Kind self-talk beats self-criticism for real change
Martha Beck's KIST practice, Jim Doty's work on rewriting negative self-talk, Sarah Jakes Roberts and Mel Robbins's coaching of Chrissy Teigen agree that punishing yourself does not motivate lasting change. Treating yourself with the kindness you'd offer a friend keeps the nervous system out of threat mode so growth is possible.

The Short Version
Across these conversations, a life coach, a neurosurgeon, a pastor and a motivational coach reach the same conclusion from different directions: beating yourself up does not produce lasting change, and meeting your own suffering with the kindness you would show a friend does. Martha Beck's KIST ("kind internal self talk") asks you to feel what hurts and then speak to yourself as a caregiver would [1]. Jim Doty learned at 12 that "the negative dialogue that was going on in my head was not truth," and he connects harsh inner talk to a nervous system stuck in "fear mode [2]. Sarah Jakes Roberts spent ten years sitting with herself only to punish herself, and concluded You can't want to heal and punish yourself at the same time [3]. Mel Robbins told Chrissy Teigen, a self-described punisher," that her power lies in what she thinks of herself [4]. Ethan Kross adds one qualification: a firm inner coach can help in the moment, but negative self-talk becomes harmful when it loops [5].
Table of contents
What They Said
Martha Beck: KIST, the compassionate witness and one-degree turns
Martha Beck, a Harvard-trained sociologist and life coach, told Andrew Huberman about a tool she had kept to herself for years because it seemed too simple for an academic audience: "there's something I call KIST KIST and it stands for kind internal self talk" [1]. It works in two steps. When you wake up feeling off, you first let yourself register every sensation "without pushing back without restricting it." Then you talk to yourself the way a caregiver talks to someone they love [1]. She gave an example of that inner conversation: "how are you? How you doing? Not great. Okay. So there's some anxiety. Oh, your sinuses are blocked too. Let's see what could we do for you? Let's get you a hot drink and like I call with a good friend or a book or something" [1].
Beck is clear that the goal is care, not suppression. She dislikes the common goal of "bringing down" anxiety: "People talk to me about bringing down their anxiety. And I say, how do you feel if I told you I was going to bring you down? That's not a nice thing to say. If I told you I'm here to understand you and care about you, better" [1]. Her instruction is simple: "So just allow yourself to feel all the suffering and then start saying kind of things to the one who is suffering" [1]. The practice isn't limited to crises. It works "Even if it's just tiny suffering," and she does it continuously: "you just actively work as your own caregiver from the moment you are conscious in the morning" [1]. She calls this "humaning" rather than self-parenting [1].
KIST sits inside a larger method. For people fighting a bad habit, Beck asks them to picture the wild part that does the habit in one hand and the controlling part that condemns it in the other, see that both are well-meaning and exhausted, and wish both well [1]. The one who can feel compassion for both is what she calls the compassionate witness, a part that is "totally still and totally peaceful and completely compassionate" [1]. She links this to Richard Schwartz's internal family systems model, in which people eventually find a Self with a capital S that is not a part but who they are [1]. Her four steps are blunt: "first step, suffer. Second step, pay attention to suffering. Third step, follow compassion to its origin. Fourth step, never stop doing that" [1]. The second step came from experience. Her "let it stay" meditation replaced a "let go" approach that had failed, because fighting suffering didn't work [1]. She believes thousands of repetitions have built a well-worn circuit that takes her back to that self quickly [1].
Beck treats inner division itself as the source of distress. Scrolling Instagram for hours eventually leaves her feeling cramped and uneasy, like a car making a funny noise, because "a divided person is always anxious" [1]. So self-criticism doesn't solve the problem; it is one more split between a controlling part and a suffering part.
For making change, Beck now recommends gentleness over force, and she says so from experience. Her own year-long "integrity cleanse," a year of telling no lies, "was a kind of violent breaking of connections" [1]. "So now if I'm coaching somebody, I'm like, be very gentle. Take the, I call it one degree turns. If you're flying a plane and you turn one degree north every half hour, you won't even notice it's turning, but you'll end up someplace very different" [1]. Her examples are acts of self-kindness: "Get yourself the cup of tea in the morning to soothe your throat, listen to your own sorrow. Cancel a meeting because you just don't feel like doing it. You know, these are the things that bring you back to your truth. And it's always loving" [1].
The same idea appears in how she talks about relationships. When Huberman described losing himself in partners, Beck said that wanting the beloved's joy more than your own "is not love. That is a hostage situation" [1]. In what she calls "spider love," "You find yourself starved of your own your own validation, your kindness to your true self" [1]. She told a story about a friend who, when Beck insisted on calling despite pneumonia, texted: "do not impinge on your own health because you want me to feel loved. I don't like it. I want you to be healthy" [1]. In her view, kindness to yourself is not selfish. It is what makes real love for others possible.
Andrew Huberman: the cost of overriding yourself
Huberman spoke about the opposite habit. "One of the biggest mistakes I ever made was teaching myself to be more resilient to certain forms of stress," he said [1]. Growing up in skateboarding culture, he learned to push past his body's danger signals and then carried that into overwork and risks like great white shark diving, where he had an air failure [1]. "What had happened is I learned to override the signals of the body," he said. "If we don't listen to the signals that our body says, and we learn to override them repeatedly and systematically, we can place ourselves into real psychological, emotional and physical danger" [1]. He admits the change is still hard. When he sleeps in or does yoga instead of running at 5 a.m., "then I feel bad. I feel kind of lazy" [1]. Here the inner critic is still trying to punish him for being kind to himself. Beck, who once ran until her toenails came off, answered that overriding the body is a useful tool, like scissors, but you have to know when your heart is in it [1].
Jim Doty: the magic shop and why negative self-talk isn't true
Dr. Jim Doty, the Stanford neurosurgeon who founded the Stanford Center for Compassion and Altruism Research, told Mel Robbins the story that shaped his life [2]. He grew up with an alcoholic father and a chronically depressed mother. At 12, riding his bike away from fighting at home, he walked into a strip-mall magic shop, where the owner's mother offered to teach him if he came back every day for six weeks [2]. He came back, he admits, because "i had absolutely nothing else to do" and "she was giving me chocolate chip cookies" [2].
She taught him something like a mindfulness practice: first relaxation, then focused attention, "and then probably the most critical thing was she taught me that the negative dialogue that was going on in my head was not truth" [2]. Doty explained why that was so hard to see. "As a child i was in a war zone all the time," with muscles always tight and eyes always scanning, and "if you can't be present it's not possible to learn" [2]. Self-criticism feels true for a built-in reason: "oftentimes when we tell ourselves we're not good enough we're not worthy we don't deserve love we think there's some truth in that yeah but we have as humans a negativity bias where negative statements have a tendency to stick with us" [2]. Those statements feed on themselves: "this leads oftentimes to rumination. And once you tell yourself, it is not possible, I cannot, that becomes truth. Yeah. And so we create our own limited belief system" [2].
Her answer was three moves at once: "she taught me a technique to respond with positive self-affirmation, but also to not respond to those negative feelings and just let them drift by, but also to constantly encourage positivity within yourself" [2]. The change went beyond him. "If you're hypercritical with yourself, you're hypercritical in the lens through which you see the world, and you're very judgmental," Doty said. Once he understood what was going on in his own head, he saw the world through a lens "of kindness. compassion. And it also dissipated the anger that I had towards my parents" [2]. He came to see that people who lack tools for their own pain can't care for anyone else [2].
Robbins asked for step-by-step help for someone who has told themselves "I'm not good enough" their whole life, noting that negative self-talk "is so embedded in the subconscious" and "is actually programming deep within" [2]. Doty started with honesty: negative self-talk will not go away 100%. When he asks audiences who has it, about 90% raise their hands, and the other 10%, he jokes, are lying [2]. The aim is to notice it, let it sit without ruminating, and add what he says Stanford teaches beyond mindfulness: self-compassion and affirmations like "you're worthy, you're good enough" [2]. Next, understand where the story came from, through therapy or reflective writing about your childhood, because "You're manifesting all the time": relationships, jobs and decisions often follow the story our baggage wrote [2]. He also asks people to accept their "shadow self," the parts they are ashamed of, instead of pushing them away, which weakens the inner critic [2]. Every negative statement, he says, is like laying another brick in a prison you build for yourself, yet everyone holds the key [2].
Doty connects all of this to the nervous system (see Why It Works). His summary of the problem: "so many people live in a fear mode all the time and of course it has all sorts of deleterious effects and being in a love mode or a heart-centered mode is very difficult" [2].
Sarah Jakes Roberts: you can't heal and punish yourself at once
Pastor and author Sarah Jakes Roberts, in a clip Robbins chose as one of her podcast's eight most important moments of the year, described learning to belong to herself rather than seek approval from others [3]. "Instead of seeking a sense of belonging, a sense of okeness from other people, maybe I can just embrace myself. If I could find a way to be ok with myself, then I can wrap my arms around who I am. And for me, I had to sit with myself until I no longer cringed. I had to sit with myself until I no longer felt shame" [3].
For ten years, she says, she sat with herself only to punish herself, and she came to believe You can't want to heal and punish yourself at the same time [3]. She explains why people cling to self-punishment: it feels like protection. "This is what we say though, we say to ourselves, I'm going to keep this from happening again by constantly living with it right in front of me. And if I can live with it right in front of me, if I can beat myself up, if I can punish myself, then I will keep this from happening again" [3]. That is the logic of self-criticism as motivation, stated plainly, and Roberts rejects it: "we don't do ourselves any favors by committing to punishing ourselves over and over again for what we did, for what we allowed to happen" [3]. Keeping your worst moment in front of your face locks you into that one moment [3]. She spent years not wanting to be defined as a teen mom, and now embraces "but also": she is a teen mom, has been through divorce, and is also an author, a dreamer and a woman owning her power, a tapestry rather than a record of failures or achievements alone [3].
Robbins called her own paraphrase, "You cannot heal while you are still punishing yourself," one of the most important sentences she heard all year [3]. She added: "How often do you sit with yourself just replaying the same harsh, critical thoughts? You think you are just reflecting but the reality is you are just repeating the pain over and over and over again. What Sarah is reminding you of is that true healing, it doesn't come from self-punishment. It comes from self-acceptance, from self-compassion" [3]. Robbins frames this kindness as active and demanding, not passive: "Learn how to sit with yourself as uncomfortable as it may be. It not only takes courage, but it's an active love" [3]. And she says it frees you from needing other people's approval: "When you embrace who you are, imperfections and all, and you stop seeking validation from other people, you'll realize you don't need the validation because you've actually learned how to give it to yourself" [3]. Her summary: You're not just one chapter of your life. You're the whole book [3].
Mel Robbins and Chrissy Teigen: the prison of self-punishment
On Teigen's podcast, Robbins heard one of the clearest descriptions in these sources of self-criticism as a way of life. "The relationship with myself is the hardest part. I've always been a punisher, whether it was through diets and food emotionally or drinking. I always inflict some kind of pain on myself and punish myself for letting people down or feeling like I wasn't good enough in a group of people," Teigen said [4]. She described the result: "It's getting so exhausting being this mean to myself. And I don't know what it's like to not be that way. And if I could heal that part of myself so much would change" [4].
Teigen's self-punishment didn't make her more successful or more at peace. By her own account it made her life smaller. She rarely leaves the house, because after any interaction, even at the grocery store, she works hard to make sure people had a good experience and then dwells on it endlessly [4]. When Robbins told her she was in a prison of handing control of her worth to other people's reactions, Teigen pushed back: "I can by being really good." Robbins replied, "No you can't," and asked whether Teigen could control what Robbins would say about her to her daughters afterward. Teigen admitted she couldn't [4].
Robbins connected Teigen's self-criticism to her search for outside approval: "we're looking for validation outside ourselves because we're trying to escape the criticism that is running on repeat in our own heads" [4]. She stressed that this isn't malice toward yourself: "I don't think we mean harm to ourselves and yet here we are caught in this negative loop with ourselves" [4]. And it isn't your fault. It was conditioned in childhood, when you learned you were responsible for other people's moods [4]. Her alternative is to look inward: "the better approach is to learn how to give yourself clues internally" [4]. Her thesis for the episode: "Your power is never in what someone else thinks. Your power is in what you think about yourself" [4].
Her tool, the let them, let me theory, is at bottom about changing how you talk to yourself. "Let them assigns someone else's mood or opinion to them rather than to your worth. Let me returns your attention to your own thoughts, actions and emotions [4]. That's how you're going to start to change the way that you talk yourself to let me part, let me remind myself of who I am and that I'm a good person and I know what I intended, she says [4]. Her closing message to listeners was a claim of possibility: It is possible to change how you think it's possible to change how you talk to yourself. It's possible to feel good enough" [4].
Teigen's biggest fear shows what is at stake. She worries about passing this on to her children, not wanting them to feel they must perform and be good all the time [4]. Robbins told her this is her enormous opportunity: her kids are watching how much strangers affect her, and by focusing on what is hers to manage she shows them that their opinion of themselves matters more than anyone else's [4].
Dr. Paul Conti: where the inner critic comes from
In the same episode, Robbins played a clip from psychiatrist Dr. Paul Conti that explains why self-blame starts so early [4]. Children try to make sense of the world without abstract thought or life experience. If a stressed parent snaps at a child who asks for a drink, the child doesn't think the parent is in a bad place; they conclude it must be them. "So we attribute the negative things around us to ourselves," which is why these lessons are so hard to undo [4]. Conti cites the English physician Winnicott's idea of raising children to feel good enough, meaning solidly able to face what needs fixing: "If I get knocked down, I can get back up again. These are the lessons that we want" [4]. And he is hopeful for adults who missed out: "we can go back and look at that and we can change that later in life" [4].
The GIST of every new summary in your inbox, daily or weekly. Free, and you can unsubscribe any time.
Ethan Kross: the qualification, when a harsh voice helps and when it harms
Psychologist Ethan Kross, who studies the inner voice at the University of Michigan, gives the most careful version of the argument, and he disagrees in part [5]. He calls chatter, "looping on over a problem without making any progress" or telling yourself "You're an idiot, such an idiot," "a dark side of the inner voice" [5]. But he warns against lumping all negative self-talk together: "negative self talk is often equated with harmful outcomes. Negative emotions are functional when they are activated in the right proportions. Sometimes being firm with yourself can be quite effective" [5]. His example: "I'm channeling my high school wrestling coach who is really hard on me. You know, you better like shape up. You know, you can't, you know, wimp out here. That serves an amotivating function for me there" [5]. His line: "So if we're recruiting some negative voices, that isn't bad per se. What is bad is if we start looping. That is the what we really want to equate with chatter. It's getting stuck in those thought loops at when things get get harmful when those negative emotions are tweaked too intensely or for too long" [5].
Kross's first defense against chatter looks a lot like the "friend standard the other speakers use. With distanced self-talk, he coaches himself using his own name and you, as if advising a friend, because we give better advice to others than to ourselves [5]. When he wakes at 2 a.m. with chatter, he asks himself by name how he will feel about it tomorrow morning. Remembering that feelings pass turns the volume down enough to fall back asleep [5]. He stresses that having chatter doesn't mean you have a disorder: welcome to the human condition" [5].
Where They Agree, and Where They Don't
They agree that self-punishment doesn't produce the change it promises. Roberts states it most directly: you can't want to heal and punish yourself at the same time [3]. Teigen's years as "a punisher" left her exhausted and housebound, not improved [4]. Doty says hypercriticism feeds rumination and a "limited belief system" [2]. Beck says a divided person is always anxious and prefers gentle one-degree turns to force [1]. Even Kross, the most qualified voice, agrees that negative self-talk becomes harmful once it loops [5].
They agree the inner critic's claims aren't reliable. Doty's central lesson is that the negative voice "was not truth," and that it feels true because of a negativity bias [2]. Conti explains that children blame themselves for the bad things around them because they can't yet see other explanations [4]. Robbins calls self-criticism a "negative loop" that no one chose [4]. Kross notes that chatter is universal [5].
They agree the alternative is to face the pain, not suppress it. None of them recommends positive thinking as a cover-up. Beck's first step is to feel every sensation without pushing back [1]. Doty says to let negative thoughts "drift by and notice them without ruminating [2]. Roberts sat with herself until I no longer cringed [3]. Robbins calls sitting with yourself an active love" that takes courage [3].
They agree that kindness to yourself spreads to others. Beck says KIST "makes you so compassionate to other people because you're not fighting the suffering in yourself" [1]. Doty says a kinder view of himself changed how he saw the world and dissolved his anger at his parents [2]. Robbins tells Teigen her kids are learning from how she treats herself [4].
Where they differ. The main disagreement concerns the firm inner coach. Kross says a harsh, drill-sergeant voice in a short burst can motivate. He channels his wrestling coach, and Huberman describes tripling his reps on a hard set by cycling through tough coach voices such as David Goggins and Jocko Willink [5]. The others focus on chronic self-punishment aimed at who you are, which is where their evidence comes from: Teigen's years of punishing herself through diets, food and drinking [4], Roberts's decade of self-punishment [3], and Doty's childhood "war zone [2]. The two views are compatible. Kross separates a brief, task-focused push (shape up) from getting stuck in those thought loops" that run "too intensely or for too long" [5], and Beck separates overriding the body as a tool used knowingly from overriding it as a way of life [1]. Huberman's story sits on the line between them: the same toughness that helped his workouts led him into overwork and physical danger [1][5].
They also differ on method. Doty adds explicit affirmations such as "you're worthy, you're good enough," along with therapy or writing to trace where the story came from [2]. Beck avoids reframing talk like "bringing down" anxiety and prefers care and curiosity [1]. Robbins uses a thought-sorting tool that assigns other people's opinions to them [4]. Kross uses distance: your own name, "you, and imagining tomorrow [5]. He would likely see this variety as healthy. His research found people used three or four tools a day and the ones that worked varied widely, and he notes that when you impose a particular view on folks, like you have to do it this way, that tends not to work out very well" [5].
Why It Works
Threat states shut down the parts of the brain needed for change. Doty explains that the sympathetic branch of the nervous system (fight, flight or freeze) evolved to fire briefly in response to a threat, after which survivors returned to the parasympathetic state "we were designed to live in" [2]. In that calm, caring state, oxytocin and other neurotransmitters reward us, and the brain's networks and the body work at their best [2]. Robbins sums it up as "fear mode" versus "heart mode," and Doty agrees [2]. Neuroscientist Tara Swart describes what chronic threat does in the brain: "low power mode," in which blood supply is pulled from "thinking creatively, thinking flexibly, solving complex problems, overriding our biases, regulating our emotions" [3]. Those are the capacities any real change depends on. Doty makes the same point from his childhood: in a constant war zone "your muscles are always tight you're always looking around you can't focus," and "if you can't be present it's not possible to learn" [2]. An inner voice that attacks you all day recreates that war zone inside.
Safety makes learning possible. Doty says the woman in the magic shop gave him psychological safety, which he calls key to calming the stress response, by looking at him eye to eye as an equal [2]. KIST gives you that same safety from yourself. Beck's caregiver voice ("how are you? How you doing?") is the calm adult Doty met, used on your own behalf [1][2].
Negativity sticks and loops. Doty points to a human negativity bias "where negative statements have a tendency to stick with us," leading to rumination until "it is not possible, I cannot, that becomes truth" [2]. In Doty's account, the default mode network, active when the mind wanders, builds the story of who you are, and it is also where rumination like "I'm never good enough" lives [2]. Kross calls chatter a transdiagnostic process: filled with sad thoughts it pushes toward depression, with fears toward anxiety, with traumatic memories toward trauma [5]. Chatter soaks up attention and leaves less for problem-solving and creativity [5]. Self-criticism doesn't just feel bad. It uses up the mental resources you would need to improve.
Repetition rewires. Doty's method relies on "what fires together, wires together": repeated practice builds neural pathways [2]. Beck says thousands of repetitions of her four steps have built a well-worn circuit back to calm [1]. Huberman notes, from developmental neurobiology, that "the same neural stuff is repurposed in adulthood" [1], so adults often run adult lives on child-based patterns, which is why they can be retrained.
Why the critic starts early. Conti's account of attribution explains why self-blame feels so natural: as children we "attribute the negative things around us to ourselves" [4]. Kross adds, via Lev Vygotsky, that children learn self-control by repeating caregivers' words aloud before that outer voice becomes an inner one [5]. So the voice in your head often uses your childhood caregivers' tone, which is why deliberately changing that tone can matter so much.
Positive states improve physiology. Doty says positive belief systems "make your physiology work its best both your brain and your peripheral physiology," and that being focused on others and on possibility "stops you or limit you from going down the spiral into your default mode ruminating about what can't be versus looking at the world through the lens of what could be" [2]. Swart says mind-body practices such as meditation, yoga, nature, journaling and gratitude lower cortisol and move the nervous system from "sympathetic, which is fright, like fight to parasympathetic, which is rest and recover" [3].
Distance brings back perspective. Kross's distanced self-talk works because we give better advice to others than to ourselves. Talking to yourself by name, as you would to a friend, borrows that clearer view [5].
Where It Applies, and Where It Doesn't
It applies most to chronic, identity-level self-criticism. The strongest cases in these sources are lifelong patterns: Teigen's "I've always been a punisher" [4], Roberts's ten years [3], Doty's "I'm not good enough" story from childhood [2], and Huberman's habit of overriding his body [1]. Here the sources are unanimous that punishment keeps you stuck.
It applies to small, everyday suffering too. Beck stresses KIST works "Even if it's just tiny suffering," a blocked sinus or a bad mood on waking [1]. Robbins points to ordinary triggers, such as an email or a boss's bad mood that sends you spiraling [4].
It doesn't forbid a firm voice. Kross is explicit that "being firm with yourself can be quite effective" in short bursts, as with a coach's push during a hard workout [5]. The line he draws is looping and intensity, not tone alone [5]. Beck likewise calls overriding the body a useful tool, like scissors, if you know when your heart is in it [1].
It isn't avoidance or indulgence. Beck's kindness is always tied to truth. She asks people to move toward integrity, not away from hard facts [1]. Doty warns that the negative voice won't vanish and must be noticed, not ignored [2]. Kross says healthy distraction differs from avoidance through substances, and "if you find that the problem keeps resurfacing, that's a cue you need to engage and deal with it" [5]. Roberts's self-acceptance means accepting the whole record, mistakes included [3].
It isn't a cure for deep wounds by itself. Teigen mentions childhood experiences that shaped her people-pleasing and says she is in therapy [4]. Doty recommends therapy or reflective writing to understand where your story came from [2]. Conti describes changing childhood lessons as work done later in life, not a quick fix [4]. If self-criticism comes with depression, anxiety, trauma or self-harm, a mental health professional's advice matters; these sources describe practices, not treatment.
No single tool fits everyone. Kross's research found people used three or four emotion-regulation tools a day, and the ones that worked varied widely [5]. Beck's caregiver talk, Doty's affirmations, Robbins's let them, let me and Kross's distanced self-talk are all ways of doing the same thing.
What To Do With It
Start the morning with a check-in, not a verdict. When you wake up feeling off, first register every sensation "without pushing back without restricting it," then speak to yourself as a caregiver would: ask how you're doing, name what hurts, and offer something concrete like a hot drink, a call with a good friend, or a book [1].
Don't try to "bring down" your feelings; try to understand them. Replace the goal of fighting anxiety with Beck's "I'm here to understand you and care about you" [1]. If you're battling a habit, picture the part that does it and the part that condemns it, see that both are exhausted and well-meaning, and wish both well [1].
Label the inner critic's claims as opinions, not facts. When "I'm not good enough" shows up, remember Doty's lesson that the negative dialogue "was not truth" and that it sticks because of a negativity bias. Let it drift by without ruminating, then add a self-compassionate line such as "you're worthy, you're good enough" [2].
Talk to yourself by name, the way you'd advise a friend. Use Kross's distanced self-talk: your own name and "you." At night, ask yourself, by name, how you will feel about it tomorrow morning [5].
Sit with the hard memory instead of keeping it in front of you as punishment. Notice when you're replaying a mistake "to keep this from happening again," and follow Roberts: sit with yourself until you no longer cringe, and then add "but also" to the story [3].
Trace where the story came from. Use therapy or reflective writing about your childhood, as Doty suggests, and keep Conti's point in mind that children blame themselves for what happens around them, which means these lessons can be changed later in life [2][4]. Kross adds that expressive writing for 15 to 20 minutes a day for one to three days imposes structure on chaotic thoughts [5].
Make one-degree turns, not violent breaks. Pick one small act of self-care a day, such as a cup of tea for a sore throat or canceling a meeting you don't want, and let those small turns add up [1].
Assign other people's moods to them, and yourself to you. When someone's bad mood or opinion sets off your inner critic, say "let them," then "let me, and remind yourself of who I am and that I'm a good person and I know what I intended" [4].
Calm the body first. Use a short breathing practice to shift out of fear mode, as Doty does each morning: in through the nose for four to six seconds, hold for four to six, out slowly through the mouth, for a minute or two [2]. You can also use Nerurkar's three-second stop, breathe and be reset, which gets you out of what if thinking and gets you back into what is [3].
Keep the tough coach, lose the loop. If a firm voice helps you through one hard set, use it, but notice when it turns into looping chatter that runs "too intensely or for too long," and switch to kindness there [5].
Sources
- Dr Martha Beck Access Your Best Self With Mind Body Practices Belief Testing Imagination · Huberman Lab
- How to Manifest Anything You Want: Unlock the Unlimited Power of Your Mind · The Mel Robbins Podcast
- 8 Habits That Will Change Your Life: The Expert Advice You Need This Year · The Mel Robbins Podcast
- How to Stop Caring What People Think of You · The Mel Robbins Podcast
- How to Control Your Inner Voice & Increase Your Resilience · Huberman Lab