Experts weigh in on what you can do to overcome the debilitating stress of perfectionism.
If you’ve ever so much as looked for a job, you’ve likely been in an interview and asked, “What’s your biggest weakness?” You know you can only admit a socially acceptable flaw, so you say, “I’m a perfectionist,” meaning you hold yourself and others to impossibly high standards.
Since many outsiders see perfectionism as a badge of honor that proves tenacity, you may have been rewarded for that answer with a job offer in your inbox.
Sounds great, right? But an obsession with excellence often comes with a price. Do you stay up all night planning every last detail anytime you have to host anything? Do you spiral when someone corrects a typo in a presentation you thought was impeccable? When perfectionism goes too far, you can easily end up feeling anxious, overwhelmed, and devastated when small details go wrong. In fact, the perfectionist tendencies that we humblebrag about are often linked with mental health issues that can impede our quality of life.
We’re delving into why perfectionism can be harmful to your mental health. Plus, we gathered expert insight on what you can do to overcome those frustrated, anxious reactions to imperfection — and how you can embrace mistakes.
You can’t get a diagnosis for perfectionism — but your high standards may hint at an anxiety issue
The American Psychological Association’s dictionary describes perfectionism as “the tendency to demand of others or of oneself an extremely high or even flawless level of performance, in excess of what is required by the situation.”
Tom McDonagh, PsyD., of Good Therapy San Francisco, says that perfectionism isn’t a clinical condition: “In and of itself, it’s not automatically a problem, but it can become one when it impacts your daily life functioning. It can start to affect your mood, sleep relationships, or work.”
“[Perfectionism],” Dr. McDonagh clarifies, “is a way of thinking that — when problematic — can contribute to an anxiety disorder.”
Troublingly, evidence shows that perfectionism can become problematic way more easily than we’d like. A 2014 study links perfectionism with generalized anxiety disorder. Those researchers concluded that screenings for the disorder should include questions about perfection: “This finding has clinical relevance as it highlights the need for mental health professionals to include questions about perfectionism when conducting assessments for individuals presenting with [generalized anxiety disorder symptoms].”
If you’ve ever informally characterized your need to have everything just right as OCD, you might not be so far off. A 2016 study found that perfectionism is “elevated across eating disorders, anxiety disorders, OCD and depression compared to healthy controls.” So, people suffering from one or more of those ailments are more likely to become obsessed with perfection when compared to “healthy” people. Another study assigned simple tasks to a group of people with anorexia and a group of “healthy” people and subjects with anorexia took longer to finish in hopes of getting everything just right.
Most worryingly, research found a “small-to-moderate” correlation between perfectionism, suicidal ideation, and completion of suicide.
If all of this makes you feel panicked, scared, or down on yourself, don’t worry: None of these outcomes are guaranteed. But at the same time, you might want to understand why you cancel a night out because you can’t get one remaining wrinkle out of your dress, why you get a case of the shakes when you don’t have enough time to wrap a gift just so, or why you get upset after you open a bag of chips “wrong.”
It’s probably not accurate to flippantly frame perfectionism as a wacky character trait, let alone a “good” or “healthy” mindset that we should all aspire to. And if your perfectionism is starting to sour your quality of life, we’ve got plenty of expert advice on how to change that.
You can change your mindset if you get a little messy
First things first: Dr. McDonagh clarifies that you should work with a mental health professional if your high standards are seriously bringing you down: “If you’re feeling irritable, depressed, or anxious for two to four weeks, you might want to reach out for professional help.”
In addition to therapy, there are plenty of strategies to help you ease up on yourself and others.
Sometimes, facing imperfections or “failure” can lead you to feel a physical panic response like sweating, shaking, or chills. Dr. McDonagh says “two to five minutes of deeper breathing” can make a difference. You can also try progressive muscle relaxation, where you tighten and relax your muscles on purpose to take control of bodily stress and tension: “You can trick muscle groups to relax them and calm the body down.”
But if you want to address big-picture thinking, you’re going to need a more drastic adjustment. Kristina Mand-Lakhiani, cofounder of Mindvalley authored the book Becoming Flawesome: The Key to Living an Imperfectly Authentic Life and promotes a mindset that she dubs the “Green Marker technique.”
“Imagine you write a long essay and you give it to a teacher,” Mand-Lakhiani says. “To mark your essay, the teacher picks up the red marker and points out everything wrong about your work, then the teacher gives it back to you to correct your mistakes. This is pretty standard in schools and it’s the paradigm in which we grow up.” She believes we’ve been trained to focus on our flaws and try to eliminate them.
Mand-Lakhiani says we should put our energy toward improving existing areas of strength instead: “If we worked this way, the teacher would take your essay and mark every spot where you were a genius. When the teacher gave it back to you, you’d look at it and have to advance the strong points of your paper.”
Does this total shift in priorities and strategies sound a little idealistic? To ease into overcoming this and separating yourself from your unreasonable ideals, Mand-Lakhiani recommends taking things slowly by intentionally facing small moments of imperfection: “I suggest people consciously allow some imperfection in their lives for a short time first because a lot of perfectionists get really stressed out about the concept of accepting flaws wholly and permanently.”
Stef Ziev, life coach and author of the forthcoming self-help book The Choice is Yours, addressed perfectionism a little more aggressively. She sought out and leaned into small moments of imperfection: “Whenever I was completing a task, like writing a chapter, a paragraph, or a social media post, I gave myself the permission to do it badly. That alleviated some pressure.”
Dr. McDonagh agrees that writing can be a powerful tool in overcoming extreme expectations: “When we keep things in our mind, those fractured thoughts are too slippery to get traction with.”
He suggests writing out your goals and fears to ground yourself in reality: “Write down the expectation that you have for the situation and what is the bad thing that’s going to happen if you don’t meet that expectation.”
Ideally, this method of externalizing your thoughts will help you to process these big emotions: “Writing forces you to think through things in complete sentences. When you have complete sentences you can actually challenge [anxiety and perfectionist tendencies].”
Ziev offers another way to check in with your emotions: “One of the key tenets I work with and talk about it in my book is a tool called, ‘Who’s sitting at the head of the table?’” In this exercise, she recommends evaluating which emotion you’re feeling the most and where that emotion is leading you.
“If we think about all these different parts of us that are sitting around the table, we have happiness, sadness, anger, doubt, fear, love and anxiety,” she says. “So the question is always ‘Who’s sitting at the head of the table?’ If perfection is sitting at the head of the table, then we have to ask, ‘What are the stories that that part of us is telling? What is that part saying? What’s the negative self-talk? What does that part say is going to happen if we’re not perfect?’”
It’s likely that your perfectionist self-talk dictates that imperfection will result in catastrophe. But facing your perfectionism also means letting go of that feeling that the world hinges on your obsession with success.
“The world doesn’t need your perfection,” Mand-Lakhiani says. “That’s an illusion. The only person who needs your perfection is you. What the world needs is the real you. I bet that’s not perfect.”
