When Friends Sabotage Your Self-Improvement Project

People who care about you may subvert your goals, intentionally or unwittingly. Learn why, and what to do about it.

Image: Pexels/DS stories

When you set any new challenging personal goal to make positive change — perhaps fix a relationship, start a difficult medical treatment, change careers, or maybe pursue a long-lost passion for art — support from family and friends can make all the difference. Unfortunately, loved ones too often undermine those efforts, on purpose or otherwise.

New research highlights several ways in which people you’d expect to count on for support could try to thwart your effort to lose weight, as but one example:

• Intentionally undermining your efforts, perhaps by offering you food when you don’t want any, discouraging the whole idea of healthy eating, or highlighting the cost of a gym membership.
• Colluding with you to share that pint of ice cream in your moment of weakness.
• Reacting with ostensibly positive comments like, “You look fine, you don’t need to change!”

Turns out these kinds of sabotage are common, regardless of what sort of major self-improvement project an individual might undertake. So I reached out to some experts to understand why our…