Dr. Noah St JohnFounder, St. John Executive Coaching · The Caveman Conversion King | Keynote Speaker: Tame the Caveman in Your Brain™ | My $3 Billion Playbook turns AI fear into peak human performance | What kind of Caveman are you? Take the Caveman Quiz

Stop Self-Sabotage: Overcome Success Anorexia NOW! #shorts

13 Apr 2026 · 2 min

Watch on YouTube

1:37

In this YouTube short, Dr. Noah St. John and Jenny discuss why people often self‑sabotage just before a promising opportunity materializes. Jenny describes witnessing friends and family “implode” deals at the last moment. Dr. St. John attributes this to “head trash,” a term he uses for limiting mental patterns, and introduces his concept of “success anorexia”—the tendency to starve oneself of success by not developing the inner psychological foundation needed to sustain external opportunities. He explains the distinction between the “outer game” (tangible deals, actions) and the “inner game” (beliefs, mental habits). When a person’s inner game lags behind their outer game, they self‑sabotage and the opportunity collapses. The short references Dr. St. John’s book The Secret Code of Success, which offers strategies to overcome success anorexia and align inner and outer games.

I love that term, head trash. That makes so much sense to me. There's been people along my way, my journey, including family members, where I've tried to help them, you know, get deals or something. And just, just before it was about to manifest, like literally sign on the dotted line, they would implode it. And I would always be shocked. Mm-hmm. And there's about a handful of people in my lifetime where I can say, oh my God, I cannot believe they imploded that just before it happened. What happens at that point?
Well, that is your head trash kicking in. See, this is what I've been teaching people since 1997, Jenny. I also invented or discovered something called success anorexia.
That's right.
People are actually suffering from success anorexia. That's another book I wrote called The Secret Code of Success where I show you how to overcome success anorexia. People are actually starving themselves of success. So when you got that deal, this is a perfect example of what I've been teaching for 20 years. When you, when you got that person that deal, Because you were helping them with their, what I call their outer game, meaning here's the deal, right? Right. It's here, sign on the dotted line. But because they hadn't evolved enough on their inner game, which is the stuff that happens between your ears that you can't see directly, but you see the effects of it, see? And so you were basically handing them an outer game deal, but because their inner game hadn't caught up to their outer game, they couldn't do it. They imploded. They self-sabotaged. And that is ironically a function of success anorexia.
That is the condition That actually cause those symptoms.