Mark your calendars:
Integration Lab, a 1-hour hangout for paid subscribers only, in which we can meet, get to know each other, talk about what you’ve taken from the last few weeks of Life Intelligence, and ask me anything. It’s a free benefit to my paid subscribers because you are very special to me.
👉 When: Sunday, September 5 at 10:30 am (Pacific Time)
➡️ Zoom link at the bottom of the post.
Long before psychology existed as a science, Edgar Allen Poe struggled with self-sabotage and wrote about it, clearly self-aware but unable to stop himself. He drank excessively, quarreled, and burned bridges until he died mysteriously at 40, found delirious and destitute on a Baltimore street.
In “Alone” (poem, 1829), he wrote:
“From childhood’s hour I have not been
As others were — I have not seen
As others saw.”
In “The Tell-Tale Heart,” he speaks through an unnamed narrator who, insisting on his sanity, meticulously plans and carries out the murder of an old man because of the man’s “vulture-like” eye. After dismembering and hiding the body, the narrator’s extreme guilt manifests as the hallucinated sound of the victim’s heart beating beneath the floorboards, ultimately driving him to confess the crime to the police. The crime gains him nothing, but is a portal into his self-destructive impulsivity.
In his life, even though the world and his subconscious came a-tapping at his chamber door, he was never able to course-correct. While most of us don’t wander candlelit chambers at midnight, muttering ‘nevermore,’ the shape of self-sabotage today isn’t so different. Most of us don’t need to be tragic geniuses to recognize the same behavior patterns.
You look around and see unfinished projects. You feel like you’re not living the life you meant to be living. Your relationships feel messy and complicated. You often ask yourself why you did or didn’t do something when you knew better and wanted to do better.
At the same time, you delay or avoid taking care of the stuff that matters to you, because you consistently choose comfort and what’s easy over the stress of responsibility. Then you make promises to yourself to do better and follow through, but you repeatedly break them. When you need help, you refuse to ask for it or reject it when it’s offered and available. So, when things don’t turn out the way you wish they would, you justify it to yourself by telling yourself that you never really wanted them in the first place.
You’re a master of distractions, choosing Netflix, scrolling, or reorganizing your closet instead of the thing you know matters. Perhaps you say yes to too many things, so you “don’t have time” for your real goals. How about missing deadlines on purpose so you can say, “I could have done better if I had more time.”? Or quitting just before a breakthrough because “it’s too hard,” or “it’s not the right time”?
At work, you might fail to apply for a promotion. In your relationships, you pick partners you know are not good for you despite clearly seeing the red flags. You pick fights, ghost, or test people to see if they’ll abandon you, and then complain that they did.
Your health suffers because you give up on your workouts, comfort eat, and drink when you are stressed, even though you know you’ll feel worse after. You stop medications and therapy prematurely, push yourself too hard, and do not give your body time to heal and recover.
The Psychology of Self-Sabotage