Self-sabotage: Why do you do it? And how can you stop?
Why do you self-sabotage? Why do you sometimes try to undo all of the hard work that you’ve put in with your exercise routine, eating habits, lifestyle changes, or other self-improvement goals? It’s a question that I’ve worked through many times with clients over the years. Very rarely do they understand why they do it. And that’s one of the issues. Getting to the root cause of a behaviour, understanding what triggers us to act that way in the first place, allows us to either seek to remove the trigger from our life, or to at least recognise what’s going on and come up with a plan for when it does occur. Let’s take a look at some of the most common reasons I’ve heard from clients over time, and some possible solutions. Why do I press self-destruct? 1. Issues with self-worth A number of clients I’ve worked with over the years have come to the realisation that they don’t see themselves in a particularly positive light. This can be for a whole host of reasons but, whatever it is, in many instances it has led them to feel as if they’re not worthy of achieving the goals they are after. They see themselves as undeserving of good health or happiness or career success or whatever it is they’re working on. Action: What can you do about it? In the first instance, you might find it helpful to talk this through with someone; a friend or family member, your trainer, or, if more appropriate, a counsellor. Understanding how you see yourself, and why, can be the first step towards changing that perception for the better. 2. Fear of, or potential drawbacks to the change Sometimes, when I work through what went wrong with clients, they discover that they were actually harbouring some fears or concerns over the goal they had put in place. They hadn’t consciously recognised that they had legitimate concerns about the changes that would happen were they to succeed. Instead, they had let their subconscious mind sabotage their efforts so that they wouldn’t have to worry about these things. Quite clever, and entirely logical if you think about it. Action: What can you do about it? Perform a ‘Benefits & Drawbacks Analysis’ on your goal. What are the potential positives for you of achieving it? What might be the negatives? Having done this, you can analyse in more detail which of these things is most important to you and decide if the goal is right for you right now. You may find that a simple tweak is all it takes for it to work much better, or you may want to choose another goal entirely. It really doesn’t matter. What matters is that it works for you. 3. Negative self-talk – ‘I’ll never succeed’ This can happen for many reasons. Maybe it’s a self-worth thing. In which case, see Point Number One. But, sometimes it can be far simpler than that. Sometimes it’s a belief that has been ingrained into your mindset over time. Let’s take Newcastle United fans as an example (sorry to any Magpies amongst you). They probably go into each football season firmly believing that they’re not going to win the league. Why? Because year in, year out, they don’t. If you imagine their belief that they won’t win the league as a tabletop, every time that belief is backed up in reality, a leg is added to the table underneath. If it happens just once, the belief is on shaky foundations and can easily be changed. But, when it happens time after time, that table (belief) has many legs and it becomes much harder to topple over. Maybe you’ve tried losing weight a number of times but you haven’t succeeded in keeping it off. In this instance, you can start to believe that it’s never going to happen, so you say to yourself, ‘it doesn’t matter if I eat those biscuits, because I won’t lose weight anyway.’ It becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Action: What can you do about it? Try ‘I might’ instead of ‘I will.’ Stable beliefs don’t always change overnight. They may take time. I could tell you to just simply believe in yourself, tell yourself you can do it and so on and so forth. But you may just look at me and say, ‘Why should I?’ In this instance, it can help to start with ‘I might.’ I might lose weight if I didn’t have those biscuits, or I might find running easier if I did 1-mile three times a week for a month. Give yourself a timescale that you’re going to try it for, and see what happens. You might just notice some progress. Think about times where you have been successful. If you do notice that you feel negative about yourself, think back to times where you have succeeded and it made you feel good. What did you do? How did you do it? Whose help did you enlist to make it happen? What was different about that instance? And how can you use that with this goal? Focus on small wins. Set micro-goals. Rather than saying, I’m not going to eat biscuits this month, focus on just one day, or even just half a day. Every time you succeed with one of these little wins, you saw a negative leg off that belief table of yours and replace it with a positive one. Reframe. I frequently hear words like ‘disaster’, ‘nightmare’, ‘failure’, or ‘self-destruct’ from clients who struggle to maintain their goals. I even used that last one myself to title this article. But I did it because, if you’re someone who experiences this, you probably use that term too. How about we try reframing it though? Maybe ‘blip’ or ‘stumble’ or ‘minor setback’ or ‘one of those days.’ Call it whatever you like that decreases its importance, because one unhealthy meal, or one day of too much alcohol, or one day of no exercise,
