Setting goals and being consistent is not easy, and many of us give in when there is temptation or we simply don’t feel like it. We tell ourselves that just once is ok, but notice that the once turns into a frequent excuse. And then we wonder why we can’t stay on target with our health goals. We feel helpless, frustrated by the lack of motivation, and in the end, defeated, as if we just can’t do it.

Self-sabotage is when you undermine your own goals and values. Even if there is a goal you really want and you know it’s good for you. But then, ultimately, you do things that directly conflict with that goal.

Does that sound familiar?

You followed a nutrition or fitness program for the longest time and reached your goals. You’re so proud of yourself that you stayed consistent. But then something happened, and during your Netflix binge, the snack gremlins came out, and you couldn’t help but give in. You know better and that your hard-earned efforts will vanish if that habit continues. So you’re thinking, why am I doing this to myself??? Why am I sabotaging what I worked so hard for? 

The holidays are a great example of this very thing happening as we treat ourselves to the goodies that we only make during that time. We feel guilty because we feel like we are cheating. So we feel horrible that we are exercising less and eating more of the things we never eat, and it seems almost impossible to get back to healthy habits. 

Let me share a story with you that my friend shared with me. 

“… I did well all day yesterday, and I made some bad choices in the evening. I’m really down on myself for doing that and not sticking to my guns. I let my friend have her way as we shared an entree, which wasn’t what I wanted for myself.”

Another one of my friends and clients, Susan, had lost 60lbs and was doing really great! 

Until she shared that, “for some reason. I don’t know. I slowly gained it all back…I keep trying to start again..but ultimately fail…I’m not sure what the reason is. I need an answer to this question too..and it makes me feel horrible. Not just mentally but physically because the extra weight just causes more pain and a hard time breathing when I walk etc..I have asthma..so it just adds to it.”

Signs that you’re self-sabotaging your efforts

• Tend to procrastinate – You might say things like, “now is not a good time – I’ll do it later”.
• Dwell on mistakes – “Why did I do this to myself?”
• Break a promise you made to yourself – You might tell yourself, “It’s just me, so it’s ok”.
• You’re intensely fearful and full of criticism – That might sound like, “I can’t do anything” or “I’m not good at anything”.
• You refuse to ask for help – “I don’t need anyone”.
• Make excuses for your behavior – “It’s not a good time right now,” or “it’s too much”.
• You don’t set boundaries with yourself and others – “My friend made me do it”. It is simpler than Susan’s story.
• Prioritize what’s comfortable rather than healthy – “I know I should do it, but…”

Two Forms of Self-Sabotage

Self-sabotaging behaviors can be both conscious or unconscious depending on how aware you are of them:

• Conscious self-sabotage is when you know your actions undermine one of your goals or values. For example, you know you should be planning your workouts, but instead, you read a book. 
• Unconscious self-sabotage is when you do something that undermines a goal or value, but you don’t realize it until after the fact. For example, meal prepping has worked well for staying on track with healthy eating habits, but suddenly, you don’t feel like meal prepping and pick junk food up while shopping instead. You might even get home and go, “Oh no!” when you realize you unconsciously self sabotaged.

Everybody self-sabotages at one point or another in life. For some people, it’s only on occasion with minor consequences (missing one run during the week), but for others, it’s a chronic pattern that leads to significant setbacks in their health and life. 

That is why it is so important to identify when, how, and why you are self-sabotaging.

3 Self Sabotaging Habits

Find out what might be the self-limiting and self-destructive behaviors that hold you back and undermine your progress so you can learn how to stop sabotaging yourself.

• Procrastination. Everyone procrastinates from time to time. Examples of this might be putting your scheduled run off until it stops raining or not meal prepping on Sundays but watching a show on Netflix instead. This behavior holds many people back for no good reason.
• Negative Self-talk. If all you do is put yourself down and talk negatively to yourself, nothing will make you believe in yourself. As a result, you’ll never succeed because you’ll never try. 
• Perfectionism. If you’re waiting to be perfect for doing what needs to get done, you’ll wait forever because nobody is perfect, which also connects with the negative self-talk.

There’s no one reason why self-sabotage happens.

Looking for a simple answer is often a sign that you don’t fully understand what self-sabotage is and what it takes to work through it.

First, you need to know how to stop sabotaging yourself. If you want to stop self-sabotaging, you need to understand why you’re doing it and what void it fills. Then get creative about identifying healthier, less destructive ways to meet that need.

5 Practical Ways To Stop Self-Sabotaging Forever

1. Understand why you’re self-sabotaging yourself

When we try to stop self-sabotaging, we tell ourselves to get tough, get over it, and have more willpower which doesn’t work at all. This feels good at the moment, but it misses the most crucial step to overcoming self-sabotage, which is understanding the need that the sabotage feeds. 

Be kind to yourself and understand why you can’t commit to your healthy habits and what purpose self-sabotage serves.

Is it because of fears? Anxiety? Or because over the years, your self-confidence dropped? Is it because you are hypersensitive? Are you an introvert and lack social skills? 

If you can ask yourself these questions, you’re likely to find out the cause(s) of your self-limiting attitude (or thoughts). 

Here are some examples:

• If you want to stop stress eating, you need to understand that this behavior will make you feel less alone when you feel lonely.
• If you want to stop procrastinating, you need to understand that that behavior helps you avoid failure or fear of success. 
• If you want to stop drinking too much, you need to understand that alcohol alleviates after-work stress.

It’s essential to understand what void self-sabotaging is filling. Only then can you create other habits to fill that void? This way, you build alternative habits and give up self-sabotaging for good.

Action Step: What is the cause of your self-sabotage? Write it down and what habit you choose to compensate with. 

2. Be realistic 

Understanding what is going on in your life, not somebody else’s, is essential. Be realistic that nobody is perfect, and striving to be perfect makes some goals impossible to achieve. 

As a perfectionist, you’ll most likely be physically and mentally stressed trying to make everything perfect, but you cannot meet the “perfect” standard that you strive for at the end of the day. Being realistic with your expectations will help you be yourself and obtain your goals with less stress. 

Besides, perfectionism will stop you from taking action on your goals because you’ll wait until the right time, and the time will never be right, leading to self-sabotaging yourself. 

3. Anticipate and plan for roadblocks

Sticking to new behaviors and good intentions is easy when everything is just right. But when you stop self-sabotaging yourself forever, then you need a backup plan when things get tough. 

What if you identified your alternate habits, but life gets in the way of applying that new behavior?

• You didn’t shop for any fresh fruit and vegetables.
• Your co-workers invite you to happy hour after work.
• Your friend wants to share a dessert with you that you didn’t plan for.

Here are some examples of how to anticipate roadblocks and how to create a strategy for overcoming them:

• If you want to keep healthy snacks on hand instead of junk food, set a recurring order of nuts and seeds so you’ll always have healthy snacks at hand.
• If you want to chat with a friend when you feel lonely, make sure you have 2 or 3 people that you can call and are not stuck when the one doesn’t answer.
• If you want to exercise daily but know that before dinner, you hang out on social media on your phone and waste time scrolling, then get rid of the apps on your phone. 

4. Change your behavior 

No matter how well you plan, your new habits will feel emotionally hard at times:

• It’ll feel tough to give up the ice cream and instead eat the almonds that are in front of you.
• Talking to your friend is amazing, but giving up on the quick gratification of the drink will feel hard.
• Choosing exercise over social media will make you feel like you’re missing out on chit-chat.

In order to form new habits and learn how to stop sabotaging ourselves, we have to let go of the habits that no longer serve us. This isn’t an intellectual problem of being ready with a good strategy. It’s an emotional tolerance problem. This is so true for replacing self-sabotaging behaviors with new healthy habits. 

Start with baby-steps

• Find out what comes up when you let go of your old self-sabotaging behavior and instead pursue the new habit. Identify that emotion. Is it fear, sadness, anger, frustration, etc.?
• Next, when does that emotion come up in other parts of your life? For instance, you are frustrated when there is not enough produce in the grocery store.
• Instead of instantly doing something about that feeling, wait and distract yourself and practice tolerating it for a little while. For instance, instead of pulling out your phone to scroll through social media when you’re frustrated, practice doing nothing and let yourself feel frustration just for 10 or 20 seconds.
• Gradually build up your tolerance for that particular emotion in other areas of your life.

5. Surround yourself with a supportive community

The people you surround yourself with considerably impact all aspects of life, just like in the story of my friend whose friend convinced her to share a meal she didn’t want to eat.

Most people sabotage themselves because the people around them (friends, family, co-workers) are mostly self-saboteurs. Why would they ask, “Why don’t you eat that cookie?” then keep asking you to eat one. Or those that don’t exercise and keep stopping you from going for your exercise class because they don’t like the class and tell you that it doesn’t work? 

Stay away from the nay-sayers and the ones that always have a reason to say ‘no’. Are they pessimists? Stay away from these negative people because they are not supporting you and your healthy lifestyle. 

After a while, you start believing their stories and attitude, doubting yourself, and undermining yourself without even knowing it. 

If you want to stop self-sabotaging for good, the key is to understand what need it serves and then develop alternative habits that fill the same need more healthily and productively.

It’s not enough to adopt alternative habits to avoid self-sabotaging yourself. You need a plan of action of how to stop sabotaging yourself when roadblocks appear when you first start implementing your new steps.