Why Do We Self-Sabotage?
When somebody asks me, “Why do we self-sabotage?”, my first answer is:
It depends.
It depends on the person. It depends on the context. And, most importantly, it depends on the function that self-sabotaging behaviour is serving for them.
Many years ago, when I was training as a clinical psychologist, I had a brilliant German supervisor who taught me to think through a philosophy called functional contextualism.
It sounds horribly academic (and to me very German).
It is actually one of the most useful ideas I've ever learned.
Most of the time, when we see a behaviour we don't like, we try to change the behaviour at the level of the behaviour.
You're procrastinating? Stop procrastinating.
You're avoiding something? Face it.
You're spending too much time on your phone? Put it down.
You're overworking? Set better boundaries.
And sometimes, of course, that works.
But as a clinical psychologist, I'm usually much less interested in stopping a behaviour than I am in understanding why that behaviour is there in the first place.
What we can see is often only the visible part of a much larger system.
Imagine I tell you that someone is drinking too much every night.
Well, they need to stop drinking.
Maybe.
But what is the drinking actually doing for them?
Are they drinking to numb emotional pain?
Are they drinking because it's an important way they connect with their partner or friends?
Are they drinking because being sober in social situations makes them feel self-conscious or anxious?
Are they drinking because it's embedded in their social world, it's what everyone around them does?
You can't decide what somebody should do differently until you understand what the behaviour is doing for them and the context in which it's happening.
That's the problem with trying to change behaviour at the level of behaviour alone.
The behaviour tells us what someone is doing. It doesn't yet tell us why.
So rather than immediately asking:
How do we stop this behaviour?
Functional contextualism asks two different questions:
In what context does this behaviour occur?
and
What function does it perform?
Context, function... and need
When I'm trying to understand someone's behaviour, I'm broadly thinking:
Behaviour → Context → Function → Need
The behaviour is what we can see.
The context is where and when it happens.
The function is what the behaviour actually does.
And underneath that, I'm interested in the need it's trying to meet.
So perhaps you procrastinate.
Okay.
That's the behaviour.
But when do you procrastinate?
Do you procrastinate on boring tasks? Important tasks? Tasks where you'll be judged? Things you're not confident you can do? Things other people have asked you to do? Only when you're exhausted? Only when you're overwhelmed?
And what does procrastinating do for you?
Perhaps it gives you relief.
Perhaps it allows you to avoid feeling incompetent.
Perhaps it restores a feeling of autonomy when somebody else is telling you what to do.
Perhaps you're exhausted and it gives you rest.
Perhaps putting something off means you never have to find out whether you're capable of doing it.
Perhaps scrolling Instagram is simply more rewarding than filling in your tax return.
Those are very different functions.
And therefore they require very different solutions.
But context also has a history
When I think about context, I'm interested in where and when this happens now.
But I'm also interested in:
Where did you learn this?
Most of us haven’t found our coping strategies yesterday.
At some point in our lives, many of the behaviours we now find frustrating worked.
Avoidance worked.
Keeping quiet worked.
Being perfect worked.
Making everyone happy worked.
Not relying on anyone worked.
Working incredibly hard worked.
Keeping expectations low worked.
Not trying worked.
They protected us from something, helped us obtain something, reduced discomfort, maintained relationships, created safety, or helped us navigate the particular world we were living in.
The problem is that human beings are remarkably good at continuing to use strategies long after the environment that required them has changed.
So I tend not to think about these things initially as bad behaviours.
I think of them as coping strategies or protective mechanisms.
Some are enormously costly.
Some are no longer particularly useful.
Some might be making your life substantially worse.
But before we try to remove them, it's worth understanding what job they're doing.
Your brain is trying to protect you
This makes more sense when we zoom out slightly and think about what brains actually do.
Your brain is, first and foremost, a protective organ. One that is forever focused on survival, protection and threat detection.
My favourite way of understanding the brain is as a predictive system.
Your brain isn't passively waiting for the world to happen and then responding to it.
It's constantly predicting what's likely to happen next.
That's part of what makes human beings extraordinary problem-solvers.
If I write:
Roses are red, violets are...
You already know what's coming.
Your brain predicted it.
But the same predictive machinery operates in far more consequential situations.
Imagine you learned early in life that when people became angry, the safest thing to do was keep quiet and stay out of the way.
Your brain learns from that experience. It builds a prediction:
Conflict is dangerous.
Speaking up makes things worse.
Staying quiet keeps me safe.
And importantly, that strategy might have worked. It might have been exactly the right thing to do in that environment.
But fast-forward twenty or thirty years. You're sitting in a meeting at work. Someone says something you strongly disagree with.
You're not back in that childhood environment. You're not actually in danger. But your brain doesn't approach the situation with a completely blank slate.
It predicts from what it already knows.
And before you've consciously decided what to do, you notice yourself agreeing, appeasing or going silent.
The problem is that sometimes we're responding to the world that's here and now based on what our brains learned in the there and then.
Our Negativity Bias
People who know my work will know that I eventually find an excuse to talk about evolutionary psychology.
So here it is.
Imagine one of our ancestors walking through long grass.
There is something long, thin and dark beside his foot.
His brain has two possible errors available to it.
He can think:
Snake!
...when it's actually a stick.
Or he can think:
Stick!
...when it's actually a snake.
Those errors do not have equal consequences.
The first one costs him a moment of unnecessary fear.
The second one might cost him his life.
So evolution didn't produce a brain designed to perceive reality with neutrality.
It produced a brain heavily biased towards keeping us alive.
That's one reason human beings have what psychologists call a negativity bias. We notice threats, failures, criticism and potential danger remarkably efficiently.
Which brings us back to self-sabotage
So, why do we self-sabotage?
As I hope is a little clearer by now… it depends.
The interesting (and important) bit is understanding why.
Two people can procrastinate on exactly the same piece of work for entirely different reasons. In fact, you can procrastinate on the same piece of work for entirely different reasons.
On Tuesday, you might avoid it because you're frightened you won't be good enough.
On Friday, you might avoid it because you've worked a 60-hour week and your brain desperately wants to watch Netflix.
Which is why my starting point when someone comes to me with a behaviour they want to change usually isn't:
How do we get rid of this?
It's:
What is this doing for you?
Sometimes we'll discover that it's protecting you from something. Sometimes it's helping you manage a difficult feeling. Sometimes it's an old coping strategy that made perfect sense in a different time and place.
And sometimes… you've just learned that watching YouTube feels better than doing your work.
So I'm going to leave you with a question this week.
Think of one thing you do that you regularly describe as self-sabotage.
Rather than asking yourself how to stop it, ask:
What is this behaviour actually doing for me?
You don't need to have the answer yet.
Next newsletter, I'll take you through some of the most common reasons I see people self-sabotage, and the first few places I'd look when trying to understand what's actually driving it.
Warmly,
Matt
Dr Matt Slavin is a Clinical Psychologist working with individuals and teams.
Find out more about his approach and services here
