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Video Description
We are often our own worst enemy — and the strangest part is that we build the obstacles on purpose. This lecture from Academy of Ideas explains self-handicapping: the hidden strategy of procrastination, addiction, and manufactured excuses. It protects a fragile self-image by making failure explainable before it even happens. But the strategy backfires — the barriers we raise make real success less likely, until the very self-esteem they were built to protect collapses. The way out begins with catching yourself in the act, because the trick only works while you don’t notice it.
Full Video Transcript
The self-handicapper reaches out for impediments, exaggerates handicaps, and embraces any factor
reducing personal responsibility for mediocrity. Rather than simply contending with external
obstacles to success, many of us actively collaborate in our own defeat. We are our
own worst enemies and our inability to achieve goals, develop our character, and attain success
is a result of self-handicapping. In this video, we explore the psychology of self-handicapping.
We look at why it emerges and why living a life constrained by
self-erected impediments can prove so attractive to some people.
The idea that we would deliberately undermine our potential may seem absurd.
Given the apparent irrationality of self-handicapping,
one may be tempted to relegate it to fringe cases of severe personality disorder.
Self-handicapping, however, is not only common,
but also an effective way to satisfy deep-seated psychological needs.
self-handicaps consistently have been demonstrated in empirical research over
the last decade writes the psychologist CR Snyder indeed although some persons
are especially prone to self-handicapping there are certain
circumstances that may lead the perfectly normal person to engage in
self-handicapping so if some of the people tend to self-handicap most of the
time and most of the people tend to self-handicap some of the time a
A reasonable conclusion is that people must be getting something out of such maneuvers.
What is that something?
To understand the benefits of self-handicapping, we need to recognize that among life’s primary
motivations is the need to create and preserve a reasonably tolerable image of ourselves.
Psychologists refer to this need to think well of ourselves as the need for self-esteem.
By self-esteem we refer to the evaluation the individual makes and customarily maintains
with regard to himself. It expresses an attitude of approval or disapproval. There are both healthy
and unhealthy paths to self-esteem. The healthy path is to strive after valued goals and in the
process cultivate skills, competencies, and a more complete character. Or as William James put it,
healthy self-esteem is a product of perceived competence in domains of importance.
To attain self-esteem in this manner requires hard work over many years, the acceptance of risk and
sacrifice and the courage to face up to situations that may end in failure.
Many people recoil from the demands and uncertainties associated with the healthy path to self-esteem.
Yet the reluctance to undertake the work of cultivating competence does not eliminate
our need to think well of ourselves.
When the healthy path feels too threatening or arduous, we seek alternative means of preserving
a positive self-image and attaining self-esteem.
such alternative is the strategy of self-handicapping. People in general employ
self-handicapping strategies in order to protect self-esteem, writes Frederick Rodewalt, and as
Raymond Higgins continues, those individuals who are most likely to self-handicap are characterized
by uncertainty concerning their abilities and competence. By partaking in chronic substance
abuse, habitually procrastinating, identifying as a victim, or playing an active role in the
maintenance of anxiety and depressive disorders, we impose impediments on ourselves and then
invoke these impediments as excuses for our underachievement. We convince ourselves that
our lack of effort and success is not the consequence of cowardice, laziness, or personal
failure, but of obstacles beyond our control. Through this mixture of self-deception and
self-exculpation, we absolve ourselves of the guilt and regret that accompanies a failure
to actualize our potential, and therein safeguard our self-esteem. In the words of the psychologists
Stephen Berglas and Edward Jones, self-handicappers do not primarily set out to ensure failure.
They are willing to accept probable failure if it can be explained away. Or as Raymond Higgins
continues, self-handicappers are adept at inhibiting or masking their achievement status
concerns and, like narcissistically disturbed patients, may appear to renounce striving for
success as a means of masking their self-esteem concerns. It is because self-handicapping
fulfills the defensive purpose of enabling us to avoid the arduous road to healthy self-esteem
while still preserving a tolerable self-image that the great 20th century psychologist Alfred
Adler referred to self-handicapping as the acceptance of defeat in the interests of
protection, or as Adler wrote with striking insight, the patient selects certain symptoms
and develops them until they impress him as real obstacles.
Behind his barricade of symptoms, the patient feels hidden and secure.
To the question,
What use are you making of your talents?
He answers,
This thing stops me.
I cannot go ahead.
And points to his self-erected barricade.
Self-handicapping, however, does more than merely preserve a tolerable self-image
in the face of a passive existence.
It offers another potential reward.
For if success comes our way despite the presence of self-imposed impediments, our self-image is greatly enhanced.
Achievement in the face of a handicap is interpreted as evidence of exceptional ability, proof of our specialness.
After all, if we manage to succeed while burdened by limitations, imagine what we might have accomplished without them.
Or as the psychologist H.S. Baker wrote regarding his analysis of students who avoid studying via procrastination and other self-handicapping strategies.
Not studying offers two possibilities to maintain the grandiose self intact.
If an exam is flunked, it is only due to lack of study, not due to the lack of ability.
If, however, it is passed without study, it is doubly delicious, providing a good grade in confirming magical powers of brilliance.
Needless to say, success is unlikely to arise from the strategy of self-handicapping.
For the symptoms, illnesses, and self-erected barriers we create through self-handicapping
make the challenge of attaining success in life much harder than it already is.
If we participate in self-handicapping, we all but assure ourselves that when we cross
into the latter half of life, we will have little to be genuinely proud of.
It is often at this stage that our self-handicapping strategies start to lose their effectiveness.
We can only blame external impediments for underachievement for so long before such excuses
become old and stale. At the same time, after years or decades of self-handicapping, those
within our social circle may grow weary of offering sympathy and may begin to see how
desperately we cling to our fake excuses. Without other people to validate our self-constructed
handicaps and facing the emptiness of a meaningless and mediocre life, the fragile
structure supporting our self-esteem is left exposed and may come crashing down. Or as Edward
Jones explained, the apparent paradox of self-handicapping is that self-erected barricades
make failure more likely. Though failure can perhaps be more conveniently explained with
reference to the inhibiting constraint, it is still failure. And failing or flawed performances
can have a devastating long-range effect on the very self-esteem that self-handicapping is designed
to protect. For those whose potential is being crippled by self-handicapping strategies, the
first step on the road to recovery is the awareness of what we are doing. For the power of this
strategy lies in the fact that, while we cling to self-created barriers, through an act of
self-deception we simultaneously avoid awareness of our self-sabotage. For as Edward Jones writes,
self-handicapping phenomena are strategic while eluding conscious awareness. To bring these
strategies into awareness and see how we have been complicit in our downfall is often humbling
and painful. Yet, it is only through this difficult coming to consciousness that there
is the possibility of putting an end to this pernicious behavior. For as Raymond Higgins
and Stephen Berglas explain, the maintenance of self-handicapping is facilitated by our
motivated self-deception, i.e., our lack of awareness, in regard to its enactment. For
self-handicapping strategies to be effective, one must include an element of self-deception
so as to prevent full awareness of the purposeful nature of the strategy.
We will conclude with a case study described by Alfred Adler
concerning a 32-year-old man whose preferred self-handicapping strategy
involved the use of alcohol.
This man was intelligent, healthy, and well-educated,
yet he lived entirely at the expense of his parents
and repeatedly engaged in bouts of extreme binge drinking.
Over the course of therapy, Adler came to understand
that the man’s drinking served a psychological purpose
as it allowed him to save face in his own and others’ eyes while living far below his potential.
Drunkenness and the brutal hangovers that followed, in other words,
functioned less as the cause of his failure to launch than as his secret and cherished alibi.
Or as Adler writes,
The usual tensions of every day were not severe enough to drive him to drink,
and he was able to use his sober intervals to display good intentions.
His drunkenness would begin when he was expected to go into society or when there was a demand of
duty. His evident aim was to be relieved of every duty and to be supported for his own sake alone.
Self-centered and wholly lacking social adjustment, he had nevertheless attained a
goal of superiority by the elimination of defeat. He had no defeat in society for he did not enter
it. No defeat in work, for he had no occupation. Subjectively, he triumphed over life, lived it
upon his own terms entirely. But objectively, of course, the terms he obtained were almost the
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