Why Am I So Hard on Myself?
You said something slightly wrong in a meeting last Tuesday, or you forgot a birthday, or you snapped at one of the children, and you've been running it back ever since. Nobody else has mentioned it. Nobody else would. The only person still talking about it is you, and the tone you're using on yourself is one you'd never use on anyone you loved. If you've typed why am I so hard on myself into a search box, that's the voice I want to talk about, because I've got one too, and mine still goes off over a skipped word.
The Voice Isn't Yours
I said this on the radio last December and I'll stand by it here: self-criticism is normally not your voice. It's the voice given to you by others. Somewhere early on, a teacher, a parent, an older brother, a coach, somebody whose opinion counted, said a thing about you often enough that you stopped hearing it from them and started saying it yourself. It didn't have to be cruel. "You're not listening." "Why can't you just concentrate?" "You're the clumsy one." A child doesn't file that as one adult's opinion on one wet afternoon. A child files it as information about who they are.
The research points the same way, as far as it goes. A 2023 review that pooled the studies on it found self-criticism runs higher in people whose early attachments were less secure, and higher still where that insecurity took the anxious form rather than the avoidant one. That's an association across many studies, not a verdict on your childhood, and the authors say the measures need sharpening. But it fits what I see. The people who are hardest on themselves almost never grew up around people who were soft on them.
Mine came from a classroom in Wolverhampton in the 1970s. I've told the story of the stupid class and the red pen on my ADHD and neurodiversity page, so I'll spare you the whole thing. What it said then matters less than the fact that it's still saying it. And if the sentence yours uses most is that you're about to be found out, my imposter syndrome post is the one for you.
It Never Grew Up
Here's the part most people miss. The voice formed when you were small, to keep you safe, and it never grew up. It still talks to you the way it talked to you then: in warnings, in blame, in the language of a frightened child. You're fifty and it's addressing a five-year-old.
I'll give you mine. I talk for a living, more or less: radio, teaching, the room. I'm good at it if I'm prepared and I know my subject. But if I have to read something out loud, I feel it. I'm dyslexic, and at school I was made fun of for finding reading aloud difficult, and if I skip a word in front of a room now, something in me goes straight back to that classroom. Intellectually I'm fine. I'm just wired differently. The voice doesn't know that. It's still waiting for the laughter!
That's why you can't out-shout it. I've tried, and so have you (that's what all the "come on, pull yourself together" is). You have to change the relationship with it instead, and the rest of this post is about how.
A Stupid Thing or a Stupid Person
Listen to the grammar of the voice, because the grammar is where the damage is done. Brené Brown draws a line I use with nearly everyone who comes to see me. Guilt is "I did a bad thing". Shame is "I am bad". The same mistake, two completely different sentences. "That was a stupid thing to do" is about an action, and actions can be changed. "I'm stupid" is about who you are, and there's nothing to be done about who you are except feel worse. You can do stupid things. It doesn't mean to say you're stupid.
Most people's critic speaks almost entirely in the second kind of sentence. If yours does, don't argue with it. Translate it.
Why Telling Yourself You're Great Doesn't Work
On the radio I've recommended positive affirmations. "I am enough." "I am worthy of the space I take up." I still think the second one is a good sentence. But I owe you the study that cuts against my own advice, because it's the most useful thing I found while writing this.
In 2009 three psychologists ran a survey and two experiments on exactly this. People with low self-esteem who repeated the statement "I'm a lovable person", or who concentrated on the ways it was true, ended up feeling worse than people who didn't. People who already had high self-esteem felt a little better, and only a little. The authors put it plainly: positive self-statements may help some people and backfire for the very people who need them most.
I think I know why, and it's the grammar again. If the critic has convinced you that you're not lovable, then "I'm a lovable person" lands as a claim the critic gets to cross-examine, and it has forty years of evidence lined up. The affirmation starts the argument, and the argument is the thing you were trying to stop. (One detail from the same experiments: the people who were asked to think about how the statement was true and not true did better than the people who just repeated it. Honesty beat cheerleading.)
What Does Work, and How Much
Self-compassion is the usual answer, and the evidence for it is real but smaller than the version you'll see on Instagram. A 2021 review pooled 20 randomised trials, 1,350 people in all, of courses built to reduce self-criticism specifically. They worked: a medium-sized reduction on average, and more when the course was longer. Two honest limits, which the authors give themselves: the studies were of moderate quality, and the effect was bigger when the comparison group was doing nothing at all.
That second one matters, and an earlier review spelled out what it means. Across 22 trials, compassion-based therapies improved self-compassion, anxiety and depression. But when the comparison was another active treatment rather than a waiting list, the difference disappeared for every outcome. So these approaches work. They have not been shown to work better than good therapy of other kinds. I'm not saying don't bother. I'm saying know the size of the claim before you pay for anything with the word compassion in the title.
There's one small, specific tool with decent lab evidence behind it, which is talking to yourself by name rather than as "I". "David, you made a mistake, and that's all right." I've written about it on my self-esteem page with its limits, so I won't repeat them, except to say it's the one I use in the twenty seconds before I read something aloud.
A Critic Grades You. A Mentor Looks at What You Can Do
I had a teacher who showed me the other voice. From the age of eleven I trained in karate under Kuniaki Sakagami, and his club ran on three words: ability first, grade second. Nobody cared what colour your belt was. They cared what you could do, and if what you could do was better than your belt, you were trained accordingly. He had a phrase, hammering in the nail, for the day a student got above himself and had to be brought back to size. It was never cruel and it was never about who you were. It was about what you'd just done, and what you'd do next.
Years later I ended up coaching a national squad, then teaching, and now I tutor people training to be psychotherapists. The lesson I took from Sakagami is the one I give them: as a teacher you don't have to be better than your students. It's your job to make them better than you!
Now hold your inner critic up against that. A mentor grades the work and then lets you get back to it. A critic grades you, and never stops. The strange thing is that they're the same part of you. The critic is a frightened younger version of you doing a mentor's job badly, because nobody showed it how. So when it starts up, I ask people to picture it sitting across from them, that younger, scared part, and to say something like: I know you're trying to protect me, and I can handle this now.
What I Actually Suggest
Not ten tips. Five things I actually say in the room.
Name it as a thought. "I'm having the thought that I made a fool of myself" is a different sentence from "I made a fool of myself". We are not our thoughts. Thoughts are what we do.
Ask what it's protecting you from. The critic always has a job. Usually it's trying to keep you small so you can't be laughed at again. Thank it, and tell it the laughing finished decades ago.
Translate shame into guilt. Every "I'm useless" becomes "that didn't work". Say it out loud if you have to. It feels silly for a week and then it doesn't.
Don't pick up the second arrow. There's an old Buddhist teaching I used on the show in July. Being hit by an arrow hurts. Picking it up and shooting yourself with it again is optional. The mistake is the first arrow. "This proves what I always knew about myself" is the second, and the second is the one that does the lasting damage.
Forgive the version of you that didn't know yet. That's the line for the people replaying something they said last week. The mind replays it hoping to fix it. It can't. What it can do is forgive the person who said it, who was doing their best with what they had at the time.
And if the voice has been running your decisions for years, and your good days as well as your bad ones, the NHS has a plain page on long-standing low self-esteem that's worth reading before you decide whether you need more than a blog post.
If you come and see me about this, I won't tell you you're wonderful. I'll ask whose voice it is, and we'll work out what it's been protecting you from. And if the voice is already telling you your problems aren't bad enough to bother anyone with, that's the voice I mean.
Send me a messageThe voice will probably never go completely. Mine hasn't. It just stops being in charge.
