Struggling emotionally can leave a lasting imprint. When life becomes painful, uncertain, or overwhelming, the mind adapts by creating strategies to cope. Over time, these strategies can turn into habits, shaping how you think, feel, and respond to challenges. Even when circumstances improve, those habits do not automatically disappear.
This is why self sabotage often shows up just as things begin to feel better. A single difficult day can suddenly feel like proof that nothing has changed. Old thoughts return, familiar emotions resurface, and it can feel as though all progress has been lost. In reality, this reaction is rarely a true setback. It is more often the mind trying to return to what it knows.
Quick Answer: Self sabotage happens when the unconscious mind pulls you back into familiar thoughts, emotions, and habits, even when you are starting to feel better. This usually occurs because the mind associates familiarity with safety, not happiness. By understanding how unconscious patterns work and learning to recognise sabotaging thoughts early, it becomes possible to respond differently and move forward without feeling like you are back at square one.
Lifestyle matters for fertility. A BMC Public Health study found that women with 4–5 healthy habits had a 59% lower risk of infertility.
Fill out the questionnaire, and get a personalised, holistic and evidence-based programme tailored to you.
takes 3 minutes to completeThis article explains how self sabotage works at an unconscious level, why it is most likely to appear during positive change, and how awareness can help you break the pattern without forcing yourself into false positivity.
Self sabotage refers to unconscious thoughts, emotions, or behaviours that undermine progress, even when that progress is genuinely happening. It is rarely intentional. In most cases, it happens automatically, driven by deeply ingrained mental and emotional patterns.
Self sabotage can look like:
What makes self sabotage confusing is that it often appears just when improvement begins. This timing can make it feel personal or discouraging, but it is actually predictable once the mind’s role is understood.
Lasting emotional and mindset change happens at the unconscious level. Conscious efforts such as positive thinking or motivation can help temporarily, but they rarely create long-term change on their own.
The unconscious mind has one primary priority: safety. Its job is to keep the body alive, protect against danger, and maintain internal stability. To do this, it relies heavily on familiarity. What is known feels safer than what is unknown, even if the known experience is uncomfortable.
This is why change can feel threatening. When you begin to think differently or feel better, the unconscious mind may interpret this shift as risky simply because it is unfamiliar.
One of the most confusing aspects of self sabotage is that it often appears after emotional improvement. You may notice that after a period of feeling calmer, more hopeful, or more in control, a sudden emotional crash occurs.
This happens because the mind is adjusting to a new internal state. If the mind has spent a long time operating in stress, fear, or sadness, those states become familiar. Feeling better can feel unfamiliar and therefore unsafe.
In response, the unconscious mind may try to pull you back to your old emotional baseline. It does this not to harm you, but to restore what it believes is safety through familiarity.
This content is for educational purposes only. It has been reviewed for scientific accuracy, but it does not constitute medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Always consult a qualified healthcare professional regarding medical questions or fertility treatment decisions.
Reviewed for scientific accuracy by: Dr. Mona Bungum
Last reviewed: January 2026
Lifestyle matters for fertility. A BMC Public Health study found that women with 4–5 healthy habits had a 59% lower risk of infertility.
Fill out the questionnaire, and get a personalised, holistic and evidence-based programme tailored to you.
takes 3 minutes to completeA comfort zone is not defined by happiness. It is defined by what is known. Emotional comfort zones are built through repetition, not wellbeing.
For example, someone may feel emotionally “comfortable” in:
Even though these states feel unpleasant, they are predictable. Predictability is interpreted by the unconscious mind as safety.
When you begin to move outside this emotional comfort zone, even in a positive direction, the mind may react strongly in an attempt to return you to what feels familiar.
Thoughts and emotions reinforce each other. When a certain thought pattern repeats often enough, it becomes a habit. Over time, these habits form strong neural pathways in the brain.
Imagine a small path forming in grass. The more it is walked on, the clearer and easier it becomes to follow. Eventually, it turns into a well-worn route. In the brain, negative thought patterns can become that path of least resistance.
Examples include:
These thoughts may feel automatic because the brain has learned them through repetition.
Change requires energy. Creating new thought patterns means building new neural pathways, which takes time and consistency. In the early stages, these new pathways are fragile compared to the old ones.
The unconscious mind may resist this effort by:
This resistance does not mean change is failing. It means change is happening.
Self sabotage can appear in subtle ways. It may not look dramatic or obvious. Often, it appears as internal dialogue rather than external behaviour.
Common signs include:
When these patterns are unconscious, they feel convincing. Awareness is what allows you to separate a bad day from actual regression.
A bad day does not erase progress. However, when the mind equates emotional discomfort with failure, a single difficult moment can feel overwhelming.
This happens because old neural pathways activate quickly. When a familiar emotional state returns, the mind may conclude that nothing has changed, even when change has already occurred.
Progress is not measured by the absence of difficult days. It is measured by how quickly you recover and how you respond when challenges appear.
Recognition is the turning point. Once you understand how self sabotage works, it becomes easier to observe it without being consumed by it.
Instead of asking “Why am I back here?” you can ask:
These questions create distance between you and the thought pattern.
Change does not happen overnight. Emotional safety expands slowly as new experiences become familiar.
Each time you allow yourself to feel better without panicking, you are expanding your comfort zone. Each time you notice sabotaging thoughts without acting on them, you weaken old neural pathways.
Over time, the new way of thinking becomes the new normal.
The goal is not to eliminate negative thoughts completely. The goal is to respond differently when they arise.
Helpful responses include:
Gentleness is key. Self sabotage thrives on self-criticism. Awareness and compassion weaken it.
Forcing positivity can backfire. When emotions are suppressed, they often return stronger. Real change comes from understanding, not denial.
Allowing yourself to acknowledge difficult feelings while recognising that they do not define your progress creates emotional resilience.
True emotional stability comes from flexibility, not constant happiness.
New habits form through repetition. Each time you choose a supportive response over an automatic one, you reinforce a new pathway.
This process includes:
Consistency matters more than perfection.
Once you understand that self sabotage is a protective response, it loses much of its power. You stop taking every thought personally and start seeing patterns instead.
Awareness turns confusion into clarity. It allows you to recognise progress even when emotions fluctuate.
Self sabotage is not a sign of weakness or failure. It is a natural response of the unconscious mind when change begins to happen. Familiar discomfort can feel safer than unfamiliar ease, even when ease is what you want.
By understanding how the mind works, recognising sabotaging patterns early, and responding with awareness rather than judgment, it becomes possible to move forward without feeling trapped by old habits.
Progress does not mean never struggling again. It means knowing how to come back to yourself more quickly when challenges arise.
00:00:00 Fertility struggles are a crushing blow to the joy, love, happiness and excitement that we thought trying to have a baby would be about, and can replace it with the most unimaginable feelings and experiences that we didn't even know or think we were capable of going through. So when you start to feel better mentally and emotionally on the fertility journey, naturally you don't ever want to feel those painful feelings again. And in my experience as a fertility coach, I started to notice a trend with my clients. We started to get them feeling as a fertility coach, I started to notice a trend with my clients. We started to get them feeling really amazing again and quite quickly, and then they would have a bad day and feel like they were
00:00:39 back at square one all over again because they were experiencing some of the prior thoughts and feelings. Hi there, I'm Bella Hilton from Studio Fertility. I'm a certified advanced life coach, master NLP practitioner and hypnofertilitist, and host of the much-loved Studio Fertility podcast. I work with women all over the world, doing this work, helping them with the mental and emotional journey of fertility doing this work, helping them with the mental and emotional journey of fertility so they can feel in control again. And I do this because I went through a 10-year-long journey myself. And today I want to talk to you about how your mind can sabotage you as you establish more
00:01:12 helpful mental and emotional strategies. Like I said, I noticed my clients would have these crash days, these crash moments, until they talked to me again and I showed them how they were not in fact back at square one and how quickly they could get themselves back to normal. Back to feeling good again. Because we all have bad days. That's part of being human. But we don't Back to feeling good again. Because we all have bad days. That's part of being human. But we don't all understand how our minds work that can allow us to separate out bad days and sabotage so that we don't go back to square one. When you're educated about how your mind and body work, and you have the tools to help yourself, then you have real choice to help yourself.
00:01:48 But when you don't understand or have those tools, then you can sink further down and not know why or how to do anything about it. So today I'm going to help you to understand that. How your mind can sabotage you as you're starting to feel better. And I'm going to give you real How your mind can sabotage you as you're starting to feel better. And I'm going to give you real examples to follow. So let's understand a few things because we need to understand your unconscious mind. Any real change in our mindset and emotions happens at the unconscious level. Otherwise, we're trying to force ourselves to think and feel more positively. And that doesn't last. That can lead to toxic positivity, because we're actually just pushing down the
00:02:27 feelings. That's like seeing a motivational speaker and feeling that motivation for a bit, feelings. That's like seeing a motivational speaker and feeling that motivation for a bit, but then it goes because it's not self-motivated, self-sustained, and not enough of a change has happened to take hold. Have you experienced that? Like every year I would watch the Australian Open as a kid and get all excited about playing tennis again. And I'd drag my friends a couple of times with me, probably I guess they will, to play tennis. But then the Australian Open would stop. And I'd be like, oh, I'm not going to play tennis. I'm not going to play tennis. I'm not going to play tennis. And I'd stop. And I'd stop being in the world of tennis. And I'd lose my
00:02:57 going to play tennis. And I'd stop. And I'd stop being in the world of tennis. And I'd lose my motivation to play, going back to my status quo of not playing tennis. So when we're forcing ourselves to be positive and burying our real emotions, instead of dealing with our real emotions to get to the positive feeling again, the crash will inevitably happen because you haven't created any real change. So we don't want to force ourselves to be positive. We want to actually feel the change. However, if you've legitimately been feeling the changes or are currently making changes and you're if you've legitimately been feeling the changes or are currently making changes and you're
00:03:33 feeling more positive and then you crash and feel like you're back at square one, let me show you what is happening so you know that indeed you are in a better place than you think, how to stop the sabotage once and for all. So firstly, we kind of need to understand the purpose of the unconscious mind. Now, there are a few functions, but according to NLP, one of the major directives of the unconscious mind, where the lasting change actually happens, is to keep us alive, to protect us, to keep us safe, to keep our heart beating and our spleen, is to keep us alive, to protect us, to keep us safe, to keep our heart beating and our spleen, you know, spleening, and to keep us in our comfort zone because that represents safety,
00:04:12 right? It wants to keep you safe, keep you alive. And we can act quite instinctively with our unconscious mind. Like when there's a fire in your house, you don't stop to consciously and logically think about what to do. You instinctively act and react to it. And that's what we want to do. And that's what we want to do. And that's what we want to do. And that's what we want to do. And that's what we want to do. And that's what we want to do. And that's what we want to do. And that's what we want to do. And that's what we want to do. Remove yourself from the danger to keep yourself safe. Now, our unconscious mind seems to think Remove yourself from the danger to keep yourself safe. Now, our unconscious mind seems to think
00:04:34 that it's better the devil we know, because the unconscious mind can perceive change, any change to be danger. Because at that stage, we think there is more pain in changing than there is in staying the same. We can actually change quite quickly. And we think there is less pain in changing than staying the same. This is our unconscious mind. And we can actually change where we perceive more danger or pain in changing than staying the same. And we have all developed where we perceive more danger or pain in changing than staying the same. And we have all developed strategies that keep us in our comfort zone to deal with different situations in life. Our comfort zone can be a positive thing, like you go for a walk every morning because it makes
00:05:15 you feel good and looking after the health of your body. And you can't imagine not going for a walk. Or negative, you look in the mirror and beat up on yourself every day about how much you weigh or how fat you look, because there's been a lot of weight loss. And you can't imagine not going for a walk. become your strategy to make sure you keep your weight down and you don't know how to stay thin become your strategy to make sure you keep your weight down and you don't know how to stay thin without hating your body. Now, we don't do this consciously or as consciously as we think. So for fertility in this instance, we're usually going from feeling miserable and not conceiving and not being able to interact in the world fully, to feeling more positive about ourselves and our
00:05:51 lives and our chances. And when we're shifting, we need to be aware of two things. Our thoughts, and our emotions. Because we tend to get addicted to how we usually think, and our bodies tend to and our emotions. Because we tend to get addicted to how we usually think, and our bodies tend to get addicted to how we usually feel, which perpetuates and influences our habits, our actions, our decisions, our thoughts so much. This becomes our comfort zone. So essentially, we're trying to break unconscious strategies and almost addictions. When we habitually think one way about a topic, this is never going to happen. My body is letting me down. I'm being one way about a topic, this is never going to happen. My body is letting me down. I'm being
00:06:32 punished for something. Then we start to make these neural pathways in our brain, like a little pathway. Think of it in our brain. And if we go on for long enough, we kind of create this super highway in our brain that becomes the pathway of least resistance. So then it actually becomes difficult to be positive, because the path of least resistance in our brain is negative thoughts and negative strategies. And then we start to make these neural pathways. And then we start to make these neural pathways. And then we start to make these neural pathways. And that's where we feel comfortable. Now, why would we do this? For some, it might be, if I don't feel anxious, comfortable. Now, why would we do this? For some, it might be, if I don't feel anxious,
00:07:06 I won't feel motivated enough to solve the problem. I won't be vigilant enough. And I'll miss that one thing that will turn all of this around. And I'll miss out on my deepest desires of motherhood. Does that resonate with you at all? So when we start off on that path of feeling better and changing things around, we might do well for a while. And we can start to think better and feel better feelings. And we start to build new neural pathways, a positive set. But of course, and feel better feelings. And we start to build new neural pathways, a positive set. But of course, it does take time to build these new habits and strategies. And it seems crazy to think that our unconscious could sabotage us from that. But if you aren't used to thinking those positive
00:07:45 thoughts or feeling happy, then it tends to think it's unsafe and outside our comfort zone. It doesn't fit in with your current strategy for how to achieve success. It will try to bring you back to what it's used to. Your mind and body will try and bring you back It will try to bring you back to what it's used to. Your mind and body will try and bring you back to what it's used to. Try and fire up your negative superhighway again. And what is happening at the unconscious level is your body and mind are saying, oh, this is too different. This doesn't feel safe because I don't know this. This isn't my strategy to solve this issue. For example, I can't love my body and stay thin. If I love my body, there'll be nothing stopping me. And I'll
00:08:26 eat all that chocolate cake for sure. Hating my body is how I won't eat that chocolate cake, eat all that chocolate cake for sure. Hating my body is how I won't eat that chocolate cake, how I won't eat those extra calories. Or I can't not test six days out from my period. I don't know how to do this not being anxious because I have to know immediately if I am pregnant. So if I am pregnant, I can relax. But actually, even if it is positive, I probably won't relax because I'll be anxious about a miscarriage. And if it is negative, I'll be a mess. Every day for six days and probably start testing more often to stay anxious. Or something will go
00:08:56 Every day for six days and probably start testing more often to stay anxious. Or something will go wrong and I need to prepare myself for it. What we're really saying is this feels too uncertain for me and it's currently outside my comfort zone. But also when you're living a lot of uncertainty because of your fertility challenges, the unconscious mind wants to minimize being out of your comfort zone because you're already sacrificing so much. So it keeps you miserable to feel more comfortable. So the unconscious mind, when you start to feel better, miserable to feel more comfortable. So the unconscious mind, when you start to feel better, freaks out and it literally starts to try and throw things at you to come back to your normal.
00:09:37 And normal could be depressed. Normal could be miserable. Normal could mean going down a rabbit hole on Google or testing six days of every month and driving yourself crazy. Those daily habits are part of your strategy to achieve success. And your brain says, no, this activity is keeping me safe. I'm going to do this. I'm going to do this. I'm going to do this. I'm going to do this. I'm going to do this. And we're also getting a little bit of an addicted hit from it. And it will try and drag you back by And we're also getting a little bit of an addicted hit from it. And it will try and drag you back by helping you to remember a thought or a feeling that it might usually feel around this issue.
00:10:09 It will try and distract you back to what you usually do. So for example, let's look at sabotage and how this works. I have a friend who comes to me every couple of months in a state of like depression and not feeling like her life is enough and or like she is enough. And each time I ask her what's happening in her life and business, and she's usually in a better position than she was before, her business growing and things like that. But she creates that feeling of just being able to before, her business growing and things like that. But she creates that feeling of just being able to relax, to let go and surrender to her business process more. After all, she's doing really well. But her usual feeling in life is to put a lot of pressure on herself. So the second her body and
00:10:48 mind start to feel like she's getting somewhere, doesn't need to work as hard, she might be able to relax a bit more into her business. And then she's able to relax a bit more into her business. Instead, her brain and body start to freak out and say, I don't know this feeling. I don't know Instead, her brain and body start to freak out and say, I don't know this feeling. I don't know these thoughts. I've only ever created success by beating up on myself and feeling anxious. So she starts to try and create problems where there are none, dissect things and fix things, and maybe goes out and gets drunk. She creates new problems for herself to keep herself stuck in that mindset and those emotions, because it is what her mind and body know and what her mind and
00:11:25 body think creates success. Similarly, when people start to feel better on the fertility journey, body think creates success. Similarly, when people start to feel better on the fertility journey, their unconscious can start to not trust it and think that if you feel better and don't do all the habits associated with anxiousness around your fertility, then you may miss something instead of realizing that in fact, you'll probably make better decisions and notice things more. And so it will start to try and drag you back to those habits and actions that were keeping you anxious. But when you become aware of this sabotage, it's easy to see it for what it is, just our mind and
00:11:55 But when you become aware of this sabotage, it's easy to see it for what it is, just our mind and body's way of trying to keep us safe because we've stepped outside of our comfort zone. But the beautiful thing is this, as we continue to build the better strategies and the better habits and build an environment around us that actually supports us, the more you keep going, the more you will expand your comfort zone, build that positive neural pathway and feel a real shift within. So when you do have a bad day, it's just that, a bad day, and you can recognize it, So when you do have a bad day, it's just that, a bad day, and you can recognize it,
00:12:31 recognize the sabotaging thoughts, be gentle with yourself, and you will bounce back so fast because it isn't about never feeling down or challenged or angry or even triggered again. It's about how long you stay stuck in those feelings. So today I want you to answer three questions. 1. Where do you find your unconscious mind might be dragging you back to its comfort zone? 2. What are those common thoughts you keep having? 3. Where is your body dragging you back to known feelings that might be associated with those 3. Where is your body dragging you back to known feelings that might be associated with those
00:13:04 thoughts? 4. And what can you do instead or remind yourself of to get yourself back on track and set yourself up to win?
