2 surprising ways to stop self-sabotaging

Perhaps the most important question in life isn’t what’s the meaning of all this or why did your ex mrs leave you, but why is it that during periods of success does something inside you want to throw it all against the wall?

Why do we self-sabotage when doing so is most certainly against our own interests?

Since I was old enough to self-sabotage I’ve thought deeply about why it happens at all. And much to my amusement, I’ve found three potential reasons as to why we self-sabotage and three potential cures.

Reason 1: (Wanting to feel an emotional depth)

The first reason we self-sabotage is because we want to feel an emotional depth.

We could argue a lot of life is mundane, true success is paved by doing simple acts repeatedly and oftentimes people don’t live up to the fantasies we’ve created about them in our heads.

A lot of change requires simple everyday actions, nothing fantastical, and most things worth pursuing in life take time to come to fruition.

All of this can leave you in a grey gloom of emotional shallowness. If hard work is what it takes to become successful, then it’s better to shun emotions for a while so you can focus, you reason.

But after a while, your desire for emotional depth returns wanting attention, even more so because it’s been neglected.

Suddenly you yearn to escape the seriousness of discipline and to embark on a delightful date, a blissful dance through the woods or to be in rapture over the beauty of life.

However, the way we go about this isn’t as simple as we’d think.

What we usually do in order to achieve this escape is throw a spanner into the cog of our work so we can retreat into the gloom of sadness, vulnerability, apathy and depression.

Perhaps one day you stop working at all, you binged eat chocolate or you feel like abandoning the habit, work project or grand mission for your life.

So instead of giving yourself the proper restoration you crave by journalling or talking a walk through the woods, you stay tucked under your bedcovers until noon. You scroll on your phone for hours on end and you do anything to avoid facing your good habits.

Suddenly, in your self-imposed doom of sabotage, you begin to think of all the reasons why you’re not good enough to do the thing, to enact the change, to achieve success, and you further morph your feelings of depression into inadequacy and inferiority.

Seeing it from this angle, why would anyone do this?

We do this so when we bounce back by escaping the rut, the emotional high we feel is even greater due to the contrast in emotion between our defeated state and our success pursuing state.

To elaborate, the week when you return and get back on track after self-sabotaging is incredible! You’re off to the races again! And you’ve got the emotional depth you were searching for. Now you feel exhilarated, enthusiastic, focused and energetic because a week prior you felt lethargic, demotivated, confused and depressed.

Your self-sabotage is a ploy you play on yourself to fulfil your need of rest and retreat, in perhaps the most counterintuitive way possible.

Cure 1: (Feel an emotional depth throughout the day & rest before you’re tired)

The cure for self-sabotage due to a desire for emotional depth is rather simple.

Feel an emotional depth throughout your day.

Instead of forcing this emotional depth upon yourself by shifting to the polarity of darkness in order to shift back towards the light, perhaps you negotiate with yourself and reason you don’t need to shun your emotions in order to knuckle down.

Instead you can listen to what your emotions have to say and give them the reassurance that after your act of discipline you will give them a chance to speak.

Maybe before a workout you feel lethargic, docile and languid. So you do the best you can during your workout and then find out you need more sleep, or that you need to process your grief of a previous relationship.

Additionally, allowing yourself time throughout the day, after work, to fall in rapture with life, nature or a conversation with a person, can stand as a stabiliser for the hard work you’re doing, whether it’s rebuilding your life, striving for a promotion or getting your health back on track.

Don’t shun your emotions, listen to them and channel them either into the task at hand whilst letting them know you will listen to what they have to say.

Lastly, don’t forget; the consistent plan you follow is better than the perfect plan you quit. So instead of doing a 3 hour workout twice a week and hating yourself for it, do 30 minutes everyday.

Instead of working on your passion project for 5 hours everyday as well as working a full time job, do it for 45 minutes everyday.

Learn how to rest before you self-sabotage in order to get the relaxation you crave.

Reason 2: (Mimetic distraction from others)

The word mimesis means to re-create through imitation and it’s a brilliant descriptor of the world we live in.

Oftentimes when we’re on the internet, talking to a friend or close colleague, we’re confronted with the reality of our susceptibility to what other people want.

Because we are social animals, humans can’t help but be influenced by the desires of others even at the expense of our own desires which we’ve spent a long time uncovering.

Perhaps after scrolling on social media for an hour, you suddenly want to uproot your life and become a travel vlogger, a high-flying stock trader or the next fitness influencer. And not because you’ve realised you want to do those things through your introspection and revisiting your childhood dreams, but merely because you’ve seen other people, more famous than you, do those things with apparent ease.

So the sequence plays out: quit what you’re doing, switch boats and do exactly what this person is doing! After all, it seems so easy from what they’re showing!

But for anyone who’s quit something they’re doing to pursue the desire of another has quickly realised all that follows such a choice is a crisis of meaning. The second thing we realise after such a choice is the difference between thin and thick desires.

A thin desire is a want of yours which holds no substance. Much like a floating leaf in the wind, elusive to your attempts to grasp it and therefore never giving you the solace of actualising it.

A thick desire, however, is like the roots of a tree. Sturdy, durable, grounded and deep. Fundamentally graspable.

So if we explore this sequence further we find something rather peculiar…

The more time we spend on social media, the unhappier we are.

Because social media is a platform for other people to show us what to want, mostly always at the expense of what we’ve already deemed worth pursuing in our life. And we can be sure what other people want will manifest in our lives as thin desires.

Cure 2: (Cultivate thick desires & forget the bigger picture)

The cure for mimetic self-sabotage is to cultivate thick desires in your life and to forget the bigger picture.

In other words; the cure is clarity and care.

We need clarity over the intrinsic pursuits we are striving towards in life, uncovered through the lens of our values, principles and desires. And we need to care for ourselves, in the words of Jordan Peterson, as if we’re someone we’re responsible for helping.

Because you are unlikely to renounce the social world and retreat into the mountains. So we must learn how to navigate the expectations and desires of others without letting ourselves absorb them at the expense of what we want.

Think back to a time in your life where you felt a sense of intrinsic meaning, as if you were in the right place at the right time doing the right thing. You had a reason to wake up in the morning despite any turbulence in your life.

Think back to those moments like a curious scientist. Because that’s where your thick desires present themselves to your.

Lastly, forgetting the bigger picture stands as a prevention to overwhelming yourself with a grand vision.

Often we are susceptible to measuring our self-worth based on the gap between our current situation and the overall goal we’re striving to achieve. But that is the easiest way to become your own worst enemy.

So, to forget the bigger picture, we would do well to look at everything close up.

Perhaps instead of focusing on a one year goal, you set weekly goals. Then, when your motivation wanes in the middle, you only have to power through a few days of demotivation as we near the closure of our goal.

We would do well to love ourselves as if our lives depend on it.