Silencing Your Inner Critic Starts Here

Thought For The Week

Feelings of ineptitude, shame, helplessness and even self-loathing are not uncommon when we’re struggling to get to where we want to be with our bodies. Unfortunately, these feelings can undermine our efforts and leave us feeling paralysed unless we’re able to start silencing our inner critic. Rather than ignoring these feelings or berating ourselves for our perceived failings, self-compassion is the act of being gentle, kind, attentive, and understanding towards ourselves when we experience pain or struggle. Self-compassion has the power to suppress those negative emotions and is an essential tool to master if we want to keep moving forwards.

Exercise Tip

Exercise offers a great space to practice self-compassion. Next time you head into a workout, see if you can catch yourself having any negative thoughts about your body, or about how you’re feeling, or about anything else associated with your training session. The first step is simply to recognise these negative thoughts. Then, see if you can consider them through a different, kinder, more compassionate lens. For example, if you catch yourself thinking you don’t like the way your body is feeling in a pair of tight leggings, can you shift your focus to how the muscles in your legs feel as you sit back into your squat, pause at the bottom, and push back up? How you can feel them working (well done, legs!)? How powerful they feel (go, legs!)? How you’re committing to showing up and getting the work done (yey, me!)?

Nutrition Tip

Building self-compassion into your approach to eating is essential to address any problematic eating behaviours and practicing mindfulness is an excellent place to start. I wrote about mindful eating a few months ago, but we focused more on the actual process of eating, and drawing your attention to the sensations associated with it. Here, I want to emphasise the importance of practising mindfulness with regards to the feelings and triggers that might be causing you to eat in the first instance. For example, before you reach for the wine/crisps/ice cream/chocolate as you walk through the front door at the end of a tough day, notice the thoughts and feelings that are happening inside your head. What do you feel specifically, and can you put a name to it? Can you speak it, out loud? Slowing down to observe and label our feelings helps lessen the extent to which any semi-conscious impulse guides our behaviour and enables us to make a more fully conscious choice about what we eat.

Links & Resources

Website: Kristen Neff is a leading psychologist in the field of self‑compassion. Her website offers theory, research, tools, and practices to support to anyone wanting to cultivate a kinder, more resilient inner life.

Book: The Compassionate Mind by Paul Gilbert offers a great introduction to self-compassion and Compassion Focussed Therapy.

Book: The Compassionate Mind Approach to Beating Overeating by Ken Goss explains why we have a tendency to overeat, and how we can use Compassion Focussed Therapy as an alternative to dieting, food restriction and willpower.

Inspirational Quote

"No amount of self-improvement can make up for any lack of self-acceptance."

Robert Holden