Headspace Studios.

Hey friends, welcome back to Radio Headspace, it's Dora.

Back in 2010, I was sitting in my room trying to meditate for one of the first times.

I had found this recording online, one of few that existed back then, and I wanted to give it a try.

The instructions seemed simple enough. Focus on your breath and just follow the breath.

But within minutes, my mind was spinning. Should I be following my breath, feeling it,

counting the breaths? And then came this strange panic. I forgot how to breathe naturally.

Like suddenly I didn't know how to do this thing, my body had

been doing automatically my entire life. And that's when the inner critic got really loud.

This isn't working. You're doing it wrong. Meditation isn't for me. This is too challenging,

and I'll never get the hang of it. I felt this tightness in my chest, the sense of falling short of what I thought meditation was

supposed to be, calm, blissful, peaceful, and I wasn't experiencing any of that.

So I stopped for a whole year, and I didn't try again.

Here's what I didn't understand back then.

The inner critic isn't a sign that something's wrong with you.

It's actually a defense mechanism designed to protect you from perceived harm.

We have what's called a negativity bias, where we pay more attention

to bad things because in the wild, threats were more likely to harm us than good things

were to help us. The inner critic also forms during childhood as a way to navigate relationships

with caregivers. We internalize the critical voices of parents,

teachers, authority figures, and it becomes a coping mechanism. If we criticize ourselves first,

maybe we can avoid external rejection or punishment. But when I was sitting in my room

...