What does it meant to self-sabotage? This psychological phenomenon occurs when a person does or doesn't do things that have a direct impact on achieving their goals, usually preventative. This can happen to anyone and manifests both consciously and unconsciously.
When hearing the term "sabotage", it comes off as aggressive, due to the literal definition being to deliberately damage or impair something. Although, self-sabotage is not an intended deliberate block, sometimes the things we do or say can get in our way. This happens when there’s a miscommunication between our behaviour and our values. Ultimately, we have an idea that something might not align with what we really want and won't help to get there, but continue to do it anyway.
Self-sabotaging behaviours can affect your mental health as well as your physical health by impacting your personal and professional accomplishments. Self-sabotaging patterns include perfectionism, moderation, procrastination, neglecting personal needs, lack of communication. Self-sabotaging behaviour is also linked to cognitive dissonance, and can lead to an internal imbalance. Unconsciously, we often try to rectify this imbalance by creating a loophole that seemingly relieves us from the blame.
A few ways to stop self-sabotage:
Journalling - therapeutic writing allows us to write out our thoughts/feelings both positive and negative
Introspection - developing self-awareness allows to pay keen attention to the things we are doing and thinking and how we respond to the things around us
Communicate - highly important and necessary to share your goals and wants with others, which will ultimately help with accountability
Make a plan - by identifying the the behaviour patterns we want to break and listing ways to address them
Practice Mindfulness - using breathing activities and meditation to gently move away from previously set coping mechanisms, this allows us to learn more about ourselves and create self-compassion
It's important to have knowledge on how to make your quality of life better. We hope you find this information insightful and encouraging. Please feel free to contact us if you want to share your experience or have any psychology or neuroscience related questions.
Remember to Be Kind to your Mind, your Mental Health is Important.
~ Mind IT
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