Some years ago, I sat in a BBC boardroom facing a panel of senior editors interviewing me for a promotion. After treading water in a junior role for years, I wanted the job more than anything. One of the editors asked me a question about teamwork but, as I reached for my anecdote and started to speak, something strange began to happen inside my head. A song started to play on repeat. The wheels on the bus go round and round, round and round, round and round. I’d sung the song to my children as toddlers. But now its cheery tones were an exacting demand. I chanted it in my head – round and round, round and round – feeling compelled to grind my teeth together in time. I also needed to blink.
I wasn’t fully aware of doing this extra hidden work as I recounted my story of the late guest and the impatient presenter: just vaguely conscious that telling it felt really hard, like trying to have an in-depth conversation in a nightclub. Meanwhile, the tyrannical one-man band in my head kept on going. I was determined the panel should see none of it. But then I found myself blinking madly and caught the head of department eyeing me. I was rumbled.
Over the years, my obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) has manifested in a panoply of painful and punitive habits. Scraping my tongue over my teeth, performing complex eye movements, peeling the skin off my lips until they bleed. It’s worse when the stakes are high: when I am trying to do something prestigious, or with someone I want to please. It’s also bad when I’m trying merely to exist in the moment. Also, when I’m trying to let go and have fun. My OCD is insidious and shape shifting, evading conscious awareness or control. It seems to have a will of its own. Except that, of course, it is a part of me.
OCD is only one of the ways in which I work against myself. I am a procrastinator. When writing, I constantly break my focus by scrolling, and I experience an urge to check email when I want to spend quality time with my children. I am also an addict. Not a pathological addict, but a normalised everyday addict. I’m hooked on screens (though I don’t own a smartphone) and use alcohol to switch off in the evenings (though I drink less than the recommended weekly allowance). I’m addicted to producing and achieving, too; to ticking things off to-do lists, to busyness, to filling every second – even as I crave time and space to reflect.
Procrastination, distraction, addiction and OCD are all forms of self-sabotage. It is a curious fact of life that we harm ourselves, even when times are hard; even when we need all the help we can get.
Self-sabotage takes many forms. If you’re anything like me, you will mess things up when you’re put on the spot, blanking when asked a question in public or blurting idiotic lines when you’re out to impress. If you’ve made space in your day to do something you really want, you too might find yourself frittering away those precious hours on life admin and social media. Perhaps you’ve criticised a long-suffering partner about stupid, trivial things, to the point you worry they may actually pack up and leave. Or you criticise yourself endlessly, so it actually stops you making progress. Self-sabotage is about deferring our stated goals and – when we are given a shot – blowing it, or subtly hindering our chances. The puzzle is why so many of us perpetually find ourselves getting in our own way and disrupting our best-laid plans.
In the Phaedrus, Plato uses the metaphor of a chariot to describe how the human psyche is divided in two. The charioteer is guiding two winged horses, one light and one dark. The light horse symbolises our high moral intentions. The dark horse refuses to obey the whip. The light horse pulls the chariot upwards towards truth, beauty and wisdom. The dark horse is irrational and undermining, pulling the chariot down to earth.
This model of a split self has echoed through history, in the work of thinkers as diverse as Friedrich Nietzsche and the psychiatrist R D Laing. In recent years, neuroscience has come to dominate the field of human psychology; and it has some useful things to say about why we subvert our own ‘better self’. Tobias Hauser, professor of computational psychiatry at University College London, leads a project to investigate what is going on in the brains of people with OCD, identifying, for example, imbalances in those neurotransmitters that prevent the brain from regulating intrusive thoughts.
Pattern-forming behaviours are also in play. When I spoke online with Piers Steel, a leading expert in the science of motivation at the University of Calgary in Canada, he took me on a dizzying screen-share tour of software he’s designed to collate the existing research on procrastination (including fMRI studies that observe the process in the brain) in order to identify underlying patterns. This meta-analysis reveals that the biggest drivers are impulsive pleasure-seeking behaviours, and the delay of procrastination itself, which renders completing something offputtingly distant. ‘What makes procrastination particularly interesting is that it’s an irrational delay,’ Steel said (although, as I’ll suggest later, there may be a silver lining to forms of apparent self-sabotage such as procrastination). ‘We do it despite knowing we’ll be worse off. We know we want to do something, but when we look inside ourselves for the motivation, it evaporates. And we wonder what is wrong with me; why can’t I do this?’
Most of us are addicted to instant gratification, even if we are not ‘classifiable’ as addicts
Addiction arguably occupies the sharp end of procrastination. It is a perplexing phenomenon that’s been explored by the philosopher of mind Gabriel Segal, who favours an approach grounded in cognitive science, albeit with nods to Stoicism and Zen Buddhism. ‘There’s a good neurological theory of addiction now,’ Segal told me: ‘it’s called incentive sensitisation of the dopamine system.’ Normally, a rewarding experience produces a dopamine spike that leads us to desire another reward; in addicts, this desire becomes a craving. ‘That’s the fundamental way in which addiction relates to self-sabotage,’ Segal said. ‘You’re intending to do something, but then you feel you need to do this other thing first. It’s like becoming very hungry. You drop everything else and get food. And if that becomes a dominant feature of your life, you just end up sabotaging everything.’
The psychiatrist Anna Lembke believes that most of us are addicted to instant gratification, even if we are not ‘classifiable’ as addicts. Lembke, professor of psychiatry at Stanford University in California, a specialist in addiction and the author of Dopamine Nation (2021), told me that whenever we do something pleasurable we get a hit of dopamine, followed by the brain’s counter-response, which is to reset dopamine levels back to the baseline; but in order to do that, the brain overshoots in a downward direction, putting us in a ‘dopamine deficit state’. That’s the danger zone, ‘the state of real urgency or craving’, Lembke told me, and ‘we’ll do a lot of work – broadly defined as how much the organism is willing to sacrifice to get to a certain goal – to bring ourselves back to that homeostatic baseline.’
‘Addicts often behave in ways that are quite destructive to their own purposes: health, wellbeing, jobs and relationships,’ said Segal, like the alcoholic who has a job interview, but gets drunk and doesn’t turn up. ‘Humans generally – and addicts in particular – have different sub-characters inside them,’ Segal continued. ‘So there could be an element of sabotaging the mature person who wants a job, but serving the purpose of the inner teenager who wants to go out and have fun.’
The anxiety of achievement felt by many self-saboteurs is especially acute for addicts. Another interpretation of the job interview debacle is that the addict fears success. ‘If you succeed, then you come under threat – other people want to throw rocks at you; knock you off your pedestal,’ Segal said. ‘You may be aware that, if you succeed, somebody else fails as a result, and you don’t want other people to be upset. If success brings power, you might be afraid of what you would do with the power.’
Self-sabotage – particularly its common manifestations in addiction, eating disorders and self-harm – raises complex questions about the extent to which we are in control of ourselves and our lives. ‘Addiction is a spectrum disorder, from mild to moderate to severe,’ Lembke told me. ‘Along that continuum, there is a gradual increase in loss of agency and self-determination.’ Classifying self-sabotage as a malady beyond the hard border of ‘the normal’ means we avoid thinking about these grey areas of choice and control: territory that psychoanalysis has traditionally been happy to inhabit.
For Anouchka Grose, a psychoanalyst and author who has brought her specialism to bear on such topics as fashion, vegetarianism and eco-anxiety, this tolerance of ambiguity is precisely what makes Sigmund Freud’s work ‘radical’: ‘There isn’t a boundary between the normal and the pathological,’ says Grose, ‘and I think that’s a good way of thinking about it. We really don’t know how these things are going to play out in our lives.’ I ask her about the articulation of Freud’s aim, turning neurotic misery into normal unhappiness, and Grose reads it ironically: ‘I suppose, in a way, the reason that’s a kind of joke is because the slippage between one state and the other is so discreet: it’s not like you would ever know.’
I believe that the mechanical explanations of self-sabotage – neural pathways and dopamine responses – get us only so far. They are physical descriptions of psychological patterns and processes that can be explained in more profound terms: namely, the terms of psychoanalysis. Where neuroscience seems to demand that we overcome ourselves, psychoanalysis suggests we develop a more accommodating and nuanced understanding of our split selves and contradictions. To take it down to basics, we engage in self-sabotaging behaviours because at some level it feels like they are helping. My OCD is a kind of coping mechanism. Slumping in front of a screen or drinking wine on a dry day is a respite from self-flagellating productivity. Snow days, train strikes and pandemic lockdowns allow us to let ourselves off the hook with impunity, even as we feel thwarted.
Freud thought that we are governed by two opposing instincts. There is the pleasure principle, associated with life and creativity, and the death drive, which is the impulse to return to an inert state. ‘We’re all after a kind of homeostasis,’ says Grose, ‘and excitement has to be managed very carefully … not doing things is actually quite comfortable, except that it tips to the point where not doing things becomes morbid and deathly.’ A healthy balance, in other words, must be maintained between the two impulses: as Grose put it with down-to-earth wit: ‘You have to live, you have to act … and you also have to flop.’
Self-sabotage becomes problematic only when the death drive is too dominant. Fear of failure, for example, can overpower our ambitions. So we put obstacles in our own path in order to keep the painful reality of our imperfection at bay – not preparing well for those job interviews or public appearances, or behaving erratically. What the psychoanalyst Ronald Fairbairn in 1952 called our ‘internal saboteur’ tries to protect us from shame. But it does so at a high cost, foreclosing the possibility of novel, creative and authentic experiences, perhaps even hope. Grose believes that the advice to ‘get out of your comfort zone’ is really a reminder to resist the death drive and engage with life: ‘don’t procrastinate, actually do this thing, even though it’s awful. Write your book, even though you might fail.’ Although we think we want to do well, this comes with the risk of inciting envy in others that might rebound upon us, becoming ‘a profound source of comeuppance’, the psychoanalyst Josh Cohen told me during a conversation full of humorous exasperation at these inhibitions: ‘The subtext is, What am I doing enjoying myself at this moment? Who do you think you are!?’
The interruption is a form of self-sabotage, but it also expresses a need for connection and validation
If we have omnipotent tendencies that overinflate our sense of our own destructive capabilities, we may scupper our chances of happiness or fulfilment to defuse the possibility of harming those around us. Even if we just have thoughts and feelings towards loved ones that make us feel bad (including what the family therapist Terrence Real calls ‘normal marital hatred’), we can turn that aggression on ourselves, which stops us having to properly own those impulses. Freud called this internal judge and jury the superego, and what should be a necessary system of checks and balances can become tyrannical.
Carl Jung came up with another useful concept to add to our saboteur’s toolkit: the shadow self. The shadow self is the parts of ourselves that we label undesirable, or that we think society will reject: unmet needs, say, or aggressive impulses. We split off these parts, but they revolt against us powerfully and unpredictably, as erratic outbursts, mental blocks or physical ailments that compromise our plans. ‘When an inner situation is not made conscious,’ wrote Jung in Aion (1951), ‘it happens outside, as fate.’ An example is the worker who constantly distracts herself with social media. The interruption is a form of self-sabotage, but it also expresses a need for connection and validation that she has repressed as invalid, and which emerges with redoubled force in those procrastinatory habits.
Jacques Lacan described the paradox that, while we fear failure, success may provoke more anxiety. The ‘curse of the lottery’ strikes when winning millions generates unexpected discontent; or think of the man who, all his working life, looks forward to retirement, but experiences a crisis when the structure of his day job is removed. I’ve felt a minor version of this when I’ve gone on a long-awaited holiday and found myself fiddling; at a loose end, I snap at my family, and scroll British news headlines so I can catch up on domestic gloom. To paraphrase Oscar Wilde, there are only two tragedies in life: one is not getting what one wants, and the other is getting it.
If self-sabotage exists on a spectrum, the contemporary world – with its alluring screens and overwork culture – has made it far more prevalent. Forms of self-sabotaging behaviour previously classed as abnormal have become ubiquitous. There has been a 400 per cent increase in the number of British adults seeking a diagnosis for ADHD since 2020, according to Tony Lloyd of the ADHD Foundation. And, according to Steel, about 95 per cent of people admit to procrastinating at least some of the time. A growing number of young people ask for extenuating circumstances to complete the coursework for a degree they may ostensibly really enjoy. Universities are dealing with an entire system on the brink of logical absurdity and administrative collapse. Faced with collective self-sabotage in the form of climate change and an ever-more competitive jobs market, many young people appear to be turning the anxiety upon themselves, inducing a kind of paralysis. We should exercise caution when we link mental illness to ambient conditions such as geopolitics or the dominance of screens. But it’s also worth considering why self-sabotage is such a feature of modern life.
The big change is that diversions from our chosen path appear at every turn. The researchers I spoke to pointed to recent research on the impact of screen time, particularly social media. ‘We are hacking our own operating systems, and marketers have very quickly discovered how to exploit our impulsivity,’ Steel told me. ‘Procrastination is on the rise because there’s a trillion-dollar industry to get us to indulge in these smaller sooner temptations at the cost of our larger later dreams.’ The philosopher Harry Frankfurt in 1971 defined these as first-order and second-order desires. So, our first-order desire might be to look at Instagram, but the second-order desire might be to become an artist. We can only be said to have free will when our first- and second-order desires align. The stakes couldn’t be higher. As Steel says: ‘These are deep questions about what kind of society we want to live in, and we have not designed it to maximise human flourishing.’
It’s a double battle: the world offers opportunities for self-sabotage and raises our perfectionist expectations
Our screen addictions prevent us from accomplishing our higher goals, but they also prevent us from resting and living in the moment – something we are constantly told is good for us. ‘We don’t know how to relax anymore without digital media,’ said Lembke. ‘The way that we now relax is to take a break from our externally focused attention and then to mind-wander, facilitated by social media. But, in essence, when we’re doing that, we’re consuming a drug and so we’re not really allowing ourselves to return to a homeostatic baseline.’ We can neither properly get on with our work, nor truly sit still.
We are ‘nurtured in a competitive, individualistic atmosphere’, said Cohen. His interests are wide-ranging; he’s written about anger, how to live, being a loser, and he’s questioned whether we even possess a private life, while his book Not Working (2019) offers a critique of our workaholic culture. In the past, our sense of duty came from the superego: a hard taskmaster, but somehow contained. But, under capitalism, the compulsion comes from another Freudian concept, the ‘ego ideal’, which is more internal and insidious. ‘The ego ideal never says “you must”, it says “you can”,’ Cohen explained. ‘Under the gaze of our own perfection, our own punishing ideal, we’re always falling short.’
So we seem to be fighting a double battle: the contemporary world offers readily available opportunities for self-sabotage and it raises our perfectionist expectations, making distraction and addiction more tempting. As well as leading to overwork, the ego ideal makes us less good at our work, too: another downwards spiral. This state of mind is ‘performance wrecking’, says Cohen: ‘you lose conviction and confidence in yourself. The more you’re aware of falling behind, of not quite being at the level you’re supposed to be, the more it does something to your capacity to seamlessly produce.’
Can self-sabotage be reduced or eliminated? In order to think about what might help, we need to distinguish between the self-sabotage that is caused by the contemporary world, and that which is simply a part of us.
As far as the external world is concerned, Lembke takes an original and bracing approach, arguing that we need to ‘change the narrative’ away from the drive to experience pleasure to ‘a new form of asceticism’ that paradoxically will enable us to achieve what we are really after. When Lembke considers the problem of young people failing to launch themselves into the world, in a growing number of cases ‘it’s not that their lives are too hard. It’s that their lives are fundamentally too easy, and that with more friction they would find more purpose. With more purpose, they would be able to endure the pain of being alive. Because it would have at least some meaning for them.’ The way to do this, she argues, is to create ‘a world within a world where we insulate ourselves’ from these ‘highly reinforcing substances and behaviours’. Similarly, Steel has found that one remedy for procrastination is putting pleasures a little out of reach: ‘We need delays, and even small ones can be very effective.’
Beyond switching off the internet and taking cold showers, a first step in limiting our self-sabotaging tendencies is to recognise that we have them. In some ways, we’ve come a long way as a culture in appreciating that we don’t always act in our own best interests. Behavioural economists like Daniel Kahneman, Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein have questioned the model of ‘homo economicus’, the rational, self-determining individual. They’ve documented how irrational we actually are: we neglect our pensions, stick with our overpriced insurance plans, and demolish mediocre takeaways on the sofa. The equivalent in political theory is false consciousness: as Thomas Frank puts it in What’s the Matter with Kansas (2004), it’s the conundrum of ‘working-class guys in midwestern cities cheering as they deliver up a landslide for a candidate whose policies will end their way of life, will transform their region into a “rustbelt”, will strike people like them blows from which they will never recover.’
Making sense of the deeper logics beneath what is dismissed as perverse can be the most effective remedy
In the mainstream conversation about ‘wellbeing’, however, self-sabotage can appear counterintuitive. The self-optimisation movement is driven to some extent by a recognition of the need to overcome bad habits, but its positivity (encapsulated by the injunction to live your best life) can downplay our feelings of being out of control and irrational, making us feel bad for being merely ‘normally unhappy’. Here it resembles the rhetoric of self-management that pervades popular discussions of neuroscience: the assumption that if it’s physical, it’s fixable. Psychoanalysis, by contrast, understands very well how and why we undercut our conscious intentions. Rather than eliminating these aspects of the self, psychoanalysis brings them into the light, where we can better understand them.
In fact, making sense of the deeper logics beneath what is dismissed as perverse can be the most effective remedy. OCD’s triggers may be genetic, but they are also contextual: perhaps you were made to feel, from an early age, that your natural emotions – especially rage, but also desires that felt underserved or risky – were poisonous. Such conditioning pops up like a self-appointed security guard, keeping that ‘shadow self’ toxicity channelled away inside. The bestselling popular psychiatrist Jeffrey M Schwartz, who champions our ability to rewire our neuroplastic brains, advocates a combination of conscious awareness (or mindfulness) of the compulsions, while thinking about why they occur – an approach that has certainly worked for me. Though it may look less empowering on the surface, I am reminded here of Melanie Klein’s belief in the need to replace our idealised self with our actual self, so we might reconcile ourselves to the difficult reality of our imperfection. We can defuse our deep-seated fear of envious revenge, for example, by seeing it as our own projection – a strategy that might have rescued my BBC interview.
Comprehension leads to self-compassion. Accepting the reality of self-sabotage loosens its grip. We need ‘to work with our symptom rather than “return to normal” or assume that there’s a sort of benchmark human,’ Grose told me. The task is ‘how to include your symptom in a life that you can live – and like.’
Perhaps, then, we don’t want to jettison our self-sabotaging tendencies altogether. Ironically, renowned analysts such as Freud and Jung deployed their own struggles with self-sabotage to spark innovative and creative breakthroughs – delving into their neurotic, maddening inability to work to help them understand these tendencies in us all. Jung had hallucinations and heard disturbing voices – documented in his fantastically illustrated masterwork, The Red Book – that were both debilitating and groundbreaking. Freud’s letters reveal that, around the age of 40, he faced the unbearable realisation that he would not be able to accomplish his life goal of explaining all human psychology in terms of the physical workings of the brain. He complained of ‘a feeling of depression’ that took the form of ‘visions of death … in place of the usual frenzy of activity’. He found he couldn’t stop smoking and was ‘completely incapable of working’, declaring that ‘in times like these my reluctance to write is downright pathological’. But then he had a revelation, and moved beyond this narrowly scientific project into an exploration of fantasies and dreams. ‘Symptoms, like dreams, are the fulfilment of a wish,’ he wrote, realising that his neuroses have their own wishes. Only when he attends to them is he able to invent the discipline of psychoanalysis.
Self-sabotage may be debilitating, but it can also be a spur. Very often, it is the engine of productivity – and humour. There is something precious about the neurotic tangles that make many of our most relatable cultural figures who they are – I’m thinking of George Costanza in the TV show Seinfeld. ‘Lots of people who are very successful are on that boundary,’ Grose told me. ‘It’s a tight-rope act between being insane and brilliant.’ The best we can hope for, perhaps, is having people we can rely on to save us from ourselves. After all, it worked for Marcel Proust. ‘Proust was a total perfectionist, and drove his publisher mad,’ Grose said. ‘Left to his own devices, who knows what would have happened. But that was his process, and luckily, in his case it was possible for someone to step in and say: we’re going to press, right now. It’s time to stop!’
