The Internal Resistance Files

Which Self-Eating Brain Type Are You?

Find out which type you are and combat it with self-awareness and curiosity

Image credit: the author. Created by AI in response to the prompt ‘self-eating brain’. The other responses were too horrifying to share.

Take the Self-Eating Brain quiz and get a free downloadable guide for your brain type

You might think that being good at things meant feeling good about those things, but unfortunately — for lots of reasons — the opposite often seems to be true. For many people, using their particular talents becomes fraught in direct proportion to those talents. No one worries they might not actually be smart enough like the people who have been told their whole lives how smart they are.

I’ve been coaching and teaching people like this for long enough that I’ve seen most of the main ways that this tangle tends to manifest itself. And while there is significant variation and overlap, there are a few recognisable types of what I call the self-eating brain: the over-deliverer, the spin-cycler, the upper-limiter, and the white-knuckler.

Before I describe these, I want to acknowledge that diagnostic labels can sometimes have downsides, in that they can wind up reinforcing the very behaviour we want to shift. But, in this case, I think the opposite is true because the…