48 Brianna Wiest Quotes from The Mountain Is You on Self-Sabotage and Healing

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Excerpt: Why do we self-sabotage? How can we heal? Where do we start? These Brianna Wiest quotes from The Mountain Is You will help (tremendously).

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Introduction: Painfully Slow

Healing isn’t just about confronting what others have done to you—it’s about confronting yourself and the role YOU play in your own suffering. Sometimes the one is what leads to the other. But also, it’s the other that leads to the one.

As an example, when I was 10 people made fun of my weight. For years after, I became my own worst critic. My self-talk was hateful, demeaning, and hurtful. But, then I started Martial Arts; and MoveMe Quotes; and daily writing—and a slew of other things that allowed me to confront that inner critic.

…And quiet him the hell up.

…Or maybe better said: gave him new, constructive, optimistic things to focus on and talk about.

Day-by-day, it didn’t feel like much was changing. Not when I would kick and punch for an hour; not when I collected quotes for an hour; and not when I started writing for an hour. But, today? After 20+ years of kicking punching? 12+ years of collecting quotes? 2+ years of writing daily?

…Let’s just say that if Old Me and New Me sat down for a cup of joe… neither would recognize the other. This is how healing works. Painfully slow and like nothing is changing day-by-day… until one day, you look back and it’s all different.

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The List: 48 Brianna Wiest Quotes from The Mountain Is You on Self-Sabotage and Healing

Below, you’ll find our collection of Brianna Wiest quotes from The Mountain Is You that’ll lay a foundation of understanding for why we self-sabotage, get you positioned to begin a healing process, and motivate you to take action. And in a world where so many people: “Don’t feel like it,” “Are too busy,” “Would rather do just about anything than confront pain”—this book comes just in time.

One of the fundamental truths from her book is that you don’t change your life when you fix every piece of yourself that needs healing (we’ll always need healing)—you change your life when you commit to a healing practice and take deliberate steps regularly to do more inner work. You know, the kind of work that sheds light onto our unconscious behaviors, allows us to change self-sabotaging actions, and helps us integrate our deepest desires with our foremost thoughts.

Are you ready to being the process? There’s no better place to start than right here. Enjoy!

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8 Brianna Wiest Quotes on Self-Sabotage:

“Self-sabotage is not a way we hurt ourselves; it’s a way we try to protect ourselves.”

Brianna Wiest, The Mountain Is You (Page 28)

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“When it comes to self-sabotaging behaviors, you have to understand that sometimes, it’s easy to get attached to having problems. Being successful can make you less liked. Finding love can make you more vulnerable. Making yourself less attractive can guard you. Playing small allows you to avoid scrutiny. Procrastinating puts you back in a place of comfort. All the ways in which you are self-sabotaging are actually ways that you are feeding a need you probably do not even realize you have.”

Brianna Wiest, The Mountain Is You (Page 30)

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“On the surface, self-sabotage seems masochistic. It appears to be a product of self-hatred, low confidence, or a lack of willpower. In reality, self-sabotage is simply the presence of an unconscious need that is being fulfilled by the self-sabotaging behavior. To overcome this, we must go through a process of deep psychological excavation. We must pinpoint the traumatic event, release unprocessed emotions, find healthier ways to meet our needs, reinvent our self-image, and develop principles such as emotional intelligence and resilience.”

Brianna Wiest, The Mountain Is You (Page 11)

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In the end, self-sabotage is very often just a maladaptive coping mechanism, a way we give ourselves what we need without having to actually address what that need is. But like any coping mechanism, it is just that—a way to cope. It’s not an answer, it’s not a solution, and it does not ever truly solve the problem. We are merely numbing our desires, and giving ourselves a little taste of temporary relief.”

Brianna Wiest, The Mountain Is You (Page 13)

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“If we feel bad about not being as successful as another person, we might try to find something negative about them to make ourselves feel better. If we do that every time we come across a person who is more successful than we are, we begin to associate that level of success with being disliked. When it comes time for us to take action to move our lives forward, we’re going to resist doing it, because becoming more successful will create a breach in our self-concept.”

Brianna Wiest, The Mountain Is You (Page 45)

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“Being mean to yourself first will not make it hurt less if other people judge or reject you, though that is why you are using this defense mechanism. Thinking the worst of yourself is a way of trying to numb yourself to what you really fear, which is that someone else could say those things about you. What you don’t realize is that you’re acting as your own bully and enemy by doing it to yourself. What could someone else’s judgment realistically do to your life? Honestly, it could stop you from pursuing your dreams, ambitions, and personal happiness. And that’s exactly what you’re doing when you stay fixated on those damaging ideas. It’s time to get out of your own way.”

Brianna Wiest, The Mountain Is You (Page 88)

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“If you want to master your life, you have to learn to organize your feelings. By becoming aware of them, you can trace them back to the thought process that prompted them, and from there you can decide whether or not the idea is an actual threat or concern, or a fabrication of your reptilian mind just trying to keep you alive.”

Brianna Wiest, The Mountain Is You (Page 95)

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“Feelings do not inform you of the right decisions to make. Right decisions create the right feelings. Your feelings are not intended to guide you throughout life; that is what your mind is for. If you were to honestly follow your every impulse, you would be completely stuck, complacent, and possibly dead or at the very least in severe trouble. You aren’t, because your brain is able to intervene and instruct you on how to make choices that reflect what you want to be experiencing long-term.”

Brianna Wiest, The Mountain Is You (Page 94)

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23 Brianna Wiest Quotes on Healing:

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“What you believe about your life is what you will make true about your life.”

Brianna Wiest, The Mountain Is You (Page 18)

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“The first step in healing anything is taking full accountability. It is no longer being in denial about the honest truth of your life and yourself. It does not matter what your life looks like on the outside; it is how you feel about it on the inside. It is not okay to be constantly stressed, panicked, and unhappy. Something is wrong, and the longer you try to ‘love yourself’ out of realizing this, the longer you are going to suffer.”

Brianna Wiest, The Mountain Is You (Page 21)

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“Nothing will save you, and so you must begin the work of saving yourself, which is the entire purpose of your life.”

Brianna Wiest, The Mountain Is You (Page 167)

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“You cannot avoid all pain, but you can absolutely avoid a lot of suffering by staying focused on your internal growth.”

Brianna Wiest, The Mountain Is You (Page 235)

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“If you try to fix the problem on the surface, you will always come up against a wall. This is because you’re trying to rip off a Band-Aid before you have a strategy to heal the wound.”

Brianna Wiest, The Mountain Is You (Page 15)

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“To do your inner work means to evaluate why something triggered you, why something is upsetting you, what your life is trying to show you, and the ways you could grow from these experiences. Truly powerful people absorb what has happened to them and sort of metabolize it. They use it as an opportunity to learn, to develop themselves. This type of inner mental and emotional work is non-negotiable if you want to be truly powerful.”

Brianna Wiest, The Mountain Is You (Page 187)

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“Your emotional backlog is like your email inbox. When you experience emotions, it’s as though you’re getting little messages from your body stacking up one at a time. If you don’t ever open them, you end up with 1,000+ notifications deep, totally overlooking crucial information and important insights that you need to move your life forward.”

Brianna Wiest, The Mountain Is You (Page 158)

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“Happiness is your natural state. That means you will return to it on your own if you allow the other feelings you want to experience to come up, be felt, be processed, and not resisted. The less you resist your unhappiness, the happier you will be. It is often just trying too hard to feel one certain way that sets us up for failure.”

Brianna Wiest, The Mountain Is You (Page 231)

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“If you are doing ‘everything you are supposed to be doing’ and yet you feel empty and depressed at the end of the day, the issue is probably that you’re not really doing what you want to be doing; you’ve just adopted someone else’s script for happiness.”

Brianna Wiest, The Mountain Is You (Page 60)

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“You are not supposed to feel happy all of the time. Trying to feel happy all of the time is not the solution; it’s the problem.”

Brianna Wiest, The Mountain Is You (Page 225)

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“When we are faced with resentment, what we instead must do is reinvent our image of those around us or those we have perceived as having wronged us. Other people are not here to love us perfectly; they are here to teach us lessons to show us how to love them—and ourselves—better.”

Brianna Wiest, The Mountain Is You (Page 77)

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“It is healthy to be angry, and anger can also show us important aspects of who we are and what we care about. For example, anger shows us where our boundaries are. Anger also helps us identify what we find to be unjust.”

Brianna Wiest, The Mountain Is You (Page 73)

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“If you want to know what you truly want out of life, look at the people who you are jealous of. No, you may not want exactly what they have, but the feeling that you are experiencing is anger that they are allowing themselves to pursue it while you are not.”

Brianna Wiest, The Mountain Is You (Page 76)

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“Remember this: The next time you’re trying to craft a glow up story that is compelling to others, ask yourself why you are still waiting for their approval. The answer, almost always, is that you still do not have your own.”

Brianna Wiest, The Mountain Is You (Page 173)

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“There is nothing that makes us more insecure than hanging around what isn’t right for us. There’s nothing that will collapse faster. There’s nothing that will bring us inner turmoil quite like it.”

Brianna Wiest, The Mountain Is You (Page 153)

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“It is very hard to show up as the person you want to be when you are surrounded by an environment that makes you feel like a person you aren’t.”

Brianna Wiest, The Mountain Is You (Page 42)

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“What isn’t right for you will never remain in your life. There is no job, person, or city that you can force to be right for you if it is not, though you can pretend for a while. You can play games with yourself, you can justify and make ultimatums. You can say you’ll try just a little longer, and you can make excuses for why things aren’t working out right now. The truth is that what is right for you will come to you and stay with you and won’t stray from you for long. The truth is that when something is right for you, it brings you clarity, and when something is wrong for you, it brings you confusion.”

Brianna Wiest, The Mountain Is You (Page 151)

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“The only time you’re going to really hold onto the past is when you haven’t fully learned from the past. When you have, you can apply those lessons to the present moment and create what you wanted to experience then.”

Brianna Wiest, The Mountain Is You (Page 226)

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“You will never find peace standing in the ruins of what you used to be. You can only move on if you start building something new.”

Brianna Wiest, The Mountain Is You (Page 139)

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“Triggers are not random; they are showing you where you are either most wounded or primed for growth. If we can see these triggers as signals that are trying to help us put our attention toward some part of our lives that needs healing, health, and progress, we can begin to see them as helpful instead of hurtful.”

Brianna Wiest, The Mountain Is You (Page 228)

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“Your mountain is the block between you and the life you want to live. Facing it is also the only path to your freedom and becoming. You are here because a trigger showed you to your wound, and your wound will show you to your path, and your path will show you to your destiny.”

Brianna Wiest, The Mountain Is You (Page 8)

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“To have a mountain in front of you does not mean you are fundamentally broken in some way. Everything in nature is imperfect, and it is because of that imperfection that growth is possible. If everything existed in uniformity, the gravity that created the stars and planets and everything that we know would not exist. Without breaks, faults, and gaps, nothing could grow and nothing would become. The fact that you are imperfect is not a sign that you have failed; it is a sign that you are human, and more importantly, it is a sign that you still have more potential within you.”

Brianna Wiest, The Mountain Is You (Page 6)

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“The real glow up isn’t proving the people from your past wrong. It is finally feeling so content and hopeful about your future that you stop thinking about them entirely.”

Brianna Wiest, The Mountain Is You (Page 170)

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17 Brianna Wiest Quotes on Lifestyle Change

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“The first step to becoming your most powerful self is to literally envision that person. Don’t take yourself out of your current context, either. Begin to ask yourself: What would the most powerful version of me do right now? What would they do with this day? How would they respond to this challenge? How would they move forward? How would they think? What would they feel?”

Brianna Wiest, The Mountain Is You (Page 184)

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“The truth is that you do not change your life when you fix every piece and call that healing. You change your life when you become comfortable with being happy here, even if you want to go forward. You change your life when you can love yourself even though you don’t look exactly the way you want to. You change your life when you are principled about money and love and relationships, when you treat strangers as well as you do your CEO, and when you manage $1,000 the same way you would $10,000.”

Brianna Wiest, The Mountain Is You (Page 147)

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“The greatest gift that life will hand you is discomfort. Discomfort is not trying to punish you! It is just trying to show you where you are capable of more, deserving of better, able to change, or meant for greater than you have right now. In almost every case, it is simply informing you that there is more out there for you, and it is pushing you to go pursue it.”

Brianna Wiest, The Mountain Is You (Page 229)

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“The truth about your psyche is this: Anything that is new, even if it is good, will feel uncomfortable until it is also familiar. Our brain works the opposite way, too, in that whatever is familiar is what we perceive to be good and comfortable, even if those behaviors, habits, or relationships are actually toxic or destructive.”

Brianna Wiest, The Mountain Is You (Page 116)

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“Making big, sweeping changes is not difficult because we are flawed, incompetent beings. It’s difficult because we are not meant to live outside of our comfort zones. If you want to change your life, you need to make tiny, nearly undetectable decisions every hour of every day until those choices are habituated. Then you’ll just continue to do them.”

Brianna Wiest, The Mountain Is You (Page 112)

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“Most people do not actually change their lives until not changing becomes the less comfortable option. This means that they do not actually embrace the difficulty of altering their habits until they simply do not have another choice. Staying where they are is not viable. They can no longer even pretend that it is desirable in any way. They are, quite honestly, less at rock bottom and more stuck between a rock that’s impinging on them and an arduous climb out from beneath it.”

Brianna Wiest, The Mountain Is You (Page 24)

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When you decide you truly do not ever want to feel a certain way again, you set out on a journey of self-awareness, learning, and growth that has you radically reinvent who you are.”

Brianna Wiest, The Mountain Is You (Page 23)

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“The objective of being human is to grow. We see this reflected back to us in every part of life. Species reproduce, DNA evolves to eliminate certain strands and develop new ones, and the edges of the universe are expanding forever outward. Likewise, our ability to feel the depth and beauty of life is capable of expanding forever inward if we are willing to take our problems and see them as catalysts. Forests need fires to do this, volcanoes need implosions, stars need collapse, and human beings often need to be faced with no other option but to change before they really do.”

Brianna Wiest, The Mountain Is You (Page 6)

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“The truth is that we actually do not accomplish great feats when we are anxious about whether or not what we do will indeed be something impressive and world-changing. We accomplish these sorts of things when we simply show up and allow ourselves to create something meaningful and important to us.”

Brianna Wiest, The Mountain Is You (Page 37)

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“If you’re stuck in life, it’s probably because you’re waiting for the big bang, the breakthrough moment in which all your fears dissolve and you’re overcome with clarity. The work that needs to happen happens effortlessly. Your personal transformation rips you from complacency, and you wake up to an entirely new existence. That moment will never come. Breakthroughs do not happen spontaneously. They are tipping points.”

Brianna Wiest, The Mountain Is You (Page 110)

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“Fear is not going to protect you. Action is. Worrying is not going to protect you. Preparing is. Overthinking is not going to protect you. Understanding is. When we hold onto fear and pain after something traumatic has passed, we do it as a sort of safety net. We falsely believe that if we constantly remind ourselves of all the terrible things that we didn’t see coming, we can avoid them. Not only does this not work, but it also makes you less efficient at responding to them if they do.”

Brianna Wiest, The Mountain Is You (Page 168)

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“You may feel as though you cannot take action, when you most certainly can. You simply do not feel willing, because you are not used to it.”

Brianna Wiest, The Mountain Is You (Page 69)

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“We are not held back in life because we are incapable of making change. We are held back because we don’t feel like making change, and so we don’t.”

Brianna Wiest, The Mountain Is You (Page 68)

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“When we have a goal, dream, or plan, there is no measure of intent. It is only whether you did it or did not. Any other reason you offer for not showing up and doing the work is simply you stating that you prioritize that reason over your ultimate ambition, which means that it will always take precedence in your life.”

Brianna Wiest, The Mountain Is You (Page 40)

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“The truth is that most people regret what they did not do more than they ever regret what they did. This isn’t a coincidence. Regret isn’t actually trying to just make us feel bad that we didn’t live up to our own expectations. It is trying to motivate us to live up to them going forward. It is trying to show us what it is absolutely imperative to change in the future and what we really care about experiencing before we die.”

Brianna Wiest, The Mountain Is You (Page 78)

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“Your new life is going to cost you your old one. It’s going to cost you your comfort zone and your sense of direction. It’s going to cost you relationships and friends. It’s going to cost you being liked and understood. It doesn’t matter. The people who are meant for you are going to meet you on the other side. You’re going to build a new comfort zone around the things that actually move you forward. Instead of being liked, you’re going to be loved. Instead of being understood, you’re going to be seen. All you’re going to lose is what was built for a person you no longer are.”

Brianna Wiest, The Mountain Is You (Page 26)

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“When you reach the peak of it all—whatever that may be for you—you will look back and know that every step was worth it. More than anything, you will be overwhelmingly grateful for the pain that led you to begin your journey, because really, it wasn’t trying to hurt you as much as it was trying to show you that something was wrong. That something was the risk of your potential remaining untapped, your life spent with the wrong people, doing the wrong things, and wondering why you never felt quite right. Your life is just beginning.”

Brianna Wiest, The Mountain Is You (Page 239)

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If you enjoyed these Brianna Wiest quotes from The Mountain Is You, you should read Brianna’s book in full—it comes highly recommended.