Who is renting the space in your head?

In my work as a wellness coach, I frequently hear clients talk about how they see themselves. "I am a failure", they will say, or "I am not good at..." and then go on to share a long list of perceived inadequacies, everything from social interaction to athleticism to artistic endeavor. "I am a fraud, a joke, a mistake" go some of the worse refrains in these songs of existential woe.

We all have this voice in our heads that tells us things like this. It is known as the inner critic, the voice that seems to consolidate all of the unpleasant things we have ever heard or thought about ourselves. It has a great memory, this inner critic; it never forgets a mistake we made or a slight we received, no matter how slight (see what I did there?) In the echo chamber in our brains, these words reverberate, becoming louder and more persistent the more we indulge them. A feedback loop develops, and eventually these hurtful words become our truth. In reality, if someone who rented a room from us talked to us like this, we would evict them!

There is a way to stop this process. By practicing mindfulness, paying attention to the present moment and noticing the thought process, we can observe these thoughts as they come through our consciousness (e.g. I am unattractive, no one will ever want me) and choose to let them go, going back to focusing on the sensations in the present moment - the blue of the sky, the smell of strawberries, the warm softness of the cat's fur. The patterns of thought that we habitually engage in become apparent; we start to notice how many of these critical thoughts we have. We get faster at recognizing them and letting them go, which robs them of their power. They are just thoughts, after all, and thoughts aren't facts. We can choose to be in the moment, where we can experience all of the wonder and beauty around us.