Notice It, Then Notice Something Else

Mary Huhn

I want to start very simply. With a voice. Not mine. Yours. The one that says, [gentle] that was a stupid thing to say. Or, [sighs] you're too much. Or, [skeptical] everybody else seems to know what they're doing except you. Maybe it says, [softly] you should be handling this better by now. Maybe, at this age, you ought to have it together. If you recognize that voice, then you already know what we're talking about.

Mary Huhn

People call it the inner critic. That's a useful name, I suppose. But I'm less interested in the label than in the experience of it. I want us to notice what it does. How quickly it moves in. How convincing it sounds. How it can take one small moment and turn it into a verdict about who you are.

Mary Huhn

And I want to say this clearly. The inner critic is not a character flaw. It is not proof that something is wrong with you. For most people, that voice began as a survival strategy. It developed in environments where fitting in mattered, where mistakes cost something, where being too visible or too different did not feel safe. So the mind got busy. It tried to protect. It watched, compared, corrected, warned. It said, don't do that again. Be careful. Stay small. Stay acceptable.

Mary Huhn

Now, that may have helped once. But many old survival strategies do not know when their job is over. That's the problem. Not that the critic appeared, but that it kept going long after the emergency passed.

Mary Huhn

And for many of us, especially as we get older, that voice picks up more material. It absorbs the culture around us. A culture that can be awfully unkind about aging. It treats slowing down as failure. It treats a forgotten word like some grand tragedy instead of just... Tuesday. It suggests that if you're not moving at the same speed, looking the same way, producing in the same way, then somehow you've become less valuable. And after hearing that long enough, the voice starts to sound like our own.

Mary Huhn

That is one of the crueler things about ageism. It doesn't stay outside us. It borrows our own face, our own tone, our own history. And then we begin enforcing it on ourselves.

Mary Huhn

So here's the sentence I want to offer you today. Really, it's the whole practice in one line. Notice it. Then notice something else.

Mary Huhn

Not argue with it. Not defeat it. Not lecture yourself into being more positive. Just this: notice it, then notice something else.

Mary Huhn

When the critic says, [matter-of-fact] well, that was embarrassing, you can say to yourself, all right, I hear it. There it is. And then you shift. You notice the chair holding you up. The air on your hand. The sound in the room. The color of the light. It's a small move, but don't dismiss small moves. Sometimes the smallest moves are the ones that quietly give us our life back.

Mary Huhn

Here's why this works. [calm] The inner critic runs on evaluation. That's its fuel. It needs a standard. It needs comparison. It needs some measure by which to grade you. Am I too slow? Too sensitive? Too old for this? Not doing enough? Saying the wrong thing? It is always trying to place you on a scale somewhere.

Mary Huhn

And let's be honest, we live in evaluation-rich environments. We are compared constantly. Rated, reviewed, tracked, measured. Even casual conversation can become a little performance. So the critic has plenty to work with.

Mary Huhn

But direct sensory experience is different. Sensory experience is immediate. Personal. Hard to argue with. If I ask you right now, what does the air feel like on the back of your hand? Warm, cool, still, moving? There isn't a right answer. There isn't a better answer. Your answer is your answer. The critic can't do much with that.

Mary Huhn

If I ask, what sound is furthest away from you right now? Or what do your feet feel like inside your shoes? Again, there is no grade. No gold star. No failure. Just experience.

Mary Huhn

I think of this as two frequencies. I may be stretching the analogy a bit, but it works for me. One frequency is evaluation. That's where the critic lives. That's the channel of judgment, comparison, self-correction, and worry about where you stand. The other frequency is noticing. That's the channel of direct contact with the moment you're actually in.

Mary Huhn

You cannot fully tune to both at once. You may move back and forth quickly, yes. But you cannot be wholly inside judgment and wholly inside noticing at the exact same moment. So noticing is not a way to silence the critic by force. It's a redirection. A shift in channels.

Mary Huhn

And that matters, because trying to silence the critic often turns into another fight. Then you're evaluating your evaluation. You're criticizing the critic. And around we go.

Mary Huhn

Noticing is gentler than that, but it is not weak. It's actually very sturdy. You say, yes, I hear the voice. And now I am going to place my attention here, in what is immediate and real. In the warmth of this mug. In the hum of the refrigerator. In the way my shoulders feel right now. In the faint scent of soap on my hands.

Mary Huhn

That shift may only last a few seconds at first. That's all right. You're practicing a turn. And turns practiced over time become habits. Then one day, in the middle of some ordinary hard moment, you realize you know how to come back to yourself a little faster. Not perfectly. Just faster. And usually that's enough to begin.

Mary Huhn

So let me make this practical. Three simple moves.

Mary Huhn

First, name the critic without arguing. When it says, you shouldn't have said that, don't debate it. Don't build a legal case against it. Just notice it the way you'd notice a car passing outside. Oh. There it is. The critic is talking. That's move one. Very plain. Very clean.

Mary Huhn

Then notice something else. Something in the room, on your skin, in the air, under your feet. You are not suppressing the voice. You're just not climbing in and letting it drive.

Mary Huhn

Second, take one sensory pause each day. Just once is enough to start. Thirty seconds. You don't need a special chair or a perfect mood. Ask yourself, what do I feel physically right now? What's the temperature around me? What do I hear if I really listen? What color is the light today? You do not need to make it meaningful. That's important. The mind always wants to make a lesson out of everything. You can skip that. Just notice.

Mary Huhn

Third, bring one sensory observation into a conversation. Not an opinion. Not a complaint. Not a report. A sensory detail. The soup is hotter than I expected. The room got quieter when the rain started. The sunlight on this table is beautiful. Something like that.

Mary Huhn

I was at a lunch table not long ago, and instead of asking people how they were doing, which often gets us a list of symptoms or tasks, I asked them to describe what they were eating using only sensory words. Temperature, texture, color. No good or bad. No healthy or unhealthy. Just the experience of it.

Mary Huhn

And the whole room changed. People softened. They laughed. They remembered things. Stories began to come out. Not because anyone was instructed to be open, but because evaluation lost its grip. No one could be wrong about what the soup felt like in their own mouth. That's what I mean by a Judgment-Free Zone.

Mary Huhn

A Judgment-Free Zone is not just a nice idea. It's not a sign on the wall. It's something we help create when we shift attention away from ranking and toward experience. Especially shared experience. The critic may develop in relationship, and I think healing often does too.

Mary Huhn

So I'll leave you where we began. Not as advice exactly, but as a practice you can carry into the rest of your day. Whatever the inner critic says, notice it. Then notice something else.

Mary Huhn

Not because the voice is evil. Not because you have to conquer it. But because the moment you observe it, rather than become it, you have a little room. And in that room, you can choose.

Mary Huhn

Notice it. Then notice something else. I'm Mary Huhn. Thank you for being here. We'll keep going.