That brutal voice in your head might feel like honesty, discipline, or ‘having high standards’… but what if it’s actually keeping you anxious, stuck, and afraid to move forward? This week I’m talking about why being hard on yourself really isn’t helping you. So, Let’s Talk About Mental Health!

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Episode Overview:

If you ever wonder, “Why am I so hard on myself, and how do I stop letting self criticism run my life?” then we need to talk… because that harsh inner critic is doing more harm than good! 

In this episode of the Let’s Talk About Mental Health podcast, I’m talking about being hard on yourself: that harsh inner voice that picks everything apart, keeps you stuck in negative self-talk, and makes you believe you have to beat yourself up in order to improve. Spoiler alert: you don’t. Because being too hard on yourself doesn’t make you stronger, or more disciplined, or more successful; it usually fuels self-criticism and anxiety, low self-worth, fear of failure, and that horrible feeling that nothing you do is ever good enough.

So, in this episode, I’ll help you understand where your inner critic comes from, why that self-critical voice feels so convincing, and how to stop putting yourself down without pretending everything is fine. I’ll walk you through practical mental health tips for inner critic healing, including how to be less hard on yourself, how to create space from painful thoughts, and how to move forward with more kindness, confidence, and peace. 

👉 Ready to stop handing your harsh inner voice the wheel? Then let’s talk!

💡 TL;DR: This episode is about how to stop being so hard on yourself, understand your inner critic, and break the cycle of self criticism without relying on fake positivity or pretending everything is fine. 🙂

New here? Hi! Let’s Talk About Mental Health is your weekly dose of practical mental health advice for real life. I’m Jeremy Godwin (hello! 👋) and I keep things simple, honest, and doable so you can feel more in control of your life and your mental wellbeing. If you’re not already a free subscriber, sign up below to have episodes and transcripts land in your inbox every Sunday:

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Episode Transcript:

Why you’re so hard on yourself, and how to stop

Nobody is harder on you than you are.

All day long, that voice in your head picks you to pieces… and you’ve probably never really questioned it, because it feels like it’s telling the truth.

But it isn’t. You’ve completely misread what that voice actually is, and how to approach it.

So let’s talk about… being hard on yourself.

Hello and welcome! I’m Jeremy Godwin and this is the Let’s Talk About Mental Health podcast, full of practical advice to help you understand and improve your mental health.

OK, so here’s something that almost none of us will ever admit out loud… maybe not even to ourselves: you probably talk to yourself in a way that you would never, ever speak to someone you care about. If a close friend told you that they’d messed something up, you’d be kind, understanding, supportive; you’d give them a bit of grace, right? But when it’s you, you go straight to the judgement. “It’s not good enough.” “I should have done better.” “What’s wrong with me?”

And look, if that’s you, let me just say this very clearly: there is nothing wrong with you for having that voice. Nearly everyone has some version of it. For some people, it’s loud and constant. For others, it’s a quiet hum in the background that never quite shuts up. It shows up differently depending on your life, your upbringing, what you’ve been through, et cetera. But the voice itself, it’s almost universal.

Now… here’s the part that matters though, and it’s why I wanted to talk about this topic today. Most of us assume that being hard on ourselves keeps us honest, keeps us sharp, keeps us from getting too comfortable. And so, we never think to question that voice. And that’s the trap, because that assumption is doing you real harm… and I’m going to show you exactly how it is.

Because when you understand what that voice actually is and where it comes from, you can finally stop being at its mercy. The good news is that you don’t have to win some massive, epic, impossible battle in order to silence it; you just have to learn how to work with it… because that changes everything, and that’s what we’re going to explore today.

Now… before we go any further, I just want to give you something really quick to try if you’re struggling with that voice; it’s small, but it does a lot. For the next day or so, just notice the voice. That’s it. Don’t fight it. Don’t argue with it. Don’t try to shut it up. Just catch it in the act and quietly go, “Oh, there it is again.”

Because at the moment that voice probably feels like it’s just you, just the truth, blending into the background of your own thinking… and the moment you start noticing it as a voice, as a thing that’s happening rather than a fact about who you are, you put the tiniest bit of space between you and it. You are not the voice in your head. And so creating that little gap is where everything we’re going to talk about today actually becomes possible.

Alright, so let’s define what this is all about, because it’s probably not what you think. So let’s talk about…

What being hard on yourself really looks like

At its simplest, it’s the habit of treating yourself as a problem that needs to be corrected rather than being a person that needs to be supported. It’s holding yourself to a ridiculously high standard that you’d never impose on anyone else, and then punishing yourself over and over again for not meeting those impossible standards.

And the thing is that it doesn’t look exactly the same for everyone, which is precisely why so many people don’t realise that they’re doing it. For some of you, it’s loud; it’s a running commentary that narrates everything you do and enjoys picking it all to pieces… you know, you make one small mistake and the voice is right there saying, “You idiot! You always do this! What’s wrong with you?!”

Now, for others, it’s much quieter than that… and honestly, more insidious. It’s a low, flat sense that whatever you do, it’s never quite enough. You finish something and instead of getting any satisfaction there’s just the thought of, “OK, what’s the next thing?” and a vague feeling that you should have done the thing better or faster or sooner.

For some people, it sounds like a parent or a teacher or whoever it was that made you feel like you were always falling short of expectations. You absorbed that voice so long ago that now it just feels like it’s yours, like it’s the truth about who you are. And for a lot of you, it doesn’t even show up as words at all; it shows up as holding yourself back. You don’t go after the thing you want. You don’t rest when you’re exhausted. You don’t let yourself have the good stuff in life. Because somewhere underneath, there’s a quiet verdict running the entire show: I don’t deserve that, I haven’t earned that, who am I to want more?

So, however it shows up for you, let’s talk about what it feels like on the inside. It feels like you can never quite relax, because there’s always a part of you that’s disapproving and judging. It feels like nothing is ever fully good enough to just enjoy. It feels like exhaustion, the specific kind that comes from carrying a critic around with you everywhere you go.

And maybe the loneliest part is that it feels completely justified, like you’re just being realistic or keeping yourself accountable or that maybe being hard on yourself will make you better. But that belief that the harshness is actually helping you is completely backwards. And once you really see why, you can’t unsee it.

So with that in mind, now let’s talk about…

Why being hard on yourself backfires

OK, so here’s where stuff gets real. The common belief is that being hard on yourself pushes you forward… but the truth is that it does almost the exact opposite. And to see why, you have to understand what that voice is actually doing to your body and your brain. When you attack yourself, even silently, even just in passing, a part of you reacts as if it’s under threat… because it is.

Your system cannot tell the difference between a critic on the outside and a critic on the inside. It just registers the critic, and it registers danger. And when you feel under threat, your brain does exactly what it’s built to do in the case of danger: it narrows its focus, it braces for impact, it gets ready to protect you… not to help you do your best work or to grow or to take a chance, but to survive.

So the more you criticise yourself to try and improve, the more you’re actually pushing yourself into the one state where improving is hardest. Just think about that for a moment. The voice promises to make you better, or that it’s highlighting the things you need to work on, right? But instead, it’s pushing you into a permanent state of high alert.

And that’s the piece that sits underneath all of this that almost nobody actually sees. Being hard on yourself isn’t a high standard at all. It’s a frightened one. It’s fear wearing a fancy costume. It’s fear of failure. It’s fear of rejection. It’s fear of judgement. Right? It is a threat response that’s running on a loop.

And the unfortunate reality is that a brain that is stuck in threat mode doesn’t reach for anything, doesn’t risk anything, doesn’t create, doesn’t take time to rest and recharge, and doesn’t take time to be. Instead, it hides, it plays small, and it calls it ‘being careful’.

Being hard on yourself doesn’t make you sharp. It keeps you scared.

So if you’ve been wondering why all of that self-criticism never actually turned into the results that it promises, why you’re so hard on yourself and you’re still stuck, this is why; you’ve basically been pressing the brake and the accelerator at the same time, and then wondering why your engine keeps blowing out.

And the thing is that the mental and emotional cost of that builds and builds quietly for years. Research on this stuff is pretty consistent: the more self-critical someone is, the more anxiety and low self-worth tend to follow. And not just in the moment, but compounding over time. Which makes sense, doesn’t it? Right? If, if the most constant voice in your life is the one telling you that you’re not good enough then of course you’re going to start to believe it, of course you’re going to feel anxious… because part of you is always braced for the next telling-off.

Except the person delivering the character assassination is you, so there’s nowhere to hide and there’s no time off from that voice. You are both the one throwing the punches and the one taking them.

And so here’s something that I really want you to sit with for a moment: you almost certainly would not tolerate someone else speaking to you the way that you speak to yourself. If a partner or a friend talked to you like that day in, day out, you’d recognise it for what it is: abusive behaviour. So then… why the hell do you accept it from yourself? Because all it’s doing, all it’s ever done, is leave you feeling terrible about yourself over and over and over again and calling it ‘being honest with yourself’ or ‘having high standards’. But none of that changes what it actually costs you and what it costs your emotional wellbeing, your mental wellbeing.

Look, I’m talking about this topic in this episode because I see it constantly in the work I do, in the comments on this show, and quite frankly, in my own life; don’t think I don’t criticise myself, ’cause I do. I see, so often, people who are kind and capable and thoughtful and absolutely brutal to themselves and completely unaware of how to stop that brutality from holding them back.

So if no one’s ever said this to you clearly and directly before, let me be the one: the voice is not the truth. It’s just fear talking. However, you can learn to work with it… and we’re going to talk about how to do that right after this quick break.

[AD BREAK]

And welcome back! Now let’s get into the ‘how to’ part of today’s episode, and let’s talk about…

How to work with the voice instead of against it

So here’s the shift you can make that changes everything, and it’s probably going to sound a bit counterintuitive at first. The goal here is not to get rid of the voice. I know, I know, that’s probably what you came here for… but you’ve very likely already spent years trying to shut that voice up. And how’s that been going for you? Let me guess: not so great?

And no surprises there really, because the voice is sticky and it will cling on for dear life. The harsh stuff especially tends to dig in and resist any attempt to argue it away. So we’re going to stop fighting a battle that you cannot win, and instead start doing something that actually works. Here’s how. First…

Stop trying to win the argument.

The first thing for you to do here is to stop arguing with that voice. Now… this won’t apply to everyone because some of you are in a situation where you let that voice just rip you to shreds, which is totally understandable, and we’re going to circle back to that shortly. But if you have a tendency to clap back when the voice tells you that you’re not good enough, then you’ve just started a debate with the most stubborn opponent that you’re ever going to meet… and you will lose, because part of you doesn’t believe your comeback. Worse yet, the fight itself keeps you locked in that threat state that we talked about earlier. So don’t argue and don’t try to force it to be quiet either. Just let it say its piece without handing it the steering wheel and letting it determine where you go to next. A thought is not an instruction. You can just leave that voice to yammer away in the backseat all it likes. But seriously… don’t give it the wheel. It doesn’t get to drive. Next…

Stop treating the voices’ verdicts as facts.

Next we’re going to take away the thing that gives that voice its power and this applies whether you do tend to argue back with it or if it’s got you figuratively pinned into a corner while it tells you repeatedly what a waste of space it thinks you are. The voice’s whole trick, its whole routine, is that it relies on the fact that it doesn’t feel like an opinion… it feels like the truth. But it’s not. Because if you really were too useless to function, then I doubt you would’ve had the wherewithal to find this episode and press play on it, right, because you want to change something for the better. It’s not telling you the truth.

So the thing to understand is that when that nasty little voice says things like, “Oh, you always ruin things!” you don’t experience that type of thing as just a harsh thought. You experience it as a fact about who you are. So this week when you catch it, like I recommended earlier in the episode, I want you to try adding five words in front of whatever it says, which are: “I’m having the thought that…”. So for example, “I’m having the thought that I’m not good enough.”

Now… it probably sounds almost silly, but really feel the difference here: suddenly, it’s not a verdict handed down from on high; instead, it’s just a thought… one of the many thousands that you have every single day. And the thing about thoughts is that most of them are wrong or useless anyway. It’s just the brain processing stuff. So you don’t have to believe everything you think. Now, that’s something I’m going to be exploring much further in next week’s episode. So if you subscribe to my free mailing list, you’ll get it in your email as soon as it’s released. The link is in the episode description. OK, next…

Answer it differently.

So now we’re going to turn things around by changing what you do with that voice if and when it pipes up and starts reading you to filth. When the voice starts to pile all of its negativity onto you, pause and ask yourself one question: would I say this to someone I love who was struggling? You already know that you wouldn’t. You’d never look a friend straight in the eyes who was exhausted and falling behind and go, “Yeah, you’re useless, no wonder everyone’s disappointed in you.” I mean, unless you’re a self-absorbed monster with no social skills… in which case, I doubt that you’d have friends who would come to you for advice anyway, right?! No. The truth here is that if you’re even half decent, you’d be kind and supportive to your friend because you know that kindness is what actually helps a person get back up when they’re down. So give yourself the same.

Now, just to be clear, this is not about fake cheerleading. It’s not about pretending everything’s fine. You do not need to “rah rah!” if you’re not in a “rah rah” headspace, OK? It’s just the basic decency that you hand out to everyone else for free, and finally showing that decency to yourself. This isn’t you going soft on yourself either. In fact, it’s quite the opposite; it takes real strength to treat yourself with respect when every habit that you’ve got is screaming at you to tear yourself to shreds. Now, if you do tend to struggle with being kinder to yourself, I went deeper on exactly that topic in Episode 326 so I’ll leave that linked in the description. Next…

Move forward while the voice is still talking.

Here’s a big mindset shift, so let yourself just sit with this for a bit: you do not have to wait for the voice to stop before you live your life. A lot of the time we think that we have to fix our confidence first, silence the doubt first, feel ready first, and then we can act. No. You act while the voice is still going. You feel the “I can’t,” the “Who do you think you are?”, the “You’re going to embarrass yourself”… all of that, you feel it all, and you do the thing anyway with the voice still chirping away in the backseat. Because every single time you move forward while it’s talking, you prove it wrong in the only language that works… which is action, not argument. And motivation doesn’t just come from nowhere. Motivation follows action. So does courage. And courage was never the absence of that voice. It’s doing the thing while it’s still yapping at you and telling you what a terrible person you are. Next…

Build a new habit on purpose.

OK, so none of this is ‘one and done’ or a magic overnight cure and I’m not going to pretend that it is. You’ve spent years up until this point, maybe even decades, wearing a groove into your brain that sounds like that nasty little voice, and you don’t undo all of that in a single afternoon. So this is about an ongoing practice, not making a sudden switch. Every time you notice the voice instead of obeying it, every time you answer yourself with a little bit of decency instead of contempt, you’re laying down a new track. And at first it’s probably going to feel awkward and clumsy and forced and maybe even a bit fake. And that’s fine. That’s normal. That’s what ‘new’ feels like. Nothing changes if nothing changes… and this is you changing the thing, one small and honest step at a time. Next…

Get curious about where it came from.

OK, so one more big picture piece that makes the rest easier. When you’ve got a bit of emotional room to spare to do it, get curious about whose voice that actually is. Because harshness is learned. Nobody is born tearing themselves to shreds. Somewhere along the way, you picked it up; maybe from a parent, or a teacher, or a culture that confused punishment with improvement or an environment where you only felt safe if you got things right. Mine was a mix of family and a couple of really toxic workplaces, and I’d developed this thing over time that I thought was discipline but that really just turned out to be a whole bunch of survival mechanisms that I’d cobbled together to help me cope in unhealthy environments.

Now… figuring out that sort of thing takes a huge amount of time to identify, right, and even longer to process. But it’s such a relief when you do. Because here’s the freeing part: if that voice was learned, it can be unlearned. That voice that you’ve been treating as the absolute truth about who you are is often just an old recording that’s playing someone else’s words in your head long after they’ve gone from your life… and you don’t have to keep on pressing play on that recording. And when that old recording activates itself, you don’t have to listen. You can choose to change the track. Now… realising all of that doesn’t fix everything overnight, but it definitely loosens the grip that harsh voice has on you; I speak from experience! Because it’s a lot harder to be terrorised by a voice once you realise that it was never really yours to begin with.

Conclusion

So here’s what I want you to take away from this episode. The harsh voice in your head is fear, not the truth. And you don’t have to silence it to be free of it. You just have to stop letting it drive… because you cannot hate yourself into becoming someone that you’re proud of. You can notice the voice, you can name it, you can show yourself kindness, and you can move forward while it’s still talking.

So here’s the main question I want you to sit with: if you spoke to yourself the way you speak to the people you love, what would actually change?

Because when you boil it all down, peace of mind starts the moment you stop accepting the harshness as the truth… because it’s not.

Each week I like to finish up by sharing a quote about the topic, and I encourage you to take a few moments to really reflect on it and consider what it means to you. This week’s quote is by an unknown author, and it is:

Give yourself some of that kindness you reserve for those you love.

Unknown

Let me repeat that.

Give yourself some of that kindness you reserve for those you love.

Alright, that’s it for this week. If you found this helpful, please share it with someone who might need to hear it and leave a rating or review on your favourite platform because it really helps more people discover the show and the advice I share. And if you’d like to support my work, you can join my Patreon; it’s linked in the description below.

Thank you very much for joining me today. Look after yourself and make a conscious effort to share positivity and kindness out into the world… because you get back what you put out. Take care and talk to you next time!

Join me next week when I talk about why you don’t have to believe everything you think, and check out my episode on improving your self-worth next. It’s linked in the description. I release new episodes every Sunday, so follow or subscribe to never miss an episode.

Join me next week when I talk about physical anxiety symptoms, and check out my episode on being kinder to yourself when you’re struggling next. It’s linked in the description. I release new episodes every Sunday, so follow or subscribe to never miss an episode.

Let’s Talk About Mental Health is an independent program. Discover more at ltamh.com.

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Let’s Talk About Mental Health.
Making Mental Health Simple.

Let’s Talk About Mental Health. © 2026 Jeremy Godwin.

The information provided in this episode is for general awareness on the topic and does not constitute advice. You should consult a doctor and/or mental health professional if you’re struggling with your mental health and wellbeing. You’ll find additional information on the Resources page of this website.