A friend called me recently to ask whether herbal sleeping tablets had ever worked for me. I said I'd never tried them. "I'm starting a new job," she explained. I told her I understood completely.

For the past ten years, this friend has missed the first day of every single job she has ever had. A few celebratory glasses of wine always get out of hand, and before she knows it, rather than turning up smelling of day-old Merlot, she is calling in sick. At first we laughed at it as a funny quirk of character. As the years rolled on, her ability to derail herself before she had even started began to seem less quirky and more like something worth taking seriously. "I get so nervous," she explained. "I feel like the wine will help me sleep."

I might take some comfort in a small sense of superiority, I have never been hungover on a first day, but I am far from immune to this kind of behaviour. I have gotten drunk the night before a half-marathon I had spent months training for. I have handed commissions in well past deadline, repeatedly telling my exasperated editors I was working on getting it just right. I have ended perfectly good relationships for reasons I can barely articulate.

"Behaviours that stand in the way of us achieving our long-term goals are said to be self-sabotaging," explains chartered counselling psychologist Dr Sarah Crawford. It is not that we do not know the right way forward. We just choose, with varying levels of awareness, not to take it. Self-sabotage is the gap between should and did, an oddly alluring space that I have found myself in more times than I care to count.

It is such a recognisable feature of modern life that we have come to fetishise the self-saboteur, particularly the female one. Fleabag, Phoebe Waller-Bridge's searingly honest creation, built an entire cultural moment around choices so self-evidently destructive that one reviewer called it "a squalid little story of a life gone wrong." Emma Jane Unsworth's novel Animals, and its subsequent film adaptation starring Holliday Grainger and Alia Shawkat, charts two women stuck in a cycle of bad decisions and worse habits. Roisin Conaty's GameFace, Halle Butler's The New Me, Ottessa Moshfegh's My Year of Rest and Relaxation, all narratives of women who are, in some way, opting out. Part of their appeal is that each protagonist eventually finds a way through. Real life, as I have discovered, tends to be less tidy.

For years I tried to correct my own patterns the way my friend tried herbal tablets: surface-level interventions applied to problems with much deeper roots. It took therapy for me to begin understanding why I kept ending up in the same places. Those sessions reached a conclusion that maps closely onto the framework cognitive hypnotherapist Hazel Gale sets out in her book The Monster Mind Solution. Her argument is that we self-sabotage because of internal narratives, she calls them monster stories, that convince us we cannot, or do not deserve to, achieve what we are actually working towards.

My monsters, it turned out, were specific. The abandoned half-marathon: I had spent most of my training fretting about finishing with an embarrassingly slow time. The missed deadlines: the procrastination, what I privately call suicide by Netflix, is driven by a deep-seated fear that I am not good enough to deserve the commission in the first place. The ended relationships: leaving first is a form of protection. To go is better than to be left.

Career coach Lisa Quinn offers a practical way into this that I have found genuinely useful. Her starting point is counterintuitive: rather than trying to stop a self-sabotaging behaviour immediately, first ask yourself what the benefit of it is. Every behaviour, however destructive on the surface, is serving some function. If you regularly miss deadlines, the gift might be that the longer you delay filing your work, the longer you postpone the possibility of negative feedback. Naming that clearly gives you a choice you did not previously have: do I want to consciously keep doing this, knowing what it is actually doing for me? What might be possible if I chose differently?

Fear, Quinn says, is almost always the engine underneath. "We're acting from our fight, flight or freeze response rather than from a place of compassion and confidence." Her reframe is simple but disarming: ask yourself what you would do if you knew you could not fail. The answer tends to illuminate what you have been avoiding and why.

On the inner critic specifically, her advice is to give it daylight rather than trying to suppress it. Bring it into the open, either to yourself or to someone you trust not to judge you, and then ask what evidence actually supports what it is saying. More often than not, she says, the answer is very little.

After the fairly brutal work of recognising my own patterns, therapy also gave me something more unexpected: permission to stop optimising. The most helpful thing, for me, was finding activities where there was no goal attached, no metric, no comparison. I started running again, this time without tracking my pace or competing against anyone, including myself. Just the pleasure of movement. It sounds almost embarrassingly simple. It was, in practice, genuinely freeing.

There are no universal remedies for self-sabotage. The process of working out what is driving yours, and what might help, is one of the more demanding forms of self-knowledge there is. Perhaps that is why we are drawn so persistently to stories about it. We learn something by watching people delve into their worst habits, and more still by delving into our own. When it comes to self-sabotage, the journey, uncomfortable as it is, tends to be where most of the useful information lives.