Mental Health s r e tt a M Breaking free from self-sabotage By Derran Heney “In the battle of life, you are the enemy and you are the warrior.” – Chin-Ning Chu Self-sabotage is when we have ideas, or set goals for ourselves to make our dreams and desires come true, yet somehow always find ways to avoid reaching them. Often making excuses that we are never good enough! Some good examples include wanting to eat healthier, yet buying junk foods or over eating; trying to save yet spending money on things we don’t need. We may want to do well on the exam yet don’t spend the time required to study by distracting ourselves. In other words, talking ourselves out of the goals we create for ourselves. We’ve all been there; even the most successful people on the planet can sabotage their finest efforts! Other sabotaging behaviours include procrastinating, people pleasing, blaming others and not taking responsibility for our
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own actions, negative self-talk, obsessing about perfection, feeling undeserving of good things in life, being afraid of taking healthy risks, or refusing to ask for help.
“In other words, talking ourselves out of the goals we create for ourselves.” Some behaviour can be generally destructive or interfere heavily with leading a healthy functional life. “Self-sabotage is when we say we want something and then go about making sure it doesn’t happen.” - Alyce Coryn-Selby So, what purpose does sabotage have? What’s really in it for us? Sabotage keeps us in our comfort zone and in tight control of our current circumstances. However, this is not the healthiest or most successful way to move
forward and be happy in life. Sabotaging comes at the great expense of not making any real progress forward. It’s timewasting, frustrating and limits the way we see ourselves. So, why do we engage in behaviours against our true desires? What often underlies all of our behaviours are our core beliefs. Sometimes we hold beliefs that we are undeserving of anything positive, such as success or happiness in our lives. While we would probably argue that’s not the reason, it must be timing, poor motivation or some other reason, and that may also be true - it is worth challenging those thoughts. It may be that it’s driven by the subconscious part of our brain that might say, “Hey, you don’t deserve this.” “All self-sabotage, lack of belief in ourselves, low selfesteem, judgments, criticisms, and demands for perfection are forms of self-abuse in which we destroy the very essence of our vitality.” - Deborah Adele Mostly, we are not aware we are doing this. The subconscious is the part of our brain that operates in the background of everything we do yet we remain unaware of its processes. It holds all our automatic thoughts and reactions.
“…we need to stop and take a moment to think about what sabotage we may be engaging in.”
