All of us are prone to sabotaging our lives in various ways—whether it’s our career, our personal and professional goals, or our romantic relationships, friendships, or family relations.
This is because we’re all biologically wired to be scanning for threats. That, of course, is the key to our psychological and physical survival, but there also has to be a balance between threats and rewards. When that balance is kept in check, everything goes swimmingly. However, when something causes that threat to become amplified, you're much more prone to self-sabotaging as a form of protection because (oddly enough) your brain is trying to protect you from the potential harms that it sees.
This is a topic I delved into in my book, Stop Self-Sabotage. My book delved into the six steps to unlock your true motivation, harness your willpower, and get out of your own way. Today, we are going to explore how to identify and overcome self-sabotage. For an in-depth overview of this topic be sure to check out my most recent podcast episode right here in substack. You can also listen on Apple, Spotify, or watch on YouTube.
L.I.F.E. Happens
So why do we sometimes overestimate threat and allow it to stop us from continuing on our path toward our goal? The answer is L.I.F.E. happens. In my research and through my experience in working with clients, I’ve found time and again that there are four elements that fuel the conflict between going for what you want and being held back by perceived threats that won’t harm you. These four influences represent aspects of your personality and how you relate to the world. You can take the free quiz yourself here.
L stands for low self-esteem. When you have a shakier self-esteem, you may not believe you deserve good things, and so when you do get closer and closer to a good outcome in some area of your life,you're more likely to self sabotage unconsciously.
I stands for internalized beliefs. These are ideas from your childhood where perhaps you've learned a certain way of coping that's not very adaptive by watching your parents cope with different stressors. Maybe your parents were “nervous nellies” and were always watching out for fears, and so, as an adult, you’ve developed some of those same predispositions.
F stands for fear of change. As humans, we all like familiarity because when we can predict our environment, we feel safer. But there are certain personality types that tend to fear change or the unknown a little bit more than the average person. And if so, that might predispose you to self sabotage.
E stands for excessive need for control. This is for all of my go-getters, perfectionists, type A individuals out there. Oftentimes these individuals do admirable things. Their perfectionist equalities get them really far in life. But also when a situation involves another person, another person's feelings, another person's actions, it’s harder for them to let go of control and manage their emotions when someone else is in the pilot’s (or co-pilot’s) seat.
Your Self-Sabotage Triggers
Once you’ve developed an awareness of the potential roots of your self-sabotage, it’s time for the next piece of the puzzle: understanding the six forms of self-sabotage triggers (also known as negative automatic thoughts) that can lead to cycles of self-sabotaging behavior. Self-sabotage triggers are like the termites that invade a house. They can seem tiny and inconsequential individually, but when there are many of them, they can ultimately devastate the foundation and mess with the structure of the entire building. Similarly, negative thoughts can wear at you over time and because they lurk in the background, you don’t see the effects until you are in the midst of a fraught relationship or health crisis, or experiencing job trauma.
I talk about an easy way to uncover your thought patterns, and it’s a quick exercise you can do in under 3 minutes a day. Check out my podcast at the 7 minute mark (here on substack, Apple, Spotify, or YouTube) for instructions on how to do this. Once you start to pay attention to your thoughts more, you’ll notice patterns in how you tend to respond to stressful situations. These responses often present as one or more of these six thought triggers:
Overgeneralizing/catastrophizing, which means taking one fact and jumping to conclusions, usually bad ones. For example, have you ever thought a friend was upset with you simply because they hadn’t returned a text?
Shoulds-based thinking, which means relying too much on your own rules and expectations about how things should go. Like that friend you texted should have gotten back to you by now, regardless of what they may have going on.
Black-and-white thinking, which allows for only two possibilities and no in-between. Perhaps a colleague passed you in the hallway without greeting you, so you firmly conclude they’re a rude person.
Mind reading, which is simply thinking you actually know the thoughts or intentions of others. Maybe you didn’t get a promotion and you think that’s because your boss doesn’t care about your efforts.
Discounting the positive, which usually plays out in downplaying what’s good about yourself or things you’ve done. For instance, have you ever turned down a compliment instead of just giving a simple “Thank you?”
Personalization, which refers to any thinking in which you measure yourself against other people. In other words, when was the last time you scrolled social media?
Knowing that these triggers exists in the first place (and which apply most to you) is an important piece of the puzzle, but the problem with some of your most triggering thoughts is that they can run rampant and exert power over your feelings and behaviors. So, we need to learn to routinely question, transform, and deemphasize the impact of these types of self-sabotaging thoughts.
How to Deemphasize the Impact of Self-Sabotaging Thoughts
I want to share one practical tip to quiet the negative internal dialogue you might find yourself experiencing, especially during times that are particularly stressful. Thoughts are just mental events - nothing more. But often, we allow negative thoughts to color our world view and attitude. When we do that, we inadvertently make that negativity synonymous with ourselves. We identify ourselves by our negative self-talk.
Sometimes, it can be easy to forget in our daily lives that our thoughts are something we have rather than something we are.
Cognitive Defusion (a concept coined by Steven Hayes) refers to the practice of observing and distancing from your mind. Its associated techniques are helpful for a variety of difficulties, and it can help to break the progression of thoughts, emotions, and behaviors and to create space between thoughts and feelings.
It is essential to understand that thoughts do not always have to lead to feelings and then progress to behaviors. In fact, in some cases, there does not have to be a direct relationship to feelings or behaviors at all! Just because you experience a self-sabotage trigger does not mean that self-sabotage is inevitable.
Defusion is an effective way to break that chain of events before it starts that downward spiral toward self-sabotage. It helps you to spend more time seeing thoughts for exactly what they are—merely mental events and not literal truths. It allows you to separate from your thoughts and break the usual sequence of self-sabotage triggers to intense feelings to self-sabotage behaviors.
Exercise: Try Labeling Your Thoughts
Labeling is a technique that uses language to identify what a thought truly is—a mental event that you have. This exercise is good for any time a negative thought emerges and repeats itself in your mind and you feel the immediate need to create some space before you begin taking any self-sabotaging actions.
The next time you notice a negative thought, try adding the phrase “I’m having the thought that” in front of it. For example, “I will never get another job,” becomes “I am having the thought that… I will never get another job.”
This technique not only helps to change the way in which you think about your thoughts as separate events from you, but also it provides distance, both physical and mental, from a self-sabotage trigger. It reminds you that a thought is a mental event, not who you are, nor does it necessarily represent the truth.
You can take this exercise a step further by adding another short phrase: I notice that. Now the phrase now becomes: “I notice that…I’m having the thought that…I will never get another job.”
This additional simple phrase brings to the forefront that you are the active agent doing the noticing of your thoughts. You are the one who is spotting a negative thought, and then labeling it as just that—a mental event and nothing more.
Try this the next time you have a negative thought that you find it hard to disengage from, and let me know how it goes.
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About me:
Dr. Judy Ho, Ph. D., ABPP, ABPdN is a triple board certified and licensed Clinical and Forensic Neuropsychologist, a tenured Associate Professor at Pepperdine University, television and podcast host, and author of Stop Self-Sabotage. An avid researcher and a two-time recipient of the National Institute of Mental Health Services Research Award, Dr. Judy maintains a private practice where she specializes in comprehensive neuropsychological evaluations and expert witness work. She is often called on by the media as an expert psychologist and is also a sought after public speaker for universities, businesses, and organizations.
Dr. Judy received her bachelor's degrees in Psychology and Business Administration from UC Berkeley, and her masters and doctorate from SDSU/UCSD Joint Doctoral Program in Clinical Psychology. She completed a National Institute of Mental Health sponsored fellowship at UCLA's Semel Institute.
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