Every runner has that voice in their head that wants them to slow down or stop altogether. For some people, it’s largely on mute, popping up once in a while when the weather is particularly challenging or in the middle of a tough training session. For others, it’s more of a persistent background presence – always there but easy to shove down and ignore.

And then you’ve got people like me, for whom this voice is a mortal enemy. I’ve joked before that my body is allergic to running – not because I come out in hives when I start to jog, but because the volume at which my head screams at me to stop and walk is so loud it feels like an innate, physiological response. Whether I’m running my local Parkrun or competing in a race, there’s always that noise in the background telling me to quit, to just stop and walk away.

Why is this? According to Dr Josephine Perry, sports psychologist at Performance In Mind, it’s a personality thing. “Running will feel mentally easy for some and very tough for others, but those who tend to find it toughest mentally will be highly intelligent pragmatists,” she explains. “The high intelligence means the prediction function of your brain is incredibly active, constantly trying to identify all the things that could go wrong and the ways you could get hurt. And the pragmatism means that you start to believe the things that the voice tells you about how you should slow down, stop or find a really good excuse for not working as hard as you originally wanted to.”

How to quieten the voice in your head that tells you to stop when running