Self-Handicapping

A social psychological concept called “Self-Handicapping” refers to a tendency many people display when faced with challenges they worry they might not be equal to.

The bare-bones version of this concept suggests that in order to preserve our self-esteem, we may at times hold back rather than fully throwing ourselves into a challenge, which then allows us, if we fail, to attribute that failure to a lack of effort not a lack of capability.

So if we’re challenged to run a mile but we worry we can’t do so, we may exaggerate our lack of running skills, telling ourselves that it’s not even worth trying—maybe we should walk the whole mile, instead, because what’s the point anyway? What’s gained by running a stupid mile?

This same cognitive strategy is often used when we’re anxious about our capabilities at work or in relationships or within other scenarios in which there are external pressures to perform up to a given standard, those pressures real or imagined.

And while it’s theorized that this protective reflex helps us temper stress responses and feel okay at a moment in which we might otherwise become riled-up on anticipatory adrenaline and possibly even preemptively flog ourselves for our assumed near-future failure, it’s also thought to contribute to lowered self-esteem over time.

The mechanism for that diminished self-esteem is tied to the process of self-reflection after a failure which, though muffled by self-handicapping justifications, still informs our learning-related sense of attribution.

In the moment we might be able to justify a one-off failure as the consequence of our intentional lack of effort, but if this happens regularly over time, the parts of our brains that look for patterns will do some meta-analysis and come to the conclusion that we’re just not capable of accomplishing things.

Thus, future challenges we face will be filtered through the perceptual lens of “I’m not capable of accomplishing things” because in the past, whatever the justification we provide ourselves in the moment, that’s been the result: a failure to accomplish a goal.

This can lead to what’s sometimes called a sense of “defensive pessimism,” which often manifests as a spiral of ever-lowering self-expectations, our anxiety flaring up more frequently as ever-simpler tasks become perceptually out of reach.

While one-off instances of self-handicapping can be brushed aside as momentary blips of psychological protectiveness, then, repeat reliance on this defensive tactic can lead to a recalibrated self-definition that positions us as incapable failures who should never try to do anything because we will definitely fail and experience shame. This can then further diminish our perception of self, leading to something akin to learned helplessness, but a version of it that arises from cascading acts of preemptive ego-defense, rather than environmental variables that are beyond our ken or control.