Hello my friends, and welcome back to not another Mindset show. I’m your host, Dr. Kasey Jo. My goal with this podcast is to take the science of mindset and behavior change and distill it down into actionable takeaways for you. Together we’re gonna unpack research around motivations, self-sabotage, willpower, and so much more, and we’re going to take all of that and translate it into strategies you can immediately apply.

To your health, fitness, relationships, business, marketing clients, all of the things. But just to be clear, it’s not all serious and sciencey around here. We’re gonna have a ton of fun too, and I’m so excited to share all of this with you. All right, let’s go ahead and get into the episode. Hello. Hello my friends, and welcome back to not another mindset show.

Today we’re getting nerdy as if we don’t do that on half. More than half, 90% of these episodes. But we’re getting like real nerdy, ’cause we’re talking biology. We’re talking neuroscience. Of self-sabotage. And I have talked about self-sabotage a lot on this podcast show, and I’m going to link some additional episodes in the show notes that I think are gonna be beneficial for you.

If you’re listening to all of this and you’re like, okay, well, what are the next steps? What else do I need to know about self sabotage to help my clients, to help myself? I’ll make sure that you are well equipped, my friend. Uh, but today we’re, we’re talking kind of more about why self sabotage happens in the first place.

And I say this a lot, but it is just so important to really understand the foundations of why things are happening in the first place because I can give you all the tips and tricks and strategies and specific questions to ask your clients. And I have those, and you’ve heard me share those in this very podcast show.

But if you don’t understand why things are happening in the first place, and you’re just using those strategies blindly, they’re not gonna be very effective. And you’re not gonna know what to do after you actually get a response from your clients, and you’re not gonna know how to be able to pivot and do things differently for clients based on their specific situation.

So. That that’s so important. And I spend even inside the health Mindset coaching certification, which is sort of like my bread and butter program for coaches to learn how to leverage the science of mindset and behavior change in psychology. We spend a good chunk of time actually talking about like the theoretical underpinnings, if you will, of why all this stuff exists in the first place.

Because if you don’t understand client psychology, but you’re trying to use strategies inside in client psychology. It just, it just doesn’t work. It doesn’t work super well. So this specific episode was actually born out of a poll that I did on my Instagram stories, and I had hundreds of votes on this poll.

And what I learned is that you tend to lack confidence when it comes to how self-sabotage actually works, how it manifests, and why, and better understanding. Why your clients actually do it. So it’s like, you know, it’s there obviously, but then why it happens and what to do about it is, is somewhat lost on a lot of you.

And that’s no one’s fault except for maybe, I don’t know all of the health and fitness coach certifications that exist that don’t actually talk about this stuff, which is why I created one myself. By the way, um, in the health mindset coaching certification, this is like such. Such a big cornerstone of what we talk about is essentially helping your clients get around fixed mindset, self-limiting beliefs, things that, cause you guessed it, self-sabotage.

So. After seeing that, I’m like, okay, I’ve done a couple episodes on self-sabotage. Obviously I’m kind of like talking about self-sabotage a lot, whether it’s all or nothing thinking or fixed mindset, drama. Um, but I haven’t really talked about why it happens, how it happens. You are like. What’s going on in someone’s brain that leads to self-sabotage.

And the first thing I wanna talk about is your own mindset around self-sabotage. Because it’s not a very nice thing. It’s not a very pretty thing. It’s not something we talk very fondly about, right? Self-sabotage is, is bad, we don’t want it. However, I want you to understand that. Self-sabotage stems from biological adaptations to help us survive.

And that’s so much of what we do as humans. Like we’re just out here trying to survive and reproduce at the end of the day, we’re just animals. But it’s true, but it’s true. And if we can understand that, like, oh, this is actually somewhat of like a protective safety mechanism. It really starts to make a lot more sense.

And rather than just like getting pissed off as a health and fitness coach or getting upset with yourself because you’re self-sabotaging, you can go, oh, I understand why I’m doing this. And once you understand why you’re doing it, you can start to do things differently. So that is what we’re getting into today.

And. Yes, self-sabotage is a survival mechanism. And to be honest, if you never self-sabotage, then you probably would never survive a day in the wild. And what I mean by this is that we are focused on two main things. I mean, we’re focused on a lot of things, but for the the, the purpose of this podcast, we are focused on two main things.

We want to either attain, reward. Or we want to avoid threat. The reality is it’s really not an an or situation. Those are the two things that we want to accomplish, attain, reward, and avoid threat, and. We have been conditioned to understand that if we do these things, we’re attaining rewards and we’re avoiding threats, we are going to survive.

We’re going to avoid any mishaps with saber tooth tigers. And I say that, that’s always my example when I’m talking about these like biological wi wirings, the, the software that is our human brains. Because that’s where it came from. And although we aren’t battling Saber tooth Tigers anymore, we are still wired that way.

Instead we are battling like angry emails from clients. Right. So with that said, these desires still live on and can very much explain why self-sabotage exists in the first place. So this first desire attain, reward, the. Original Saber-tooth tiger days, the back, back in the day with the Saber-tooth Tigers.

The original rewards that we sought were pretty much solely focused on food, community stability, shelter survival, right? And in today’s society, we kind of have these. I guess secondary rewards that have been socially conditioned. You know, things like money, education, climbing the ladder, like all of those things are rewarding, but they still serve the same purpose of yes, attaining the reward, but providing that stability, safety, security, um, survival, right?

So it all kind of like comes back down to that and achieving these. Rewards these goals. It feels good. And it feels good because dopamine is released. So this is your little neuroscience lesson. Dopamine is released in anticipation of a reward, and when we have that dopamine released, it kind of creates this, this positive loop of like, oh.

Dopamine’s released in anticipation of the reward. We get the reward because of that dopamine. We want to do it again, and it kind of creates this cycle. Right. Um, and I guess like a quick note on dopamine too, because I hear it talked about, it’s like, oh, dopamine is released when you get a reward. No, it’s a reward seeking.

Neurotransmitter rather, and not pleasure. I hear that said a lot too. So it’s released really before, during, and after, which makes you more likely to want to do it again. So that’s thing number one. Desire number one, and I will tie this all into self-sabotage once I get through both of these. Um. The second desire is to avoid threat.

We don’t want to be in threatening situations again because it feels like it’s a threat to our survival. And Saber-tooth Tigers. Are no longer with us, but there are a lot of other threats to our wellbeing in our, in our day-to-day lives. Even if that’s things like, I know it seems crazy to like draw a parallel between a saber-tooth tiger and like discomfort, um, in like our day-to-day lives and doing things that scare us or intimidate us or whatever.

But that’s, it’s essentially. It’s igniting the same mechanisms in our brain, so when we feel threatened, we have a neurological response. Starting with your thalamus, this first detects that a threat is present. It’s kind of like your alarm bells going off in your head, and then your amygdala activates a fear response.

So it’s like, oh, this is something we should be scared of. We should be paying attention to this. Right? And that then initiates the good old sympathetic nervous system response. You know, fight, flight, freeze, all of that stuff. All because of a saber tooth tiger or an angry email, right? Um, so this process is, is interesting because it does increase cortisol, which is our primary stress hormone.

Everybody knows about cortisol these days, um, which makes the threat incident. Easier to remember, which is really interesting. And again, we like demonize cortisol all the time, but it’s really just doing something to protect us. It really is. And. With that, we’re essentially like building a library of memories based on this cortisol response of like, don’t do that again.

So with attaining rewards, it’s a let’s keep doing that Again, that’s what your brain is trying to help you do with threats. It’s a Let’s stop doing that. Let’s not go near the saber tooth tiger. Again, let’s not go into these like fearful situations because it’s a threat to our survival. However, because of this, we tend to selectively.

Remember mistakes and negative experiences over anything else, because the goal is to avoid those things. So your brain, again, has that like library of memories packed away, stashed away, like don’t do again, like warning. Warning, don’t go there. But the problem this poses in today’s world is that we have a lot of hypothetical threats, A lot of like, oh, I don’t.

Know if this feels like I should be doing this, or like, I don’t know how to do this yet, or I’m gonna make a fool of myself, or I’m going to fail, or you know, whatever that looks like for you. Anxiety, nervousness, stress, stuff that comes from that. And so that keeps us stagnant because we have those same alarm bells going off as if there was a saber tooth tiger in front of us.

But so much of it is hypothetical and we’re just worried about a hypothetical outcome from a hypothetical threat that we don’t actually know for sure. But. It’s just our brains trying to protect us. So your clients have this library of memories that is essentially keeping them from wanting to try new things or do things differently and avoid anything that could be threatening to their survival.

And I know that sounds like really, really intense and it, and it is, it’s not really rational, but we are very. Predictably irrational beings in general. So it becomes an issue and leads to self-sabotage. This avoiding threat and attaining reward kind of coming together here when there is the balance is out of whack.

Like if we have a happy balance of avoiding threat in attaining reward, we’re probably in a pretty good place. But when the balance of attaining reward. Avoiding threat gets thrown out of balance. That’s where we run into issues. This is specifically an issue when the desire to avoid threat overrides and is something that’s more important to us than the desire to obtain the reward.

So clients. Start to move away from doing things that actually support their goals because they’re so worried about these threats. And again, a lot of them are like hypothetical that that’s becomes more important than actually obtaining the world. Okay, so the thing is, none of this is inherently bad. The desire to obtain reward, the desire to avoid threat.

It’s all, it’s all just mechanisms trying to help us, right? But it becomes an issue when these things are out of balance. Specifically. For instance, if we’re thinking about our clients as health and fitness coaches, you’re thinking about yourself. If your desire to avoid threat. Overrides and is more important to you than obtaining reward.

That’s when we start to see self-sabotaging behaviors surface. So when this happens, we run into something called the approach avoidant conflict, and this is essentially a psychological phenomenon that occurs when someone is faced with a decision or a situation, I guess that. Has both desirable and undesirable outcomes and like, hello, welcome to health and Fitness, everything, right?

If we’re trying to change our lifestyles to be healthier, to be more fit, to be focusing on these things, there are lots of undesirable things with having to change your lifestyle in that way, and a lot of hypothetical threats and a lot of like real threats. Let’s be honest. And there’s also a lot of really desirable outcomes.

So you can see very clearly here how these desires with reward and threat can very quickly be thrown off balance when we’re talking about health and fitness behaviors, which is why we see self-sabotage being like one of the biggest issues when it comes to creating new behaviors and habits in a healthier lifestyle.

So. Again, when the desire to avoid threat overrides attaining reward, this takes clients away from doing things that actually support their goals because they’re so worried about the threat that that becomes more important than the reward. So an example would be like a client who wants to lose weight, right?

This client is probably also worried about. All of the changes that are going to be necessary to be made in their lives and their lifestyle, the conversations that they’re gonna have, the, again, often hypothetical threats of like what ends up feeling like you’re being like exiled from your community because you’re not doing the things that everybody else is doing, and that’s what it, it can really feel like.

Right? So their desire. To avoid the, the worry or the anxiety that comes along with that can override the desire to actually attain the reward, the outcome, the healthy lifestyle, the weight loss, right? So as a coach. Because of this, like self-sabotage can really feel like something that’s totally out of your control.

But when you realize that it’s just really this biological wiring, guess what? We can also rewire that we can think differently, and I think that this is like a beautiful thing to. Be sharing with your clients and help them better understand. Because if we better understand why we’re thinking certain ways why we’re doing things, I mean, how often do you hear from clients or do you say this to yourself?

I just, I know I want these things, but I don’t know why I keep getting in my own way or why that’s so hard for me, or why I can’t stick to it. Like I don’t understand. I don’t get it. And if you can understand and you can get it, you can take your power back. You can feel more in control. And guess what?

When we feel more in control. That also helps us feel safer and more secure. So you can see how that can kind of be like the antidote to some of these self-sabotaging behaviors, or at least the start, right? I won’t say that that will solve everything. Go tell your clients about the saber-tooth tigers and suddenly they never self-sabotage.

Again, that’s not the case, but it can definitely be helpful and I would argue is necessary to really understand where this stuff is coming from in the first place. So. The next step here now that we kind of like understand the very, very, very basics of self-sabotage and what might be going on here is to better determine the type of self-sabotage that your clients are experiencing.

’cause there’s all different types and everybody is so different in these experiences. So that’s where I do have a podcast episode on. On the shit method, as I call it, it’s SHIT, and that will help you diagnose the type of self-sabotage with your clients or again, with yourself. So I’ll make sure that that episode is linked in the show notes.

That’s episode eight if you have not listened to the that yet, but I do hope that this just really. Really changes your mindset at least a little bit starts to shift it in this direction of like, okay, self-sabotage isn’t necessarily inherently a bad thing. It’s coming from a lot of really good things.

It doesn’t support us in our goals, but if we can better understand it, you know, show it a little bit of love. Some compassion here for, for the self-sabotage, for the saber tooth tigers. Um, and better understand it, that that can give you more power to really start to change it. And that is all I have for you on the biology of self-sabotage.

I feel like this, this episode really could have been three hours, but I was like, let me just like dial it into these two big desires that we have and how. When they’re out of whack, that’s where self-sabotage really starts to surface because I want you to really just start thinking about this on a basic level and, and just make more sense of it.

So I hope it was helpful and I’ll see you next time. And that’s a wrap for today’s episode of Not Another Mindset show. If you enjoyed today’s episode. Don’t forget to hit that subscribe button so you get notified of the next one, because if you’re anything like me, if the episodes aren’t popping up for you automatically, you’ll keep forgetting to come back to the show even if you really, really enjoyed it.

So go ahead and hit that subscribe button and make it super easy for you and of course. If you wanna see more episodes just like this one, I’d love for you to let me know by leaving a review. I know, I know it’s super annoying to do, but the few seconds that it takes means the world to me and also ensures that I can keep providing free education and value to you.

And just to sweeten the deal, I am going to be picking a random reviewer every single month to receive a free workshop or product from me if you’re looking for more free resources. Or just wanna connect, hang out, chat a little bit. Come find me on Instagram. I’m Coach Casey, Joe over there. That is where I hang out the most in the land of social media.

Alright, my friends, that is all I have for you this time. I so appreciate you being here and love to see you prioritizing your growth. I’ll see you next time.