Episode 13: Silencing the Inner Critic: The Voice in Your Head Is Lying

Welcome to Episode 13: Silencing the Inner Critic: The Voice in Your Head Is Lying

If that annoying voice in your head has been telling you that you’re behind, not enough, too old, too messy, too emotional, or too late — this episode is your reminder that just because that voice is loud does not mean it’s telling the truth.

In this honest and empowering conversation, Anne and Melissa unpack the exhausting power of the inner critic and why it often gets even louder in midlife. Between body changes, career transitions, caregiving, shifting identities, financial stress, and the pressure to somehow hold it all together, it’s easy for negative self-talk to start sounding like fact. But this episode calls that out for what it is: fear, conditioning, perfectionism, and shame dressed up as truth. 

Together, Anne and Melissa explore how the inner critic shows up in everyday life — in the second-guessing, the people-pleasing, the pressure to do more, and the belief that your worth is constantly up for review. They remind listeners that not every thought is true, not every harsh opinion in your head deserves authority, and not every hard season means you are failing. 

This episode is for the woman who is tired of being bullied by her own thoughts. The woman who is carrying a lot, navigating change, and still somehow expecting herself to do it all perfectly. It is a conversation about self-doubt, mindset, perfectionism, emotional wellness, self-compassion, and learning how to interrupt the lies that keep you stuck. 

Tune in to learn practical ways to challenge the inner critic without slipping into fake positivity. Because the goal is not perfection — it’s truth, grace, and freedom! 

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:00

Welcome to Midlife Interrupted and Unfiltered.

SPEAKER_00 0:03

I'm Melissa, coach, counselor, and professional truthbringer.

SPEAKER_01 0:07

And I'm Anne, trial lawyer, accountability partner, and certified Pilates instructor. Yes, I really am.

SPEAKER_00 0:14

We're two East Coast women who met at kindergarten drop off. And 15 years later decided that Midlife needed a megaphone anatomy button.

SPEAKER_01 0:21

So we're here to interrupt the negative narratives. And share the unfiltered truth about reinvention, perimenopause, and everything in between. Just real talk. Let's go.

SPEAKER_00 0:31

Welcome to episode 13: Silencing the Inner Critic. The voice in your head is lying to you. So welcome back. And that's what we're going to talk about. This is the messy truth. We all have that voice in our head. And we're going to talk about the beauty of telling it to quiet down.

SPEAKER_01 0:50

And today we're going straight for the jugular of one of the most exhausting and annoying roommates we've ever had, which is that inner critic.

SPEAKER_00 1:02

Oh, yes. That voice in your head that says, you should be doing more. You should look better. You should earn more. You should handle this better. You should age differently. You're not parenting correctly. You're not going to church enough. And while you do all this, you need to make sure you sleep eight hours, eat right, and drink enough water.

SPEAKER_01 1:20

And let's be honest, that inner critic is loud. And she's not offering feedback. She's running a full-time emotional surveillance program.

SPEAKER_00 1:30

Exactly. And that's why we've called this episode Silencing the Inner Critic. Your voice in your head is lying, because that voice, it may sound authoritative, but it's not always telling the truth.

SPEAKER_01 1:41

And in fact, sometimes it's not even telling a little bit of the truth. Sometimes it's like a dramatic gremlin in designer vlogs. I don't like gremlins.

SPEAKER_00 1:52

So today we're going to talk about why this little gremlin voice gets so powerful in midlife and why it feels maybe more believable than it should. And what can we actually do to quiet it down without pretending we're suddenly going to become glowing Zen goddesses by Tuesday?

SPEAKER_01 2:10

So, why the inner critic gets louder in midlife? And I swear that inner critic hits differently in midlife. In your 20s, it's am I enough? In your 40s and 50s, it becomes, oh, is it too late to do something I love? Oh, did I spend too much time and waste too much time on something that wasn't really important? And why does everyone else look like they have a vitamin gene in a five-year plan?

SPEAKER_00 2:34

Midlife is such a pressure cooker, isn't it? There's these body changes, mind fog, career shifts, caregiving, grief, marriage changes, divorce, teenagers, adult children, financial stress, identity changes, pressure from the outside all at once. It just feels so overwhelming.

SPEAKER_01 2:52

And that inner critic loves transition and chaos. Give her an hormonal shift in an unanswered text, and suddenly she's telling you that you suck at everything. And honestly, I do have these moments. And I swear the other day I walked into my sunroomslash home office and I completely blanked on why I walked in there. But I was also trying to answer a text and remember if I needed to do anything before my daughter left for London in a few days. So my inner critic instantly went to, you're off your game, and I don't know if you can pull it together. And I had to catch myself and instead reframe that as okay, right now you're overstimulated, you're jugging, juggling too many balls, and you're engaging in way too much multitasking at this moment. Give yourself some grace.

SPEAKER_00 3:45

That's and yesterday I came home from work after being with clients all day, and I was training for a race, and so I knew I had to do a run. And I came home and I just laid on the couch and the doggies came and snuggled me. And I said, you know what? Screw this. I'm gonna put my legs up and I'm not gonna do anything but snuggle the dogs and sit in silence while my husband took my daughter to dance. And that's what I did. And you know what? I saw it's that inner critic, and I woke up this morning with more energy because I took care of myself.

SPEAKER_01 4:11

I don't know how you can have more energy like you're tripping up wires all the time.

SPEAKER_00 4:15

Let's keep going. Here's what's important about the inner critic it often sounds convincing because it borrows the language of responsibility. It says, I'm just trying to keep you from messing up, but really it's often driven by fear, shame, and old conditioning or narratives.

SPEAKER_01 4:32

And that hits pretty hard and did when I first realized it, because my inner critic always sounds like she's trying to help me. And she'd say things like, Oh, if you don't stay hard on yourself, you're gonna get lazy and you're gonna be out of shape, or you're not gonna have your edge anymore. If you stop criticizing yourself, you're gonna let yourself go. None of that is true.

SPEAKER_00 4:53

And so many of us have been taught that self-criticism is the price of excellence. Like we have to almost keep our game on. And when we tell ourselves that being hard on ourselves is what makes us strong, disciplined, desirable, productive, or respectable. And this is back to one of our earlier episodes. I know we talked about what we needed to change about what we tried to show people of who we were. And I know both of us had felt like we had to keep it all together. Guess what? That was the inner critic talking to us.

SPEAKER_01 5:21

Absolutely. And meanwhile, while you're telling yourself that, oh, you have to be stronger, more disciplined. Meanwhile, a lot of us are overexhausted, second guessing something we sent in a text or since we put in a text, and even apologizing to the barista because they screwed up our order.

SPEAKER_00 5:42

And let's just say it, the critic isn't the truth, it's the gremlin, and it's a little monster. So let's remember that.

SPEAKER_01 5:52

That not every thought that we think is actually true. So now for the women in the back organizing everybody else's appointments and multitasking at this very moment while listening to this podcast, what do we want to tell them clearly again?

SPEAKER_00 6:12

Not every thought you think is true.

SPEAKER_01 6:14

Amen, sister. And just because a thought is loud, repetitive, or familiar absolutely does not make it factual.

SPEAKER_00 6:24

And that statement right there is so important. Actually, experts describe a lot of inner critic thinking as distorted thinking, and that's what we talk about in the psychology world. And distorted thinking are patterns like catastrophizing or perfectionism or filtering out the positive or mind reading or just personalizing everything. In other words, your brain can tell a very dramatic story and present it as evidence when we have this distorted thinking.

SPEAKER_01 6:56

So, for example, with this distorted thinking, like you forget one thing at work, and your brain goes, obviously, this is the beginning of the end of your career and you're in your professional decline.

SPEAKER_00 7:08

Or maybe you catch a glimpse of yourself in harsh lighting and suddenly decide, oh my God, I need extra Botox filler or new makeup and that little line in my crease of my smile. And I personally think some of the salon mirrors are agents of chaos. I believe that. They really are.

SPEAKER_01 7:23

And I think for so many midlife women, the inner critic takes normal human moments like being tired or needing a rest or changing direction or not wanting to be everybody's everything all the time. And then it spins them into some type of moral failure.

SPEAKER_00 7:41

Yes. It turns I'm overwhelmed into I'm weak. It turns I need support to I should be able to do this alone. It turns my life is changing into I'm losing myself.

SPEAKER_01 7:52

And that's the lie. The lie is not just you're not enough. The lie is that your worth is up for review every single day.

SPEAKER_00 8:02

So, what does the inner critic actually sound like? Should we name a few common inner critic phrases? Because I think sometimes hearing them out loud might help us catch them faster. Definitely.

SPEAKER_01 8:13

So here we go. You start, bring it on.

SPEAKER_00 8:16

You're too old to start over. Everyone else has this figured out. You should be handling this better. If you were stronger, smarter, prettier, calmer, more organized, this wouldn't be happening. Oh, you've missed your chance.

SPEAKER_01 8:32

And my personal least favorite is who do you think you are?

SPEAKER_00 8:36

Yeah, that one. That one showed up for me when I signed up for getting my certification for coaching a few years ago. And I remember hovering over this registration thinking it was like this legally binding blood oath. And the voice came in fast. Like, really? At your age, you think you're gonna study and take all these courses and all these tests? You're gonna try this now? And really what struck with me later is how quickly excitement had turned into self-doubt. And it wasn't because anything was wrong, it was just because I was daring to be new at something again.

SPEAKER_01 9:08

And the who do you think you are is such a weaponizing sentence because it doesn't just question what you're doing, it questions whether you have the right to take up that space at all.

SPEAKER_00 9:19

So if any of those phrases I mentioned felt familiar earlier, let me just say this to you directly. Familiarity does not equal truth. Sometimes it just means the pathway in your brain is well protected and well practiced, but repetition makes thoughts feel official. And when a repeated lie is a lie, it's still a lie. So let's reframe these and make them not lies and positive.

SPEAKER_01 9:46

So let's talk about how to answer the inner critic without becoming what we call toxic positive.

SPEAKER_00 9:52

Yeah. Yeah. Now, when we say silence the inner critic, we do not mean slapping a glitter sticker over pain and pretending everything is amazing.

SPEAKER_01 10:04

So we are not here for just love yourself, babe, while your nervous system is on fire.

SPEAKER_00 10:10

Exactly. The goal is not fake positivity at all. The goal is truthful compassion.

SPEAKER_01 10:15

Truthful compassion is good.

SPEAKER_00 10:18

And when the critic speaks, let's try a four-step response and give it a little framework. What do you say?

SPEAKER_01 10:25

All right, give us those four steps.

SPEAKER_00 10:27

The first thing is name it. Say to yourself, that's my inner critic gremlin talking. Not, oh, that's the truth. Not that's who I am. It's just the little gremlin, that's the critic.

SPEAKER_01 10:43

And I love that because it creates space. It's the difference between being inside the storm versus watching that storm pass by your window.

SPEAKER_00 10:52

And then after you name it, let's check the evidence. Ask, what evidence do I have for this? Is this thought completely true? What facts support or contradict it?

SPEAKER_01 11:02

I'd like the evidence. So instead of I am messing everything up, maybe the truth is I made one mistake while juggling 17 things and being human.

SPEAKER_00 11:13

And then when you do that, you replace that cruelty that you're giving yourself with accuracy. Not fantasy, accuracy. Instead of I'm failing, maybe you just say, I'm in a hard season. Or instead of, oh my gosh, I'm a mess, try, I am just stretched so thin. And maybe if you say, Oh, I'm too old, it's too late, try, I'm still becoming, I'm becoming in the new me.

SPEAKER_01 11:34

And that right there, when you replace cruelty with accuracy, that can change your entire emotional response, right?

SPEAKER_00 11:44

Absolutely. And oftentimes we do it so well with others, but with ourselves, we speak to ourselves like crap. And so when you speak to yourself like some someone that's worth loving, that's the fourth thing to do. The helpful rule I actually love from Mayo Clinic is don't say anything to yourself that you wouldn't say to anyone else.

SPEAKER_01 12:04

And that's so true because, for example, if you called me and said, Ann, I forgot one deadline. My adult daughter needs me. My teenager rolled her eyes at me 10 times today and I'm losing my mind. I would not say, Correct, you are losing your mind. You are a disgrace. Hopefully not. I would cry. Hopefully not. But that's something that I might respond to myself with my inner critic if that same conversation were going on in my head. And that's why we're on this topic. But I do want to segue here, and I have to admit that just yesterday, it was a gorgeous day here in Kansas City, and I had the top-down on my convertible. And for those of you who know me, I love gangster rap. So I had my notorious BIG Pandora playlist playing. And for a second, I seriously had the thought, oh my god, Anne, you're too old for this. Which I would never say to Mel or any friend. And you know what? And then I changed the narrative, and I thought, fuck that. I thought, nope, I'm not too old. I'm a badass convertible and the privilege of driving on a beautiful day with the top-down, listening to my notorious BIG Pandora station.

SPEAKER_00 13:26

And to that, I say, watch her folks, watch her.

SPEAKER_01 13:31

I love it. But that was really like a I had the thought, and then I instantly reframed it and took it from being critical and replaced.

SPEAKER_00 13:42

So next time, if you're in this vicinity and you hear gangster rap or you hear anything else, you know it's Ann Right. Midlife reframe. Yeah. We talk about this idea that midlife is decline again because I think this inner critic feeds on that really mean cultural story.

SPEAKER_01 14:01

Absolutely. Midlife women are constantly being sold the message that they're becoming less relevant, less attractive, less visible, and less valuable.

SPEAKER_00 14:10

And that message is deeply harmful because what many women are actually becoming is clearer, more discerning, less tolerant of nonsense, more honest about what they need and what they want, and more authentically them.

SPEAKER_01 14:24

So true. Because midlife is not loss. It's a revelation. It's the season when you're finally realizing I don't have to keep auditioning for my own life, or I don't have to say yes to things I don't want to do. And I don't have to care what other people think if I'm honoring how I feel and what I want.

SPEAKER_00 14:46

And that is so, not to sound cheesy, but that's really beautiful.

SPEAKER_01 14:50

It really is. And I felt that recently when I almost said something, said yes to something that I absolutely did not want to do. You know, that like full body reaction where you're like no and your stomach's in knots and your heart races a little. And I could hear that revving up of don't be difficult, don't disappoint anybody, be agreeable, they're counting on you. And I paused and thought, what if being true to myself is better than being liked in this moment? And that was a tiny thing, but it really did feel huge. And it felt good. And I did not regret saying no.

SPEAKER_00 15:23

And I bet you woke up the next day with more energy, like I did after last night. That's a powerful thing. And it's a realization that you can do that because research even tells us that midlife women, if we have self-compassion, that may support healthier attitudes towards aging or better well-being. And so this isn't indulgence. It may actually be an important internal resource during this stage of life. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 15:50

So takeaway and lesson is be kinder to yourself. If you're being kinder to yourself, it's not lowering the bar, it's giving yourself a stronger foundation from which you can evaluate things and then take action.

SPEAKER_00 16:06

So action. Let's get to action because this is a practical exercise that we want to give you. And don't you think we should leave them with something that they could do, like a simple reset today?

SPEAKER_01 16:18

Absolutely. So here we go with Mel framing some action items.

SPEAKER_00 16:24

So I'm gonna add the next time your inner critic gets loud, we challenge you to pause and complete these three sentences. One thing my inner critic is saying right now is blank, but the truth is blank. That's two, actually. And if I spoke to myself with compassion, I would say blank. I'm gonna say that again. One thing my inner critic is saying right now is blank, but the truth is blank, and if I spoke to myself with compassion, I would say blank. And a fun little exercise to do that is to maybe put a persona to your little inner critic Gremlin and give it a name, and when it gets loud, you can say, shut up, Sandy.

SPEAKER_01 17:14

Shut up, notorious B I D.

SPEAKER_00 17:15

Yeah, there you go.

SPEAKER_01 17:18

So if the inner critic is saying you're behind, everyone else is more put together than you, then what do you say?

SPEAKER_00 17:27

The truth is you're awesome and you're where you're supposed to be.

SPEAKER_01 17:31

And the truth is I'm caring a lot and I'm allowed to move at a human pace. Beautiful.

SPEAKER_00 17:38

And if I spoke to myself with compassion, I would say, I'm not behind. I'm living a real life, not an Instagram curated one. That's it. That's the work. Not perfection, interruption.

SPEAKER_01 17:53

All right. I like that. Not perfection, interruption. I think we should write that on a bullying out trucker hat.

SPEAKER_00 17:59

Let's remember that when we put it on Instagram, and we'll have to find a visual for that. And we'll find one with Anne and her convertible and her music. So if you take one thing from today, let it be this. Your inner critic, your little gremlin, whatever you name, him or her, is not your wisest voice. It's not your truest voice. And it is definitely not the voice of your worth.

SPEAKER_01 18:21

It may be stubborn, it may be loud, it may know exactly where your tender spots are, but it's not the final authority on who you are.

SPEAKER_00 18:31

You don't need to earn rest by collapsing. And if you don't know that now, you're gonna learn the hard way. You don't need to earn kindness by becoming perfect. And if you don't know that now, you're gonna find that out the hard way. And you don't need to bully yourself into becoming someone that you can't fully approve of.

SPEAKER_01 18:50

And if no one's told you lately, you're allowed to soften, you're allowed to begin again, you're allowed to stop speaking to yourself in a voice that only understands fear.

SPEAKER_00 19:03

Thanks for being with us today. And if this episode landed, please share it with a friend who needs to hear it.

SPEAKER_01 19:13

And subscribe so we can keep interrupting your week with real talk.

SPEAKER_00 19:18

Find us on Instagram at v.interruption with a really blinged-out convertible where we're continuing the conversation and building this community together. Until next time, keep interrupting those narratives and stay unfiltered. See you next week.