He’s determined to keep me that way, too. And having determined his appearance, I gave him a name: Uriah, because like the Dickens character my inner critic is “ever so ‘umble”. The description is based on drawings I’ve made of him. He generally looks worried, and avoids eye contact, but sometimes he stares boldly, his face contorted into a disbelieving sneer. I don’t know what yours is like, but I imagine my inner critic as small with a shaved head, and dark shadows under his bulging eyes. And it seems I’m not the only one who likes working that way. By doing that, I externalise the thoughts: they’re no longer coming from me. The first step is to become aware of your automatic negative thoughts – and for me, anyway, that’s much easier (and more fun, actually) if I personify the inner critic, with a sketch, and give him/her a voice. So we can learn to stop our thoughts travelling down the well-trodden neural pathways by creating entirely new ones.
Brains don’t stop developing in childhood, as was previously believed: studies of London cabbies doing “the knowledge” of the city’s layout have found a redistribution of grey matter, and individuals who sustained massive brain damage have been shown to develop workarounds using undamaged parts.
Happily, increasing evidence of the brain’s plasticity suggests that we can disrupt this poisonous cycle and put in place something much more healthy. We get stuck in the same old neural pathways, having the same negative thoughts again and again. In the 1960s, one of the founders of cognitive therapy, Aaron Beck, concluded that ANTs sabotage our best self, and lead to a vicious circle of misery: creating a general mindset that is variously unhappy or anxious or angry (take your pick) and which is (therefore) all the more likely to generate new ANTs. Psychologists use the term “ automatic negative thoughts” to describe the ideas that pop into our heads uninvited, like burglars, and leave behind a mess of uncomfortable emotions.