Over the course of your life, you may have had days where you've had an important task assigned to you, and you know you're perfectly capable of completing it. However, some part of you prevents you from even getting started, or trying hard enough. This is a form of self-sabotage. It can also show up in the form of picking fights and pushing away the people we hold dear, or avoiding growth in our professional lives. Even though you want to succeed, you find yourself being your own worst enemy. In this article, we'll explore what exactly self-sabotage is, and why it's so prevalent. Learning about it is the first step to overcoming self-sabotage!

What Is Self-Sabotage?

Self-sabotage is a pattern of behavior, either conscious or unconscious, that leads to self-defeating outcomes.It undermines your professional and personal growth. It can stem from deep-seated insecurities, childhood issues, past traumas, and mental health issues. It can wreak havoc in your romantic relationships, ruin career prospects, and cause financial burdens. However, self-sabotage is a paradox. A person engaging in such behavior usually wants to succeed, despite these actions. However, the aforementioned issues prevent them from overcoming self-imposed limitations.

The Mechanics Of Self-Sabotage

To overcome self-sabotage, it's important to understand that self-sabotage is a result of complex inner processes where conflicting thoughts, beliefs, and emotional responses interact with each other. This leads to behaviors that don't entirely line up with what we want to achieve. Some of the main mechanics of self sabotage are as follows:

Inner Critic and Limiting Beliefs

Most people have an inner voice. This inner dialogue can motivate and demotivate you, help you reason, self-reflect, problem-solve, and even daydream. However, in some people, this internal dialogue can be overly critical. It constantly promotes negative self-talk and causes you to internalize negative messages received from past experiences and societal pressures. These internalized messages become limiting beliefs, which are convictions about ourselves and the world that constrain us. Negative beliefs such as "love will end in pain, so what's the point," and "success brings extra responsibilities" can cause you to self-sabotage unconsciously, preventing you from having healthy relationships and successful careers. You may also interpret different situations with a negative lens, which helps confirm your negative thoughts, which then perpetuates a self-sabotage cycle.

How Intention Conflicts With Action

The "Intention-Behavior Gap" is the failure to translate intentions into actions. People set goals for themselves and have an idea on how to achieve them, but they don't follow through. This Intention-Behavior Gap is a form of self sabotage. Despite having clear goals, subconscious patterns, fears, or conflicting desires get in the way of productive action. This gap can often be caused by habit- When we are used to a routine, it can be difficult to change. Our self-sabotaging behavior becomes an ingrained habit, which makes it difficult to break even if you understand how it negatively affects you. Holding contradictory beliefs can also add to the problem, such as procrastinating when you know you're capable. This leads to feelings of guilt or rationalization, which causes you to cement in self-sabotaging behavior rather than resolving the issue.

Automatic Responses To Emotional Triggers

Emotional states such as fear, stress, anxiety, boredom, and even feelings of unworthiness can trigger unhealthy coping mechanisms as a reflex. These coping mechanisms may offer temporary relief, but they can have negative repercussions. A fear of failure can lead to procrastination because the idea of potentially failing at a task fills you with so much anxiety that delaying the task serves as a temporary form of escape. A fear of success leads to downplaying your achievements or avoiding opportunities to climb the ladder because the idea of having to deal with more responsibilities causes you discomfort. These are often automatic responses carried out without much deliberation to emotional triggers, and though they offer temporary solace, they prevent you from achieving your true potential.

Why Do We Engage In Self-Defeating Behaviors?

The psychology behind self-sabotaging behavior is complex, and it's essential to understand it before working on improving. Self-sabotage is often shaped by past experiences and human needs and desires. Here are some of the most common reasons why self-sabotaging behavior becomes prevalent in a person:

Fear Of Failure

One of the most common reasons for self-sabotaging behavior is a fear of failure. It is often driven by an inner conflict between striving for success and the fearing of its emotional consequences, which might include shame, rejection, and more. So, to avoid those negative emotions, we may unconsciously not do our best on purpose. This can come in the form of remaining underprepared, procrastinating, or even giving up. This gives you a sort of mental safety net, where you can tell yourself that since you didn't really try, it isn't actually a failure. This lets you avoid the shame, humiliation, or embarrassment you perceive when attempting and failing a task.

Fear Of Success

Success can often bring about changes- People may expect consistent success from you, you may be given more responsibilities, there may be more eyes on you, and so on. The idea of dealing with all of these things can be intimidating, which is why some folks self-sabotage their success, so that they can continue to live in the familiarity they're used to. Fear of success can also stem from imposter syndrome, where a person worries that they aren't as competent as their peers, and they fear that if they do anything noteworthy, there would be more eyes on them, leading to them being "exposed".

Enjoying Safety And Familiarity In The Comfort Zone

It can be very difficult for us to break free of a habit. We tend to indulge ourselves in our own comfort zones, even if it is detrimental to us. This is because there's comfort in familiarity. Forcing yourself to step out of your comfort zone can be daunting, even if there's a potential for growth and success, because it's something new. Because you're exploring uncharted territories, you may even deal with feelings of anxiety. This is why many people self-sabotage by remaining in their comfort zone, because they feel safer in dealing with circumstances they're already familiar with.

Maintaining Control

We always want to have some semblance of control over our lives. When we're dealing with circumstances out of our control, whether it's general life, work, or relationships, we tend to engage in self-sabotage because, in a twisted way, we have control over this one thing. It's a preemptive strike which gives us a sense of agency, even if it doesn't result in the positive result we would want. This can come in the form of ending a relationship before your partner can break up with you, or even cutting your own hair at home, even if you lack the skill to do so, because it's one thing you have control over. When everything else in the world feels so out of control, one way to retain some control is to control what we can.

Subconscious Affirmation of Unworthiness

Many self-sabotaging patterns arise from a sense of unworthiness and low self-esteem. When we lack self-compassion and engage in negative self-talk constantly, we end up believing that we don't deserve to be happy, to be in love, or to succeed. This can lead us to unconsciously engage in behaviors that affirm these negative perceptions. You end up believing that you aren't good enough, and any failures you deal with further confirm these beliefs. You may even engage in self-sabotage to "test" people close to you. For example, purposefully causing conflict in relationships to see if your partner will continue to love/support you. This is a misguided attempt at gaining validation.

Childhood Conditioning And Modeling

We are a product of our environments, and our formative years are crucial in determining our mentality, outlook on life, and even the self-sabotaging patterns we might engage in. Children living in dysfunctional families where they are constantly criticized, neglected, made to feel less than, or where they witness their parents engaging in self-defeating behaviors are more likely to internalize these behaviors and beliefs. Conflicts in relationships during childhood can lead to insecure or avoidant attachment styles, which can cause difficulties in adult relationships, along with an increased likelihood of sabotaging them. They may even choose partners who display abusive behaviors because they believe they are the only ones who could love them, or because that's what they believe love looks like based on their parents' relationship.

Impact Of Past Traumas

Past traumas, be they from your childhood or otherwise, can massively impact your self-esteem and your perception of the world. Unresolved trauma can cause you to foster beliefs that the world is unsafe, that you aren't worthy of success or love, and this makes self-sabotage a way to conform to your negative self-image.

Internalized Societal Expectations

The society you live in places expectations on you, no matter who you are. These societal pressures come in the form of stereotypes related to gender and socioeconomic status, what success should look like, and this can be internalized and lead to self-sabotage that aligns with limiting societal narratives. But what's more, you can change your whole self-concept subconsciously, leaving your internal values behind and sticking to what you have been told. It is not only behavior that gets shaped by social expectations, but your core, too.

Signs You're Self-Sabotaging

Self-sabotaging behavior isn't a constant. It can come in many forms, and some of these forms even overlap. Though they often stem from trauma, places of insecurity, or mental health issues, they can be addressed. The first step to working on yourself is to identify the form of self-sabotage:

• Career Sabotage: Missing deadlines, underperforming on purpose, avoiding professional social interaction that may support career development, and not speaking up with coworkers can be a sign of career self-sabotage. This usually arises from imposter syndrome, a fear of success, or even a fear of scrutiny.
• Financial Sabotage: Issues like chronic overspending, debt accumulation, ignorance in financial planning and budgeting, impulsive financial choices, and even not attempting to strive for raises or better work positions can be considered financial self-sabotage behavior. It often stems from low self-esteem, past negative experiences with money, or even a fear of success.
• Social Comparison: The act of measuring your accomplishments, physique, and even happiness with others is known as social comparison. Though social comparison can be healthy in reasonable amounts as it can help you understand your deficits and aim to do better, engaging in it without any self-compassion can lead to low self-esteem, self-confidence, and increased self doubt. Especially in the age of social media, it's easy to see other people living their best lives through a filtered lens. Seeing others live life through rose-colored glasses and then comparing it to your real, genuine life can lead you to feel like there's no point in persevering and aiming for personal growth.
• Imposter Syndrome: This is the sense that you aren't as capable as your peers in the field you work in, leading to the feeling that you're an "imposter" among genuinely skilled individuals. This can happen in people even if they've shown competence and success, even if they went through the same challenges as their peers. They attribute their success to luck rather than their own skill. This is accompanied by a fear of being "discovered" that you aren't as competent as your peers. This can lead to self-sabotaging behavior in the form of avoiding challenges, overworking, and not speaking up in order to maintain a low profile.
• Procrastination: This is the habit of delaying tasks until the very last minute, and sometimes even beyond that. Usually, this isn't a symptom of poor time management. Rather, its root causes lie in a fear of failure and success. The logic is that if you don't begin, you can't fail, and if you don't succeed, more won't be expected from you. It can also stem from a sense of perfectionism, where you keep delaying tasks until you believe you can do it perfectly, which often never comes, or it can stem from being overwhelmed. When this form of self-sabotage occurs, you're likely to experience increased stress, miss opportunities, and deliver subpar work.
• Perfectionism: The saying "Don't let perfect be the enemy of good" applies here. Perfectionism is the idea that if you're going to do something, it has to be absolutely perfect. While it might seem like a good idea, setting unrealistically high expectations for yourself can cause you to delay getting started with your task, as well as lead to dissatisfaction with completed tasks and a fear of making mistakes. Perfectionism is linked to cognitive distortions such as "all-or-nothing" thinking, in which a person believes that if something cannot be done perfectly, it's not worth doing at all. This prevents you from learning, making progress, and can even cause you to miss out on opportunities in life.
• Self-Criticism: Everyone has an internal monologue, and those with self-sabotaging behavior tend to experience negative self-talk. This sort of inner monologue, where you're constantly telling yourself that you aren't good enough, that you can't do "it", or any other array of self-sabotaging thoughts, can take its toll in the form of a self-fulfilling prophecy. By constantly dealing with these negative core beliefs, you'll minimize your success and blow your shortcomings out of proportion. These negative beliefs erode your sense of self-esteem, which then causes you to avoid pursuing goals entirely and settle for mediocrity.
• Neglecting Self-Care: Ignoring your physical, mental, and emotional needs is a form of self-sabotage. You may put off self-care initially because you're too busy for it, but it can have a cascading effect. By ignoring self-care needs, you may end up eating unhealthy, forgoing exercise, having a poor sleep schedule, and so on. This adds up over time, affecting your happiness and your ability to be productive. You may end up feeling as if you have to put off self-care even more to remain productive, causing a negative feedback loop.
• Relationship Sabotage: Romantic relationships can also be affected by self-sabotaging behavior. People who suffer from mental health issues, or a trauma which causes a fear of abandonment, fear of being controlled, or even the belief that they're undeserving of love. These fears lead to behaviors that push loved ones away, create conflict, or try to prevent intimacy and connection. This is done to avoid vulnerability, or to prevent themselves from "getting hurt" by ending a relationship before it has the chance to get serious.
• Unhealthy Coping Mechanisms: To escape difficult emotions, stress, and negative thought patterns, some people turn to unhealthy coping mechanisms. These can come in the form of alcohol and drug abuse, gambling, overeating, and other addictive behaviors, which provide a temporary relief. However, in doing so, these coping mechanisms can lead to significant long-term issues, such as addiction, mental health issues, and physical health deterioration. It can also promote unhelpful patterns, such as turning to these unhealthy coping mechanisms as an easy way out as soon as they come across difficulties in life.

What Are The Consequences Of Self-Sabotaging Behavior?

Self-sabotage can turn your inner world into a barrier to your own growth. Its consequences are deep and far-reaching in almost every aspect of your life, and it often leads into a self-sabotage cycle which is difficult to break free from. Understanding the consequences of self-sabotage may help you throw off that yoke and stop sabotaging your future:

Emotional And Mental Health

Self-sabotage starts quite often from emotional and mental roots, and it can also have a profound influence on it. This is why healing trauma is essential to stop self-sabotage. When engaging in self-sabotage, you're likely to experience the following negative emotions:

• Low self-esteem and self-confidence: Constantly undermining yourself can ruin the faith you have in your own capabilities. As you deal with more failures and missed opportunities, they reinforce the self-doubt you experience, as well as feelings of unworthiness.
• Higher stress and anxiety levels: Chronic stress and anxiety can arise from looming deadlines, missed opportunities, and unmet standards, which are brought about by procrastination, perfectionism, and other self-sabotaging impediments.
• Increased risk of depression: Constantly dealing with negative feelings like stress, low self-worth, and hopelessness can increase the risk of developing depression, or exacerbate symptoms.
• Hopelessness: A consistent pattern of self-sabotage can cause you to experience feelings of hopelessness. When you aren't achieving your goals, it'll feel entirely impossible to achieve anything or even change your circumstances.
• Guilt/Shame: When you're aware that you are capable of achieving your goals but you continue not to due to self sabotage, it can lead to deep feelings of guilt and shame.

Relationships

People who have trust issues or problematic attachment styles may self-sabotage their relationships as a defense mechanism:

• Reduced intimacy and vulnerability: If a person is afraid of engulfment or being rejected, they may avoid opportunities for emotional closeness. This prevents any intimate, meaningful connections from being made in the relationship.
• Conflict and strained connections: Some sorts of negative behavior exhibited in a relationship by an individual prone to self-sabotage are picking fights, being emotionally distant, being overly critical, and constantly "testing" their partner. Over time, this damages the bond they share with their partner.
• Loneliness: Constantly sabotaging relationships leads to a sense of isolation and loneliness, as well as the feeling that you aren't worth being loved.
• Repetition of negative patterns: A common pattern of self-sabotage in relationships is choosing partners who are objectively unsuitable and past unhealthy dynamics, or ending relationships when they show promise for becoming something more serious and stable. These signs of self-sabotage usually arise from unhealthy attachment styles or unresolved childhood problems.

Career And Financial Goals

Dissatisfaction with work, fears of success and failure, and a reluctance to curb improper spending can lead to self-sabotaging behaviors, which can impact you in the following ways:

• Avoiding growth: The tendency to avoid challenges, promotions, and opportunities for skill development, either due to a fear of failure or fear of success, can lead to a stagnant career as well as a sense of guilt and shame that you are not making the most of yourself.
• Job instability: Self-sabotage leading to underperformance in the workplace, missed deadlines, or workplace conflict can lead to negative performance reviews, disciplinary actions, and possibly even job loss. This can make it difficult to hold a job, and it can even make it difficult to gain employment if your work history shows that you aren't able to hold a job.
• Financial instability: Underearning due to a reluctance to strive for better jobs, impulsive spending, and improper budgeting are signs of self-sabotage, and it can lead to debt, chronic financial stress, and difficulty in achieving long-term financial security.

Physical Health

Signs of self-sabotage can even manifest in your physical health:

• Unhealthy coping mechanisms: Abusing substances such as drugs and alcohol, overeating, and other unhealthy behaviors used to deal with uncomfortable feelings caused by self-sabotage can cause more harm to your body in the long term. However, it is important to know that unhealthy coping mechanisms may also result from unresolved trauma or emotional dysregulation.
• Neglect: Some forms of self-sabotage include neglecting self-care, such as exercise, maintaining a healthy diet, and sleep hygiene. This can directly impact your physical health.
• Stress: Chronic stress that stems from self-sabotage can lead to a variety of health problems, as well as increasing your risk for cardiovascular and gastrointestinal disorders, as well as weakened immune function.

Negative Feedback Cycle Of Self-Sabotaging Behavior

One of the greatest problems of self-sabotaging behavior is that its impact often reinforces negative beliefs, which can cause a feedback cycle of self-sabotaging behavior. This cycle gets worse over time, and often feels inescapable. However, understanding the mechanisms of self-sabotage, how it affects you, and why you do it is the first step to fixing the issue. After that, incremental progress towards productivity can help you break the habit.

Self-Assessing For Self-Sabotage

Answer the following questions as honestly as you can to try and assess yourself for self-sabotage. Consider your behavior from the past year.

1. Do you typically procrastinate on important tasks?
   • Always
   • Sometimes
   • Rarely
2. Do you set unrealistically high standards for yourself, to the point where you struggle to start/finish things?
   • Always
   • Sometimes
   • Rarely
3. Do you set goals but find it difficult to follow through?
   • Always
   • Sometimes
   • Rarely
4. Is your inner dialogue often negative towards yourself?
   • Always
   • Sometimes
   • Rarely
5. Do you avoid social situations because of fear or anxiety?
   • Always
   • Sometimes
   • Rarely
6. Do you neglect your physical or emotional well being when you're stressed or chasing a goal?
   • Always
   • Sometimes
   • Rarely
7. Do you often compare yourself to others, leading to feelings of inadequacy?
   • Always
   • Sometimes
   • Rarely
8. Do you feel like you don't deserve happiness or success?
   • Always
   • Sometimes
   • Rarely
9. Do you have a pattern of initiating conflicts or pushing away people close to you?
   • Always
   • Sometimes
   • Rarely
10. Do you avoid opportunities to advance at work even though you're qualified?
    • Always
    • Sometimes
    • Rarely
11. Do you struggle to manage your finances, even if you make enough to cover all your necessary spending?
    • Always
    • Sometimes
    • Rarely
12. Do you use substances like alcohol, drugs, food, or activities like shopping, doomscrolling, gaming, etc, to avoid stress or difficult emotions?
    • Always
    • Sometimes
    • Rarely
13. Do you struggle to accept compliments or downplay your successes?
    • Always
    • Sometimes
    • Rarely
14. Do you find it difficult to forgive yourself for past mistakes?
    • Always
    • Sometimes
    • Rarely
15. Do you feel that if you achieve something, it's due to luck rather than your own efforts?
    • Always
    • Sometimes
    • Rarely

Now, let's assess your answers and determine your likelihood to self-sabotage:

• For each "Always", give yourself 3 points.
• For each "Sometimes", give yourself 2 points.
• For each "Rarely", give yourself 1 point.

Now, total your score:

• 15-25 points: You may have some self-sabotaging tendencies as many people do, but they are not a dominant pattern in your life, and you're easily able to overcome them.
• 26-35 points: Self-sabotage has a noticeable role in holding you back in some parts of your life. Becoming more aware of self-sabotage, practicing self-compassion, and learning to manage stress will benefit you.
• 36-45 points: Self-sabotaging actions are pervasive in your life. It likely impacts and hinders many aspects of your life, and it's recommended to explore science-backed strategies to overcome self-sabotage.

Conclusion and Next Steps

Self-sabotage is a form of self-betrayal that everyone experiences at one point or the other in their lives. Our early life experiences and past traumas contribute heavily to a low sense of self-worth, a lack of self-love, and increased self-sabotage. However, the fact that it is unavoidable doesn't mean it has to be a cornerstone of your life. You aren't defined by your trauma. It is entirely within your power to learn how to deal with the uncomfortable emotions that cause you to self-sabotage. In this article, we've learned to identify signs of self-sabotage, the mechanics of self-sabotage, and their consequences on our lives. In the next article, we'll explore exactly how you can work to stop self-sabotaging yourself.

Bibliography

“Self-Sabotage: How to Overcome Self-Defeating Behavior.” Www.medicalnewstoday.com, 19 Oct. 2023, www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/self-sabotage#causes.

Sirois, Fuschia M. “Procrastination and Stress: A Conceptual Review of Why Context Matters.” International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, vol. 20, no. 6, 13 Mar. 2023, p. 5031, www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10049005/, https://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph20065031.

Kelly, John D. “Your Best Life: Perfectionism—the Bane of Happiness.” Clinical Orthopaedics and Related Research®, vol. 473, no. 10, 3 Apr. 2015, pp. 3108–3111, www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4562912/, https://doi.org/10.1007/s11999-015-4279-9.

Kavaklı, Mehmet, and Gülten Ünal. “The Effects of Social Comparison on the Relationships among Social Media Addiction, Self-Esteem, and General Belongingness Levels.” Current Issues in Personality Psychology, vol. 9, no. 2, 2021, https://doi.org/10.5114/cipp.2021.105349.

“5 Strategies to Overcome Financial Self-Sabotage.” Psychology Today, 2022, www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/mental-wealth/202209/5-strategies-overcome-financial-self-sabotage.

Chuang, Ya-Ting, et al. “The Influence of Motivation, Self-Efficacy, and Fear of Failure on the Career Adaptability of Vocational School Students: Moderated by Meaning in Life.” Frontiers in Psychology, vol. 13, no. 958334, 21 Sept. 2022, https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2022.958334.

Stalder, Erika. “The Psychology of Cutting Your Hair at Home.” Www.refinery29.com, www.refinery29.com/en-us/2020/05/9844107/cutting-your-own-hair-in-quarantine-psychology.

https://www.facebook.com/TheSaraMakin. “How Unprocessed Childhood Trauma Causes Self-Sabotage + How to Cope - Makin Wellness.” Makin Wellness, 14 Feb. 2024, www.makinwellness.com/childhood-trauma/.

Sansone, Randy A., et al. “The Relationship between Childhood Trauma and Medically Self-Sabotaging Behaviors among Psychiatric Inpatients.” The International Journal of Psychiatry in Medicine, vol. 38, no. 4, Dec. 2008, pp. 469–479, https://doi.org/10.2190/pm.38.4.f.

Faries, Mark D. “Why We Don’t “Just Do It.”” American Journal of Lifestyle Medicine, vol. 10, no. 5, 22 June 2016, pp. 322–329, www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6125069/, https://doi.org/10.1177/1559827616638017.

Neureiter, Mirjam, and Eva Traut-Mattausch. “An Inner Barrier to Career Development: Preconditions of the Impostor Phenomenon and Consequences for Career Development.” Frontiers in Psychology, vol. 7, no. 48, 4 Feb. 2016, www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4740363/, https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2016.00048.

Peel, Raquel, and Nerina Caltabiano. “The Relationship Sabotage Scale: An Evaluation of Factor Analyses and Constructive Validity.” BMC Psychology, vol. 9, no. 1, 19 Sept. 2021, https://doi.org/10.1186/s40359-021-00644-0.