That Voice in Your Head? It's Full of Shit

The biggest liar in your life is inside your own head

This is the first in a short series I’m calling The Spring Clear-Out. Two weeks of clearing out the stuff that isn’t working but you’ve kept doing anyway. Starting with the voice in your head.

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There’s a version of this you’ll recognise.

You’re having a perfectly fine day. Nothing is particularly wrong, nothing’s on fire.

But out of absolutely nowhere, your brain produces something like: you’re falling behind. Or this isn’t going to work anyway so what’s the point. Or everyone else has figured this out and you’re the one who hasn’t.

It arrives with zero evidence yet total certainty.

It doesn’t knock or present a case. It just shows up in your own voice, already dressed as a fact, and you believe it.

Not because it’s convincing but because it’s familiar.

It sounds like you, so you assume it is you.

So you don’t argue with it, you barely even clock it as a thought.

I had one of these last week that was so ridiculous it actually made me laugh once I caught it.

I’m 4 months into a year-long trip through Latin America, doing work I chose and living a life I spent 2 years building.

And the thing that’s surprised me most since we started travelling? The guilt.

Not about anything specific. Just a constant you should be working right now every time I’m not at my laptop.

18 years of corporate life + a deeply type A brain will do that to you.

So there I was, sitting by the beautiful Bacalar lagoon in Mexico, and my brain’s contribution? You should be further along with your business by now.

Not “this is nice” or “well done, you!”

Just: not enough.

The fucking AUDACITY!

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We have roughly 6,000 thoughts a day according to a neuroscience team at Queen’s University in Canada.

The number might be debated, but the number isn’t the problem.

The problem is how many of those 6,000 are running completely unchecked.

Not the harmless ones (wait, is it Thursday already?). The ones that arrive disguised as truth and quietly rearrange your mood, your confidence, your entire afternoon.

In 1980, psychiatrist David Burns identified and catalogued these cognitive distortions: the specific and predictable ways your brain lies to you.

And once you can spot them, they start losing their grip on you.

The four glitches

I’ll give you the 4 distortions that would run (and ruin) my life if I allowed them to.

All-or-nothing thinking is the one that gets me on work days. I either had a productive morning or a completely wasted one. The workout was great or it was pointless.

No middle ground. No “decent Tuesday where some things got done.”

This is the engine behind every "I wasted the morning so the day's a write-off" spiral.

Your brain offers two categories: flawless or failure.

And because it sounds so clean, so logical, you don’t think to question it.

Catastrophising is my personal favourite (and by favourite, I mean the one that loves ruining a good night’s sleep for me).

One thing goes wrong and your brain fast-forwards to the worst possible outcome.

Your boss doesn't reply to an email and suddenly you're getting fired.

You skip two workouts and you've "let yourself go."

A friend cancels plans and they obviously hate you now.

It feels like preparation. Feels responsible, even.

It's neither. It's just worry pretending to be useful.

Overgeneralising is subtler but listen for the words. I always do this. Nothing ever works. If the sentence contains always or never, it’s probably this one.

And labelling. This one’s the fastest, which is what makes it dangerous.

Instead of “I made a mistake,” it’s I’m a mess.

Instead of “I didn’t follow through,” it’s I’m unreliable.

You take one behaviour and upgrade it to an identity. And then you act accordingly, because that’s what unreliable people do, right?

None of these are character flaws. They’re glitches. Your brain running patterns on autopilot while you assume you’re thinking clearly.

Where the lie actually lives

Here’s what I find most useful about all of this, though. Not the labels. Understanding where the glitch actually sits in the sequence.

Albert Ellis, a psychologist working around the same time as Burns, mapped it out.

His framework is called A-B-C-D-E (psychologists are awesome but apparently not known for their branding..)

But it’s one of the most useful thinking tools I’ve come across.

Something happens. That’s A, the activating event. A cold email from your boss. The number on the scale. Someone on Instagram who appears to have the exact life you want.

Your brain tells a story about it. That’s B, the belief. They don’t respect me. I’m a failure. Everyone’s ahead of me. This part happens so fast you rarely even notice it as a separate step.

And C is the consequence.

You spiral, eat the thing, scrap the plans. You spend the afternoon in a mood you can’t trace back to anything specific, because you’ve already forgotten the thought that triggered it.

Most of us live entirely in A to C. Something happens, we feel terrible, and we assume the feeling is the correct response.

We never examine the belief, because it didn’t arrive as a belief. It arrived as a fact.

D is where it gets interesting. DISPUTING!

You catch the story and actually question it. Is this true? Is this definitely true? Would I say this to someone I love? Is there another explanation that doesn’t involve me being fundamentally behind on life?

Basically, “show me the receipts”

This isn’t positive thinking. I’m not suggesting you look at a nasty email and think “what a gift!”

I’m saying the space between something happening and your reaction to it is the most important space you have. And most of the time, we don’t even know it exists.

E is the new effect. What happens when you replace the distortion with something more accurate. Not cheerful or gaslighting yourself here, accurate.

Which tends to produce a response that doesn’t involve eating an entire packet of biscuits or writing off your whole week by Tuesday.

The one thing to try this week

When a thought shows up that makes you feel like shit, pause.

Don’t fight it. Don’t try to be positive. Just get curious.

Ask yourself: which one is this? All-or-nothing? Catastrophising? Overgeneralising? A label I’ve stuck on myself?

Name it. That’s the whole exercise. Literally say it in your head: that’s catastrophising. Or that’s all-or-nothing.

Because the moment you name a pattern, it stops being “the truth about my life” and becomes “a thing my brain does sometimes.”

And that shift, small as it sounds, is the difference between a life spent reacting to every thought your brain throws at you and a life where you actually get to choose what you believe about yourself.

I spent years believing my thoughts were accurate progress reports on who I was and how things were going. They weren’t.

They were a running commentary from a nervous system that can’t tell the difference between a genuine threat and a bad inbox.

It’s working exactly as designed. The design is just spectacularly outdated.

You don’t need to fix your thinking. You just need to stop believing all of it.

With love,
Noemie x

P.S. Which one do you catch yourself in most? All-or-nothing, catastrophising, overgeneralising, or labelling? Hit reply and tell me. I’m genuinely curious (and I might use the answers in a future piece, anonymously, obviously).

Further reading: David Burns, Feeling Good (1980). Albert Ellis, A Guide to Rational Living (1975).

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