Self-Sabotage vs Self-Care
When you don't dare to try your best
I have spotted self-sabotaging behaviors in myself before. I procrastinate studying for my exam until the day right before it, and then I would cram from midnight to 9 AM before going to the exam. I can read fanfiction instead of paying attention to lessons or doing my homework.
I don’t know if I was doing this because I was so stressed out with most of my time spent studying, that I needed this outlet to rest, or because there is a part of me, that doesn’t want to try my best, because ‘what if I try my best and I still fail?’.
I often doubt my own decisions because I don’t know what I am doing is good for me.
For example, my current decision to ‘not take a job’ after graduating from my incredibly stressful PhD early this year (2025). I was burnt out two years into my PhD (2021), and now nearly four years later, I am still burned out.
I do believe in rest, because I have felt the effects of not taking a break properly and I am still recovering. I still have problems with clenching my jaw at night, even though I know that I shouldn’t, and it is very bad for me. It resulted in a cracked tooth, a root canal + crown procedure and that side still feels sore.
I am trying to actively rest and self care, by doing the things that I find fun and enriching. E.g. Going to the library, writing articles, thinking in my Zatelkasten and studying philosophy books. This is self development that I want to pursue for the sake of my own intellectual development, even if there is no course or certificate waiting behind that. And I think It is very freeing to be able to study things because I’m interested in them instead of because it makes me a better worker.
The problem here is that I’m also spending a lot of time at home in my room writing personal fiction that no one’s ever going to see and that I’m not going to make income from. I do have worries about how I’m gonna sustain my lifestyle, about being more difficult to employ because I’ve spent too long away from the job market and I haven’t really started and established myself in the workplace. I look at the news that says AI is on the rise and I feel like I should be trying to get a job because I have a PhD in AI and who knows how long this is going to be relevant.
My life is full of free time, but it is not necessarily helping me. recover better because I am facing anxiety and stress about the future even if I tell myself that I have earned enough money to take a break for a while There’s a voice in the back of my head that goes, ‘so how is the future going to be like when you’re done with this break?’ and yet, part of me is so very reluctant to get a job, that I don’t even want to think of that future.
There is the possibility that I won’t need to go and work for someone else, that I can be an entrepreneur, a content creator, a writer. But in my current state, I just don’t want to think about the future. I just want to take a break and I worry that this might be self-sabotage.
Am I doing this because it’s good for me to take a break, or because I’m not willing to try things (like get a job, or try dating) because I’m afraid I will fail. So rather than confront the reality that even if I do my best, it still won’t be good enough. I just preemptively self-sabotage by never actually trying, by procrastinating till this decision goes away, because the opportunities go away and I can find something else to blame for my failure.
No, this isn’t wanting to push the fault of my situation onto somebody else. It would still be my fault, but in the case above, I can just tell myself that ‘I don’t really want to date anyways’ or ‘well I didn’t try to get a job. But if I did, I probably could’. It’s this feeling of being unwilling to confront reality and escaping into fiction.
I can spend basically the entire day writing personal fiction that nobody else gets to see, and I have reasons not to monetize it. Like it’s fan fiction or it’s very weird fiction that isn’t written in the classic English literature style. I enjoy reading the fiction that I write for myself, but I don’t really want to share it. I treat it like a therapy journal.
But on the other side of things, I have spent 27 years of my life studying and I’m 28 years old. I really, really need a break. And part of that might just be needing to separate the things that I do, from what is done for other people.
If you have been following my writing for a while, you might have noticed that recently I moved from writing content that is designed for my readers to publishing things that I wrote for myself. My article now, like this one, are written as part of my thinking process, and I don’t want to think about who the target audience is, or what niche I’m supposed to be writing in.
It is difficult to figure out if my form of resting is a form of self-sabotage or if it is self-care.
Part 2
https://open.substack.com/pub/actionablenotes/p/this-is-self-handicapping?r=5g1wqv&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=true