Self-sabotage isn’t laziness — it’s your brain prioritizing safety over growth. Learn why your mind resists change and how awareness restores choice.
You know the pattern. You finally land the job you’ve been chasing, then inexplicably start showing up late. You meet someone who treats you well, and you push them away. You commit to getting healthier, then find yourself at the drive-thru three days later. You’re not lazy. You’re not broken. You’re self-sabotaging—and understanding why is the first step toward freedom.
In “The Mountain Is You,” Brianna Wiest cuts through the conventional wisdom about willpower and motivation to reveal a deeper truth: self-sabotage isn’t about punishing yourself or lacking discipline. It’s your subconscious mind trying to protect you in the only way it knows how.
Self-Sabotage Is a Protection Mechanism, Not a Character Flaw
When Carl Jung was a child, he fell and hit his head at school. Almost immediately, a thought crossed his mind: “Maybe I won’t have to go back to school now.” What followed were sporadic, uncontrollable fainting spells that kept him home. Jung later realized these episodes were what he called a “neurosis”—a substitute for legitimate suffering.
This story illustrates something crucial about human psychology: we don’t self-sabotage because we hate ourselves. We do it because we’re trying to meet an unmet need in the only way our subconscious knows how.
Wiest explains that “self-sabotage is often just a maladaptive coping mechanism, a way we give ourselves what we need without having to actually address what that need is.” Your destructive patterns aren’t signs of weakness—they’re symptoms pointing toward something deeper that requires your attention.
The Unconscious Needs Driving Your Behavior
Every self-sabotaging behavior serves a purpose, even if that purpose no longer makes sense in your current life. The person who ruins relationships might be re-creating the chaos they experienced as a child because it feels familiar, and familiarity equals safety to the subconscious mind. The professional who can’t seem to advance might associate success with becoming disliked, based on messages they absorbed growing up.
According to Wiest, “when you have big, ongoing, insurmountable issues in your life—especially when the solutions seem so simple, so easy, and yet so impossible to stick with—what you have are not big problems but big attachments.” You’re attached to the behavior because it’s fulfilling a need you haven’t identified or don’t know how to meet in a healthier way.
Consider the person who sabotages their financial progress by overspending. On the surface, it looks like a discipline problem. Dig deeper, and you might find they associate having money with losing their authenticity, being seen as greedy, or even betraying their working-class roots. The overspending isn’t random—it’s keeping them aligned with their unconscious beliefs about who they’re supposed to be.
When Success Feels Dangerous
One of the most counterintuitive aspects of self-sabotage is that it often intensifies when things are going well. You’d expect your brain to celebrate achievements and positive changes. Instead, many people experience what Gay Hendricks calls hitting your “upper limit”—the maximum amount of happiness or success you’re conditioned to handle.
Wiest describes this phenomenon: “There is only a certain amount of happiness that most of us will allow ourselves to feel. It is your tolerance and threshold for having positive feelings or experiencing positive events. When you begin to surpass your upper limit, you start to unconsciously sabotage what’s happening in order to bring yourself back to what’s comfortable and familiar.”
This explains why weddings, promotions, and new relationships can trigger anxiety rather than pure joy. Your nervous system hasn’t adjusted to this new level of goodness. The unfamiliar—even when positive—registers as potentially dangerous because your brain’s primary job is keeping you safe, not happy.
The Role of Familiarity in Self-Sabotage
Your brain is wired for pattern recognition and prediction. It wants to know what’s coming so it can prepare appropriate responses. Anything new, even something beneficial, disrupts these patterns and triggers a stress response.
“Human beings experience a natural resistance to the unknown, because it is essentially the ultimate loss of control,” Wiest writes. “This is true even if what’s ‘unknown’ is benevolent or even beneficial to us.” Your self-sabotage isn’t trying to hurt you—it’s trying to return you to what feels known and controllable.
This is why you might feel anxious after a great first date, restless in a stable job, or compelled to create drama during peaceful periods. Your subconscious interprets stability as the calm before the storm and tries to trigger the familiar chaos before life can surprise you with it.
Identifying Your Core Commitments
To understand your specific pattern of self-sabotage, Wiest introduces the concept of “core commitments”—the primary objectives your subconscious is working toward, often without your awareness. These commitments reveal themselves through what you struggle with most and what drives you most intensely.
If your core commitment is to feel free, you might sabotage stable employment because commitment feels like confinement. If your core commitment is to be needed, you might choose partners who require fixing, then resist their growth because their independence threatens your sense of purpose. If your core commitment is to stay in control, you might experience intense anxiety about situations where outcomes are uncertain.
The key insight: “Your core need is the opposite of your core commitment.” If you’re committed to staying in control, what you actually need is to develop trust. If you’re committed to being needed, what you need is to know you’re wanted for who you are, not what you do. The behaviors you can’t seem to change are pointing directly toward what you need to cultivate.
Breaking Free From Self-Sabotage
Understanding why you self-sabotage doesn’t automatically stop the behavior, but it shifts you from a position of confusion and self-judgment to one of curiosity and agency. The process of change involves several crucial steps.
First, get honest about what’s actually wrong. Wiest emphasizes the importance of getting out of denial: “The first step in healing anything is taking full accountability. It is no longer being in denial about the honest truth of your life and yourself.” Write down every specific problem you face. If you’re struggling with finances, document every debt, asset, and source of income. If it’s self-image, write exactly what bothers you. Clarity replaces the fog of vague anxiety.
Second, identify the need your self-sabotaging behavior is meeting. What does overeating give you that you’re not getting elsewhere? What does procrastination protect you from feeling? What does staying busy help you avoid? The behavior makes sense when you understand its function.
Third, find healthier ways to meet those needs. If you overeat for comfort, what else could provide that soothing you crave? If you procrastinate to avoid the vulnerability of being judged, how else could you build confidence in your work? If you stay busy to avoid feeling lonely, what would it look like to address that loneliness directly?
The Work of Changing
Wiest is clear that overcoming self-sabotage isn’t about forcing yourself to stop certain behaviors. “Overcoming self-sabotage is not about trying to figure out how to override your impulses; it is first determining why those impulses exist in the first place.”
You cannot strong-arm yourself into different behavior patterns while the underlying needs remain unmet. The willpower approach might work for days or weeks, but eventually, the unaddressed need will reassert itself, often more intensely than before.
Real change requires you to feel the emotions you’ve been avoiding. “When you stop engaging in self-sabotaging behavior, repressed emotions that you weren’t even aware of will start to come up, and you might feel even worse than you did before,” Wiest warns. This temporary discomfort is actually progress—you’re finally processing what needed to be processed all along.
Moving Forward With Compassion
Perhaps the most important shift is moving from self-judgment to self-compassion. Your self-sabotaging behaviors developed for good reasons. They helped you cope when you had fewer resources and less awareness. They’re not evidence of your brokenness but of your brain’s creativity in trying to keep you safe.
The mountain in front of you—the pattern you keep repeating, the goal you can’t seem to reach, the version of yourself you can’t seem to become—isn’t there to defeat you. It’s there to show you what needs attention, what needs healing, what needs to shift within you before you can move forward.
As Wiest beautifully puts it: “The mountain that stands in front of you is the calling of your life, your purpose for being here, and your path finally made clear. One day, this mountain will be behind you, but who you become in the process of getting over it will stay with you always.”
Self-sabotage ends when you stop seeing it as the enemy and start seeing it as a messenger. Listen to what it’s telling you. Meet the needs it’s pointing toward. And give yourself the compassion you’d offer a friend who’s struggling with the same pattern. The way forward isn’t through more discipline or willpower—it’s through deeper understanding and more honest self-care.
