This is what your brain is telling you. But it is a myth. A lie. It can be so intense, so convincing, and you probably struggle to keep yourself from following through, ‘Nobody likes me’.

There is perhaps no more painful thought in the World than ‘Nobody likes me’. It is an easy feeling to indulge and dwell on when you feel isolated, depressed, anxious or insecure.

This feeling has almost no bearing in reality and no purpose other than to deeply wound you and turn you against yourself.

While you may feel alone in thinking ‘Nobody likes me’, you actually have that in common with a huge number of people in the World.

You fail to realize is the reason behind it. The way you perceive yourself as an outcast, rejected, disliked has much less to do with your external circumstances and everything to do with an internal critic.

This critical inner voice exists in all of us, reminding you constantly that you are not good enough. It tends to be louder and meaner in some of us, and it tends to pick on us at different points in our lives.

Yet, one thing is for sure. As long as you listen to this dangerous critic that twists your reality, you can not really trust your own perceptions of what others think of you.

This inner enemy is a demon voice. This very patient and determined demon shows up in your bedroom one day and refuses to leave.

You are six or twelve or fifteen and you look in the mirror and you hear a voice so awful and mean that it takes your breath away. It tells you that you are fat and ugly and you do not deserve Love.

And the scary part is the demon is your own voice.

It is this destructive voice that instructs you to avoid getting to know people. It shuts you up in social situations and it makes you nervous, so you do not act like yourself.

It confuses you with its ceaseless stream of self-shaming observations and self-limiting advice, leaving you anxious. It bends you out of shape in such a way that creates a self-fulfilling prophecy.

By the time the critical inner voice builds the case of why you are such loser or no one cares about you, you have lost touch with reality,

And you blindly move forward believing every negative thought about yourself that this voice has said to you. You are so quick to indulge its claims that you mistake them for your real point of view.

Because of this, it can be difficult to notice that this voice has seeped in and even harder to peel away its sadistic coaching from your true perceptions.

The best way to start fighting the critical inner voice is to do two things: Identify when it is operating and understand where it comes from.

Step One: Get to know what your inner critic is telling you.

Step Two: Think about where these critical attitudes come from.

Step Three: Talk back to your critical inner voice.

Step Four: Think about how your voices affect your actions.

Step Five: Change your behavior.