Anybody who works and/or plays in a physically high performing context is treading that fine line, close to their own personal limitations. With consequences like repetitive strain injuries (RSI) - or simply 'injuries, period' - being a common part of the high striving practice. Those principles can be similarly applied to high mental/intellectual striving, in terms of primarily-mental burnout, etc.

There's a psychological component too. Anybody ever been walking down the road - a thing most of us have spent hundreds+ of hours doing without ever thinking about it - and suddenly been hit by the sensation that walking feels weird, awkward? Become strangely aware of the stilted mechanics of lifting feet and bending joints, and begun to feel self conscious, as though ones sudden mental doubts were being realised in the form of an unusual, attention-grabbing gait? Then having to sooth over that mental awkwardness, and get back into the feeling of involuntary, un-selfconscious, ordinary walking.

Stepping even further afield, it's a similar mental mechanism - of awareness of that which usually operates unremarked - as that upon which silly comedy lines such as "!You are now!, strangely aware of your ... <insert body part or function here>" or "You suddenly ... can't stop thinking about <insert very awkward thing here>" hinge, and which leverage a form of auto-compulsion, aka getting temporarily stuck in a deformed mental loop.