Are You Self-Sabotaging? Here’s What Might be Keeping You From Moving Forward

Have you ever started working toward a goal, and you’re doing great, making strides? You can see your desired destination just up ahead. It’s almost within your reach. Then, BAM! Something comes up. You stop. An excellent reason why you can’t move forward pops into your head. You might tell yourself, “it just wasn’t the right time.” We can come up with just about anything, and sure, things come up, but are we using those things to self-sabotage? Is your self-sabotaging keeping you from moving forward? We can find reasons to back up why we can’t do something and find evidence to validate those reasons.

A quick example: It’s Saturday, and you had planned to go to the gym this morning. You have been doing great, going every Saturday, but then you notice that that linen closet in the hallway is a disaster. This might be the only opportunity you get this weekend to reorganize it. You skip the gym and get in the closet. You may have some satisfaction with a clean linen closet and still feel a sense of accomplishment, but in the end, you’re going to feel bad about yourself for not getting to the gym.

What needs to happen here? You need to understand what is actually coming up for you when you are ready to grab your gym bag and instead decide to clean out the closet because it’s probably not really about the closet.

There are basically 5 compelling emotions that play a big role in why we may self-sabotage. They are; fear, embarrassment, shame, guilt, and disappointment. These emotions will lead us to hide, avoid, shrink ourselves, and can even lead to collapse altogether. This inner rebellion that you have is often evolved from your own fear of change. Read more about how fears keep us from reaching our goals and moving forward here.

The 3 Brains

There is a logical explanation for all of this push and pull we put ourselves through. The human brain can, essentially, be categorized into three areas. Stay with me here because this could be your ah-ha moment.

The first area of interest is the Cortex. We can also refer to this as the “human brain” because it focuses on logic. This is what we refer to when we talk about the conscious mind. The conscious mind loves personal growth, but it will also justify our choices and behaviors by finding meaning surrounding our feelings and/or experiences. The cortex likes to rationalize.

The next part is the limbic system part of the brain. This is the area that generates our emotions. The emotions we have will either drive us toward or away from particular experiences. When we do this, we are looking for safety and general well-being. This is caused by humans desiring a sense of love, safety, and belonging.

The third part is the brain stem. This is the part of the brain that is responsible for your physical, involuntary actions. In other words, the things that keep you alive like your heart rate, your breathing, etc. There is another job that this part has: taking in data of the entire neural system and then deciding if it’s safe or risky. You may have heard the term monkey brain, or something similar, as this is where self-doubt, fear, and all those other self-sabotaging mechanisms begin their journey. I like to refer to this part of the brain as the critter brain because it can be quite pesky.

The critter brain does not like change, and when it is comfortable with something, it likes to keep the status quo. If it was able to survive an experience once, well, it deems it familiar or safe. If something is new or unfamiliar, then it is labeled as risky. This is why you may find yourself reliving similar experiences or making the same mistake again and again.

So how do these 3 parts work together? Remember, to experience change is unfamiliar. The critter’s brain freaks out and sounds the alarm to the other parts that there is danger. The limbic system gets the message, and this is where emotions are generated. Remember, the cortex, or the conscious mind, loves growth and change, but when that signal comes through from the limbic, we will rationalize based on the emotion that we’re feeling.

So the limbic part is like the middle child. It generates the emotion that is going to keep the balance between the other 2. The balance may result in keeping us stuck where we are, but that’s safe. Furthermore, familiarity raises our dopamine because it rewards us with the feeling of comfort. Even if where we are is not serving us well, it is still familiar, so that is where we stay, and we sabotage our successes.

The key is to get a green light in all three parts. Safety must not feel threatened for the brain stem (critter brain) to have a green light. It must feel safe. The limbic system must not feel any threat to love and belonging, so it won’t generate the emotions that cause the cortex (conscious mind) to rationalize against the idea. We want the cortex to say, heck ya! That sounds great!

Some Self-Sabotaging Scenarios

When we don’t follow through, we may know why, or we may not.  Most of the time, it is in our subconscious. Either way, we likely beat ourselves up and feel as though we failed. This will then lead to not feeling so good about our choices. What we need to do is get to the bottom of why we are getting derailed. Here are three reasons why this might be occurring.

The Priority List

Self-sabotage comes into play, especially when we’re doing something to better ourselves. In general, we will almost always put ourselves at the bottom of the priority list. We will drop everything to do something to help others, and that’s an admirable characteristic. However, who will we be for others if we can’t prioritize our own needs and growth? Not our best selves, I can assure you—just food for thought.

Keeping busy and doing for others feels good, and again, it is a beautiful characteristic. However, this can also be a form of self-sabotage. This is a good excuse not to have to do that thing for yourself and a great place to hide from any deep-seated emotions or blocks you may not want to face. Keeping busy and burying yourself in things like work and extra responsibilities can also fall into this category.

Desiring Acceptance

Sometimes other people that you might be close to see the changes occurring with you and will feel threatened. They may make comments or even rebel against you in other ways, such as offering unhealthy foods or other temptations that you have been making a point to stay away from. You may feel bad or guilty that they are feeling threatened and then self-sabotage yourself to remain accepted by that person or persons. This has everything to do with love, safety, and belonging, as mentioned above. When we feel these three things threatened, the critter brain kicks into overdrive.

It is important to know that this is not about you. When it comes to the other party acting in this way, it is about them. And for you, this boils down to the fear of not being loved and/or accepted on some level. And this is a big one. Fear of losing love and the sense of belonging are common reasons why we self-sabotage. This can even happen with peers in the workplace. Perhaps being promoted will change the dynamic and the overall comradery. We want to grow, but that underlying emotion and fear cause the anxiety to kick in, and well, let the self-sabotaging commence!

“People who lack the clarity, courage, or determination to follow their own dreams will often find ways to discourage yours. Live your truth, and don’t EVER stop!” ~ Steve Maraboli

I’ve Been Good Lately

Have you ever embarked on a journey to change some unwanted habits? It could be smoking, drinking, gambling, or a prevalent scenario is adopting a more healthy diet. You may have been doing really well. Perhaps you even lost a few pounds, and then you have this inner dialogue with yourself. It might sound something like this; “You know, I have been doing really great this week. I think I deserve a hot fudge Sunday.”

1. Before I go any further, I want to clarify that we need to have that hot fudge Sunday once in a while, but the issue here is when we start closing the window on the frequency to which we have the sundae. Is this just giving yourself a weekly treat (perfectly acceptable), or will this be the beginning of you moving back into your comfort zone and readopting your old habits? Those habits are familiar, which equals safe.

If you want to change, you have to change. As quoted by Jim Rohn, “Your life does not get better by chance. It gets better by change.” This is where your daily habits come into play. Habits are defined as the automated choices or routines that we make daily. They are subconscious mechanisms that really impact our daily routines and choices. It may seem like a lot of thought is put into it, but research has shown that urges impulse or cues that we don’t readily recognize. The habits actually allow our brains to work more efficiently, making room and energy for deeper thought processes.

So, you see, it doesn’t matter if we desire the change or even set out to conquer it. The secret sauce is to change our neural pathways and transform our automated daily habits. Again, this may lead us into a tizzy (in our brain), and pain occurs. Even if the panic is not recognized, your critter brain is putting on the breaks, then; enter self-sabotage!

How Our Beliefs Might Cause Us to Self Sabotage

When we fall off track and get derailed, we might feel disappointed, ashamed, or even embarrassed in ourselves. This could be from an underlying belief that we have had about ourselves or the world around us. Maybe you were always expected to get straight A’s and perform everything to the best of your ability. This may lead to a fear of working toward that goal because if you don’t quite hit the mark, you will have failed in your own eyes. So something comes up to keep you from that path. Can you say, perfectionist?  And by the way, perfectionism is not a personality trait; it is a belief about yourself and a mindset that everything has to be perfect.

Perfectionism is not the only belief that will hold us back from moving forward. They come in all shapes and sizes. Beliefs are defined as; an acceptance that a statement is true or that something exists. Now, notice that it does not say that your belief is necessarily true. It’s the person accepting that a statement is true or that something exists. Beliefs are formed by the thoughts that you think and have been thinking through the course of your lifetime. Most of these originated in childhood, perhaps from our parents, upbringing, or even our culture. These are thoughts that have been in your brain, and you have been thinking throughout your lifetime.

When we have certain beliefs, they end up shaping our experiences. Our experiences confirm our beliefs. When things or circumstances happen in our lives, be it childhood trauma, your husband left you, you weren’t a good student. Perhaps the belief that I am unworthy of happiness will set in. Whatever the belief is, we are wired by neurotransmitters in the brain to believe the thoughts to be true. We give the brain the facts as we see them; the brain then makes meaning of it. The problem is, our brain doesn’t recognize whether those “facts” are true or not. To the brain, it’s just a piece of information that you have invited in. The good news is, we can change our beliefs and those thoughts so that we can start living the life we were meant to live and stop self-sabotaging.

Getting Back On Track

Your resilience determines how you will be successful in your ventures. To get back on that train is key, even after we have derailed. We all derail at some point, and those that can look at what they could do better and come back even stronger, are those that are successful. What we may consider failure can be used as feedback. We want to approach the perceived failure with curiosity. And by the way, there is no judgment in curiosity. It is simply looking for that feedback of why the self-sabotage is serving you positively. And it most always circles back to love, safety, and belonging.

Falling off track doesn’t make us bad people. We are human, after all, but this toxic cycle of self-sabotaging, falling off, and beating ourselves up, will lead to breaking down our resilience. We are just protecting ourselves, even if it means staying in a bad situation. It’s what we know and is familiar with. Our critter brain deems it safe.

When we self-loathe and judge ourselves, this is not in alignment with healing and growth. It’s quite the opposite, in fact. What if, instead, we decided not to hide behind any excuses and to be who we really are, or embark on that journey we set out on to reach our goals. No matter what! Make it non-negotiable. Use that feedback as a springboard instead of a crutch. Understand the underlying intention that we have for keeping us from moving forward, then kindly thank the behavior, the craving, the pain, the weight, or whatever it is we want to move away from, and thank that part of ourselves for protecting us, but that we no longer need it and then move forward and stop self-sabotaging. Do the thing!!!

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