Hi,

This week, I had to remind myself of something important that we all forget.

I've been stressed recently, trying to deal with different issues with home and work life. Turning 40 definitely didn't help. I had started to think very negatively about my situation for much of the time, forgetting all the excellent things in my life that I am grateful for.

It's only this week that I became aware of what I was doing. I caught myself criticising myself, catastrophising, and generally assuming the worst. Hours of it.

This was all a total waste of time and energy.

Calming the inner critic

(Midjourney made me this from the prompt "the inner critic". Terrifying.)

Self-admonishment is actually a perennial problem of mine. It requires a lot of mental attention or "mindfulness" for me to tackle, in the sense that I need to remind myself of the trap - and that it is indeed a trap.

I wrote a helpful mini-essay about it last year on Twitter. I am reprinting it below to remind myself, and to help any of you who might have similar tendencies.

---START---

Why You Have An Inner Critic In Your Head & 3 Actionable Ways To Get It To Chill Out A Little

You suck. You suck because you're an idiot.

Did I just read your mind?

The majority of us have a grating voice in our head that unfortunately is often a bully. Rather than thinking about cool new things to try out, say, it will mercilessly berate you for being a failure and say you don't deserve nice things.

What's the point of this damn thing if it's so hypercritical?

The founder of Gestalt therapy, Fritz Perls, called it the 'topdog':

"This is the basis for the famous self-torture game. We usually take for granted that the topdog is right, and in many cases the topdog makes impossible perfectionistic demands. So if you are cursed with perfectionism, then you are absolutely sunk. This ideal is a yardstick which always gives you the opportunity to browbeat yourself, to berate yourself and others."

In his book Chatter, psychologist Ethan Kross says that the inner critic is part of our internal system of making sure we actually do and remember things. As philosopher Alfred Korzybski would have put it, it helps us "time-bind" our experiences.

So we need the damn thing. We don't actually want to get rid of it.

It's just that sometimes we let it get out of hand, especially when we have high standards.

3 small tips for calming the inner critic:

1. Kross writes that you should make it talk in second person to help distance yourself from it. E.g. instead of "What am I gonna do about this mess I've made?" try "Adam, what are you gonna do about this mess you've made?"

2. Kross also says to put yourself in situations that create a sense of awe, like looking at some amazing view. These tend to quiet the mind and put you in the present.

3. Executive coach Joe Hudson recommends you set a few daily reminders on your phone that get you to randomly check in with what the voice is saying, a gentle reminder that you don't need to identify with it.

---END---

Mad Men with mad advice

I can also add that I am trying to do a couple other things at the moment. One is listening to copywriter Earl Nightingale's famous audio essay The Strangest Secret a couple times a week. Back in the 1950s, it was apparently the first spoken record to sell a million copies.

It sounds antiquated now, and his voice is hilarious (think "chain-smoking Mad Men character"), but the core message is strong:

You become what you think about.

At first glance, this smells like hippy bollocks. But even the most skeptical of us can see it when examining how we approach social situations.

If you go to a party in the right mood, you will have the time of your life. But if you'd rather stay home, only going because you promised the host, that party will seem like a pain in the arse. In the former situation, you will be the life of the party, while in the latter, you will be the silent wallflower giving people the evil eye.

In the same vein, if you constantly tell yourself you're horrible and don't deserve nice things, then you'll end up acting in accordance with that message. So why bother expending energy on doing that to yourself?

Expanding these concepts to the wider world

One other concept I'm trying to keep in mind is the internal locus of control.

Sometimes it's easy to feel like your life is beholden to the whims of others, that it's controlled by forces outside yourself:

• The weather dictates what you can do that day
• The taxman dictates how you can spend your budget
• The war in Ukraine dictates how much petrol you can put in your car

But it's much more preferable, and certainly more enjoyable, to remember that much of life is determined by ourselves. We don't have to be victims, just remember what we do realistically have influence over, and act accordingly:

• Wear rainproof clothing and just go outside either way
• Hire an accountant to help you reduce your tax bill
• Buy an electric car and stop using petrol stations completely

If you're really ambitious, it's even better to aim for what writer Robert Anton Wilson recommended:

“When you define the power elite as somebody else, I regard that as a loser script. I define the power elite as myself and my friends, and that’s a winner’s script.

You should view the world as a conspiracy run by a closely-­knit group of nearly omnipotent people—and think of those people as yourself and your friends.”

That's enough hippy bollocks for this week. I'm very grateful to you for reading it today. Now go drink some water.

Adam

p.s. You can find more horrifying AI-generated pictures of "the inner critic" by Midjourney here.

Adam Zulawski

TranslatingMarek.com / Procrastilearning.com / More stuff

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