Health & Wellness

Break Through Self-Sabotage with These Simple Mindset Shifts

July 19, 2025

Change your thinking, change your life. Our minds are powerful, and learning to reflect on how we think can be a game-changer. On a recent episode of The Dream Bigger Podcast, Siffat Haider chats with Brianna Wiest, bestselling author of The Mountain Is You. Wiest is also known for her writing on self-awareness, personal growth, mental health, and self-sabotage.

Wiest reveals personal insights on achieving clarity, building emotional resilience, and embracing your next chapter. She also shares her transformative practices, such as journaling and stepping outside one’s comfort zone. Whether you’re feeling stuck or in a transition, you’ll want to adopt Wiest’s practical tools and powerful mindset shifts to break through self-sabotage and move forward with purpose.

What to do when you’re feeling stuck?

So, what keeps people stuck, and how can they escape that situation? Wiest says that if you’re feeling stuck, you might be taking an intentional pause. It’s not always time to move forward. “Sometimes, we don’t know what we don’t know,” she explains. “Sometimes, we need to gather more information, we need to do soul searching, or we need a break.”

Next time you feel stuck, pause and ask yourself: What do I want? What do I want to happen next? What am I not seeing right now?

Self-clarity is the answer to the moments of feeling stuck. It’s not about a lack of motivation, willpower, or momentum. Wiest encourages self-reflection through writing and journaling. “Journaling holds a big mirror up to yourself, and it helps you recognize patterns,” Wiest explains. “It also helps you organize your feelings and state what you’re stuck on and what you’re feeling at the moment.”

The psychology of self-sabotage

Wiest describes self-sabotage as the presence of two coexisting but conflicting needs—one conscious and the other unconscious. When you self-sabotage, you are in a moment of unconsciously holding yourself back, but Weist says there is always a reason. “You can really look at self-sabotage as a profound act of self-love,” she explains. “There is some sense of safety, comfort, or need that we are not aware of, but we are actually giving it to ourselves.”

Once you recognize this, you can move past self-sabotage and evolve into loving yourself in a bigger way. Weist says this looks like finding a healthier way to meet your unconscious need to move forward.

What it takes to navigate major life shifts

Moments of big change are a time to be mindful and stay present. When people go through periods of change, they must grapple with the competing desires to hold onto their old selves and to embrace change. “Anything new, no matter how good, is going to be uncomfortable, until it is familiar,” Wiest says. “Anytime you are going through any life change, you are going through an identity shift, a self-worth shift, a self-image shift, a self-belief shift.”

According to Wiest, whenever you say yes to one thing, you say no to something else. In seasons of transition or change, the first thing you are going to have to sacrifice is your comfort zone. “It takes a lot of courage to let go of what you know and to reach for what may be,” Wiest adds.

The power of radical responsibility

There is much in life that is beyond our control. Radical responsibility is about moving from a space of blaming your circumstances to taking responsibility. Wiest says it starts by asking yourself, “What can I control?” or “What is in my hands right now?”

Wiest explains that things that are beyond your control will inevitably arise. They’ll bother you and affect you. “But your mental health is contingent upon you having some grasp of what is yours, and that you can have a say in your own life,” she says.

Wiest shares a powerful quote that helps her embrace radical responsibility: “You don’t have a right to the cards that you think you should have been dealt, but you have a responsibility to play the h*ll out of the ones you’ve been given.”

We are all able to take control of what we can control. So keep moving forward and learn to play the hand that life has dealt you.