How to stop believing the voice in your head
- Lindsey Elliott
- Jun 12
- 3 min read
If you’ve spent any time trying to deal with the voice in your head, sometimes referred to as the inner critic, you'll know it picks apart your decisions, replays conversations, and tells you you’re not handling things as well as you should. And you’ve probably tried a few of the usual approaches.
Reframing what it says. Talking back to it. Being kinder to yourself. Picturing it as a small, angry character and giving it a name. Maybe even a meditation practice aimed at getting it quieter.
Some of that helps for a while but most of it doesn’t really stick. And there’s a reason for that.
Why the usual approaches don’t last
All of those approaches work on the same basic premise that the voice is saying something real, and your job is to manage it. So you end up in a relationship with the voice where it’s the loud one and you’re the one trying to handle it.
And if you’ve been doing that for any length of time, you’ve probably noticed it’s exhausting. The voice doesn’t get tired. It can do this all day. You can’t. So rather than trying to outrun a machine that’s purpose-built to keep generating, there’s a different way of looking at this entirely.
The shift isn’t about the voice, it’s about what the voice actually is
To stop believing the voice, the thing that has to shift isn’t the voice. It’s your understanding of where the voice is coming from in the first place.
Most of us treat the voice as if it’s a kind of inner narrator who knows things. Who has access to the truth about us. Who’s reporting on our character.
But that isn’t what the voice is. The voice is your mind doing what minds do, which is generating thought, constantly, about everything, without your permission. A huge amount of what your mind produces is judgment, narrative, and meaning-making, because that’s what the mind is built to do.
So when you hear the voice saying you handled something badly, what’s actually happening is that your mind has generated a thought, and that thought is taking the form of a sentence, and the sentence sounds like it’s coming from a place of knowing. But it isn’t. It’s just thought, showing up.
It has no more inherent truth than the thoughts your mind has produced today about what to make for dinner, or whether you locked the back door. You don’t believe every thought you have about dinner. You only believe the thoughts that sound personal.
What changes when you stop believing it
The voice still talks. You just stop being its audience.
You start to notice it the way you might notice the weather. It’s there. It’s doing its thing. But it’s no longer dictating what you do, how you feel about yourself, or whether you can move forward with a decision.
That’s what I mean by stopping believing the voice. It isn’t that you successfully argue it down. It’s that you see what it actually is, and the moment you really see it, it just doesn’t have the same hold any more.
Watch the full video
I made a full video on this — what it actually looks like to stop believing the voice in your head, and why it isn’t about fighting it, silencing it, or reframing it.
Watch the video here
If this resonated, you might like to meet Sue — the name I give the voice in your head that worries, second-guesses and replays. My free two-minute quiz shows you which part of her talks loudest, plus a short audio from me on what it means.
If you’d like to explore what it would take to genuinely change your relationship with this voice, that’s the work I do with women inside Ordinary Magnificence, my one-to-one coaching programme. You can book a 'Get Out of Your Head' Clarity In call with me here.
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