What to do when you hate the voice in your head
Learn how you can let go of a nasty and intrusive inner narrator or critic
“I hate my inner dialog!” a client said to me in a session recently.
And as her coach, I wanted to give her a giant, virtual hug. Because I had the same relationship with my own mind for a long time. I know how painful it is to wake up each morning having to listen to intrusive, mean, and sometimes bizarre thoughts that make you feel awful.
If that’s the situation you find yourself in, then I hope this article can help. Working with a nasty inner narrator or critic is a confusing and counter-intuitive process.
Honestly, it’s a lot like being stuck in quicksand. The more effort you exert to try to “deal” with this voice, the more you get sucked in.
Here’s how you finally step out of the mess.
Part 1: Why you have a nasty inner narrator in the first place
My most recent article goes into this in a lot more detail, but in short, a nasty inner narrator gets created like this:
- Something happens to you that makes you feel like shit. An accident, a rejection, a fight, a loss, etc.
- These emotions are painful and awful. As a kid, they pass through you pretty quickly. But as an adult and a respectable member of society, you get really good at not feeling these emotions. You learn to suppress, project, ruminate, and distract from them.
- This unintentionally teaches your brain that these emotions are actual threats to your physical safety and need to be avoided at all costs.
- So your brain, ever the protector, starts trying to scheme and control reality so that you never end up in situations that will make you feel this way again.
Our poor brains have a single job in our lifetimes—to keep us safe and alive. And they will do anything within their power to make that happen. Even if that thing actually makes us miserable. Your nasty inner narrator is actually sort of like an overbearing, anxious, protective parent—it just wants you to be safe.
If you’ve unintentionally treated rejection as a mortal threat, your inner narrator will start telling you to avoid any opportunities in which you could be rejected.
If anxiety has been the problem, then your inner narrator will start telling you to avoid the places, people, and thoughts that make you feel threatened.
If you believe that these thoughts are “you,” or your “authentic voice,” then you’ll listen to them and act as if they were entirely true. Your life will become smaller and more painful as a result.
Which is why one of the first insights I give my clients is called cognitive diffusion. Cognitive diffusion is a fancy, scientific term that essentially means you are not the voice in your head.
That voice isn’t you, it’s just a collection of thoughts your brain has been repetitively thinking to help you make sense of and navigate your life.
Once you’ve realized this, you can start to actually “debug” the nasty inner narrator.
Part 2: Non-engagement and irrelevance
This is critical to understand.
Your brain does not understand the dialog you have with it. It only understands what you DO when it sends you certain thoughts. Specifically, it is looking to see if you react to a thought or not. If you react to a thought, physically or mentally, you signal relevance. Your brain takes that reaction as positive reinforcement— it will keep sending you that same thought again because you’ve unintentionally shown your brain the thought is useful.
Therefore, the only reason you still have a nasty inner narrator or critic is because you keep reacting, physically or mentally, to the thoughts that compose it.
If your brain tells you, “hey you’re a giant worthless piece of shit” and you do literally ANYTHING with that thought—mentally argue back, try to ‘block’ it, prove it wrong, analyze it, lurch out of your chair and go for a walk—you just signaled relevance. You unintentionally just told your brain, “hey that thought is actually important to my survival—please keep sending it to me!”
And this is why I call this a quicksand problem.
Any effort—mental or physical—to resolve or combat your nasty and whacky thoughts will only make them stick around more. And any attempts to block, suppress, or otherwise “not have” the thought will also backfire because of something called the ironic process of mind. Your brain does not understand the concept of “not” or “no” because again, that’s language. That means in order for you to “not think” a thought, you have to actually think the thought in the first place.
That is why the literal only way that you debug a nasty inner voice is with something called non-engagement. When you do not engage with a thought, you signal irrelevance to your brain. When your brain gets the irrelevant signal, it stops sending you that thought because if you don’t do anything when you get it, clearly, it’s not useful.
Non-engagement is the way out, but that’s a lot easier said than done because not engaging requires you to get really good at feeling all the shit you don’t want to feel.
Part 3: Bravery, and the willingness to feel like shit
If it were truly as easy as just “not reacting to thoughts” then nobody on the planet would have a mean inner narrator, right?
But remember how that inner narrator got formed in the first place? It arose as your brain’s attempt to “save” you from feeling negative emotion—both now and in the future. This is why in my practice, I frequently say that those of us who are overthinkers are often underfeelers. We “think” so much as a way to dissociate from the emotional life of our bodies.
When you start trying non-engagement, you will notice something. The emotional charge behind that thought—fear, sadness, rage, jealously, whatever—will ramp up severely. Your brain will start going haywire because, remember, it thinks feeling this thing is literally going to kill you. It sees your fear or sadness as a pit of lava you’re about to dunk into, so of course it’s going to start getting really, really uncomfortable.
And your job, through all of that chaos, is to do absolutely nothing. Doing nothing over time is the thing that dissolves your nasty inner narrator because it signals irrelevance. Thoughts that are irrelevant don’t automatically resurface.
When I say nothing, I really mean it. You do nothing in reality and you do nothing in your head. Any kind of reaction, even a very subtle, sneaky mental action, will continue to signal relevance to your brain. And when relevance is signalled, the thought will keep resurfacing.
This is not a one-and-done exercise. Your brain is very good at thinking thoughts that you have signalled relevance to over the years.
So if your nasty inner narrator has been with you for a long time, it’s going to take continued dedication (which, ironically, means continued non-effort) for it to subside. I can’t give you specific timelines or expectations for this work. I can only promise you that if you stick with it, it does get better.
Part 4: Common pitfalls along the way
This (non) work may seem simple, but it is certainly not easy. As you go through this process, if it feels like your inner critic isn’t dissolving or is even getting louder, here are some common pitfalls to debug.
- “Checking” to see if the voice is gone. Because of the ironic process, each time you check to see if something is gone, you actually summon it up again in the first place, thereby signalling relevance. Don’t check!
- Sneaky mental reactions. Arguing with the voice, trying to mentally suppress it, journaling about it, or giving it ANY form for mental attention are all counter-productive. Another way to think about irrelevance is non-attention. You need to continually, gently move attention away from the voice.
- Whiplashing your attention. I said “gently” above on purpose. If you try to IMMEDIATELY move your attention away the second the voice chatters, you’re still acting as if the voice is a literal threat to your safety, which will definitely cause your brain to mark it as relevant. Be gentle with your non-engagement.
- Sneaky distractions. This one is a bit complicated. Remember the goal of this work is to feel your negative feelings while living your normal life. We want to move attention away from thought and into living, but we don’t want to do that artificially or urgently. For example, feeling anxious and then immediately going for a walk can quickly become compulsive and not helpful—your brain learns that the walk is what “cures” the anxiety vs learning that the emotion itself is self-resolving and not a threat. That said, it’s not like you can’t ever go for walks—you just want to do them without the explicit, urgent intent to solve or fix a feeling. It’s the difference between “oh God I’m anxious I need to get outside NOW” vs “Ok, I feel a bit anxious and cooped up—I’ll take a stroll in 10 minutes or so.”
- Perfectionism. Don’t analyze if you’re “doing non-engagement right” or start reviewing any potential mistakes you may or may not be making. Again, this will only serve to summon up the thoughts you hate more frequently! Instead, trust that your effort is going to pay off. If, over a few months, you’re in a similar or worse place, then it’s probably time to get a coach or a therapist to help you out.
If you need a guide to help you navigate the (many) pitfalls of debugging a nasty inner voice, I’m here to help! Reach out and we can get a totally free 30 min discovery session on the calendar!
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