Recently, I had a very good conversation about self-beliefs that make people successful. The idea is that people strive to be consistent with the self-belief, so that it actually transforms into behavior and from behavior into habits. For example, if the self-belief is "I am a reliable person", this individual may find it important to be on time and work towards being on time. So this is a self-belief, that can make the person successful. Of course, the environment needs to value the self-belief, too.

In that conversation, we also talked about mini-stressors. These are little things, like wondering, if you should have taken a different route to avoid traffic, if you could have influenced a person into a different direction, if your babysitter will be on time and so on. The more mini-stressors you have during a day, the more exhausting your day will be.

Without having done any research on this, I assume that a self-belief can turn into a mini-stressor. So, if you take the example of being on time as being an important self-belief, any external factor that keeps you from being on time (traffic, late babysitter), will stress you way more than if you don't hold that self-belief. 

Is this a catch-22? It certainly can be. But it can be also an opportunity to identify the next self-belief that you may need to revise and fine-tune.

And, by the way, moments, when you need to change your course of action, are the ones that make up stories. So, in my case, if I get to a point that challenges my beliefs and it may be very unconfortable, I console myself by telling me that some day in the future the pain will have passed and I will have a good story to tell.