The shame→procrastination cycle.

When you procrastinate, then you criticize yourself for procrastinating, you make it less likely that you'll actually get started. And yet, this is a cycle that a lot of people recognize. Struggling, criticizing themselves for struggling, which then makes it harder for them to bounce back, get back on track, or actually get started. In this video, I want to make the case that self-criticism is the enemy of growth. And I want to talk about four ways to break the self-criticism cycle that is keeping you stuck. But first, I want to talk about the evidence that shows that self-criticism is just keeping you stuck. Like it's simply not helping you in any way, shape, or form. I'm going to start by talking about this huge study from 2025 that shows a bidirectional relationship between procrastination and negative emotions. In other words, the meaner that you are to yourself after you procrastinate, the more likely you are to keep on procrastinating. It is a vicious and self-reinforcing cycle. In the paper, they compare this to

something called self-difference theory. So, it starts with you not living up to your ideal self, the version of the you that you really want to be, which then triggers a bunch of negative emotions towards yourself, self-criticism. And those negative emotions actually make it more likely that you will continue putting things off. And that is how the self-criticism cycle works. In the same way that we know someone else criticizing us does not motivate us, we know that criticizing ourselves doesn't motivate us. Self-criticism only makes you feel negative and sorry for yourself. And we know that we don't feel inspired and motivated when we feel negative and sorry for ourselves. And to be clear, I'm not talking about self-criticism that looks like, "Oh, I've fallen off my healthy eating habits. I best get back onto that. " I'm talking about self-criticism that looks like, "I fell off my healthy eating habits. What is wrong with me? " Self-criticism is personal. And when you fall into that personal kind of self-criticism, it keeps you stuck in a vicious, self-reinforcing cycle. Which is why in this video, I want to talk about how to break the cycle. What can we do about it so that we're not stuck in this loop? So that you can start not only feeling better, like it feels nicer to be nice to yourself, but also so that you can bounce back with a lot more ease. To break this cycle, it helps to understand why your brain is actually in this cycle

in the first place. There are a few theories around why we criticize ourselves, but one of the popular ones is all about self-protection. Your brain is keeping you in the self-criticism cycle because it thinks that it's helping you out and keeping you safe from perceived threats. So, sometimes a threat can look like a physical threat, hot stove, a dangerous animal. Other times, a threat can look like a threat to your autonomy and freedom, like an assignment that's due next week, or a phone call that you don't want to make. Sometimes, a threat can look like a social threat. For example, someone sending your little Tik Tok to their friends and saying something mean about it. So, when your brain engages in self-criticism, it might actually be trying to protect you from a perceived threat. After all, self-criticism doesn't lead to action. It leads to negative feelings. It leads to you feeling sorry for yourself. It stops you from doing that assignment that threatens your freedom and autonomy. It stops you from posting that Tik Tok that might result in a social threat. So, while being mean to yourself can seem really counterproductive, it actually [snorts] could be your brain keeping you in a beautiful cycle of comfort. And of course, your brain wants this cycle to continue, not because it keeps you happy and thriving, but nice and safe. There's a lot more to this cycle than I can cover in this video. But in this particular video, I really want to talk about how to break the habit of self-criticism that feeds this self-reinforcing cycle. Because getting things done and adopting healthy behaviors and personal growth really is that deep. Your brain is doing all of this stuff to keep you safe, what can you do to actually break out of this cycle that is self-reinforcing, that is not helping you in any way, shape, or form. It's just kind of making you feel bad and do less. Step number one, we got to start updating your

brain. I remember when my sister got a new boyfriend and we went from hanging out every day to barely seeing each other at all. And then one day, I'm talking to her and she's like, "Your vibe's off. Is something wrong? " And I was like, "Yes, you've left me. " But in a way more confrontational way. And in that moment, I was 100% predicting rejection. I was like, "She's going to get defensive. She's going to deny. She's going to tell me that I'm being too sensitive. " And then she was like, "Oh, yeah, you're kind of right. Like that's my bad. " And immediately, we made plans for the next day. And in the next few weeks, she was following up with me and reminding me of how much she loved me. And I remember in that moment, it was like my brain glitched and I was like, "Oh, it's actually possible to confront someone and get a healthy response. " Ooh, it's making me a little emotional. I remember my brain kept on like going back to that moment where I was predicting defensiveness, denial, and then picturing her reaction. And it was this feeling of surprise of like, "Oh, what? That's possible? " It felt like my brain was reprogramming, and that's because it was. When you have a felt experience of surprise, something happens that you didn't predict would happen, your brain updates. Surprise is actually a fundamental and necessary ingredient if you want to learn new things. And I don't mean learn new things intellectually, I mean embody new learnings. So, surprise is necessary for your brain to update and to learn, it makes sense that if you want to break out of the self-criticism cycle, you need to experience some kind of surprise. You can't just logically get that self-criticism is unhelpful, you need to get that on an emotional level. And that happens through surprise. But how do you do that? How do you engineer a surprising moment where you have a felt sense of surprise that helps you to drop the self-criticism cycle? Firstly, it helps to understand what surprise is

made up of. The first ingredient of surprise is prediction. And your prediction usually isn't in your conscious awareness. A lot of our predictions are going on underneath the surface. In that moment with my sister, I had an underlying prediction of confronting someone about needing more love never goes well. When it comes to self-criticism, the underlying prediction is around how self-criticism is going to keep you safe, how it's going to protect you from something. Ingredient number two of surprise is an error, a felt sense of, "Oh, actually, I don't think self-criticism is going to get me what I want. I don't think that prediction was accurate after all. Something has shown me that there's something wrong with that prediction and that there's a prediction error. " So, the question is, how do you engineer a felt experience of surprise in order to break the self-criticism cycle that is keeping you stuck? One of my favorite ways to engineer a feeling of surprise is through imagination exercises. Because we know that our brain can't really sense the difference between the things that we imagine and real life. When you imagine stuff, you can trigger very real feelings. And one of the feelings that you can trigger is a feeling of surprise. It's a sense of, "Wait, maybe I am wrong after all. " So, if you want to break the self-criticism

cycle, one imagination exercise could be taking a recent experience where you leaned into self-criticism. Maybe you didn't return your library book on time, didn't do your daily exercise, whatever. And then you immediately started getting mad at yourself and being mean to yourself. Step back into that experience, really feel all those feelings, and then imagine something that triggers the experience of surprise. So, this could be personifying your self-criticism. So, actually taking the self-criticism out of you in that memory and giving it a little person, a little character. And watching them say the same things to you that you were saying to yourself. And really notice in that moment like, "What they're doing is not going to help me to get what I want. Maybe my prediction of self-criticism is the best way to protect myself isn't quite right. " But to make this more helpful, I want to

introduce to you symptom deprivation journaling. This is another step that you can take to break that self-criticism cycle by creating a feeling of surprise. If you've ever heard the phrase, "You don't know what you've got till it's gone," that is symptom deprivation. So, you want to take the symptom of self-criticism, and you want to imagine I've taken away your ability to criticize yourself. I have powers that have allowed me to do that. And of course, you don't know what you've got till it's gone. So, once you no longer have the ability to criticize yourself, you can watch yourself squirm and sit in the discomfort of not being able to criticize yourself because it will feel uncomfortable. And that's when you can start journaling about why being deprived of the ability to criticize yourself is hard. So, there are a few benefits to symptom deprivation journaling. Number one, it's such a good pattern interrupt. If mid-self-criticism, you sit back and you go, "Huh, okay. Imagine this random YouTuber has taken away my ability to criticize right now. How does that feel? Okay, that feels uncomfortable. Why does that feel uncomfortable? " Like that's such a beautiful way to interrupt that cycle. And we love a pattern interrupt. Secondly, it helps you to bring into your conscious awareness how ridiculous what you're doing is, which can create a feeling of surprise. If you start writing out, "Oh, well, I miss being able to self-criticize, or I'm scared of not being able to self-criticize because it's the only way to keep myself small and I need to stay safe, etc., etc. " Once you write that out on your little paper, your brain will start to go, "Hmm, that's a little I don't know about that. " And you'll start to question whether that prediction is actually real and accurate. So, in your day-to-day life, here's what symptom deprivation journaling would look like. Imagine you have an assignment due in 3 days and you start procrastinating. Then, you start being mean to yourself for procrastinating, so you're in the self-criticism cycle. That is when you would engage in symptom deprivation. So, you'd go, "Okay, that random YouTuber has cast a spell, and that spell says I can't criticize myself. " You're playing pretend for a second. So, if you're good at hypotheticals, like, "Would you still love me if I were a worm? " If you can get behind that, then this hypothetical. If you're not so good at engaging in hypotheticals, this could require some practice. And then you want to start journaling. So, if you good sentence starters, say, "I'm worried that if I can't be mean to myself in this moment, then dot dot. I'm scared that by not criticizing myself, the consequence will be dot dot. If I can't criticize myself, then dot dot dot happen. To be clear, symptom deprivation, not my idea. It's from coherence therapy. It's just something that works really well for me. [clears throat] And you might be thinking, this is ridiculous. Like I'm not choosing to self-criticize. No, you aren't. You're not consciously choosing to self-criticize. Why would anyone do that? But be open to the idea that your motivation to criticize yourself isn't currently conscious, especially when it comes to self-protection behaviors. There's no conscious thought behind them. You don't think, okay, there's a lion. Okay, like maybe I'm going to run. You just run. Similarly, you don't consciously think to yourself, I'm procrastinating. Okay, well, okay, I might be mean to myself now. Like I might just like be really nasty to myself. That would be a really good way to handle that. Like that's not what's happening. It's a very unconscious process. Another way to engineer surprise is to do as the dentist did. A

while ago, I went to my dentist for some tooth sensitivity, and she was like, let's try composite bonding. Basically, that's like putting concrete over brick to protect the brick. She was like, it's not permanent. Like they fall off eventually. It's no biggie. But I was deeply hesitant. I kept on flip-flopping and being like, maybe I will, maybe I won't, until she sat me down. And she kept on prodding with questions to understand where my hesitancy was coming from. Until I came out and I said, I don't want to be going back to the dentist every month to get these redone cuz you said that they were non-permanent. Immediately, she was like, that's not going to happen. Like these can last years. And also, you don't have to get them redone. Like you're not obligated to. So I was like, oh, okay, cool. Let's do it. My dentist could have been very critical. She could have labeled me as a frustrating patient, but instead, she sought to understand where my hesitancy was coming from, where my fear, my flip-flopping was coming from. Because it had an origin. Even if I didn't know what that origin was. It took me a while to articulate and understand it myself. It took her being curious to really understand why I was struggling with this decision. If you want to break the self-criticism cycle, something to try is swapping out the critical dentist mindset for the curious dentist mindset. Instead of condemning, always seek to understand. There is some grounded research behind the idea that this is a valid way to break the self-criticism cycle. American neuroscientist Dr. Jud Brewer talks about how when we get curious, it actually fires off some dopamine pathways in the brain. So it's actually a very rewarding internal experience. Think about the last time you were really curious. Maybe someone had a little bit of gossip to share. Maybe that was just a really interesting fact that you learned and you kind of lean in and you're like, huh, like what? Really? Like it feels really good to be interested, to be curious. And if you're going to swap one behavior, like self-criticism, with another, it's going to have to be another quite rewarding experience for your brain in order to break that cycle, which is why curiosity can be the perfect swap. Curiosity looks like my dentist leaning in and going, talk to me about your hesitations. Like where is this coming from? What assumptions exist here? Let's get to the bottom of this. In a way, this is kind of about uncovering your predictions. So your brain might be going, actually, I'm predicting that you're going to overwork on this assignment, and I'm not going to get any rest. play. And that's why I'm avoiding things. Beautiful. You can talk to that part of you that's so scared and be like, well, how about I commit to not doing that? How about I make sure that you are protected, but in a very different way. If you're trying to break out of the self-criticism cycle, another approach to try is the Michelle Segar

approach. Michelle Segar is an expert on sustainable behavior change, and she also coaches people who are trying to embrace an exercise habit, one of the hardest habits for people to adopt. And a lot of people will come to her and they'll go, here's what I want to do. I want to work out for 1 hour a day at my local gym. I want to cut out all sugar, all dairy, go keto, cut my carbs down, and so on and so forth. They present these radical plans. And then she goes, okay, well, let's list out all of your past attempts at getting healthy and what they all looked like and how they all went. Often times, when she does this, people with that mentality of rigid, I need to go all out, will write down a list of their past attempts, and all of their past attempts will have looked the same. The all-in mindset, the changing my life in radical ways mindset, which often ends in failure because it doesn't account for the human brain. And when they list out all these past attempts that look very similar to current attempt, she'll ask them, how is this approach working out for you? And that conversation eventually ends with her clients having a moment of hopefully surprise, where they realize, oh, this radical approach to changing my health behaviors probably isn't the move. And really seeing all of your attempts on paper, all of which look the same, helps you to have that experience of surprise in the moment to go, oh, okay, like maybe that's not working for me. Maybe I need to try something different. If you want to change the self-criticism cycle, you can do something very, very similar. When you're in the midst of surprise, ask yourself, how's this working out for me? Is this getting me what I want? Like is this moving me towards my healthy behaviors, my goals? Is this making me more motivated? When I really look inwards at these thoughts and feelings, like do they feel like they're helping me? And do this in a very curious way. This shouldn't be done analytically. Once again, you kind of want to trigger a feeling of surprise, where you look your feelings in the face and really notice, oh, this isn't getting me where I want to go. This isn't protecting me in the ways that I'd like it to. If you liked this video, you'd probably like my podcast self-trust series that I've been creating, where I'm basically riffing on a book that I'm writing all about productivity. I'm going to have that link down below. It's not going to be talking head videos like this one. They're a bit more riffy and casual, but if you are interested in these concepts, you might enjoy listening to that playlist. I'll have a link down on the screen as well as down below. I appreciate you so very much, and I'll see you soon.