How to Unmask Your Inner Critic

Camden Baucke, MS, LLP

The harshest voices in the back of our minds rarely claim to be anything but normal.

An athlete who calls themselves an “idiot” after every failed attempt is simply doing what they would deem normal. A student who ruminates over their failures and how they let their family down might believe their inner voice is just “reminding them of what’s important.” But it’s not.

It’s natural to be convinced that self-neglect and punishing ourselves is an effective way of navigating life’s challenges. However, it often has less to do with the challenges and more to do with our way of regulating our self-image.

In this article, I will help you unmask your inner critic and uncover better ways to regulate yourself.

What is Self-Regulation?

Self-regulation is the practice of independently managing your behaviors, thoughts, and emotions.

Think of it like a personal project outside of school and work. No one is telling you how to do it, why you should do it, or when it’s due. The timetable, purpose, and outcome are completely your own. However, if you want to get it done, that means you should develop proactive self-regulation to set a routine, rules, and goals for yourself—they’re necessary, but how you enforce them is important.

If you perform independently with no issues, you don’t need corrective self-regulation—you’re doing exactly what you want. However, It’s when things go wrong that corrective self-regulation plays a vital role in returning yourself back to baseline and getting back on track.

Healthy corrective self-regulation can address negative emotions such as anger, anxiety, or depression, with helpful methods such as walking, journaling, or talking to a friend. It also includes investing time and resources into finding a mental health professional who can assist you with getting to the root of your issues. Taking good care of yourself and seeking help are two pathways to healthy corrective self-regulation.

What is Unhealthy Corrective Self-Regulation?

If you are a coach, and you are training an athlete who just botched their performance, how do you address them?

If you scream at them, call them names, criticize, and shove them, that’s unhealthy corrective self-regulation. If you direct this same energy toward yourself, it’s self-criticism. It’s a learned pattern of treating yourself worse in hopes of better outcomes.

In other words, it’s punishment. From decades of research, we know that punishment doesn’t make someone avoid a behavior, it makes them avoid the punisher. If you beat yourself up between your ears, chances are you might dissociate and distract yourself to get away from your inner critic.

I wouldn’t blame you.

Most of the time, punishment doesn’t help you work harder or smarter. It activates your sympathetic nervous system, which drains you of energy quicker and increases recovery time. Self-punishment contributes to several clinical conditions and medical complications. Simply put, it doesn’t work.

Even worse, it rarely has anything to do with what you’re actually trying to accomplish.

The Inner Critic uses Vague Language

Unhealthy corrective self-regulation, or punishment, can start as a pattern of behaviors, but persist as a framework.

A framework that’s not specific to a certain action or situation, but applied to almost everything you do.

Imagine being punished by an athletics coach. You learn to speak that way to yourself and later use that self-criticism to punish yourself for the way you fold your laundry. Where and how you beat yourself up might actually have little to nothing to do with where it began in the first place.

When unhealthy corrective self-regulation is a framework, you must ask yourself a simple question: How does my inner critic speak to the grounded and tangible challenge in front of me?

More than likely, it doesn’t.

It can feel so unquestionably normal to criticize yourself until you realize it has little connection to the reality of your situation.

For example, imagine you’re resting on Sunday afternoon. However, your inner critic arrives to correct your behavior. It beats you down by saying you’re being lazy, uncaring, and worthless. It claims you aren’t working hard enough, other people are, and you’re letting yourself and everyone down by doing nothing.

So, what is it actually talking about? Is it talking about work around the house? The light bulb in the bathroom that needs replacing? Does it want you to exercise to improve your heart health? Is the critic referencing your career? What part(s) of your career? Your current position, your desired position, a specific project, what?

If it feels like it could be any and all, then that’s a vague answer. A vague reason to beat yourself up is a lie. It’s self-destruction looking for a way to rationalize what it normally does. That is a framework of self-criticism disguised as self-improvement or healthy self-regulation. It does not improve your life, nor does it regulate yourself in a healthy way.

Healthy Self-Regulation uses Grounded Language

An athlete doesn’t need punishment for a better performance. They need reinforcement and detailed coaching for a better next attempt. An academic does not need a scathing review of their work, just structured reasoning behind their mistakes, illuminating a method of fixing it. Improvement doesn’t require destruction.

In the same way, you don’t need to beat yourself up to get better. In fact, it will likely make it harder. Alternatively, you could support yourself as a way of self-regulation.

Imagine you’re not performing well in a class. Instead of beating yourself and starting a self-destructive cycle, you could explore methods of improving your situation in a variety of grounded ways.

Maybe you need more time to study, so make room for more of it in your schedule. Maybe you need a study partner, so reach out to people in class. Maybe you worry when you study, so make your study sessions more comfortable. Bring a pillow, listen to music, write it out on a white board, get yourself a meal right beforehand, and maybe have a mid-study snack. This is proactive self-regulation so you need to correct yourself less.

When you make a mistake that demands correction, choose how you do so in a supportive way. Hold yourself accountable, but punishment is unnecessary. Sure you need to remind yourself to do your homework, but beating yourself up makes you less likely to do it, and it will likely decrease the quality of your work.

Instead, step back, and do some diaphragmatic breathing. Reevaluate the situation and readjust your strategy. Pick out the pain points and imagine better methods of managing them. These suggestions will almost always be grounded in nature—changes you can make with your hands, body, and brain. They’re not vague suggestions implicating character, but grounded strategies to improve outcomes.

It’s about taking your self-image out of the equation.

When Did your Self-Image get Involved?

Unhelpful self-correction is often more about self-image than it is about the task at hand.

The task at hand is usually about biology, technique, effort, time, and practice. However, those who punish themselves vaguely might attribute their struggles to personality, worth, and character. Unfortunately, those are all intangible, unmoved even by success, and can’t be changed by your next attempt. If you attribute your mishaps to invisible and damned components of your essence, then your next attempt will likely be worried and worse.

For example, when I coached shotput throwers in track and field I focused on (1) technique, (2) effort, and (3) persistence. Technique is grounded in that sport, because every refined inch of your form helps you succeed. Effort is necessary, and can be tracked by the kinetic movement in every throw and minutes spent throwing. Persistence is measurable by the amount of times an athlete can fail, and still support themselves enough to get back into the ring and try again.

The only time I coached self-esteem was when it was being inappropriately applied to the 3 factors just mentioned.

If your inner critic punishes your image, it disregards the task it’s using to hurt you.

Such self-criticism usually has a history—a voice that you internalized and made your own. It could have been a parent, teacher, coach, sibling, friend, or anyone who chose to punish rather than support. This past is worth looking into. If you can identify who’s voice the inner critic is, you can disregard it. You can choose to take reasonable accountability and support yourself on the way to success.

Regulating your actions is grounded and helpful, but regulating your self-image is vague and self-destructive.

Final Thoughts

Don’t let normal patterns of unhealthy self-regulation rule your day.

Unmask your inner critic by questioning its normality. Take a deep look at it and explore it’s scope and intended target. Is your inner voice supporting or punishing? Is it specifically noting your behaviors or is it vaguely referencing your self? Is your self-esteem involved, and if it is, why? Who taught you to speak like that to yourself, when did you learn that pattern? If it’s not accurate or helpful, why still do it? Why trust your inner critic? What else could you do?

Use your imagination and ponder better patterns of self-regulation. What would actually help you achieve your goals? How can you healthily self-regulate in both a proactive and a corrective way? You can set yourself up for success and keep yourself on track without beating yourself up—ironically, it just takes technique, effort, and persistence to find out how.