Self-sabotage means you take direct actions against yourself. You stop yourself from achieving the goals you want, turn away the relationships you want, and convince yourself you don’t want what you actually do want.

In a nutshell, self-sabotage is ‘working against yourself’ or ‘being your own worst enemy’.

Sabotage can hide behind impulsiveness and a need for excitement, making a decision that takes you away from something else you had planned.

Often sabotage looks like indecision - you really want something, but when it actually starts to happen decide maybe you don’t.

Sabotage most often comes hand in hand with self-criticism; you make statements of low self-worth to convince yourself not to do things you want.

It might also wear the mask of perfectionism - “I won’t do it as I’ll never get it perfect.”

Another common face of self-sabotage is procrastination - you have a deadline but do everything else instead. 

Self-sabotage can take the form of destructive habits, such as overindulging, drugs, alcohol or spending money. 

Once you have sabotaged yourself, you can resort to defensiveness - over explaining or talking at length why you made those particular decisions.

Sabotage is our unconscious way to avoid having to face negative thinking and negative emotions.  It can feel ‘easier’ than success because it’s more familiar. If we aren’t used to good things happening, it can be a case of picking ‘the devil we know’ by sabotaging and ensuring our comfort zone of failure.

The more complicated we can convince ourselves things are, the more we can throw our hands up in the air and refuse to go forward, i.e., sabotage our progress.

Simplicity can come from taking out the drama. This means recognising any pattern of black and white thinking that is causing you to make things bigger than they are, or incorrect filters that distort your thinking, causing you to throw obstacles in your own way. Simplify things and you might just realise that moving forward without sabotage is easier to achieve.