There’s a quote attributed to Carl Jung, “Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.”
Many people who walk through my office door talk about self-sabotage. They sometimes connect it with a lack of motivation, or even a problem of procrastination. But whatever mental lens you view it through, it remains a common problem for many of us. And if left unchecked, self-sabotage can compound into mental negativity about yourself, your life, and your future as you repeatedly struggle to achieve your goals.
So, if self-sabotage is something you struggle with, then keep reading as I’ll highlight some of the issues at play and some ways to help you start addressing it.
What Self-Sabotage actually is
Self-sabotage is not a character flaw. In fact, I believe it’s quite dangerous to label it as “part of your character”, as this may lead you to conclude it’s a permanent part of you that can’t be changed.
It isn’t proof that you’re weak or lazy, either. Once again, your conclusions you reach could be lead you astray, and make you believe something about yourself that makes little sense, and does not really help you analyse your choices, or learn from them.
The more constructive way to view self-sabotage is within a cycle. This means we can understand it as a pattern of behaviour where you often attempt to make progress, only to then later find yourself erasing that progress. This cycle repeats, impacting your life more and more with every repeat, and negatively influencing how you see yourself. This can be very impactful for those who are quite self-aware, because they see what they do to themselves (and how they’re stifling their own lives), yet they feel powerless to stop the cycle.
The Four-Step Cycle
When you slow self-sabotage down and watch it frame by frame, it usually follows these four steps:
Step one: The Trigger
Something happens, usually something that requires something of you, and stress or discomfort begins. Perhaps it’s a deadline, a difficult conversation, or a moment where you’d need to be visible, or competent, or both. The trigger can also be the opposite, where things are going too well. Perhaps you’ve received a new client, or a project that’s actually starting to gain momentum. For high-achievers, success is often the more dangerous trigger, because it raises the stakes and causes feelings of stress.
The concern with a trigger is that it causes a form of significant discomfort for the person. It might not be unbearable discomfort where one feels panic, but it certainly affects you to the point where ignoring it doesn’t work.
Step two: The Escape
Whatever your particular flavour is, to avoid the discomfort you start engaging in that thing to the detriment of your goals. This is where you’re doomscrolling, having a drink, diving into the fridge, viewing adult content, going down the rabbit hole of further research, etc. It shows up as a coping mechanism that you use, and it’s effective in escaping the feeling, but only in the short-term.
Step three: The Relief
The escape does what it’s supposed to do, and the uncomfortable feeling recedes. You feel normal again, or even good, for a little while. By removing you from the stress you’ve experienced in step one, it takes the edge off the uncomfortable feeling. That’s why it’s so hard to shift, because the behaviour works just enough, and reliably enough, to keep you from facing the stressors you’re avoiding.
Step four: The Shame
With time, the relief fades into more discomfort. You wake up tired, or fuzzy, or behind. With time, and the more cycles of self-sabotage, a gap starts to form. The gap identifies who you know you’re capable of being, and who you’re becoming by repeatedly engaging in self-sabotage.
What fills that gap, more often than not, is a feeling of shame.
“Why do I keep doing this? I know it’s not good for me.”
And the cruel part is that the shame you experience can become the trigger for the next cycle. This is how the loop sometimes turns into a spiral.
Also, the spiral is why resting too long sometimes makes you more tired. This is why a day on the couch can leave you lower than the previous day that drove you there. Doing nothing isn’t neutral, and can be the active ingredient that’s taking you backwards in life.
But there is hope. Once you can name these steps in your own life, you’ve already begun the efforts to break its hold in your life.
Where Self-Sabotage comes from
If the cycle is the how, the next question is the why. Why do intelligent and capable people keep doing things that take them backwards? Below are some of the more common themes we identify:
Competing commitments
A lot of self-sabotage isn’t a failure of willpower, but rather a collision between two things you want at the same time. For instance, you want a successful business, but you also want to stay invisible. Or you want a relationship, but you also don’t want to lose your freedom. Another is you want to be seen, but you’re afraid of being misunderstood.
The problem here is that we’re more scared of losing something important, than focussed on the thing we’ll gain in its stead. People will work harder not to lose something they have, than they will to gain something new. Most of us wouldn’t bet our life savings on a coin flip, even though the odds are 50/50, because the fear of losing everything outweighs the appeal of doubling it. So, when you have a competing commitment, the fear usually wins. The commitment to not-losing outmuscles the commitment to gaining, and it happens below the level of conscious awareness, which is why it feels like fate.
The motivation myth
A large amount of self-sabotage-through-inaction is built on one belief: I have to feel ready before I act.
“I can’t socialise if I’m not confident.”
“I can’t film that thing if I’m not energised.”
“I can’t start until I’m inspired.”
The problem with this thinking is that motivation doesn’t actually precede action as much as we would believe. Facing discomfort is primarily a choice, rather than a motivated feeling. In this way, action comes first, and only then produces motivation.
The feeling you’re waiting for is the output of doing the thing, not the input required to start it. The work itself is the healing process: you do it, you feel proud, and that pride is the momentum you were trying to summon beforehand.
The control addiction
There’s a particular kind of self-sabotage that presents quite irrational: quitting before you can be fired. For instance, ending the relationship before you can be left. Or, turning a disagreement into a fight because you were losing the disagreement. The basis of this thinking leads along the line of at least if I lose, it’s on my terms.
For some people, the cycle of “I’m down, I’m going to fix it, I’m up, I’m down again” is itself the thing they’re addicted to. In this way they’re hooked on controlling the outcome, even if it’s a bad one. The sabotage gives them a problem they can solve. And solving problems feels like progress, even when the problem is self-inflicted.
If this might ring true for you, then honest self-reflection is a must, even though it can be very difficult. We’re the easiest person in the room to lie to, and admitting that we’re more focussed on an outcome of our own terms, even if a negative one, can be very confronting.
Look at the environment
Before you go digging in your psyche for why you keep sabotaging yourself, check your environment. If you’re trying to make changes in your life, but your environment is not conducive to those changes, then the risk of self-sabotage increases.
For instance, if you’re trying to change your eating and the kitchen is full of the thing you’re trying not to eat, willpower was never going to win that fight. Or, if your screen time is out of control, the fact that the app is three taps away, means there is a strong chance you’ll access it.
The environment – your physical environment, your job, your routines, the people around you, are all leverage points for change.
In short, set up your environment in a way that aligns to what you need to focus on, and get rid of the elements that are sure to test your resolve.
The Compounding Effect
As I described earlier, with more cycles of self-sabotage you engage in, the more shame you feel, and the bigger the gap between the person you wish to be and feel you are.
However, just as self-sabotage has a compounding effect over time in a negative direction, we can also rely on how positive actions may compound over time to produce positive shifts. In short, small actions repeating over time, works in your favour too. In this way we can use small and manageable positive decisions to start turning the tide, one step at a time.
Instead of focusing on changing your life, rather focus on one or two small actions that you can start today, and take consistently. For instance, instead of reading a whole book, rather just read five pages (but read five every day). Or, rather than becoming fit and healthy, rather just take a short and manageable walk today (but walk every day).
Many people are too focussed on big goals, or feel pressured to implement massive fixes in their lives, which places too much discomfort on them. In this regard, it’s just too difficult, and they’d rather just keep avoiding it, as they feel too much like a failure, or embarrassed to face it.
So,the key unlock is to rather focus on the small, repeatable, almost invisible things you can do daily, and then compound with time. The walk you take, the five pages you read, the one small signal of warmth you send in your relationship… with time, these things really add up, and start compounding in a positive way.
The most useful question isn’t “what’s my big move?” It’s: what’s the one small, boring, repeatable action that, done daily, would put me on a different trajectory in three months?
What to actually do
If we consider a CBT-grounded approach to addressing self-sabotage, I’d suggest the following steps. These would be best done with the guidance of a therapist, but you can also do them on your own to start with:
1. Map your own cycle: For the next few weeks, keep a simple journal at home. When you feel the want to escape, jot down what triggered it. After that, also write your feelings and thoughts you experience. You’re not trying to stop. You’re trying to observe yourself and notice the cycle. Seeing the cycle in real time is a central part of starting to address it.
2. Surface the competing commitments: Draw a line down a page. On the left, write what you want (e.g. “a successful business”). On the right, write what you might lose if you achieved it (“the safety of not risking failure”). List as many as you can identify. The right-hand column is your barriers. Naming it doesn’t make it disappear, but it stops operating invisibly without awareness. This helps you to start addressing these because you’re not blind to their influence in your life.
3. Act before motivation: Pick one small version of the thing you’re avoiding (e.g. ten minutes of it, not the whole thing), and do it as consistently as possible, every day. The point isn’t the little output achieved, but committing to becoming consistent, no matter how small. With enough time, you’ll gain some momentum, which creates a feeling of becoming motivated to do more.
4. Redesign the room: Pick the biggest environmental friction point in your life (e.g. the app, the cupboard, the late-night scrolling, etc) and remove it or make it harder to access. If you make it harder to access this unhealthy coping method, there’s a higher chance you’ll stop grabbing for it at every juncture.
5. Course-correct without shame: A lapse need not be a total relapse. The shame that follows a slip can be painful, but if you focus on it too much, rather than getting back on track, then it could be the trigger that reloads the self-sabotage cycle. Those who become experts in experiencing a lapse, treating it as data, and learning from the experience – are in the best position to prevent relapses from happening. Questions like “What did I learn about my triggers?” beats “What’s wrong with me?” every time.
6. One thing at a time: If you try to fix too many things at once there’s a real chance you’ll net out to zero changes in time. Change is difficult (you wouldn’t be reading this if it was). Pick one aspect to focus on, and prioritise it in your day. Protect it, and let the others stay messy for now. As you gain momentum with one successful change in your life, this will help you become more motivated and positive in your self-beliefs to action change in other areas of your life.
A small experiment
For the next week or two, don’t try to stop the self-sabotage blindly. Start by observing yourself with curiosity (no judgement) to study your feelings and thoughts. Catch the triggers, and start understanding the cycles. Name the escape and notice the relief you experience. Sit with the shame for sixty seconds before it becomes the next trigger.
You’re not fixing anything yet. You’re making the unconscious conscious. That alone, Jung would argue, and so would I, changes more than you’d think.
If any of this resonates and you’d like to talk it through with someone, the practice is here. You don’t have to map it alone. Dr Guil is a clinical psychologist at Baldivis Family Medical Centre. This post is general psychoeducational content, not individual clinical advice. If you’re struggling with patterns of self-sabotage, disordered eating, substance use, or low mood, please consider reaching out — to us, to your GP, or to a registered mental health professional in your area.
