#10: Dealing with your inner reviewer 2
Does writing make you anxious? Is having any original idea immediately followed by a nagging voice in your head telling you that it's probably rubbish? That's your inner reviewer 2. Here's how to deal with her.
In this episode, you're going to learn 4 useful strategies for responding to your inner reviewer 2:
Acknowledge that she's there and that she's making things hard for you
Recognise that she's actually trying to help - it's just that she's not very good at it
Rethink the relationship between your inner reviewer 2 and your motivation and growth
Schedule her criticism: tell her to come back later, when she won't cause so much chaos
Episode transcript:
Do you find it hard to write without a nagging voice in your head telling you that it's probably all rubbish? That's your inner reviewer 2. Here's how to deal with her.
You’re listening to The Academic Imperfectionist. I’m Dr Rebecca Roache. I’m a coach and a philosopher at the University of London, and week by week I’ll be drawing on philosophical analysis and coaching insights to help you dump perfectionism and flourish on your own terms.
Hello, everyone. Welcome to another episode. Now, I've talked on this podcast before about the inner critic. But if you're a researcher, and especially if you've been one for a while, you might have a special type of inner critic: an inner reviewer 2. Now, reviewer two is kind of a joke among academics. It refers to the anonymous reviewers who comment on papers that we submit to peer reviewed journals. Sometimes those reviews are helpful, and sometimes they are unhelpful, ungenerous, spiteful, and completely miss the point. ‘Reviewer 2’ has become a term to capture all the worst aspects of anonymous review.
As researchers, after we've been around the block a few times producing research and receiving feedback, criticism, and rejections, we learn to write with one ear open to what our critics might say. So we try to ensure that we anticipate and deal with any objections before we show our work to anyone. In one way, that's good, because being aware of potential objections is an important part of building a strong argument. But it can really stifle our creativity. It can make our research uninteresting and over-cautious because we hold back from making ambitious, exciting claims in favour of making modest but water-tight and ferociously defended ones. For many of us, the voice of the inner reviewer 2 can become so loud and dominating that we can barely formulate an original thought without worrying about potential objections to it. And we don't even need a clear idea of what those objections might be. Sometimes just the fear that there is probably some damning objection that we haven't thought of yet is enough to make us doubt ourselves. The objection doesn't even need to be reasonable. Just the thought that someone might say something unkind about our ideas can make us think twice before writing them down.
If this chimes with you, the chances are that writing makes you anxious. So what can you do about it? How can you handle your inner reviewer 2? Well, the advice from the previous episode, episode 9 - ‘Cancel your productivity anxiety’ - is relevant here. I talked there about an analogy with the paradox of hedonism. The paradox of hedonism says that, even though happiness is a good thing, and maybe even the most important thing, making the pursuit of it your number one aim is doomed to failure. And instead, if you want to be happy, you need to pursue other aims like nurturing friendships, exploring your interests, engaging in activities that you find worthwhile, and so on. And then happiness will follow as a side effect. In a similar way, writing good quality research is a good thing, and maybe even your most important goal as a researcher. But making it your number one aim can lead to anxiety and fear, because you feel that nothing you're writing is good enough. In order to write good quality research, you need to focus on something else. Specifically, you need to give free rein to your creativity and your curiosity, pursue your intellectual interests, and trust in your own abilities and in the process, and in the end, good quality research will follow.
Now, that might all sound very sensible. But how do you actually do it? You might be wondering how you can give free rein to your creativity and curiosity when the fear of having a flawed idea is preventing you from articulating the idea in the first place, or at least making it such a stressful exercise that you end up leaping on the first available distraction whenever you sit down to write and spend all your writing time procrastinating instead.
How do you get past this? Well, I'm going to take you through a few important strategies here. I'm going to suggest that you acknowledge the voice of your inner reviewer 2 and the effect it's having on you, that you recognise that your inner reviewer 2 means well, that you think carefully about its effect on your motivation, and that you also think about when might be a time for thoughts about flaws in your research. So let's just go through those one by one. The first one was acknowledgement of your inner reviewer 2, and this is a really simple step. It's very easy to do, but lots of us don't do it. A simple, easy thing you can do right now is just acknowledge that you have this internal critical voice, and that it's making life really hard for you often. I see this time after time with my clients, we move straight from the critical voice to responding to it, whether that's by getting down to work, or perhaps more commonly doing something else so that we can avoid the work that gives rise to the voice. We don't stop to acknowledge how our inner reviewer 2 makes us feel.
Taking that pause can be really beneficial for at least two good reasons. The first is that simply acknowledging how we're feeling can be powerful. I talked a little bit about this in episode 3 of this podcast - ‘Rage against the positivity’ - where I pointed out that simply having someone acknowledge our negative feelings can itself make us feel better: it can help us feel seen and validated. If you think about how you might respond to a friend who was feeling down, part of being a compassionate, empathic friend would be simply to acknowledge that she's feeling bad. And in the same way, just acknowledging your own negative feelings is an important part of being compassionate towards yourself. Another reason why just pausing to acknowledge the effect that your inner reviewer 2 is having on you is that it's the first step towards weakening her influence over you. To see this, think back to a time when somebody else - a colleague, your boss, someone in your family, a neighbour - was making you feel stressed, and someone close to you witnessed their behaviour and made a comment like, ‘wow, he's pretty rude,’ or, ‘gosh, it must be stressful for you to have to deal with that sort of behaviour.’ You’ve probably had the experience of hearing that sort of comment and thinking for the first time, ‘You know what, you're right, this is causing me a lot of stress.’ Now, even if the problem behaviour doesn't change, and even if the person remarking on it doesn't actually offer any advice or help about dealing with it, simply recognising it as something that's hard to endure buoys us up, gives us strength, and perhaps help us disengage emotionally from it. You need to recognise your inner reviewer 2 as a problem before you can escape her influence.
Now, the second strategy for responding to your inner reviewer 2 might sound kind of strange. I want to suggest that it's going to be helpful to you to recognise that she means well. Unlike the real reviewer 2, your inner reviewer 2 has your best interests at heart, she wants to keep you safe. I've said before on this podcast that I sometimes think of my inner critic as more like an inner helicopter parent. And the same is true of your inner reviewer 2. So ask yourself, what is my inner reviewer 2 trying to protect me from? The chances are, she's just trying to ensure that you're well prepared for the real reviewer 2. She's hoping that if you deal with any problems with your research before you write anything down, then you won't have any nasty reviewer comments and you won't get hurt, right? Or maybe she's trying to guide you along the road of becoming the sort of researcher that you need to be. And that's one who doesn't thoughtlessly write down every daft idea that she has, but someone who is thoughtful and thorough and rigorous. The problem is that just as well-meaning helicopter parents can end up smothering their child and stifling their growth, your inner reviewer 2 is smothering and stifling you with her well-meaning criticism. The fact is, her constant criticism hasn't ended up protecting you against the real reviewer 2s, you have to deal with them still right? And you haven't ended up developing into a thoughtful and thorough writer. Instead, you've ended up fearful and anxious, afraid to be creative, afraid to indulge your curiosity and your desire for intellectual exploration. Recognise that the voice of your inner reviewer 2 isn't always reliable or reasonable or true. She means well, but she's flawed just like you and just like everybody else. She upsets people when she doesn't mean to. And her words don't always have the effect that she hoped they will. And so one thing you can do is say to your inner reviewer 2 - and you can say it out loud, if you think it'll help - ‘thanks for looking out for me, but I'll take it from here.’
Now, when I talk about this with my clients, when we get into discussing how they might weaken the hold of their inner reviewer 2, something really interesting happens. And that brings us on to the third way that I'm going to suggest you respond to your inner reviewer 2, and that's by giving some thought to how she affects your motivation. Because one thing I see a lot is that the very people who are stifled and kind of terrorised by their inner reviewer 2 are often really afraid to get rid of her. It turns out they're afraid that unless they're in the grip of that critical voice and heavily influenced by it, they won't improve. They think that the constant criticism and fault-finding will ensure that they'll keep on trying. And they worry that if they start talking to themselves compassionately, they lose their motivation to grow, and they'll fail.
Perhaps this sounds familiar to you. It's one of those lines of thought that can feel very compelling and plausible, until you recognise it and say it out loud. The chances are that even if you think your inner reviewer 2 is playing an important role in keeping you motivated, if you just reflect on this for a few moments, you'd probably see straight away that it's not true. So when I have clients who think in this way, one thing I often ask is, if you tried to motivate and encourage a friend or a colleague or a student by constantly criticising them, what do you think would happen? And invariably, the answer is, well, the friend, colleague or student would get upset and demoralised, and they'd probably stop even trying. In other words, they have no problem recognising that constant criticism is the very opposite of motivating, at least they have no problem recognising it when they think of the target of the criticism being someone other than themselves. And usually I ask these clients what they think would be a good way to motivate and encourage another person. And they have no problem answering that what they need to do would be things like, say lots of positive things, be encouraging rather than critical, and be very careful about how they express anything negative, like suggestions for improvement, or objections to what they're doing, or what they've written. Shining a light on all this shows us very clearly that constant criticism isn't helpful. In fact, the very reason why we have an inner reviewer 2 in the first place is to protect us from the criticism of the real reviewer 2. So if criticism from other people is something that we need to be protected from, why on earth would any of us think that it's in any way helpful to criticise ourselves? The next time you hear your inner reviewer 2’s voice - after you've acknowledged that she's making life hard for you and recognised that she's well-meaning, just a bit inept - think of what you'd say to a friend, colleague, or somebody else who you wanted to encourage and motivate. And if you're really interested in encouraging and motivating yourself to improve, those are the sorts of things you need to be saying to yourself too.
Okay, there's one more strategy I want to suggest. And this is not so much about eliminating the voice of the inner reviewer 2, but giving some thought to when, if at all, it might be helpful to think about problems and potential criticisms of your work. As I've said, those of us that suffer with a domineering reviewer 2 voice tend to hear it all the time. It's not something that just appears when we're getting towards our final draft. It's there all the time before we even put a word on the page. And it can discourage us from writing anything at all. And I think this is a problem, not just because the criticism itself is demoralising, but also because thinking about criticism at an early stage of writing is really unhelpful. In fact, there's lots of parts of the writing process that would be unhelpful too early. So for example, have you ever been working on writing something and early in the process stopped to fiddle around with the fonts and the headings, the citation style and other things to do with how the draft looks? I know lots of us have done things like this, and we laugh about it, because it's a form of procrastination. That's not to say that making your research papers look nice is irrelevant. It's just that it's something to think about later, when you finished writing it. Early in the process, it's just a silly distraction. You need to work out what you're going to say before you decide how it's going to look. The same is true when it comes to exploring problems with your ideas and anticipating objections. There's a place for that, but it's not right at the beginning of the process, when you're first trying to get clear about what your ideas are. And it's not even in the middle of the process when you're building things up and drawing connections and developing your argument. The time to think about the problems is close to the end, when you have something substantial to work on. There can't be any problems with your writing before there's any writing in the first place, right?
Now, that's not to say that it's a good idea to completely ignore any potential serious problems in the early stages. You don't want to write problems into your research that you'll have to unpick later, laboriously. In the same way, you don't want to build sloppy formatting into your work in a way that's going to take a lot of effort to put right later. But there's a big difference between avoiding obvious problems and being over-vigilant about them, especially when that over-vigilance involves (as it commonly does) assuming that what you write is riddled with problems that you just haven't spotted yet. So, give yourself the benefit of the doubt. Trust yourself. You're good at this, and you're qualified to do it. If you hear your inner reviewer 2 wringing her hands and saying, ‘there's bound to be something wrong with this,’ or, ‘this is all rubbish,’ but not giving you anything specific to work with, tell her to come back later, when she has something constructive for you. A really useful model to work with here is the Disney method. You can hear more about that in episode 5 of this podcast, ‘Bitch, do you even dream?’ Basically, the idea is that you separate out the different processes of coming up with something new. So first, you have the dreaming stage, which involves articulating ideas with an ‘anything's possible’ attitude. After that, and separate from it, you have a realist stage, which involves working out how to turn the dreams into a reality. And after that comes criticism. I talked in episode 5 about the problems with trying to do all these things at once. Basically, the ideas can't even get off the ground if you bring in criticism too early. And if your inner reviewer 2 is on your back while you're trying to get your research ideas down, that's what you're doing. You're not going to get rid of your inner reviewer 2: she's part of you. But you're in charge. You can manage her. You can recognise that she's eager to help you, but she's flawed. You don't need her in order to become a better writer. Practise trusting yourself, because the more you practise that, the less space your inner reviewer 2 will take up when you're trying to write. See you next time.
I’m Dr Rebecca Roache, and you’ve been listening to The Academic Imperfectionist. If you enjoyed the episode, please subscribe on whatever podcast app you like to use, and please consider leaving a review on Apple Podcasts and sharing the podcast with any friends who you think might find it useful - you can take a screenshot on your phone and send it over to them. For more information and updates about me, the podcast, and my coaching, or just to get in touch and say hi, please visit the website - academicimperfectionist.com - or follow me on Twitter @AcademicImp or on Facebook @AcademicImperfectionist. Thank you for listening, and see you next time!
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