Stop Doing That Sh*t summary

Have you ever heard someone describing a self-sabotaging friend? We all nod along and agree, their life could be so great if they stopped getting in their own way. But…what exactly does self-sabotage entail?

Well, let’s look at the basics of sabotage first. What does it mean to sabotage something? It means to intentionally destroy, hinder, or hurt someone or something. So add the self part on the front of the word, and we have… that’s right, we have someone intentionally harming themself or their own efforts at something.

But you’d never do that to yourself, would you?

Unfortunately, you almost certainly do. Don’t worry, we’ll dive into how to stop self-sabotaging later in this Blink, but right now, let’s stay focused on how you might be self-sabotaging without even realizing it.

Have you ever reached a point in life and thought, hey, my life is really going well?

Then what happens? Do you start to stress about what terrible things might be just around the corner that will upset everything? Maybe you start to make nervous, scared decisions instead of embracing the unknown. Or maybe you pull back from life, scared that you’re about to make some grave mistake.

And then bam, it hits. Your car breaks down at the same time your pet needs a big medical procedure, and then you lose your job. But wait, those are all external issues that just happened to you, right? You couldn’t have caused any of that to happen.

Take a closer look.

Did you skip your oil change because you were so busy worrying about your job that you couldn’t take the time to take your car in? Were you skimping on your pet’s medication because you were worried about some impending loss of income? Had you been distracted and making tons of mistakes at work because you were obsessively trying to predict when your fortunes would fall?

This is self-sabotage at its finest. The worrying, the stressing, the fretting about when the other shoe’s going to drop. It might not seem like it, but these thoughts can subtly – or sometimes not so subtly! – influence your actions, which then leads to the dreaded losing it all. And yet, had you not been so stressed or anxious, you’d still be doing just fine.

So you hit the rough patch, and you tell yourself this time you’ll really make it, this time you’ll work so hard that life will have to be good to you. You build yourself back up, things start looking really good again. Then wham, things explode in your face once more.

And the cycle repeats, and repeats…and repeats.

For many people, these cycles of self-sabotage continue despite all the self-help ideas out there. Why? We’ll explore that in the next section.