Ep. 13 - Why You Keep Sabotaging Yourself — And How to Finally Stop

Do you ever feel like you're your own worst enemy? Like, no matter how much you achieve or how hard you try, there's a voice inside that's always ready to pull you back down?

In this episode, Sophie starts with something that might genuinely change the way you see yourself: the science of negativity bias — the biological reason your brain is wired to focus on the negative, and why that means self-sabotage isn't a character flaw. It's a survival mechanism you no longer need to be ruled by.

From there, Sophie takes you through the inner bully so many of us have been living with for decades — often without even realizing it — and offers a completely different way of looking at where you are in midlife. Not as a crisis, but as an awakening. A turning point. The moment when you decide the next chapter is going to look different.

This one is warm, honest, and deeply practical. There's a simple takeaway at the end that you can start using today.

If you've ever whispered to yourself, "Why do I keep doing this to myself?" — this episode is your answer.

Visit SophieUliano.com/podcast for access to an amazing collection of free resources!

Subscribe, leave a review, and share with a woman who needs to hear this today.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:02

Hey, welcome to another episode of Tea with Sophie. If you are somebody who sabotages yourself all the time, then this episode is for you. I'm going to explain why you do this, why it's normal, why we all do it. Once you understand why you do it, you're going to know how to work with it so that this sort of system that you have within, which is actually a protective system to keep you alive, I'm going to show you how to work with it so that it doesn't run your life anymore. And by the end of this episode, you'll understand how to stop sabotaging yourself. All right, I'm going to take a sip of my beautiful. I've got I'm trying a new matcha this week, a new brand of matcha, and I'm really, really enjoying it. Okay, so negativity bias is what I am talking about here. And this is really important to understand. So it's one of the most well-documented features of the human brain, is something called negativity bias. And this is what psychologists understand, and it this has been extensively written about. And I'm going to explain what it is because this explains succinctly why you default all the time to self-sabotage, to basically being mean to yourself. And after years of it, because the women that I work with are most of them are 50 and over, this is we've really entrenched these neural pathways in our brain of being really not very kind to ourselves. So why do we do it? What is the biological adaptation? So negative negativity bias served us at a time when we needed to survive. So our ancestors, you know, millions of years ago, um, they didn't, they weren't scanning and looking around for the beautiful sunset or for what was positive or what was working, you know, in their life and in themselves, because that wouldn't have kept them alive. What actually kept them alive was scanning for where is the danger coming from? Where is the threat coming from? If I've made a mistake, I better do something completely different next time. I better pay attention to every mistake that I make because it's a matter of survival. So to look for the negative, to look for the threat, to look what's wrong, to look for the mistakes that you're making, that is basically what negativity bias is. It is a part of your brain, it is a default for many, many years, like many of the adaptations that we have evolved to have, it's survival. It basically kept us alive, but we do not need it anymore. Just as much as you know, millions of years ago, we needed, we evolved a taste for high high caloric, sweet, fatty, salty foods. Why? To literally keep us alive. And now in our modern day culture and and uh our modern-day environment, excuse me, um, those are the very foods that are making us, you know, fat, sick, and miserable, basically. So it's really important to understand how the human being evolves over time and how it was adaptive at one time. There is a reason for almost everything in the way that we move through the world and we think and the tastes that we've evolved to help us survive in times of whenever it was way back then. But how is very interesting to me, and I think this was interesting when I very, very first started studying evolutionary psychology, which as an adult learner was one of the most fascinating um courses uh that I ever learned when I was going back to school, because it fascinated me, this idea that we um we evolve and we adapt this psychology to do uh whatever it is that we need to do as human beings, which basically is to survive and how it becomes maladaptive over time. So that's why you sabotage yourself all the time. That's why you have a little voice in your head all the time going, You're an idiot, you shouldn't have done that, you're not enough, you don't deserve, you better be looking out for every single threat and danger. You are going to be, um, things are gonna go wrong, um, things are not gonna work out for you, and you know what that voice is that I'm talking about. Um, but this is where it's gone wrong for you today, and this is where we can change it. So that voice in your head, I want you to start taking a step back and realizing that you have a voice that is almost like a constant companion, is with you all the time. Most of the time you're not aware of it because it sort of lives in your subconscious mind, but it's there all the time. It's a constant background chatter and conversation that is going on as it's scanning and making meaning about what's going on, about what your day is, who you are, etc. And I think for most of us, that voice is not very kind. Now, number one, I've already explained negativity bias, which is we're dealing with that first off. Secondly, we have been raised, many of us, with beliefs and stories, and we've been handed, inherited, if you like, these beliefs about ourselves, which really don't serve us. That this this now compounds the issue. So wherever we picked it up somewhere along the way, um, that you know, you're not good enough and you can't shine, and you're a bad person, and you never get things right, and you shouldn't feel like this, and you are selfish, or um, you don't deserve. Now, you might not have been directly told that by a parent or caregiver, you don't deserve and you're not a value, but you felt that way, and then you made meaning a certain look that somebody gave at you. Maybe there was abandonment issues, maybe your caregivers or parents weren't there for you in a very nurturing way. Maybe something happened to you along the way. And so we start to pick up and layer on these beliefs and these meanings of, oh, that happened, therefore, that means that I'm unlovable, that I'm not good enough, that I don't deserve. So it's complex. And this is why the work that I do with my clients is we really want to look underneath the hood and really understand what's going on individually with us. But suffice to say that I have never met anybody in the 20 odd years that I've been coaching who hasn't had this constant running, we call it that what's going on in your operating system, dialogue that isn't helpful or useful anymore. It has become maladaptive. So you're walking around with this conversation all day long, and it is not making you feel very good, it's not productive, it's not empowering, and it makes you feel hard, um, contracted, it just doesn't feel good, uh, basically. And so I want you to imagine something. If you had a friend following you around, or somebody, not a friend, but somebody following you around all day long, let's separate that voice out and let's go that voice is an actual person. Okay. With the women that I work with within the Ignite methodology, we sort of give it a name to understand how loud and ridiculous we almost want to make it a bit cartoonish so that we can really see it. We call it the sort of supervillain. But imagine that there's this being, this entity that's following you around all day and it's saying, is talking to you, okay? And you drop something, you're an idiot, idiot. You always do that. Oh, come on, you can do better. No, you can't do that. You'll always fail. See, you did it again. You're useless. You've got so much to worry about, you're not going to be able to get things done. You haven't got time. You're looking so old and and and ugly. Look at your belly fat. It's absolutely disgusting. I mean, I'm I'm I'm being uh I'm exaggerating a little bit here, but I'm kind of not. Because if you really think about it and you take a step back and you really hear that conversation when you're driving, when you're walking, when you're standing in line at the grocery store, you know, oh, you forgot that again. Oh, you're never going to be able to do that. Oh, that recipe's too difficult. Oh, you're never going to be able to stick to this way of eating. Oh, you're useless. Oh, you feel so horrible. There are so many things wrong with you. And it just goes on and on and on. So imagine that's an actual person, an entity who is talking to you like that. Okay, that is you. That is what you live with all the time. And so you wouldn't tolerate that. If it was an actual person talking to you on your back all the time, following you around, you wouldn't tolerate that. At some point, unless you were, you know, you had serious patterns of, you know, I'm really up for constant abuse 24-7. Um, you would, you, you just, most of us just would, when we really heard and heard it and saw it, would be like, no, that is absolutely intolerable. Go away. That it would almost be a form of insanity. It's like, I am not tolerating that. And yet we tolerate it within ourselves every single day, and have been for decades and decades and decades. And we get by, and every now and again we come out of it. And some of us have done therapy and whatever, we've done journaling, we've done our self-help work, and every now and again we do our affirmations, but then it's so, so easy to slip back into that because that voice just it's so familiar that it lives in our subconscious. So, you know, if we talk about the super villain, she kind of lives undercover. I always say she does push-ups while we're sleeping, because just when you're unaware, it just kind of pipes back up again. Um, and so you what I want you to really think about here is I want you, this is your wake-up call for this episode. So I was thinking about this when I was journaling this morning. I look back at my life, at my past over the last 20 odd years. I'm almost 62. So I look back and I go, okay, I'm gonna look back over the last 22 years of my life. And if I really am honest and think, how much time, and I do this for a living, I coach women for a living. I'm probably more aware than the average Jane out there, but and have become increasingly so, I will say, over the last decade. But certainly from my in my 30s and 40s, let's go back a little bit further. When I think of the amount of time that I have wasted hours, days, months, years, if it was actually time on the clock, where I have been allowing that voice to dictate you're not good enough, you you you're not valuable, you don't deserve, you can't, you can't, you don't have a right to say that or to be that or to do that, and on and on. The time that I have wasted, if I could go back and change anything, and I'm a great believer in not going back and changing things, because I think we can use our past as a tool and see how our past, even you can look at your past, by the way, and and and and change your story and the voice that you narrative that you have about your past. That's for another episode. But when I look back, I think, goodness, you know, how heartbreaking, how heartbreaking. I'll sometimes look at photographs of myself as a new mother, you know, when I was 37 years old, when I had my daughter. And it just breaks my heart. You know, I was doing the best that I could do with the tools that I had, and yet still, oh, forever guilty, you're not this enough. As a mother, you're not that enough, you're not doing this. Look at her, da-da-da-da-da-da. Seriously. So, here's the wake-up call for this episode of T with Sophie is I want you to think of your future self. And my clients and I, we we spend a lot of time focusing on that version of ourselves. So, think about your future self-like you're on your last legs here. You're you're you're near the end, whatever age that is for you. Hopefully, for most of us, it'll be in our late 90s, but you're near the end. And I want you to imagine that you're looking back at the last few decades of your life until where you're sitting here now, okay, and she, that version of you, is looking back. Okay, now you have an opportunity. You're in midlife now, and you've got an opportunity to change this. But if you got to your dying day and you would spend another 20 or 30 years just basically being unkind and mean to yourself, how heartbreaking would that be? So that's what I really want you to think about. When you think about that beautiful version of you that God willing you will become, that wise, sage, inspiring, deep, kind, compassionate, that who you really are, your higher self, whatever you want to call it, but she, as your future self, is looking back at you now. What would she say to you now? She would go, don't waste a second, please, don't waste another day talking to yourself, allowing yourself to be talked to like that, actually. Now we're giving that voice a different entity. Because I think it helps to do that because it's so hard to hear it in ourselves, right? So let's change this. Let's change it. Let's learn to talk to ourselves with more kindness, with more love, with more encouragement. Can you imagine if that voice, and this is what I want you to imagine, start doing, is can you imagine, even just for one day, for one day, you practice this, you spend the entire day from when you wake up in the morning and your first waking thoughts are, oh, what a beautiful day. This day is going to be. I want now, stay with me here. I want you to imagine that you're talking to a beautiful, innocent child or somebody who you love unconditionally more than anything else in the world, right? I want you to imagine you're talking to that, that, that, that being. Oh, it's a beautiful, it's going to be an amazing day. No, you that you know, I know that you've got a few challenging things ahead of you and challenging circumstances in your life, but you can do it. Look at what you've done in the past. You are so resilient, you are so strong, you are so brilliant. Come on, let's get up and do this. And then every single step of the way, you know, you go and stand outside and and and get some light. Oh, look, that's a win. You're getting some light in your eyes. Oh, you drop something. Oh, never mind. You know, that happens all the time, but you're so good at at, you know, when you drop things or you make a mistake or you, you know, drop the forget to put the lid on the blender with the smoothie, which I've done before, and it went all over the ceiling of my kitchen. You know, oh my gosh, that is so normal, you know, to forget to do these things sometimes to get the lid on. They're really tight on lids on the Vitamix. It's easy not to click it in place. Uh you can see where I'm going with this, on and on. Okay, and now you're thinking about your work day, and you're like, oh, okay, I get it. You know, you're human. It's it's you feel a little anxious or scared about whatever it might be, you know, but you know, you've got this. So that's the voice that I'm talking about. It's you can call it the voice of your fairy godmother, you can call it the voice of your cheerleader, you can call it the voice of unconditional love. You know, if you uh, you know, if you if your faith is, if you use the word God and and and and that and you're that is the faith that you align with, sometimes you would might want to ask yourself, well, you know, how would how would God, how, how would this divine loving presence talk to me all the time? So there's the voice. Um, so let's not spend the last chapter, the next chapter, like the last one. All right. So let's not have the supervillain undermine everything that you do, okay, while you're doing incredible things in your life. How sad is that? You're doing incredible things in your life, you're taking care of elderly parents, you're getting through diagnoses and an enormous challenge, you're helping um raise children in the world. And sometimes those children are having great difficulty. You are overcoming enormous grief in your life because at a certain age we are going to be losing people that we love, uh, pets that we love. Um, you are doing all these incredible things and you are becoming stronger and stronger. And there has never been a time where women, particularly, I think, post-menopause, have this opportunity to step into this incredible version of themselves and take a stand for that and really go, yeah, this is me now. This is what, because the other thing is, and I think this is the other little thing, is that I think some women think, well, it sort of keeps me right size, it keeps me in check. That's certainly a belief that I was raised with. You couldn't you don't talk up yourself, you talk down yourself. I think it's partly being a bit of a British thing as well. You know, it's always that thing of, you know, being very quote unquote, it's kind of false humility and false modesty in a way. Um, so a lot of women I work with also have, you know, it's it's a real challenge to take a stand for their wins and their celebrations and who they are and what they're doing. We really do need to flex that muscle because if you think about it, when somebody walks into a room, another woman, and she really, because that's humble, that's humble, to stand and take a stand for who you are and what you're doing, and to be really, really proud of that, and to really say it out loud and declare it. That is not boasting, that is not showboating, that is being real, that is humility. People think that, oh, it's humble saying, Oh, I'm such a bad person and I'm such a nightmare and everything goes wrong. No, that's not humble. That's actually arrogance. Because that's you standing on high, judging yourself. That's arrogance. God doesn't judge you that way. The most loving part of you doesn't judge yourself that way. You wouldn't uh judge a divine, beautiful being like that. So that's arrogance. Humility is seeing things as they are, human. Humility is being human, meaning that when you make mistakes and when you slip up, which I hope you do, by the way, because the only way we grow is by making mistakes and having quote unquote failures. And so that's happen, that's part of growth. That is absolutely beautiful. Just as much as a child learning to ride a bicycle, she is gonna fall. She's gonna wobble and fall. She's gonna have her training training wheels on. And then when you take those training wheels off, that happened with me, it happened with my daughter. She fell a few times and she was furious and mad and upset and she hurt and scuffed her knee and all of that business. Yeah, that's how she learned to do that. It's all part of the failure. But then what we learn to do is not to say you're a bad person for that failure. Look at you, you're an you that that was ridiculous that you did. That was so stupid. You must never do that again. No, no, that's okay. That is normal. We took the training wheels off. You're gonna wobble probably quite a lot more, you're gonna fall down, you know. And the beautiful thing is that I know you can keep on coming up again, uh again and again and again. That's the voice, that's what we want to employ. All right, so um, one other little thing. You weren't born with that voice. You weren't born with it. Okay, you weren't born with the little baby, there's something wrong with you, you're a bad person. Okay. There's a divine, perfect, beautiful, light, and human being. That's how you were born. So then, yes, we have the negativity bias, which we've evolved over years. Hopefully, now you're aware of that, you know what you're working with. Okay, and then on top of that, we've got all the years of inherited beliefs and meanings that we've made. Some of us had an easier time growing up, and we were given a lot more confidence and unconditional love by our parents and caregivers, and that's a huge advantage. So maybe your supervillain isn't quite so loud and mean, but um, and but some of us weren't. And either way, I think we've all got that voice that can become a lot kinder and a lot more supportive. So this is your takeaway for from this episode is catch the voice. Just catch it, okay, and name it when it happens. You might be waiting at a traffic light and you may be going through, oh, I shouldn't have done that. That was so stupid. That conversation that I had, or I can't, whatever it might, or I can't do that, or I blew. It again or whatever. Just notice. Oh, there it is. There's a super villain. There she is. She's a bully. She's a bully. She has become a bully. And with bullies, okay, we don't just pretend they're not there. Because if we pretend they're not there, they become louder. If you've ever, ever experienced a bully in a classroom, a teacher of a classroom, I've taught in classrooms. I taught sixth grade at my daughter's school for a while. I taught science and gardening at a crazy public school. The bullies. If you just ignore them and shut them out of the room, they're gonna get louder, they're gonna try and bang that door down. No. You bring them in quietly and you go, hey, what's going on? I need to hear what's going on. Listen to what you're saying. I'm listening to what you're saying. Let's really unpack this. Let's really unpack this. You're I know you're hurting, because hurt people, hurt people. The hurt part, the hurt part of yourself comes back to hurt you. But we don't shut the bully out, we don't shut the superfillin out. We go, hey, I just want to take a listen to what you're saying. We're not talking about toxic positivity here. I want to see what you're saying. Oh, okay.

unknown 23:17

Okay.

SPEAKER_00 23:19

Okay. I'm not gonna listen to that. That isn't helpful to me. That is not empowering. Service is no longer required, is what we often say in my program. Service is no longer required. So now I'm gonna replace that voice with the voice of my fairy godmother, or the voice of kindness, or whatever word you want to use, the voice of God, whatever works for you. I'm just gonna replace that. And this is life-changing when you do this. So the simple question that you ask yourself when you catch yourself, which you will occasionally, so practice. Would I say this to someone I love? Would I say this to somebody love? And if the answer is no, you don't have to believe it either. So that's it for this episode of Tea with Sophie. I've been talking so much that I haven't had a drink of my beautiful matcha, so I'm going to enjoy this right now. You can go to SophieYuliano.com forward slash podcast to see the other episodes and any information that I drop in, show notes and whatnot from other episodes. Please follow wherever you're watching, please leave a review. Not everybody says that, but this is quite a new podcast, so that may it's a very new podcast, actually. So that makes such a difference to me. Um, if you're watching on YouTube, leave me a comment. I want to know what's going on with you. I want you to try this for a day, just one day, and see how many times you catch yourself. You catch the super villain, and let me know in the comments. And any other details, if you're watching on YouTube, in the description below, and I will see you for the next episode of Tea with Sophie. Cheers. But anyway, I think probably a better term is probably now must stay, which I do love, which is the good in me or the spirit in me bows down to the good and the spirit in you. I'll see you next time.