.

We know how anxious we felt before giving the presentation.

We only see how confident the other person looked.

We know how difficult it was to get ourselves out of bed.

We see somebody else posting photographs from the gym at 6am.

We know every mistake we made while parenting.

We see another family's smiling photograph.

We are comparing two completely different sets of information.

If comparison repeatedly leaves you feeling inadequate, it may be worth asking whether the comparison is actually giving you useful information.

Try Changing the Question

When something goes wrong, self-criticism tends to ask questions such as:

"What's wrong with me?"

"Why am I like this?"

"Why can't I just be normal?"

These questions sound like attempts to understand the problem, but they often lead nowhere useful.

Try changing them.

"What made this difficult?"

"What would help next time?"

"Was I expecting something realistic from myself?"

"Is there a practical change I can make?"

"What do I need now?"

The first set of questions puts you on trial.

The second set gives you something to work with.

Notice When Your Standards Keep Moving

Some people rarely experience a sense of having done enough.

They complete one task and immediately focus on the next.

They receive nine positive comments and spend the evening thinking about the one criticism.

They achieve something they had worked towards for years and within days it becomes the new minimum standard.

Nothing is allowed to count for very long.

If this sounds familiar, try deliberately noticing completion.

Not celebrating every ordinary task as an extraordinary achievement, but simply allowing yourself to register:

"I did that."

"That went well."

"I handled that better than I would have done a year ago."

If your mind is extremely efficient at recording failures, you may need to become more deliberate about recording progress.

A Final Thought

There is a strange assumption many of us carry that being cruel to ourselves will somehow make us better.

Sometimes it makes us work harder.

But working harder and functioning better are not necessarily the same thing.

You can spend your life being driven forward by the fear that you are never quite good enough.

You may even achieve a great deal that way.

The question is what it feels like to live inside that system.

Changing self-criticism does not mean lowering every standard or pretending that mistakes don't matter.

It means learning to separate:

"I got something wrong"

from:

"There is something wrong with me."

One describes an event.

The other becomes an identity.

When you notice your inner critic becoming particularly loud, you don't have to silence it completely.

Start by questioning whether it is actually helping.

Then try replacing judgement with curiosity.

What happened?

What made this difficult?

What can I learn?

What would help next time?

Those questions still allow you to grow.

They just don't require you to hurt yourself in the process.

Dr James Glass
MBChB MRCPsych
Medical Director, WMI Psychiatry