By HAYDEN FINCH, PhD
In the last section, I shared about my history with perfectionism and talked about some of the risks and benefits of perfectionism. Again, it’s great to have high standards and to strive to be the best we can be. That lets us know we’re making progress on the goals we’ve set for our lives and helps us continue to grow as people and professionals. But unrelenting standards can cause problems and actually interfere with goal setting and goal attainment and compromise our self-worth.
Several things keep perfectionism alive.
1. Unrelenting standards we set for ourselves.
When perfectionists don’t achieve their goals, they assume it’s because they didn’t work hard enough. So if their goal is to get 100% on every assignment they complete, when they get a 98% they’ll assume they should have tried harder. If they studied for 30 hours for that test, some perfectionists might study even more for the next test. Others will feel defeated and give up. If perfectionists do achieve their standards, it’s often at a very high cost to them personally and to their relationships. They have less time for friendships, rest, relaxation, and play, and they start building up a chronic stress response that affects their physical health in the long term. Sometimes, when perfectionists are able to achieve their standards, they’ll up the ante and set an even higher, even more unrealistic standard, setting themselves up for eventual failure.
2. What we focus on
There’s way too much information happening in any given moment for our brain to process. Too many sounds, too much movement, too many visual details. It’s just impossible for our brains to take in everything, so they select a certain amount of the information to focus on based on what they consider important. Right now, your brain has decided that your socks and shoes aren’t important, so you don’t notice them. But if I mention them, then your brain can tune in and feel your socks hugging your feet. Our brains ignore most of what’s happening in our lives in any given moment because it’s just impossible to consider everything. One pattern we observe with brains is that they tend to pay attention to information that fits what they’re expecting.
Here’s an example. As a kid, your mom would tell you to try a food for the first time and you’d turn your nose up at it before you even tried it – you brain anticipated being disgusted, and that expectation colors your experience of it. Your mom warned you about this (“Don’t turn your nose up at it yet! You haven’t even tried it!”).
If your standard or belief is that your family will only be proud of you when you are the absolute best at something, you’ll collect evidence to support this opinion throughout your life. You’ll remember how excited they were when you brought home a straight-A report card. You’ll remember them beaming when you were nominated for Homecoming Court. You’ll remember them bragging at church when you earned your Eagle Scout. Your brain somehow won’t notice the times they encouraged you to go to the school talent show instead of continuing to study. You forget they were also proud of your brother, who wasn’t “popular.” You don’t realize they bragged just as much when you were a Cub Scout and didn’t know a single thing about camping or first aid. That selective focus makes us continue to believe that we must be perfect to earn respect from ourselves and the people we care about.
“If perfectionists do achieve their standards, it’s often at a very high cost to them personally and to their relationships. They have less time for friendships, rest, relaxation, and play, and they start building up a chronic stress response that affects their physical health in the long term.”
3. How we think
Not only do our brains focus on certain information selectively, but they also get into certain thinking patterns. One example is black-and-white thinking. This type of thinking makes us have trouble appreciating “gray” areas, or factors that affect how things turn out. So if I don’t get 100% on a test, which is my definition of “success,” then I’m a complete failure. It’s black-and-white – there’s no room for “I did well even if I didn’t answer every question correctly or even if I didn’t do quite as well as I’d hoped.” There are many other thinking styles, and your psychologist can help you review these and determine what your thinking styles are and how you can change them to be healthier.
4. The lengths we go to in order to achieve our goals.
As I mentioned in my last post, I went to great lengths to over-prepare for projects, over-study for tests, and over-review assignments. I also compulsively made and remade to-do lists to ensure I never missed anything. Other people procrastinate (if you don’t think you can do something perfectly, you might delay because starting makes you anxious; the line of thinking is usually something like, “I can’t fail if I don’t try”), give up too quickly, do all the work themselves (think: group projects), make others conform to their standards, seek reassurance that they’re on the right track and doing okay, overcompensate in other areas of their life, or many other things. As long as we engage in these behaviors, we assume they’re necessary for our success. If I nailed a presentation, how do I know it’s not because I over-prepared? How do I know I would have done just as well with less preparation? I assume that had something to do with my success, and I better prepare just as much, if not more, next time.
5. The rewards our families and society give us for high achievement.
The Centre for Clinical Interventions developed this schematic of what maintains perfectionism:
A psychologist is specially trained to help you overcome perfectionism. He or she will help you identify your perfectionism behaviors and perfectionistic thinking, set small goals to test your beliefs, and begin thinking in a new, more balanced (i.e., less black-and-white) way. He or she will also help you re-evaluate the importance of achievement and how achievement fits in with your other goals and values. As I’ve mentioned, standards and excellence are important – but so are relationships, relaxation, and fun. It’s possible to have it all, and a psychologist can help you figure out how. In the next post in this series, I’ll have some practical strategies you can begin on your own or in concert with your psychologist.
Hayden C. Finch, PhD,
is a practicing psychologist
in Des Moines, Iowa.
