The Exhaustion of Doing Everything Right

I spent most of my twenties trying to assemble a better version of myself. I kept a running inventory of my flaws, a mental record of every awkward comment, every relational misstep, every pattern I wished I could smooth out and improve. My inner world felt like a construction site. I collected therapeutic tools with the quiet hope that if I just found the right one—the right insight, the right practice, the right way of understanding myself—I could finally become someone who didn’t carry so much anxiety, grief, or inconvenient longing.

There is a particular kind of exhaustion that comes from doing everything “right.”

You go to therapy. You read the books. You track your patterns. You name your triggers. You build awareness. You understand where things come from. You work on your nervous system. For a while, it feels like something is shifting.

And then one day, the same feeling returns.

The anxiety. The reactivity. The familiar relational pull. The internal voice you thought you had outgrown. Beneath it, a quiet question surfaces: Why is this still here?

For many people, this moment is more disorienting than the original pain. Not because something new is happening, but because the orientation they’ve been living from begins to fracture. If effort is supposed to change things, and insight is supposed to heal, what does it mean when you’re still standing in the same place?

Most of us don’t stay with that question for long. We turn the pressure inward. We assume we’ve missed something. We decide we need to work harder, regulate better, try a different modality, be more disciplined, more consistent, more aware. We apply more effort.

This response makes sense. We live inside a culture—both therapeutic and cultural—that treats distress as evidence of something unresolved. Something broken. Something that needs to be corrected. Even when the language is gentle and compassionate, the underlying orientation often remains the same: if you do enough work, you will eventually arrive at a version of yourself that no longer struggles like this.

But effort, when organized around fixing, often does the opposite of what it intends.

The problem is not that insight is useless. Insight matters. Awareness matters. Understanding your history can be profoundly orienting. The problem begins when insight becomes a strategy for self-correction—when the purpose of understanding yourself is to eliminate the parts of you that feel disruptive, painful, or inconvenient. In that orientation, your system never rests.

There is always another layer to uncover, another belief to reframe, another reaction to manage. Pain becomes evidence of failure, recurrence becomes discouraging, and being human starts to feel like falling behind.

I see this constantly in my work, and I’ve lived it myself. There is a particular despair that comes from believing you’ve already “worked through” something, only to feel it surface again later. It can feel as though all the effort was wasted—or worse, that something about you is fundamentally wrong for still struggling.

But what if the premise itself is off?

What if the reason patterns persist is not because you haven’t done enough work, but because the work has been organized around the wrong orientation?

Patterns do not loosen when they are targeted for removal. They loosen when the relationship to them changes.

The anxiety, the hypervigilance, the shutdown, the over-functioning—these are not errors in the system. They are intelligent adaptations that once made sense. They emerged in response to real conditions. They live in the body, not because they are stubborn, but because they were protective. And protective strategies are maintained, not by ignorance, but by threat.

When your inner world is organized around fixing—around monitoring, correcting, improving—those strategies often tighten. The system stays on alert. Effort signals danger, even when the effort is compassionate. This is why so many people feel stuck despite doing everything “right.”

Relief does not usually arrive when something finally goes away. It arrives when the fight with experience softens. When orientation shifts from elimination to relationship. When the question changes from How do I fix this? to What is this trying to protect?

This is where the work of unbecoming begins.

Unbecoming is not about constructing a better self. It is about loosening the grip on identities, strategies, and beliefs that were once necessary but are no longer true. It is not an act of effort, but a reorientation of attention—from managing experience to meeting it.

This is also where the idea of wholeness becomes both relieving and difficult to trust. You are already whole does not mean you are regulated, healed, or resolved. It means your worth and legitimacy are not contingent on your patterns disappearing. It means your essential nature is intact, even when your adaptations are loud.

For many people, this realization brings relief and confusion at the same time. Relief, because the pressure to finally arrive can ease. Confusion, because if you’re not fixing yourself, what are you supposed to do instead?

That confusion is not a problem. It is often the doorway.

When orientation shifts—when you stop relating to yourself as something to be repaired—a different kind of curiosity becomes possible. Not the anxious curiosity of self-monitoring, but the quieter curiosity of relationship. The kind that asks, What happens if I stop trying to outrun this? What happens if I listen instead?

This is not about doing less work. It is about changing the premise of the work.

You don’t unravel who you are by fixing yourself into someone better. You unravel who you’re not by loosening your grip on the belief that something about you is fundamentally wrong.

Coming home to yourself is not a finish line. It is an orientation—one that allows effort to soften, patterns to loosen, and presence to replace striving.

So here is a place to begin.

The next time a familiar, unwelcome feeling arises, notice the urge to correct it. Then, gently, try something else. Instead of asking Why is this here again? or How do I make this stop? ask, with no agenda to change the answer: What do you need?

Often, that simple shift is enough for something to finally begin to loosen—not because you tried harder, but because you stopped trying to fix what was never broken in the first place.