Show Notes
Hello and welcome to the No Complaining Podcast where I'm going to try to help you move from feeling stuck and in a bad place to taking action and feeling more in control of your world. I'm going to give it a shot anyway. I'm Cianna Stewart, and I'm really grateful that you're here.
Several of you have written to me about, being really hard on yourself and complaining about yourself. A lot of stuff about dealing with the inner critic, about feeling really just horrible right now. And it's no surprise. I mean, the world is very, very stressful right now. And I'm going to talk today about how those two things are interrelated, and I'm gonna go a little bit into science of emotions and thoughts, and then how that relates to the inner critic. And I'm going to give you some tools that I hope will help you.
Let me start by saying that I can definitely relate to this feeling of being down and having your inner critic kind of having free rein right now. I've been definitely feeling my inner critic going into overdrive. I want to do that right by all of you. I also want to help fix whatever's going on in the world (which is a lot of things right now). And then feeling really frustrated and exhausted by everything all the time. And so then I feel like I'm not doing enough. And then my inner critic gets back down on me about not doing enough. And then we just go into a little spin.
So that's kind of the place that I've been in, and it's actually included the push to try to continue to do this podcast. I'm very much aware of the gaps in my release schedule. And yet I still find that so many of you are listening and I'm really grateful for that and it shows me that there's something in here for you. And there's some way that this is I'm helpful to you, and that's really helpful to me. So thank you for listening and for continuing to gave me the feedback that there's something here. Doing this podcast is one of the things that I'm doing to counter that feeling of lack of productivity and lack of agency. And in a little bit, I'll go more into why that's important and how that particular thing helps. So thanks again. And now a little bit about the science.
So, for anybody who knows me, you know that I read a lot all the time and I have just a love of science and I am always excited to learn new things. If you listen to anything even related, like even minorly related to, psychology, neuro-psychology, neurology - you'll know that there have been a lot of discoveries in the last few years, like the last 10 to 15 years, ever since the emergence of Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging, fMRI, which gives a great insight into which parts of the brain are activated during certain activities. This kind of insight wasn't available before. And so a lot of the things that were taken as truth about the way that we experienced the world have been challenged. So these kinds of discoveries are really exciting. Some of them reinforce the things that we sensed or reveal more information about them. And some of them are really surprising.
One of the things that is not surprising, and that just got reinforced, is the idea that we are affected by other people's stress.
So we have these things called mirror neurons, and what they do is to help to keep us in resonance with other people. This is really important because we, as a species needed others for survival. We are basically pack animals. And so you need to know what the group is feeling and thinking in order to be able to stay aligned with them in order to be able to stay part of the group. So mirror neurons developed in us that... basically it's not really allowing you to feel what somebody else is feeling, but it kind of is. What they do is they evoke in you feelings that are in resonance with other people. Right now two big things are going on that are deeply affecting our ability to regulate ourselves. One of them is that many of us are on our own during this pandemic, that we actually don't have that many people around us who we can mirror off of and who can affect our moods. Because we are alone, a lot of people are self isolating or they're isolating with just a handful of other people or maybe just one other person, and those people that you are interacting with are generally very stressed out. Just about everybody right now is stressed out. We are exhausted. We are dealing with things that are uncertain and in general humans don't do very well with uncertainty.
And so when we are falling into resonance with other people, We are falling into resonance with stress or depression or fear. And all of these things, then, they start to build up inside our own bodies. And so that's really, really hard. So it's like, not only are you taking on whatever you're experiencing, but there is a way in which you are taking on what other people are experiencing as well. Some people do this more than others. Some people are more empathic than others. Some people shield themselves off so that they don't experience that, and that actually has its own level of stress on your body. The blocking of other people's experience is actually very, taxing all by itself. So when you are feeling in resonance with others in general, they're not feeding you positive things that can lift you out of your experience.
This is one of the ways that we generally heal ourselves when we're not in pandemic times, when we're not on lockdown. You know, when we go to dinner parties, we have conversations, we laugh with other people. When we go dancing. We do sports. We do other things that are very much the things that heal us. Some of it is about shifting those feelings inside ourselves and then shifting other people's in response or hanging out around with people who are in a better place than we are. And then having ourselves shift because we are feeling their generally good mood, their confidence, their, hope. When we are around those kinds of people, then we feel better and it's just a natural kind of thing. But a lot of us don't have that right now. So we're, so we're very internally disregulated as one of the terms for it is just this feeling of like, "I don't know how to control what is going on inside of me, and I don't know how to get out of it." And it's that other people are also feeling that level of stress. And so you're kind of surrounded. You're in this little soup of depression and fear and anxiety.
And I just want you to know that you're not alone and that other people are feeling it as well. And maybe that doesn't make you feel better, but there is a way that the inner critic has a special mean part of it that's, you know, "You are the only one," or, "You're the worst," or, "You know everybody else is doing better." And there's a way that the inner critic isolates you. And so you kind of need to start to counteract that by actually noticing that other people around you are stressed.
And there's a way that you might be taking that on and absorbing it as well. And so try to learn how to differentiate, like what is yours and what is other people's, and start to create a little bit of space there so that you can ease your own burden. Only work on yourself.
One of the other things that affects our self esteem and our inner critic and our general ways of beating ourselves up is whether or not we feel like we have agency, whether or not we feel like we have any level of control over what is happening around us. And right now the way the world is with what's going on everywhere, you know from the pandemic to politics, to climate, to everything that's happening right now, it's very easy to feel like you have no agency, that you feel very powerless. And it's because these things are very big and they are out of our control. In some ways, acknowledging that, seeing that looking directly in the face of how big those problems are might contribute to you, feeling powerless. And at the same time, try to allow yourself to feel some relief for the fact that you are not solely responsible for fixing it. That there are actions that you can do to contribute to healing or to making those situations better, but that you are not the one who's actually the bottom line, that you are not the one who is alone going to fix any of those problems. If anything, see if you can find a way that it can spur you to connect with other people who are also working on those situations that are really of concern to you and acknowledge the level of control that you do have. What are the things that you can do inside of your own world to feel like you are contributing to the outcome that you want on any of these situations that you feel are bigger than you, or that are, that you're feeling powerless about? One of the best ways to get out of some of this negative feeling is to take some, even small actions because action is the thing that helps us feel more in control.
It can just be the smallest thing, but you know that you did it and then you can reinforce that you did it, and then you can take the next action after that.
Now I want to talk about one of the things that was one of the most surprising discoveries in neuropsychology in the last few years. And this one, when I first heard about it, I was like, "What?!" And it is still something that is kind of hard to sit with cause it runs against so much of what we understand about ourselves or have thought in the past and what we, most of us have grown up with. And that is that we feel things first, and then we think second. So much of our world and our history and our literature has been based on the idea that we are thinking rational creatures. And there's a lot of times when we're feeling really bad that we work on thinking our way out of it. And that we also think that what our mental understanding of what's going on with us is actually the start of a lot of emotions. And sometimes that's true, but there's this thing that I want you to try to absorb and understand, which is that we feel negative - especially negative - things so much faster than we think. Evolutionarily, it makes sense that you would feel fear at some kind of a threat and then later on you worry about processing what kind of threat it was and what your response would be, but the very first thing is to feel it and then to get out of the way. So it turns out that we actually feel fear and negativity and all that kind of thing very quickly. And it actually leaves our body very slowly. And our thoughts are usually a little behind in the emergence of that, you know, explanation of what caused that negative feeling. And they might go away really quickly, like what we think, or we understand about what's happening, they might go away more quickly than our bad feelings. Bad feelings might still stay in your body.
And then what happens, which is kind of nuts, is that your brain then starts trying to understand, "Why am I feeling bad?" and comes up with new rationales for what it is causing this bad feeling. So, what this means is you start casting about, even unconsciously, your brain is casting about for an explanation of why you feel crappy. Now go back to what I was saying before, where you're generally feeling crappy because the world is crappy and everybody around you is feeling crappy. So there's no real cause or actual you know, thing that's happening that isn't, you know, you can't say like, "Oh, it was because of this thing that I felt bad." It's kind of just in the air right now. We all got this sort of general malaise and we have a generally fearful, anxious, stressful environment. And so we might be just feeling that. And there is no specific cause. But we still want to have a cause. We still want to be able to explain that, which makes a lot of sense, because if you can understand what's causing it, then perhaps you could actually stop doing that thing or thinking that thing or whatever it is that's causing it, maybe you can get away from it. And so your brain wants to know why this is happening. Now given that a lot of us are alone during this pandemic or that we are feeling this stuff internally and maybe not wanting to share it with others, because also everybody's feeling bad, so you don't want to make other people feel worse you just talking about your own thing. So I think a lot of us are actually sitting with this bad feeling inside of us. Our brains are casting about for a reason to understand why we're feeling bad. And the next thing that it falls on is our inner critic.
Our inner critic is generally around to try to protect us, you know, it does it really badly. It usually has old information. And a lot of the things that it's warning you about are actually things from like, when you were a kid or just like really, really old, old fears and consequences that you've probably learned how to deal with, and that you're better at it now because you're an adult, but your mind doesn't know that. And so the inner critic starts berating you because you feel bad. You want to get away from this terrible feeling. You're alone. And you know, the only person, therefore the cause must be you.
I want to invite you to think about the fact that maybe it's not just you, maybe it's just what's going on with the world. And your inner critic is just using all of this language to blame you for it. But you might just give yourself a break and just say, I don't think that that's really what's going on. I just am feeling what the world is feeling right now.
So this brings us into talking about the tools that we can use to try to deal with the inner critic and being down on ourselves. And the first main tool is to get some distance on your thoughts to recognize what it is you, and is not you. To also start to play with the idea that your thoughts are coming as a result of your emotions and your feelings, and that maybe you can shift the way that you're thinking about them or explaining them. You start to just put some distance between you and your thoughts, between you and the inner critic.
The best way to do this is to have a regular mindfulness practice. And I know a lot of people are talking about mindfulness right now, and it is really, really important and there's a lot of different reasons for doing it. But at the root, the main reason to do this is to be able to train yourself to have the ability to choose where you're going to place your attention, and to choose your thoughts so that you become less wedded to historical reactivity, that your previous automatic responses are no longer so automatic. That you start to actually be able to, you have more control over how you respond to things. So that's the base reason, the actual skill of mindfulness is mostly that. It's being able to place your attention where you want it.
And then it really just comes through practice. It is a skill, a lot of people start doing mindfulness exercises or meditating, and they're like, "Oh, I'm not good at this. This is terrible." But it just really, that it's a skill. You know, the first time you walked as a little kid, you just couldn't. You didn't actually do it the first time. And you know, the first time you tried to talk, you also weren't able to put together a sentence or even just make yourself understood. So you just have to have some faith that there's a skill inside of mindfulness and that you're going to bumble your way through it. And you're not very good at it for a long, long time.
I'm still terrible at it. And I've been doing it for years. And yet I have more control now than I did when I started. I have more skill now than I did when I started. And so that's been great to be able to experience it. And I, you know, encourage you to take up a mindfulness practice so that you have a little, so, you know, talking about agency, you want to have some agency over what you're thinking about.
The other big thing about mindfulness is that the practice centers on becoming present to the current moment, to really staying in the here and now, and it's been shown that being present all by itself increases happiness. Even if you're being present to terrible, terrible things, if you're being present to the frustration and the fear or the circumstances that you're in, just the act of being present is enough to actually start to shift you into a space of feeling generally happier.
It lifts you out of anxiety, which is generally focused on the future. And it lifts you out of regret, which is focused on the past. And it just gives you some ability to choose to stay right here in the here and now. And that can be a calmer, more peaceful and more realistic place than living in the future or the past.
So that's the actual practice of mindfulness, is to do that work, to stay present to what's happening right now.
When you think about it, a lot of the things that we usually talk about that make us feel better (the things that we're not allowed to do right now) are things that are centered around being really, really present. They're not really centered on it so much as you just sort of find yourself in the middle of that and you're like, "I feel great right now," you know, whether it's because you're going out dancing or you're playing a sport and have to be really, really focused, or you're traveling and you're in that moment of awe about something that you haven't seen before. And so you're just completely present to that experience.
Sometimes it's even just like having dinner with friends or cooking dinner, where you actually have to pay attention to what you're doing. And you're actually trying to time things and so you do have to be really aware of what's going on around you. And you're in a conversation with people, you know, as you're talking about something that you both find really pleasurable and in that moment, you're forgetting everything else. You're just right here, right now.
And in all of those activities, there is a quality of presence. And that is the thing that is extra healing with all of those activities. So in our current pandemic moment, when we can't actually do so many of those things, the quality that you might want to start looking for, in terms of crafting some new activities to help yourself feel better, is to look for other ways to be present. And also engaging your body in your senses in some way. So maybe you can do a phone call while you're walking outside. I've been enjoying having dinner with somebody else on zoom and we both order from the same place or the same style of food so that it feels like more like we're having dinner together.
There's something unsurprising to me that a lot of people started getting into baking bread at the beginning of this, because that's actually such a physical activity and that's also very nourishing. It's a very tactile thing. Um, there's a way that, you know, it feels so satisfying to do that kneading and all of that. And then at the end of it, there's also an end result. So maybe you can, you know, we can go back to doing a little bit of bread baking and then mailing that to friends. Like if you think about who you're cooking for, while you're cooking, that can help you become even more present to what you're doing.
So, you know, just as a way of trying to counteract some of those other feelings, I'd invite you to start looking for ways that you can be both a little bit more physical or have some of your senses engaged and be more present as you go about your day. Again, we're trying to get away from anxiousness and regret, living in the future or the past. We're trying to find a way to just be present.
So I want to leave you with a little thing from the book, "Make Peace With Your Mind," by Mark Coleman. The subtitle is "how mindfulness and compassion can free you from your inner critic." This is a great book and I highly recommend it. I'll leave a link in the show notes. because it's just so good.
So one of the things that he was talking about that I loved is to choose your allegiance. You know, when you're dealing with the inner critic, Whose side are you on? Who do you think is more believable? Do you actually believe the critic's opinion or do you believe your own opinion of yourself? Who do you think is more reliable? And some of this is you have to actually start to become more vulnerable to the pain that is caused by your inner critic. You have to start being willing to dive into that part of the impact of the inner critic and not just listening to the words, and try to like respond and, you know, either get combative or to just start fighting back, or complying and trying to strive to make the inner critic happy. It's just, you know, what if you sat with the pain of it? What if you sat with the impact of those words and how hard it is for you to make the critic happy? The critic's never going to be happy. So whose side are you on? The goal here is to have some compassion for yourself and to defend yourself against your critic, just as you would defend a friend, a dear friend against a bully.
You know, there's a way that we don't defend ourselves, we don't think of ourselves in with as much kindness as we think of our friends. And that's sad. And so take a moment to sit with the sadness and the pain of the impact of the inner critic.
Let me just read you this thing:
"For me, the ability to access this, self-compassion signaled a significant shift that allowed me to move from paying attention to the words of the critic, to feeling the pain they inflicted. Since that time, there is no longer a cell in my body that wants to let such thoughts in. There is a quiet strength in the ability to rest in that tender place. Vulnerable, it is. Weak, it is not. It reminds me of a quote from the ancient texts that says, 'Make your heart as vast as space, so big that nothing can harm it.' When our hearts are that wide, it is as if the judgments are ripples on water flowing away and leaving no trace. This is what vulnerability makes possible. It allows the natural strength of the heart to emerge."
That's a great place to close. I wish you I wish you so much love and luck in dealing with your inner critic. Please don't be too hard on yourselves. This is a really hard time and we are nearly all of us, if not all of us, struggling in some way. So be gentle. Gind something sensual to do that makes yourself feel better. Get a little distance between you and your thoughts. And choose yourself over your inner critic. That thing is a bully and you don't need to listen to bullies. None of us need to listen to bullies.
That's it for now. Thank you so much for listening. It really means a lot to me.
Once again. Thank you to Daniel Berkman for this lovely music.
And I wish you all the best. Go NoCo.