A Nervous System Approach to Healing Self-Talk for High-Achieving Women

You know the voice. The one that whispers (or shouts):

• “You should be doing more.”
• “That wasn’t good enough.”
• “Everyone else has it together. What’s wrong with you?”

Most women think this voice is a mindset problem. Admittedly, I did, too, for years. But what if your inner critic is actually a protective pattern of your nervous system? (Spoiler Alert: It is.) I like to start by naming the inner critic almost like an alter ego because it helps to see that this voice isn’t you. It’s a patterned survival response.

The Inner Critic as a Survival Pattern

The inner critic often develops early in life as a way to stay safe:

• If I’m harder on myself, others won’t be.
• If I keep achieving, I’ll be lovable.
• If I catch my flaws first, I can control the damage.

This self-monitoring mode is a stress response, a blend of fight, flight, and fawn, that your nervous system uses to stay protected. It’s not that you hate yourself. It’s that your body thinks you need that critique to stay safe. Fight turns inward as self-attack, flight fuels perfectionism, and fawn sharpens hyper-awareness of how we’re perceived. When we understand the critic as adaptive rather than defective, we can begin to regulate the nervous system beneath it rather than trying to silence it by force.

A Quick Win: Repatterning for Self-Trust

Try this 2-minute practice to begin shifting the critic-safety loop:

Repatterning for Self-Trust

1. Pause. Notice the moment the inner critic pipes up.
2. Place a hand over your chest or low belly. Reconnect with your body.
3. Say this out loud or silently: “I hear the fear behind that voice. Thank you for protecting me.”
4. Repeat this phrase: “In this moment, I choose curiosity over control.”

This interrupts the shame-spiral with safety. Not fake positivity. Not pushing harder. But a nervous system message of, “You’re allowed to feel safe without proving yourself.”

You’re Not Alone in This

If your nervous system has been wired for survival, your thoughts will reflect that. But the good news? You can rewire safety slowly, gently, at your own pace.

This is the work I do with women every day: Decoding their inner critic through the lens of physiology, not failure.

You don’t need to fix yourself. It’s about feeling safe being yourself.