How to Quiet Your Inner Critic
Every socially anxious person carries a passenger: a harsh inner voice that comments on their performance, predicts their failures, and narrates their shor...
Category
The Inner Critic and Self-Compassion
The Self-Compassion Break: A 30-Second Practice
Self-compassion can sound abstract until you have a concrete way to practise it in the exact moments you need it most. The self-compassion break, developed...
How to Stop Beating Yourself Up After Social Situations
You get home from a social event, and instead of relief, the beating begins. You replay every exchange, cringe at every perceived misstep, and deliver a ha...
Mindfulness for Social Anxiety: Watching Thoughts Without Believing Them
Mindfulness has become a popular word, but for social anxiety it points to something specific and genuinely useful: the ability to notice your anxious thou...
How to Accept a Compliment Without Deflecting
Someone pays you a genuine compliment, and before it can land, you deflect: oh, it was nothing, or you are just being nice, or you turn it into a joke. For...
Why Self-Compassion Beats Self-Criticism
Many anxious people believe that self-criticism is what keeps them functioning, and that if they eased up on themselves they would collapse into laziness a...
How to Be Kind to Yourself After a Setback
Progress in overcoming social anxiety is never a straight line. You will have brave weeks and frightened weeks, forward steps and days when the old fear fl...
Why Shame Keeps You Stuck and Kindness Sets You Free
At the root of much social anxiety lies shame: not the passing embarrassment of a specific misstep, but a deeper, aching sense that there is something wron...
The Double Standard: Speak to Yourself Like a Friend
Here is a single exercise that reveals, in an instant, how unfair your inner critic is, and points directly at the remedy. It is called the double standard...
Common Humanity: You Are Not the Only One Struggling
One of the cruelest features of social anxiety is the way it isolates you, whispering that you are uniquely broken, that everyone else finds this easy and...
Where the Inner Critic Comes From
The harsh inner voice that narrates your social failures can feel so much a part of you that it seems it has always been there and always will be. But the...