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This article is an excerpt from the Shortform book guide to "Stop Self-Sabotage" by Judy Ho. Shortform has the world's best summaries and analyses of books you should be reading.

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Do you have a tendency to undermine your own success? How can you overcome your self-sabotaging tendencies?

In her book Stop Self-Sabotage, Judy Ho explores the root cause of self-sabotaging behavior: the conflict between the desire to get what you want and the desire to avoid what your mind perceives as danger. Then she explains how to replace your self-destructive habits with better ones.

Keep reading for an overview of Stop Self-Sabotage.

Stop Self-Sabotage Book Overview

Have you ever wondered why you undermine your own success, despite having clear goals and the ability to achieve them? In her book, Stop Self-Sabotage, Judy Ho discusses why intelligent, motivated people often end up derailing their own progress and how to overcome that tendency. She provides strategies to help you identify your unique self-sabotaging tendencies, understand those habits’ psychological origins, and break your self-defeating habits. 

Ho holds a PhD in clinical psychology from the California School of Professional Psychology, and is a board-certified clinical neuropsychologist, forensic psychologist, and health service psychologist. She’s also an associate professor at Pepperdine University. Ho has published research on cognitive processes, motivation, and behavioral change and has dedicated her professional career to helping people overcome psychological barriers, with a focus on understanding self-destructive patterns and promoting mental resilience.

This guide will start by explaining the root cause of self-sabotaging behavior: the conflict between the desire to get what you want and the desire to avoid what your mind perceives as danger. Next, we’ll discuss the specific patterns that self-sabotage tends to follow. Finally, we’ll explore how to overcome those self-defeating behaviors by regaining control of your thoughts and feelings, and replacing your self-sabotaging habits with empowering ones. 

Our commentary will support Ho’s ideas with background information from psychology and neurology. We’ll also explore how self-sabotaging tendencies can affect different people in different ways, particularly those with underlying mental health conditions. Finally, we’ll provide ideas to help you put these principles into practice and start overcoming your self-sabotaging habits. 

Why We Self-Sabotage

Ho says that overcoming your tendency to self-sabotage starts with understanding why you do it in the first place. She emphasizes that self-sabotage isn’t a personal failure, but a common human experience rooted in ancient survival mechanisms. Once you understand those mechanisms, you can start consciously working to disrupt and change your self-defeating thought patterns.

Self-Sabotage Comes From Competing Motivations

Ho explains that people have evolved with two fundamental motivations: to get rewards (things you want) and to avoid danger. These competing drives helped our ancient ancestors to survive by seeking out necessities like food and shelter, and avoiding deadly danger like predators. However, in the modern world, they can cause you to work against your long-term goals.

This happens because the tension between seeking rewards and avoiding threats creates what psychologists call the approach-avoidance conflict, meaning that something seems desirable and undesirable at the same time. People generally experience this conflict as an initial feeling of excitement and intense motivation, then their enthusiasm wanes as they realize that what they’re trying to do is more difficult or uncomfortable than they expected.

For example, someone who gets a great idea for a story might get excited and write thousands of words in a single sitting. However, as time goes on, they realize that writing a book takes a great deal more time and effort than they want to spend, they’re missing major plot elements, and some scenes are tedious to write. As a result, they lose interest in the project, and their book never gets finished. 

We Struggle With Outdated Defense Mechanisms

Ho adds that, of the two fundamental motivations (seeking rewards and avoiding danger), the drive to avoid danger is usually stronger. This makes sense because ancient humans wouldn’t be likely to, for instance, pick fruit from a tree that has a bear underneath it—better to miss a meal than to risk death.

While modern “dangers” aren’t usually life-threatening, people are still hardwired to respond as if they are. Therefore, even things you rationally know are only minor threats (such as potential embarrassment or physical discomfort) trigger the same fight, flight, or freeze responses that once protected our ancestors from deadly dangers.

For example, being rejected by someone you find attractive or interesting often triggers this protective response. That’s why it can seem so difficult and daunting to talk to someone you’re interested in, or to ask them out—your brain is conflating the fear of disappointment with the fear of death. As a result, people often choose not to even try, meaning they have a “flight” or a “freeze” response to that perceived danger. 

Recognizing Six Self-Destructive Thought Patterns

In addition to the two fundamental motivations people struggle with, Ho identifies six automatic thought patterns that can undermine personal progress and create psychological barriers. 

Note that everyone experiences these thought patterns to some extent. They’re essentially mental shortcuts: Your mind tries to fill in missing information in a way that’s likely to benefit or protect you. However, because of the overactive threat-avoidance drive we discussed before, these patterns often lead to overly negative assumptions and beliefs.

The six thought patterns Ho discusses are:

1. Oversimplifying and catastrophizing: Drawing broad, negative conclusions based on limited evidence. For example, if a student does badly on a test, they might assume that it’s because they’re stupid and unable to do better—when, in reality, anything from a bad night’s sleep to an upsetting personal event could be a better explanation for their poor performance on that one test. 

2. Binary thinking: Reducing complex situations to two opposite extremes. For instance, it’s common to talk about people’s careers in terms of “successful” or “failed”—typically depending on how much money they earned, how high of a position they reached, or how long they were able to keep a business afloat. However, this success-failure binary overlooks a lot of nuance and context: a so-called “failure” might have quit their career because they’d already achieved what they wanted, or because they found a new opportunity that was more personally fulfilling.

3. Assuming: Thinking you know others’ thoughts and motivations, even when you have no realistic basis for those assumptions. For example, suppose a coworker who usually greets you doesn’t say hello one day. You might assume that they’re upset with you, when in reality they were just preoccupied with something totally unrelated to you. 

4. Unrealistic standards: Holding rigid and unreasonable beliefs about what you should be doing, or be capable of doing. For example, workaholics feel guilty whenever they take time to rest, because they believe they should be working even harder than they already do.

5. Minimizing achievements: Discounting the things you’ve achieved as being unimportant or unimpressive. In a sense, this is the same self-esteem issue as unrealistic standards, but focused on what you’ve already done rather than what you’re currently doing.

6. Comparison: Comparing yourself against other people, usually to your own detriment. For example, suppose you’ve been working to lose weight; instead of being pleased with your progress, you might feel discouraged because you don’t look like Chris Hemsworth yet.

How We Self-Sabotage 

We just discussed why self-sabotaging behavior is hardwired into us by evolution. However, Ho says that self-sabotage is not an inevitable process. Instead, it’s a predictable sequence of psychological events, leading to self-defeating behaviors that become habitual over time.

In this section we’ll describe how this psychological sequence goes from a stimulus (something happening to you or around you) to your response (what you do because of that event). We’ll then discuss how people learn self-sabotaging behaviors in the first place, and why they engage in such behaviors. Finally, we’ll explain how those behaviors eventually turn into bad habits. 

How We Respond to Events

Ho explains how the psychological sequence that determines how you’ll respond to an event follows a concrete and predictable pattern. Understanding that pattern will help you recognize it before it pushes you into self-sabotaging behaviors. 

The psychological sequence begins when you experience something—anything from a major life-changing event to something as mundane as looking at the clock. That stimulus triggers you to have certain thoughts, which generate corresponding emotions and physiological reactions. Those feelings, in turn, prompt your behaviors. 

An example of how this process can play out in a self-destructive manner might begin with someone feeling overwhelmed (stimulus), which triggers the thought, “I’ll just check social media to relax.” That thought brings temporary relief or escape (emotion), which leads to hours of doomscrolling (behavior)—a self-sabotaging response that ultimately makes the person feel worse instead of better.

However, with consistent practice, you can change those ingrained thought and behavior patterns. The author adds that your goal shouldn’t be to eliminate self-sabotaging thoughts entirely—that’s impossible—but to develop greater emotional flexibility and resilience, so you can resist the impulse to turn negative thoughts into negative actions. 

Self-Sabotage Is Learned Behavior

Ho urges you to remember that self-sabotage is a behavior, which is an important fact for several reasons. 

First of all, behaviors serve specific purposes, primarily helping you either attain rewards or avoid threats (the two fundamental motivations we discussed earlier). However, while many learned behaviors do help you navigate your environment effectively, others are maladaptive: They’re inappropriate for the situation. For instance, a bullied child might learn that the only way to stay safe is to be quiet and avoid notice. However, once they grow up, those behaviors that once protected them will make it difficult to find jobs, meet people, and so on.

Furthermore, these maladaptive behaviors often start as coping mechanisms. This means that such behaviors offer immediate relief from negative feelings or uncomfortable situations, but are harmful in the long run. Drug use is a common example of this: People get high in order to escape from problems or negative feelings, but end up doing serious damage to their mental and physical health, their relationships, and their careers as a result. 

How Self-Sabotage Becomes a Habit

We previously discussed the mental process by which a stimulus leads to you taking  action in response. The method by which those actions become habits is similar, consisting of a cue, a behavior, and a result that reinforces the behavior. This three-step model helps to explain why people not only self-sabotage, but engage in the same self-sabotaging behaviors over and over again. 

Cues are the triggers or circumstances that precede a behavior, setting the stage for specific actions to occur. This is essentially the same as the stimuli we discussed before: Something happens that starts a chain reaction, with the end result being that you take an action. 

However, Ho adds that the power of cues lies in their ability to trigger learned behavioral patterns—in other words, habits. This means that certain cues always, or nearly always, prompt the same responses (like the person who scrolls social media for hours whenever they feel stressed).

Consequences also play a critical role in determining whether a behavior turns into a habit. The author says there are two types of reinforcement: Positive reinforcement means receiving some kind of reward that encourages you to repeat the behavior, such as positive attention or a small gift. Conversely, negative reinforcement means avoiding unpleasant experiences or feelings. They’re both called “reinforcement” because if something you do leads to either of those outcomes, then you’re likely to keep doing it—the results reinforce the behavior. 

Ho warns that negative reinforcement is especially powerful in driving self-sabotaging behaviors. By providing immediate relief from unpleasant feelings, such behaviors reduce  short-term discomfort while masking long-term consequences. For instance, procrastination might temporarily reduce your anxiety about a difficult or tedious task, even though it ultimately increases stress and lowers performance quality because of the time you’ve wasted. 

Overcoming Self-Sabotage

So far we’ve discussed the psychological roots of self-sabotage, and how it manifests in maladaptive behaviors that eventually turn into bad habits. In this final section we’ll explain Ho’s methods for breaking free of your self-sabotaging behaviors and building the kind of life you want. 

We’ll start by exploring how you can regain control of your thoughts and feelings—and therefore of your actions. We’ll explain why focusing on your deeply held personal values can help you stay in control and resist the impulse to self-sabotage. Finally, we’ll discuss how you can replace your bad habits with better ones, and why it’s necessary to replace those habits rather than just resisting them. 

Regaining Control of Your Thoughts

Ho emphasizes that your thoughts aren’t objective truths. Instead, they’re mental constructs built around your past experiences and influenced by your personality and (to some extent) by genetics. Recognizing thoughts as subjective mental events rather than immutable facts is crucial to breaking out of self-sabotage patterns. Ho offers several methods to help you recognize and transform self-destructive thought patterns.

One method is to rationally examine the thought and question its validity. This means determining what evidence supports your idea, what evidence might refute it, and what assumptions you made to arrive at your conclusion. It’s also helpful to consider other possibilities and perspectives to see if a different thought might be closer to the truth.

Ho says another technique is to distance yourself from a negative thought to lessen its impact. One way to do this is to identify and label the thought, rather than simply accepting it as true. 

For example, suppose you look in the mirror and don’t like what you see. Instead of internalizing the idea that you’re unattractive, you could take a mental step back and say, “I’m currently having the thought that I am unattractive.” This will help you to recognize that it’s only a passing thought, and not an accurate representation of yourself or of reality. 

Regaining Control of Your Feelings

The author says that, along with thoughts, emotions play critical roles in self-sabotage. Therefore, she introduces several techniques for gaining control over your feelings, reducing the likelihood of negative feelings turning into self-sabotaging behaviors.

One of these strategies is to “vent” your emotions by physicalizing them. This means turning abstract emotions into concrete forms or actions, such as hitting a punching bag or drawing a picture that represents your feelings. The key here is to work through your feelings by choosing a behavior that’s beneficial to you, or at least not self-destructive.

Another method the author suggests is opposite action, meaning you intentionally act in a way that’s the opposite of what you’re feeling. So, if you’re feeling sad, you might force yourself to laugh; if someone makes you angry, you could speak to them kindly instead of lashing out. The disconnect between your emotions and your actions will disrupt your thought patterns, helping you to regain control before negative feelings can push you into self-sabotaging behaviors.

Grounding Yourself in Your Values

Ho says that identifying and focusing on your personal values—deeply held beliefs that guide your decisions—is a crucial part of overcoming your self-sabotaging impulses. There are two key reasons for this.

First, setting personal and professional goals that are aligned with your core values creates powerful intrinsic motivation: a drive that’s based on your desires and sense of purpose, rather than on external rewards like money or status. This internal drive empowers you to overcome challenges and keep working toward your goals, even when doing so becomes challenging or unpleasant. 

On the other hand, when you pursue goals that don’t resonate with your core values, you’re likely to suffer from a lack of motivation, inconsistent effort, and a sense of dissatisfaction upon achieving those goals (if you ever do). In short, Ho argues that if your goals aren’t aligned with your values, you’re much more likely to self-sabotage. 

Furthermore, your values can guide your moment-to-moment decisions and steer you away from self-destructive behaviors. When you have a self-sabotaging urge you can pause, think about your core values, and then make a choice that aligns with your beliefs and goals. 

For example, suppose you promised you’d take your child to an event, but when the day comes you’re feeling tired and don’t want to go. Your impulse is most likely to find a reason to stay home, which would upset your child and possibly damage your relationship with them. However, if you have core values like honesty (which includes keeping your promises) or nurturing (raising a healthy and happy child), you can take a moment to reflect and recognize that living up to those values requires you to go to the event.

Replacing (Not Breaking) Self-Destructive Habits

To conclude, Ho discusses how to transform good intentions into behavioral change, thereby freeing yourself from self-sabotaging habits. She explains that the key is not to “break” your bad habits through willpower, but rather to replace bad habits with better ones. She also suggests two psychological techniques that can help you accomplish this. 

The first technique the author discusses is contrasting, which means vividly imagining the future you want for yourself, and comparing it against your present circumstances. The disconnect between where you are now and where you want to be will create cognitive dissonance: an unpleasant sensation that happens when you try to hold two conflicting ideas at once. That feeling will naturally motivate you to resolve the dissonance by overcoming your self-sabotaging habits and working toward your ideal future. 

The second method Ho suggests is called implementation intentions. Come up with an “if-then” statement that identifies a cue for one of your bad habits, then replaces that behavior with a better one. 

For example, say you have a bad habit of snacking late at night. In that case, you might set the intention: “If I feel like eating a snack before bed, I’ll drink a glass of water instead.” Setting intentions like this ahead of time helps because instead of trying to fight your bad habit as it arises, you’ve already made a plan for success—all you have to do is carry it out.

Willpower Isn’t Enough

In conclusion, Ho says that techniques like contrasting and implementation intentions are necessary because, contrary to popular belief, willpower isn’t an infinite resource. Just like your muscles get tired with use, your willpower becomes weaker as you make difficult decisions throughout the day. Furthermore, even when your willpower is at its strongest, there may be things you can’t do through sheer resolve, especially when it comes to breaking bad habits

Because your willpower is limited, it’s crucial to find ways to reduce your reliance on it, such as redirecting your existing habits instead of directly resisting them. After all, if you could break your bad habits through sheer willpower, you wouldn’t have needed to read this guide in the first place.

Exercise: Stop Sabotaging Yourself

Now that you’re familiar with Ho’s ideas about how and why you sabotage your goals, as well as ways to overcome that tendency, think about how you could start creating the life you want

  • What’s one goal you’ve had for a long time, but haven’t achieved? 
  • What negative thoughts and feelings about this goal could be getting in your way? For example, maybe you think it’s impossible or that you lack the skills to achieve it—as a result, you feel frustrated and hopeless when you think about that goal.
  • What actions do you take that sabotage your progress toward that goal? For instance, maybe you distract yourself from the negative feelings by playing video games or going out to the bar instead of working toward your goal. 
  • Come up with an implementation intention to overcome that self-sabotaging behavior. Remember that these normally take the form of an if-then statement. For example, “If I get the urge to play video games, then I’ll work toward my goal for one hour before starting to play.” 
Stop Self-Sabotage by Judy Ho: Book Overview & Lessons

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Like what you just read? Read the rest of the world's best book summary and analysis of Judy Ho's "Stop Self-Sabotage" at Shortform.

Here's what you'll find in our full Stop Self-Sabotage summary:

  • Why you tend to undermine your own success, despite having clear goals
  • Six self-destructive thought patterns that create barriers to success
  • How to overcome your bad habits and replace them with better ones

Hannah Aster

Hannah is a seasoned writer and editor who started her journey with Shortform more than four and a half years ago. She grew up reading mostly fiction books but transitioned to non-fiction writing when she started her travel website in 2018. Hannah graduated summa cum laude with a bachelor’s degree in English and double minors in Professional Writing and Creative Writing.

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