One of the hardest ideas I’ve had to get my head around while working on my own self-sabotage is this: self-sabotage is a survival mechanism. Your subconscious isn’t trying to wreck your life. It’s trying to help.
When I first came across that, I thought it was bonkers. Why on earth would my own mind keep me somewhere uncomfortable? Why would it help me make a mess of the things I actually cared about? It made no sense.
But the more I learned about it, the more it explained.
Your subconscious is built to keep you safe
Your subconscious has one main job, and that’s to protect you. It likes things familiar. It likes knowing what’s coming. And it steers you away from anything that might hurt, whether that’s physical pain or emotional pain.
The trouble is, change falls squarely into that “might hurt” category.
Change is uncomfortable. It sometimes turns up at short notice. It can be emotionally painful, and you never quite know how it’s going to turn out. So even when the change is a good one, your subconscious reads it as a risk.
Its answer is to keep you where you are. And here’s the odd part: it will do that even if where you are isn’t a pleasant place to be. Once your subconscious has decided that this is your normal, the place where it knows how to operate, it will work hard to keep you there.
What that looks like in real life
You might recognise it. You start something and run out of steam just before the finish. An opportunity comes along and suddenly you’ve got a dozen reasons not to go for it. Things finally start going well, and you slip back into old habits as if someone flicked a switch.
It’s easy to put that down to laziness or weak willpower. More often, it’s your subconscious quietly pulling you back to familiar ground.
Getting your subconscious on your side
So what can we do about it? The aim isn’t to fight your subconscious. It’s to get it working for you rather than against you.
I’ll be honest, I haven’t fully cracked this. But I am getting somewhere, and the biggest shift so far has come from one idea.
Your subconscious wants to move away from pain and towards things that feel good. Right now, it links change with pain. So the job is to change that link. I wouldn’t call it tricking your subconscious. It’s more like retraining it, so that when it looks at where you’re heading, it sees something fun, exciting and good rather than something risky.
In practice, that has meant two things for me.
First, getting clear on what I actually want. Where do I want to go? Who do I want to be? What do I want to be doing? That’s a whole other kettle of fish, and I’ll write more about it another time. But your subconscious can’t move towards something it can’t see.
Second, attaching real feeling to it. Not just thinking “it would be nice to…” but letting myself feel how good it would be. The excitement, the relief, the pride. The stronger that positive feeling, the more your subconscious starts to see the change as something worth moving towards, instead of something to protect you from.
Where I’ve got to
This sound great, but it isn’t easy. I’m working on it, and some days it’s bloody hard. I still get the nagging doubts. I can still feel my subconscious trying to pull me back to where things are manageable and comfortable-ish.
But I can tell I’m making progress. I’m getting clearer about where I want to go, and I’m starting to attach proper, feel-good emotion to it. And the pull backwards isn’t as strong as it used to be.
Your subconscious isn’t the enemy
When you think about it, your subconscious wants good things for you. It wants you safe, comfortable and happy. The problem is that its idea of “safe” is based on old programming, and that programming says “stay put”.
So, start thinking about where you want to go. Get clear on it, and attach some strong, positive emotion to it. The more you do, the less control that survival mechanism has over you.
Like most personal development, this is often straightforward but rarely easy. But I promise you it’s worth the effort.
Have you noticed your subconscious keeping you “safe” from changes you actually want? I’d love to hear about it in the comments.
