When Insight Stops Feeling Kind: The Cost of Constant Self-Correction

When Growth Starts to Feel Like Pressure

I’ve been thinking a lot about how often we talk about working on ourselves. It’s usually framed as something positive and responsible. Read the book. Listen to the podcast. Set the goal. Reflect harder. Become more self-aware, ironically. There’s an assumption that this is what care looks like. That if you’re not actively optimising something, you’re falling behind.

But the more I sit with this, the more I notice how often “working on myself” doesn’t actually feel supportive. It actually feels effortful and sometimes really exhausting. You might have had this experience; as if you’re constantly monitoring yourself from the outside, looking for what needs correcting next.

I sometimes wonder when growth can actually became surveillance and there’s a particular feeling that seems to accompany this way of relating to ourselves. A sense that you’re never quite finished or enough as you are, always one insight away from being acceptable. Even rest can start to feel conditional. Like it’s something you earn once you’ve done enough work on yourself.

What strikes me is how subtle this shift can be. It doesn’t begin as self-criticism. It often starts as self-awareness or a curiosity. A genuine desire to understand yourself better. But somewhere along the way, that curiosity can harden into a forceful correction or even an obsession.

I think this is where something important changes.

When the Self Becomes a Project

I notice how easily we begin to relate to ourselves as projects.

Projects have objectives, timelines, and deliverables. They need managing and  benefit from efficiency. But when something goes wrong, the natural response is to diagnose the fault and intervene.

None of this is inherently bad. The problem, I think, is what happens when this mindset is turned inward and never really switched off.

When you start treating yourself as a project, it becomes very difficult to simply be with yourself. Every feeling is analysed. Every reaction is assessed and your moment of discomfort is interpreted as evidence that something still needs fixing.

I sometimes wonder what it costs to live under that kind of internal management.

The Quiet Psychological Cost

Psychologically, this way of relating to ourselves keeps us slightly braced.

Even when things are going well, there’s a sense of watching yourself closely. Monitoring your tone and adjusting your behaviour. Asking whether you’re responding in the “right” way. What this does is it keeps the nervous system alert.

I think this is why so many people feel tired even when they’re doing all the “right” things. There’s no real place to rest when you’re always being evaluated, even if the evaluator is you.

Self-improvement promises relief, but often also delivers pressure. It offers direction, but rarely a sense of safety within us. It gives us a sense of movement, but at the cost of a sense of being content.

I find myself wondering whether some of our exhaustion isn’t coming from change itself, but from the way we’re relating to ourselves while we pursue it.

When Awareness Turns Into Self-Suspicion

One of the things that feels most important to name here is how awareness can quietly turn against us.

Awareness, notices without rushing to judge. But when the aim becomes improvement, awareness can easily turn into self-suspicion. You stop asking “What’s happening here?” and start asking “What’s wrong with me now?”

I think this is where a lot of people get stuck. They become incredibly articulate about their patterns. They can name their defences, their attachment style, their trauma responses, and yet, instead of feeling freer, they feel more constrained. As if they’re constantly watching themselves perform their own psychology.

Insight becomes another place to hide.

Why Fixing Feels Productive but Rarely Feels Settling

I can understand why fixing is so appealing. It gives us something to do. It creates a sense of control. It makes uncertainty feel manageable.

But control is not the same as care.

Fixing assumes that the problem is the self. That something about who you are right now is insufficient and needs upgrading. And even when this is wrapped in the language of compassion, the underlying message can still land as conditional.

I think this is why fixing rarely feels settling. It doesn’t allow the nervous system to stand down. It keeps us in a posture of readiness, always preparing for the next adjustment.

And there’s something deeply human that doesn’t thrive under constant correction.

A Different Way of Relating

The alternative, as I see it, isn’t doing nothing or abandoning growth altogether. It’s shifting the posture of it.

Moving from “How do I fix this?” to “What’s happening here?”

From “What’s wrong with me?” to “What’s asking for attention?”

This is where coaching, at least the kind I believe in, comes in. Not as a tool for improvement, but as a different way of relating. One that assumes you are not a problem to be solved, but a person in process.

I’ve noticed that when people feel met rather than managed, something softens. The internal pressure reduces. They stop performing insight and start listening more honestly to themselves.

And often, change follows naturally from there.

When the Pressure to Improve Finally Eases

I don’t think growth happens because we push ourselves hard enough. I think it happens when the internal conditions feel safe enough for something new to emerge. Sometimes that safety comes from slowing down. Sometimes it comes from being witnessed. Sometimes it comes from realising that not everything uncomfortable is a signal to intervene.

When Fixing Becomes the Only Language We Have

The part that troubles me most is how normal all of this has become.

How easily we accept a relationship with ourselves that would feel harsh, even unkind, if it were mirrored in any other context. Constant evaluation. Conditional rest. Worth measured by progress. A quiet suspicion that if something feels uncomfortable, it must be wrong.

I think we underestimate what it does to a person to live under that kind of internal gaze for long enough.

Fixing promises freedom, but it often delivers compliance. You learn how to behave, how to manage yourself, how to stay functional. What you don’t always learn is how to feel at home in yourself. How to settle. How to stop scanning for the next thing that needs correcting.

And the most unsettling part is that this way of living can look like growth from the outside. It can sound articulate. It can appear disciplined. It can even be praised. But underneath it, something quieter is happening.

A person slowly loses the ability to rest without justification.

To feel without analysis.

To exist without being assessed.

I sometimes wonder how many people mistake self surveillance for self care, and call it growth simply because it keeps them moving.

Perhaps the real cost of fixing yourself isn’t that it doesn’t work.

Perhaps it’s that, over time, you forget what it feels like to be with yourself without trying to change something.

And that loss is subtle enough to go unnoticed, but heavy enough to shape a life.

Kindest thoughts,

Isaac Davis.