The Real Reason Why You Sabotage Your Own Goals

How to overcome psychological reactance, the rarely discussed psychological reflex that’s holding you back

Illustrations: Fru Pinter

Recently, as I was clearing the dinner table, I asked my daughter if she could wash the dishes.

“I was going to, Dad,” she said. “But now that you’ve asked me to, I don’t want to anymore.”

I should have known better. This was a classic case of psychological reactance.

Psychological reactance is our knee-jerk negative reaction to being told what to do. It’s why, when you were a teenager and your mother told you to put on your jacket, you would not put on your jacket, just ’cause. Only later, as you’d hear your teeth chattering in the cold, would you concede that you should have taken Mom’s advice. It’s why you bristle when your manager asks you to do a task, even though you know, when you think about it logically, that the task is critical.

Almost everyone has this negative mental reflex. It kicks in whenever we sense that our autonomy is being threatened. This isn’t inherently bad — if people are too compliant, they’re vulnerable to manipulation. But psychological reactance can, at times, prevent us from doing things that we should do, sometimes even things we want to do. Most alarmingly, it can lead to self-sabotage.

How? That knee-jerk impulse of “don’t tell me what to do!” can kick in even when it’s you telling yourself what to do. This is common when you’re trying to make commitments and follow through on them by building a schedule, a technique I recommend in my book Indistractable. You may have scheduled time for something that you legitimately want to do — say, work out or read a nonfiction book. But when it comes time to do those things per your schedule, you might feel a bit of reactance. This happens because, in that moment, it doesn’t feel as though you’re deciding what to do. Rather, it’s you from the past giving orders to you present self. Ugh, who does that guy think he is?

Psychologists tell us this paradox is why we can often be hypocrites — we say we’ll do something, but when the time comes, we don’t.