224 When self improvement becomes unconscious self sabotage (and how to break the cycle)

3rd November 2025 • Busy Woman's Guide to Wellbeing • Alix Hubble

Speaker A: 00:00:00

What if I told you that the very things you're doing in the name of self improvement right now could also be the same things that are holding you back and keeping you in that self sabotage loop? And that when you are experiencing self sabotage, it has nothing to do with being lazy or lacking in willpower.

And it's not because the actions you're taking are necessarily wrong, but it could simply be that the way you're approaching that self improvement right now needs a bit of a reframe. So today we're going to be exploring three key ways in which you could be unconsciously self sabotaging yourself right now.

And we'll talk about what we can be doing to break that cycle instead.

Welcome to the Busy Woman's Guide to Wellbeing, the podcast for women who are done with the hustle and are ready to feel at home in their own skin.

I'm your host Alix, Life, Therapeutic and Fitness coach for busy women who want to do less, live more, and feel good from the inside out.

Every week I'm going to help you to cut through the noise, challenge the shoulds, and find new ways to live and move that actually feel like you.

Welcome back to the podcast this week where we are talking all about self sabotage or more accurately, how some of the things you are doing right now in a bid for self improvement could actually be unconsciously sabotaging you at the same time.

And this one is particularly relevant if you feel that you keep repeating some of the same patterns, some of the same unhelpful patterns in your life.

So you're somebody who is probably very self aware, you take care of your wellbeing, you're maybe making some strides towards changing habits, adding more healthy habits into your life, and yet also you feel like there's a lot of starting over. You feel like there's this devil on your shoulder going on as well.

You know that sense that however much you believe in what you're doing, however much you kind of want to do what you're doing, there's also this little voice that's always trying to persuade you to sack it in or give up till next week. So you get left in this position where self sabotage never feels very far away.

And you're either engaging in it, you're allowing it to happen, or you feel like you're having to constantly fight against it.

And it can be really exhausting to live with that pattern because it feels like you get a certain way towards the changes that you really want to make. But there's this sort of invisible tether that's holding you back all the time. And you can't seem to figure out why.

The changes that you really want to make just stay frustratingly out of reach still.

So today I really want to get into this because here's the thing, when this keeps happening, it starts to feel like it's a bad habit of yours. It starts to feel like the problem is with you.

It starts to feel like you, you are missing some magical quality that you need to fully see things through. Because that tether keeps bouncing you back all the time.

It's like this kind of strong elastic band that's permanently fixed to you and it only allows you to get so far. You stretch it only so far and it ricochets you all the way back to the start again.

And like I say, that can start to feel, when it keeps happening over and over again, like it's a personality trait, like it's something that we just can't help, that it's some flaw in our being, our personality or whatever that does not allow us to kind of take off that elastic band, get rid of it, and actually take those strides forward. But the good news about all of this is that you're probably not doing anything wrong right now.

I think that, when I work with women in this kind of area, this self sabotage area, it's not that the things they're asking of themselves are unreasonable. It's not. And it's not that the things that they are doing are intrinsically wrong. It's often something else. It's something deeper than that.

It's something that is coming from the way in which they're approaching those goals. Now, of course, there's always tweaks that we can make here and there.

And for sure, when I work with women, I will make suggestions on little tweaks we can make, little changes we can make. Maybe let's try and do a little bit less. Because that's often the thing, isn't it? We're overloading ourselves with too many things.

So, yeah, sure, there are tweaks that we can be making, but the likelihood is that if you are someone who's very engaged in your wellbeing, you have a lot of knowledge, right?

You know about what's going to serve you best, you know, the things that you should be doing, you know, the things that you want to work towards, right? That is often not the problem. It's the, place that this is coming from. So today is about a bit of a reframe.

Because what happens when you keep experiencing this pattern is that some of the ways in which you believe you have to approach self improvement are just working against you, not in an obvious way. And that's why I've talked about this as being kind of unconscious self sabotage. Because it may not be obvious to you.

You're not sitting there going, oh, well, I can see why that self sabotage keeps happening. It's often much more subtle, it's often more hidden away.

It's stuff that you're not necessarily conscious of, thoughts you're not necessarily conscious of, ways you have approached things that you're not necessarily conscious of and often not conscious of because they've come from outside of you, they've come from other people telling you you should do this, you should do that. They're not your own. Right? Because we, of course, we look at people outside of ourselves for information.

You know, I look at people outside of me for help with running my business, for example, because I don't know all the things I need so get that from outside of me.

But something that a coach that I worked with last year really instilled into me is that, yeah, the strategies and all those kind of things, they're great, but you've got to do them in your own way. You've got to do them in a way that works for you.

And that's why some of the stuff has felt hard, because you've been doing it in a way that somebody else has told you. Now, you can still take that strategy, but you can do it in a way that you're going to make work for you.

So that's really what we want to be thinking about here and today when we're talking about self sabotage is that the strategies are not necessarily wrong. The things that you're trying to do are not necessarily wrong. There's also not anything wrong with you. Right. I really want to make that clear.

There's not anything wrong with you. It's just that you're not making it work for you. You're not making it work in your life.

Right now we're going to go through these reframes or talk about how we can reframe this so that we can make it work better for you.

And there are three sort of key areas, I suppose, that we sabotage ourselves, that my clients sabotage themselves, which I'm going to go through with you today.

Before I do that, I just want to say if self sabotage is something that you do feel keeps happening to you, then it's also definitely worth Revisiting episode 158, which is called Does Self Sabotage really Exist? Because listening to that is going to give you a little bit of pause on what's really going on when you're blaming that self sabotage.

So do go find that one because it'll give you an another layer to this piece, so to speak. And I'll put the link in the show notes for you as well. But that's episode 158. But let's get on with it

Let's start with what are these three key areas that I tend to see as being the areas in which we unconsciously create that self sabotage for ourself? It's almost like we, we think we've got to do something in a certain way and it's almost sabotaging us before we begin, if you like.

So the first one is trying to exert control. So you know, we want consistency, right? We want to try and control what we're doing.

We want to feel like we've got control over ourselves and the things that we're doing and the habits that we're creating. But what can happen is that that control starts to feel a bit more like punishment.

And underneath that there can be this fear of what will happen if I stop. Like, I see this a lot with food, for example. Or weighing yourself.

So I've had so many people over the years say to me, I weigh myself regularly because that's the only way that I can keep myself under control. Or I track my calories on an app every day because that's the only way that I can keep myself under control.

And there's this sense of I need to exert control over myself at all times because I don't trust myself. I don't trust myself with what will happen if I don't do that. And so we're trying to exert a lot of control.

And we think that we can do that by tracking the calories or weighing ourselves or whatever it is to almost force ourselves, to force ourselves into a position where we have no choice but to do all of the things that we think we should be doing. But that feels really punishing. Feels really, really punishing.

And whenever somebody tells me they weigh themselves regularly for that, then I take it as a personal challenge upon myself to show them, not to force them, but to show them that there are other possibilities for them that they can step away from the scales, they can step away from that sense of punishment.

So, yeah, we try and control because we think that if we, if we have these, these tools and these methods for controlling ourselves, we're going to stay on track. But what I'd love to you to do, if that is something that you are doing, is to reframe this into a bit more curiosity.

And what I mean by that is having curiosity about alternatives, having curiosity about other ways of doing things, having curiosity about trying things.

And I think we do struggle with that because we feel if we step away from the scales, for example, it's going to go to pot, we'll have no way to control ourselves, we won't know what's going on. And that feels really fricking scary.

So in that instance I wouldn't be saying, right, I'm going to take the scales away from you, I'm going to throw them away and we're never going to use them again. Because I know that that's going to throw you into a panic. There's going to be definitely a sense of fear that's going on there.

But what I would encourage you in that situation, if that is something you're doing in certain areas, is to allow a bit of curiosity, to allow a bit of oh, I wonder what would happen. I wonder how I could change this, I wonder how I could approach this differently.

I wonder how I could work with myself rather than trying to control myself.

And I think that's the thing, that's what it, for me, what it comes down to is working with ourselves, working with that bit of self trust, allowing ourselves to try different things and see how they work for us and being curious about them. Because I think we often when we're trying to control, we can only see one way forward, we can only see one possible solution to this problem.

And that solution is often something that feels hard, that feels punishing, that feels restrictive maybe.

So that's the first one is when you're trying to exert a lot of control, could you instead start to maybe bring in a bit more curiosity into that situation? Curiosity about different ways of doing things, different ways of managing that that are going to feel a little bit more easeful.

The second pattern that I see around self improvement is guilt. Is every failure leading to guilt. And again this comes down to I suppose this control.

Again because when we are on it, when we're being consistent, when we're doing all the things, we feel like we are in control, right? We feel like we're on the right path, we're doing the right things, we're pleased with ourselves, our self esteem rises, we feel great.

But as soon as that stops, as soon as that doesn't happen for a week, as soon as we feel like we've failed in that area, we just feel really guilty. We feel guilty about what we've done wrong. We feel guilty that we allowed our worst instincts to take over the show.

And it leaves us in this place where we have this very narrow idea of what we should be doing and how we should be doing it. Which is why every failure leads to that guilt.

Because we're like, I didn't do what I was supposed to do. I'm going to have to start again. And we do. We keep doing the same things over and over and over again.

So instead, if that is something that happens to you, if every failure leads to you just feeling really guilty and feeling like you have to start all over again, you have to be perfect all over again, then instead, I want you to think of this as an opportunity for growth. Because the truth is that you are going to fail on your journey. We all do. We don't get everything right.

Some days the worst parts of ourselves want to come out to play and they want to ruin everything and they want to sabotage everything. That's okay, it's going to happen.

But instead of just feeling the guilt and almost where we feel the guilt, we close ourselves off to other possibilities instead. I want you to see it as an opportunity for growth. I suppose, again, this is about curiosity, isn't it?

Have that failure and then go, okay, what am I learning from that? What needs to be different next time? What could I change next time? How could I be kinder to myself in this situation?

How can I use that as an opportunity rather than it being a dead end? Because I think that's often what happens. The failure becomes the dead end rather than the doorway. And we want it to become the doorway to growth.

Are there different ways in which I can measure my value? Are there different ways in which I can measure my success? For example? So again, leaning into.

Yeah, into that self trust, into that trust within ourselves that goes, actually, I can use this. Actually, I do have the tools to use this for future growth, for future self improvement. Because that's what life is, isn't it?

We don't suddenly do all the things, get all the qualifications, and then we're as perfect as we're ever going to be for the rest of our lives. It's not how it works. We're always figuring stuff out. We're always learning stuff, we're always failing. We need to fail.

Failure is actually really important part of the process. But if we let every failure create guilt, then we're just sabotaging ourselves every single time. We're just taking ourselves to a dead end.

So really think about where's the opportunity here? Where's the opportunity for growth? Where's the real opportunity for self improvement?

Because I would argue that in order for us to have self improvement, to improve ourselves, we have to fail. And we have to use that as an opportunity. If we don't do that, we are not improving ourselves.

We're just staying in the same place and going around in the same circles all the time. So that's the second one, the third one is, and again, it's sort of tied in with the others….

Is this constant self audit, this constant self surveillance that we engage in.

Constantly watching ourselves, constantly thinking about what we're doing, constantly thinking about what I need to have a breakfast and lunch so that I can save myself for that dinner tonight. What I can do to pack all the workouts in for the first few days of the week so then I can relax and be done with it for the rest of the week.

You know, this, this constant feeling that we've got to be on ourselves all the time, that we've got to be managing ourselves all the time, that we've got to be auditing ourselves all the time. Let's imagine you're, you know, you're at school and you've got a very, very, very strict teacher.

And that strict teacher is leaning over and watching every single thing that you're doing.

You know, every time you're writing something, every time you're doing a sum, they're over your shoulder, they're watching you and they're saying, no, don't do it like that, do it like this. No, that's not right. This is right. Right? You're going to be a nervous bloody wreck by the end of it.

You're going to be second guessing yourself all the time. You're going to be just assuming you're going to get stuff wrong all the time.

You're not going to be feeling so great and you're probably not going to be improving yourself very much because there is somebody who is always there telling you you should do better, you should do more, you should be doing this. No, don't do it like that. And that's often what we do to ourselves when we are in this phase of self improvement. I'm not doing it right.

I need to be doing more of this. I need to be better at this, whatever it is. We are constantly surveilling ourselves.

So instead the reframe here is how can you actually support yourself better? What can you do to support yourself again? Let's go back to the classroom.

If you've got a teacher who is there, they're supportive, they're going to answer your questions, they're going to help you to improve things. They're going to say, okay, that's a really great start. But how about you think about doing it like this?

Or how about we just change a couple of words here? How about we just move this number here. You are going to build confidence within yourself.

You're going to build confidence that you are able to do things.

You are going to be looking for that support when you need it, but you're also going to be able to carry on and get on with those things even when you're not being audited all the time.

So it's going to feel a lot more easeful to do it that way and there's going to be a lot less of that potential self sabotage going on at the end of it. So those are three things.

And I think, you know, really what they boil down to is that what happens when we engage in self improvement is that we lean very heavily into discipline because we feel that that push energy, that force is what is going to get us over the line. And that discipline is important, right? There are going to be days where we are going to have to push ourselves a little bit.

Days where we're going to have to be a bit more honest with ourselves. But it's about learning to apply that at the right times. We don't want it to be this blunt instrument that we apply to every single situation.

You know, what's the saying if all you have is a hammer everything looks like a nail? In other words, you're trying to apply the exact same tool in all types of situations. You're trying to exert control over yourself.

You're trying to exert discipline over yourself. You're trying to use guilt as a motivating factor. You're trying to audit yourself and surveil yourself all the time. That's the hammer.

We're using the hammer in every single type of situation. But every single type of situation does not need a hammer.

Because there are other times when it's going to be like trying to use a hammer to repair a hole in your jeans. It's not going to work. You're going to End up sabotaging your efforts and you're going to feel really frustrated.

So what we need to be thinking about is, yeah, how can we make a little bit of space for that, for that discipline, for just a little bit of control here and there. But how can we also make space for softness? Because I think that that's what we miss out on. We have the discipline.

We don't allow ourselves the softness because we think the softness is the weakness. We think the softness is going to let us down. We think the softness means we're going to ultimately fail.

But the truth is that unless our attempts at self improvement become a little bit more about self care, a little bit more about self trust, then we're going to struggle. We're going to keep sabotaging ourselves because we can't always exert that level of self control.

Certainly not without it feeling very or without us feeling very hemmed in, without us feeling like there's all these dead ends around us. You know, it's being in a room, there's no door.

We're just surrounded by walls, these walls of self control that don't give us a lot of flexibility, a lot of space, and that's really hard to live like that all the time. We need to allow ourselves a few doors out of this room. We need to allow ourselves a few possibilities.

We need to allow ourselves a little bit of curiosity. So here's a quick practice that you can do to see where self improvement that you're doing right now might actually be turning into self sabotage.

So think about one area of your life where you're trying really hard - you’re trying to exercise more, you're trying to eat better, you're trying to be more mindful, you're trying to, you know, manage your nervous system better. Anything like that, where you're trying to hard to do better in your life at the moment.

And then have a think about the rules that you've set around that. What are the standards that you think you should be meeting?

What are the walls that you've created for yourself that are not allowing a lot of space for movement and flexibility? What are those really tough standards that you've set up for yourself?

And then ask yourself, if I stopped trying to do that for one week, if I let go of those rules for one week, what would it actually feel like? Would it feel like relief? Would it feel like guilt? Would it feel like panic? Let's go back to the weighing yourself on the scales every week.

If you were to stop that, if you were to stop trying to use that to control yourself around food, how would that feel?

Would you be like, oh my God, that would feel amazing if I didn't weigh myself every day, or would you be panicking?

Would you be thinking, there's no way that I can do that because if I don't have that level of control over myself, I'll just go mad, I'll go to town, I'll eat everything in sight and I'll put on half a stone.

Now, if any of those feelings are coming up for you, then it's very likely that that self improvement that you are trying to aim for has become self sabotage or will become self sabotage. That feeling that you have around the idea of dropping those rules away is going to tell you an awful lot.

If you're indifferent to it, if you're, if you're thinking, ah, yeah, be all right, I suppose, then likelihood is you're in a good place with it.

If the feeling is, oh my God, everything's going to go wrong if I do that, then maybe you need to be having a little look about how you can reframe that situation.

Because when that self improvement is something you have to force all the time, when it requires you to exert a huge amount of self discipline all the time, when it means that you're on high alert, a lot of the time it's not necessarily going to feel safe in your body. So eventually the body rebels and you self sabotage. And that self sabotage is not a failing, it's just a message.

And I think again we go back to the curiosity piece. When that self sabotage is happening, it's a message, it's not a failing. And if you can see that and if you can go, okay, this is information.

What is the information? How is this going to help me then? Then you're engaging in self improvement.

So you could, for example, if you're trying to exercise more, you could be doing it from a place of feeling disappointed with your body in a way that feels like you have to work out a certain number of times a week or it will mean you have failed. A lot of us do that. Or you could be doing it from a place of I want to feel stronger and more energized.

You could be doing it in a way that allow you a bit of flexibility in the schedule. It allows you to seek out movement that brings joy to your life.

Same kind of same thing or same end result maybe, but one is going to be very hard to maintain and is going to be very easy to self sabotage. The other is going to be much easier to maintain and keep going and it's going to feel so much more joyful and easeful, you know.

So thinking about how you can reduce the potential for self sabotage in your life is going to really, really help you in these situations. But also knowing that self sabotage probably will happen at some point and that's okay, let's use that as information.

That's where we get self improvement, is where we get curious. And we use this as information not when we see it as this, this dead end all the time.

So if you do find that self sabotage is happening for you a lot, then really thinking about why that's happening, what's the motivation behind what I'm doing? How can I upgrade the way I'm thinking about this, the way I'm approaching this in way.

And in fact there's a couple of things that you can think about that you can sort of take away with you, I suppose. So first of all, before you plan a new habit or a change or maybe something you're doing at the moment, ask where is it coming from?

Is it coming from curiosity? Is it coming from excitement? Or is it coming from fear and frustration?

And be honest with yourself about this because people will often say to me, well, I want to lose weight because I want to feel great in myself. But we dive a little bit deeper and we're thinking, no, this fear, this frustration that's running away, away from something that's going on here.

And that's why then we end up self sabotaging our way out of it. So really think about where it's coming from. Be really honest with yourself about where it's coming from.

Think about setting fewer goals, but ones that are really supportive of what you want to achieve. So again, we want to think about self support.

Not the teacher that's standing over us all the time and trying to manage us and control us, but the teacher that's there that is being supportive. But that's going to really help us to use what's happening, use the mistakes, use the failures and learn from them and improve ourselves from them.

That's the teacher that we want, that's the teacher that we want ourselves to be.

Start to build trust in yourself rather than just tracking the numbers all the time or getting annoyed when you didn't do something, just get curious. That curiosity builds trust with yourself. It builds trust that you can use that information to make things better next time.

And then also think about redefining that progress.

Sometimes progress is actually about allowing yourself to rest where normally you wouldn't, is allowing yourself to listen to what you really needed on a particular day. For example, progress is not always about the cold hard numbers.

It's about changing the way that you treat yourself, changing the way you talk to yourself, changing the way that you trust yourself. Those things are progress, those things are self improvement for sure. So it's not about necessarily changing the things that you're doing.

The things that you're doing or some of the things you're doing right now might be fine. It might just be about reframing.

It might be about coming at it from a slightly different angle so that you can take yourself away from this, this very rigid sense of what should be going on from that room without the doors and about opening a few doors, putting a few doors into that room. So if you do feel like your self improvement habits have become a little bit exhausting.

If you do feel like self sabotage is happening a little bit too often, then the body you'll love living in is a great next step because you get to work one to one with me to unpick what's really going on for you and to help you to rebuild that routine from a place of deeper trust and a bit more ease as well. So just head to lifeeditcoaching.com to find out more. I'll pop the link into the show notes as well, but almost done.

So just to say as we wrap up that unconscious self sabotage is not a sign that anything is wrong with you. It's just a message from your mind, from your body asking you to stop fighting with it.

And when you start to listen, you might discover that it's not about adding more and being ever more disciplined. It's about upgrading where that change is coming from. It's upgrading the things you're saying to yourself about making that change.

And it's getting really curious so you don't end up just using the hammer for everything that you've got those different tools. With all that said, I'm going to love you and leave you and I'll see you back here again next time. Thank you as always, for joining me.

If this episode has hit home, share it with another woman who needs to hear it and come connect with me on Instagram @lifeeditwithalix for more real talk, mindset shifts and daily inspiration.

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