Here’s how you can stop your self-doubt from chewing you up every day from the inside out and take ownership of your thoughts and your mind. 
You can get peace from that inner voice of self criticism and doubt with the idea of a “quick win.”
For me, it was flossing.
The Voice Is Cognitive Dissonance
When you lay down to go to sleep, does your brain flood your thoughts with every awkward social situation you were involved in since first grade?
When it’s quiet, does your inner critic remind you how your sink is full of dishes, you don’t exercise, you eat the wrong food, you eat too much, you drink too much, you’re wasting your life?
That’s cognitive dissonance.
Cognitive dissonance is the idea that we have this pattern of behavior that we think we should be doing. But when we see that we’re not behaving that way, we experience dissonance.
It’s that nagging uncomfortable feeling that you’re not doing what you’re supposed to be doing.
Over time, the dissonance and self-doubt grow and gather more ammo to throw at you.
You watch too much TV, you’re not saving enough money, you’re not making enough money, you’re on your phone too much, you don’t have a girlfriend or a boyfriend, you can’t carry a conversation, you haven’t done laundry in weeks…
All of these things pile up on top of each other so that the stream of self-criticism has an ocean of material to drown your thoughts.
Silencing Your Self-Doubt with the Progress Principle
The Harvard Business Review spent 15 years studying people working inside of companies and organizations.
They found that you can instantly improve the mix of emotions, motivations and perceptions that you have about yourself, your work and your life by making “any progress in meaningful work.”
Any progress. Meaningful work. It’s the idea of a quick win. They called it the Progress Principle.
If you can make even just a small amount of progress in the work that you find meaningful, it can rapidly and dramatically compound and snowball and springboard into incredible change in your life.
Here’s how.
Exploit The Secret Weakness of That Inner Voice
That inner voice of self-doubt has a very obvious weakness that I’ve never heard anyone talk about.
Its weakness is this: it will show you all its cards. 
If you listen to that voice, it will tell you everything that it has on you. It’ll open up its war chest and show you all its ammo.
So if you want to know all the dirt and bullshit that it has to throw at you: then be mindful of when it speaks to you and start taking notes.
You have to be aware. You have to actively monitor it. When you hear it--sometimes it will only be a twinge of a feeling, like the shadow of a splinter of a feeling--you have to make a note of it.
When I started listening to what my critique was telling me, this is what it said.
- Not exercising
- Not eating healthy
- Watching too much TV
- Not making enough money
- I’m angry. I yell.
- Messy room
- Disorganized garage
- Dirty dishes and dirty laundry
- Not watering grass
- Not flossing teeth
I don’t know why flossing was something that my self-doubt latched on to. But it was just one more thing for my dissonance to throw at me.
So I committed to flossing every single day. It was the easiest one to do. It was a quick win.
I already had one of those little plastic containers of floss tucked away in some bathroom drawer. I took it out and set it right on my bathroom sink counter. Every night, I took 90 seconds to floss my damn teeth.
I wasn’t even doing it for the dental hygiene benefits. I did it so I didn’t have to hear my damn voice criticize me for it.
And something incredible happened.
I would be getting ready for bed, listening to the constant negativity in my thought life...but there was one less thing it could throw at me.
It would still go through the normal list of stuff I was failing at. But I had successfully taken something away from it.
Once I had done that, I threw myself a little party. I celebrated my win because I had found a path to victory.
It was a massive step because it gave me the first glimmer of hope that I could defeat that voice and find peace. I proved to myself that I could actually do something to change my life.
From there, it became a matter of just going up my list and doing the work. And it got easier because I had already observed that it was possible. I had seen the change I could make in my life. I knew that it would work.
The next thing I did was start watering the grass in my yard. I set a timer on my phone and started doing that every night. And that was another thing I robbed from my inner voice.
Then I tackled a big one: I started working out every other day. No matter what. No matter what.
I simply could not lay down at night with that voice owning me; parading through my head listing out the failures of my life. I could not live like that anymore.
So I took its ammo away. I took away its power. I robbed it of everything it had by taking notes of what it was saying and then doing them.
I just needed a small win, a small piece of progress on meaningful work and that was really what started this whole thing. Flossing my teeth.
I encourage you to start listening to that voice of self-doubt. Listen to what it’s saying and start taking notes.
Then find the easiest one, the low hanging fruit. Get yourself a quick win. Maybe it’s your dishes or your trash or laundry or showering. Maybe it’s brushing your teeth.
A great place to start is with sleeping more. I have a short article on why sleep is so important here.
Find that small win, the small progress you can make on meaningful work. Then do those small things and allow them to snowball into greater transformation.