← Take Out Therapy: End Overthinking & Overwhelm for Empathic High Achievers
Take Out Therapy: End Overthinking & Overwhelm for Empathic High Achievers
Stop Self-Critical Thoughts and Rewire Your Brain For Less Stress and Overthinking
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In this episode, you'll discover how to stop being ruled by your inner critic. And I'll give you a method to help you finally, Quiet the noise. Welcome to Takeout Therapy, the podcast for empathic high achievers who are done with overworking and overwhelm. I'm Rebecca Hunter, a therapist and anxiety expert here to help you stress less, set better boundaries and finally relax without guilt. If you're ready to stop people pleasing, take control of your mental health and create real balance, you're in the right place. Thanks for listening. Let's get to work. Well, hello there friend. I'm so glad you're here for today's session. In this episode you'll discover why self critical thoughts feel impossible to control. The emotional cost of living in that mental loop. And of course I'll give you a neuroscience based method to take your mind back. Can I just tell you a little something about my life real quick? Yeah. My empty nest is not empty anymore. My boys are back at home for like this transitional period which means that my house is full and noisy again. It's awesome, but also really chaotic. So I had to go out and rent an office to get some quiet space. And this morning, while I was unpacking my old training materials from all the different trainings I've been to and putting them on my new bookshelf, I found this handout on something called called four Steps plus one. I had completely forgotten about it, but when I reread it I thought this is exactly what we need right now. Because these relentless self critical thoughts, they're exhausting. It seems that every time someone comes to see me to get help, the first thing that we end up discovering is the self critical mind. It's relentless, isn't it? It doesn't just whisper to you, it literally narrates everything in the background of life. Every single decision gets questioned. Every mistake you make is proof you're failing. Can you relate to this? This self critical mind is really active at around 3am, isn't it? Replaying something that literally doesn't even matter. And the worst part, I think that really impacts people's mental health is that this churning and this criticizing and this relentless narration, it feels involuntary, like you can't turn it off. The brain just keeps producing evidence all day long against you. It's not just annoying, it can be really painful because it chips away at our self confidence. It makes rest feel unsafe and it turns self improvement into a self attack. And the more you try to fight these thoughts, the louder they get. You use Logic, maybe affirmations, hopefully mindfulness. And sometimes those things help. But the pattern is really strong, isn't it? I always say to people, the pattern is stronger than you are because the inner critic isn't a rational thought. It's habitual brain behavior. It's a loop built from years of conditioning, survival strategies, and frankly, old programming. You start to believe it's just who you are. That's when people start saying, I know that I'm not as terrible as my thoughts make me out to be. I know better, but I cannot stop these thoughts. And honestly, that feeling of helplessness is the real impact. You know you're capable, but your own mind won't even let you chill out. So what most people want isn't to silence their mind completely. Like there's a lot of good stuff going on in there, right? But it's really to have a choice about what you're thinking about. To maybe be able to notice a thought and not spiral into it being self depreciating and this big long narrative about how terrible you are. Right? We really want to be able to separate truth from noise and to live in our own heads without constantly being under attack. That's what this method, the four Steps plus one, actually gives you. It's a way to retrain the brain and step out of some of these self depreciating, self critical thought loops. I had this client one time who you might relate to, but she apologized constantly before she even knew what she was apologizing for. She'd say things like, I'm sorry, I'm probably wasting your time. It's so funny because she used to do it in session, you know, where she was paying me to listen to her and help her and advise her. She would apologize to me and she genuinely believed those words. I started using this framework with her. Being able to label that apology is just a pattern. Over time, she learned to pause, take a breath, and literally reprogram that moment of dialogue that just did not fit the situations of her life. She didn't become a different person, obviously, but she stopped believing that voice, that apologetic voice. That's exactly what the four steps plus one process is designed to do. So I'll give it to you and I'll make it snappy because I know you love my short episodes. This is the four steps plus one strategy. It was developed by a guy named Jeffrey Schwartz, who is an expert in treating ocd, obsessive Compulsive disorder, which is a lot of automatic thinking and behavior that is very addiction and Habit based. He used the work of Gabor Mate actually in his book on addiction to create this process. So the first step that we always want to do is to relabel. So once we notice the thought that we're trying to get out of our lives, just notice it as a symptom. Call it what it is. This is my inner critic. This is a brain habit. That's something my brain does. Labeling really works because it moves you from being emotional about a thought to. To actually stepping back a little and just being able to observe a thought as a thought. When we do this, we activate our own awareness instead of activate a reaction which, you know, a lot of people are just trying to slow down the rate of reaction. An example is the thought I'm so lazy just becomes an observation and a relabeling of like oh, that's my self judgment loop kicking into gear. So relabeling is the first place to pause. And then we want to do what's called re attribute. And what this means is that we have to remind ourselves where this thought comes from. Whether it's old conditioning from your childhood, maybe it's past experiences, maybe it's trauma showing up in your present day life. Whatever it is, it's not the core of who you are, it's not your essence. Reattribution rewires. We stop identifying with that voice as truth and start just seeing it for what it is. It's just a habit, it's just programming, right? So when the thought comes in, an example of re attributing would be to maybe say something like this thought comes from how I was taught to earn worth. It's not true, it's just a pattern. This thought comes from my mother, right? That sounds like my dad. Anytime you can take the thought and give it a background, give it a little bit of context, it's so, so helpful. And then the third step to do is just refocus. Honestly, buy yourself some time, friend. All you have to do is shift your attention from you to a more grounded, solid, value based action. Maybe you're going to move your body or focus on a sensory detail which I talk a lot about. That's the basis of mindfulness. Or perhaps you decide to just do something nice for somebody. The point is that the attention to the thought fuels keeping it going basically right? The more attention a thought gets, the more that thought will expand and keep stay alive. However, when you shift your attention, you weaken that neural pathway loop. Basically you interrupt a pattern, right? So an example of this is if you have a self critical thought and you notice it and you're willing to both relabel it as a thought and re attribute it to where it comes from. You can take a deep breath and say what's one small thing I can do that matters? And then do it. So a simple example is just buy yourself some time after a criti self critical thought. Just take a nice slow breath and say like, what else can I do with my thoughts? What else can I do with my time, frankly? Then go do it. And it needs to be something that you have to focus on. Right. And then the fourth step in this little process is to re value meaning lower the importance or the value of the thought. When we believe our thoughts, we sure do give them a lot of value, don't we? So a lot of people argue with their thoughts and then they just spin right into a new loop of criticizing their self critical nature. Yeah. So don't argue with the thought, just devalue it. A common way to do this is to say something like, this isn't useful information, it's just brain noise. This isn't helpful. Right. And this works because you're giving the brain information about what your priorities are. When you stop engaging with your thoughts, you break the reward loop, you break the cycle. Honestly, an example of doing this is creating a mantra when your self critical thoughts come in. That's sort of like, I don't need to fix this. This thought has no value. See how I just downgraded that thing and like this is nothing, this is just a thought. Right. And now I'll give you the fifth step. Four steps plus one. This is the plus one. What you do in the fifth step is you consciously practice a new internal voice. Imagine the version of you who talks to yourself kindly with compassion, respect and frankly authority. Neural plasticity means you can't just delete old wiring. You actually have to build new pathways by repetition and practice. So when you have a thought that you don't want to have that you don't like and you don't want to engage with, just replace it with something that you do want. One thing that I've used over time is it's okay. It just basically means like, hey, so this is just a thought. It's not useful information, it's just a bunch of noise. And like you're okay. It's okay to have thoughts. Right. Some people would say replace the thought. I'm such a mess with. I'm learning, I'm a work in progress. Right. Then act accordingly. Once you get to the end of this little process, just reflect or reset instead of continuing to engage in the process. Like move on. This process really works to rewire the brain because it's grounded in neuroscience and it also includes element of self compassion. And actually when we practice self compassion, it's much much easier to rewire the brain. You can't rewire the brain by bullying yourself out of thinking. You're not fighting your thoughts, you're retraining your brain to respond differently. This is what healing actually looks like my friend. New patterns get built on your awareness, not on a bunch of old dialogue and self attacking. If this method hits home with you, just start with the first step and see how you do. Just relabel thoughts. Every time that inner critic shows up, just name it and take a breath. That's where control begins. In this episode you learned why self critical thoughts feel really automatic, how they're wired into your brain and how to interrupt and replace them with the four steps plus one. You can't stop your thoughts, but you can stop believing them and engaging with them. And that my friend, is where real peace begins. Thanks so much for spending your time with me today. I really appreciate you being here and doing this work. New sessions come out every Friday and the short sessions usually on Mondays. To start your week off right. Be sure to subscribe and leave a review if you like the podcast. And as always, while Takeout Therapy is a great educational resource, get the level of support you need for your situation. Head to takeouttherapy.com to stay in the loop and until next time, take really good care of yourself friend.