There was a month — okay, three — when I had a writing deadline I deeply cared about. A personal essay for a publication I respected. An editor who believed in me. A topic that was so me it felt stolen from my therapy notes.
Naturally, I missed the deadline.
Not because I didn’t care. Not because I didn’t know what to say. I just… stopped opening the document. Stopped replying to emails. Cleaned my oven. Googled “do pigeons feel regret?” at 2:14 a.m.
Eventually, I convinced myself they forgot about me. I made it mutual by ghosting them first.
That’s the magic of self-sabotage. It’s not loud. It’s not dramatic. It’s a quiet disappearance from the things you want the most.
Self-sabotage isn’t just procrastination or fear of failure. It’s the emotional art of getting in your own way on purpose — but in a way that looks accidental.
It’s hitting snooze on your own potential. Flirting with chaos when things get too still. Sabotage wears disguises: perfectionism, numbing, fake busyness, pre-rejection.
Psychologists often describe it as a conflict between conscious goals and unconscious beliefs. You say you want love, success, peace. But somewhere deeper, you believe you don’t deserve it — or won’t survive it.
Dr. Judy Ho, a clinical neuropsychologist, puts it like this: “Self-sabotage is a misguided form of self-protection. We think we're keeping ourselves safe from disappointment. What we’re really doing is keeping ourselves small.”
Here’s the sick twist: sabotaging yourself can feel powerful. You choose to blow it up before someone else can. You ghost before you’re ghosted. You quit before you fail.
It feels like control. Like a preemptive strike. Like outsmarting pain.
But really, it’s fear dressed up as agency. You’re not avoiding failure. You’re avoiding hope.
Because hope makes you vulnerable. Hope means opening yourself to the ache of what if? And if you’ve ever had that hope crushed — a parent’s absence, a partner’s betrayal, a dream deferred — then your nervous system remembers.
Better to stay in the loop you know than risk a new one that might hurt more.
For me, self-sabotage is micro and cumulative. Not answering emails. Turning in work late. Pulling away from people who like me too much. Deciding I “don’t really care” about something I very clearly do.
For a friend of mine, it’s dating emotionally unavailable people on purpose, because “I can’t get hurt if I already know how it ends.”
For another, it’s perfectionism as avoidance — a book she’s been editing for three years that “still needs tightening,” even though it’s tighter than most things I’ve read in print.
Sometimes self-sabotage is subtle. Sometimes it’s spectacular. Either way, it’s a form of protection. We wreck the thing so the world can’t wreck us first.
There’s actual brain science behind this.
When your early life is marked by unpredictability, rejection, or conditional love, your brain wires itself to see safety in sabotage. You learn that being too visible, too successful, too emotionally exposed = danger. So you develop unconscious strategies to keep things “manageable.”
Your comfort zone becomes a kind of emotional thermostat. Any spike in joy or visibility? You sabotage to cool it down.
Psychologist Gay Hendricks calls it the “Upper Limit Problem” — the idea that we all have a happiness set point, and when we exceed it, we subconsciously self-destruct.
Not because we’re broken. But because somewhere in us, success feels unsafe.
The world is rigged for sabotage, honestly.
We glamorize burnout and then shame rest. We celebrate hustle but don’t teach emotional regulation. We tell people to dream big but don’t fund their safety nets. We flood social media with curated success and then wonder why people panic when something goes well.
In a culture obsessed with performance, self-sabotage can feel like rebellion. A way to say, I’ll crash this car before I let you drive it.
And for people from marginalized backgrounds? Sabotage can feel like an act of preservation. If no one like you is allowed to succeed here, better to fail on your own terms.
Recently, I almost bailed on a relationship that was going well. Too well.
We’d been together six months. He was kind. Communicative. Knew how to listen. I felt seen, and it made my skin crawl.
I started nitpicking. Testing him. Shutting down. Not because he’d done anything wrong — but because the absence of dysfunction felt unfamiliar.
I wanted to end it just to breathe.
But this time, I didn’t.
I told him. Out loud. “Sometimes I want to run from this, not because it’s bad, but because it’s good and I don’t know what to do with that.”
He didn’t fix it. He just stayed. So did I.
Let me be clear: this isn’t a redemption arc. I still ghost emails. I still pretend deadlines don’t exist. I still make jokes about my feelings when I should probably cry instead.
But I’m learning to notice the sabotage. To pause. To ask: Am I trying to protect myself from pain that isn’t here anymore?
Sometimes that question is enough.
Sometimes I still disappear.
But more and more, I stay.
Sabotage isn’t your enemy. It’s your body remembering how to survive. But maybe now — finally — you get to choose something gentler.
