There is a particular kind of exhaustion that has nothing to do with external stressors or excessive work. It is generated by a mind prone to hostile self-interpretations. You may be familiar with the tiring labour of constantly analysing, judging, and questioning yourself, the heavy mental load of second-guessing every feeling, reaction, desire, and decision. All of that comes at a high cost.

The people I work with as a coach are reflective, intelligent, psychologically literate, and often highly accomplished. They have read the books. They have done the therapy. They can explain their patterns eloquently, often in exquisite detail. And yet they still feel trapped.

What exhausts them is often not work alone, but the story they are telling themselves about who they are, what they should be, and why they are never quite enough. Their minds often generate extremely hostile and damaging interpretations about their actions, decisions, feelings, and value as human beings. If somebody else came up with these kinds of interpretations about them, we would call them cruel and abusive bullies.

This kind of internal exhaustion unifies many experiences we tend to treat as separate: burnout, imposter syndrome, chronic self-doubt, shame, rumination, procrastination, and sometimes also the hidden costs of undiagnosed neurodivergence. It is often a core feature of high-functioning and high-achieving people who look fine from the outside but are deeply depleted on the inside. It is also the reason why rest might not be restful; the hostile inner interpreter knows how to spoil everything.

When insight doesn’t liberate

We live in a culture that prizes self-understanding. Insight is held up as the royal road to freedom. If you can just understand why you are the way you are—your childhood, your attachment style, your trauma history, your neurological make-up—then surely something will shift.

But many people discover a more troubling truth. They understand themselves, and still feel stuck.

They know why they overthink, procrastinate, people-please, burn out, or feel chronically behind. They can trace it back to family dynamics, school experiences, social conditioning, or neurobiology. Their inner critic is not crude; it is sophisticated, articulate, and relentless. It makes plausible arguments. It marshals evidence. And because it sounds intelligent, it is believed.

This is what I call narrative entrapment. Narrative entrapment occurs when we are stuck inside a rigid, outdated, or unfair self-story that masquerades as truth. We are living inside a dysfunctional and maladaptive interpretative framework that we can no longer step outside of. We are both the prosecutor and the defendant in an endless internal trial.

The symptoms—anxiety, exhaustion, low self-esteem, self-sabotage, even self-loathing—are merely the rotten fruit. The root is the toxic story beneath them.

We are storytelling animals, and that’s both the problem and the solution

Human beings are storytelling animals. We constantly narrate our experience, selecting certain facts, linking them into patterns of cause and effect, and then evaluating what those patterns mean to us and our place in the world.

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This capacity is extraordinary. It allows us to learn from the past, to make meaning in the present, and to imagine different futures. But it also comes with a cost. Because once a story becomes familiar and habitual, it does not feel like a story anymore. It feels like reality. Our storytelling minds constantly filter the facts of our lives. To avoid cognitive dissonance, they only allow those facts that don’t trouble our current story. It is in this way that our stories solidify into core beliefs and shape our lived experience.

Many of us are exhausted not because we lack motivation, resilience, or discipline, but because we are living under a hostile interpretive regime. Every mistake is evidence for our fundamental wrongness or worthlessness as human beings. Every hesitation confirms a flaw. Every success is discounted or explained away.

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This creates a state of permanent internal surveillance. We are never just acting; we are also watching ourselves act whilst judging and evaluating our actions. We are never just feeling; we are judging and questioning the feeling. Unsurprisingly, our nervous systems cannot thrive under those conditions.

The real desire: epistemic relief

What we want and need in this state is often misunderstood. We don’t want more confidence in the glossy, motivational sense. We are not looking for positive thinking or affirmations that feel false. We don’t want to be “fixed,” optimised, or turned into someone else.

What we want is relief. More specifically, epistemic relief, relief from the exhausting effort of constantly judging and criticising ourselves. Relief from hostile interpretations and defective lenses.

We want to stop believing everything our mind tells us. We want to feel internally aligned rather than internally at war. We want to act without constant self-doubt and self-prosecution. We want to feel fundamentally legitimate, in all our complexity and glorious contradictions.

We want narrative authority. Narrative authority does not mean constantly controlling our thoughts or attempting to silence our inner critic for good (which is impossible). It means no longer being trapped inside our destructive story. It means that we can recognise it as a story rather than as the terrible truth about ourselves. It means turning our story into the object of our discerning attention—observing it in action, understanding its origins, patterns, and functions, letting go of the parts that don’t serve us any longer, and beginning the work of constructing more helpful and kinder narratives about ourselves.

From self-prosecution to self-authorship

The problem is not that we tell ourselves stories. The problem is that we confuse the story with the truth, and then live under its rule. Self-story work aims to change our relationship with our storymaking mind. To learn metacognitive tools that allow us to observe, question, edit, re-interpret, and author our narratives rather than being run by them.

This approach is not about symptom management or motivation. It is a form of narrative re-authoring for people who are tired of analysing themselves without changing how they feel or live.

When we begin to step out of our narrative entrapment, something remarkable happens. Energy returns. Decisions become simpler. Feelings become clean; we feel what we feel, without judgment. Action feels less fraught. There is more room for play, curiosity, and experiment – because every move no longer carries the weight of existential self-judgment.

Self-story work doesn’t seek to “fix” our inner and outer landscapes but rather seeks to change the lens through which we view them. It helps us establish fairer, kinder, and more flexible interpretive and sense-making frameworks, which allow us to see ourselves and others in a different light.