 It's a rabbit hole of deliberately ruining your own happiness. For instance, where you convinced that you've found the one, but you fell into unreasonably antagonistic behavior and pushed the person away, or perhaps that one time you wrecked your chance of landing that ultimate dream job by refusing to prepare for the job interview. According to an article by Psychology Today, self-sabotage is the act of destroying your own best intentions and goals. You will become your own barrier, whether it's losing those extra pounds, receiving the ideal love or getting a dream job. You desire a particular thing so badly, but you're also afraid that once you receive it, you might be incompetent in managing it. It's a way of protecting yourself by eliminating all the possible chances of disappointment at any early stage. This undermines your efforts to build the life you want. So why do you pull that trigger towards your own foot instead of shooting for the moon? Let's explore what can be triggering your self-sabotaging behaviors. Your own worst enemy. People with self-sabotaging behaviors have a tendency to fulfill negative self-beliefs. You're destined to fail. You don't deserve to be happy. These are some of the common mental playlists that run through the head on repeat. You engage in negative self-talk, telling yourself that you're inadequate or unworthy. According to psychologist Ellen Hendrickson, those who self-sabotage lack self-compassion. They have negative beliefs about themselves and deliberately look for self-embarrassing events and failure. The cognitive dissonance theory gives a logical explanation about why we're so quick to act upon our negative self-beliefs. Humans like consistency. Your behaviors usually align with your thoughts and values. So you adapt your behaviors to match with what you subconsciously believe to be real about yourselves. In other words, when you feel like a failure, you'll go above and beyond to demonstrate to yourself that you were right from the get-go. You try to provoke a similar response from people around you, thus validating your core belief. Puppet master. What happens when you're overly concerned about a writing assignment given by your professor? Believing that you may not get the grade you expected. In your heart, you know choosing to stay out all night rather than writing the assignment isn't a good plan at all. But at least, when you're the captain of the ship, sinking into the deep sea knowingly feels more manageable and hurts less than when it happens unexpectedly. Psychologist George S. Everly explained that procrastination and excessive desire for control are usually driven by fear of failure. When you are overly anxious about failing, your chances of achieving your goals are reduced even more so. Your road to success is purposefully filled with self-made roadblocks. You may claim that you tried your best but were hindered by outside forces. This inclination to externalize your failures through self-sabotage is known as self-handicapping, comparable to the self-serving bias in which we credit our success on our values and our defeats on external circumstances. Self-handicapping is an ego protection mechanism that protects our self-esteem from our weaknesses. Imposter among us. Have you ever believed that you didn't earn your position regardless of your various accolades and accomplishments? Do you subconsciously feel that you are an utter fraud and that your achievements are the consequence of gratuitous coincidence? If these are all too relatable, you probably have the good ol' imposter syndrome. Licensed clinical social worker Lea Morone says this conflicting belief or idea that you are not deserving or good enough to take on a particular position drives you to crave external validation, which can result in self-sabotage and exacerbate anxiety. You feel as if you are a phony. You become fearful that someone will notice your fakeness, which causes you to adopt strategies so your fraudulence remains undiscovered. You will either believe that you have to put in double the effort to succeed, or you will procrastinate as a form of self-sabotage to alleviate yourself from the stress. Licensed clinical psychologist Dr. Melanie Greenberg explains that one reason we self-sabotage is due to the familiarity heuristic. Our brains are naturally wired to hold onto the familiar, exaggerate danger, and avoid attempting new methods. We overvalue what we already know, and undervalue what is novel. Stress causes us to depend even more on this familiarity heuristic. This is why we fall back on old routines and methods of accomplishing things under duress. Even if they're ineffective, we're tempted to the known and familiar. A study conducted by Stanford University researchers examined this phenomenon by having one group of participants solve difficult word puzzles under time constraints, and the other group to take their time. Upon completion, respondents were asked to choose between a longer puzzle created by the same creator or a short puzzle created by someone unfamiliar. The longer puzzle was more appealing to those working under the stressful condition of constrained time. Their brains were jumbled when weighing length against familiarity, such that they ended up succumbing to the familiarity heuristic. Relationship trauma Have you ever become uneasy once you feel a certain degree of closeness to your significant other? Do you often feel that as much as you desire love and affection, you also fear rejection if you get too close? Eventually, you sabotage your own relationships by pushing people away. According to Dr. Greenberg, unconscious self-sabotaging behaviors include picking fights, micromanaging, or becoming too clingy and needy, which stem from early interactions with your caregivers. For example, if your early caregivers demonstrated rejection or were inconsistent in showing you emotional support, you might develop an insecure attachment style. As an aftermath of experiencing this pain in your childhood, you avoid forming relationships that may leave you vulnerable to experiencing the same pain. This trauma stays with you even as adults, and you may struggle to form meaningful relationships with others especially when they start getting too close for comfort. Individual therapy is a wonderful first step if you're determined to break the cycle of self-sabotage. Talking with a therapist to explore any of these issues will assist you in understanding why you participate in them, in developing healthy coping skills and habits. 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