Meet your primitive mind — I named mine, and it changed everything

There’s a voice in your head, and it is not kind. It narrates your mistakes, predicts your failures, and offers a running commentary on everything you say, wear, and do. It’s harsh in a way you’d never dream of being to a friend. 🧠

For years I assumed that voice was me, my honest opinion of myself. It turns out it wasn’t me at all. It was my primitive mind. And the day I understood that, and gave it a name, everything changed. Let me show you why.

The voice isn’t you. It’s an ancient survival system.

Your primitive mind is the oldest part of your brain, and it has exactly one job: keep you alive. Not happy. Not fulfilled. Alive. It does that by being relentlessly negative, because in evolutionary terms, the ancestor who assumed the rustle in the bushes was a lion survived, and the optimist got eaten.

So your brain is wired to catastrophise, to expect the worst, to replay threats. That harsh inner voice is just this system doing its job, badly suited to modern life, but doing it. It genuinely believes that by tearing you down, it’s protecting you. ✨

Which means the voice isn’t the truth about you. It’s a smoke alarm that’s a bit too sensitive, going off at toast, not fire.

Why naming it changes everything

Here’s the trick that sounds silly and works brilliantly: give the voice a name. Mine has one. A lot of my clients call theirs Karen. 🙃

When you name the primitive mind, you create a gap, a tiny bit of distance between you and the thought. Instead of “I’m going to embarrass myself,” it becomes “ah, that’s Karen catastrophising again.” You’ve gone from being the thought to observing it. And in that gap is all your power.

You can’t stop the primitive mind piping up, it’s hardwired. But you can absolutely stop taking dictation from it. Naming it is how you learn to recognise, in the moment, that you’re not being told the truth. You’re just hearing a very old, very anxious alarm. 🧘

From recognising it to quietening it

Naming the voice is step one, the recognition. But you can go further. When your stress bucket is full, the primitive mind is loud and constant. Empty the bucket, take your brain out of survival mode, and the voice naturally quietens, because the alarm has less to shout about.

That’s the real work: not silencing the voice by force (impossible), but reducing the threat state that keeps it switched on, and reframing the old beliefs feeding it. Do both, and the warm voice, the one that gives you a sense of safety, gets room to be heard instead.

You don’t have to live with that voice running the show

I help women turn the volume down on the primitive mind and turn it up on the warm one, in person in East London or online across the UK.

Here when you’re ready. 🫶🏼