The key ideas

The Mountain Is You: Transforming Self-Sabotage Into Self-Mastery

Brianna Wiest, 2020

Why do we get in our own way exactly where we want change the most? Brianna Wiest shows that self-sabotage is not laziness or weakness. It is a defence that meets a hidden need. You will learn to read your triggers, feelings and fears as clues, and to change your life through small shifts instead of big leaps.

Who it is for

For anyone who keeps promising to start and keeps slipping. And for anyone whose life seems to fall apart right when things begin to work.

Self-sabotage is not a way to hurt yourself. It is a way to protect yourself.

A salad in the morning, a drive-through at night

Picture this. In the morning you make a firm decision to eat better, and you even tell your friends. A few hours later your car seems to turn into the drive-through all by itself. You order exactly what you swore off that morning. This is how Brianna Wiest describes self-sabotage. You want one thing and do another, again and again: with food, with money, with work, with relationships.

Wiest is an American writer and essayist. Her pieces on thinking and feeling are published by Thought Catalog, and that is where this book came out in 2020. Its title, The Mountain Is You, holds the whole idea: the mountain you have to climb usually stands not in front of you, but inside you.

The book's central claim is a surprise. Wiest believes self-sabotage is not weakness and not laziness. It is a clever defence: your subconscious uses it to meet a need you may not even know you have. Until that need has a name, fighting the habit is pointless, because another one will take its place.

Over the next half hour you will follow the book from the foot of the mountain to the top. You will see what your sabotage protects you from. You will learn to read triggers, feelings and fears as messages. You will find out how to let go of the past and build the future in small steps. And you will see why the mountain is there at all.

The fainting spells that saved him from school

When Carl Jung, who would grow up to be a famous psychiatrist, was a boy, a classmate pushed him at school. He fell and hit his head. His first thought was almost happy: maybe now he would not have to go to class. Soon the fainting spells began, sudden and impossible to control. Because of them, he stayed at home.

Jung later called this a neurosis: a disorder driven not by an illness of the body but by a hidden purpose. The fainting did exactly what he wanted. It took him out of a classroom where he felt miserable and out of place. Neurosis, Jung said, is a substitute for legitimate suffering: instead of facing the problem honestly, you get a symptom.

Wiest builds her whole book on this story. Self-sabotage in the usual sense, she argues, does not exist. The habits you cannot drop, however much they hurt you, were built by your subconscious, and built very sensibly. They meet an unmet need, a buried feeling or an abandoned wish.

That explains the mistake almost everyone makes. You fight the behaviour: you scold yourself, set rules, slip, and scold yourself again. But if you remove only the habit, the need stays and finds another way out. Wiest calls such problems symptoms. Taking away the way you cope is not the same as solving the problem.

So the book's first question is not "How do I stop?" but "What is this behaviour doing for me?" If something keeps hanging on in your life, it is there for a reason. All that is left is to find out what the reason is.

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About the author

Brianna Wiest is an American writer and essayist. Her books on thinking and feeling are published by Thought Catalog Books, among them the collection "101 Essays That Will Change the Way You Think".

All books by this author: Brianna Wiest

Terms from the book

  • Procrastination
  • neurosis
  • Jung
  • Emotional intelligence
  • Self-sabotage
  • Trigger
  • Supernova
  • Extrapolation
  • Trauma
  • Thought Catalog: An American digital magazine and publisher, Thought Catalog Books, which publishes Brianna Wiest's essays and books.
  • Deep commitments: A phrase from the book, not a scientific term: what a person is truly most loyal to, such as freedom or control, even when the goals they name are different.
  • Hendricks: Gay Hendricks, American psychologist and author of "The Big Leap" (2009), which describes the "upper limit problem".
  • Upper limit: A concept from Gay Hendricks that Wiest uses: an inner ceiling on how much good a person will allow themselves. Once they pass it, they tend to pull things back to the familiar level without noticing.
  • Awosika: Ayodeji Awosika, American blogger and author of self-development books. Wiest quotes his account of his own turning point.
  • Clairvoyant thinking: An image from the book, not a scientific term: the habit of treating a frightening thought as a prediction of the future.
  • Holiday: Ryan Holiday, American writer who popularises Stoicism, author of "The Obstacle Is the Way", a book about Stoic resilience in hard times.
  • Positive disintegration: A concept from the Polish psychiatrist Kazimierz Dąbrowski: the breaking apart of an old picture of yourself that leads to personal growth.
  • Kuhn: Thomas Kuhn (1922-1996), American historian and philosopher of science, author of "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions" (1962).
  • Paradigm shift: Thomas Kuhn's phrase for one accepted scientific picture of the world being replaced by another. Wiest applies it to slow change in a person's life.
  • Microshift: A word from the book: a tiny change in behaviour, repeated until it becomes a habit.

All terms

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