STRESS-BUSTING BENEFITS OF SILENCE
Learn to silence your inner critic
BY:MARY ELIZABETH TERZELLA
You snap at your child or charge and then berate yourself for being a bad parent or caregiver. You forget to reorder medication or to pick up milk and immediately think: “I never do anything right.”
Not surprisingly, these negative thoughts can sour your mood. Yet, women are prone to such self-criticism. If you take time to tally the comments you make to yourself, “you’ll discover that the vast majority are negative,” says Alice D. Domar, PhD, author of Self-Nurture: Learning to Care for Yourself as Effectively as You Care for Others (Penguin, 2001).
But you’ll make yourself miserable if a soundtrack of criticism constantly plays in your head. “Self-punishing thoughts are mental fuel for anxiety and depression,” says Dr. Domar, director of the Domar Center for Complementary Healthcare in Boston? and an assistant professor at Harvard Medical School. “When faced with stress or challenge, the stream of negative self-talk only boosts the stress response, undermining your coping abilities.”
According to Dr. Domar, to stop bad-mouthing or blaming yourself, you need to challenge the logic and truth of negative thoughts and then replace them with “kinder, more realistic assessments.” For instance, a more reasonable assessment of flying off the handle may be: “I’m not perfect—I’m doing the best I can.” Or “I lost my temper because I’m tired. I’ll try to do be more patient. I’m a good caregiver.”
Chances are that most of your negative thoughts and expectations are not rooted in reality. After all, is it true that you never do anything right? Don’t accept such senseless self-putdowns. “Whenever you catch yourself thinking that you can’t do something, recall one or two past successes, such as the time you prevented the doctor from prescribing the wrong dose or how much fun you had with your kids when you had a snowball fight together,” Dr. Domar suggests.
The more you counter your inner critic, the more contented you’ll be.