Are You in a Race with Yourself? – The Tyranny of Self-Improvement and the Neural Networks That Fuel It.

We don’t notice when it begins. At first, it feels like ambition, curiosity, or the gentle tug of possibility. A new idea, a new project, a new path that seems worth exploring. And because you’re capable—and because life has shown you that striving usually works—you begin to move.

But somewhere along the way, the movement turns into momentum, and the momentum turns into urgency. You stop walking beside yourself and start racing ahead of yourself. The finish line keeps shifting. The next milestone keeps whispering. And without realising it, you begin to live inside an unspoken belief: “I should be further along than I am.”

This is where the tyranny of self-improvement begins—not as external pressure, but as an internal chase—a race against a version of yourself that doesn’t yet exist.

The Paradox of Self-Improvement

The relentless pursuit of becoming “better” can, paradoxically, amplify our sense of inadequacy. When we are constantly striving to improve ourselves, we may inadvertently reinforce the belief that we are not good enough as we are. This ongoing chase creates a cycle in which the urge to close the gap between who we are and who we think we should be becomes a source of dissatisfaction, rather than fulfilment. Instead of feeling accomplished by our efforts, we might find ourselves trapped in a loop where improvement only highlights our perceived shortcomings.

In this blog, I explore the underlying reasons behind the urge to constantly improve ourselves and examine how this mindset affects our mental and physical well-being. I introduce three neural networks, the vital triad, that quietly shape the architecture of your inner world and the reality you perceive. Each of these networks influences different aspects of your lived experience — your sense of self, what you focus on, how you respond to pressure, and the values that guide your decisions. By understanding how these networks affect your thoughts, emotions, and behaviour, you gain clearer insight into the unconscious forces that shape your life and the patterns that keep you rushing ahead of yourself.

The Vital Triad of Your Mind

Most people live as though their thoughts arise from a single place—one mind, one voice, one stream of consciousness. But modern neuroscience tells a different story. Advances in functional MRI (fMRI) over the past two decades have revealed that the mind is orchestrated not by one unified centre, but by large-scale neural networks that switch on and off depending on what you are thinking, feeling or doing.

Much of who you believe yourself to be is shaped by the dynamic interplay of three key neural networks. They work together continuously, silently, and often without your awareness. Yet their behaviour determines whether you feel grounded or restless, calm or pressured, aligned or lost.

The Vital Triad of Neural Networks:

1. The Default Mode Network (DMN) – Your Story-Maker, Your Inner Voice

The DMN lives in regions such as the medial prefrontal cortex, posterior cingulate cortex, hippocampus and angular gyrus — but you don’t need to remember the names. What matters is what this network does.

It is the silent architect of your inner world.

The DMN holds your sense of self, your memories, your imagined future, your hopes, your fears, and the lifelong question: “Who am I?”

When balanced, it gives you a grounded identity — a feeling that you know yourself and your place in the world.  But when it becomes overactive, the DMN turns into a relentless commentator.  It loops old stories, exaggerates worries, pulls you into rumination, and fills your mind with noise rather than clarity.

This is the network that begins the internal race.

It creates the idealised future version of you, whispers that you are behind, and urges you to accelerate. 

Once the DMN starts narrating this race, the other networks simply follow its lead.

2. The Salience Network (SN) – Your Determiner of Importance

The SN sits within the anterior insula and anterior cingulate cortex — the regions that help you sense what truly matters.

If the DMN is the storyteller, the SN is the editor deciding which lines deserve emphasis.

Its role is simple: to determine what is important in any given moment.

When balanced, the SN acts like a wise gatekeeper. You notice what deserves attention and what can gently be ignored . You are neither jumpy nor detached — just attuned.

But when dysregulated, the SN becomes unpredictable. It might miss subtle emotional cues…or, more commonly, it overreacts to harmless ones.

The SN is the network that constantly scans your inner world and your external environment, switching you between reflection and action.  It behaves like a highlighter pen across your consciousness — illuminating whatever feels urgent, risky or emotionally charged.

And here lies its vulnerability: the SN often trusts the DMN’s story without questioning it.

If the DMN imagines a threat… the SN highlights it. If the DMN invents a sense of falling behind… the SN marks it as important . And once something is highlighted, it becomes almost impossible to ignore.

The SN then passes these “important” targets to the ECN, asking your brain and body to take action — even if the urgency is entirely imagined.

3. The Executive Control Network (ECN) – Your Inner Taskmaster

The ECN, anchored in areas such as the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex and parietal regions, is the part of your mind that turns intention into movement.

It is the planner, the organiser, the decision-maker — the part of you that gets things done.

When balanced, it helps you focus deeply, prioritise wisely, and act decisively. But when the ECN is overloaded, your clarity crumbles. You procrastinate, lose direction, or become mentally exhausted.

The ECN takes its cues from the SN. Whatever the SN highlights, the ECN treats as a task to be executed. And because the SN often takes its cues from the DMN, your behaviours can become a literal translation of your internal stories.

If the DMN creates urgency, and the SN amplifies it, the ECN shifts into acceleration mode.

You plan more.

Push harder.

Tighten your routine.

Raise the bar.

And stretch yourself beyond your natural rhythm.

Your behaviour becomes the living expression of the story your DMN writes and the emotional weight your SN assigns to it.

Modern life — with its constant alerts, comparisons and interruptions — chronically overloads this network. When the ECN is strained, decision-making becomes reactive rather than intentional, and your sense of control diminishes.

All of human experience — from confidence to chaos — can be traced to how harmoniously these networks operate.  If the balance between these networks collapses, so too does peace of mind.

How These Networks Create the Race Against Yourself

The race begins the moment the DMN sketches a future version of you—a more accomplished, more fulfilled, more impactful self. This imagined identity can be a source of inspiration, but the trouble starts when the gap between your current self and your projected self grows too wide. The DMN begins to interpret this gap as a shortcoming, a sign that you are behind, not enough, or running out of time.

The SN then steps in, tagging this perceived gap as important or urgent. It highlights the story of "falling behind", colouring it with emotional weight, and sends it forward as a priority signal. The ECN receives this as a task to be executed and begins organising, scheduling, pushing, tightening, accelerating — mobilising your mental and physical resources to close a gap that exists only in imagination.

This is the moment the internal race begins.

Not against the world. Not against others. But against yourself.

And because the DMN continuously generates new versions of who you could be, the projected self keeps moving—the finish line shifts. And the race never ends.

The Hidden Cost: Allostatic Load and Micro-Stress

When this internal race becomes your default mode of living, your body pays the price. The constant urgency created by the DMN-SN-ECN loop activates low-grade stress signals throughout the day. Not enough to feel like a crisis, but enough to create a chronic internal strain.

This contributes to what scientists call Allostatic Load (AL)—the accumulated wear and tear on your mind and body from repeated cycles of stress. Over time, this can lead to:

• persistent fatigue

• anxiety-like restlessness

• irritability

• sleep disturbances

• reduced resilience

• increased inflammation leading to a whole host of chronic illnesses

Many high-functioning adults experience these symptoms without any obvious external stressors. Their careers are stable. Their families are fine. Their lives look good. But internally, the mind is in perpetual motion.

The body simply cannot distinguish between an external threat and an internal narrative of urgency.  Over time, this physiological burden predicts higher mortality, cardiometabolic disease, and declines in cognitive and physical function across multiple body systems — including the neuroendocrine, immune, metabolic, and cardiovascular domains.

How to Stop the Race

Calming the race is not about doing less or lowering your standards. It is about changing how you work with these three networks so your ambition no longer turns into self-persecution.

Most high-functioning adults try to solve this problem at the surface:

• by pushing through,

• by dropping a commitment or two,

• by taking a holiday,

• or by adding yet another productivity system learnt from a self-help guide.

These may offer short-term relief, but they rarely touch the root—because the race is being generated inside the mind, not outside in the calendar.

What follows is a more honest way to step out of the race—not by asking what you should do differently, but by first understanding which part of the Vital Triad is driving the urgency.

Before behaviour shifts, the foundation that creates your thoughts, emotions and actions must be strengthened.

Often, your thoughts (DMN) need calming. Sometimes your emotional triggers (SN) need softening. Other times, your actions (ECN) need to be redirected. And sometimes your deeper compass—your values and direction—needs rediscovering.

These four domains are the heart of a stabilising framework I call the Four Pillars:

• Cognitive Awareness (DMN)

• Emotional Regulation (SN)

• Behavioural Alignment (ECN)

• Existential Alignment (your deeper direction)

These are not surface-level tools, nor quick fixes. They work at the level of the networks that create your inner story in the first place.

You don’t fix the story — you fortify the structure that creates the story.

When these pillars strengthen, the Vital Triad stabilises. When the Triad stabilises, clarity becomes natural, calm becomes familiar, and your actions become coherent rather than reactive; your goals stop feeling like battles and become natural by-products of neural coherence.

1. Quiet the Story-Maker (DMN)

Pillar: Cognitive Awareness & Existential Alignment

The DMN is the starting point — not loudly, but through the quiet emergence of inner stories. These stories are seldom questioned because they seem truthful. Yet, upon closer inspection, most are simply rough drafts of identity made in haste. Cognitive Awareness involves recognising these drafts for what they are. It is the moment you notice your mind saying, “I am behind,” and realise this is not a fact but a prediction — one coloured by memory, comparison and imagined futures.

To quiet the DMN is not to silence it, but to soften its certainty.

One way is through Thoughtful Detachment — the gentle skill of observing your thoughts from just one step back. Another is through Metaphor-Based Reflection, where you allow the mind to reveal its state symbolically. A metaphor bypasses argument; it shows you the truth without the need for analysis. And the Calming Cabinet offers the DMN a place to rest its repetitive concerns, reminding the mind that not every thought is a task.

When you relate to your thoughts rather than fuse with them, the DMN settles. Its stories become possibilities rather than commands. And in that softening, the race begins to slow.

2. Soften What Feels Urgent (SN)

Pillar: Emotional Regulation

If the DMN writes the draft, the SN decides its emotional tone. It is the network that turns thoughts into felt experience. When the SN becomes overattuned — often through years of stress, comparison or over-responsibility — everything begins to feel heightened.

Emotional Regulation does not mean blunting emotion; it means teaching the SN to distinguish between genuine urgency and learned urgency.

The Thought Diet is one of the simplest ways to begin. Your SN is shaped by what you consume — the intensity of your mornings, the tone of your environment, the emotional charge of your relationships. Reducing overstimulation allows the SN to recalibrate.

Equally powerful is attuning to body signals. The SN is deeply embodied. A tightening chest, a quickened pulse or a rising discomfort are often responses not to reality, but to a thought the SN has mistaken for a threat. When you ask, “What did my mind just mark as important?” you reveal how seamlessly emotion follows narrative.

As the SN learns to highlight less and observe more, false urgency dissolves. What remains is a quieter, more accurate emotional landscape — one where your reactions are shaped by truth, not by noise.

3. Give the Executive a Better Brief (ECN)

Pillar: Behavioural Alignment

The ECN is where intention becomes movement. Yet it is rarely the source of overwhelm; it is simply the executor of the emotional and narrative signals it receives.

Behavioural Alignment begins by giving the ECN a brief that is grounded, not frantic.

Rather than vague internal pressure — “Sort your life out” — the ECN responds far better to gentle specificity: one clear task that aligns with your values. The ECN settles when it knows what is being asked.

Designing experiments instead of verdicts is another way to calm the system. Experiments remove the weight of perfection. They turn life into inquiry rather than judgment.

Many people have been conditioned to believe that waking early, grinding relentlessly or constantly pushing limits is the only path to success. Yet neuroscience shows the opposite — sustainable progress comes from steadiness, not strain; from alignment, not exhaustion.

Introduce a rhythm of short, intentional practices — brief, structured actions such as meditation, breathwork, yoga, or other activities that create momentum without overwhelming — as this gives the ECN a steady cadence to follow.  These gentle actions reveal an important truth: progress comes from coherence, not intensity.

When the ECN is no longer reacting to urgency but responding to clarity, your behaviour becomes steadier, kinder and more sustainable. Action stops being a compensation for inner chaos and becomes an expression of alignment.

4. Reconnect With Your Deeper Direction

Pillar: Existential Alignment

Beneath most internal races lies a quiet longing — the longing to live a life that feels congruent. When your deeper values and your daily actions diverge, the DMN senses the gap but does not know how to bridge it. So it runs faster.

But there is a steadier guide within you — a North Star of sorts — your inner value compass. It is not dramatic, loud, or driven by urgency. It is the part of you that already knows what matters, even when the rest of your mind forgets. It points not to achievement, but to alignment; not to perfection, but to truth.

Existential Alignment is the practice of returning to this inner guide — not conceptually but experientially. Your North Star does not tell you what to chase; it tells you what to honour.

And when your actions align with it, something remarkable happens: the DMN stops running. It no longer needs to manufacture better versions of you, because the version you are becoming is grounded in your deepest values.

It begins with questions that invite honesty rather than performance:

·       Am I living according to my values today?

·       Do my actions reflect what matters most to me?

·       Is my current direction consistent with my purpose?

As these answers surface, even softly, your North Star brightens. The DMN’s urgency loosens. You are no longer chasing a theoretical “better version” of yourself. You are moving — quietly, deliberately — toward a life that feels like an honest expression of who you are becoming.

And when this inner direction returns, the race dissolves. Not because you slow down, but because you finally know where you’re going — and because you trust that the path you’re walking is yours.

A life aligned with its North Star does not produce perfect actions; it produces right actions — actions that bring inner peace because they arise from truth rather than fear.

When you follow this inner compass, you no longer run away from yourself.

Stepping Out of the Tyranny of Self-Improvement

The truth is, the race was never about doing more. It was never about potential left untapped, or opportunities missed, or ambitions not yet realised. It was always about the story your mind was telling you — a story written by the DMN as it was trying to protect you, not punish you.

When the DMN calms, the future stops pulling you away from the present. The imagined versions of yourself — the ones you felt compelled to chase — lose their urgency. Time stretches. Space returns. Possibility feels spacious rather than pressurised.

When the SN becomes more discerning, the world feels less like a sequence of alerts and more like a series of signals. You stop interpreting every discomfort as a warning. You begin to sense the difference between emotional truth and emotional noise.

And when the ECN receives a clearer brief, your behaviour no longer arises from fear or comparison. Movement becomes intentional rather than frantic. Productivity becomes a by-product of clarity, not a substitute for it.

This is what neural coherence feels like: a sense that your mind, your body and your deeper direction are no longer competing with one another, but moving in quiet agreement.

And in that agreement, the race dissolves. Not because you have slowed down or lowered your standards, but because you have stepped off the track entirely, as there was never anyone else on the track.

If this resonates with you and you’d like to explore your own Triad and Pillars, reach out. You don’t need to walk this path alone.