You know you want to change your life for the better, and you recognize that you have the power to do so, despite how much you have to overcome. But when you start to go about it, you inevitably have to face this challenge: to rewire your thinking and behavior in a way that facilitates genuine growth. It sounds easy, until it isn’t. You soon realize that you keep standing in your own way and no matter how hard you try to push back, you end up defeated. You then go through a self-destructive cycle of holding yourself back because you’re still living in fear and clinging to your old ways of coping with your feelings of unworthiness and inadequacy.

When you believe that you’re unworthy to change your life, you might experience the following self-sabotaging things that undermine your efforts to grow and change your life for good:

1. You feel uncomfortable with your negative emotions and you try to blame them on everything external to you.

2. You postpone all the things you really want to do because you deeply fear that you’re already late to the game and you’re not as talented as all the people you look up to.

3. You keep imagining how people who put you down in the past would react if you did something worthy of praise, and this influences the way you set goals, which is unhealthy, but you’re too paralyzed to do anything about it.

4. You look at people who give the illusion of having an “easier” life than yours.

5. You spend a lot more time passively scrolling through other people’s lives than creating your authentic life because you’re afraid that you’ll never measure up to them.

6. You can’t help but obsessively keep track of what ages people accomplish certain things and envy them for having these achievements and rewards much earlier than you.

7. You constantly put yourself down because you feel like you’re talentless and undeserving of what you want.

8. Your thoughts make you feel more drained than motivated.

9. You get mad at yourself for being a beginner. You want to be great right off the bat, even if it’s impossible.

10. You think that to get rid of your feelings of unworthiness, you must chase after as many goals as you can without considering whether they’re right for you or not.

11. You blame your younger self for making the wrong decisions.

12. You expend much of your mental energy beating yourself up for not succeeding as quickly as you think you ought to (which is rooted in incessantly comparing yourself to the way other people have succeeded in whatever you want to do).

13. You’re wandering around in circles with your most self-destructive thoughts.

14. You sleep too much or too little. You eat too much or too little. You work too much or play too much. There’s little to no balance in your daily life, which is why you feel either too frenetic or too lethargic.

15. You hold yourself back from expressing your genuine thoughts and feelings because you still have an intense fear of people not valuing you if they don’t like you.

16. You make long lists of excuses of why you can’t do things that would change your life for your own good.

17. You belittle your accomplishments because you believe that your failures are true indicators of your skills.

18. You’re so fixated on all the ways you’ve fallen short compared to everyone you know.

19. You can’t see how far you’ve come because you feel like you’re always at the starting line of a very long race that you’re inevitably bound to lose in.

20. You focus so much on the bad things that are happening around you, and this makes you so exhausted that you postpone the things that do make you happy.

21. You feel like you’re never going to accept yourself enough, so you don’t see the point in trying anything different to change it.

22. You never feel like you’re enough and you try so hard to prove that you’re enough, but instead of making you feel better, you feel worse, and thus you lose the motivation and drive to pursue what you actually want.

23. You doubt your ability to navigate through your life. You believe that your life is like a dark labyrinth and you’re the helpless creature running around in it, trying to seek a light that you believe doesn’t exist.

24. When it comes to self-discipline, you’re either too harsh with yourself or totally apathetic. You fluctuate between two extremes and as a result, you still feel stuck where you’re at.

25. You don’t allow yourself to rest peacefully. When you sit still for prolonged periods of time, you end up getting caught up in very anxiety-fueled mental webs, which is why you feel drained, even after doing nothing.

26. You think that a great life is reserved only for people who are more innately deserving of it. You don’t think you’re smart, talented, disciplined, or diligent enough to create the life of your dreams, so to avoid the fear of unworthiness, you postpone changes and keep doing what you don’t want to do, even when it stunts your growth.

27. You can’t help but feel a tremendous sense of guilt when you think you can be something more than you are now because you somehow believe that to be a good person, you must be satisfied and never want anything more.

28. You use your worst past memories and your most horrifying premonitions of the future to terrorize yourself into staying small and subduing your authentic self before it has a chance to blossom.

29. You give up too early on a lot of endeavors (both professional and personal) because you wrongfully think that growth must occur exponentially or else you’re just a fraud and wannabe who isn’t worthy of stepping out of your comfort zone.

30. You do recognize that you have the power to change your life and light your own way, but your fears and doubts are still too strong for you, and thus you don’t experience positive growth for a long time.