The Have you ever said something critical to yourself?

And then if you happen to share this insecurity with someone else,

they say something along the lines of, I don't see that at all.

This used to happen to me all the time a few years ago when I was an on-camera actress.

I would be preparing for an audition or a shoot day and say to my husband,

I feel like I'm having a weird face day.

To which he would usually reply,

What? Your face looks the same to me as it always does?

In truth, I was probably just feeling tense or nervous because of the upcoming shoot or audition,

and that tension was what I was noticing.

There are things, physical or otherwise, that we notice about ourselves and may become critical

of that other people simply don't, certainly not in the way we imagine they do.

We live with ourselves all day, every day, and thus it can become easy, certainly when under stress, to put excess attention

on our thoughts, feelings, behaviors, and appearance. One thing I like to do when I have that

critical voice come up is to stop and check in with what the emotion is behind that voice.

Do I feel fear, sadness, anger, anxiety?

Once I can identify the emotion behind it,

it helps me to disconnect it from the critical reaction of it.

For example, during my weird face days,

once I realized that that was more often than not about the underlying nerves and tension I was feeling, I could address the tension instead of feeling critical about my appearance.

I could do some deep breathing, meditation, go on a walk, jot down a gratitude list, any number of things to help me take my focus off my self-criticism. The bonus is that when I felt calmer, I looked in the mirror

and also felt better about myself. Sometimes that critical voice is quiet all day,

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