My model of "fixing your shit", heavily inspired by @reasonisfun, is that you have to *actually* deal with all your inner conflicts sooner or later, if you want to operate "in good form."
"in good form" meaning you can do the "right" behavior (or mental behavior) painlessly, robustly, and sustainably; you don't burn out, or spend down another resource, in order to get there. and you don't stop doing the "right" behavior if conditions worsen.
"I don't feel like doing this but I'll do it because it's right/strategic" is *possible*, and it's often better than not doing that, but it's not "good form" because it hurts and spends down your mental energy and falls apart when conditions change. "White-knuckling."
Personal experience makes me skeptical that doing lots of white-knuckling "naturally" leads to doing the right thing in good form.
Actually thinking through tough inner conflicts, though, seems to require a conversation partner a lot of the time, and a LOT of words/thoughts compared to what's typically socially acceptable to spend on "working on yourself."
My (tentative) opinion is that antidepressants make it WAY easier to say "I'm not going to worry about this now" (which is useful if you are prone to unproductive worries) but don't *literally answer the questions* you were worrying about, which makes them an imperfect solution.
(I mean, how could a drug answer a question? It's a molecule, it doesn't contain that much information. PEOPLE answer questions. Drugs change some of the weights on the function you use to answer questions.)
And if you are spending energy to "push aside" a question that keeps coming up, even if it's *less* energy than it used to be, you haven't solved the problem.
is it unrealistically optimistic to want to *totally* clear your backlog of inner conflicts? It might be, but it doesn't seem like there's a good reason this should be impossible.
(by contrast, it *does* seem physiologically difficult to feel euphoria all the time.)
(by contrast, it *does* seem physiologically difficult to feel euphoria all the time.)
of course this "ideal state" would involve continual maintenance -- new problems arise and have to be dealt with, as long as you're alive. But it seems like you *could* be dealing with stuff roughly as fast as it piles up, and get to "inbox zero" intermittently.
