Knowing yourself is about honest study, not staring. Self-obsession stares; self-knowledge takes notes and moves on.

Study and staring look alike from outside, and only one of them goes anywhere. Study produces something usable: a pattern, a name for what keeps happening, a change worth trying. Staring produces a more detailed account of the same stuck position and calls the detail progress.

After your next stretch of thinking about yourself, ask what came out of it. A sentence you could say to someone, a thing to do differently, anything at all. If nothing did, the thinking has stopped being useful for now, and the honest move is to close the notebook and go do something.