During my junior year of college, everyone was stressed to find internships for the summer. Internships lead to jobs lead to success. An internship at a brand-name tech company like Google or Apple would obviously be the top choice. Some of them pay interns $8000 per month! For an international student making $200 per month, I can’t understate the allure.
But to get there, you needed to pass interviews. And tech interviews, for the uninitiated, can be dreadful. Having to solve complex problems in front of a panel of people, and then coding in front of them can be daunting. So when I did get my first interview, I should have been preparing for its day and night. Right? Only, I went into it with cursory knowledge, bombed it, and gave up halfway through. Afterwards, I just blamed my lack of preparation and moved on.
I had created an external villain before I even gave the interview. Just to have a scapegoat in case I didn’t make it through. I had purposely not studied as much as I should have, and instead focused more on my college academics even though I didn’t need to. Just to have an excuse at the ready. I was self-handicapping.
Why do we try to convince ourselves to try to fail? It seems so paradoxical to our internal goals. Or maybe, the goal was never internalized, to begin with, and all we’ve been doing is chasing goals we don’t really have the heart for.
That’s unlikely to be the case for a lot of people, to the extent that they have thought about their goals. If it was simply up to motivation, I doubt people would get anything done. But we do have things we want in life. Financial stability. A feeling of purpose. Good relationships.
With every goal, you need some metric of success. Some feeling of validation. For some, it’s all about the status. I must admit, a few years ago, my behavior could probably be categorized as being heavily status-seeking.
Seeking the validation of others, and letting them define what success looks like. This does a few things actually. It creates a very easy feedback loop. You can change behavior based on what others like. It also ties your self-esteem to the words of others.
When you have tied your self-esteem to volatile external factors, it’s natural to want to protect it.
Why does it even matter if we self-handicap?
When we self-handicap, we are preparing the setting to provide protection in case of failure. Not sure you have what it takes to get a good grade on an exam? Party the night before and then you have an excuse. One that isn’t tied to your intellect and knowledge of the subject.
But it does come at a cost though…
1. We let success be the counterfactual
Thinking of “what if” might be a fun thought experiment, especially if you are relatively happy and want to be grateful for the random decisions you made. But when we self-handicap, we create the inverse. Now, the counterfactual becomes “what if I had actually studied” or “what if I had not given up on purpose”. These counterfactuals become ghosts that follow us whenever we reflect. The silver lining is that they may act as a source of self-reflection to break out of the habit.
2. The power of bad habits
We can start freeing up the mental toll of decision-making by turning them into habits. Sometimes, we only have to repeatedly witness the “immediate benefit” of an action and it turns into a habit. Self-handicapping, once it becomes a habit, becomes a lot more dangerous. It’s easy to see how it might become a habit.
According to James Clear, the guru of Habits, bad habits might form because of stress. For people with low self-esteem, protecting their sense of self-worth is stress-relieving. Once it becomes a habit, you become unaware of the effects it might have on you. It becomes second nature to you, making it more difficult to escape the spiral.
3. Losing our ability to adapt
Allowing yourself to create scapegoats in case of failure is a strategy. A strategy to cope with failure. Naturally, if you are trying to avoid the repercussions of failure, wouldn’t it be better to not fail at all?
Growing up, failure didn’t seem like an option. And when you failed to outperform others, you would be publicly shamed. From rankings on report cards that were then compared and publicized, or relatives asking around for results, and wondering who did well. If you do well, you get praise (and possibly money), while those that don’t, get shunned, ignored, and told to look at their siblings/cousins and be more like them.
When you avoid failure to this extent, you lose your ability to cope with failures. A study analyzing the consequences of self-handicapping on coping and adjustment in students found just that. How then do you react when things don’t go your way? You self-handicap even more, digging a deeper hole to protect yourself
Why do we fall sir? So that we can learn to pick ourselves back up again.
Alfred Pennyworth in Batman
4. Avoiding the gradient of improvement
If we want to improve, in any aspect of life, we need to operate on gradients. In Machine Learning, when teaching a model, we use an algorithm called “gradient descent”. Basically, we are trying to improve the model based on the factors that will create the most optimal changes. Higher gradient means if we change a little bit of factor X, we will get a massive improvement in result Y. But what if the gradient is flat?
What if you self-handicap to the extent where you become desensitized to negative outcomes? You stop being able to utilize the gradient. You stop being able to use the negative feedback to improve and get where you want to be.
Do external villains protect us?
There is a logical reason for self-handicapping. It gives us the ability to protect our perception of our self-worth. We are able to protect ourselves in situations that might hurt us even further. Short term, it keeps our morale up. A study analyzing self-handicapping in sports realized that people who self handicapped and lost matches, maintained high levels of morale, allowing them to not lose motivation for their next challenge.
Also, what if we actually give it everything, but still tell people that we barely studied? I’m sure you have, at some point, said the same. Sure, it can be because you want to stay humble. But we also lower our risk of “embarrassment” and appearing “like a failure” if we tell people we try hard and then don’t have anything to back it up. Some studies found it difficult to distinguish the two. Is proclaimed anticipation of bad grades because of self-handicap or simply a way to lower risk.
I developed this habit in high school, where whenever someone asks me how my exam went, I just respond with “We’ll find out on the results day.” Here, I try a different strategy than lowering expectations. Constantly lowering expectations can make people desensitized. You say you did bad but you always end up doing well. Kind of like “The Boy who Cried Wolf” No one actually believes you. Not telling them anything at all worked better for me.
You can reap the known short-term benefits of it, but the long-term effects are a little more sneaky. Kind of like a drug. Once you get ‘high’ on creating and assigning blame, it might become even easier to do it later down the line. By then, it becomes difficult to understand where the lack of motivation and default self-sabotage may come from.
So the question is, do you realize when you are self-handicapping, and if so, how do you feel about it when you do.