Mind and body

How to Stop Self-Sabotaging Your Own Success

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A student spends the night before an important exam at a party. If the exam goes badly, the hangover takes the blame, not the student’s ability. Psychologists call this pattern of self-sabotage self-handicapping. Stopping it means making failure less of a verdict on your worth, then giving full effort anyway. Hypnosis can help you rehearse that.

What is self-handicapping?

The Wikipedia article on self-handicapping defines it as avoiding effort in the hope of keeping a possible failure from hurting your self-esteem. The idea was first theorized by Edward E. Jones and Steven Berglas, who described self-handicaps as obstacles a person creates, or claims, in anticipation of failing.

The trade-off is appealing in the moment. Failure can be blamed on the obstacle, and success looks even better because it happened despite it.

What does it look like?

The article describes two kinds:

  • Behavioral handicaps: actually making the task harder. Examples include drinking, choosing unattainable goals, refusing to practice, and putting the work off.
  • Claimed handicaps: announcing an obstacle in advance, such as telling friends you feel unwell on the morning of a test.

Both can show up anywhere people are expected to perform: school, sport, work or creative projects.

Why would anyone do this?

Because the threat is to self-image, not just to the result. According to the article, research links self-handicapping to uncertainty about your own ability and to fear of failure, described as a heightened sensitivity to shame and embarrassment. People with unstable self-esteem were more likely to do it.

An early experiment by Jones and Berglas shows the logic. Participants received positive feedback on a problem-solving test regardless of how they had done. Those who had faced difficult problems, and so could not be sure their success was deserved, were more likely to choose the performance-impairing drug over the performance-enhancing one.

What does it cost?

The article reports that self-handicapping is, in general, negatively associated with performance, persistence and motivation, and with longer-term costs including worse health, more frequent negative moods and higher substance use. In one study by Zuckerman and Tsai, self-handicapping among college students predicted later depression and coping by denial and blaming others, and depression in turn predicted more self-handicapping. The relief is temporary; the doubt about your ability stays, which invites the next handicap.

How do you break the pattern?

A 2017 study of physical education, cited in the article, suggested raising self-esteem, working toward mastery goals and holding fewer goals about avoiding looking bad as strategies for reducing self-handicapping. Applied to everyday life, a reasonable version is:

  1. Change the goal: from “don’t look incompetent” to “learn this” or “get better at this.”
  2. Catch the excuse early: notice the sentence you are preparing in advance, such as “I barely slept,” and ask what it is for.
  3. Remove the handicap you can see: go to bed, practice, start on time.
  4. Let the result be information: a full-effort failure tells you what to work on, which a handicapped one cannot.

Can hypnosis help you stop undermining yourself?

With the fear that drives the handicap. In a session you can picture the real event, the exam or pitch or performance, prepared and fully committed, and then picture it going imperfectly anyway, staying with the disappointment until it feels survivable. You can also rehearse noticing the urge to stay out late or skip practice and choosing the preparation instead. The work happens when you show up fully prepared; the session makes that easier to imagine.

When is it something more?

If the handicap is alcohol or drugs before things that matter, or if the pattern comes with persistent low mood, talk to a doctor or licensed therapist. The article’s own examples include drinking, and the costs it lists include higher substance use.

Three questions before your next big moment

Before the exam, interview or launch, ask yourself: What obstacle am I creating or announcing? What would I learn if I gave this everything and still fell short? What is one thing I can do today that removes my excuse?

This article is general information, not medical or psychological advice; talk with a licensed clinician about your own situation.

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