This week felt off before it even started.
Agitated for no clear reason. Self-critical over small things I would normally shrug off. My inner critic got loud, and the tape it was playing sounded suspiciously like a highlight reel of everything I hadn’t done, hadn’t finished, hadn’t figured out yet.
For a couple of days, I believed it.
Then I checked my cycle tracker. Luteal phase. Of course.
The story changes fast when you have one extra piece of context. Nothing about my life had actually gone wrong. My brain was just keeping score – and it was keeping score wrong.
Today in 4 minutes or less, you’ll learn:
✔️ One small check-in to run before you believe your inner critic
✔️ A reflection question about whose voice you’re actually hearing
✔️ Why your brain keeps score, and what to do when the numbers don’t match reality
Doable ideas 💭
Before you take your inner critic’s word for anything this week, run a two-question check.
Question 1: what’s my body doing right now? Am I under-slept, under-fed, over-caffeinated, mid-cycle, coming off a big week, or three days into a cold I keep ignoring?
Question 2: would I say this to a friend in the same state?
You’re not trying to argue your critic into silence. You’re just checking whether the voice yelling at you has any new information – or whether it’s a body state wearing a very convincing costume.
If the answer to question one is “yeah, something’s off physically,” and the answer to question two is “absolutely not,” you’ve got your answer. The thoughts are real. The verdict isn’t.
The point isn’t to dismiss what comes up. Sometimes the inner critic is pointing at something worth listening to. But it’s a lot easier to hear the signal when you’ve turned down the noise your body is making underneath it.
Reflections 🪞
When your inner critic gets loud this week, whose voice does it actually sound like – and when did you first start hearing it?
What would the score actually look like if you kept it honestly, accounting for everything your body was carrying this week?
Mindfulness 🧘🏻♀️
My brain keeps score. Constantly. It tallies what I’ve done, what I haven’t, who I’ve disappointed, who I’ve let down, whether I’m behind, whether I’m enough. And it presents these tallies as if they are facts.
They are not facts. They’re a story my brain writes based on whatever inputs it happens to have that day.
And the inputs are so much messier than we give them credit for.
Sleep. Hormones. Blood sugar. The last conversation you had. Whether you moved your body today. Whether you saw sunlight. Whether you’re two days out from your period or two days into a work project that feels bigger than you.
All of that goes into the tally. And then the tally gets read out loud in the voice of your harshest critic, and we treat it like objective truth.
This week, the score my brain was keeping said: “you’re behind, you’re not doing enough, everyone else has this figured out, you should be further along.”
The actual score, once I stepped back, was: a full week of client sessions, showing up for the people I love, enough sleep most nights, and a part of my cycle where my brain is chemically primed to notice everything that feels wrong. Not to mention I had 2 intense months of planning and executing a wedding, visa lodgement and an overseas trip.
Same week. Two completely different stories.
The work isn’t to stop the scorekeeping. Our brains are pattern-matching machines and they’re going to keep matching patterns whether we like it or not.
The work is to notice when the score is being kept in a rigged game – and to stop treating the final number as gospel.
Before I let my brain hand me a verdict on how I’m doing, on who I am, on whether I’m enough, I want to check what state the scorekeeper is in.
Because a tired, hormonal, under-fed, over-stimulated scorekeeper isn’t a neutral observer. It’s a very loud, very confident narrator with an axe to grind.
And it is almost always wrong about the important stuff.
Ideas Worth Pondering 🧠
Listen to ideas, not their messenger.
Focus on the contents, not the box.
Avoid ideology.
– Derek Sivers
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If so, please let me know by either:
- #1: Forwarding this to a friend whom you think would benefit from actionable well-being tips
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P.S. Have you checked out my handpan guided meditation soundtracks. to boost your focus, energy and reclaim your peace of mind?