Inner Critic: How Meditation Can Help Counter Your Inner Critic

Your inner critic is a mental inner voice that criticizes and judges your actions, thoughts, and behaviors. In the early twentieth century, Austrian psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud referred to it as the “superego,” and it’s been a constant source of study for psychotherapists ever since.

Learning to address the excesses of your critical inner voice is an important element of self-care and holistic well-being. Popular psychology movements of today—like cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) and acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT)—assist individuals with reframing their inner critic’s negative thought processes.

At its best, the inner critic is one voice among many—and you can take it or leave it. If you can sift through these self-critical thoughts objectively and analytically, you can discover whether they’re valuable or merely detrimental and untrue. The former can help you improve as a person; the latter will only bring you down.

At its worst, the inner critic can act as an intrusive, overpowering force—wracking you with unnecessary self-doubt and causing insecurity, depression, and anxiety. Letting your inner critic run roughshod over you like this usually isn’t healthy. Managing this facet of your inner dialogue can lead to positive personal growth possibilities, but left to its own devices, it can cause an overwhelming amount of negative self-talk and low self-esteem.

Assessing your mental health means knowing when your inner critic is doing nothing but harm. Here are three examples of an inner voice that engages in self-destructive behaviors:

1. 1. Dwelling on the past: If you regularly beat yourself up for past mistakes and regrets about life experiences, recognize that many of these thoughts are self-defeating. Your inner critic draws on memories like this to keep you incapable of growing in the present moment.
2. 2. Focusing on shortcomings: Your inner critic might be a perfectionist—holding you to impossibly high standards—or just constantly echo your deepest insecurities. If you think of yourself in the second person a lot—”you’re not good enough,” “you’ll never succeed,” and so on—you might be under the thumb of your inner critic.
3. 3. Worrying about the future: You might constantly think that you’ll inevitably say or do something to destroy your future prospects. Your inner critic might insist bad things are inevitable and that you should always stay in your comfort zone since you’re bound to mess things up if you color outside the lines. Heeding these judgmental demands will limit your ability to grow and enjoy all life has to offer.

Slowing down and centering your mind can help you combat the critical inner voice in your head. Here are just five ways meditation can help you:

1. 1. Empowers you with positive affirmations: Through certain types of meditation—like metta or the “lovingkindness practice”—you can use upbuilding and compassionate thoughts and mantras to anchor your sense of self-compassion and combat the worst urges of your inner critic. These affirmations help reorient your mind in a positive direction holistically.
2. 2. Enables you to recognize impermanence: At the center of meditative practice is a recognition that the present moment is ever fleeting. As soon as you pay attention to one breath, your mind whisks away to some stray thought. The more you do this—always returning to the subject of meditative focus—the more you’ll see your mind divert to your inner critic’s viewpoint. It’ll become obvious as you continue to meditate that it’s just one point of view among many—and you can pay attention to its demands or ignore it just the same.
3. 3. Encourages you to determine what’s of value: Not all self-criticism is bad. You should discard needlessly negative thoughts, but you can turn the inner critic into one of your best friends if you tame its voice. The equanimity brought on through meditation helps you see when a critical thought can be constructive or when you should ignore it for being untrue and damaging.
4. 4. Gives you an opportunity to practice compassion: A mindfulness practice allows you to see yourself from the outside looking in—and this experience often brings about a sense of self-compassion. As you meditate, you can see and feel the damage the inner critic is doing to you from an objective standpoint. This can lead you to treat yourself more kindly and, as a result, treat others more kindly, too.
5. 5. Helps you detach from your ego: Meditation allows you to reorient your sense of self-esteem away from the attachments of your ego. By distancing yourself from your ego (or “I, me, mine” thoughts) in general, you also distance yourself and even silence your inner critic. Although it might sound contradictory, thinking less about yourself, in general, can significantly boost self-confidence overall.

Find something comfortable to sit or lie on, grab a MasterClass Annual Membership, and dial into the present moment with Jon Kabat-Zinn, the father of the Western mindfulness movement. From formal meditation exercises to examinations of the science behind mindfulness, Jon will prepare you for the most important practice of them all: life itself.