Panic Attacks

Self-criticism and depression are frequently locked in a toxic, self-sustaining cycle. When you’re constantly beating yourself down for making mistakes, or maintaining impossibly high standards, it can have a significant impact on your emotional state and mental health. It can lead to heavy feelings of not being good enough, feeling like you're a failure, and can deplete motivation and self-worth.

The Harsh Inner Critic

In getting to know how your own inner critic can fuel depression, it's helpful to reflect on where these self-defeating patterns started. For many people, the harsh internal voice can actually bear a strong resemblance to the critical voices they heard during childhood. A parent, sibling, or even a teacher, for example. The more often you hear these critical voices, the easier it can become to internalize them and even buy into them yourself. When you internalize these messages early in life, they can become deeply ingrained in your self-perception and self-worth.

Self-criticism can sometimes develop as a way of making sense of painful experiences. If you experienced rejection or constant criticism as a child, you may have unconsciously felt that you deserved it. This can become a survival mechanism. Perhaps a part of you maintains a sense of control by thinking, “If it’s my fault, then I must be able to fix it.” This creates a “greenhouse effect” that allows depression the ideal conditions to grow.

People also can lean on self-criticism as a way of holding themselves accountable, often stemming as well from a previous critical voice. For example, "If I beat myself down for mistakes, or perceived imperfections, then I'll learn and remember next time to do it better." A false sense of accountability as most of the time the standards are too high and the hoped-for lesson isn't learned as much as it becomes the trigger point for further self-reprimanding.

This cycle of self-criticism can also serve as a form of emotional avoidance, which can at times become a strategy to avoid deeper, often painful feelings. When you focus intensely on your perceived flaws and failures, you don’t have to sit with deeper feelings of vulnerability, fear, or shame. Although destructive, self-criticism can become a way of staying emotionally preoccupied, away from deeper feelings.

The Inner Critic Is Not Your Ally

Self-criticism often feels like it’s helping you improve or that it's protecting you from failure. However, in reality, it’s usually doing something quite different. When you criticize yourself relentlessly, you’re creating an internal environment where nothing you do feels good enough. It can leave you feeling like you actually are bad, defective, worthless, or lagging behind others, setting the stage for depression and low self-esteem.

What many often don’t realize is that harsh self-criticism often develops as a defense mechanism. If you grew up in an environment where you were consistently judged, or where love felt conditional, you may have internalized that critical voice. In this sense, carrying a self-judging voice within you now becomes a way of trying to control what is out of your control. If you can criticize yourself first, you can avoid the pain of it from others.

But this protection from vulnerability, failure, and shame comes at a cost. The more you engage in self-criticism, the more you reinforce a belief that you’re fundamentally flawed or inadequate. Over time, this belief becomes deeply ingrained, and can set the stage for depression (and anxiety). In fact, on anxiety for a moment, I have found that panic attacks, and even phobias, such as fear of flying and agoraphobia, can be exacerbated by a harsh internal critic. This voice can make it difficult to experience genuine moments of satisfaction, as you may ultimately be giving more attention to where you're going wrong and are flawed rather than being in the present.

The Self-Sabotaging Feedback Loop

The connection between self-criticism and depression becomes clearer when you look at what happens emotionally. Depression often involves feelings of worthlessness and hopelessness, along with a pervasive sense that things won’t get better. Self-criticism feeds directly into these feelings.

When you repeatedly tell yourself you’re not good enough, you’re basically building a negative foundation into your mind. This creates a cycle: you feel down on yourself, which leads to more self-criticism for how bad or flawed you must be. This deepens the depression and makes you more vulnerable to harsher self-judgments. It also makes you prone to negative projections—the idea that other people are also seeing you the way you see yourself. The cycle reinforces itself.

Self-criticism is also depleting. It takes significant emotional and psychological energy to maintain this internal attack. Depression on its own already drains your energy and motivation. Adding the weight of self-judgment makes this even heavier. You may end up feeling stuck, unable to find more energy or motivation to improve, and it can reinforce a sense of hopelessness.

Reclaiming Your Worth and Voice

If you find yourself caught in cycles of harsh self-judgment alongside feelings of depression, it is possible to emerge from these states. Therapy can help you explore, understand, and work through the depths of your inner critic and develop a more compassionate relationship with yourself.

#Depression #Anxiety #MentalHealth #Phobia #phobias #Agoraphobia #fearofflying #PanicAttacks

Depression, Anxiety, Panic Attacks

If you've struggled with the anticipation of flying, you know first hand how torturous it can be to lead up to a flight when you're feeling fear, dread, panic, and anxiety. For some, the anticipation of the flight can be the worst part. While for others, it's one of several difficulties with fear of flying—takeoff, turbulence, cruise, etc. However, approaches to resolve anticipatory anxiety often miss the mark.

When you're feeling scared and panicked, the last thing anyone wants to hear is why they shouldn't be anxious, or that they should rationally be thinking about things differently. When you are scared, comfort, protection, reassurance, and safety is needed most. It's very hard to reason with emotions. While this may sound simple on the surface, the real complexity is that for people who struggle the most with flying anxiety, it can be difficult to really internalize reassurance and comfort when the danger and threat feels so real and imminent.

The Power Of Emotions Topples Rational Understanding

I've been noticing a recent increase in fear of flying courses offered by pilots and airlines. These courses generally try to explain why flying is safe, in the hopes that this understanding will quell a person's anxiety. Sometimes they may offer meditative or breathing exercises in the hopes that this will be enough. And, while they may have good intentions, these kinds of courses have mostly not done the trick for people (even if a select group of people have been helped by them). I've often had people come to me after trying these programs noting that they were interesting, but they still feel anxious about flying.

While pilots and airlines are experts in flying and aviation, their expertise isn't in emotional processes, trauma responses, anxiety, panic attacks, or mental health. These courses don't tend to get at the deeper flying anxiety issue. There can be a temporary relief brought on by the sense of understanding some details—which can actually be useful in the greater process—but this alone usually makes a minimal dent in the overall issue. When it comes time to fly and all of the overwhelming anxieties come charging back in, all of the knowledge and calming exercises are no longer accessible for most people and, even if accessible, generally aren't able to withstand the intense wave of emotions.

In reality, anticipatory anxiety stems from deeper emotional fears and experiences that are brought to the surface when moving towards flying. The closer you get to the flight, the less in control you feel, the more vulnerable and helpless you may feel, and the more desperate you may start to feel as the anxiety builds. It can be like you're in a completely different version of yourself that feels unrecognizable from who you usually are.

Anticipatory and Flying Anxiety Is An Internal Experience

What people who are trying to help often miss about anticipatory anxiety is that the experience all happens internally. It doesn't take place in the actual flying experience, it takes place removed from the experience—hence the anticipation. When sitting with this kind of anxiety, people can easily be flooded by their worst fears, projections, thoughts, and emotions. Everything they see and feel internally about the experience feels like is what they're going towards. If you see a plane losing control in your head, a part of you is going to feel the emotional preparation for a plane going out of control—rather than preparing internally for a typical safe flight.

It's very difficult to take in how many flights per day take off and land safely when in this fearful state. Instead, the focus becomes about the fact that there's not a one-hundred percent guarantee, that there's a catastrophe they see in their minds, or the unbearably overwhelming feelings of fear they're going to have to somehow sit and contend with for hours and hours during a flight. Feelings of agoraphobia (being trapped with no escape), and claustrophobia can also be parts of the anticipation. This doesn't only happen with thoughts, but also body sensations that can feel like panic and significant discomfort. The fact that something bad could remotely happen at all overrides any sort of reassurance. It's very hard to reason with emotions when the feeling is that the worst is going to happen.

Powerful Feelings

Anticipatory anxiety in fear of flying can make you feel like you're the one that the bad thing is going to happen to. The feeling is powerful. The mind comes up with so many possible threats, fears, what-ifs, and more. For some, the anxiety can continue into the flight—anticipating turbulence, or waiting for signs that something bad is about to happen. For others, once they are actually out of the anticipation and into the flight, they can settle down once reality can show them a different picture that the earlier thoughts.

When caught in the grip of anticipatory anxiety, there is often the sense that you're headed towards something bad, or dangerous. Something is a threat. In this state, there is no relaxing until you're able to identify the source of it—which can often mean people stay on edge looking for an issue to happen throughout the flight. It often doesn't just calm down when you don't find the actual threat. For some it might, but for many, it persists until you're able to locate an issue. This makes the experience of leading up to and during a flight feel fraught with anxiety, dread, and can even turn into panic attacks. Anticipatory anxiety and fear of flying plays out differently for everyone because the deeper source is different for everyone.

Overcoming Fear of Flying and Anticipatory Anxiety

When working with fear of flying, knowledge about planes and flying, and emotional regulation exercises (such as deep breathing) do very little to calm it. Both can be helpful as a secondary measure within the process, but once the emotions kick in they become much harder to rely on. Overcoming fear of flying involves helping the brain be able to internalize safety in the flying environment (the way you likely feel when getting into a car). Knowledge is "front of the brain". Emotions and lack of safety come from the "back of the brain". Working with the back of the brain is generally necessary in helping to calm deeper fears, and this opens the space to normalize flying.

#fearofflying #Agoraphobia #Claustrophobia #Anticipatoryanxiety #Anxiety #Phobia #PanicAttacks #MentalHealth